- Hi guys, it's Ross Hoddinott from NatureTTL.com
and I'm here today to help you
take great photographs of woodland.
(light uplifting music)
(clicking camera shutter)
I've decided to come to woodland today,
because the weather isn't particularly good,
it's a bit drizzly, it's overcast
and woodland's a really good place to go
to take photographs on a fairly rubbish day,
weather's not great,
come into the shelter of some woodlands
and hopefully I can photograph,
there's a really nice river here,
so I'm hoping to photograph the river,
there's some seasonal colours starting to appear,
so I'm hoping to shoot those as well,
I'm hoping to find some fungi
and perhaps some other kind of textures and patterns,
so fingers crossed, we're going to have a little explore now
and we'll see what we can find and what we can photograph.
(gentle relaxing music)
(rushing water)
I think this is a really nice spot along the river.
I'm a bit concerned about some of this
kind of debris in the background here,
I think that really ruins the shot,
but the viewpoint looking in this direction is really nice,
there's a few autumnal leaves in the foreground,
which I might decide to incorporate into the shot,
but I definitely think there's real potential
for a nice image here,
possibly using a polarising filter
to kind of give the colours a bit more intensity
and also maybe use an ND filter,
just to give the water motion,
just a little bit of kind of creative blur,
so I'm going to set up now.
(gentle uplifting music)
So the river look fantastic here
and this is my initial composition,
I've decided to use the foreground rocks
to give a little bit of a frame,
I also quite like the fact
there's some autumnal leaves here in the foreground,
which I think is kind of quite attractive,
that makes it look quite seasonal,
I've deliberately, as you can see from this shot,
I've intentionally obscured the sky,
I don't want any white sky coming right into the shot,
so if I just alter this and you can see
some kind of white highlights
coming into the upper part of the shot
and they will burn out and they'll look really distracting,
so when you photograph woodland on overcast days,
ideally try and exclude the sky
and make sure that the frame is filled up with just woodland
and that will reduce the contrast
and make it a lot easier to get a very nice shot.
I've just attached a polarising filter
I used a LEE Filters Landscape Polarising Filter,
and the reason why I've done that
is because polarizers are great for woodland interiors,
most people think of polarizers as just being good
for blue skies and kind of big, open vistas,
but polarizers reduce all the glare and reflections
coming off water and foliage and so for a scene like this,
it does a really good job of giving the scene more punch,
giving the colours more vibrancy.
This is the unpolarized scene at the minute,
and just as I rotate the filter,
you'll see that the colours really start to intensify
and the contrast within the moving water
becomes much greater,
the image looks far better now with this filter
and if you're going to go out and shoot woodland,
I would really recommend
that you bring your polarizer with you.
In this instance, I'm using the leaves
and this kind of rocky ledge as my foreground interest,
but a scene like this doesn't have to have foreground,
I think a lot of photographers get really hung up
on always having foreground interest
and river scenes can look great with a fallen tree
or rocky boulders in the foreground,
just to add that little bit of interest,
but when you're shooting water motion,
that water motion itself can create
that really nice, kind of foreground interest
and sometimes that's all you need.
You'll probably notice that with my shot,
that I'm shooting upstream
with the kind of water running in towards the camera,
which I think in this instance works really, really well,
but don't worry too much about whether
you're shooting upstream or downstream,
rivers are really good at creating a natural lead-in line,
so whichever direction you shoot in,
the river's going to direct the eye through the image
and create a really kind of deep, compelling composition.
(light uplifting music)
Another good technique to try on a day like today,
when it's damp and a little bit miserable
is to try Intentional Camera Motion
or ICM, as people often describe it
and this is a technique where you move the camera,
you drag the camera during the exposure
to blur subject detail, subject motion,
that's what you're kind of creating.
Now, I've come to this particular spot here,
this group of trees in front of me,
because I'm looking for strong structure,
so when you intentionally blur your subject,
you're looking for a subject,
that has got really good structure to it,
strong, bold shapes, there's texture, there's contrast,
so that when you kind of create that motion,
the image actually still has
really good definition and interest.
So for ICM mages, it's quite a good idea
to actually use a tripod, but you can shoot them handheld,
it's not an issue, different heads work in different ways,
this tripod head isn't the best for this,
it's a geared head and it creates a little bit,
it's a little bit jerky to actually move up and down,
possibly a ball and socket head would produce
a slightly more kind of flowing motion,
but whatever you decide to use,
it's just a matter of trial and error,
try different lengths of exposure
and also just vary the actual speed,
that you move the camera
and those things will all create different looking results.
One of the big considerations, when shooting ICM images
is shutter length, you need a relatively long exposure,
in order to get the creative level of motion,
that you're trying to achieve,
I would say an exposure time of around a second
to two seconds is a really good starting point,
so you can achieve that with a low ISO,
you could also select a very small aperture,
you don't need to worry about diffraction at all,
when you're taking these kind of images,
because obviously they're soft anyway
and you could use a solid ND filter
to help create that long level of exposure,
I've got a polarising filter on at the minute,
because that's absorbing a couple of stops of light,
it's also saturating the colours,
which is making my images
look a little bit more saturated as well.
(light uplifting music)
One of the first things that comes to mind
when you think autumn is all the lovely autumnal colours,
but you have to be really careful
that Auto White Balance doesn't try and neutralise them,
I recommend you shoot one of your presets,
like Daylight or Cloudy and you could actually use
one of the presets to deliberately
saturate the colours slightly more,
Cloudy and Shade are both really good
at just giving your shots a little bit of extra warmth.
The other subject that you really think of
when you think of autumn is fungi
and that's what we're going to go and look for now.
(light uplifting music)
And it looks like we've found the perfect subject.
There's some really nice groups of toadstools here,
but they're a bit chaotic, there's a lot going on,
so I'm actually looking to find just one or two
and they're growing kind of slightly
more separately from the others, which I can isolate
and hopefully make a kind of a simpler,
kind of nicer composition from them
and often it is better to go for small groups,
than it is to go for obvious large masses.
I've found my subject, it's in pristine condition
and now I've set up my tripod to give me stability,
there's not a lot of light obviously in the woodland today,
so I need the tripod to give me not only stability,
but also it allows me to fine tune my composition.
In terms of composition, I've gone for a fairly low angle,
because that generally looks more intimate,
it looks more natural and often with fungi,
a low, worm's eye view, when you're looking up at it
can look really nice.
I've just isolated the one mushroom,
the other ones are kind of out of focus around it,
I'm going to use a relatively shallow
depth of field to achieve that
and the fungus is just kind of on an intersecting third,
which is a really kind of nice, striking place
for the subject to be.
So now having set up, I've got two things
I really need to think about, my focusing and also lighting.
With focusing, I always favour Live view,
it is great for really precisely applying my focus,
so what I can do is with a Live view activated on my screen,
I can just zoom in and then manually adjust my focus,
I can do this with great precision,
generally with close up subjects,
it is better to focus manually, you have more precision,
Autofocus can sometimes hunt around
for focus on small subjects shot at high magnification
and I'm just very, very finely adjusting focus,
so that it's placed just on the edge of the cap
and having done that, I'm going to zoom back out,
it's all nice and sharp and I'm ready to take my photograph.
I'm really pleased with it, the shot works very nicely,
I think the toadstool is standing out really well
from its kind of out of focus foreground and background,
so I'm happy from that perspective,
but the image does look a bit flat,
which is hardly surprising,
the light's very flat, you know, it's overcast
and there's a very dense leaf canopy above,
so in order to try and give the image just a bit more drama,
I'm going to apply a little bit of artificial lighting
and to do that, I'm going to use this LED,
the one I use is made by Manfrotto,
but there are all kinds of versions available
and the nice thing about using a constant light source
like this is that you can be very creative,
you can kind of move the LED around the subject
to kind of get different effects,
I've always liked backlighting the most,
so I'm just going to turn this LED on now
and I'm going to just handhold it behind my subject
and obviously I'm just regulating effect
by either moving it closer or further away,
I'm just looking at the effect on the screen on my camera,
I'm happy with that and suddenly I've got an image
with a lot more interest and impact.
Another really good lighting accessory
for close ups is a reflector,
in these kind of dark conditions,
just having a little bit of natural light
reflected up in your subject
can just relieve very dark shadow areas
and just create a really kind of nice,
natural looking light,
a small version like this, this one's made by Lastolite
is ideal and a perfect accessory
to kind of keep in your backpack,
when you shoot woodland close ups.
So there you have it, three really neat ways
to take great shots in woodland on an overcast day.
I hope you've enjoyed this video
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