DSLR Photography Masterclass for Beginners

1. Class Introduction: [MUSIC] Hi there and welcome to photography masterclass Part 2. Again, my name is Rose, I am a photographer and videographer and I will be your instructor for today. In Part 1 of this masterclass, we learned about the art and creative side of photography. We learned about properly exposing your scene to create a stunning image. We also learned about different tools to effectively tell stories through your photos. We touched on planning, dug deep on lighting, and many more. If by chance you are watching this and haven't watched Part 1 of this masterclass. Pause it now and checkout Photography Masterclass Part 1, the creative part under my classes. But if you've completed that class already, then it's time for you to take your photography skills to the next level. In this class, we will cover the technical part of photography. [MUSIC] We will study camera anatomy, how it works, and how we can maximize the settings to create stunning images. We will go over file formats, lenses, and other accessories that will greatly help your photography career and business. I also have a bonus lesson on everything that they will complete your creative process, all that and more inside the class. If you already know all the art and creative side of photography and want to further learn about the technical side. If you are a beginner and want to become an expert in photography. If you want to be a professional photographer, then this class is perfect for you. By the end of this class, you will have a solid understanding of the exposure triangle, the three most important settings in your camera to create that standing image. [MUSIC] You will learn about the file format that most professional photographers use. Basically, everything that you will need to be an expert and a professional photographer. What are you waiting for? Head onto the next video and let's get started. 2. Class project: Before we jump in into the class, I encourage you to participate in the class project. The biggest mistakes that you will make in this class is not doing. I wouldn't be where I am today if I did not man up and took my first 100 ugly photos. I took one photo, then another, then another, then 100. The next thing I know I was farther than where I thought I would be. That is exactly how you will improve and be an expert to apply everything that you will learn here. One lesson at a time, one practice, shoot at a time, one step at a time. Participate in all the activities at the end of each lesson and upload your images in the project section of this class. I can't wait to see your masterpiece. Have fun. 3. Camera Anatomy Part I: In this lesson, we're going to learn camera anatomy and how a camera works. But before we jump in, let me tell you a story. I accidentally had to learn a camera. I read a book, watched courses but what really made the difference for me is when I actually practiced and repeatedly used a camera. It is like using your smartphone. The first time you get your hands on your phone, you are not an expert with it yet. But after days of playing around with different settings and continually using it, you develop muscle memories and expertise. Good news is it works the same way with your camera. You just need to use it repeatedly. In my case, I initially took photos using the auto mode or automatic, where my made made the exposure decision for me. At first it was really nice and handy to be able to take photos without thinking about the settings because everything is in auto mode. But as I take more photos and discover my unique style, I realized I wanted to be able to control the exposure and other settings in my camera to achieve the final image that I have envisioned. In the next lessons, I will tell you how to smoothly transition from shooting in auto mode to a priority mode, to a more professional manual mode. For now, let's take a look at how a camera works. All cameras use the same basic design. Light enters an enclosed box through a converging or convex lens, and an image is recorded on a light sensitive medium. A shutter mechanism controls the length of time that light can enter the camera. Or to simply put it, a camera has a shutter that opens for a certain amount of time, usually a fraction of a second, and meeting light into the body of the camera through a lens, then uses a grid of full biosensors to record the incoming pattern of light. Each sensor returns an electrical current when it's truck by the incoming light. Finally, an image in the form of a binary file is created. Now that you have an idea of how a camera works, let's dig deeper into camera anatomy. I know this is not one of the most exciting lessons in photography, and some people manage to take great pictures without ever leaving these details. This doesn't mean that it's not important to know all the main parts of a camera. It is very important to know the key parts of your camera and how they work together to let you create stunning images. I will be focusing on the key parts of DSLR and mirrorless cameras because these are commonly used by hobbyists and professional photographers. Plus these are the cameras that are usually required if you are paid to take photos. If you are using a smartphone, feel free to check my smartphone photography course. Let's dive in. Let's start with the very basics. You have the lens, the mount, the grip, and the body. The camera body is a light proof box. The controls for exposure settings and other effects are located on the camera body. The camera shutter and the image sensor are located inside the camera body. Next, lenses are the eyes of the camera and they bend light to make things appear closer or further. Depending on the type of camera, lenses can either be fixed or interchangeable. Lenses are available in different types that include standard, standard zoom, telephoto zoom, fisheye, macro, wide angle, etc. Next, mouth is where we attach or detach the lens. Finally, a grip is where we keep a firm hold on the camera. [MUSIC] Next is the controls. All cameras have the on and off button, the navigation pad, the shutter release, mode dial and command dial. Now, these parts are common on most mirrorless or DSLR cameras. It may look different on your camera, but most of the controls that I will show you are universal, just take note that the layout or where it is located on your camera may be different. For this lesson, let me show you these parts on my Panasonic mirrorless camera. First you have the power button where you turn the camera off and on. Then the navigation pad to access the menu system of the camera. Depending on the manufacturer and model, this is used for quick access to different options. In my case, I have ISO, white balance and function buttons that I can customize. Of course, we have a shutter release button. On most cameras, you can half press this button to focus and full press to take a photo. Next we have the mode dial where you can set different shooting modes. For photography, I often use A for aperture priority and M for manual. The reason why you need to learn how to use this is in the coming lessons. Next, we have these command dials. It looks different for different cameras, but what it does is allow you to set the aperture, shutter speed, and other settings when in priority and manual modes. Now you might say it's also boring. I agree with you. I remember when I attended a real estate brokerage seminar and the speaker started dissecting real estate loss and taxation. It was horrible. But guess what? Because of the knowledge I got from that seminar, I saved myself from a massive penalty. It's the same thing with learning the basics and the buttons on your camera. If you have just purchased your camera or if you're planning to buy, the very first step is to go to the manufacturer's website and download the instructions manual, and go through all the buttons and menu and what it does. I am sure that you will discover things there that will become handy and lifesaver once you start shooting. With that, let us continue on with the other parts. Don't worry, we are halfway there. 4. Camera Anatomy Part 2: [MUSIC] Next is the viewfinder. This is where you look through the frame and compose the shot. Since I have a mirror-less camera, I have the option to look at an electronic LCD or LED screen instead. This LCD/LED screen is also a monitor where I can see different information about my shot. If I'm using or if I'm shooting in RAW. My aperture, shutter speed, ISO information, the histogram, which is awesome, the battery, etc. When I press the menu button, this is where I will see the main menu and access a whole lot of settings. Next, we have the built-in flash and the focus assist light. The built-in flash is from the word itself, your camera's own flesh. But honestly, it is rare that I use this. In photoshoots, I use either natural light and separate artificial lights when natural lighting is not possible. The focus assist light is the tiny LED light that is built into most cameras. Not to take photos, but to actually help the camera auto-focus, especially in the dark. Moving on to mounting. [MUSIC] first we have the tripod mount. This is where we mount a tripod base plate, which we will then attach to our tripods. Then we have our hot shoe where we mount an external flash or an external microphone, which is more applicable if you are also doing videography with your camera. Next are the connections. We have the microphone jack, remote socket, USB socket, and HDMI socket. The socket where you connect an external mic is applicable if you were also doing videos, and it is handy for better sound quality. I use my camera for videos and honestly, sound captured with an external mic is way, way better than the sound captured by the camera alone. But that is reserved for the videography course. Going back, the remote socket is useful if you want to use a shutter remote control, which is helpful in some photoshoots, especially capturing movement or motion picture. Next is the USB port or socket to connect the camera to a computer, to backup photos, import photos or directly upload online. Finally, the HDMI socket to connect our camera directly to a television or a big screen. This is handy for presentations and live shoots. How about the inside parts? We have the battery, the memory card, and the sensor. The battery is self-explanatory, but the memory card, make sure to buy the one that your camera supports. In my case, a free memory card compatible with this camera was included when we bought it. Last, but definitely not the least is the sensor. This is one of the most critical components of a camera. This is what captures the light and converts it into a digital image. The image quality that a camera produces depends on the lens and the sensor itself. This is also the camera part that you should handle with utmost care. [MUSIC] When switching lenses, don't point the camera upwards to avoid dust falling on your sensor. Avoid touching the sensor with bare hands and leave smudges. Now, all of this won't matter if we can fake photos. If you have your camera all set up and ready, if you're like me, you will start taking photos using the auto mode. This means your camera makes all the settings or the adjustments or the decisions for you. Your camera adjust the settings that affect the exposure, the white balance. But more of that in the coming lessons. If you are used to taking photos using auto, or if you've taken shots or photos using auto mode already, then you can skip this and move on to the next lesson. But for those of you who haven't and want to practice taking photos first and take it one lesson at a time, one button at a time, I will encourage you to take at least 20 photos using auto mode while following the lighting, storytelling, color, and composition techniques from the previous [MUSIC] lessons. It's your turn. Have your camera ready, select auto, and take at least 20 photos giving priority to lighting, storytelling, color, and composition before you move on to the next lesson. 5. Exposure Triangle Introduction: Congratulations on doing the last activity. Taking gazillion photos in auto mode will help you understand the next lessons. When I first learned to shoot in different modes on my camera, I felt like I am a superhero. I feel powerful and invincible. It's true. By this time, I can confidently call myself a professional photographer. If you want to promote yourself from taking auto mode photos to taking a more professional photo by understanding the exposure triangle, head onto the next video and let's get started. [MUSIC] 6. The Exposure Triangle: In this lesson, we're going to study the exposure triangle. When I was making the curriculum for this course, I kept telling myself that I should teach my students as if I am teaching the beginner version of myself. Honestly, the exposure triangle was the lesson that I had a hard time understanding. If you are like me or if you are like my younger self, here's what I would tell you to better understand the exposure triangle. Number 1, this will be your guide in properly exposing your photos. Exposure is the amount of light which reaches your camera sensor. It is a crucial part of how bright or dark your photos appear. But understanding how to expose an image properly, you will be able to capture photographs of the ideal brightness, including high levels of detail in both the shadows and highlight areas. Exposure is to the photographer, what measuring is to a carpenter. It is an essential skill, Number 2, to properly expose a photo, you need to understand about the three most important cameras settings of all, shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. Let me just quickly relate this to baking bread. You cannot bake bread without flour, yeast, water, and salt. They always come together and when you blend them properly, you can have a nice freshly baked bread. In photography, getting the proper exposure for a photo is about balancing shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. The rest of the photo looks good. From depth of field to sharpness, there are ways in your camera to tell you if your image is properly exposed. You have your histogram and light meter. When looking at the histogram, you will see this graph. If there is more weight on the left, it means your photo has a lot of shadows or your photo is dark. When weight is on the right side, it means that the scene is too bright and there are a lot of highlights. This is helpful, but there are situations when you intend to have more shadows on your photo. Looking at the histogram may not be applicable. Next is the light meter. There are many ways for you to access this on your camera. In my case, I just need to press the ''Display'' button a couple of times to see the light meter. When I point my camera to a scene, the light meter will tell me if it is under or overexposed. Or in other words, if it's too dark or too bright, you would want to see it in zero for a well exposed photo. Just a tip on the histogram and light meter. There are times when they are not accurate. For example, there are a lot of dark colors in my scene when the light touches the subject and is reflected to the camera, the light measuring tools may see it as underexposed. What I do is take a test shot to make sure that I am getting the exposure and the mood that I want for the scene. Then adjust the aperture, shutter speed, and ISO to match the final image that I envisioned. For example, I have this photoshoot setup. Observe what happens whenever I change one of the three settings. If I change the aperture and leave the other settings, I get a dark photo. As soon as I change the other two settings, which are the shutter speed and ISO, I get a more or a well exposed photo. To promote yourself from taking photos in auto mode, [MUSIC] take the time to practice taking photos in manual mode and change the three most important camera settings. The good news is there are what we call priority modes, which can help you transition smoothly from all automatic to manual. 7. What is Aperture and Aperture Priority?: Aperture priority is my favorite mode to shoot aperture manual. These food photos that I shot for clients are all painted using the aperture priority mode. Before we proceed on how to shoot using aperture priority what is aperture anyway? Aperture is like the pupil in your eye. It can open or shrink to change the amount of light that passes through. At night your pupils dilate so you can see things more easily. The same is true for your aperture. When it is dark, you can open the aperture blades in your lens and let in more light. Aperture values are given in terms of the ratio of the focal length of the lens to the effective diameter of the aperture. Example aperture scale are F1.4, F2.0, F2.8, and so forth. F means fraction. Just like in mathematics, one over four is larger than one over 32. That is why a higher aperture for example, F22 means less light is entering the camera because the opening is smaller. On the other hand, a lower aperture for example F1.4, means more light is entering the camera which creates a nice depth of field making the background blurry. Just to remember that a lower number means more light and a higher number means less light entering your camera. The aperture you use is a crucial factor in the design of your photos. The use of blur enables you to direct your viewers eye toward the most important part of the subject and give emphasis to certain details. If you'd like to experiment with deep and shallow depth of field in your photos or if this is your priority then you will find the aperture priority mode handy in every photo shoot. You can find aperture priority on your camera mode dial. It's usually symbolized by the letters A or AV. When you switch to this mode, you can control your aperture, ISO, and white balance. Your camera will change the shutter speed every time the light changes. You can't manually adjust your shutter speed in this mode. This is useful especially when you are shooting in natural light, when lighting is a bit inconsistent so you have to adjust your settings regularly. Once you set your aperture to let's say 4.0, your camera will make sure that your shutter speed and ISO are properly adjusted. To sum up the aperture lesson, you can use aperture in properly exposing your photos. Choose a lower number like F1.4 to 2.0, when you need more light to enter your camera when shooting in dark or low-light conditions. On the contrary, you can lessen in the light being captured by your camera by selecting a higher aperture number like F22 or F32. This is ideal when shooting with harsh light or bright light conditions. Another way to use aperture is when you want a shallow depth of field, which looks good in portrait and food photos. 8. What is Shutter Speed and Shutter Speed Priority?: [MUSIC] Next is the shutter speed. If the aperture is like your eye's pupils then the shutter speed is like your eyelid. They act as a pair of blinds that open and close extremely quickly. The shutter speed settings shows as 1 over 400 or 1 over 40, which means that the shutter is open for 1 over 400 of a second or 1 over 40th of a second. You just have to remember that that's what the number means. [MUSIC] 1 over 40th of a second is a longer length of time than 1 over 400 of a second. A shutter speed of 1 over 40 is a slower or longer shutter speed, and a shutter speed of 1 over 400 is a faster or shorter shutter speed. Slow or longer shutter speeds allow more light into the camera sensor and are used for low-light and night photography, while fast shutter speeds help to freeze motion. Just like aperture, you have two uses for this setting. Number one is to help properly expose a photo. Number 2, for your creative shots like freezing motion or creating intentional blur or creative blur. For example, this shot was created using a higher shutter speed to freeze motion. While this photo is shot using a lower shutter speed to intentionally blur the water movement. Shutter priority is often the best exposure mode for photographing sports, action, and wildlife. [MUSIC] This mode allows you to select a shutter speed while the camera automatically adjusts the aperture to get the correct exposure. In most cases, it is labeled as TV or time value or S shutter speed priority auto. 9. What is ISO?: Finally, the ISO. I know for some, these settings and the exposure triangle, it can be overwhelming, but I challenge you and encourage you to really make these three settings your best friends. Because again, having a solid grasp to the settings and how they work together to create a stunning photo is one of your most powerful and indispensable tools in photography. Stay with me on this one, actually for the rest of the course, because I still have so much valuable information in store for you, especially toward the end of this course. Going back to ISO, what is it? It is actually the easiest setting to explain [LAUGHTER] and one that is least confusing. Basically, ISO is the setting that will brighten or darken a photo, and it's pretty straightforward. Low ISO number equals darker photo. High ISO number equals brighter photo. Sensitivity or ISO priority, often abbreviated SV for a Sensitivity Value on your camera command dial, is a setting that allows you to choose a specific sensitivity or ISO value while the camera selects a shutter speed and aperture to match. This is handy when your priority is the darkness or the brightness of the image in a photo shoot. Just bear in mind that the higher the settings of the ISO or the higher the value of the ISO, the more noise or green will appear in your photos. Some cameras have the ability to minimize noise even when using high ISO, but to be safe, make sure to keep your ISO lower than 1600. Ideal ISO when doing indoor shoots with decent lighting is 400-800, 200 when shooting outside, especially on golden hours, and 100 when the sun is up and bright in the sky. Now that you know more about the three most important camera settings in photography, it's your turn to really master it and understand it by practice. I can do all the explanations, but what will really help you with getting a solid grasp of these settings and exposure is practice, and a lot of practice. Before we move on to shooting in manual mode, it's your turn. Grab your camera, have a little photo walk outside, and shoot using aperture priority, shutter speeds priority, and ISO priority. Take at least five photos for each mode, import it on your computer, and observe the final image that you will be able to create. 10. Intro to Manual Mode: How was your photo walk? I actually did mine and here are the photos or some of the photos that I took. Let me share with you differences and my observations on each photo using different priority modes. This is my first photo. So this is in front of our house. We have these beautiful red roses. So I set the aperture to F22 because I want to have a deep depth of field, meaning you can see the background. So I set the aperture to F22. It means my lens is quite small. Since I am on aperture priority, the camera made the adjustment for the shutter speed and the ISO resulting to a shutter speed of 40 and an ISO of 3200. As you can see, it's a bit blurry because my shutter speed is a bit low. This is the final image. This is an image straight out of camera. I did not do any edits on this yet. But as you can see, this is how a photo with a deep depth of field looks like, meaning the aperture is low. But sorry, that's a bit confusing. Aperture is low, meaning that your aperture number is high or it's more than 10. But then the lens or the opening of your lens is actually small. Just remember that in aperture, the lower the number, it means the wider the opening of the lens, and the higher the number, it means the smaller the opening of the lens, giving you a lesser light, but giving you a deep depth of field. Next, this is the second photo. I set this to shutter speed priority because from the previous photo, you saw that it's a bit blurry. I did not want that. I set the shutter speed to 250 so that even though I have camera shakes, I'm shooting handheld, my camera will freeze the motion, so I will get sharper image. My shutter speed is 250 for this one, and it's on shutter speed priority. My camera made adjustment on my aperture and my ISO so that I will have a well-exposed photo. Now, if you will notice, my aperture is on F1.7, and you'll notice that my depth of field is shallow, giving me that blurry background. As you can see, when you play around with your settings, you will see how it will affect it creatively, as well as the exposure. In this photo, you can see how the lower aperture number gave me that shallow depth of field a nice blurry background, and then a higher shutter speed freeze the motion. So even though I have camera shakes because of handheld shooting, I was able to get a sharper image of the rose. Now, it's still bright outside, so my ISO is just set to 200. Next, I set the ISO or I step the ISO priority in my mode dial. As you can see, I set it to 25,600 so that I can just show you the noise on the photo. As you can see, it's a bit grainy and noisy. Then because in this photo, I actually set the aperture I think to F22. That's why it adjusted all the settings this way. But then as you can see, when you select a higher ISO, you will get a grainy and noisy photo. Personally, that's not my style, but of course, if that's something that you find attractive, feel free to do so to add grain and noise to your photo. I'm just showing you the effect of changing settings. As you can see, my aperture is set to F22, so meaning the opening on the lens is quite small. That's why I had to adjust the ISO to 25,600 to really expose the image. Because if I set this ISO to a lower number, my photo will be really dark. As in, you will not be able to see the rose. Moving forward to this photo, I got lucky this day. I was walking around. I was doing my photo walk. This is just in front of our house. So I did not have to go far. Then I was able to get this photo. It's really nice. I don't know what kind of insect this is, but then I really wanted to have that shallow depth of field, meaning that blur. When you say shallow depth of field, it means like the background is near your subject. I set the aperture to F1.8 so that my lens will be open really, really wide and then the ISO to 200 because it's still bright. I did not want a brighter photo, and then the shutter speed to 200 because I'm shooting handheld. Of course, I have camera shakes. I wanted to get a sharp photo, so I adjusted it to 200. If you want a sharper photo and you're shooting handheld without a tripod, best to shoot with shutter speed of 100 and above. This is my final image straight out of camera. I have not done any editing yet. Next, this is the same subject, but as you can see, my aperture is F18. F1.8 versus F18, so meaning my lens or the opening of my lens in this photo is smaller. Less light is coming through and then I have a deeper depth of field. My background looks deep. You can see more of the background. Earlier you can see that it's all blurry because of the shallow depth of field. That is the effect of a lower number of aperture. Now with the higher number of aperture, you get a deeper depth of field. This is ideal when you're shooting landscape, when you really want to showcase the background. This is not very appealing for this photo, but I just want to show you the difference. Since my lens or the opening of my lens is smaller because of the higher aperture, I had to adjust the ISO as well to 12,800 to properly expose the photo. But as you can see, there are grains and noise in the background because it's actually a very high ISO, 12,800 is a really high ISO. Now the shutter speed I just set 260 to compensate with the exposure because if I will set it to 200 and above, it will be a darker photo. That is how you balance those three settings. If your priority is the aperture, you will need to adjust your shutter speed and ISO to match and to properly expose your photo. Next image is this car. I set the shutter speed to 500 because I want to capture motion. I want to freeze the car that are passing through our house. As you can see, this is a very high shutter speed. So I set it to 500. Then my aperture, I set it to a really wide. That's a lower number. That's F1.8 so that I will still get a well-exposed photo, and my ISO is set up to 200 because when I opened my lens or set my aperture to 1.8, it gave me enough exposure or it gave me a well-exposed photo. On the contrary, when I adjusted the shutter speed to 30, that's a lower shutter speed, so meaning my shutter speed is closing really slowly. As you can see, it created that blurry effect or I did not capture motion, it was blurry. If you want to capture motion and freeze emotion, make sure that your shutter speed is set to 100 or higher. It's actually overexposed because I forgot to change the aperture. It's still on 1.8. If I wanted to well-expose this photo, I should have adjusted my aperture to maybe F4.0 or higher. But from there, you will see the effects of aperture, shutter speed, and ISO. Now, we are really pushing limits here. We have reached the How to Shoot in Manual Mode lesson. I guarantee you, if you have studied and practice the creative part of photography and combined it with shooting in manual mode, you will be surprised where your photography journey could take you. If you want to be a photography superhero and shoot using manual mode, head onto the next video. [MUSIC] 11. Shooting in Manual mode: [MUSIC] I know I up shooting in manual mode, so many times in the previous lessons. But really, how will it benefit your photography? Well, number 1, it will really help your creativity. To be a master of shooting in manual mode means you can shoot at any light conditions with the settings that you want for that scene. You will not be intimidated by both bright and low-light conditions. This is powerful, especially when you will do this as a full-time career or business. There are a lot of unknowns in a photoshoot and going into a panic just because you don't know how to expose your photos the way you want it in a photoshoot is not pretty and may cost you your relationship with your client. Number 2, related to number 1, the ability to shoot in manual mode can let you create silhouettes, get beautiful bouquet, and blurry backgrounds. Basically, the ability to shoot in manual mode will give you the ability to create photos that are as beautiful as the ones that you see in magazines, photo books, and your favorite Instagram theme. Now you might say, okay Rose, I'm all in. How do we do this? First a review of the exposure triangle. You have your aperture, shutter speed, and ISO. When you make a change on one setting, you will need to make changes on the other settings to achieve the exposure and the look that you are going for. It will depend on how you are shooting, how you will set each setting. Number 1, you have to set your aperture based on the depth of field that you want. Do you want a shallow depth of field where the background is blurry? Or do you want a sharp background? Depending on your answer is your aperture value. Let's say for this photoshoot, I want a shallow depth of field where my background will appear blurry. Then I need to set the settings to a wide aperture like F14, F2.0, or 2.8. On the contrary, if you want a sharp background, you need to set it to a narrow aperture like F22 or F32. If you do this, it means that your lens opening is small and little light is entering your camera, so you will need to compensate for it with your remaining two settings, shutter speed and ISO and that leads us to number 2. Set your shutter speed based on your subject matter. Is your subject matter moving or not? You also need to consider camera shakes. Remember that shutter speed plays a big role in keeping your image sharp. A low number of shutter speed means your shutter takes time to open and close, resulting in a blurry image. If either your subject is moving or you are getting camera shakes, because of handheld shooting. It will depend on the subject and what is your priority in the photoshoot. If you are taking a landscape photo and you want a deep depth of field where you set your aperture to F22 or higher, it means you need to set your shutter speed lower so you have to avoid camera shakes. To help solve that is by using a tripod. Remember if you are shooting with a shutter speed of 60 or lower, make sure to use a tripod for a sharp and well exposed photo. On the contrary, if you want a dark photo but your aperture is set to wide, you can use shutter speed to make your scene darker by increasing it to 100 or higher. A shutter speed of 100 and higher will also freeze motion in your image, and it's handy when shooting handled without a tripod. Number 3, is setting your ISO. At this point, you should have take an aperture based on artistic considerations, and you should have a shutter speed dialed in for that perfect sharpness. All that's left is to nail the exposure. After you set the aperture and the shutter speed, looking at your viewfinder, your histogram, and the light meter, you will have an idea if you need to increase or decrease the light being captured by your camera. You can use ISO to add more light after setting a narrow aperture and fast shutter speed or decrease light entering your camera if you set the aperture wide and you have a tripod and your shutter speed is slow. This is handy when shooting at night as well as sports photography. Just remember that the higher ISO value can add noise or grain to your images. From there you can see how advanced the technology inside our cameras and how amazing it is to manipulate lighting in our image by playing around with these three important settings. Before we finish our promote yourself to manual mode lesson, I just need to add a final step, which is very important in creating a stunning image. Number 4, is setting your white balance. Another reason why you need to learn to shoot in manual mode is that no matter how advanced the technology in our cameras, our eyes and brain are still the most reliable. Remember in auto mode, the camera decides all the settings for you, but let's face it. Our eyes and our brain is still superior to our cameras. That is why when shooting using manual mode, we set the settings ourselves. We make the decision. Same thing with white balance. Our cameras are not like our eyes. When we look at a scene, we know what color white should look like. Our cameras do not know that. When we set the white balance, it's like we are telling our camera that, hey, this is white, then our camera will adjust the color in the entire scene. There are different ways to set this on your camera. First is pressing the white balance button. Then you select which best describes your lighting. Another way is by using a white card or pointing at something white. Third way to adjust the white balance is in post-processing which will be discussed in the coming lessons. For now, it is time to get your hands dirty again. It's your turn. You can either shoot inside your house or go on another photo walk, select Manual from your mode dial, set your aperture, your shutter speed, and your ISO and white balance, according to the lighting and setup of your scene. You can use a stack of books if you don't have a tripod, then take up at least 10 photos playing around with your manual settings. Have fun. 12. Intro to File Formats: Welcome back and congratulations on promoting yourself from auto photographer to manual photographer. Now, if you still don't feel confident, I'd recommend that you go back to the previous lessons, that you are still having a hard time, watch it again and do the activities. You learning photography is like you're learning to ride a bike. I can tell you all the information and tips, but it's you who will ride the bike to learn. With that you really have to make your camera your best friend and shoot and shoot and practice and practice. Before you get discouraged and lazy whenever I tell you to practice, I will give you a hint on my big final activity that will really help you level up as a photographer. At the end, I will ask you to create your photography portfolio. Now, if you want your best photos to be in that portfolio you need to take the ugly ones now. Let me tell you with all honesty that I took 100 ugly photos first before I was happy and before my photos looked professional. It's like riding my bike. I had to fall a couple of times and collect minor wounds before I actually learned to ride my bike. If I were you, I'd take my ugly photos now so once you created your portfolio, you are so done with the ugly photos and have progressed to a more professional, eye-catching and stunning image. Now, apart from lighting composition, storytelling, and the exposure triangle, there's another element that can set you apart from other photographers, and that is using the right file format. If you want to be one more step closer to a successful photography hobby or business, head on to the next video. 13. RAW vs JPEG: I want to start this lesson with my story. First, I am a person who is too excited and ambitious. When I first got my DSLR camera, I thought my photos would immediately look like the ones in magazines and my MacBook screen saver. I thought once I have a DSLR camera, clients would come looking for me and book me as their photographer. To my surprise, none of that happened. My photos looked ugly and I had a hard time looking or booking for photography clients. I had to really dig deep, study the fundamentals and do a lot of practice shoots. That is why it is very important that you do the activities in this course. Photography involves a lot of trial and error. It is better for you to discover your errors during your practice and activities, not in actual photo shoots for clients. Going back to my story, the only time that I was 100 percent satisfied with my photos was when I understood lighting, followed composition, and storytelling techniques, shot using manual mode. For this lesson, shoot in RAW and the ability to edit my photos thoroughly. But what is RAW format anyway? Remember in earlier lessons, your camera has a shutter that opens for a certain amount of time, admitting light into the body of the camera through a lens, then uses a grid of photosensors to record the incoming pattern of light. Each sensor returns an electrical current when it struck by the incoming light. Finally, an image in a form of binary file is created. That file can either be RAW or JPEG, depending on how you will set it. A RAW image file contains minimally processed data from the image sensor of a digital camera. RAW files are named so because they are not yet processed and therefore are not ready to be uploaded or printed. Similar to raw food ingredients that need to be prepared and cooked before consumption, a RAW image needs to be post processed using software before it is ready to be printed, shared, or shown on a display device. Imagine this, let's say you want to eat cake, you can either buy a baked one or buy ingredients such as flour, sugar, vanilla extract, salt, et cetera so you can bake it yourself. Let's say you bought one that is already baked and realized that you want it to be sweeter, you cannot just add sugar and mix it to the cake, it will taste funny. That baked cake is just like a JPEG file. Your camera made all the adjustments for you, processed it, and compressed it to a smaller file size, ready to be uploaded. On the contrary, when you buy your cake ingredients and bake it yourself, you can adjust the amount of sweetness and other ingredients to your liking. That is what a RAW format does for you. Your camera preserves all the data. That means you keep all the color data and you preserve everything you can in the way of highlight and shadow detail. The purpose of RAW image formats is to save with minimum loss of information data obtained from the sensor. It does not look appealing when you look at it, but it has enormous potential in what you can achieve with it in the editing room. [MUSIC] Now, going back to the big cake, ready for consumption, JPEG images are fully processed in camera and all settings such as white balance, color saturation, tone curve, sharpening, and color space are already baked in or applied to the image, so you do not need to spend anytime on post-processing the image. It is basically ready to use. Just like the cake, ready for consumption. JPEG is not well-suited to files that will undergo multiple edits. As some image quality is lost each time the image is recompressed, particularly if the image is cropped or shifted. Although our eyes and our brain without a doubt can do better when it comes to deciding how to process an image, most cameras nowadays have advanced image processing mechanisms that could make our JPEG images as beautiful. At the end of the day, where you set your file format depends on the purpose of your image. If you are working with a client, I strongly recommend shooting in RAW, so you can still do adjustments and multiple edits to your images. I use JPEG for immediate consumption images, let's say I just need to take a photo of something and be able to use it without editing it. Before we end this lesson, let's go over different advantages of using each file format. For RAW or for RAW file format. Number 1, one of the main benefits of capturing a photo as a RAW file is that the additional tonal and color data in the file offer more options, especially if exposure changes are needed. Number 2, RAW files or RAW file formats are best if you prefer to post-process your photos for color correction, color grading, sharpness, white balance, and exposure. Number 3, it is best if you are shooting for a client so you have more control in post-processing in case you made a mistake and need to recover exposure, color, et cetera. On the other hand, JPEG is best used for immediate display, shooting for lower-quality uses, if you have limited space in your memory card and computer because file size is smaller compared to RAW. Finally, for personal use, images. Let me just show you how I change the file format on my camera. I have the option to just select JPEG, RAW or best when starting out, select both RAW and JPEG. My camera makes a JPEG and RAW file of an image. The JPEG processing applied by the camera is designed to produce a good-looking image right out of the camera. This processing cannot be undone. A RAW file on the other hand, is processed by you so you can decide how the image will look. One of the main benefits of capturing a photo as a RAW file is that the additional tonal and color data in the file offers more options, especially if exposure changes are needed. As a professional photographer, based on my experience, it is important that you can shoot using both. You can start shooting in JPEG first while applying all the things from the previous lessons. But once you have mastered all of it, make sure to transition to shooting in RAW, so you can push your creativity in post-processing and the editing room. It's your turn. Once you think you have taken a reasonable amount of JPEG photos and you think you're ready to go further and edit your photos to the next level, change the file format setting in your camera, plan another photoshoot or photo walk and shoot everything in RAW. Import and keep your images so we can edit them later in the bonus section of this course. 14. Focal length and lenses: Welcome back. If you are still here, let me just tell you how happy and proud I am of your eagerness and determination. We are almost at the end of the course. If you've applied everything you've learned from the previous lessons and did all the activities and will continue the same positive attitude until the end of the course. I am sure of your success in photography. But let's be real, you might be here and have completed the previous lessons, did the activities, yet up until now, you are still not satisfied with your photos. If you're already using a DSLR it could be because of your lens. When my husband and I first got our camera, I told you about expecting to get magazine-quality images right right. Good thing, my husband knew about photography before me so he was able to help me with most of the things that books and online courses could not teach me. One of which is using different lenses. It is different for different camera manufacturers, but for some of you, you may get a kit lens when you buy your camera, or when you first bought your camera. For some, you have to buy a separate one for your camera to fully function. In my case, my camera came with a kit lens. It is a 12-16 millimeter kit lens. I can use it to take decent photos but I feel like something is missing, and I can create a better photo. Getting a 50-millimeter prime lens made the difference for me. Let me show you these photos. It's the same subject and lighting conditions but different lenses. [MUSIC] To help you decide which lens to get for your camera, it is crucial to understand focal length, and how it can affect your photography. What is focal length? Focal length is the distance between the optical center of a lens and the camera image sensor. Just like with aperture, shutter speed, and ISO, the numbers mean something. The greater the focal length, the closer the image, and the less the angle of the view. The less the focal length the further the image and the greater the angle of view. To make it simple, you just need to remember these three things. Number 1 short focal length lenses are used in architectural, documentary, and landscape photography because they have a wide-angle of view. Wide-angle lens have an equivalent focal length in the range of 24-35 millimeters. These wide-angle lenses make subjects appear smaller which requires photographer to stand closer to fill the frame. Number 2, standard lenses have focal lengths between 35-70 millimeter. They capture the world in a way very similar to how our eyes see, 50-millimeter lens or a 50 millimeter is generally considered the focal length that most closely approximates the human field of view. Focal lengths closer to 50-millimeter are flexible and used for almost every genre of photography. A 50-millimeter prime lens is actually the first separate lens that my husband and I bought after our DSLR camera. Since we are shooting people, landscape, and food, we decided to get a 50-millimeter focal lens so it is very similar to how our eyes see plus it is very flexible to use. You will also prefer 50-millimeter if you like photographing people, food, and products, or still life subjects. Number 3, focal lengths from 70-85 millimeter and above are generally considered longer focal lengths, and they're often referred to as telephoto lenses. Whether you use zoom lenses or prime lenses, you can expect to see compression of distance and less distortion in longer focal lengths. They are regularly used by wildlife photographers to get closer to their subjects without being seen. To sum it all up, wide-angle lenses are best for landscape and architecture photography wherein foreground elements are emphasized while background elements are diminished. Standard focal lengths show a natural perspective without distortions and are best with portrait photos. Telephoto lenses create magnification giving the impression of background elements closer to the subject. Now focal length is just the first thing to consider when deciding which lens to get. Next is, what type of lens you should get? When choosing a lens for your camera, you have two general options, a prime lens or a zoom lens. A prime lens covers only one focal lens, example, a 50 millimeter. While a zoom lens covers a range of them from 24-70 millimeters. Depending on your subject matter and your approach to photography will determine which is the best lens to buy. In my case, my husband and I shoot food, products, and people, so we bought a 50-millimeter prime lens and a zoom lens. Our fixed 50-millimeter prime lens is great because it always, or it allows more light to enter the camera because of wider aperture. The images that I shot using my prime lens are sharper and it's the smallest lens that we have. Our zoom lens on the other hand, is best when we're shooting weddings. When we don't want to interrupt the ceremony and want to stay far away from our subjects. Let me just share an observation that the image quality of the one taken using a prime lens is much better than the one taken using a zoom lens, so that's something to take in consideration. Other types of lenses are wide-angle lens, useful for architecture and landscapes, and macro lens useful for really detailed close-ups of anything, capture amazing microscopic details. Well, I know this is a lot for the lens and focal length lesson. Please don't get hung up on the definition of focal length or even the difference between the angle of view, the field of view, and the equivalent focal length of a lens. What is important to remember is that lenses with long focal lengths bring objects closer like a telescope. On the contrary, wide-angle lenses are great for capturing landscape. If you need to get closer to your subject than you can physically opt for a telephoto or zoom lens. If landscape and architecture are generous, you enjoy shooting, then make sure you carry a wide-angle lens. For portraits and anything else in-between, you can't go wrong with a 50-millimeter prime lens in your bag. Now, it's your turn, I know what you're thinking. Will Rose ask me to buy a new lens? Absolutely not. In this activity, what I want you to do is check out Instagram and your favorite photographers. Observe at least 10 of their photos. Most photographers include the lens and focal length information that they use to achieve that shot in their photos. Next is take note of the photographers online that includes focal length and lens information in their photos. Pick your favorites and the photos that you will likely to shoot in the future. From there, take note of the lens and the focal length that they are using. From there, you will have an idea of what lens and focal length you will be needing in your next photo shoot. Let's say you are observing three photographers who are displaying their focal lengths and lens information. Then from each photographer you list five photos each, then you've observed that these three photographers only use a 50-millimeter lens. That will give you an idea of what you like your photos to look like and what lens you can use to achieve that. This will also help you in shopping for your next lens. Just remember to take note of your needs, your subject matter, and what is important to you. Make sure that the lens that you will be getting in the future satisfies all your requirements. Yes, it is okay to invest in lenses as long as you will get your return of investment may be through paid photoshoots or creating photos that you are proud of. [MUSIC] 15. Intro to making money in Photography: Look at you. You now know most of the secrets and powerful tools that you can maximize in your photography journey. Remember in Lesson 1, we talked about the promises of having skills in photography? Remember that it is a high-value skill? In the coming lessons, we are going to talk about the business part of photography. Yes, I say it's a business. When you are a photographer, yes you are an artist, but once people are paying you for the images that you are creating, then you are an entrepreneur. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you will get your return of investment in photography, the sooner you will stop undercharging if you are already getting paid. I am not saying you will overcharge as a photographer. What you will learn in the next lessons are ways you can profit from photography. I said profit, not just make money. If you want to know how I transitioned from being a bank employee to making photography a full-time business, if you want to know how you can make photography a successful career, business, and even a successful hobby, then head on to the next videos and finish until the end of the course. 16. How to profit from Photography?: In this lesson, you will learn different ways you can profit from photography and make it a full-time career or business. If you want to make photography a hobby and you don't want to earn anything, then feel free to skip the lesson. My husband and I originally started as videographers. We were making personal videos before we offered it as a paid service to people. In the pricing lesson, I will share how we ended up with our rate. We were surprised with our weekly gigs because we are not paying ads or anything like that. We started with organic and clients through referrals. It turns out. Although there are already a lot of well-known videographers in our town, people loved our work because of our unique style. Our clients wanted their special celebrations captured by us because we specialize in raw moments and storytelling. We will dig deep on developing your unique style and its importance in your photography journey in the coming lessons. In just a span of one year, we shot more events than we thought, and we expanded to offering photography and providing prints in nice albums and other different services. But then the pandemic came and all our events got canceled. We had to find a way to still continue with our videography and photography business. We expanded to taking video and pictures of food and products. Because of the pandemic, almost all people are spending more time online. E-commerce bloomed. Online food deliveries and online. Stores became in-demand. There we found an opportunity. Most online sellers have great products but could not sell it properly because of weak photos. At first, we offered our food and product photography for free to build our portfolio. Then eventually landed are paid gigs and it grew from there. The Internet is built on pictures. Ninety percent of information transmitted to the brain is visual and visuals are processed in the brain at 60,000 times the speed of text. First way to profit in photography is to take pictures for e-commerce. Most businesses already know that they can sell their products better if they can present it better visually. A survey says that most consumers buy products because of how it is presented to them and this is how I pitch food and product photography to clients. The best part, if you book a client and they love your work, you can have a contract with them for a year. It means you will be providing visual content to them in the form of pictures for a year. That means you have a short profit for a year. Now, this is where it can get exciting. For example, you charge, let's say, for example, $10,000 for a year contract with a client. Then what you do is provide visual content every month. It could be in the form of photos for social media, photos for stories, prints, etc. Let's say you can book four clients with the same arrangement. Imagine you have a short earning a $40,000 for that year. Now you may ask, but Ross, how do we know if we can charge $10,000? More of that in the next lessons. For now, that is one way to profit. Next is taking pictures of friends and family and other people. It could be taking pictures of events like birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, etc. This is also nice and this is how we started. If you can create a great portfolio and reputation, this can really go well for you. You can start charging the same as the photographers in competition and increase your rate as you grow your skills and offer more value. That's the thing. You don't just overcharge people. If you really wanted to excel and be successful, you have to always, always do more than what you are paid to do. Then the time will come that people will pay more than what you can do. Think of famous and highest speed photographers in your town or country. These things they started that way. I don't think so. They started where you are right now. Then they cultivated their skill and served and provided value. Don't ever make money your number 1, motivation, or priority. Because honestly, if you do your best, if you stay consistent, if you continually grow your skill and market yourself properly, the money will just follow. Onto the third way to earn in photography. If you are a person who likes certainty and could not take the challenge of being a freelancer or making photography a business, then you can be an in-house photographer. But make sure to be the best one. If you really love taking photos, if what makes you happy is clicking the shutter of your camera, then this is a win-win for you. The beautiful thing in life is that we can actually work wherever we want and earn as much as we want. How? First, decide which company you want to work with. Decide how much you want to make per month or per year. Next is to research the company that you want to work for. Take note of their values. Is it the same with yours? Because if not, you may end up not liking it after a couple of months of working there. What is their mission and vision? If you can talk with or interview someone working there, that would be a plus. Next, list all the things that you can do for that company. How can you be valuable to them? Which photography, especially if this is accompanied with an online presence. There's so many opportunities. Next, don't wait for an opening. Make the company notice you. If they have an online presence, it's easier. You can take photos for them for free, include some valuable additional content, then tag them. Do it multiple times until they notice you. Once they do, give it your best to pitch yourself and services. Just remember that when you get the job, do more than what you are paid to do. You decide how much are worth. But first, you need to prove it through your work. Fourth, way is selling your pictures. Yes. Just like painters sell their paintings, you are the creator of your images. You created something out of nothing and if that photo looks beautiful and compelling to you, then it may be the same for someone. Yes, people buy pictures. I remember watching the Dakota Johnsons' house store, where she showed a photo of Alice Mann wherein she photographed a marching band girls in South Africa. She said she loved that photo because it makes her hopeful. The same thing with some wealthy people. Some of them buy framed photos and paintings to remind them of their journey. If there is a photo gallery in your area, take time to know how you can sell your photos there, or if you know someone who does, talk to that person and get more guidance, especially on pricing. This is why it is important that you learn the creative and technical part of photography. You can take pictures that you are proud of and a good part, be able to share with people and the world, and the best part, be paid for it. Those are just some ways to profit through your photography. I am sure there are gazillion more ways. You just need to first cultivate your skills, be really proud of it, and ask that question, why, and how. You have to really know why you are doing what you are doing. At the end of the day, it's not about the money but the fulfillment. It's easy to be called successful. You can stay up a job for years, then get promoted to the highest position and people can say that you are successful. But the question is, are you happy? Are you fulfilled? Before you decide on which path you will take, ask yourself what are the things that you are happy to do on a daily basis? See if you can build a business around it and finally, it's a paradox, but I can let myself finish this course without telling you, that you need to get out of yourself and think outside of the box. Living for yourself is selfish. You will be surprised how your life can change if you start thinking about how you can help people. How can you give more value? It does not have to be extravagant. Take me as an example. I started helping one one business owner at the time. I help them sell their products better. Some great photos. I went the extra mile by giving them other marketing tips. One person at a time for a year is a lot of people. That is why I told you in the beginning of this course to see yourself succeeding in one year because success does not happen overnight. You have to give it time. Just do your best every day. Have that hunger to grow every day. Think of improving just one percent every day and it will take the pressure off. But if you will be consistent, you will be surprised what that one percent better every day can do to your life. Now, it's your turn. My goal is not just to teach you photography, not just for you to make money in photography, but to push you to live the life that you really want. In this activity, get your notebook, make a list of the things that you love doing. Then make a list of your big dreams. Then make a list of what really makes you happy. But it does not end there. Write down what do you think is your life purpose? Then write down how photography can help you fulfill this purpose. I would love to read your answers. Feel free to send it to me via message or DM on Instagram. Of all the activities, this is the one that I really love for you to take seriously. Take time and really focus on doing it. Good luck. 17. Intro to Pricing: Welcome back. How was the experience from the last activity? Goosebumps. It is so nice to pause and just think about your life and purpose. Many people dabble through life because they don't know their purpose. Many people reach at the end of their life confused because they forgot to plan and fulfill their purpose. They got too busy and caught up with the demands of life that they have forgotten how to live it. If you finished the last activity and found your purpose, then congratulations. You are a step closer to a rich and fulfilled life. I just want to add that it does not mean it's going to be easy. There could be a lot of resistance. Promise me that you will never, ever give up on your goals and purpose. This course is just one step. You might be taking more courses after this, and that's fine as long as you are growing. With that, let us continue on pricing. You might be saying that the last lesson with ways to profit is nice, but how do we really set up our pricing. Not just that. How in the world do we create photography contracts and worse, what different clients ask for an invoice. Don't worry, all that and more in the next lesson. 18. Pricing: Remember our earlier lesson when I gave an example, if you are earning $40,000 a year as a product photographer. You might be asking, how can I come up with charging that amount with my photography? Let's dig deep into that. Here are factors that you should consider when you are setting fair rates for your photography services. First is the type of photography. Wildlife photography is more expensive than wedding photography. More of what expenses you should take note of when deciding how much you will charge your clients. Next is experience. This is objective. Others think that just because someone is new and he's just taking photos for a year, he or she can't charge competitively. If that photographer doubled his or her effort and growth, then he or she can deliver, then he or she can charge close or the same as experienced photographers. Finally, customer based and location. Depending on these, you can have any idea on how much you can charge as a photographer. [MUSIC] I'm sorry, but I cannot give you a straight and specific answer to how much exactly you can charge, but the factors that I mentioned can be your guide. Other factors are how long will it take for you to complete the photoshoot? If you've experienced having a job, you would have an idea of how much is your hourly rate, so that's another factor. How much is your hourly or daily rate? This will increase as you grow your skill and business. Next is usage and licensing. Did you know that photographs are protected by copyright from the moment of creation? The owner of the work is generally the photographer so you have full rights through the photos. The only exception is if you are an in-house photographer, your employer is generally the owner. Apart from your hourly rate, you can add each photo to your rate, but this is up to you. You can either charge your clients all in or charge them per hour plus per photo. It will depend on your arrangement and contract. Other factors that will help you decide how much you price will be your gear, the quality of your camera, lenses, and other accessories. Other things to consider when deciding on pricing is your gas mileage, hotel stays, or sorry, location bookings, props and other photoshoot related costs. Oh, and don't forget taxes. Make sure to check this as well when you set up your pricing. Again, I can't tell you exactly how much to charge, but I hope the guides I mentioned will be helpful for you to come up with a fair rate that can still make your career and business profitable. Just to that once you set up your pricing and you accept the bookings, always send your clients a copy of your contract and have them sign. This way, both parties will be protected by an arrangement or an agreement. There are a lot of contract templates online now, and websites that can customize this for you, but I will also attach a sample contract to this class. Next is creating invoices. I started doing this in Word documents, but as your business grows, it pays to have a more professional platform for your invoices. It will help in your brand and your business looking more professional. If you want people to take you seriously, you need to be serious with these things. There are now new invoicing platforms online like ShootProof, invoicely, etc. That can help you create, send, and even receive payments. This will prove your photography business is professional and convenient, which can greatly affect client satisfaction. Remember that when you have satisfied clients, you can get referrals and repeat distance. Another good thing with invoicing software is that you can easily keep track of all your pending invoices and all your invoices. I attach a sample invoice in this class as well. 19. Marketing: Now that you know about setting a fair rate for your photography business, you have an idea on how to create a contract and invoice. Next, how you can start getting clients. Here are my proven ways. Number 1, people have to know. Start taking pictures of friends and family. Let all of them know. If you have social media, post it so everybody would know. Remember, your friend has a friend, who has a friend, who has a friend, who has a friend, and it goes on forever. I know that if you are just starting out, this can be a bit overwhelming and tiring. It's okay. This is how you will grow. Just make sure to list everything that you will learn from every shoot and improve. Take rests and time to reflect. Don't go into another photoshoot not reflecting on the previous one. This is a powerful practice. Aside from taking photos of people, you can also take photos of real estate. A lot of people sell their houses. I sold the condo last year, and you know what made the sale? The photos. At first, I just took a photo of our condo using my phone. Actually I uploaded it into different buy and sell website and on Facebook. I got very few inquiries. Then my husband told me, hey, why not use our DSLR and Lights, take better photos and re-upload it. That did it. I was flooded with inquiries and found a buyer. We became friends with that buyer and she would always tell me, that it was the beautiful photos that convinced her to meet us and look at our condo. Guess what, she did not have chance of buying another condo at that time. She just really loved the photos and was excited to see and live in it. See, photos are powerful. So make sure you take good ones and let your friends, family, acquaintances, and everybody know. Number 2 is creating a brand. If you have taken a lot of photos of friends, family, real estate, landscape, products, or food, you would have an idea which one is your favorite subject matter. You will have an idea of your favorite composition, your favorite colors, and ways of telling stories. Creating a brand is like creating your unique voice in photography. More of finding your unique voice in the coming lessons. But once you figure out what kind of photographer you want to be, it will be easier to create a brand. When you have a brand, you create familiarity and consistency. People want that. You don't want it to be just a photographer. You want people in businesses to be excited to be photographed by you. Number 3 is giving value. Yes, you heard that right. Have you also heard the famous saying, give and you shall receive? How about, the more you give, the more you will receive? The same is true with photography. When you keep growing and getting out of yourself and thinking of ways on how you can add value to people in businesses through your photography with your unique style, you will be surprised with the results. It may not be 100 percent of the time, but in my experience, this is how I acquired most of my clients. First is to find local businesses in your area that really need help with marketing and visuals. Then what I would do is do a bit of research on their business, their products, and their values. Then order their products and see if it's something I'd be proud to represent. If it's a yes, I will take great photos of it, create a compelling caption and tag the business. Some end up asking if they can share my photos, but most end up paying for more photos and having all their products photographed. Don't be afraid of taking photos for free. This is one way for you to market yourself. If that photoshoot did not translate the business, then you can still use that photo to add to your portfolio. Still a win-win. Now there are a lot of other ways that you can market yourself like creating a website, a YouTube channel, Instagram, and more. I provided information on the ones I've tried and proven to work. Whatever marketing strategy you choose, just remember this formula. Have a unique voice, be consistent, do your best, and provide value. These are proven ways to grow your photography career in business. Now that you know how to price, and market, and all of that stuff, how can you make your photoshoots more professional? In the next lessons, we're going to dig deep on the accessories that will make your photos look more professional, and the version too of what camera should you use in case you don't have a professional one yet. See you there. [MUSIC] 20. Accessories for a Professional Photodshoot: In this lesson, we're going to look at accessories [MUSIC] that can help your photos look more professional. Remember, I talked a lot about doing more than what you are paid to do. Remember me talking about giving your best in each and every shoot. Aside from being an expert with the creative and technical part of photography, you can also do this by adding powerful accessories to your gear. Number one is using a tripod. This is super helpful, especially when you are shooting indoors or in a studio. For example, while you style your scene, your camera is set up on a tripod, which will allow you to have a look of how your setup looks or your scene looks in your camera. Another use of a tripod is low shutter speed because your camera is on a tripod, there are no camera shakes, so you can set your shutter speed to a minimum, giving you that well-exposed and sharp image. Finally, is the ability to shoot without [MUSIC] you holding your camera. I can just set it up on my tripod, and depending on the manufacturer, connect the camera to a remote or a smartphone and control the camera. This is especially helpful when doing a stop-motion. My camera sits still, the framing stays the same, allowing me to use my hand and do whatever on my scene and be able to shoot it too. Tripods also help you do long exposure shots, symmetrical shots, and many more. Next accessory is artificial light. Remember the camera anatomy where I told you I don't personally use built-in flash. What I use instead, especially for my indoor food and product photoshoots is our events slide. This is my artificial light. You may also use other types of artificial lighting, but I am just showing the one that I'm using. [MUSIC] Artificial light will enable you to shoot anytime and will give you more flexibility. It will allow you to shape light to follow the mood that you are going for, like bright and airy and dark and moody. This is how I do it in most of my photoshoot. Next, lenses are another must-have. If you have a kit lens, that's fine. We started our business and we accepted big gigs and used the kit lens that came with our camera. But once you have the budget, invest in high-quality lenses that will help in your creativity process. You may want to get a prime wide-angle lens if you're doing landscape photography, a 50-millimeter prime lens, if you are doing portraits, a zoom lens if you're photographing weddings, a macro lens, if you're photographing food and products, you get the point. This will really help bring out the best in your images. Just make sure that you have mastered the creative and technical parts of photography before you go and buy expensive lenses. Other accessories that you will find on our camera bag are extra batteries. Of course, you don't want to ruin a photoshoot just because you ran out of battery. We started with one extra battery per camera and grew from there. Next, are extra SD cards. Same with battery, you don't want to ruin a photoshoot just because you don't have enough memory space. Just make sure to get good-quality and compatible ones. ND filters are commonly used when shooting outside where the sun or the lighting is too bright. Let's say you want to use the widest aperture, but then it makes your image overexposed and blown out, you can use ND filters for that. [MUSIC] I also have tapes for many purposes. I have white folders, black and white illustration boards for bouncing and absorbing light, or my light shapers and reflectors. With that, I have my light diffuser as well to help me create soft light, which is best for food photos. I have a lens cap that is used when shooting outside. Avoid lens flare unless it's part of your composition. Finally, I have this camera bag which is useful and handy, when I have outdoor or on-location shoots. It has a nice division and pockets and a nice place for a laptop or Macbooks, and there you have it. From there you will have an idea on what are the accessories that you may be needing in the future and their uses? Your gear and accessories may be more than what I mentioned. [MUSIC] Just remember to always do your research before buying, so you would know if it's the one you need. If it's compatible and if it's the best price. Next, Version 2 of what camera should you buy? 21. What camera should you use?: Now that you know all about composition, exposure, aperture, focal length and most photography fundamentals, it will be easier to talk about which camera should you buy. We bought our first DSLR camera last 2017. At that time, our main focus was wedding videography. That is how we decided to buy our Panasonic Lumix G85 mirrorless camera. At the weddings we've experienced shooting couples from a distance, so we added a zoom lens. We also had a hard time innovating a frame when shooting handheld, so we also got monopods. We got this mirrorless camera because, number 1, it was within our budget range. We were not financially free like we are now back then, so we had to really think about everything that we were buying. Our first decision-making factor was the price. We listed all the cameras within our budget range and started from there. Our next consideration was accessibility. Our camera is user-friendly. It is very easy to operate. We could have purchased an advanced and tacky camera with gazillion buttons, but we won't be able to use it. What's the point? We went to the store and physically held the camera to feel the weight and the buttons. It's like buying a shoe. You have to have a feel if it would fit. Next is the specifications. Our camera had a build-in stabilizer, which is important in videos. Sorry, I kept on saying videos. I know we're studying photography, but I just want to share with you why we got our cameras. The picture and video quality is great as well. It is capable of 4K, it is weather proof and has great features that suited our needs. Finally, it was smaller than other cameras. When you are shooting weddings, it is a bit distracting to see photographers and videographers with gigantic cameras. We opted for a smaller one, so we will be a bit discrete when shooting weddings. It took us days to decide which camera to buy. We had to list our budget and all our consideration so we will be sure that the one that we will buy will satisfy our needs. Cameras are not cheap, so it really pays to do your planning and research. But I still haven't answered your question. Which camera should you use? Well, let's discuss different types of cameras that you may consider. Nowadays we have DSLRs, mirrorless, full-frame, crop sensor, etc. DSLR cameras or digital single-lens reflex camera, is a digital camera that combines the optics and the mechanisms of a single lens reflex camera with a digital imaging sensor. The reflex design scheme is the primary difference between a DSLR and other digital cameras. In the reflex design, light travels through the lens and then to a mirror that alter needs to send the image to either a prism which shows the image in the viewfinder or the image sensor when the shutter release button is pressed. The viewfinder of a DSLR represents an image that will not differ substantially from what is captured by the camera sensor as it presents it as an optical view through the main camera lens. Rather than showing an image through a separate secondary lens, DSLRs largely replaced film-based SLRs during the 2000s. Next are the mirrorless cameras. A mirrorless camera or a mirrorless interchangeable lens camera or simply mirrorless camera, also called digital single-lens mirrorless, is a photo camera featuring a single removable lens and a digital display. The camera does not have a reflex mirror or optical viewfinder, like a digital single-lens reflex or a DSLR camera. Many mirrorless cameras within a mechanical shutter, like a DSLR in mirrorless camera accepts any of a series of interchangeable lenses compatible with its lens mount. Compared to DSLR cameras, mirrorless cameras are mechanically simpler and are typically smaller, lighter, and quieter due to the elimination of their moving mirror. While nearly all mirrorless cameras they'll have a mechanical shutter, many also have an electronic shutter allowing completely silent operation. Another factor to consider, to decide what digital camera you want to buy or use, one of the most important decisions you have to make is what sensor size to use. In the world of digital photography, there are two main categories of cameras, those with crop sensors and those with full-frame sensors. A full-frame camera is a camera with a full-frame sensor. This is an image sensor that's the same size as the sensor of an analog camera. The biggest advantage of a full-frame camera is that it has no crop factor. Crop factor means that the image is cut out because the sensor is too small to capture the entire image. You can do this with a full-frame camera. The full-frame sensor can also be useful with wide angle perspective control or build shift lenses. In particular, the wider angle of view is often more suitable for architectural photography or landscape photography. When buying a full-frame camera, actually, when buying any type of camera, you need to pay attention when purchasing lenses. Not all lenses fit on a full-frame camera. A lens for a full-frame camera needs a full-frame lens mount. A crop sensor is smaller than the standard 35-millimeter size, which introduces a crop factor to the photos these cameras take. This means that the edges of your photo will be cropped for a tighter field of view. While the crop factor can be seen as a weakness of these cameras, you can also turn this magnification to your advantage in scenarios where you need to get as close as possible. Your next question may be, which manufacturer is best? Well, it's a cliche, but really there's no straight answer to that. Different camera manufacturers have their strengths and weaknesses. When we were deciding on which camera to buy, the Sony Alpha a6300 and Panasonic G85 we're on the top of our list. Because of the price range, we went with the Panasonic G85 because of the battery review on the Sony. Many users reported overheating and as wedding videographers and photographers, we cannot risk overheating because it will mean for us not having a camera to use and will result to us failing to capture the wedding. But we cannot deny the fact that the Sony cameras has better picture and video quality and other amazing features. But we had to stick with our priority, which is number 1, to capture the event and focus on emotion and storytelling. At the end of the day, your client does not care who the manufacturer is and how expensive your camera is. They just want you to deliver. Don't get too caught up and obsessed with which brand. Think about your budget and what features you would like to get for it. Hold both cameras in your hands and listen to your instincts. Which one feels better, more natural, more intuitive? The answer is the right camera for you. 22. Developing your unique style: What can I say? You now have almost all the information, guides, and tools that can level up your photography journey. [MUSIC] We are just two topics away from the end of the course, other photographers have access to all the information I mentioned in the beginning lessons. You might think other photographers are already experts and are nailing it. So how can we set you apart from other photographers? The answer is to find your unique style in photography. Yes, everybody knows about composition, story telling, lenses, focal lengths, and photography techniques but there is only one you. Your thoughts and ideas are yours. Everyone can photograph the Eiffel Tower, but once you discover your style and photograph that tower, it will be unique. You are the only person who can capture a photo the way you do. Once you find your unique style, you need to let the world know. You can do this by marketing yourself. This can be through your own website, your Instagram, your Facebook etc. Find which medium is best for you. Your location and type of photography, join groups that will benefit from your photography, let everybody's see and know, create your portfolio, and make sure to create a strong one. Don't put all the practice photos you took, be intentional. Your portfolio is like your resume, your portfolio will do the selling for you. Make sure that when your target audience sees your photos, they will want to work with you right away. Make sure that your message is clear. Now that is well and good but how can you practically find and develop your unique style? First is look for inspiration, for photo books or online, what photos appeal to you the most? Collect nine photos which you can use as models. In deciding for the nine photos, look for number 1, the subject matter. Which subject appeals to you the most, is it people, portrait, animals, nature, is it food products, or landscape? Number 2 is the composition. Do you like photos in the rule of thirds rather than symmetry, do you like negative space and minimalist compositions? Do photos with lots of leading lines excited yo?. Number 3 is the color. What colors appeal to you the most? Is it teal and orange? Is it warmer colors? Is it dark and moody? Light and airy? Do black and white photos make more sense to you? Use this three guides in choosing your nine photos. If it's from a photo book, cut it out and make a whole large out of it. If online, print it out and post it in a place where you can see it every day. What you are doing is planting the elements in these photos in your subconscious. The more you look at these photos eventually you will notice that you take photos the same way, then you can post photos the same way. Next thing you know, your Instagram is filled with photos with same composition, colors, and subject matter but your own style. [MUSIC] Once you develop your unique style, people will follow you and want to work with you because of the way you take photos. Because of your unique style, they will want to see their vision through your lens. For example, for one of my clients, this is their product but they want me to photograph it in a way that showcases my photography style, and this is the result. So from this to this. So start by getting inspirations, then really work on developing your unique style. If you do this continually people will see your photos and they will know that it's you who took that photo. The best part with developing your unique style is that it will lead you to the right audience and clients. You stopped being that photographer who takes pictures of everything at low prices and become that photographer who has his or her own creative and unique style, and you sought after by big brands and high paying clients. But it will not happen with you just sitting there, so It's your turn. This is the big activity I mentioned in the previous lesson. It is time to start building and creating your portfolio. First, create your inspiration board, cut out or print out nine photos that appeal to you the most, look at these photos every day to plant it in your subconscious, do your best to also practice taking pictures every day, maybe you're ceiling, your window, the view from your window, your pen, your food, your kids, your house, your backyard, your office, your traveled to work, your friends, whatever. Just make sure you take photos and at the end of every week, plan and create an image that you will include in your portfolio. Do this until you create a portfolio that you are happy to send to clients and share with the world. Just a tip, continue on doing this until you reach your goal. Perseverance beats failure. So never give up. You only lose when you quit. Good luck. 23. Intro to Indoor Photoshoot: How was your portfolio? I'm excited to see it. In the meantime, I want to share with you an actual photoshoot. In this demo, I will share with you how I set up my lighting, my tripod, my camera, and how I set up my settings and shoot in manual. Basically, I will apply everything that we learned and we talked about in the technical part of this photography masterclass. If you want to see all of that, head onto the next video. 24. Indoor Photoshoot Demo: In this demonstration, I will be photographing food. Here's my setup. It's already nighttime, so I don't have natural lighting available. This is my artificial lighting. The light behind this diffuser is actually our events spotlight. We use it mostly in weddings. But with the use of this diffuser, the light is softened, so I can use it for product and food photoshoots. Next, I also have this tripod, which I will be using to monitor my scene. I will be composing a scene here later on and then I will be putting my camera here on my tripod. This tripod will also help me to have a minimum shutter speed so my images will be sharp. Next, this is my table. Basically, this is where I will be shooting, from this table. I have this backdrop. This is just a backdrop that I purchased online. As you can see, the style is wood, so I'll be doing a bit of a natural and Filipino-style photoshoot. It's more on wood and natural props that color scheme and mood. That's my base and backdrop. I also have a background. I want to maintain a dark theme. This is going to be my background and this is where I use the tape that I mentioned earlier. I always have tapes. It's very handy when doing food and product photoshoot. [MUSIC] [NOISE] I will be pasting it here. This is where I will be doing my scene or where I will be composing my scene. Next, I have my black and white illustration board. This white area will be my light reflector. This is my main light. This whiteboard will be reflecting light from my light source back to the subject or the other way around. If I use the black side of it, it will absorb the light, and it will give more shadow to my scene or if I want, let's say, to shape my light, if I want to black this area, I can also use this if I want to control the light coming to my subject. That's how photographers play with light when they're doing food and products, or even portrait photoshoots. I also have white folders. It can also act as my reflector. I just put it right here like that. I don't even need a stand. It can stand on its own, and then same purpose, it will reflect the light back into my subject. Now that we have our backdrop ready, our background, our light is ready, I decided to set up my lights here on this side. Basically, I just turned on the spotlight. I place this diffuser to give me that soft light. Then I will be putting the reflectors here. Later on, I will check whether I need my reflector or if I want the black part of it to give me more shadow. Now, I will just set up the camera in this tripod before I set up my scene so I have a way to monitor it. Let me just get the camera. [MUSIC] I love this tripod because it gives me that ability to shoot in portrait mode like this. Later on, I will show you how it looks like on my camera. Now that may tripod is ready, the camera is ready, light is ready, my setup is ready, it's now time for me to get the props then my food. I'll be right back. All right, I'm back with our props and our food, so I'll show you how we set it up, how I will style it, first of all. My camera is not set up properly. I told you about shooting in manual so you can control the aperture, the shutter speed, the ISO. So this is one way that I can show you how we can do that and how we do white balance and all of that. As you can see, it's very dark. We can even see the scene. We will be adjusting our settings on manual. Since our aperture is on 5.0, it means that our lens is a bit closed or our opening is small. When I adjust it to 5.0, it's a bit brighter, but then we need to add more light, so I will be lowering down the shutter speed. As you can see, when I set the shutter speed to just eight, it gave us more light. That's how you expose your photo. My aperture is 5.0 because that's my kit lens that I'm using. It can only go as high as in 5.0. That's the good thing with buying a prime lens or a different lens, it can give you a wider aperture. Right now, I'm on 5.0. Then my shutter speed is at eight. I will keep my ISO because if I set my ISO to, let's say, 1,600, it could be a bit grainy, so I'll stick with 800. Next is the white balance. When I press the white balance button, select White. I will just point it to something white and then Set. That's it. Basically, my camera will detect that. This is how white should look like, and then the color on my scene will be more balanced. This is how my setup looks like right now. I'll just show you how I will be styling this setup or I will be composing my shot. [MUSIC] We talked about the diagonal leading line. Instead of putting your subject in a boring straight line like this what I did was I made it diagonal, so it will lead our eye in the photo. [NOISE] This is how I styled the scene. This is how it looks like. Now let us start taking pictures. I actually like it with the white side of this illustration board because the light as you can see. Let me show you. This is it without the white and then this is how it looks like with the reflector. I like it better with the reflector. It reflects more light from the light source. Let's just see if I need to make it stand. That's good. This is how it looks like with the white. Again, this is how it looks like without the white. This is how it looks like with the white or with the reflector. Let's now take sample shots. I actually made a mistake earlier. I can actually go as wide as 4.1 in the average wall. That's why as you can see, it's brighter and I have a bit of shallow depth of field. Let's try taking photos. Let's see how it'll look like. That's nice. I'll just like to move the fork. Let's take another one. Then there's something that I want to actually achieve in this shot, is adding human touch or I want to pour in the source of this food. This is actually a Filipino dish or I think it's a Filipino dessert. It's called a black [FOREIGN]. It's jelly. I don't even know how to explain it actually, but it tastes really good. What I want to achieve is I want to pour the sauce of this desert and capture it that way. With that, I'll show you why it's important to have a tripod. As you can see, I'm doing all this shoot. I don't have to hold my camera all the time. I can move around, get props, get anything when I have my setup in here. I have my camera just pointed at my scene or my setup here. Next, let me get my phone. I will be using my phone as a remote. I will be using my hands, these hands to pour the sauce. Because if I will be using my hands to pour in the sauce, I won't be able to press the shutter. I will be using my phone as a remote control so that I can take photos while I'm pouring in the sauce. Let me show you how I will do that. On my camera, I will just go to Menu. Then I'll go to my Wi-Fi settings and then Wi-Fi function and then remote shooting in view. Then on my phone, I'll go to settings, network, and Internet. I'll turn on the Wi-Fi. When I turn on the Wi-Fi, it will see my camera. I'll select G7, that's my camera. Then I'll go to an app where I can remotely control my camera. [MUSIC] You'll see that on the screen. It's trying to connect now. Next, I'll be pressing this remote control icon. As you can see on my phone, I I'm now seeing this setup and I can control my camera from here. Just making sure that we have that in full course. Next, I want to pour in the sauce and I want to capture it. I will just adjust my shutter speed because I want to capture motion. Remember in the previous class, if you want to capture motion, you need to adjust your shutter speed to a higher number. In this case, we will adjust the shutter speed too. As you can see earlier it's on 10, so I will adjust it to 100 or 125, but then I have to adjust the ISO as well. Actually, I can't, I can only go as high as 1,600. Maybe I'll adjust the shutter speed to just 50. But it actually lead blurred out. See from here I cannot adjust my shutter speed further because it's really giving me a dark photo. Let's see if I adjust the light, if it will help. I had to adjust the lighting really, really high for me to get this look on this scene. My shutter speed is now 150. I can try and put it to 100. Now let's try and take the shot. I will be pouring the sauce. Let's see. It's now pouring, so I take the shot. Then I take another shot, then another. Then move to the next dessert and then move here, show my hands and shot. As you can see from there from that photoshoot, what happened was I needed to adjust the lighting because my camera could not take a well exposed photo. As you can see, I tried to balance the upper core and then the shutter speed and the ISO, but still not enough so say I had to adjust the lighting. If that's not possible you really have to make sure that you adjust those three settings. From there, you can see why it's important that you know how to adjust and balance the three. As you can see, my priority on this shot was the pouring of this sauce. I had to really increase the shutter speed. I had to also move the ISO from 800 to 1,600 so it will be brighter because as you can see, this is how it looks like with it being 800. As you can see, this is 800 ISO. Then when I adjusted it to 1600, this is how it looks like. From there, you can see how we played with those three settings. You also saw how I used the reflectors, my light diffuser, the tripod, my cell phone as a remote control. How I used it so that I can also do pouring shots and I can use my hands in the scene. How I used props, how I set up my backdrops, how I used tapes. This is actually how I set up my professional food and product photography. My product shoots for clients. Basically, that's just it. I just set up everything. Before I came to this way of setting up, I actually did a lot of trial and error. But basically, I know what I want already. This is my signature style. I usually shoot using this backdrop and I have this wooden props. I use it all the time. When business owners or when brands want their products in this kind of environment or this kind of scene, they just contact me and we discuss about how we can work together to really bring out the best in their products and in photos. Basically that's it. If you have other questions, feel free to message me. I hope you'll join our creative mastermind Facebook group as well. That's it. I'll see you in the next lessons. I hope you enjoyed and learned a lot from that live shoot. Now, these are the photos straight out of camera. This is a decent photo, but personally, I I'm not completely satisfied with it. I'm not happy to send this to a client. What I will do is post-process and edit using Adobe Lightroom Classic. If you want to see how I edit this photo from this to this, head onto the next video. 25. Intro to Editing: Honestly, photo editing is a whole new topic and can make a whole new course. But my goal in this course is to really equip you as a professional photographer. Now, before you dread another complex topic in photography, take time to think about this, editing your photos is not cheating or unnecessary added work. If you are a professional photographer and work with the clients, you need to have an edge in editing. This is another powerful and high-value skill. Remember our topic about file formats, RAW and JPEG, if you shoot in RAW, which is the ideal way and more professional way to do it, you will need to post-process it. Post-processing your images will also give you the ability to edit it. I post-process most of my images by Adobe Lightroom Classic CC, this software allows me to manage, or sort, organized, and enhance my photos. Now, you may have used other post-processing and editing software, but I'm just telling you which one is best for me and the one that I'm currently using. Photo editing can help you tell a story and create a mood. For example, you photographed a warm afternoon with friends, but then you are not satisfied with how your camera captured the colors. You have a second chance to create the mood that you are going for in the editing room. Best part, editing can help you develop your unique style. The way you edit your photos, add to your personal touch on the final image. It is a crucial part of the creation process. You are a creator, you create a photograph from scratch, and part of that process is editing your image to give you the final photograph that you have envisioned. Other benefits of editing an image is ability to adjust the exposure, change the color temperature to warmer or cooler, add sharpening, a brightness and contrast. Editing is also the best way to properly crop your photos to really nail the composition you have in mind. You can also add vibrance, vignetting, and blurs. It's like your second chance at perfecting your photo. There may be errors during photoshoots and in my case, I'm able to redeem my photos through editing. In the next videos, I will show you basic editing demos in Adobe Lightroom to show you the effects of editing and to give you an idea on how you can edit and enhance your photos. 26. How to edit and enhance your photos?: In this lesson, I will show you how I edited this photo from this to this. As you will notice, it's a bit different from the one that I shot from the last demo. What happened was, aside from I am not using a prime lens, I also forgot to select the RAW setting or the RAW file format when I did the photoshoot. I was too pre-occupied with a demonstration that I actually messed up with my camera settings. From there, you can see that there are really a lot of trial and error, and anything could happen during a photoshoot. So it's really, really good to be prepared, to really practice so you don't mess up on actual photoshoots. With that, this is the final image that I was able to come up. I did another photoshoot, so I was happy with the number of black kutsinta that I was able to put on the plate. I added this prop. This is a basket with fresh flowers from our front yard. I was quite happy with this photoshoot, so I like this better than the first one. This is the final image, but this was the original one. As you can see, the original image has an off white balance. The flowers are quite competing with the food. For me, there is a bit of, or not actually a bit, but this actually has a huge potential and I'm happy with how I was able to do the final edit. As you can see, the focus is on the subject and the color is correct, the white balance is correct. It is well-composed, well-exposed, and the crop is right. Let me just show you the very original photo without the cropping. So I'll just reset it. Let's just go back here, and I'll reset everything so I can show you the original one. This is the original photo. When post-processing or editing a photo, the first thing that you should do is to adjust the crop or to properly crop your photo. As you can see from this image, there is this area where it is showing my original wall. This is my background or my backdrop. I need to crop this area because it's distracting. For this photo, it will mainly be used on Facebook. The crop that I'll go for is the four by five, so square or the four by five crop is best for Facebook. [MUSIC] To really draw your eye to the subject, I will be putting it at the very center, and then putting this cup on the rule of thirds. So let's see. Actually, I'll include more of my hands. Our food will be on the rule of thirds as well. This looks better for me. Also, if you will notice, this is a RAW file format. We discussed about JPEG and RAW. Again, when you are shooting for clients or for a more professional look, always go for the RAW file format so you can do all these changes. Let's say this is a dark photo, you can really adjust the exposure without ruining the photo if this is a RAW photo or a RAW image. But if it's a JPEG, once you go crazy with the settings, it will really show, your image will really look funny. With that, let's continue on the editing. We're done with the correct crop. Next, we want to correct the white balance. Lightroom has these pre-installed settings here. So depending on your shot, I usually go for auto. Lightroom will correct the white balance for me, and I think it does a pretty good job. Next is the exposure. For me, my photo is well-exposed, but I want to expose my food or the main subject. With that, I will be using a more advanced feature in Lightroom. This is called a radial filter. It will adjust the exposure on the selected area. When I click this box right here, it will show this red mask overlay, so it means this is the area that will be adjusted. I just remove that and then make the adjustment on the exposure. Maybe at 95, not too crazy, or 94 is good, and that's done. As you can see, it's giving more light into this area of the photo, drawing your eye to our main subject or our hero, which is the food. Next, I want to adjust the highlights and shadows. I always do this with food and product photos because lowering down the highlights will retrieve those details, and then I just add a bit of shadows. Maybe 14 is good, and then I just compensated with the contrast. So 15 is good. Then I just adjust the whites and the blacks, depending on the look that you are going for. I want to minimize the whites on this photo and add a bit of shadow. That's looking more dramatic. This is very subjective. Editing is subjective. That's why I told you that editing can also add to your unique style. Just showing you what looks good for me, but of course you can edit in different ways, but this is the look that I'm going for. I'm going to add a bit of texture as well. As you can see, the wood right here, it looks different when I added texture. Let's turn it up. It's looking better. I will just decrease the clarity to soften this image a bit, so maybe just 10, and then I will add vibrance. I rarely use saturation. I use vibrance more because for me it's a smarter way of adjusting the saturation in your photo so it's not overdoing it. Especially when you're editing portrait, it's better to use vibrance than saturation. It does not adjust all the colors on the image. I feel like it adjust just the ones that needs it, so vibrance is good. Next, I will also use the tone curve. This is another advanced feature in Lightroom. This is intimidating at first, it took me sometime to use it. But then when I forced myself to use it and started using it in my photos, I actually enjoyed it and use it on some of my photos. Let's see the effect. It's shadowy, it's more dramatic. Basically, what you want to do is just form a subtle S-curve when adjusting the tone curve, or depending on the look that you are going for. Next, there's another cool feature here in Lightroom called HSL, which means hue, saturation, and luminance or the color where you can adjust the color separately. As you can see, I have these red roses here. Let's say I want to saturate or desaturate, you'll see the red rose is changing colors when I move this slider for the red. For this one, I would like to desaturate it to maybe a negative 20 because I don't want it to really compete with the main subject because roses are beautiful and it's a flower, so it could really compete. As well as the yellow, I want to desaturate it so it won't compete with our main subjects. Maybe just 39 will do. I'm happy with that. Next, I'm not doing any split toning. Sharpening, no. I'm happy with the sharpness of this photo. Let's see luminance. See what happens. Maybe just a bit and then remove chromatic aberration, meaning it will remove those unnecessary colors or chromatic aberration. Unfortunately, it's not detecting my lens here in Lightroom, so I can't really do any profile corrections. But I'm happy with how it looks. What I can do or add is vignetting to really focus on the main subject. I'll just add just a bit, don't go overboard. [LAUGHTER] This will work for me. Actually, maybe more, 14. Well, this looks perfect for me. Let's see the before and after. As you can see, in the before photo, everything is exposed, it's a bit distracting to see everything in focus, not in focus, but in bright colors. As you can see in our second photo, your eyes will really focus, your eyes will be led to the main subject. Aside from the leading line of the pouring sauce, I darkened the surroundings of our main subject. So really giving that main focus to our hero or our subject. That is how I edited this food photo that I shot after our demo because I was not able to edit the one that I did on the demo. I actually did another photoshoot, and actually, it turned out better, and this is our final photo. 27. Your turn!: Now it's your turn. You can either edit your photos or download the raw images I attached to this lecture, starting with the basic edit and progress to the more advanced functions. You may use Adobe Lightroom or others editing software. If you don't have any editing software yet, don't worry, Adobe Lightroom and other editing software have free trials, so you can use them for a couple of days without paying anything. Make sure to do this activity and really practice. I was not an expert at editing and I'm still learning up until now. But I can say I have gone a long way from off-white balance photos to your realistic and spanning images. Don't be frustrated if you don't get it the first time. Just keep on repeating and learning and take it one day and one practice at a time. 28. Congratulations: How do I even start? I created this course for months. I just can't believe we have come to this final lecture. Maybe I will start by congratulating you. The techniques and the certificate that you've acquired by finishing this course will greatly help your photography career, especially if you really applied everything and practice. I personally admire people who invest in knowledge and themselves. If you are that person, I admire you because you did what very few people do. Share this milestone to someone close to you. Celebrate your small wins. But please don't end here, make sure that you will go out there and turn the vision that you have into reality. This course was just my big dream. It took me months to plan and structure and write and shoot and edit this course. But as I was writing this final lecture, my eyes were tearing up because what was just an idea many months ago is now helping and empowering aspiring photographers and that makes me really happy. Let me thank you for choosing me and choosing this course. There are a lot of experienced photographers out there, but you chose me and that means a lot to me. If ever you have questions or if you need help with this course in your photography journey, feel free to message me or DM me on Instagram. I love connecting with my students. My students also have an exclusive Facebook group where we will share or we share our work, ask for feedback and just encourage one another. You can also connect with me and other students there. If you find this course helpful or you think it's the best, please leave a rating and review. It will greatly help me and other students finding this course. If there's anything I need to improve in this course, feel free to message me as well. Again, thank you for being the best and congratulations. Everything that I shared with you in this course are results of study and practice. More than half of what I learned from photography are from actually doing it. The last nugget and the most important advice I'll give you that you can apply, not just in photography, but in life as a whole, is learn by doing. Don't be afraid of failures and criticism. Use them as tools instead. I will say this now and I am sure of it. It is remarkable what an artist, photographer, entrepreneur, and person you can become if you don't stop learning, growing, and giving. Have a fantastic rest of the day and I hope to see you out there. Good luck. [MUSIC]