In this video I take a walk across the Millennium Bridge in London for a 15 minute photo challenge
Hello, I'm Gavin Hoey and you're watching AdoramaTV, brought to you by Adorama, the
camera store that has everything for us photographers. And today you join me at
the Millennium Bridge in London for a 15 minute
photo challenge.
So I'm going to walk along the bridge, walking back towards St. Paul's Cathedral,
see what amazing pictures we can find. The weather today is quite
changeable. We've got overcast, cloudy skies. Sunshine one minute,
light rain the next, so this could be quite interesting, but, well, the best pictures
are over there so let's get going.
Sometimes the best pictures of bridges are underneath the bridge and I think
this is actually great place to begin. This is really nice. I like the symmetry
of this shot.
I'm using my Olympus E M5 Mark II and a 12-40 mm lens, a good sort of
walk around lens, but I can actually see people through the grating above me,
so I'm actually going to try shooting in upright or portrait format and get some
different perspectives.
I'm shooting in aperture priority mode, I'm on f/8, just for a
middle-of-the-road kind of aperture. That should give me plenty of depth of field at a
wide angle shot. Of course, there's nobody walking over the bridge when you want them to.
Here we go.
Sometimes the best pictures are right behind you, like now. You
probably could see the picture that I couldn't see walking up and this is
great.
So let's just try to get a shot here.
I might need to wait for the crowds to the clear but I need to get a lovely symmetry.
Come on everybody, out of the way. There you go.
Got one. OK, let's get going.
So this is kind of fun. There's a lovely glass here and glass normally means
reflections. So, well, let's go a bit closer because I might be able to get a
nice reflection of some poles.
So here's how it's working. If I want to get a reflection, I shoot it from here.
I get a reflection, but watch what happens when I leaned right against the
glass. I'm getting right up against the glass, I get a completely different reflection.
I actually like that. I like the fact that I'm seeing more of a reflection the
closer to the glass or get, but if I come out slightly,
I get a subtle, but most noticeably different shot.
Trying to get a different angle as well really helps but what I'm seeing through the
viewfinder is a massive amount of moiré pattern. Now if that comes through in the
final pictures and it might because the E M5 Mark II, doesn't have a low pass filter,
I know a photoshop trick to fix it and you can find that on the Adorama
Learning Center.
Here we go, look. It seems every bridge has some of these on now. They've got some
little padlocks. Romantic. Aw, romance. I like this one. It's pink and it's
heart shaped which is kind of fun. The depth of field - well- I'm in aperture priority
mode so I can adjust my depth of field really quickly. Let's try f/2.8, go for a nicet
shallow depth of field.
And let's try the other end of the scale. Let's go f/16, f/22, try a maximum depth of field.
And that does drop my shutter speed significantly, which means I need to
adjust my ISO significantly. Try and keep the shot because this bridge wobbles ever so
slightly, but it wobbles nonetheless. It's kind of fun.
It's a really moody sky over London, so a night little shot of the London skyline.
I've got the Shard, I've got tower bridge. Over the side I've got Shakespeare's Globe Theatre.
So that's a really nice sort of a cameo of London just there.
15 minutes walking across Millennium Bridge - perfect amount of time. Just
enough
photo opportunities to keep the photographer happy, I reckon, and compared
to the last bridge I walked across on AdoramaTV, which was, well, in New York
this one's much smaller and that's a good thing. I like that. So let's get one of
these pictures into Photoshop and we do a quick bit of editing and I'm going to
do that right now.
Sometimes the weather can be a massive help to your photography and other times
it can be a massive hindrance. In this case it was actually both a help and a
hindrance because I got some really great looking skies but those cloudy
skies meant that the ground was lit with flat, really boring lighting,
so I've got to do some post processing to get the most out of the sky, but also
to add some contrast and lighting on the ground and I found that almost all the
images from this challenge had a similar problem and a similar solution.
So let's get a RAW file, jump into Photoshop, see what I did.
So this one kind of sums everything up really. I like this shot, like the
symmetry and there are great clouds in here but you might not spot them
straight away.
This is a nice looking sky and to get more detail out of that sky,
I need to come down to the highlight slider here in Camera Raw and reduce
that down.
Now, of course, I did do this in Lightroom and Lightroom it would be
basically the same steps as well,
and whilst I'm here I thinking maybe a bit more contrast in the scene.
So for mid-tone contrast I'll use the clarity slider and just for a bit of
general contrast
I'll pop up the contrast slider. Now that does darken down these areas here a
little bit so let me just increase the shadow detail just a tiny bit too.
Okay, so far so good, but there must be a better sky in here and there is. I can
still see there's more sky to come out of this and to get it I'm going to use
the local adjustments so that is the brush, the graduated filter and the
radial filter.
Let's do the the graduated filter I think that's grab that one and I'm going
to come down to the exposure and reduce the exposure by one-and-a-half stops,
something like that and let's just start by clicking in the middle and then dragging
down
and that should give me a lovely dramatic sky.
Now I can actually do even more with that sky by coming back to the same
sliders and come down to say clarity, why not, let's put some more clarity on that
sky and one of my new favorite ones de-haze. De-haze does wonders to skies, just
a little bit. Don't go too mad.
That's nice. Now, that's ok, but of course the way that graduated filters work is
that everything from this red line upwards. In this case is going to be
affected to a lesser or greater extent, including the faces of the people that I
would like to bring some detail back. So I can come over to the graduated filter
and find the brush option.
Make sure it's set to the minus button and I can just paint away the effects
with a nice soft, fuzzy brush, something like that.
So that means rather than having a dead straight line I'm now sort of painting
a fuzzy wobbly line and that tends to work rather well on a shot like this.
Now I could also use the + button just to sort of add in bits at the bottom so I
can even use the same settings and just sort of darken these areas down as well,
and if you're looking at that and thinking, well, isn't that just the
adjustment brush?
Well, it is very similar but like anything inside of post-processing, you
get to the same end result in many different ways.
Photoshop, Camera Raw and Lightroom all have multiple ways of getting more or
less the same results, which is right is entirely up to you.
As long as you are happy with the picture at the end, you did it right. So let's use
the adjustment brush. Let's come in here to the adjustment brush and just grab
that because I think what I'd like to do is put a bit of light down this area here.
So if I come over to my exposure, I'll increase my exposure and I'm really
going to pop up the clarity as well and just sort of lighten this area here.
So what we end up with is sort of darker corners and then lighter patches, as if
we had some interesting lighting effects. That looks pretty good. I think I'll stop
there.
Now one of the things I got to at this point and thought, well, color, what about the color.
Let's go back to the basic panel and for a very quick way of going black and
white, I can just get the saturation, reduce the saturation down to -100
and there you go. You have black and white and I think these images work
well with black and
white, but in this one I like the color. In fact I liked this sort of cyan color
coming through here, through the glass.
So what I think I'll do is I'll just reduce the colors down so it has a less
bright, colorful image but then I'm going to try and target those cyans by
coming up to the HSL/grayscale, finding the saturation and aquas, there
we go. That's going to be the one. That looks closest to me, and if I just move
it up and down I can see yes that is definitely the color.
There might be some blue in there as well, but I reckon if I really push that
up that should give me a nice, colorful line through here, but mute all the other
colors down. Now, as always, there's a bit more work to do on this, a bit of fine-tuning
here and there, but there you go,
there's my final image completed.
Well that was a lovely relaxing 15 minute photo challenge, a very nice walk
across a lovely bridge.
So if you want to see more videos from myself and the other amazing presenters
right here on AdoramaTV, you know what you've got to do?
Click on the subscribe button. I'm Gavin Hoey, thanks for watching.