Hello, this is Mr. Ben and to answer your first question,
yes I did accidentally cut my beard too short...
It was a new electric razor, and when you get one
for the first time, you gotta learn the settings...
Today we're going to be talking about manual exposure.
And if you own one of these, a 360 camera,
then you've probably been taking 360 photos
already in auto mode, which is super easy, right?
You turn the camera on, you take a photo,
done.
And when it does this, it guesses the optimal settings
to use in your specific lighting situation.
And yeah, it gets it right a lot of the time,
but a lot of times it doesn't which is why understanding
how to expose your photos manually will guarantee
you get an awesome shot every single time
you go out shooting, especially in tricky lighting
situations such as scenes with mixed light and low light.
Why don't they sell beard wigs?
So let's do it, let's get out of auto!
I never really talked about this in my video course
or my book because those are for beginners,
so consider this an added section that you get
completely for free that goes with those two things.
Now, look around you.
Yeah, I'm serious, do it, look around.
As you look around your environment, you'll see
your eye picks up detail with almost perfection.
It can see bright highlights.
It can see dark shadows and it's all
relatively evenly exposed.
This is what you want your camera to do.
It doesn't do it automatically and this is why shooting
manually helps us get the best overall exposure
that is closest to what your eye would see.
Auto exposure gets kind of confused sometimes.
It thinks, should I expose for the highlights,
the shadows, the middle of the range?
Hmm, I'm just gonna pick one at random.
And the photo ends up way too dark or way too bright.
So when we go into manual mode, we're like, hey you,
don't do that, I don't want that ISO, that shutter speed,
that aperture, I want this shutter speed,
this ISO, this aperture and the results
are incredible and so much better
than your camera could've done on its own.
Manual mode can also help you get stylized effects,
no matter what the lighting situation.
Like here, I was able to shoot a silhouette
of the Harbour Bridge when it was completely bright out.
Now let's go shoot.
Oh, by the way, I'll be using the Theta Z1 in this video,
but you can use any camera you like, as long as it has
the ability to shoot manually.
So how do we take complete control over our exposure?
Well there are four variables that will help us do this.
Shutter speed, ISO, aperture and white balance.
These are the four things that lead to us
getting a perfect exposure with perfect colors.
It's important to keep in mind that the end result
you'll want in most situations is even lighting.
Even exposure, you want everything to look
completely even like it does now in this video.
That means no blown out highlights,
no crushed shadows and no funny colors.
To change our exposure, we'll either need to adjust
the shutter speed, the ISO or the aperture.
When you change one of these up or down,
you'll inevitably have to bring
the other one the opposite way.
This is what keeps the exposure even.
Shutter speed refers to how fast the shutter clicks.
If it's a short shutter speed, it'll click like this.
If it's a long shutter speed, say one second,
it clicks like this, capturing much more light
and making the image brighter.
So if it's really bright out,
you'll go with a fast shutter speed,
if it's low light, you'll go with a slow shutter speed.
The speed that the shutter clicks also affects
how we capture motion.
The faster the shutter speed is, the easier it is
to capture fast moving detail.
Here's an example where I attempted a jumping shot
at a slow shutter speed and because the shutter speed
was so slow, it wasn't able to capture me in mid air.
Because remember, it's capturing everything that happens
during the time it closes, so if it goes...
Then it's capturing, capturing, capturing, capturing,
no longer capturing, therefore anything moving
is going to get blurred.
Now I'm going to change it to a much faster shutter speed
and first try, it's captured me pin sharp in the air.
Look at that, you can even see the details of my shoelaces.
And this is because I captured this
at a 1/6400 shutter speed which essentially means
it's one 6400th of a second that it's
capturing information in this scene.
Damn, that's fast!
Shooting with a fast shutter speed is not only helpful
in situations where you've got lots of movement
in your environment, but also when you're walking around
with the camera and the camera is moving.
Bye bye camera shake, nice to know you.. not!
Our next factor is ISO and this is something
you will want to avoid bumping up too high
if you can help it because ISO is essentially
fake light being added to your image
and the higher you bump it up,
the more imperfections your photo has.
This is most commonly known as noise,
which are blotchy imperfections
in the darker areas of your images.
So usually, no matter what I'm shooting,
I will always try and keep my ISO as low as possible.
The only situation really, when I would bump up the ISO
is if I was shooting handheld at nighttime
and shooting with a slow shutter speed wasn't an option,
because if you walk around with
a one or two second exposure, then it's going
to blur the crap out of your image.
So slow shutter speeds can only be used
when your camera's static.
This is just another factor to add to our equation
because there's no perfect shutter speed,
there's no perfect ISO, there's no perfect aperture.
It really depends on your situation
and what's required for it.
The final factor for manually changing
your exposure is aperture and up until this point,
point and shoot 360 cameras have had a fixed aperture.
However, now with the Theta Z1 just being released,
we can now change it between three different variables.
Now if you were shooting with a DSLR,
aperture would be the first thing you'd go to
to affect the light and the composition of your shots
because with opening up your aperture
comes affecting the depth of field.
Right now, on my DSLR that I'm shooting this with,
I'm at an F2.0 aperture and that means I'm in sharp focus
and my background is slightly out of focus.
But with 360 cameras, it doesn't mean the same thing
because it has two lenses that see everything.
You kinda need to see everything
or it would just be 360 degrees of blurriness.
I'm actually kinda hoping cameras in the future
do have this feature, I think it would be cool
shooting a shallow depth of field shot in 360.
But for now, the variable aperture is just another factor
we can use to increase or decrease our exposure.
If you don't have a Theta Z1, just forget I said anything.
Finally, the fourth setting that all 360 cameras
with manual exposure will have is white balance.
How warm or cool your image looks.
This is measured in Kelvin and yes,
that's a very silly word, but it's used
to describe how warm or cool an image is.
I'd say probably 95% of 360 cameras do a good job
with auto white balance, so you won't always need
to change this, it's only if your camera's
really misinterpreting a situation,
making it way too blue or way too orange,
that you'll want to do this manually.
But if it's not too extreme, then this is
something you can usually fix in post.
Always look for live feedback in the app as you go,
yeah, see that little preview screen there?
That way you're not left completely in the dark
about what your shot is going to look like.
So now I'm going to demonstrate
how you might use these manual settings
in three very different lighting situations.
I went to one of my favorite spots around Sydney Harbor
with amazing 360 degree views.
And I took a 360 photo firstly in bright sunlight,
secondly at golden hour, just as the sun was setting
and thirdly, at nighttime when it was really dark
all around yet there were hot spots all around the horizon
where they were just setting up for the Vivid Light Festival
which is an annual light show they hold here in Sydney
and is a photographer's dream.
Eee, I'm excited.
With each of the following shots, I tried a number
of different exposure combinations,
until I got the image I was happy with.
Here I am in bright daylight, and to give you an idea,
this was 2:38pm and I chose to shoot
with the aperture closed as far as possible.
That way I was able to keep my ISO right at the bottom
and choose a shutter speed of 1/320 of a second,
that I knew would capture the movement of the water
with crystal clear detail while simultaneously
not overexposing the sky, so I had the option later on
to bring down the highlights, bring up the shadows
and get the overall exposure perfect.
I'm gonna be honest, that was a tricky lighting situation
because the Opera House was so bright and the sun
was hitting it from above, yet it wasn't hitting
anything else around me, it was actually quite dark.
So I'm really happy that I was able to even out
this image by keeping the exposure down,
but also somewhere in the middle that I knew
I could recover the shadows and the highlights
and get the sharpness of the water that I wanted.
And look, yes, I was shooting RAW here,
but if you F up your exposure completely,
and you're shooting RAW, it's still won't matter
because RAW only has a certain amount that it's able
to recover, it can't perform miracles,
which is why even if you're shooting RAW,
you still gotta get that exposure right.
Look at that, it's a fill light.
(laughing)
My next shot was taken right on sunset, aka magic hour,
which right now in Sydney is like 5:00 p.m., boo!
But I think I got pretty lucky here.
The sky looked awesome and I knew if I could get
that exposure right, I'd be able to capture
exactly what I was seeing at the time,
which is really hard to do on any kind of camera.
So after taking a few test shots,
I decided to change the aperture to F3.5.
The shutter speed to 1/10th of a second
and the ISO still right at the bottom
because it was getting dark and I still didn't want
that noise to creep into my image and here's what I got.
I'm really happy with this one.
It would have been easy to just leave it to auto exposure,
but auto exposure sucked in this situation.
It decided to expose the entire photo just for the shadows
leaving the entire skyline completely white.
Never let the sky go completely white,
unless it's a "stylistic choice".
And by that, I mean maybe it's cloudy or overcast
and a plain white sky would look better than gray clouds.
Otherwise, you want color.
My final shot was taken just after 6:00 p.m.
and it was really dark out,
but the view was absolutely incredible.
They were just setting up for the Vivid Light Show
and the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Opera House
and the city all looked absolutely incredible
and well lit up with bright colorful lights.
This one definitely took the most amount of test shots,
but it was worth it.
In the end, I chose an aperture of F2.1,
ISO 100 and a four second exposure time.
Which made things kinda tricky because I was shooting
with this monopod with the camera above my head
and with an exposure time of four seconds,
and if you remember before, we can't move the camera
with long exposure shots.
I had to hold this dead still.
I placed it against the railing so it would be as secure
as possible and I made damn sure the camera didn't shake
or move for those four seconds.
I shot this just last night and this has already turned
into one of my most popular ever Facebook photos.
So it shows you, if you get the exposure right,
if you spend the time to get everything perfect,
the lighting, the exposure and you don't
just settle for the first shot.
You do it few times and then you edit your photo
whether it's RAW or just a regular JPEG
to be as good as it possibly can be,
then you know you've got the best result possible
from your camera and the situation you were in.
I'm gonna put all three of these on my Facebook page
side by side, if you wanna take a look at them in 360
and see just how different these three photos ended up
just by changing the camera settings and shooting
at a slightly different time of day.
This was literally the same photo three times over.
I had to look for a certain mark on the railing
in front of me to know this is where I had to come back to,
to shoot the next photo, and I got the camera
in the exact same spot every time.
So it's the exact same setup,
yet the end results were extremely different.
You can also find me on Instagram and Twitter,
but don't follow me on Twitter because I don't Tweet.
If you wanna learn more about 360 photography,
I have a book about tiny planets, it's seven bucks
and it will teach you even more tips and tricks
for getting awesome results with your 360 camera.
To end this video, to tie it up in a nice little bow,
I wanna say, I don't use manual exposure all the time.
I still use auto exposure in 95% of situations.
It's only situations where there's tricky lighting
or low light that this is going to be massively beneficial,
depending on the camera you own and I assume you've chosen
a good one if you've been following my channel.
Your camera is probably gonna do a good job
in most situations in auto exposure.
But if you want to take your 360 game from here to here,
you'll need to learn to shoot manually.
All right that's it.
How rude of me, I didn't even say bye.
And I'm not going to!