Hi I'm Doug McKinlay
and you're watching AdoramaTV.
Now it's awesome
we're in London's Hampstead Heath.
It's a great spot for Cityscapes as well as
catching all that autumn color.
It's also a good spot for doing a Landscape Redux.
Now we haven't looked at Landscapes
in quite a while so let's do a revisit.
I suppose the first question I ask is;
what is landscape photography?
I know it's a bit of a loaded question.
For me personally I don't think landscape
pictures necessarily need to follow
any set of rules.
One description states that landscape photographs
should typically show the presence of nature,
often free of any man-made obstructions.
Now it's that word 'often' that gets me.
I think that we can expand the landscape.
We don't necessarily have to have just
trees or rivers or mountains
but we can include a bit of city
and people even I think we should open it up a little bit.
Don't get me wrong I love the classic
way of taking landscape pictures,
in fact I do them all the time but I also love
the way that landscape photography
has gone past a pastoral kind of scenes
into Urban, Cityscapes, Beach shots
whatever? Now what's right or what's wrong I'm
going to leave that debate up to you guys
but for us today we're going to look at a
few laws on how we can improve our
landscape pictures.
Of prime importance
before any landscape outing is planning.
I cannot emphasize how important this is.
It's the making or breaking of your
pictures. It's everything from the time
of day, the season even? Making sure
you've got the right equipment,
keeping your lenses and sensors clean,
and crucially knowing your locations. Now
you cannot leave locations to chance.
Let me repeat that.
You cannot leave locations to chance.
Finding those sweet spots is usually
a matter of good research.
Google Maps, word of mouth etc.
Ordnance Survey maps are great for topography
and trails. Now once you've found these places then
you got to record the times of day,
the direction of light, the times a year etc.
and then you've got to keep going back
over and over again to get those great
pictures. It's a bit of a slog but it's worth it.
Cityscapes, same thing
Lens choice is the lifeblood
of landscape photography. Now I would say
that most landscape pictures are shot
on the wider angles of 21mm and
24mm or 50mm
but don't forget there's longer lenses as well.
Now I'm a little partial to the long lens
landscape. I just love the way it
compresses the scene.
I just think it's got a really quite cool feel to it.
Okay so I'm going to get a few still shots here
of a really good scene behind me the
autumn colors really working well
but the sky is a little bit,
kind of the difference
between the light
it's quite a lot so I'm going to add a graduated neutral
density filter to try and even the light
a little bit.
This is just a Lee filter
setup for the grads.
Will mount it onto the tripod of course
to give us that stability we need
and we'll go from there see we get.
Now there's two things
that I'm always banging on about.
If anybody's watching previous videos
and they are;
use a tripod when absolutely necessary
or when necessary
and shoot in RAW.
So I think for landscapes
we're really looking for the
stability because we're going to shoot
at our lowest ISO setting a hundred of this
camera; Canon 5D Mark III
so I want stability,
so I'm going to set the pot up
and get an idea where I'm going to go
and I'm going to use a long lens on this one.
This was going to be a long lens landscape.
Make sure it's locked in place,
everything's tight.
We got our our carrier for the graduated
neutral density filters
and then I'm going to,
first thing I'm going to do is
I'm going to just check the light
and I'm going to want to,
I'm going to want to shoot around f/11
I think for a lot of depth of field
so I'm shooting manual
and I'm going to slightly under expose a little bit
just to help bring those colors out a little bit.
Now once I've got my my compositions
where I more or less want it
and the light,
the exposure set correctly.
I'm going to pop in a grad filter.
This one is a 2 stop grad and pop
it in the carrier and then we're going
to adjust that filter by bringing it up
and down on making sure the dark
the dark point comes across the tops
of the distant trees and brings the sky down
just a little bit and I'm going to set
the driver at two seconds,
so that I don't have to touch the camera after
I press the shutter button.
Now I could lock the mirror up as well but I haven't
done it right now
and when I take the photograph
I'm going to cover up the eyepiece just with my hand
just to dispel any kind of light coming through
the back. I'm going to have a look at it
and I'm going to think at the back of
the screen and do I need to adjust
a little bit and I think I do, so I can pop
that back up a little bit so I can
adjust my, adjust the filter
and the exposure
and adjust the composition where I have to,
making sure making sure
everything's focused. One thing I forgot
to say, I'm going to pop the autofocus to
manual focus, bringing that filter back in place,
cover up, take another shot.
Have a look at it.
Looks good. Check the histogram
and it's a RAW file
so from there I'm going to get in the
computer later and I'm going to adjust
the color, the light etc. to make the
picture look like I see it
and from here we're going to move closer.
We're going to use a wider angle lens.
I've got the Lee filter graduated rig on
again and I'm going to employ
going to go back to the 3 stop,
the 3 stop filter stuffed in my pocket
and we're going to stick that
into the filter holder
and we're going to adjust that.
Now the great thing these filter holders
is you can move them around.
It's fantastic, adjust it to the angle of the Sun really
so I'm going to stick it in there.
I've already set up my my exposure
and I'm going to adjust the brightness
of the sky in the background.
Okay it's just a little underexposed
so I'm going to just change that a little bit.
Reposition the grad.
Remember the cameras set to a two second timer
so I don't have to use a cable release
I'm a firm believer in trying to get as much
of your image finished in the camera
rather than the computer but there are
times when the computer is a real
fantastic tool
now I'm thinking Lightroom here.
Now we're using these graduated neutral
density filters and even though
we're trying to even the light up sometimes
it's a bit too much, so I sometimes
what I'll do is instead of using a heavy-duty grad
I'll use quite a light grad now
and then finish it off in Lightroom.
Now Lightroom has this built-in
graduated filter that can be a great little tool.
It works really well when you've got subjects
or parts of subjects in your image
that are poking into the sky like trees or
mountains etc. because a graduated
neutral density filter
has no way of knowing
the ups and downs
and the poky uppy bits
of trees so that'll just
darken that as well.
So if you use a grad filter
it's not quite as heavy and then
bring that into Lightroom
and then use the Lightroom grad
to try to even that out
and the great thing about the Lightroom grad
is within the construct
of that graduated filter,
there's a shadow slider.
Now the shadow slider if
you take it to the right
will lighten up the shadows
so all those pokey bits up
into your picture
you'll tend to take a lot of the shadow out
and not affect the sky,
it's a fantastic tool
and something you should really look into using.
Now we really haven't talked about
composition. Composition is a
never-ending debate, argument
whatever you want,
there's many different ways of looking at a scene
and composing it.
Now one of the most popular compositional
rules of course
is the rule of thirds
where you break the picture or the back
of your camera up into a grid pattern
of a three by three.
It's a good rule but I don't think that every picture
has to follow a certain set of rules.
You need some flexibility,
the composition should not be so set in stone
that you can't
find out ways of taking the photograph.
You know one of the biggest issues
I see with landscape photographs
is that photographers
especially those first starting out,
try to get too much in a scene.
Their eyes are bigger than their stomachs.
Remember less is more.
Now it takes a lot of practice
to create that eye where you can start
to see what's most important in the scene
so the only way to hone your skills
is to really
just get out there and start shooting
lots and lots and lots and lots.
Only by doing this will you start to really
understand how landscape pictures work.
color it's not the only spectrum
for landscape photography.
Don't forget black and white too.
Black and white almost seems like the natural
home for these kind of images.
Just look at the work of Ansel Adams for instance.
So when I'm photographing
a landscape scene,
I'm not just thinking of a color
image but I'm also thinking
about black and white image
and this is where some
of that's built in software
for your computer really works well.
Now I personally use
Nik software Solar Effex Pro 2
and I think it's a great tool
for making really standout
black and whites.
So that's it for me I'm Doug McKinlay for AdoramaTV,
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