In this episode I'll give you three tips for shooting in natural light.
AdoramaTV presents
Exploring Photography with Mark Wallace. Hi everybody welcome to this episode of
Exploring Photography right here on AdoramaTV.
I'm Mark Wallace. Well I'm here in Paris, France and as you can see behind me that
is the
Eiffel Tower. I was here a couple years ago and I shot this image
of the Eiffel Tower. I sorta like it. It's the traditional vertical shot
of the Eiffel Tower at night and I shot this actually with my Fuji
X-PRO1.
Well this time when I got to Paris I wanted to do something a little bit
different. I want to have the River
in front of the Eiffel Tower and I also want to take a cheesy sht I could turn
into an
old-timey postcard to send back as a gag to my friends and family to say hey, I'm
in Paris.
So what I did was I set out to take pictures of Eiffel Tower. You’d think it would be
pretty
easy, but it's been sorta overcast and rainy and the weather hasn't been so good
and nothing I did worked. The reason for that well
is the light just wasn't right. It reminded me that there are three things
every photographer should do when shooting in natural light.
The first thing is don't fight the light. We can't change natural light it is
what it is. You can't reposition a light or do anything with it. If it's an
overcast day, it's an overcast day, you can't just sweep the clouds away.
So you need to work with what you have. What I did was I was trying to shoot the Eiffel
Tower from the wrong place. The Sun was
coming on the wrong side the Eiffel Tower, so it was washing it all out. I was
trying to shoot when
it was an overcast day. It was looking sort of glum and I was flight
the light that I had and I shouldn't have done that. I should have not fought the
light. I should have done number two, which is
do your homework. You know check the weather and see what the weather's going
to be like. Is it going to be sunny? Is going to be overcast or partly cloudy?
Use the Photographer's Ephemeris. Now this is a great
homework tool because you can see exactly where the Sun is going to be at
any time of the day, at
any certain place and so using the Photographer's Ephemeris I was able to
place a point on the Eiffel Tower and scroll through the day and see
exactly where I needed to be when.
Then I was able to implement tip number three.
That is be patient. As somebody famously said ;the Sun will come out
tomorrow' and certainly
the Sun did come out the next day and because I done my homework I knew
exactly where I needed to be
and I was able to get this photo of the river and the Eiffel Tower
and it looks great. As I was shooting I found it ironic
that the sun all a sudden got hit with clouds and you can actually see in this
very short sequence of shots the clouds actually..
or the shade climbing the Eiffel Tower. You can see it get darker and darker and
darker
and more modeled and so in that situation you just have to be patient
or shoot at a different time or just wait it out. So
don't fight the light, do your homework and be patient and that's going to pay
off for you
big-time. I have a bonus tip for you and that is
check out this little guy. This is a small tripod is made by Cullmann.
A lot of the places that I was shooting I wanted a tripod but I couldn't bring
my full size tripod because they're too many people and too many restrictions.
So I was able to use this little guy it's about 20 bucks but I was able to place
that
on the guardrails and position my camera
and that's what I did when I got this shot. Now and talk about the pictures I
shot those with my Leica M type II
camera with my 35mm lens, shot in aperture priority mode
at f/8. I think it averaged out to be around 250th, 500th of a second something like that. I
put in the video exactly what it was.
I focused with hyper focal like we talked about in the last episode
and that's all there is to it. Aperture priority mode, f/8, hyper focal
let the camera worry about the exposure and shoot away. Well thanks so much for
joining me for this episode. Don't forget those three tips, don't fight the light,
do your homework and be patient
and you'll get great results when you're shooting in natural light
and don't forget to subscribe AdoramaTV, it's absolutely free
and that way you won't miss any episodes. There's ton’s of them
out there and don't forget about the Adorama
Learning Center as well there are tons of articles,
specifically I just wrote one about natural light and properties of light
and all that kind of stuff.
it’s at the Adorama Learning Center as part of the AdoramaU
series. So check that out, it goes into much greater detail about positioning and
quality of light. I think I find that very useful.
Well thanks again for joining me and I'll see you again next time
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