Aerial Perspective: Taking Pictures from Above

1. Introduction: Hi. I'm Jason Peterson, jasonmpeterson on Instagram and my day job is I'm the Chief Creative Officer of a global advertising agency called Havas. When I was first introduced, by a friend of mine at work almost three years ago, to Instagram, I thought it was just some corny little filter app. It was right when I moved to Chicago from New York. I was walking home on Lakeshore Drive and I took a photo of the lake, and I was just blown away that I just took this photo on my iPhone. I was trying to emulate a Hiroshi Sugimoto shot. So to me, when I first started taking photos on it, I had the idea of kind of emulating the style of classic photographers that I love. This class is going to cover from start to finish your creation of an image. It's going to be from scouting to actually shooting to editing to sharing that image out and everything kind of in between. So the challenge for this class is you shoot a unique perspective from overhead. Obviously, unless you're some crazy rich kid, you're not going to have access to a helicopter. I mean, I never did before Instagram but I think you can be smart about how you kind of do it. A lot of times, I'll shoot from overhead on bridges. A lot of times, I'll shoot above from balconies or I can shoot above from the building itself. Get a ladder and shoot down on something else that might be a smaller object. The idea behind it is figuring out what object or what sort of point of view and what lighting situation would look best from above. So I think the intention with this class is it's meant to be for everyone. I'm an amateur and yet, I'm teaching a class. I think it's for amateurs, professionals, for anyone who wants a little more insight how to create a little more unique images for their social media or just mobile photography in general. I think this is an opportunity for you to take the techniques that I'm talking about in the way that I kind of shoot and figure out your way, the way you want to do and portray overhead photography in an interesting way. 2. Assignment: Capture Overhead: Your assignment is going to be based upon my aerial flight today and the aerial class. If you look at mobile photography and Instagram, a lot of people started with the lookup shot, looking at the buildings and things like that, which I think is a unique perspective. Again, the thing that I really tried to push was, "Okay, what if you look down? What if you get on top of it? What if you get on top of this bridge? What if you get on top of this building and look down on subjects?" Figure out if there's a landmark or something interesting that would look different from above. Maybe there's a landmark and you could do something similar to the World's Fair, where you study light and shadow, and how it looks from direct overhead from above, then also scale this giant massive globe. A lot of the stuff we went over into helicopter isn't any different than shooting from a bridge or from a top of the building. I mean, if you have to get on top of a ladder and stage something underneath it, the important thing is for you to have a point of view. I shoot a lot of stuff in high contrast and black and white. That's my point of view of how I view things. I think that I really love and I respect people that have their own more unique point of view than copying the same thing I'm doing. If you want to, I think that's fine for this class, but I think you should really think about what is your style? What is your point of view when it comes to shooting something from above? To me, the thing that people learn most from this is thinking through before you shoot. So it's not just a matter of pulling out your phone and helping capture something that's flying by, but actually planning the thing out and figuring out what kind of shot you want to capture, and then trying to capture it. If things happen along the way, you can change your game plan from there. 3. Finding Inspiration: I think style is everything. I have a very clear goal and ambition on Instagram is to create a style that regardless of whenever I post it, if I post it tomorrow, if I posted a hundred and twenty eight weeks ago, that people recognize it as a Jason Peterson shot, so they get it. I'm in this constant slight, little tweak little evolution of trying to perfect that style while bringing something unique indifferent to i, that to me is a big change but to people who see it as just it's a slight little iteration and I'm always trying to perfect one image slightly better than the next, better than the next. I think it's important to find your own voice in your own style and I think that a lot of the popularity and success that I've had on Instagram is really based on that, is that people see one of my images and they immediately recognize it as one of mine. There's so many classics photographers that I love. Like two Iva, I really want to speak to them because they mean a lot to me, and their influence on what I do on Instagram and on my mobile photography as you'd like is massive. I have spent pretty much my whole adult life in New York City, I moved to Chicago three years ago, and a friend of mine right when I moved to Chicago, sent me a link to a photo essay that Stanley Kubrick had did before he was a Director as a photographer and he came to Chicago in 1998 and shot urban downtown Chicago. The thing I find in those images I found to be the most compelling was the urban scale versus these human forms going about their daily life, and when you really look at the images, they looked like they were timeless but when you look at them, you can see the style, differences of how people were dressed, how they were carrying themselves down the street, but the the condition there was the exact same condition I would be walking to work. One of the photographers who influenced me the most on Instagram, is a guy by the name of Harry Callahan. He's a photographer from the 1950s, he lives from Detroit and came to Chicago and shot downtown Chicago. A bunch of these famous images were there and there's one images is always burned in my head is like this dark, narrow canyon alleyway that was so contrast, it just looked like almost black lines with a single literal like small little businessman figure at the bottom, this giant canyon, and I always am trying to shoot an image that is good as that because it does what I love about photography. It captures this massive scale against this tiny little figure, and to me that's what I love about Instagram, it's like you can take these massive images from a helicopter of a giant cityscape and you shrink them down to this tiny little square on your iPhone and it still has that sense of scale and epic quality to it. Again I don't really consider myself a photographer but more of an art director, so it's like I'm finding things are out there and just waiting for life, right moments to happen and I want to be there to capture it. When I was first introduced into Instagram, to me it was like a game. How did you get on top of that building? How did you get into that alley? How did you get into that tunnel? How did you get on that train that no one has been on? There's that competitive side of it and there's so many amazing talented people that are using that channel that inspire me to go to the next step. The big one for us, in Chicago, was Marina Towers, right? Marina Towers is kind of corn cob buildings which I love and I've shot from the ground so many times and the architecture was so amazing like that movie bullet. It's so Chicago, right? Then we had a goal, we got to get on top of it and so, again, I'm a law abiding citizen and an adult and I have kids so I'm like, "I'm not going to sneak on and break on the top of buildings with a lot of people." So we just called them up and said, "Hey, we take cool photos. Here's a couple of them. Can we come and take photos?" And we built a relationship with them so now they let us go up there and then after I got up there, hang off the side of the building, took some amazing shots, I was like, "Now I want to have a helicopter and I want to be above the two towers shooting down both of them." So it was that quest to get further and further and further. Arrow photography taught me so much about seeing things obviously in a whole different perspective. The whole tabletop shot people do on Instagram of shooting their food or laying out all their stuff for their photography or whatever they're packing from overhead, that really clean shot, to me the idea of taking that aesthetic but taking massive over a city, over the Empire State Building, over a giant cityscape, helped me bring a whole different perspective to architecture and what I was seeing around me, which maybe I was thinking when I shot the Empire State building from above, did the guy who designed the Empire State building even think of it from that perspective, right? Because you think about architecture so much from the ground point of view and how it is and the scale of that unique perspective is something that I've been chasing, and then you add light on top of that, because I found a couple of times again it's trial and error. It's shooting and shooting and shooting. One time I went up and there's like these super long dark shadows, and I was shooting these buildings from above that I thought would be cool, but the shadows were so dark and deep it ruined the whole shape of the building and shooting it from that angle. So I've learned to me, a lot of stuff I like to do for my style and shooting it from above, is getting more midday light so the shadows themselves are more contained or smaller shadows, so it's really more about the architectural piece you're looking at. 4. Scouting Locations: I love coming to this location usually when I fly in from out of town. We're going to scout out the globe and figure out the best way to kind of shoot it in the most unique way. One of the things that I tried to do different than a lot of other people do shooting kinda aerial photography is like, I tried to scout a location first. In the city I've gone to like 50, 60 different kind of locations to figure out next time I go up in a helicopter, what would be the most unique kind of location to shoot? This is what I've been sort of dying to do for a long time. I wish that the fountains were on, I wish the US Open was going on because the fountains from above would be really great but maybe we'll do that next time, and I've shot this numerous times before. I've always really wanted to shoot it from above to see not just the shape of the architecture is, but the shape of the whole pavilion. I loved the blue circle that goes all rounded the perfect size. So the thing that I'm thinking about from above is, how do you send her off not just the globe itself but how are you going to be wide enough to center off the entire of blue area and see what that looks like? I tend to do mostly black and white, but then I do some stuff with spot color and I usually think of the stuff had a time. For me, the idea of this kind of blue ring around this amazing globe, I think might be really cool to kind of keep the blue. Maybe they make the blue more saturated so it kind of pops out a bit more and make the rest of the photo black-and-white. Normally, this would be like a tourist attraction where you'd go as a tourist. But what I tried to look at it as in a whole different kind of life. People riding bikes, people running, families having kind of a little moments, it's like real human kind of moments that are going around this amazing piece of architecture, and how do you bring kind of emotion to capturing something that's kind of cold? I think it's kind of excuse to say like I don't live in a cool place to photograph because I think anywhere you go is kind of cool to photograph. Like I'll look at kids who are living in like Wyoming or someone like that. It's like, "Oh we don't have any cool buildings." I'm like, "But you have this massive sky and this crazy scale and all this stuff. So, I think that you just have to go out there and find the cool stuff. " I don't consider myself a photographer at all. I consider myself an art director. To me, the big kind of difference is I'm looking and finding existing shots. I'm not creating this out of the blue and art directors point of view to me, it's very clean. Everything has its place. So, I think if there's one overlying sort of style I have is really clean, really simple, geometric, simple sort of shapes, and that could be kind of anything. So, people do talk about the rules of thirds and I use that a lot on bigger landscapes, cityscapes, and things like that. But if I'm doing something like this today, this is really shooting towards a square of what Instagram is, right? So, Instagram is a square format, there's hashtags of circle and a square. So the idea of looking at this massive blue circle with the globe and a middle and a square format, I think is going to be a really great tight well art directed composition. Well, like when you're shooting stuff from below like this, it doesn't really give you a sense of the scale, and you kind of lose the whole structure of the piece. So to me, getting on top of this and seeing the reverse of that, I think is pretty interesting shot. 5. Shooting from the Helicopter: This is Rob. Rob is the pilot for our New York On Air, and really the cinematographer, and the guy who is going to help me set up and get our shot from above today. Today, I want to go to the World's Fair, and we're going to be shooting the globe at the World's Fair. I'd love to get these shots, all predicated on LaGuardia Airport. Hopefully, their flight plan is landing on the north and south runways. If that's the case, we can get right in and look right down. They still may let us get inside of their airspace, but It's such a cool look. Yeah. He'll help set me up and give me an exact right position, so I'm able to get the shot, and usually it happens really fast. It'll be that kind of thing. He'll get me in that position, and boom, one shot I know I kind of got it. Let's go and we are done. He knows what he wants. I know what he's trying to accomplish, and since he's sitting on my side, I can always look down. If we're doing that straight down look shot, or even if we're set up, say like on a bridge, and when he wants to look across the bridge, I'm going to lean the bridge up with him. Remember, I'm up ahead of him, so I've got to move the helicopter a little bit forward because he's behind me. So, you look straight down. The gun barrel of the bridge, for instance. So, it's all a matter of communicating and putting it together, and know what we want to do. Yes. This is not a typical helicopter ride. The doors are going to be open. I'm going to be strapped into the actual base of the helicopter, so I won't fall out. But the doors will be open, so there's no glare from the windows, and I'm able to hang out of the helicopter to actually capture and shoot the image. So, I've been talking with Rob about how we want to capture and shoot the globe itself. We should be up right around 1:00 o'clock, 1:30, where the shadows will just be falling off of the globe. Today, I'm going to be shooting primarily on my iPhone. I'm super excited. I got the new iPhone 6 Plus. I got to make sure I don't drop it out of the helicopter because I don't have a proper harness for the phone, which is kind of a little bit scary, and the phone is brand new, and then I'm also going to shoot. Since I'm up here, I'm going to shoot backup on my Canon Mark 3 5D, might feel most comfortable with an iPhone, so we'll see it. It'll be interesting to look at the comparison to the images I get off the iPhone, and then what I get as backup on the Canon, so It'll be fun. [inaudible] Jason, I think what I'm going to do is, I'm just going to do a quick a little orbit around it. Yeah. Just to kind of establish, let you get some shots. Then, we'll just figure out what we're doing. Yeah. The thing that I'm looking for that I've been talking with Rob about is positioning me directly above it, so we could capture the scale, but seeing it from that angle and where. Right now, it's kind of like, almost by the timer above it, it should be about 1:00 o'clock, so the shadows will be coming off slightly off to one side of it. We're hovering above the globe right now. I want to make sure that I have a great focus, so I'm selecting the hard focus on the iPhone itself right now. So, I make sure that the globe itself is going to be in focus, and I'm overshooting. I really love shooting with the burst mode on the iPhone. So, then from there, I can go in and make a select of the exact right image. So, hopefully, there are some people down kind of moving around. I can get a person in the right position by shooting on the burst mode. I'll do a lot of scouting on the ground before I go up, so I know what the light is going to look like. So, I really have the idea for the shot clearly in my head before we ever even get up. I think the pre-planning is the most important thing, and I do that for anything. If I'm going, I'm planning to shoot some trains from overhead from a bridge, I'll make sure that I think it through and have that image before I walk away from overshooting. I think the biggest thing I've learned from aerial photography is trying to shoot while you're moving, but then also, trying to capture something and find that angle that no one has kind of seen before. I've done a lot of stuff where I've captured the Empire State Building, which has been photographed probably more than any other building in the world. But, the angles that I've been able to capture out have been really refreshing at least to me to see that shot, especially from a guy on his iPhone hanging out of a helicopter. The point of me being up there is to really come away with an amazing image. 6. Editing the Final Photo: All right. There we are. Now, the fun part. I mean, I love coming in after shooting some images like that, and trying to figure out what we're going to edit. If I can't edit a photo within five, maybe 10 minutes at the most, I delete it and I start again, or I just don't edit the photo. I think that a lot of times that having the tools don't necessarily mean you should use all the tools. I think it's one of the biggest mistakes I see with people in mobile photography, is over editing, adding in things, taking an image, and there's almost a point at which you reach when you over edit it, which to me destroys the purity of the image that you created. So, first thing I'm going to do is, I'm super excited. I think we got the shot. I'm going to go through, I'm going to make a couple selects. So, I'm just going to go through everything that I shot. The thing about shooting in a helicopter, is tons of vibration, so I tend to overshoot. This is blurry. So, I'm going to delete this right away. That's okay, but it's not centered. So, a lot of it was, as you saw in the helicopter, was moving around the globe to find the exact right angle and during that, I was trying to get that framed up perfectly. That one's not bad, but I think we could do better. That's another one that's blurry, so I'm going to dump that one. Okay. Got the rotor blade, and this one was a problem, but that's going to happen just as you move along. I don't like where the shadow is anyways on that one. That's pretty cool though. Same with this one. So, I'm going to take this image, I'm going to make a select. I'm going to put it in a folder to edit. Maybe that's the one, maybe it's not, I don't know. I'm going to look through the rest, and put that in a folder. Let's have titled Fix. Let's go to the rest of these, is about the same, is about the same. So, this is we're moving around, a little bit of shadows changing a little bit. I'm going to throw that one in the folder too, just to compare the two and I get there. A lot of these are good. Let me see, so I did some on burst mode. So, I tend to shoot a lot, street level even helicopter though. I shoot a lot with the burst mode, because it'll help get focus, and when you are at the street level, it helps you get that right image. People ask me all the time, how'd you get that person crossing the street just that moments? Because I shot, burst mode and 50 of them and just selected the one that's perfect. So, sometimes in a helicopter, this helps because, one shot might be out focus, and it definitely make sure you have a shot that's in focus. I like that because I actually like, the little people as well, and the little shadows. That might be cool. So, I'm going to select one of those. So, this is when we came more around to the side, which lost more the shadows. So, this was what I was thinking about, probably from my original vision on this. So, I'm going to select one of those. I don't really care what's going on in the outside of the image, because I'm actually going to end up blowing this up, and darkening in on the outside of it, so it doesn't matter what those trees are doing. You see a little helicopter right there down, it's funny. I tend to like, when you look at the images on the iPhone, usually when it comes up, it's got a white background. I like to press it once, it kind of go, so black background. So, I'm literally just looking more at the image, I find it easier to look against an image in black. This one's pretty good. Again, it wasn't exactly what I wanted to shadow. You can see how it's dark there, but I might be able to lighten that up a little bit more, but I like how deep the contrast is on that one. I don't really like this one. It's not at center so we going to delete that from the album. We're going to edit one that has a bigger shadow, which I wasn't planning on shooting. I think I'll probably do this one, and one that I was originally going to do. So, let's have less of a shadow, which I'll do that one. First thing I do is, I open up Snapseed. I really only use it for one thing, which is the, I'll show you, is the sharpening tools. So, I'm going to go to my folder, and select the image. Right here at details, this is the thing I like the best about it, because it sharpens up to image a lot, makes up for the fact of how small the lenses on the iPhone. So, I just sharpen up a little bit. You don't want to do it too much, otherwise it starts to damage itself, will start to break up, but just enough so you can crisp out some of those lines around the image. Then in here, I just go to the tune mode, and I'll start to do a little bit of contrast, a little bit, bring down the brightness of it a little bit. I'll also, because on this image, initially I'm going to try to keep the blue in the image, and make the rest of the image black and white. We'll see what that looks like. So I may know, I'm going to do that. But I'm going to up to saturation in this, so you can see what it does. It blows the greens out where they start looking probably too blown out, but I'm not really looking at those right now, I'm really just looking at what it does with the blue. I'll save that image, and then I'm actually going to crop it, in this image row, begin the cropping process in here. What I want to do is really center up that blue circle more than anything else, because that's the thing that's going to be symmetrical. To this shot, it's not necessarily how I framed up on the helicopters. There's a lot of variables going on there, with the angle, and the movement, and everything like that. So, I really want to get, that blue circle as centered as possible. That's pretty much what I'm going to do in this app, so I'm just going to save it. Now, we're going to open this up in the next app which is called Filterstorm. So, if I was going to make this image black and white, the first thing I do, so under Filterstorm, is like these are all your tools. These are all your different filters you can use. I'm going to select black and white. There's a few different things, I can just check it off and it'll make the whole image black and white, or I can hit mask which is going to allow me to put black and white, wherever I want it to be put. This is my favorite tool, and this is the secret, this is worth you're downloading the class, but is this gradient tool. So, this allows me to grayed it on anything, and allow me to grayed out on black and white, or color, whatever I want to do. But so what I'm going to do, and this is the way I do it, I mean of, this the way the apps exactly supposed to work. So, I grayed it on black and white over the whole image. So, it's 100 percent black and white, and what I like to do then is go in with this erase tool. This is before I check it off and say it's okay, and what I do is I erase a black and white just over where the blue is. This is sometimes, this is probably the longest piece of my editing process. Sometimes, I'll waste an hour sitting on an airplane or waiting for a meeting to happen doing this. Again, it's to me, it's almost meditative, and sometimes the hard part, is sometimes I'll edit the whole photo, like draw in all this black and white, and sometimes I'll do it, and they can look stupid, so just don't do it. So I have basically, black and white all around the side, blue in the middle. I want to darken in the image on the sides. There's another tool I like to use in here which is Curves. Curves on an image, so you can kind of like brighten it, or darken it wherever you want, which is like a typical digital photography thing, kind of messing with the curves. I think one of the things I want to look at right now, is actually making the curves black. Right. Because the size of the thing aren't bother me. It's not as graphic as I had hoped. So again, so I just set the curves to black, and now I'm going to grade it on those curves. Right. So, I could do it where it, and I've done this a lot, and a lot of my photos were all grade eight on a darker color like that, which should give it a good sense of another sense of depth to it. The thing I'd be honest with this, is to be careful because if you're looking at where the shadow is coming right. So, the shadow is coming off of the objects. So, that means the light source is coming that way. So, if you're in a grade it something on, you'd want to stay correct to the image and the gradation would have to go with the light source. Right. So, if there's more bright, if the light source coming over, here the gradation and in darkness would go that way, which would make it feel more natural. But what I want to do, is just a little trick that I have, which is I'm going to grade it the whole thing to be black. So, basically it looks like your love for the black square, and I'm going to erase off just the middle. The one thing about this Filterstorm app, is that it may seem like it's difficult, but I taught myself how to use it, and I never read anything about it, I never watch any tutorials I have online. People always ask me these questions, what app did you use? What did you do to do that? To me, it so I'm always hesitant to answer those questions because, to me it's not about an app. Right. There's millions and hundreds of apps out there that do amazing things, like you could add unicorns and stars, and whatever else you want to your shots. Right. To me, it's about having a vision for what you want to do, and then having the tools that you're able to create that vision with. I think it's a big mistake I see with a lot of mobile photographers, is that they are putting app, they're putting filters, and using different apps just for the sake of using them versus the sake of what are you trying to communicate? What is the vision you have for your image? So, to me, I would encourage everyone to figure out their own vision. What does their own personal vision for what they want to do, and then figure out which apps, or which pieces of the apps would help best accomplish those goals. The thing I like about this Filterstorm, as well as if you can make mistakes, and you go in and erase them, or draw them back in. So, this is me again erasing a little more of the blacker. So, over that piece of the globe, I'm blown in. The image itself has blown up really tight. I tend to overdo it even though the image itself is being reduced down to looking at an iPhone for an Instagram image. I tend to blow up a lot more than people would end up seeing just because I think it makes it a lot more crisp, it shows less of the flaws you may have when you're creating or touching up an image like this. All right. So, that's what I have so far. I think it's actually pretty good. I'm going to check that off so now, I've saved so far what I have. I'm going to save the image to my phone just because apps crash all the time, and sometimes I'll spend five minutes or ten minutes on an image, and then ended up crashing. I do it all again. I like to reopen it, just so I'm starting to fresh with the image I just finished. This is what I have so far, there's a little person right there was pretty red. So, there's a person crossing over on the blue which I like a lot. It seems, other than whatever that is great, but there's another person over there and a little kid, which is cool. I want to bring those people out a little bit more, because a sense of scale and that's pretty crazy. Right. So, there's another tool on here I like to use which is just a sharpening tool. So, again I set this to level of sharpening, you see how it would go across the whole image, with this if you go too far you see all grainy and fuzzy the image gets. Press a little restraint. Maybe I'll do 10 percent sharpening, and then I mask that onside, press the brush, and then I brush on the sharpening just over the guy. So, you can change the dynamic or brush softness opacity. So, just because tighten him up a little bit. So, I sharpened him, and also now I'm going to add the contrasts around him so it helps it'll pop out a little bit more. So, it's the contrast which will make your darks darker and your lights lighter, and then I'm going to bring the brightness down a little bit as well. So, maybe it'll make him purple a little bit more. So, you can see what it did with that, I think it brought it all more stern look good. So, soon another tool which do not get carried away to the cloning tool. So, I can set and clone anything I want on it. Right. So, I love this little couple, but I don't want them in my image. Sorry guys. So, I set the brush for that and I clone them out. Bye. I'm pretty happy with this, I think that the blue needs to be a little bit brighter, so I'm going to look at hue and saturation. So, I'm going to take the hue of it up, this overall saturation, and I may want to make the blue a little bluer. I think the one thing I don't like, which is going to take me a second to fix, is I don't like how blue the shadow itself got. So, I'm going to again, I'm going to de-saturate. Rather than going straight black and white, I'm going to pull the saturation down. So, you can see it'll go almost to black and white in that image, and I'm going to again brush it on as best as I can, just on the shadow of the globe. All right. So, that's why we have so far. I always like to go and check the actual image on the photo rather than on the app, and check it against black. I'm never happy, it's never perfect for me. So, it is just a quick edit in an iPhone app. So, I just look at like what does this look like just against plain black and white. Plain black and white may actually be better, because I think what I like, is that section and I'm going to do that I'm going to need some. I love how it brings to figure out a little bit more. So, I'm going to go back into Filterstorm. Again, I like this little guy, but I like the idea of just having one melody, so I'm going to clone this guy out. Last thing I'll do, I want to add a little more contrast to the globe, we had a contrast and brought the brightness of it down a little bit, just because it's like the highlights are losing a little too much. I'm going to brush that on just some arizona. Black-and-white tends to do it a lot, but it makes a timeless to me like this could be like the 1950s. We overview what we did. The first thing I did, I took my original image, and I brought it into Snapseed, and I sharpened up all the details and Snapseed, which really you can see the difference between the final image and what I sharpen out a lot of detail. You can see a lot of the metalwork and stuff like that, which I think gives it a lot more impact, and a lot more depth to it. Then I brought the image into Filterstorm, and in Filterstorm did a lot of clean up around the image, and I darkened in all around the outside parameter of the fountain. Right. My art director Amy, likes everything to be perfect, and have a place getting rid of the imperfect bushes, and sidewalks, and stuff like that help bring focus just to what's going on there. You saw me originally play with the idea of keeping it a partial color image, because I really like that blue, but I definitely feel happier where it ended up with the black and white image. Again, some of it is is learning as you go. When I initially went up, I was thinking that this image was going to be the image. Right, which is going to have a lot less of a shadow to it but I was really surprised that I really liked the shape that the image created. It's not too distracting from the overall globe and the phone itself, but I think adds a lot of depth to it. I also like how the shadow itself and the image are putting a frame around our single figure that's walking through our same, unknowing is being captured for Skillshare. All right. Here is my final image. Shooting from overhead, I can't wait to see what you guys create. 7. Final Thoughts: I'm never happy with any single image I have other than the second one I first created and when I first posted and then after that, I'm in this constant quest. It's always about constant evolution and slight little change of trying to perfect your style. I have a simple, simple rule when it comes to posting an image. I will not post it unless I absolutely love it and I absolutely think it's better than the last image I post. It really clears my head and almost thinking of nothing so I'm able to solve whatever problem I have for the day for my day job and it's really great. I find that creativity. Whenever you're against that kind of wall and you can't think of the right idea. I was never a guy who could sit there and stare at a piece of paper to try to figure out. I got to go for a walk. I got to go get a coffee. I got to go listen to some music and I have to let my mind think of nothing in order to think of something that's cool and awesome. I really use Instagram that way where a lot of times it will be during the day and I drive my assistant nuts because I'll have a packed day of meeting after meeting after meeting and sometimes I'll just be like I got to go, I can't function right now and I'll be off in the middle of an alley shooting someone walking down an alley, creating some awesome image and I come back and I've got answers to all the stuff that I've been sort of working on. I don't think you need to portfolio, I just think you need to get an Instagram account. Half the time if I show up somewhere, if I'm trying to get into a building or I show up in a new city and I want to try to find some other locations, if I'm asking the guide at the hotel or I'm asking my taxi driver, I'll just show him my Instagram account and say, "Look, I do stuff like this. Are there things like that in your city?" And people are so excited to see that fresh perspective that they're really open to sharing what's available in their city. And it's a funny thing because in all my images, there's always usually a human figure with the architecture sort of surroundings and sometimes if you look real close, you can see the $5 bill and the limo driver's hand that I paid him to go stand or walk next to a tree or next to a giant building. The challenge for this class is you shoot a unique perspective from overhead and I think this is an opportunity for you to take the techniques that I'm talking about in the way that I shoot and figure out your way, the way you want to do it and portray overhead photography in an interesting way. 8. Explore Photo Classes on Skillshare: