- All right guys, in this episode
I wanna show you how I take some photos in Malibu.
(dramatic music)
(speaks in foreign language)
My name is Serge Ramelli, I'm a French photographer
from the amazing city of Paris, France.
But right now I'm in Malibu
and I wanna share with you some of my landscape stuff.
You can download all the source file of this episode,
the link is below the video.
Also don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel,
I try to make two videos per week this year,
it's my challenge and so you can get a notification
every time I do one.
All right, come and follow me
in the beautiful Malibu State Park,
it's state park that completely burned down a few weeks ago
and nature is taking back its force
and it's growing back.
Right now it looks like New Zealand,
it's beautiful.
I wanna share the beauty of Los Angeles with you.
Come and follow me.
This whole place was burned down
and we've been raining,
it's been raining a lot in LA
and now it's all growing back.
I mean some of the trees are really hurt
but it looks beautiful, it looks very lush again.
And yeah, the force of nature.
Amazing.
(upbeat music)
(camera shutter clicks)
Long shadows of the end of afternoon.
With some good retouching this is gonna be awesome.
All right, so one thing I love to do with these oak trees
is to compress them.
I sort of zoom in and really underexpose the photos
so they are all stacked up to each other
and makes like a nice frame in a frame.
Lower the sun the better.
We're chasing the light right now
because I wanna take photos just when the sun is peeking
right up the mountain.
(upbeat music)
Yeah, I'm thinking I wanna do a pano
because I wanna to get the sun,
so the sun is a little bit on the left side.
So I do like a whole pano so that we can see
the entire way but still get some of that sun.
The light, I wanna be at so many places
when the light hits the mountain
so I gotta teleport, let's go.
Voila!
So here I am, I'm so happy.
You know, one thing that I do when I do landscape
is to find the right foreground element.
And there's nothing better than a good dirt road
that looks like a snake going into the sun.
And so, yesterday I did some location scouting,
I found this place I really like
and I'm gonna be shooting this scene here,
it looks like Africa to me,
with right when the sun is gonna hit the mountain.
Because if you do it before that let me show you.
(camera shutter clicks)
The whole shot is really washed out,
it's very washed out.
If you wait for the sun to touch the horizon
then you only get a little peek
and it looks just, you get less dynamic range
and it's more awesome.
And with a bit of retouching,
hopefully it's gonna look great.
Okay for this shot I wanna be at ISO 100,
best quality photo possible,
7.1 aperture, you don't need to be more,
and I'm gonna shoot in HDR
because there's so much dynamic range
even though there's gonna be less.
When the sun is peeking is still very high.
And so I put my camera on the self timer two seconds,
(camera shutter clicks) minus two, zero and plus two.
What's gonna happen is that it's gonna wait
one or two seconds and take the three shots.
You just need to make sure that your normal shot speed
is at least 250s of a second and above.
Right now I'm at 320 second and above
which is cool because it means that
my overexposed photo is at 180s of a second.
180 of a second it's sharp
because if your normal exposure is like
at 1/100 of a second,
you're gonna find yourself with the overexposed photo
to be like at one-third of a second
and it's gonna be blurry.
So you can do HDR by hand,
you just need to make sure that your normal exposure
is 1/250 and above
and that's what I'm doing right now.
All right guys so I shot this scene to death.
You know, with the sun high up, touching the mountain,
being behind the mountains,
HDR everything.
We'll see what comes out the best.
(uptempo music)
One thing I always look for in landscapes is lonely trees
and I tried to get some a shot of this tree right there
but I'm too close to it
and it's very cluttered
because you want the tree,
you want a tree to have no background behind it
because if you have a background then it gets mixed up.
So I'm gonna go all the way down
and shoot it from up,
hopefully to have it just in the sky.
That could be cool.
We're gonna try that.
(camera shutter clicks)
(uptempo music)
(camera shutter clicking)
Wow.
(camera shutter clicking)
All right guys, so now let's go into Lightroom
and see what we got.
All right guys, so let me show you what I got.
Here I am in Lightroom and I wanna show
the good photos and the bad photos.
So this is the photos that I got when I arrived.
I mean it was so green I really did not expect that
and I started by shooting here the tree,
and I always love to really underexpose the photo
because you wanna make sure
you don't get any highlights which I burn,
and I just find that it's a better way to get the colors.
Not every camera can do this
but this is a Sony A7R III and it was really great
with underexposed photo.
I was looking for the right way to do things
so this photo is okay,
I kind of liked it but the sun was there on the left side
and I wish I had it,
so I turned around to see if I could catch
the sun on the right side but it didn't work,
it didn't work.
And so, what I ended up doing was I get doing a pano
where I really had the sun here
and then taking one, two, three, four,
five, six photos, okay.
Now to make a pano it's very simple.
You know, all you have to do is make sure
your camera is very straight
and you try to rotate it on itself kind of thing,
and make sure you got about 20% or 30%
of the photo that's in common.
Back in the day it used to be really hard to make panos,
now with Lightroom it's so easy.
So I'm gonna select all these photos here
and I'm gonna right click, Photo Merge, Panorama.
And in panorama you have different projection modes,
it's just the way the pano is made.
So, you can check there is actually three spherical,
cylindrical and perspective.
Now perspective does not always work.
If you have an object that's too close to the camera,
it doesn't always work.
And then you have this thing called boundary wrap
which you can use to just sort of
get the pixel that you're missing.
And you just press merge.
I've already done it and here is the result.
So when I retouch my photos
'cause I really wanna show you the way I work.
I work with my own preset
that I call my natural everyday preset
and don't worry I'm gonna give you some for free,
the one I'm using in this video
so you don't have to purchase anything.
In fact I'm giving you all the free preset that I'm using
plus I'm giving you all the raw files
so you can just follow along and train at home.
But if you wanna get fancy,
if you didn't wanna work like me
you can buy for a very, very little price
the 300 presets I work with.
The offer is below the video but that's another story.
Okay, so, on this one what I do is
I go through my different preset,
this was a golden hour.
So you can see here I've got like my Golden Hour Basic,
Golden Hour Linear.
So, Golden Hour Basic is basically
just a base of retouching
with the golden hour look in mind.
Golden Hour Linear is the same thing
but I'm making the top and the bottom of the photo
a bit darker.
Golden linear or circle linear
or circle is the same thing
but I'm using circle to make some parts
of the photo brighter.
And then you've got two version,
you got a dark one and a light one.
In this case, I'm gonna use a light one, okay?
I'm also gonna crop the photo.
I'm just gonna constrain to image, close.
I could have done it while doing the pano but I did it now.
And you see, I've got 27 different sliders
that's already in there
and most of the photo is already retouch.
All I'm gonna do is add a little bit maybe of magenta.
Whenever you use one of my presets
you gotta make sure that the circle
is positioned where the sun is.
So it could have been here, we got lucky on this time,
it was where the sun is.
This is really made for the sun.
It's gonna make just that part a little bit brighter.
I think I wanna make the overall photo,
one thing you have to do also when you use a preset
whether it's mine or another one,
is make sure your black point.
So hold down the option key and press the black point
and it's good.
Okay, I got a good black point
but then make sure the white point is good too.
You know, I don't care to burn the sun a little bit
and around the sun,
yes, something like this.
And then maybe make it overall a little bit brighter.
Now on my preset I have a gradient here
and it's a little too strong
so I'm gonna make it bigger
and I'm gonna, make it going up
so it's gonna be more for gradient.
Same thing here for the bottom
and voila, maybe add a little more magenta
and make it a little more warmer.
And voila, that's the panorama.
I like it.
It's kind of a cool photo,
what a place, what a place.
Okay, so let's carry on.
Now this is when I started doing my HDR
when the sun was coming down
and honestly I'm not gonna do anything with this photo
because it was just too high.
You know, I shoot it anyway in case.
I try zooming in
and I was getting a lot of blur on my,
a lot of lens flare on my lens
probably because it needed to be cleaned.
So I cleaned it, a little bit later on
it was a little bit better afterwards.
One idea that I did is
instead of basically having the sun in the shot like this,
I zoomed in a lot so that I would,
the sun would be here on the side.
And I think this could make a pretty good photo,
I can use one of the daylight preset,
daylight just to get a sense
of how the photo would work.
Not so bad.
I would take here, the gradient that's here
maybe make it a bit lower.
So most of my gradients have a gradient filled with air.
So, on this one for example,
if you make it too strong
what's gonna happen is the top of the mountain's
gonna become dark.
Now luckily there is an option and by default it's off,
called the range masking.
It basically is luminosity masking.
And to make it simple if you use the luminance
and you move this to the right,
that gradient is gonna move behind the mountains
which is really cool because it's making the sky darker
without influencing the mountain.
Let me show you.
Before, you see how the sky is bright.
After, now the sky is darker
but the mountains were not so much influenced.
A little bit but not that much.
Okay same thing here, I got another gradient.
I can make it maybe a little bit darker.
But you know, I mean I like the composition
because it's compressed, it's a beautiful scenery
but it's really washed out by the sun.
So, let's carry on and let's see.
So what is that?
That's like an HDR that I did of the same scene.
You know, I moved around.
So I was waiting for the sun to come down
so I kind of moved around and took other photos,
and honestly this one I don't like
because this one does not convey message to me.
It's like it's nice because it's got a good light
but like, what am I looking at here?
Is it this tree, is it this mountain, is it this?
I don't like it, I really don't like it.
Okay, now we come to the point where
which was what I was waiting for
and I did different version of this.
So, HDR.
This is the normal exposure,
that is I believe the underexposure
and that is,
no, that is the underexposure,
that is the normal exposure,
and that is the overexposure.
I don't know why but Lightroom sometime mix them up.
Usually I have normal, under and over,
in this case it's over, normal and under.
Don't ask me why it's like this, it is like this.
So all we have to do is select all three photos,
right click.
Photo Merge, HDR.
Okay, once you do that
I just used the option of auto-align.
I don't use the ghosting effect.
So the ghosting effect would be like
if the branch is moved during the shot
and so you have like a bit of a ghosting effect
in the final HDR.
Now in this case there was no wind whatsoever
so I don't even think I'm gonna use it.
All right so here we are,
I'm just gonna click on merge but I've already done it.
So here is the final HDR,
it's very underexposed but it's an HDR guys.
So if I open the shadows, look at this.
I'm getting all the information,
if I bring down the highlights
I'm getting all the information.
So, same thing on this one.
To go fast I'm gonna take as a base,
as a preset and again I'm giving you this preset.
You'll find a download under this video
and I'm gonna use the Golden Hour Linear Circle Light.
Yeah, something like this.
And first thing is make sure that the circle
is at the right place
which is where the light is supposed to be.
All right.
And you know what, on this one I might even try,
I might try something else.
I might try to go with the sunset preset.
I've got some crazy sunset preset.
Yeah, Sunset Inner Circle Light.
I think it's gonna work even better.
So first thing first,
let's put the circle at the right place
which is over the sun here
and the sunset preset adds,
brings back a lot more of this sort of pre,
red sunset there.
Same thing here.
On this one I'm gonna use a little bit but not much
because I like the idea that the sun
reacts a little bit on the mountain.
So maybe a little bit of luminance masking,
just like maybe a third into it but not more, not more.
Okay.
And on this one I'm gonna check my black point.
Yeah.
I'm gonna check out my white point.
I don't care if I'm burning out the sun a little bit
but I wanna make this definitely a little bit brighter.
And add a bit of contrast.
I think the overall photo needs to be a little bit brighter.
Something like this, yes.
Okay now you're talking.
I'm gonna go and get the gradient that's there
'cause I know my preset's got a gradient
and I just wanna make it a little bit darker.
And I think this one I'm gonna go 16 by nine
'cause the gallery I work with
either it takes four by three or 16 by nine.
And so I got used to 16 by nine
and I think it just gives that sort of panoramic look.
I love this photo.
Let's see here, yeah.
You have to wait for it to render but it's super sharp.
Oh, I love it, I love it, I love it.
And maybe I'm gonna bring the,
I think the highlights, now the highlights.
No, no, no, no, no.
So you know what, I'm gonna take the circle.
I don't like the fact that around the sun
we can see the sun image so I'm gonna,
we can see it, the sun is too definite
so I'm gonna make another circle around the sun.
It's just a little detail but it really annoys me.
So and on this one I'm going to invert it,
I'm gonna feather it
and all I want not exposure but I'm just gonna boost
a little bit the highlights.
Not so much.
I just want to make the sun glow a little more
just a tiny more
and maybe make it fuzzy with a bit of minus clarity.
Ah, just that and let's see before that circle
and after the circle.
So let's see before, after the whole circle.
Well it makes the whole sky more red
which is kinda cool.
Okay cool.
So I really like this photo and same idea.
This is another one that I really liked
which was the normal exposure, underexposure, overexposure.
I create an HDR just like I showed you
and on this one I use the same preset,
the Sunset Linear Circle Light.
You see it's funny how the HDR is super dark
but boom, you apply a preset to it
and it just looks,
even the light preset is even too strong.
Voila.
Sunset Linear Circle.
And so let's see here.
I'm gonna do my black point.
I'm gonna do my white point.
Okay, I'm making sure that my circle
that brings back the sun is where the sun was
'cause if it's not it's gonna look weird,
okay which is there.
And you see here I wanna get it
to go behind the mountain again.
So, let's use the luminosity mask.
This option is incre,
totally changed my life and my workflow.
Okay.
I think on this one I wanna make the circle around the tree
'cause the star of the photo is the tree.
For me a photo must have a strong message,
something you can really identify,
and for me, this is this tree.
So, I'm going to basically invert this, feather it.
Okay and just little bit of light on tree,
just not too much.
I wanna go like at 0.5 or something.
It just adds a little je ne sais quoi to the tree
which is I think is kinda cool.
I think I wanna make the overall photo a little brighter
and add a bit of more contrast.
Something like this.
And yeah, this one I don't think I'm gonna crop.
I really love this one,
I think one was really good.
Yeah, this one I think also I like a lot.
I love this view, it's really amazing.
And the last one that I,
I also tried another one
this one into like portrait mode, like more for Instagram,
and I also love the pano, guys.
I think it came out pretty okay.
All right, I hope you learned something.
Download my preset, give them a shot, they're free.
You can buy the professional version, the link is below.
We have a great offer for you.
Also don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel,
I'm gonna try to make two videos per week this year,
it's my challenge
and I will see you in another video.