Create Stunning Visual Effects Using Long Exposure

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] I love nature. Whenever I get to a place to shoot, instead of taking my camera out right away, I take my time, explore the area, take the scene in, and look for the best place to shoot. [MUSIC] Hello, and welcome to Creating Stunning Visual Effects using Long Exposure. I'm Ileana Chase, and I have been a photographer half my life. For the past seven months, I've been traveling with my husband throughout America. Right, now we're in beautiful Costa Rica. Here are a few of my pictures to illustrate what you can create using Long Exposure. Go beyond freezing a moment, and actually capture the passage of time. Throughout this class, I'll be showing you lots of sample images and we'll go together through the steps I use to create my pictures. From setting up the camera to taking the shot, to sunlight, editing, to get beautiful effects on your pictures. I'm not a technical photographer. I learn by trial and error. I believe in knowing your camera and going out to shoot and have fun. 2. The Project: [MUSIC] For this project, I want you to choose one picture either day or night using what you've learned in this class. They're not good or bad pictures. This is a safe space for creatives, artists, and anyone that would like to experiment with light and the passage of time. [MUSIC] Just for any type of picture, remember to slow down and appreciate the scene. Just think about how it feels for you, is it moving, if it looks sadness or peace, so take a look around. Don't go too far. Go outside your home. Checkout the park next to your place or the ocean or whatever you have in nature. If you don't have nature, you're in the city, go out and explore the city at night. That's going to be very cool. Just want to make sure that you're safe, that your equipment is safe. If you have a friend that you can go out with or a group of friends, even better, make it a day trip, go out with your friends and just take your camera along and have fun. Let's take a look at the equipment that you will need. 3. The Equipment: [MUSIC] For this class, you will need a camera and a tripod. If you would like to experiment during the day, you will also need an ND filter. [MUSIC] I will be using a DSLR camera. But any camera with a bulb mode can work. [MUSIC] You can use any equipment you have. But if you would like some recommendations, please take a moment to download the equipment info page under the resources. [MUSIC] Let's talk a little bit about long exposure. 4. Long Exposure: [MUSIC] What is low exposure? The easiest way for me to explain is to show you. When you take a picture, the shutter opens and closes, allowing the light into the camera. We have a very fast shutter speed, like 1/1000 of a second. Like what you would use for sports photography or to freeze a moment. You will be able to see and hear how fast the shutter opens and closes but in long exposure, we slow down the shutter. If we leave it open for five seconds or so, a lot of light will be coming into the camera. Let me show you. This is what will be considered long exposure. Once we press it, it will just stay open for as many seconds as you need to capture the light. This technique will show whatever is on movement like water or clouds just dragging to the picture. Whatever is still like rocks or an object will just remain frozen or everything else is moving around it. That's what makes long exposures so special. The use of an ND Filter will help you extend the shutter speed to capture the passage of time. Creative long exposure reveals a world that is invisible to the naked eye. I really enjoy applying long exposure techniques to almost everything. Waterfalls are one of my favorite subjects. They create a fantasy world to me. It feels almost ethereal. I won't be giving you a few tips on how to shoot long exposure before we jump into our project. Number 1, this is obvious. You need a camera on a tripod. Number 2, you might need an ND filter if you're going to be shooting during the day. Now, these are some of the settings I use in my camera. I make sure that I'm shooting raw. Why? What was easier to edit. If you don't have raw it's okay. I've been shooting with JPEGs and it turns out fine as well. Choose the white balance settings to auto. Work on manual mode. Turn off auto ISO, and turn it to 100 ISO. Make sure your ND filter is clean and then screw it on or slide it into place. Adjust your shutter speed depending on the filter you got. Use a remote to trigger your shutter, or set it on a 2-second timer if you don't have a remote. [MUSIC] 5. Day Project: Welcome back. Today we'll be going over the step-by-step process of taking a long exposure picture during the day. I'm at a local waterfall and it's a beautiful day. We will be needing a camera, a tripod, and an ND filter. Today I'm using my 10-stop filter. Depending on the intensity of the sun, if you try to take a long exposure, your picture will turn out white. With the use of a filter, you can make water perfectly smooth or see the clouds strike out. This is why you need to do full settings in your camera. [MUSIC] For this feature, I chose to leave the shutter open for 43 seconds to a minute. Remember that the time you keep the shutter open depends on the filter that you're using and the light conditions outside. This is the picture that I'm going to edit and I'm editing in Lightroom. If you don't have Lightroom, you can just download it and you can get a free trial for a little bit. I always start by cropping my image. I usually use the golden spire to crop my images. If you're not aware of what this is, it's just a way of cropping where the subject is in the middle of the picture. I can go up and down and look for different positions. Or with the letter O, you can change cropping tools to different settings. This will be the most usual rule of thirds, diagonal, center. I like golden spire the best and that's the one I use. Once I have the image how I like it, then we can start with a light editing. For example, I have here some presets. I usually don't use this, but I want to show you where to find them just in case you're interested. I will use landscape because this is landscape. If you can see here, there's a bunch of beautiful presets that you can use. Once you choose the one you like, then you can continue editing on this section. Contrast, I like always a little contrast. Pull the highlights a little bit so you can appreciate the water better. Shadows, well, you want to make sure that you can see where the rocks are. But also I'm going to show you a neat trick because this will actually light in the entire image. But if we go up to this section, is a mask and we just use the brush, you can highlight the parts that you want to see better and it will do the trick for you. There you go. That's it. Now we're going to try to move the shadows over a little bit so that you can appreciate the rocks. You can see the before and the after. You can see the rocks a little better on the right side. Now we'll go back. Here the precepts are already taking some of the changes. This is vibrance. I know vibrance is better than saturation and I will show you why. If we move saturation all the way over, the rocks look a little weird hue with colors. They look unreal, I don't like using that, so we're going to move it back. You can also play with the color mixer. If you have greens, for example, in this case, you go down to dial. It will take away the greens. But if you go up the dial, it will increase the greens in the scene. I like them a little bit green, not too much. The blues, same thing. If you have blues in the water, they will show even more. I like a little bit of clarity just so that the rocks are extra sharp and I just will use a little bit of dehaze on this image. Always use chromatic aberration. The geometry, I usually put it to auto just in case I miss something and it's not straight. See, there's nothing to correct here. I think the image is looking the way I want it. There's just one little thing here. I'm going to show you another trick. This is only for small things if you want it to change. I don't like this distraction here. If there's a lot to change, I will not use Lightroom for this, I will use a different tool in Photoshop. Now that's disappeared, which is great. We go back to editing. I think we're done. Now, one more tip. Let's say that you have a similar image that you want to look the same and you want to save time. All you have to do is copy paste the settings, right here there's three dots. It will show you settings. You copy and go to the image that you want the same settings on and hit "Control V" or paste settings. It will automatically change your image as well. That will save you lots of time. Or look it up here, it also paste edit settings. Let's take a look at our image. Let's check before and after. This is the original image. This is after the edit. I just wanted to show you a little bit of what I do in Lightroom. 6. Night Project: [MUSIC] For this project, we'll be going over the step-by-step process of taking a long exposure picture at night. We're in Santiago, Chile, known as the country of poets, at El Fuente de los Candandos. We are looking at an amazing sunset. Tonight, we'll be needing a camera and a tripod. It's a hot February summer day. I'll be waiting until it gets a bit darker to take the picture of the city in the background with amazing sunset colors and some cars on the freeway to get the effect of dragging lights. Since there's still a lot of ambiance light from the sun on the street, we won't be needing to leave the shutter open for too long. We'll try between eight seconds and 10 seconds. Let's talk again about the settings. Remember, set your camera on a tripod. You have the option, shooting raw. Set your white balance settings to auto balance. Move the focus of your lens from automatic focus to manual focus. Turn off Auto ISO, and move it to either 100 or 200, depending on the light conditions. Use a remote trigger for your shutter or set it on a two-second timer. This time, I will be using the two-second timer on my camera. I couldn't stop myself and start shooting with still a lot of light. These were the results. [MUSIC] It's a beautiful Sunday night in February, not a lot of cars around 9:00 PM in Santiago. It seems like Chileans take February as vacation time. Almost everybody flees the city, since it's the hottest month of the year. [MUSIC] Now that I've found the correct settings on my camera, I'll be waiting to get more cars in the scene. [MUSIC] I'm happy with the 10 seconds pusher, and that's a wrap for tonight. [MUSIC] Welcome back to editing in light room. We're going to start by cropping the image. Even though these golden spirals' not on top of the lights here on the road, I did not want to crop it too much because then that means that we lose the sunset. We can check on this. I still like the image as I shot it, so I'm going to just leave it as. Since I'm not doing any of the cropping, I am going to start with highlights. Move the highlights a little bit down so you can appreciate more of the sunset. Shadows. I'm going to leave the shadows, put a little bit. I'm going to work on the river on my own. We're going to go back to the brush, and we are going to highlight that river so we can see it better. That way, it wouldn't touch the buildings. We are going to full the shadows so we can see the river in the middle, and the buildings will remain dark, which I like. Going back. Now, let's see whites. Overall, little bit. We are going to move vibrance a little bit over so you can appreciate all the colors in this picture. Since we have pinks and orange and yellow, we're going to move them over a little bit so you can see them better. Check on the yellow. Let's see a little bit of the blues. A little bit of clarity and dehaze. Let's move dehaze back. I did not like dehaze on this picture particularly. We are going to check on the auto. We've corrected it a little bit, which is great. I think that's it for the picture. I'm very happy with it. I will actually love this picture. This is a 10-second exposure at 100 ISO and an f-stop of 22, which is the maximum allowed on my kit lens. 7. Conclusion: [MUSIC] When I was starting photography, I started with black and white film. I would get super excited and I will use a roll of film in five seconds. I would just shoot everything that pass in front of me. What I've learned is to be a little bit more deliberate because after spending hours and hours on lab, I realize that out of the 24 pictures or the 36 pictures that I had, I could only use one maybe, like one. I learned to slow down, look around me and take the picture that I really, really wanted. If anything I can give you is that. With [LAUGHTER] digital cameras, it's even easier to take 100 pictures and maybe you won't like any of them, so be deliberate, enjoy the moment, take your time and when you're ready, take the picture. [MUSIC]