In this video, I take on a 15 minute Photo Challenge
in a wood full of bluebells.
AdoramaTV presents: 'Take and Make Great Photography' with Gavin Hoey.
Hello - I am Gavin Hoey and you are watching AdoramaTV.
Brought to you by Adorama - the camera store that has everything
for us photographers. And as you can see today I am in a beautiful
bluebell wood because I'm gonna do a fifteen-minute
photo challenge.
Now this is just a fantastic place for photography, so much going on here
but I'm going to try and take a few different pictures, a few close-ups, a few
wide shots.
I have kind of got myself started. I'm ready to go because 15 minutes isn't very long to do this.
I've got my camera and I got my 24-105mm lens,
that is going to be the lens throughout this fifteen-minute 'Photo Challenge' and
I am likely to be using a tripod.
So I am set up ready to go. I reckon there's a couple shots here that I can take
without having to move my feet.
Which is really good for a tripod user because, well, I love tripods but they do
slow you down and 'time is of the essence'.
So lets see what we can do here. I think my first shot will just be a general wide-angle
scene - just to establish what I've got here.
I'm shooting pretty much in to the light, which is normally something you try to avoid.
I'm doing on purpose because I want to get that 'flair' effect.
So lets just come in and frame this up.
Now I reckon if I frame this up with lots of the trees
I should get quite an interesting picture.
I'm using 'Live View' to take the shots
and it's on a 2 second self-timer because
I didn't bring the Remote Release. So that's how I get around my lack of Remote Release.
Just pop it on a 2 second self timer
and the picture looks okay. There are better pictures in here. It works okay
as a landscape shot but I reckon I'm going to turn the camera around
because this could work well as a portrait format as well. So lets spin this around
and
is where the beauty of 'Live View' really comes in.
I'm going to do something you shouldn't do.
I'm going to include the Sun in the shot and you are always told never do that.
Always keeps the sun out of your shot.
But do you know what? That can really work well.
Beautiful. So you get that lovely 'star burst' affect. The 'star burst' effect is happening because
I'm at f/22, which is a really small aperture, that gives this natural 'star burst'.
So that is wide-angle stuff but I have got a 24-105mm lens so
let's try zooming in and see if I can get some shots here again.
Just see what I can get without moving even.
I will flip my camera back the other way around
and there are a couple of bluebells just sticking up above the rest,
and part of the reason I'm down so low is so I can get down to the same height as the bluebells.
That is what I want to do, to try and get a
'eye line' view across this field of blue!
I'm going to switch to manual focus for this, because
focus becomes a bit more critical. Now I've got mixed lighting here. We've got....
...'towards the end to the day lighting'. So got bright bits in the scene and dark bits.
I really want to photograph the bluebells that are in the shade.
that gives me the lowest contrast and, generally speaking,
better results. But my camera is exposing for the high lights
so I will just change my exposure compensation. Lets just increase that by a
a couple stops. Take the same shot.
This time I am biasing my exposure for the shadowy parts of the picture and
that you can a completely different look. So that's focusing
probably according to this three and a half meters in front of me but
my lens will focus a little bit closer. So let me just see if I can find a bluebell
in focus a bit closer to the front of the lens.
There you go. Again, I will use manual focus to try and nail this.
It is blowing around a little bit in the breeze which isn't helping!
But that is part of the challenge. I'll wait for the wind to die down a little bit.
Then I will take the shot.
That is just beautiful - we have a lovely 'out of focus' background because I am still shooting wide open f/4.
It's worth bracketing your apertures because although f/4
looks perfect on the back at the screen. It's not until you get back home
that you wish you had a bit more depth of field so
whilst I am here, lets also also try f/5.6
And for the fun of it, let's try f/8
Lets go one more, lets go f/11.
So what I end up with is a range of different pictures, at a range of different apertures
meaning I can do the best one not here, but I can choose it back in my studio.
There she goes! Go and get it!
I think a probably got all of the shots I can get here. Lets move around and see what else we can find.
Go and get it Ella!
Well honestly I've walked almost nowhere!
Just a few meters around and we've got this lovely tree. I'm still shooting with the light
more or less in my face.
I think is a good shot here, so lets gets the tripod down. Again I want to work low
I want to keep down. I'll show you why. I shouldn't use it this way but if
I take a shot like this.
What you end up with is the standard shot that you take at
eye height. It gets much more interesting when you get away from standard
eye heights.
I'm going to drop myself down, just yeah just like that.
No more than that.
Frame this up again.
Hello Ella! By the way, this is Ella. If you haven't seen Ella.
She comes with the woods.
Lets take the same shot. Here we go.
I reckon that the shot is going to be much better. But there is an even better shot in here.
I just have to work for a little bit. So the first thing I can do is just zoom in a bit closer,
just to frame it up a bit tighter.
Get this in focus.
I am still going to be using that nice f/4 wide-open aperture with this lens with a lovely shallow
depth of field. So that works pretty well but can I get it even better?
Well let's just try getting lower still so
I can adjust the legs of this tripod. I can get right down
so I'm literally deep inside of the bluebells.
Again, I am going to need to use 'Live View' for this.
Hello Ella!
We will get the dog out of the shot!
I am going to shoot through the bluebells. I am going to try and pick one out get one in focus.
There we are.
It's got this beautiful blue mist all around it.
Okay so I've got, well,
no time left maybe just for one quick shot at the end.
And when my favorite things to shoot, especially on a fifteen minute photo challenge,
is a panorama. So let's ditch the tripod for now.
Let's do this handheld because 'time is of the essence'.
So I am going to do a panorama here of the woods.
I'm going be using the wide angle end of my lens. If you want to see how to
really do a panorama
go check out my previous videos on the Adorama Learning Center.
I go through this step-by-step but basically what I'm gonna do is take a
meter reading.
I am going to be using f/8. So my camera is telling me
a shutter speed of a 50th sec. That's what I am going to dial in,
manual mode, f/8, 50th sec.
So I am going to take all of my pictures of my panoramic sequence at that setting.
Now here we go. I am also going to try and not get the sun directly in my shot.
So if I take a step to the side. Yes that will do.
So I've just hidden the Sun behind a tree.
I am going to take a picture my hand. So I know when I look back at these pictures
this is a panoramic sequence
- just a visual reminder - and away we go!
Taking the shots at about a 180 degree field of view
and making sure that they all overlap.
That is the secret of a good panorama - overlapping the pictures.
Around, around.....
So a sequence of images that, when I stitch them together,
just make a beautiful panorama and there you go!
Fifteen-minute comes and goes really, really quickly. I could spend
hours here and still never finish taking enough photographs but sadly
that's not possible. So let's get my favorite picture back into Photoshop
and we are going to do some editing on that right now!
So the picture I'm gonna edit is the last one and there's two reasons for that.
Partly it's because I can now make a panoramic image
directly inside of Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw.
But mostly it's because it's the first time, I think,
that I've been photo bombed by a dog and for that reason alone
it's worth editing. Let's have a look. So here I am inside Lightroom CC
or Lightroom 6, it's the same thing as far as our photo merge panorama is concerned
and I have got the images - I've sorted them out already but
I have done absolutely no processing to them. They are directly off
the camera raw files. But you can see these overlap - so here is that a big tree
and in the next shot it the same tree again and that's the secret
to making a good panorama. So how do I get these together inside of Lightroom into one
single image? Well first, I need to select them all - so I will press Control A
or Command A on a Mac. Then right click on
the image it doesn't matter which one on the filmstrip I can choose
Photo Merge and then Panorama. This is the new feature in the latest version
of Lightroom and also found in Adobe Camera Raw
inside a Photoshop CC 2014.
This will take a little bit of time to process through and I warn you now,
if you are the sort of person who doesn't have patience, this may not work for you
but thanks to the magic of video - mine is already done!
What it creates isn't a full panorama, it's just a low resolution
preview say can get an idea whether this is worth proceeding
or not. There's a few things you can change but not many.
First of all, there is an AUTO button at the top which will automatically select
the projection and the projections are these three buttons below
- so you might as well click on them to learn what they do!
'Spherical Panoramas' are 360 degrees so I didn't take one of those in this case.
I did about 180 degrees and that would make it a 'Cylindrical Panorama'
and you can see they are very slightly different. This one is a little bit
more deep and that is the one I'm going to choose.
My feet stayed still taking this panorama and I rotated. But I was walking along taking a panorama
I'd have made a 'Perspective Panorama'. It won't let me choose that in the preview
because
when it realizes their I didn't make one and that is rather clever.
Let's use the 'Cylindrical'. I could use Auto Crop,
see this white area around the outside, I could use Auto Crop and get rid of that
but I am going to do that inside of Photoshop so I will leave Auto Crop off
and just click on the 'Merge' button. This will start to create
the panorama for real. You can see it is going along on the progress bar here.
This is where it can really start to slow down because the final panorama is gonna be 8 high-resolution
raw files, merged together and that means it's going be about
15,000 pixels on the longest edge so
it's a really, really wide panorama and that is going to take some serious processing
even on my computer that is pretty powerful!
Again, thanks to the power of video, guess what? Mine is done!
So this is the unedited panorama and it is, effectively, a giant raw file.
That means I can do all the things I would have done to my original raw files
but rather than having to do them individually on all 8, I can just come
and do it on the final one.
That kind of makes sense to me - to try to edit the final raw file - rather than the
individual raw files. That's what I'm going to do. I'm doing a bit of editing here.
Maybe we'll pull down the clarity and pop up the vibrance and we'll just get
the 'Graduated Filter' and lighten up the foreground I think a little bit.
That sky does look a little bit pink but don't be fooled!
That is not actually reality - if I zoom in over that you see that's pretty good.
I need to chromatic aberration. It's just such a high resolution file
that it is showing a few odd things on this lower resolutions screen.
So I am happy with that. What about this white area?
Well, this is perhaps where Lightroom falls down slightly because I can't clone
into this white area. It just won't work if I get the
the 'Spot Healing Brush' and I trying to and spot heal over these areas.
It isn't going to work so instead of doing that - what I'm going to do
is right click on this panorama and edit in
Photoshop CC 2014.
I've moved from Lightroom into Photoshop
and I can continue my editing there and now you can see I got this checkerboard pattern.
So lets get the crop tool and just come down here and crop in here.
A little bit like that, okay and a little
bit of the bottom. Something like that. What about the rest this area here?
Well I'm gonna use the 'Clone Stamp Tool' for this because
'Clone Stamp Tool' will work really well for pretty random
patterns like this. I can come clone in - that's not so good - let's make my brush
a little bit softer. There we go!
Obviously the more time you spend doing this
the better the end result will be. I'm not exactly....
I don't have that much time because this is a video and you really don't
here and watch me clone
for the next 10 minutes or so. I'm going through this much, much faster
that I would normally do. And there you go!
There is my panorama completed!
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I am Gavin Hoey - thanks for watching.
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