Become a Better Photographer II: More Tips, Tricks and Techniques for Better Photos

1. Course Introduction: that's great. Front light gives you really nice colors. So, for example, through or flowers we've got railing against a tree. Jane's sitting kind of on a hip in between rides, legs leaning on his name. Don't you just love taking photos? It's such a great pastime, isn't it? And so rewarding as well? Well, I think so, anyway. And I guess you do, too, if you're watching this. Hi, I'm Bernie Raffi, a professional photographer and teacher based in the UK In this course on how to become a better photographer. You're not only learn about your cameras, various settings and features, but you'll also learn some of the neat composition, posing and lighting tricks used by professionals to get more creative, dramatic and polished images, you'll learn the professionals natural lighting tricks for getting more creative images. You can easily see the texture on this wall, but not so much on this one. Find out why and how this tip could improve your landscape photos. I understand some of your camera settings and features apertures, shutter speeds, white balance, eso and focusing. You might think they're zooming. Your lending it out simply makes your subject larger and smaller. think again. Discover the secret of great composition. Stop taking snapshots and give your photos are all important. Well, factor. So why not sign up now? Realize your potential and become a better photographer. Gavin, to your see improvements in your photos right from the start. 2. A neat idea for a fun, dramatic portrait: is a great quick tip. There's a terrific way of taking a portrayed, which makes it look really dramatic. Now, this is not a fundamental technique or anything like that. It's just a fun way of taking a portrayed probably not best not to overuse it, but it cannot really nice every now and again, what you need to do is look for an area where you've got a wall, maybe with lines on it, and this could be shutters or brickwork or offense. And then what you do is you put your subject against the wall, you bring yourself around against the wall so said, Come on, follow me round. I'm not going to shoot with myself right up against the wall and incorporate these lines leading into lava. Let's see how it looks. That's brilliant, isn't it? Destroy it somewhere else. Now we've got some shutters. This is gonna look great. I'm gonna come over to the wall now. I'm really close to the war now, and I'm going to get the campus close as I can to the shutters. Now, in these type of shots, you need to use of all of thirds. And also it would help if you do 1/2 press of the shutter, this is explained on the page, has another link. Let's give it a try. This is going to look billions. Look at that. That's fantastic. That's a great tip. Don't overuse it. But it could be really nice just to use it on the odd occasion. One last thing I forgot to say is that you want to avoid a war with the sun shining on it because that will make it to black. So you want to look for wall that's in the shade, and also that will look better for your subject as well. Anyway, Go and give it a try, that's all for now. 3. How to take better photos in the snow: It doesn't often snow here in the UK, but it snowed last night. Someone, it's like this. You just want to get out on DPI playing it. Don't you walk around in it. But if you're anything like me, you also want to take some great photos in the snow. And the problem is you quite often take some photos, but you get back and look at them on the computer, and they kind of look a little bit dull and grey and miserable sometimes on. There's a good reason for that now, because everything So why it Conforto meeting system in so falling and inter for an exposure. So the camera thinks, are everything's white great. I'll make it a little bit darker, and that's because the meter system tries to make everything a kind of a mid grey. But the good news is, it's a really easy way around it to demonstrate this. I'll just take a quick photo of this nice little seen here. Now the camera is on aperture. Priority or fully automatic haven't changed any other settings now. It doesn't matter really, whether using an SLR or a a compact camera, the same thing will happen, but it's too. Let's have a look. That's quite nice. Just focus in. Yeah, so as you can see, it's quite nice. But it looks a little bit dull on gray, and that's because there's so much white in the scene and so much, so many reflections coming up from the snow. What I'm going to do is it is changed the exposure, compensation and increase the exposure by just over a stop they got plus seven plus one actually gonna make it plus 1.7. Now there's a film on exposure compensation, which explains this. I'd recommend you take a look at that. So let's not take another shot. This scene looks Yeah, that's a lot better, isn't it? Much, much nicer exposure. The stone looks white now rather than the great. It doesn't really matter whether we've got an overcast day like today, or even if the sun is shining, the camp is still likely to under exposed, so you do need to use the the exposure compensation. The other thing is, if you're taking pictures, they say you're somewhere holiday and you taking skin photos. The chances are you do need that exposure compensation, but If you're taking the close up, let's say you zoom in for a close up of somebody skiing. Then there won't be so much wire. The person is going to kind of dominate the flame on, so you can usually turn the exposure compensation off. So bear that in mind. If you zoom in to a subject, you probably don't need the exposure compensation or maybe just just slightly, depending on how much white there is in the background. But you may get away with just like half a stop exposure computation. One other thing is, if you've got a compact camera, they tend to have seen modes, you know, landscape. Portray beach snow on, set the camera to the snow setting, and that will do to expose your compensation for you. The other problem. We're taking photos in the snow, and this is a bit difficult to describe. So bear with me, but it's freezing cold. My nose is running. It's kind of crunchy under four on its where on when you take a photo, all of this sensory type of stuff disappears on. All your left is with the visual of the photo. So what may seem to be a great photo at a time. Turns out to be a little bit dull and boring and doesn't really capture the atmosphere of at the time when you took the photo. So that means you need to make the photos maybe a little bit more dramatic than usual. Try and make them a little bit more exciting. Different angles on certain Cylon. So let's give that a try for this shot. We've got Katherine with a sledge, and I'm gonna get lower to get a good angle. And I'm going to use this fence as a kind of ah line leading into the scene. Let's see how this looks. Tell you what, cat months old may go great. We've got a fence on the side, we've got the overhanging trees and Kath has got a great expression that she run solves, make terrific. Another problem with snow. It is very kind of monochrome, isn't it? The pictures look almost black on white, so it's great if you can incorporate a splash of color in the scene. And with that in mind, we've got this yellow and blues sled, which I made for my Children, or about 30 odd years ago, a blue pleat Peter Sledge on Duh Cathy's got a nice little red scarfed aware. So let's try and take a nice pulled right now. I tell you what. Take hold of the scarf and swing it around. Uh, that's good, Hector said. The scarf looks will unite. You've even got the green and red of the shed in the background, which was quite nice. Great. That's a lovely shop. Sometimes it's a good idea, just a very the shot by maybe just changing the angle. So I'm gonna be down on the floor on I've changed Katherine's poses. Wells, This is now leaning on the sledge. Let's see how this looks. Ah, I'm going to get wet here. That looks really good, and the colors look great against the snow. Another idea is to take some of the small details rather than a wide scene. So let's have a guy with a snowman that looks OK, but it's a little bit boring, isn't it? I like to go down to the side, get the detail in the scene, but get something nice in the background as well. So let's give that a try. Cuts plan there in the background. Uh huh. It's a shame is not. We haven't got a sunny day. It's quite overcast. We haven't really got any particularly nice light, but there's still quite a nice idea to get some detail. But get something, get something else in the background again. It's nice to get some color into the scene, but as I said, we haven't really got any particularly nice light here. So let's see what we can do. We've got these kind of autumn autumn colors here. Let's take a shot of these. There's a nice little snowy scene. Let's try incorporating Catherine into the cat. Go over there for me. Thanks. She does. Everything I ask is fantastic, huh? We need a bit more snow on the leaves. Really? Don't make that looks nice. Lovely. There's a few shots taken later that day later buttered where I live. That's a Grand Union Canal running for it, and that was frozen over good exposures. And I tried to include a splash of color in a shop back to my garden and a detail shot of some snow covered bearers. And finally this shot taken on a different day when we had some blue skies noticed a post box in the corner. If you're taking a scene with maybe wide angle, that could not nice as well. Try and get something in the foreground, and it also helps if you've got kind of virgin snow that hasn't been Children. So that's about it. Actually, one last thing to say is that the batteries don't last long in this cold weather. So it's a good idea to have a spare battery with you on probably good ideas. Well, to keep it in your pocket so it stays warm, the cold effects of batteries and they won't last as long in the cold weather. So as I say, that's about it. I hope you have enjoyed this film. The important thing is, as Catherine just reminded me, is to have fun. Bye for now. 4. How to take photos of fireworks: It's 1/5 of November, and tonight is fireworks night. So in this film, I'm going to show you how to take photos of fireworks. Now it is going to be a great display later on over a nearby school. But for the time being, we've just come into the neighbor's garden to show you some of the settings and talk about what we're gonna do later on. Now I'm going to feel a little bit conspicuous. I think if I go along to the firework display, what with the video camera and a video light and a tripod and so on. So I think it's best if we just take the photos from the garden later on. Now we should be seeing the fireworks go above those houses over there, so this shouldn't be too about a vantage point. Okay, I admit it. I'm too tight to pay the £5 entrance fees. Not really. Now, in previous films, I haven't used much in the way of equipment, but tonight we do need a couple of things in order to do the job. The first thing is a tripod. We're going to be using some long exposures, and you're just not going to be able to hold the camera steady enough by hand. So we do need a good, sturdy kind of tripod. The other thing is going to be using a SLR camera they had. They are a lot more flexible, and it's kind of make life a lot easier for us. Another piece of equipment we're going to need is what's called a cable release now. We don't want to be touching the camera to press the shutter or to release the shutter, because that's going to shake the camera. These capable lease is really simple to use. You just plug one end into the camera on the other end has a button on it, which I can use to release the shutter. Some cameras, especially combat cameras, can't take a capable East. If that's the case, just set the pats. Just set the self timer on Andi that will allow you to take the photo without touching the camera. Another alternative is to use a long exposure setting on the camera and just maybe come for the lens with your hand or with a hat, and then we move. We move it just to take the photo. So that's another technique you could try. But by far the easiest thing to do, it's use one of these cable releases, So let's now talk about the actual camera settings I'm going to need. First of all, I'm going to turn the flash off. That's really a Portland. The flesh only goes about three or four meters, and then the light falls off. So there's absolutely no point in having the flash on a tall, funny, quite often to see flashes being popped block contacts and so on when people who about 200 meters away from the stage has absolutely no effect whatsoever. So now the exposure I'm going to be using mainly manual settings on the camera. There's no point in using auto exposure because the meter in mood system will be easily fooled. What a firework, the black sky, the black fireworks. So going to be using a manual exposure setting now a Sfar, the aperture is concerned. I think we'll go. We'll start off by using around F 11 which is a small aperture. If I find that the photos to Brian, then I'll maybe change it to F 22 or F 16 of 22 so we got a bit of flexibility there. If the photos a little bit too dark, open up the aptitude to about F eight. Alternatively, Aiken up the I. So now the shutter speed, because we want to be able to hold the shutter open for as long long as their finger is on the shutter button on the cable release who used money to use is set in called Bulb. It's a special set in, which means that the the shutter will stay open for as long as the finger is on. The is on the shutter button, and I'm just going to demonstrate that now. Daddy, I so set in, I'm going to be using the lover star, So number. So in this camera it's 200 on your cabinet, maybe 100 or 80. But using the lowest number will ensure we get the best possible quality. The other thing I need to think about is which lends to use. I'm going to take the easy way out and use one, which has a wide focal range. So this one goes from 18 to 200. I'm guessing I'm going to need about 75 or 100 millimeters my focal length. But obviously, with this lens, I'll be able to zoom in and out now. Also, this lens is quite a slow one. You can see the aperture is only a 3.5 to 6.3, but we'll be shooting at F 11 so it doesn't matter. This is just really a cheap kit type lens. There's just no need for the fast lens to take pictures of fireworks. Now, when I say fast lens, I mean lens with Attapatu of 2.8 or wider. Although they're lovely, those lenses, there's just no need for it to take when we're taking fireworks on the final setting up. Needs to think about is the focusing. Where exactly am I going to focus the camera? Well, what is it? One? This one is actually quite easy. We don't want to use the auto focus set in because as soon as I press the shutter button, the lens is going to hunt backwards and forwards trying to find the right place to focus on . So there's a couple of things I can do. I can put the camera straight away into manual on set the focusing distance to Infinity. That's the one with a little kind of figure of eight on it, and that could stay there the whole time. No need to change it if you're quite close up, actually to the fireworks. Another thing you can do is Teoh. Keep the lens in auto mode for the moment and then focus on something in the distance, half pressing the shutter. Focus on it. And then once the lens has changed, then change the focusing mode to manual on. Once it's said, that's it, except for the whole evening and you don't need to change it again. And finally, when exactly I'm going to press the shutter, that's always a tricky one. There's a couple of things I can do. First of all, I can watch the little trails of light going up, knowing that they're going to expand into a nice bloom on just to that point. Press the shutter release. Alternatively, I could just wait until the Bloom starts on black Instant press the shutter, but it is pretty much trial and error, and we'll see how we get on later on. So that's about it for now, will come back later on, when the fireworks start and we'll see how we get on. I'm looking forward to it. Should be excited by for now. Okay, the fireworks have started. The problem is, I don't have a good vantage point as I expected, but we still should get some night shots. Al Qaeda cameras in the manual mode of focused on infinity. I've got my little dude Are here already to go. That's the shutter release. Before I said I was going to use a bulb setting. But I've changed my mind and I'm going. I'm going to use 708 2nd long exposure. So we just waiting for some fireworks now? I focused on infinity. There may be some trees obscuring the fireworks, but that's what we have to live with. Commonality. Here we go. Okay, wait. Just got the edge. Is because I'd obviously pointed it in the wrong direction. So there's that. Marcus said There's a lot of trial and error here. The fireworks are going off a little bit higher than expected. Guys, try that again. Exposures look about like actually possibly on the light side. I think I may reduce the the exposure time. I'll tell you what I'm gonna do. I want to change the aperture to about F 16. It's on every 11 at the moment. I'm trying it. Teoh have 16. Okay? It was looking a little bit blood. Okay, Come on. Bit too quick for me that I didn't say them. That's if we got anything, though. There we go. So bad. Uh, pretty good for it's a good Got quite lucky there. The fireworks went off when I wasn't really expecting it. That looks about, like, maybe tiny little bit black. We can you always reduce that in post processing? Well, I think that's it. Obviously, the big finish wasn't quite as big as I thought it was going to bay. I must have missed it. But I think I got some decent shots. The problem was we didn't really have a good vantage point as I expected. So I was only able to get the very large, cascading fireworks. But I think by now you've got the general idea. Okay, That's often out. Hope you enjoy the film 5. Use the fashion photographer’s perspective trick for longer legs: So just why do women wear high hills? They're really difficult to walk in what I've been told, but obviously they want to make their legs look longer and sleeker. And who can blame them now? This is just a very fun quick tip just to show you how you can make somebody's legs look longer in the photos. Have you ever noticed in some daily papers? Have people's legs could look really short? Take a look at David Cameron and David Beckham here. I don't really think they've got little short legs, but because of the angle of the camera on the perspective, it does look like they got tiny little short legs. So we're going to use this technique in reverse to give our subject slightly longer legs. Let's see, I can work in practice now. The reason for the short legs you just saw in the newspaper cuttings was that the cameraman was too close and it was a little bit to hire on. Because of the perspective, it made the legs look a bit shorter. Let's see, let's try that now, in order to make Emma's legs are longer, I'm going to use perspective on get a lover camera angle. Let's see how this looks. Look at the difference in those two shots. Terrific. So that was just a bit of fun. But fashion photographers like to use that. True, quite often on for obvious reasons, that's all for now. 6. How the 'half press of the shutter' technique can improve your picture taking: Let's say you're about to take a picture of a toddler. She's got a beautiful smile and it's going to be a great photo. You're going to capture this exact moment. So you press the shutter down on the camera on, and eventually the camera takes a photo. But But this time it's too late. She's not smiling anymore. Your point and shoot camera has just turned into a point on white camera, but in fact this can happen on many cameras, and obviously it doesn't need to apply. Just Teoh chilled your child photography. You could be taking a photo of, say, a bee on a flower and a B but is off before the actual camera takes a photo. What, maybe you and say, a safari park taking a photo of an animal and the animal darts off before the camera actually takes a shop. What you experienced there was something called shutter lag, and it's the difference in the time it takes between pressing the shutter Andi camera actually taking a photo when most experienced photographers come to actually take the photo , they don't usually just come along and press the shutter down, all in one complete movement. That's because they know the camera has to do a little bit of work before it can actually take the picture on this work takes a little bit of time. So what is this is it's work that the camera needs to do before actually takes a photo, the cameras to me to the scene and set the aperture and shutter speeds appropriately so that the subject is populated, properly exposed. And then it has to set the letters so that the subject is she sharply, and focus will know focusing and getting the exposure doesn't take very long. It's just a fraction of a second. It can make all the difference between getting a short your one. I'm missing it completely on the time it takes to get the exposure, and focus is known as shutter lag. Now the good news is it's really easy to avoid shutter lag. All you have to do is lock the focus and exposure before you press the shutter. So when you do press a chateau, eventually it clicks straight away on the top. Lewis still smiling or the baby is still on the flower, or the animal was still still where it was originally. Some of the more sophisticated cameras have special buttons on the back to lock the exposure and looked the focus on these work great, and I'll be covering these buttons on how they work in another film. But obviously, no, every camera has these buns. And so I want to show you a way of avoiding shutter lag regardless of what camera you use. And in fact, I use this method all of the time. So here's what I do is surfacing the shutter or all the way down in one motion by half. Press it until I hear the little beep, or until there is a white focus square turns green, and at that point the focus and exposure are locked, and this is the important part. I can keep my finger half press on the shutter for as long as I like. I can move the camera around, do what I like with their on the focus and the exposure won't change. And then as soon as I'm ready, I pressed the shutter all the way down. The more observant amongst you may have seen this happen in or heard it in the films where you can hear a little bebe on. Then a few seconds later, you hear the click of the shutter to show that I've taken the picture half pressing. The shutter has other tricks up its sleeve, so let's take a look at a couple of other advantages. The half press of the shots I can really help with your focusing on a very good example of this is when you have AH group or a couple of people. And here's my couple of people. What can happen is the background could be perfectly in focus on your shopping subjects could be or blurry. Let's show you how this could happen. The camera, instead of focus in on the subjects, will focus on the background instead on the background will be sharp on. The subjects will be completely blurry, out of focus. So here's the trick. Here's what you do. Instead of just pressing the shutter down with the focus square in the middle, he placed the focus grown one person's face and half pressed the shutter, keeping your finger on the shutter. Then you recompose. Then you ask your subject to give you a lovely smile ha and you press the shutter. That way you get a night shot picture. Plus you get a great post as well, if you time it right. By the way. Many bottom capitals now have something called face recognition, which gets over the problem when taking poor traits when it switched on, the camera automatically recognizes faces on focuses in on them. The half press of the shutter can also assault some of your exposure problems, and these could occur when your subject is set against a white or bright background. And this can also happen on, say, a beach. When you've got a lot of reflective surfaces, you know the sun shining off the sea on the sand. I'm going to take a picture now, Cath, and she's gonna take it against the sky and you'll see what I mean. So you see now to cap is too dark because the sky is falling. The exposure system the way around this, using the half better to shutter its a re framed photo. So there's less sky or less of a reflective surface in the actual flame, so you can point a camera down toward a subject, and then half person shutter Onda, then recompose. So let's try it out. Makame has gone off, so that switch it on, maybe. God. Okay, so I'm gonna point a camera down and focus on the lower half of of cuts. And then I moved, blaming and taking a picture. You obviously have to be careful that the plane of focus doesn't change. Otherwise, when you recompose, you know you're gonna get a blue a blue shop, But that's a great way off solving the problem of black backgrounds and so on the other time, when her office in the shatter comes in hand, is when you want to keep your subject on the third. So instead of just pressing the shutter now I'll focus on the Jamie put him there, huh? And then I got a nice sharp shop. Great. You had 1/2 presses. A shatter is really useful when you want to put your subject on the third Just purposes shut are very composed and press the shutter button, so that's about it. It's important that you got and practices technique because sometimes you're trying half better shutter and you'll end up taking the photo by mistake. The problem is, some cameras have more sensitive shutters than than others. But keep trying. Keep practicing, Andi. Eventually, it will become second nature. And at the end you will be using it all the time. I use it every single time. You take a photo. That's what I do. And if I do it, it must be right. Anyway, that's over now. 7. How to easily create a stunning online slide show in minutes: So let's say you come back from holiday or from a family outing and you've loaded your photos onto a computer and you've deleted order about the shorter ones. You're not so keen on your now left with one or two photos. No, you now left with a whole set of photos that you're happy with. The question now is what you're going to do without photos. Well, obviously, you could put them off. But in this digital age, fewer and fewer people of actually printing their photos personally, I love looking at Prince on photo. Albums are great for family and friends, but they're really not that easy to share with people who don't live close by. Maybe you just tend to email the best photos of family and friends or put them on Facebook . But when you do that, you're not really showing the photos in their best light. What I mean is that the presentation of the images these a little bit to be desired. E mailing is okay for one or two photos, but when you start emailing out 20 or 30 images, things can still start to get a little bit cumbersome. You don't even know, for example, what order the photos are going to be viewed in in this film, I'm going to show you how you can easily create a stunning looking Web album or slideshow. The great thing about the slide shows is that you only actually have to send out the link to the slide show rather than all of the images themselves. Some of you may have heard or come across Google's Picasa on That also creates nice slide shows. But in my opinion, this method I'm about to show you is just a simple to use on creates much better looking slide shows or Web albums. Actually, if you're not sure what Web album is, just click on the link below this film and take a look. Just stop the film now. Andi, watch the slideshow. I'll wait for you. In actual fact, that's slideshow only took literally five or 10 minutes to produce. It's so easy to do, we're gonna take a look at how, how actually did it. The software is called J Album. Now. What I love about J album is it's simplicity and the fact that it produces stunning looking results, and you have a great deal of control over how the slideshow will eventually look before we actually start looking at J album. It's advisable to watch this film in HD on in full screen mode so that you can see the screen a lot easier on. There's information on how to do that below this film, so let's see how it works. The first thing we have to do is download the J Album software. It runs either on a PC on a Mac to bring up the browser and try and visit their website. It's a www dot j album dot net. It is just click on the download, Jr Been Button takes us to another page. Now you can use the software for three or user commercial version of it, but I just use the free version and pay a little bit more for the extra storage. Andi, it's just think it's downloaded and installed in a normal way. Now I've obviously already got it installed, so I just bring the software up. Here we are that this main window area here is where the thumbnails of the images will appear. The area to the top of left is where the previous albums. Previous pre existing albums are is one of a wedding. You can just scroll through the images, just little something else and you can click on a thumb. Now is if you want to make them bigger. Here's a hold on old photos of 1966. This is, uh, this is me on the light on my oldest and bestest friend Jeff. So let's make an album. First thing we have to do is click on is bringing some photos. Now you can browse for the photo. I was why I tend to prefer to just drag and drop them in. Now up comes a dialogue, which ask you for more information about the about the album than the album, name, description and so on. At this stage, I think it will ask you to register with your user name on and password, which you need to do. It's a 11 only once only registration. So we taught those in, and it brings in the images. These are set of ST photos I have taken converted Teoh Monaco, and you can reorder the photos just moving backward and forwards, or go to the views view order by just to change the older around if you wanted to, but we won't do that for the moment. You can change your captions as well on these as well. Now that will display later on. But let's make an album just click on the Make album button and Straight Away just starts to throughout the album. Preview the album and here we are. Look at that really quick, easy to do, and now we click on this button to play a slide show. Now one us playing or just explain what we're looking at. This is a set of HTML files, which on your PC or Mac, they're not on the Internet yet. They're just sitting on your hard drive, and you can see from the address bar at the top. These are my D drive. This is a set of HTML files, but you don't have to be technical to understand any of that. It's just a slide show that is sitting on your PC. So what is closed down the browser? Close at that button down. Now, let's, uh, let's have a look at this. What should we do now? Yes, this is where really the magic happens, Each one of these injuries is a different skin or theme and and well, changes the way your slideshow is going to look. So you can just fast food them and see the type of slideshow you prefer. They will look, they're all very professional and very different as well. Here this box underneath you can change the look of each individual slide should theme, so you can maybe change the color of it. We're gonna I'm just going to create a thing at the same slide show in a different color now. So you see, before we had a black one. Now we've got a cream one, and you can click on the individual images instead of doing a slide show, and you could just go backwards and forwards on. This is something your friends and family can do. They will say exactly. The site was what you've your previewing. So we closed down a browser. Let's try another theme. One of my favorite one is is one called light flow. There we are. This will look completely different. So what we do? We click on the make album button, too. Preview it and here we all really professional looking slideshow. You can scroll around to see what images what images are there. You can obviously plate the slideshow if you prefer, but you can just click on an image to bring it up and then go backwards and forwards if you like to look at the other images. Really nice theme, this one. So we closed down the Baraza. There we go, and then we're back at the on your desktop. These are the other themes. This little button here Little Gold button allows you to vary the theme, but I may be changing the transitions or the timings of the slides and so on. To be honest, I don't use it very often. So let's not make an album a popular album, though we can upload. I always preview the album before loading just to make sure everything looks OK. And it's $1. It's the turtle, which is deterred, always the name of the default album, and I click on the upload button. So now it's uploading. This little check box here allows you to include high resolution images. If you did want to make a photo book later on you, you would need the high resolution images. But we're just using a low because once for the time being, and we should see the album paging out here it is. So what comes a paid showing you your album. You can restrict who sees the album by using the these settings here. Now the actual address. This is what you'll need to copy and paste into your emails to send to your family and friends, and they'll just click on that to see the album. And this is what they'll say just exactly the same as it looked when we used it locally. What else can you dok? Although I never use the facility, you can actually edit the images so you can crop them quite easily. Just apply that, and you can maybe make the photo lighter or darker. But as I say, I tend Teoh Dawlat my processing before using this software and only use it for, you know, for making the albums so you can save the save the album. Just go back to the thumb. Now's That's pretty pretty much it. You couldn't also make a photo book if you've uploaded the high resolution images, and that's all do is to it. Give it a try. And if you do get stark, chatter me online or drop me an email, I'm always glad to help out. 8. Introduction to Landscape Photography: look at that beautiful scene looking over Pitt Stone Windmill There on Dash Ridge, embedded future UK landscape and scenery provide wonderful opportunities for us. Photographers don't know, but sometimes you can take what you think is a terrific photo of a scene. Get it back home. And although it might kind of look OK for some reason, and now it looks a bit dialling uninterested. You know, the scene that lovely you were there. But sadly, you're disappointed with the result in this section on landscape photography. I'll show you how to improve your landscape landscape images and get beautiful photos more like the ones you see in magazines. Now these types of images don't happen by accident. They require a lot of planning and forethought. And to be honest, no, everybody has the patience and drive to find the time to make great landscape photos. But you know it's not that hard. Sure, it does take a bit of practice, but, hey, that's all part of the fun of photography. Before you start taking photos, you need to have in mind the kind of image you want to create and plan accordingly. It's really that planning stage is going to make all the difference. So here's a few things to consider before you start. Get to know the location. Maybe take a look at it, using Google Earth or Google Maps to scout the location for things like parking spots or something that might be of interest in that particular scene, like trees, rocks or water features etcetera before your visit. It can be helpful to look through Flicka or another location based photography service to get an idea of what other photographers have found. Interesting. It's good now. The weather landscape photography can be unpredictable, as you don't have any control over the weather at the scene. I mean, what kind of atmosphere do you want to create with your image? The weather on the light can completely transform a landscape, so think carefully about what mood you want to evoke. Are you after bright, cheerful image or an ominous moody one? So before you travel for two hours on arrived to see a dull landscape a bit like the one we caught here today, check the weather forecast and make sure it's to your liking. But the perfect weather condition alone is useless without good life, you'll want to know to some position in the sky in relation to the overall scene. Fortunately, this is more predictable than the weather. There's various APs that can provide this info again. Think about the atmosphere you want to create light and peaceful, dark and moody. Maybe then some particular landmarks you want to highlight. The answer to these questions will inform where you want your like to bay and consequently , what time of day to shoot. Remember, though, the last thing you want to do is to show up just a za Sinus setting or after it tourism. Make sure you were alive early enough to give you enough time to look around and prepare. If you're planning to photograph a coastline, you may need to consider tides. It can be useful cut for composition purposes, obviously, but most importantly, it's for your own personal safety. Tide in the ocean are really rapid and wide, and in some cases it could be difficult, if not impossible, to escape from the waves. If you decide to shoot from the box along the shore, you know with a what. Excuse me with a rocky wall behind you. One final thought If the landmark your considering is quite famous, there might be other photographers there, in which case try to be in that place before it gets too busy so that you can choose the best spot. The videos in there in this landscape section demonstrate many tips and ideas for getting great landscape images. So I hope you like them. Why for now? 9. Landscape Images & Settings - Part I: Have you ever taken what you thought was a great landscape photo? I need to find that When you got home and looked, it looked at the image on your computer. The photo wasn't quite as great as you thought it was. You know, the scene look beautiful. You were there, but somehow the photo you took just looks a bit darling. Uninterested. Well, how does that happen? Well, let me give you a little clue. It's not the camber I have with me for this film. Call in Mill, who as well as judging photography competitions, is also a wonderful landscape photographer. His images are stunning and in fact, some of them are even better. The mind. No, I know it doesn't seem humanly possible, does it? Anyway, we're going to walk through some of his images on corn is going to share with us how we created them on how he manages to bring out the drama an impact within the scenes. Now, you may recall I've done a video like this before, but this one will be a bit more in depth on will be including more of the technical details . So calling before we start just give us a little bit of you of your background in photography. Okay. Being taking photographs now for 40 about 25 30 years Start off. Obviously in film, uh, through medium formats to digital looking thing I'm thinking now, Onda, uh, primarily being arrested. Almost all that. That's your preferred subjects. Yeah, I got to talk to people that have to direct people. Castro. Yeah, I'm not in control of the lighting, but that's about like like the the wildness of It's the fact that you're catching something natural rather than manufacturing something. Why did you do this to your more equipment? Dios will go through the equipment in detail later on. But what what manufacturer are used primarily? Cannon? Yeah, on duh. Work my way up a stable of L series lenses now. Right on. The quality's fantastic. Okay, well, let's look at some of the images and eso. This is on my way to work. We've had a fall of snow the previous night, so I knew that there was going to be something to be had. My heart sank a little as I was driving to this location because of the cloud cover that you can see. But once I'd put my boots on, climbed over the fence and waiting through the field right here to climb over a fence to get you had to climb of revenge will be careful in the farmers. Don't like you essentially trespassing on their land, but provided you you're careful and your respectful of their property. Once they find your near land and you talk to them, they're normally nine times that and more than happy for you to be their slums, you not doing any damage to the crop or anything. Um, so yeah. So, uh, the head Rwandan went inside. There it is, literally the hydro that borders the road. So they got main road going just to the right of that. But to all intents and purposes is a country view. The focal point for me was the tree up in the top right hand side on. Guy was just Fortunately, the sunlight was in a suitable position that it didn't fight for attention with the with the tree on. It provides some lovely raking light thistles, a recurring theme in most of my pictures. I love trees, trees coming here so evocative of various moments on doll so you can get them in singles or a tool or multiples on. This is a very simple composition. Simple competition seemed to work best. If you limit the amount of information that's in a picture, then the less the viewer has to look at, the better it looks and the more impact it has. And so this is just purely a leading line from the laughter inside ending on the tree, which is just emerging from the mist, misted lifted enough that I got from color in the sky. Ah, nice white. What viewpoint? A little bit of color in the lower left hand side, Two planets up with the blue on the right. Onda we have it and they used 1/5 of a second, a slow shutter speed. So you must be using a tripod. I tend to use a tripod for all my landscapes, mainly because it slows you down in the taking on. So you're not rushing on your considering the viewpoint. You're considering the composition more because you are having to slow down and work with a tripod. This is another recurring theme. While I love sunrises, probably in preference to sunsets actually. And if you look at the time Scott, the time sitting on this one, This is taken middle of Jane or the end of June. Rather just before 3 30 in the morning. You got up really early in the morning. I was a part on the beach. First woman. I slept in the car overnight, stumbling this dedication. Well, you got you gotta be the otherwise, you wouldn't have seen this man. Just a joint. Um so a lot of getting the atmosphere in a picture is about being there at the right time. If you want sunrise shots in the middle of June, then that means they're getting up. It's stupid to call of causing to be there. But in order to balance the light emitting from the sun and illuminating the sky, I had to use a neutral density filters graduated neutral density filter on. If memory serves at this point, it was a three stop neutral, neutral density filter just to balance the light appearing in the sky with under foreground shore. Now, this is after taken on the same day on as you see from the time time mark here it was pretty taken about 30 minutes later than the previous one. Eso the sun was willing, truly on his way in this guy. We'd lost that golden light on the ready golden light. But there was plenty of pale golden lights still flooding the scene. This is slightly back from the beach. A little bit looking at the sand dunes with the castle on the right hand side they're on. You just got this lovely raking light. It's the sun is still low enough that is, creating some beautiful lengthy shadows on some beautiful textures in the grass and on the castle is and you've got quite a low angled Aziz with the 1st 1 with the snow quite low. Yes, In this respect the foreground, you're emphasizing the foreground on the focal point is to cast from the background. But you want to emphasize the texture and pattern in the foreground. And so you're a low viewpoint. Yeah, spend official to this one. This is back to the same tree that was in the second photograph. Um, it's just a slightly wider view taken slightly further back. In fact, this is one of one new lenses 70 millimeter lens that'll recently purchased and you're sharing F 16 as well. Should I think the other shot? Yes. When you get a lens, it's best to run a few tests. So it on find out what is optimum apertures. It's not always best to open it to close it right down to the F 32 or after Tito. What every whatever the spores laboratories, because you get that something called diffraction, and it's the bending of light on it causes fuzzy ages. Andi actually looks at a focus when it's not eso a few tests with with a new lens to find out where the sweet spot is. And with this lens, I found out that anywhere between F 11 and F 16 was fine produced, lovely, sharp tack, sharp images on fantastic photographs. Again, the balance the the foreground and this guy have used to stop neutral density filter this time just to reduce some of the brightness in the clouds. This is another tree on the way into work. In fact, the same field is last time. This was a heavy frost rather than snow, but I quite like in this one. The gradual introduction of the blue color in the sky at the hazy nature of the cloud behind the tree. Um, you normally hear when people talk about composition, about using the rule of thirds, which is fine when it works. It works fantastically, but the rule of thirds isn't always applicable. And in this instance, what I've done is our place, the tree almost central within the image we gotta leading from the left hand side. We've got a minor leading from the right hand side, both pointing towards the tree in the middle. The way the composition works. The photograph almost runs in thirds, but the main focal point of the image is based on is centered on the image, and I think in this perspective works well. Taking landscapes doesn't always mean taking the wide view. What we have here is, ah, detail shot off a waterfall in North Wales on, and what I've done, as you will see from the from the data, resumed in 290 millimeters on my 35 300 mills. Zoom ins on just isolated a small portion off the waterfall itself. Again, it's the camera's tripod mounted a 39 2nd explosion, what you would be able to handle that one. But when it does, it gives you this lovely milky field to the to the water. Now some people would say that there's no realistic Well, photos don't have to be photo realistic or realist, too real, real life. What you're producing here is what you felt at the moment what you interpreted off the scene in the moment. And the light is beautiful. Rare. Well, yeah, the lights. Fantastic. Now this is actually three shots stapled together, all stuck together. Should say this is lowest Lauter in the Cotswolds. I just set up the the camera on a tripod to photograph the scene when these three horses wanted into this got lucky. I got lucky, beautiful colors on the on the jackets. Quite my separation as well between the three horses. So they're Noel Group together and confusing things. But the scene itself was mostly balanced without the horses. But the inclusion of the horses just adds a little extra element. This is Ah, sunset shot in the place of visited for the first time last year. I don't a little bit of research. Before I went to find out in which direction sunsets Andi from Which viewpoint Vantage point would be best to photograph this on driving down it was drizzling on. In fact, at some points it was it was even raining quite hard. But once I got to the 11 to farmed and in hitch in the rain cleared, the cloud started to clear Onda. All I had to do was just wait for the sun to go down on. I think from this little excursion I ended up with about 30 or 40 different images, all including the sun. And this is using quite a wide angle zoom to lend again to try and get inasmuch of that beautiful skies like yeah, on a starburst, I guess, is because you've used quite a small aperture or have you put a put a filled There's no filter on that. The only filters are do tend to use are the graduated neutral density filters and occasionally a polarizing so that starburst is absolutely natural because of the opportunity. Yeah, yeah, 10. Camera and Lens settings for Landscapes: So what settings are best for landscape photography? Well, there's no one Magic bullet. Best setting. That would be too easy, wouldn't it? Plus, this video wouldn't last very long, but I'll go through some of the best options now. This is a fairly advanced call, so I'm going to assume you know the camera basics. I'll start with exposure on D three elements that control exposure. That's aperture shutter speed, and I also let's start with temperature as well as helping to control exposure. The aperture is also the primary control for depth of field. That is how much of the images in focus from, you know from front to back, because the amateur opportunities are important. Unless you're going for some kind of special effect, I suggest you start off with aperture priority mode or possibly manual mode. If you're a little more experienced, many a good landscape photograph will have an interesting foreground as well as the landscape itself that you'll often want to be in focus. Very good. Mind that the smaller apertures that is the higher numbers, they'll give you a wider depth of field. So just how small oven aperture will you need to keep what you want in focus. Well, I would say that middle aperture such as F 11 is usually enough when focus slightly beyond the foreground just to confuse matters. That number will differ depending on the type of camera you're using, because the depth of field will vary depending on the size of the sensor. So, as a general rule, I would say, if you have a camera with a one inch sensor or 4/3 camera, which, by the way, I'll be using in these videos, then a Napa two of their fight should be fine. If you have an A PSC crop sensor, DSLR camera would go for Effie lover. And if you have a full thrown camera, make that F 16. And if you don't notice and sensor size of your camera, just do a Web search for suspects using the manufacturer and the model number. So assuming that you do want everything in focus, which, by the way, is not always the case, why not just use the timing aptitudes? I F 22? You could be certain then that everything was in focus. Well, I'm glad you asked that. It's a good question. The main reason is that lenses don't perform choirs world near their extremes in a pitcher's. Specifically, there's something called deflection, which causes a loss of sharpness when the lenses stopped right down on the larger you scale up your landscape photos, the more your notice this light loss in sharpness, although it's not usually significant at smaller sizes. One other possible reason is that the smaller the aperture that pollute more pronounced any dust spots will be on depending on your post processing capabilities. This could be even worse than the defection that I just mentioned. So anyway, that's the aperture moving on to I. So this is relatively simple. The lower the I so or the eye. So that is when it's at least sensitivity to light, the better the quality of the image. So, generally speaking, you want to use your camera's native lowest. I also I say, native because of many cambers, you can now set the I so lower than the native value, with a subsequent small loss in dynamic range using a low ice. I will, however, mean that to get a correct exposure, the shutter speed will probably need to be quite slow, especially with those small apertures that I've just mentioned. You can increase the I. So if you prefer, But for the cleanest image, it is probably best not to go any higher and say 400 depending on how good your cameras, of course, on how large you intend to display the photos. Now we come to the shutter speed on because you've already selected the aperture and I so you'll be confined to a specific shutter speed. In order to provide the correct exposure in aperture party mode, the camera will obviously figure it, figure it out for you in manual mode. You'll need to work out the shutter speed for yourself, but it's not difficult to do. This is why you must use a tripod, because depending on the light levels, the shutter speed will quite often be slower than it's safe to use hand held. So, generally speaking, the tripod is a must for landscape photography, so that's the exposure salted for a basic landscape photo. Now let's consider focusing. So what part of the scene should you can actually focus on? Well, my guess is that when taking a landscape for so many people would set the focus point to around the middle of the scene or even on the horizon. But this that's not the best place to focus as a general war. You should focus in the lower half of the frame about 1/3 of the way in to the scene. But this is only a general, and you might want to ignore. If the scene has a particular point of interest, that isn't about 1/3 the third area. However, if your landscape shot doesn't have one specific point of interest is probably a goal worth using. So in general, if you focus too far into the scene, chances are you'll end up with objects in the distance nice and sharp. But anything close to you notice notably our focus. If you focus on the lower third, you increase the depth of field in the foreground on as depth of field extends further behind behind a focal point, and in front of it, the distant objects will be reasonably sharp, too. There's quite a lot of debate, actually, and technical discussions around this issue, and in actual fact, correct focus depends on several factors, including the focal length of your lens, the aperture that you're using and how far the scene extends away from you. Having said all that, focusing 1/3 of the way into the scene is a useful rule to know on a good starting point when shooting landscapes. Whether you focus exactly on the third point probably doesn't matter too much. No need to get out a tape measure, but the key is not to focus on the horizon, but closer to you. Let's move on. Not a white balance, which, as you I'm sure you already aware, controls a color or more out, more correctly, the color temperature off your landscape. Photo for their outdoor photos, Many photographers use auto white butters That's the A WB setting, But for some types of photos, this could be a mistake. Auto white balance senses the color temperature in the image and corrects it to provide a more neutral balance, and that works fine most of the time. But what do you think about it? If you have warmer colors in the scene, such as those in the golden hour? Do you really want the camera to correct that warm light so it looks more like it was taken in the middle of the day. Well, of course you don't when you show outdoors in the sunshine during the middle of the day, the auto white balance setting will normally provide similar results to the daylight. White Balance. Preset setting. Getting off topic For a moment, let's say, for example, you were to take an indoor photo of a child about to blow out here. Birthday cake candles. There would normally be lovely warm light from the candles, using the sunny white banners preset, the image was showed a walk. That warm light but switched to a WB on the camera would correct the light to make it more neutral. Consequently, the image would end up looking cooler. So, generally speaking, I would just stick to using the sunny preset. Having said all of that, if you shoot your, then this argument becomes academic. As with just one small movement of the temperature or white balance slider in post processing, you can set the white balance. Do anything you like. Okay, that's the theory over with. Let's put some of that into practice now. See you in the next video. Oh, 11. Introduction to Neutral Density Filters: Haagen. Well, for some of the photos that I intend to take in this chapter on landscape photography, I'm going to be using a graduated, neutral density filter also known as n Andy and Andy Filter. So what exactly are they? And why do we need one? I mean, you might well think that it's just a plain old old gray piece of glass. Not all colorful, no style effect, no multiple image effect. Just a boiling playing gray. Well, what can that do? OK, it reduces the exposure. Well, I can do that myself. Can I buy tweaking the camera settings? It's pointless. Well, of course, it isn't pointless. It's pretty much a necessity for landscape photography. In its simplest form. On nd filter is just a dark and piece of glass that fits over the lens. So an indie filter is to a camera. What a pair of sunglasses are too human. Now it's called a neutral density filter because it reduces the light uniformly without affecting the color. Having said that, some cheaper filters do create a color caste, but they're not meant to. There are several types of nd filters available. There's round screwing ones like this that come in various filter thread sizes, and then they're square slot in ones that fit into a holder, which fits onto the lens from top to bottom. Graduated nd filters go gradually from dark to light, so they're very useful in landscape photography to darken the sky. More on that in a moment, the bomb ones can also be graduated. The trouble is, when you screw them in, you can't be sure that the dark area is going to be at the top. They could still be used for darkening the sky, but they're a bit more fiddly. So why would you even want to darken the sky? We'll just try going outside and taking a quick photo, which contains foreground scene and plenty of sky. What you'll find is that if the foreground is when exposed, then the sky will be too bright. Conversely, if the skies exposed nicely, then the foreground will be too dark on. Although this problem can be reduced in post processing. To get white encumber, you need to use a graduated nd filter to expose both the foreground on the sky correctly at the same time. Now they're available in different strengths too. Here is a table showing the filter exposure factors. Now I tend to think of them in terms of stops, but other people prefer the multiplication factor. There's also a variation of the mound nd filter like this one called fader filters. They allow you to smooth the just a filter factor that is, the amount of light reduction by simply turning the bevel index marks on the bevel show you exactly the amount of reduction now using filters is quite simple. You just even screw them on or slot them into a holder and leave the canvas the automatic exposure system to work out the filter factor. If it's an eight times, for example, the camera will reduce the shutter speed by, say, form 115 125th of a second to 15th of a second to compensate for the three stops, extra light required, or the aperture will be opened up from F 22 toe fight as an example, offset this fado nd to four times. That's two F stops. If I go into manual mode with settings of say, I s 0 200 F eight on a shutter speed of 400 of a second without an indie filter. I'll take a quick shop and you can see it's a good exposure. If I place the four times filter on the lens, take another shot, and now it's two stops under exposed. So to ensure the same exposure that I had without the nd filter, I could do one of three things I can open up the aperture opening up, letting in more light. I could bump up the eye so to make the sensor more sensitive to light, or I can slow the shutter speed to let in more light or combination of the three. Usually, however, is the aperture on a shutter. Speed is modified as the prime purpose of a ND filter is to give you more flexibility with these two camera settings, you can then open up the lens aperture fully in midday sun for a range of shutter speeds, or maybe allow longer exposure in bright light without overexposing. There's another video on this topic showing how to obtain a kite candy cotton creamy water effect by slowing down the shadow spade during the day. Now I put a square graduated nd filter on the video camera to show you the effect. I've attached the holder, but at the moment there's no filter. Here's how the scene looks. The settings on the video camera on eso 200 F 1/100 of a second. You can see that the garden looks OK, but the sky is very bright and doesn't have much color in it. So now I'm putting in an eight times filter into the holder, and that's going to gradually darken the sky by three stops. As you can see, we've now got a much better overall exposure. Also, these square filter holders can take more than Mom filter so I can add a second filter this time an nd four filter and reduce the sky exposure by another two stops Pretty nifty. You'll see me using these filters a good effect later in a shopper. So stay tuned. Bye for now, 12. Landscape session 1: Along the Grand Union Canal: again. I've come along toe old Linds laid in Leighton Buzzard by the Grand Union Canal. And before I left this evening, the light look like it was gonna be really promising, but unfortunately is going a bit hazy in the light. Strike lights dropped quite a bit, but still, maybe a nice sunset. So I'm going to go up onto this bridge. Andi, try and take a short along the canal, getting in some of the reflections on da barges and solemn I can't actually do any videoing up on the bridge because the pavement is just too now. But I'm going to try and get something nice reflection in the canal from them from the barges from from the trees andare use a couple of nd filters. I'm not sure what my exposure is gonna be until I get up on the bridge, but I probably put just put it on aperture priority. Put a couple of nd filters in shoot along the canal and hope for the best. Let's see how I will get on. So here's the first shot from the bridge taken about half an hour before sunset Aptitude quality at 5.6. The camera was a Panasonic 4/3 bottle, so depth of field is not a shallow his fourth frame or a PSC, but even so, I probably should have used their fate. But I was hand holding the camera on didn't want the shutter speed to drop too low. It's not too bad the sky looks reasonable, but the canal itself looks very bright and rather empty, and I think that spoils the image. Here's a better shot for moodier with a great sky. I waited about 25 minutes, and, of course, the sky has much more color in it. Made even more saturated by the combined five stops of the graduated and D filters, the canal is darker as it's now reflecting the sky, and the barge to the left is balanced a little more by several ducks that paddled into the scene. I got a bit lucky there. Notice. The top of the tree on the left has gone a little dark. That's because of the graduated nd filter. Sure, I could have fixed it in photo shop, but preferred to show you how the filters could have unintended consequences. So there's something to watch out for you have to be careful. That's what you might call a quick video. I just thought it was worth popping out. Just going along the canal was a nice sunset. It was a shame I didn't have any golden hour warm light. But we got quite a nice picture. Bye for now. 13. Landscape Session 2: High up at Sunset: Hi. We have come up again to Ash Ridge, which is near to Dunstable Downs in bed futures UK on. We've got a lovely evening. Last time I was here, it was a very cloudy, cloudy evening, so we couldn't really do any photography. But now we've got a beautiful evening, pretty much a cloudless sky. But hopefully, as the sun goes down, we'll get some small amount of clouds and some redness in the sky. Obviously the sunshine in from that direction. It's a beautiful scene here today, and I have to think about how I'm going to work, work the scene, what ideas I can come up with for taking some gray images. We've got this track going down towards the hill there. We just had some people walking along but have gone Now, Andi, we've got some a couple of really lovely trees. You with the light on one side and shadow on the other side on. We've got some lovely long shadows as well. And obviously, as the sun goes down, the shadows are going to get longer. So moving around this is a lovely filled over there with some kind of tracks. Tracks going off into the trees. There's another field of a different color over in the distance on. I don't know if you can see it, but there's a brown farmhouse just over to the left, to the left, there just peeping over the top of the hill. And in fact, we've got the the shadow of the tripod as well. It was a bit a bit of a giveaway, but obviously we've got the video camera on a tripod so that down farmhouse over there, you can just see it over the top of the hill. But there are some ugly gray buildings alongside it. So I'm going to try and hide those buildings using that using the hill. What else can we try? Well, obviously I want to keep these trees in the foreground as a kind of foreground interest. But sunset this evening, according to the photographers, photographers, feminist, after learned how to pronounce that, According to the AP, which we're using on our iPhone, Sunset is at 8 30 at its core to eight this evening now and so we've probably got about 10 minutes before the golden hour really kicks in. But you see how beautiful the light is already so I'm going to take some photos, first of all, without any nd filter just of some of the areas here that you see on, We'll compare them to some of the shots I'll take in a few minutes or in about half an hour . When the sun gets lower on, We've got more of a goal golden warm glow. Okay, it's now 10 past eight. So we're in the golden hour. I've got some beautiful light now. I did struggle a little bit to find my good composition, but what I've decided to do a shoot really low between these two trees. I've got some lovely little golden light on the side of the trunk and shadow on you on the other side. Nice golden light on the far drunk as well. Camera settings. F 11 s 0 200 aperture priority, and it's given us about six of a second. I put it on self timer. Let's give this a go. Yeah, this is work pretty well. Great lighting, especially on the foreground tree. It generally looks better if you don't overlap objects. That's why I kept the trees well apart. The foreground tree, middle tree and distant fields gives a sense of liars, which are depth to an image. I like the long shadows beneath the trees, but a couple of things I don't like to march on a lot of the bland sky could have done with some fluffy clouds. Also, the branches of the tree at the top have gone very black. We've lost the detail in the shadows, generally speaking outside. It's the quality of light that makes this image keeper. Okay, the sun's going down on the light is dropping off now, dramatically. But another good short, I thought, would be the sun shining through this trio over here. So first of all, I took a short without any and D filter and his Here's the short, but I put a fight enough for a five stop equivalent of five stops. Oven in graduated nd filter on that that's a three stopper on a to stop are combined to make five stops. It looks great to review. Find us a list restore shot. Now we want a 4.5 I so 200 on the camera is giving us on Aperture. Priority is given 1/13 of a second. It's a good idea to have to use aptitude priority when when the light is dropping off like this because it changes so so quickly. Just let the camera do do the work so himself. Time. Andi. I focused on the tree as well. Looking at That's beautiful. This is what it looks like, by the way, with only a three stop filter, which we used a few minutes ago. This is probably the best shot off the session, mainly because of the great sky. I think shooting with the sun peeping behind the tree works pretty well. But although the light looks quite nice on the grass, the foreground isn't really that interesting, is it? Here's a closer crop. Does that improve it? I'll let you decide. I don't quite know why you such a large aperture for this one? I would normally shoot around F 11 on a full frame camera and just let the camera choose a slower shutter speed, which is no problem on a tripod. So shooting F 4.5 was probably a mistake, but I think I got away with it here. One thing that I forgot to mention was in the video. The sky is going to be quite a lot lighter because there's no indie filter on the video camera, so you can see the difference before I end the video. Let's take a look at a photo that didn't work out that well. I think it's worth showing and talking it through to say just why it doesn't work. Sure, the life is lovely, but the sky is bland and the nd filter darken. Versions help a little, but the sky could really do with a few fluffy clouds. Also, the foreground grasses un interesting, isn't it? A lock or bush or even a person in the foreground would have livened it up a little bit. Also, I overlapped the trees to demonstrate that usually looks better when you try to separate objects while they don't have them on top of each other. So that's about it. For this video and this particular location, I hope you enjoyed it. We're still more to come for landscape photography or could be going out again to a different area in the next video Bye for now, 14. Landscape Images & Settings - Part II: Okay, This is a favorite location of mine, partly because it's very close to where I was born. On just the fourth bridge in Scotland on just on the river forth there. This is taken for South Queens, furry on beating Glasco all day, photographing the festival there on duh traveling home. We were looking at the clouds and thinking that that's guys, not the last one is going to something fantastic. And sure enough, a short journey out was rewarded with a beautiful mackerel sky and some lovely pink colors in the clouds. Again, the five second exposure on this just blurs the movement of the water sufficiently that there's no real hard definition to the water. We're back to Northumberland again. And remember, Castle, this has taken late in the afternoon. Now, this is this is an August afternoon. In fact, this was on the drive home from from the Forth Bridge. I stopped off again at Bamber, partly car up on bond, fully intended sleeping in the car again that night for some rights for a morning. Unfortunately, as with most things, sunrise didn't happen. But I got some fantastic love the night before again assess a fairly long exposure this time Only 1.6 seconds, but still long enough to get some movement in the water. It just gives it a different feel to the water as a That a sharp focus for picture wouldn't . Yeah, this is back to the field. The my favorite trees. Aaron. On Duh. I knew that this something was gonna happen here this field, because it has a river in the bottom of it, normally filled with mist on particularly misty mornings. Onda. Because of the way the sun climbs, you can normally guarantee that the Mistral clear within about 15 20 minutes of sunrise on . Sure enough, it did. I was presented with a beautiful blanket of mist as I arrived. What my way across the field. Figured out what the composition was going to be. Where the trees were going to be on. DMA needs to play around imposing these things. You do tend to work in numbers, Onda. Although I've only got two bales here. I've actually got three items within the picture that form a trio of focal points. So you're I've rests initially on the the bail in the right hand side and then follows round to the tree at the back and you and you have a nice three point focus. You saying generally Ordina Odd small, odd numbers work. The old number of members tend to work better. 357 on Obviously the few of their better as well. You don't want to overcomplicate the image. This was Ah, very lucky shot. I arrived literally. Just a za son was creating this firestorm in the sky. We were traveling up to ah week in Scotland a week on in England. Code Onda had been driving up since six o'clock in the morning. As you say, this is just on 20 past six in the evening we got to this location just a summer setting Onda We were treated to a fantastic display. Fortunately, I knew the location that we were heading to. I driven a little bit faster than I probably should in order to get here at a reasonable time or insufficient, I try to get to photograph on. So it was literally a race out of the car. Set the camera up as you're heading towards the the location, get mentioned tripod, get everything set up so that as soon as you plant the feet down, you're ready to take the photograph. No strong colors. The reds today as you saw it, you think all of you they are fantastic. Very much as we saw you know, again, you've got foreground interested in the in the shop, which I know you like. Yes, and I think with without the foreground interest, it wouldn't have been quite so sure. So interesting. Yeah, certainly would have seen a little bit more of the texture in the reflection of the sky. But I think the green and gray of the rocks and the left hand side just give you something to rest your Iona's. You're leading into the picture. So what Actual camber using for today's and Colin. But all of these pictures were taken taken on the same camera on guy used a five d mark 11 of the original ones. It's a full frame digital camera on DSO as 70 millimeter lens on. That means it is like the full size 71 of the reasons recently upgraded to a 60 primarily because of the increased, um, messily resolution asked about looking for, but also because it's still a full frame camera. Okay, so this thing is short. This is another favorite place in mind. This is the pap of Glencoe on the left hand side, but he's taken late in the afternoon. Just this summer setting. It would be a bit of a a miserable afternoon. Will told you can see the color in the sky. There is quite great, quite dark on. That's how it being most of the afternoon. But there was a split in the cloud on the western side Onda. As the sun broke through it. We were treated with this lovely lighting display, and you can see the band of bright light. I'm just resting on the mountains and hills in the background there, on just on the underside of the clouds on the right hand side. And have you used Andy Field again? A graduated filter to just to bring the intensity down a bit on balance it up a bit more. If I had been particularly particularly about this one, maybe would have also used a graduated in the only water something else started to you and just recently, eso you inverted eso. In fact, you would use to just to bring down some of the brightness in the in the foreground There. This is, Ah, very well known. Seen to anyone who has seen any pictures from Scotland, we'll have probably seen a photograph of this particular place. This is BlackRock Cottage on when it more. It's particularly iconic because it's the one cottage against the Dark Mountains background , but it's also fairly well photographed because of his location. It is literally just off them off the main road on visible from the main right as you drive through anymore again, um, using a wide angle lens but this time zooming into the 45 millimeter just to try and isolate and compress the feel of depth. Within this image, trying to get the mountain bring the mountains for slightly further forward in the image rather than being quite small as you would get with a wide angle ends being a landscape stop. It doesn't always mean taking landscapes. This is, Ah, picture bicycle that I actually taken the previous year when I took it the in fact for about 18 months before, but when I took it the last time, it was in a slightly better state. It did actually have two wheels on, but it's it hasn't moved from where it was last. So obviously someone has left it here It was, and I just called about not running with it. You can take detail shots of landscapes and create your own landscape within the landscape and enjoying this is one of my favorite ones off the past year. This is upon, uh, the old manor store on on the honest guy. What I particularly like about this one is that I wasn't actually going to go up there this day. I was staying at a B and B just down the road for about 5 10 minute drive away. I got up, looked out the window and it was miserable and actually raining birth on. No, I come all this way. I'm on holiday for a week, so I will get out and have a look. And as I was driving the range getting heavier, I got to the car park. It eased off a little bit, but it was still quite cloudy. There was no hope of sunrise, but I thought, Well, I'm here now. I put me walking boots on, getting this stuff out. The car. Andi, make the truck up and it's from the car park. Up to this point is probably a good hours walking eso. In order to get a decent photographs, you gotta put a bit of effort. You can't just get out the car and expect the landscape to be there. You got up. Put some effort and you gotta make the long walk out of the car. Parking up into the hills. Andi, I was rewarded on this day by some fantastic light. It lasted for 15 20 minutes on Got some fantastic photographs on Once it was over, the cloud covered in again Andi. It turned to rain, but for about 15 20 minutes, it was well worth the effort. This was taken on the falling day, I think, or two days later, up on a place called the Karang Up in sky again. For those of you who know the area and have seen pictures before we pull you see in this tree as well. It is quite well known for photographers who frequent that area. But this one is all about the lighting. Uh, again, I have to wait for the lights. Uh, this was 20 past 10 in the morning. I had been there since six o'clock. I think I wanted along. Sunrise didn't happen, But that's the way it goes sometimes. And you just need to be in the right place at the right time. And sometimes that means waiting. 34 maybe even five hours. Okay, this is Island Lian Dolan Castle, Just off of sky again. It's another well known picture. Put it under the name of it. But you you may well have seen it on tins of shortbread from Scotland. It is very picture. Postcard is a beautiful occasion on. You could get have endless fun here in front. It's in such a good location that you can get up here at sunrise and stay all the way through to sunset and take photographs all the way through the day, especially if you're cloud cover likely had here. That's occasionally hiding the sun on creating some lovely pattern and texture of this guy . Looking at a settings, I see that many of the shots you're using a slow shutter speed and why, just for the benefit of people who want to know more about the settings, Why, why has that happened? Why the shutter speed so slow? It's unfortunate by product, off the fact that because we're taking for the guards either early evening or late evening , I started early morning or late evening on. The light levels are slightly lower than they would be during the day, but also because the small aperture we're using isn't letting light in this facet. Would anyone open? So obviously, you're using the small aperture to get a lot a wider depth of field. That's right, yes. If we were to photograph some of these images say, maybe 5.6 or 2.8, maybe even wide open at one point, a few people toe, then you wouldn't get as much depth of field as you do with a smaller aperture. The smaller aperture gives you that great depth of field, but it has the side effect of not letting light in as fast as it would do normally, so you have longer exposures. This one in particular, has a long exposure because not only does ever sworn aperture, but I also put a three stop full neutral density filters onto it, just specifically to slow down the the recording of it so that the water didn't wasn't wasn't as sharp as he would. It would have bean as a woman explosion. 15. Landscape Images & Settings - Part III: This was, ah, long drawn of South. This is on the south coast between East born in fact, last seven sisters in the background there, between export and writing, I knew exactly what it was. What I was going to take out when I got there. So I've done my preparation. You roughly we wanted to go to so fortunate didn't waste too much time in getting the composition right. I was able to focus on getting everything set up. Andi captured the image on slightly unusually. You've used to portray orientation on dawn. This shot? Yes, I think it worked slightly better because I wanted a beautiful sky. And now I also wanted to keep the rule of thirds in mind. And so the cottages are located on the lower right hand. Third on almost the top 2/3 of the images is sky. This is up on the pink district. It's just down from coverage, which in itself is a fantastic photographic location. This is actually early afternoon. Looking at the time stamp on this one is it's just gotten one o'clock in the afternoon just after lunchtime. But because it's January on were slightly further north and we would be. Normally the sun doesn't get up as high in the sky, so you're actually able to shoot further into the day or earlier into the afternoon, and you would normally be able to say during the middle of summer on DSO. What we have here you can you can see with some of the shadows on the sun isn't particularly high in his costumes from lovely shadows and giving some lovely texture and pattern to the foreground on into the background. This is a beautiful castle up in Scotland particularly wonderful because it's a title cast . It's on the title lock. This is Castle Stalker up in Argyle, the tracks that you can see on there on the right hand side. There are tracks that lead across to the Carson on allow the owner of the cast lots of boat on. There are corresponding tracks on the other side so that he could draw the draw the boat out. And so it was the tracks that I was using as a leading on the right hand side to point this way to towards the castle. I've kept everything on the thirds again because it works in this respective works. What I have had to do was crop down a little bit of this guy just to take some of the open space up there that was just make for more into kind of a panoramic to makes you slightly anymore. Slightly more panoramic, but it doesn't just focus your attention slightly more onto the castle. This is Ah, place down in Gwinnett. Ive called Lock is another place. See, you've got to get out the car and track a little bit to this. Took me about 30 minutes to wander down to. There are no real paths to it. You got to beat your way across some Bracken on. Then when you do get down, If you look on the left and the right inside, you can see these green bushes. They're actually rooted endurance. Andi is quite an invasive species, the weight of 100 quite thick as well. You gotta really fight your way through to get a decent view point on DSO In situations like this, waterproof boots are a must as well. You're standing in the world. You standing in the war for standing in the water for this one. Sometimes you got ta in order to get the get the best location. This is January this year. Back up to Glencoe. I went up there on my own this time. Does a Scotch comedian Billy Connolly you may well have heard of him on Who says there's no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothes on in this respect. He's out absolutely right on. I was wearing thermally lined Trans is. I had two pairs of socks on. I had trouble walking boots on. I had a base layer, Um, T shirts on. Then three fleece is on top, plus a waterproof jacket on top of that. So I was really toasty while I was taking these and I needed to, because just shortly after this picture was taken, a snowstorm came in on day. It was bitterly cold on gun, really blowing the holy up On what about the cold effect in the equipment? A gunshot shortened battery life on DSO? What you do tend to do sometimes is store your batteries, tell your wife wants just to keep something much information, I think is the coldness does affect the country. So if you leave them in your camera bag, chances are that the they will be out of power when you need to use them, so you need to keep them warm on the warmest places in your underwear. A mountain It's not quite well known. Aziz Big Brother, this is the little shepherd of that ive. If I was to plan the camera around to the left hand side, you would see the great shepherd of it. Eve. Uh, it's a pair of mountains. What drew me to this picture was the break in snow. It's not actually a river or a stream. It's just Ah, marshy area where the snow had fallen but hadn't actually obviously formed a layer on the water and seeing all these lovely plan working his way through and to a degree, it kind of reflects. The pattern is happening in the mountain as well, and so it is details of that. They tend to look for when you're composing your everybody looking for an image in the first month and what format of your shoulders calling raw format or, yes, the moral, my last capes. In fact, almost every shoot these days is taken in role. Although having said that, I do adjust the settings on the camera, so I don't leave it on all the way balance. I do reset it to what I think would best suit the images. I'm taking it because there was clouds in the sky this day. I used to clarity setting on the previous image. What I had done was that if you set it on the shade setting on DSO, that just adds a little extra balloons to the image that you sometimes get with winter shots. I used the history of almost extensively in this shot to make sure that I got the full range of tones I wanted. The screen on the back of the camera primarily is just to make sure that I got the composition right. If it looks right on the screen in the back of the camera because it's so small, then he kind of know that you've got the composition right. It'll it'll just look right on a small screen. And then once you get into the biggest green, and obviously you could look at it a finer detail. Look around. Seen. Check the focusing. Make sure you're focused on the point that you want to focus on more than anything else. But if you want to get the greatest depth of field, then you're looking for an area that's about 1/3 of the way into the into the shot. In this instance, it would be somewhere between the rocks on the left hand side of the trees. Another portray orientation. Yes, another portray. And I think this this one worked well because of the balance of the river in the sky on I think I did have to take a couple of photographs of it in in traditional escaped former. But for me, the composition on this one works better in a portrait format. Yeah, this is Ah, compositional Aaron image that we've seen a shot off earlier, this time taken in March. Rather not table that last one. Waas. She's trying to five in the afternoon. The sun is setting quite nicely. Um, and what we have here is a different scene because he's got snow on the tops. Beautiful, still calm day. So that reflection of the other mountain in the foreground. And I like the way that the clouds are finding out for the mountains as well. That has a little bit of the the composition. In fact, if you draw a next from corner to corner, you kind of get the that the line off the series and the clouds following it on. That was how it worked at the composition for this one with the with the crossover point in the middle. So that's why the horizon, so to speak, is in the middle of the picture here. I think it works very well. This is one of more again taken on the same trip again, off the beaten track. On this time, I followed a little river that was running away from the main road in the hope that it would leave me somewhere. Most of the time. You can't see things that all running more because despite a looking quite flat, it is actually quite undulating. You don't always see from the road what you can see with wandering. And in fact, if we look in the picture just off to the left hand side, you'll see the buck elective mawr, which is the large shepherd and just in front of that is a little white dot on That's the BlackRock cottage that we saw a picture of earlier on. So I'm in the same location. I'm just slightly further back. Andi, I found these wonderful, erratic rocks that had bean deposited in relation of age covered in lichens on a tree to balance the composition. So I got my three focal points here in the mountain. I've got do the rocks in the foreground and about the tree on the way and side on. I got a beautiful sky on the way It was working that afternoon. I could have stayed here all afternoon taking photographs every five minutes and come away with different pictures for exactly the same location because the sky was moving all the time. Well, that's about it. I think you'll agree that those images of Collins air just absolutely fantastic. So thanks very much call in for showing that information with us. Thanks for having me Chairs. Bother now, 16. More Landscape Photography Tips: in this film going to be talking about landscape photography and scenes, and someone on the format of film is slightly different to the others in that I've enlisted the help of my friend Barber. Now we both belong to Light and Bothered Camera Club, a local club. And that's where we met. In fact, our eyes met across a crowded room. But in the club we have regular competitions. Andare quite often see Barbara's landscape entries in the competition, and I've always been really impressed with them. So I thought I'd ask her to come along, give us a few tips on how she gets such great images. So before we actually get started, though, Bob, what's your kind of general philosophy? You know, when you're taking landscape photos? Well, I like to go out into the landscape and have a good walk around. See what is there. Get a feel off it, Onda. As you walk around, you begin to see things. There's suddenly a pretty obvious what you wanted to bother and just take a picture straight away. You want to spend a bit of time just assessing what is there because you don't really want to take a landscape in one go. You may want to divide it up into two or three. Sure, five pictures. Do you really want to keep it? Very simple. You can. All right. Okay, I said, What about the light on goal in the light? Of course. Do you may have to wait quite a long time for the Latin. You want to look at the cloud to see where they going, whether there's a chance that you might get a beam of light onto something important in that landscape, and it's well worth waiting for that, like Okay, that's great. I couldn't let's get started. What we're going to do is just look on the computer of the photos and go food and one by one, Andi let and we'll see how Barbara got each individual image. This is a picture that I took 30 years ago with film. It so excited me when I saw it, and I got back that I decided that I wanted to do photography. If you could do something like this out of something so simple, I decided this landscape was going to be for me. This is a typical landscape. You might be faced with. It's going to be rather dull. No light, beautiful leaves, lovely autumn leaves coming into the picture. But what you're really waiting for here is some light because you will see on the next picture on Dhere. Having waited for a while, the low evening sun came in and lit up all the branches. But you've also change the composition. Oh yes, I have moved slightly. I've moved because I was following the light. Onda realize that that is where the picture was going to be. It looks almost backlit, doesn't it? The leaves as well? Yes, it's come through right well, when you get the light coming through the dark. It's very pretty. This is the sort of picture you'll be faced with when you start doing landscape and you'll think in where is the picture? You can see these lovely shadows at the bottom. You can see the little animals. You can see the shed in the bottom right hand side onda. In fact, you need to walk around for a while to see where your riel picture is. There's almost too much in this picture, even though it's got the light. Maybe there's a bit too much in it. It breeds to be simply for more. Okay, this is a purely a reflection in the in in the winter. I don't know why, but winter light is often very much better for landscape photography. Autumn, spring, winter but summer it It's too high. The sun is too high and sometimes goes very flat. But this was the autumn Onda. I early in the morning saw this reflected into the lake. We went to a forest and in the autumn, and the trees were absolutely glorious. They looked almost a ziff. They were on fire on this one. I thought was very interesting because it had so many leaves still on it. And there was such a lovely yellow Andi. I use just the one tree with a hint of the few trees in the background. This picture is is totally different. It was looking into a woodland. This is kind of an abstract. It is an abstract, and it's it's when you really get into doing photography, you suddenly realize perhaps you want to try things that are a bit different. On this was an example of moving the camera while the shutter was going off a rather slow shutter speed you need for this on. Do you just need to move the camera down slowly as you press the shutter? It always works better if you do it down. Rather, the lock that sex and I could almost be a large framed picture on the wall couldn't. It's interesting. It's different. This shows simplicity of a picture, Really. It was taken in late afternoon, and you have this long shadow of the tree coming right across the field. I like the small flowers in the foreground, on the woodland, back on the low light on the leaning tree and quite fond of trees that sort of lean into the picture. This is the shadows of the trees attracted me, but more attracted me with the lines that had bean ploughed or furrowed in the field. They were going in Aled different directions on. I thought they rather made an interesting pattern to the trees. When I arrived here in Scotland, I was very disappointed that the light wasn't on the castle, and this is a typical example of how sometimes you have to wait for the light on and the fact the light was in the background. I thought maybe if I wait long enough, it will come over on. Be on the castle. How long did you have to wait? Them? Oh, probably waited about half on hour. And here the sun has come over to the castle. It was taken on the same day. Fact the same evening. Really? We were driving along early in the morning in Scotland, along Loch Fine. And as we came around the corner, we saw this castle reflected in the water. But there seemed very little way of getting down to the lock side to be able to photograph it. So having clambered over fences and rocks and goodness, there is what we arrived on the lock side, and I managed to get this picture with the sort of low morning sun on it again. Winter months were very kind of warm. Like to Yes, it was a lovely, lovely scene. Yes, This is this again in Scotland on a very stormy day and factor. Not long after this, they were rain bows and everything in the sky, which, unfortunately I missed on this occasion, I love the stormy clouds on the simple lock side houses. Andi, I thought with the beach this made quite a nice scene. We went back a few days later on Ga Lo and behold, the rainbow was there by these houses. So this time I concentrated on the houses with the rainbow Onda again very stormy skies on . I think the tide was in this time so we didn't have much beach but it made a totally different picture. So it's always worth going back to a place again and again because you will get a new type of picture. This again is stormy light. I do love storms. It's much better than taking in bright sunshine sometimes because you get different types of effects on this again was late afternoon on the sun was beginning to go down, but it it's Shannon Sean across this water, Andi made it look like a silvery sea and you can just see the details in the background again. Here we have the horizon on the upper third rather than the lower third on. Where's the sun in? This is it is a backlit. Yes, it is, son is actually more or less almost coming towards you. But you have to be careful to shield the lens. If you've got the sun coming towards the camera, this is a picture taken them the lake district. I think it's Durban water and things that attract may in photography of the curves in the landscape. You often can use a curve as quite an important feature in your photograph. On this one, you'll see the horizon is just above the halfway mark. I think it's just allowable, really, but it's a it's It's the curve that attracted my eye on the little island on the right is so important, almost as a stopping point for the I. I was attracted to this picture because it was pouring with rain, absolutely pouring. Don't you don't have a lot of luck with the weather. Well, I do not like with whether it's storms rain, you name it, we get. But it's good for photography. And here we have a boat, which is in the foreground, so that sort of gives your eyes something to focus on. Something simple on the background, of course, is all in a mist. Andi, sometimes misty pictures can make wonderful photographs. They they have a sort of mystery about, um, also put the boat on third row. The boat is on third in the picture and important of in the grid in the shape of the grid that you see, I do quite a lot of travelling and I've had opportunity to go to many places in the world. And this picture I photographed in the Falkland Islands on did It was a wonderful island. It only had one house on it. So if you went on to the island, you will felt free with the camera on all the birds and the animals. They didn't mind you being around and they didn't go and hide. But this was a particularly colorful scene off the little harbor that we arrived on. All the broom was out. It was very pretty. And the water is a gorgeous blue on here again. Of course we have the curve, the curve going in the other direction. This time, Andi, it's it's quite nice in a photograph to take the I round the picture to see the curves was the curve on the tree that attracted me to this picture. But it needed something the other side of the river just the sort of balance the strength of the tree on D. I was lucky to find this little house. I think it's quite a big house. Essentially, Andre. It was all reflected in the still water. This is the river door doin on DA. It was a wonderful afternoon. Now this was taken in the middle of the day as it happens, but it was spring on. The light was still quite soft, so it sort of took the light into the shadows. This is the house across the river that is reflected in the water time house, same house. And it was the light on the trees and the house that really, I thought made the picture another great. I'm struck in interesting reflection in water. Here we're just framing the church with the trees again on the quite a sunny afternoon but not so sunny that you didn't get detail in some of the shadows. And this is the same picture six months later, in the in the snow on duh. I'm not sure which picture I like best. I think I quite like the snow one. My life is everyone, but you've also put the church by 1/3 and the trees on the side? Exactly. Yes, it's all quite important in balancing up your picture again. The horizon really is on the third and you've got 2/3 at the top. And it's quite a good idea to stick to these few basic rules when you're photographing. Think about, um, these were just some glorious trees on a whole frosty morning and I was down there for about two hours by the river, photographing this wonderful whole frost Onda. This is nearby. Only this was only yes, this is near where I live. So I could look out of my bedroom window, saw the whole frost, and I disappeared for two or three hours. In fact, my husband is nearly sent for the emergency services. He thought I'd gone in the river. Same frosty morning, and there was so many opportunities to photograph this frost. And you have to be careful that you get out early enough before the sun starts eating away at the frost. Yes, I put foreground elements in here. Otherwise, some I felt the picture might be a bit unbalanced on dumbed again, slightly curving the foreground to make it soft with the trees reflected in the water on. Do you can get the most wonderful reflections again with this some sort of light on DFO lost, it's It's an opportunity not to be missed on this, actually is the same tree using reflection again. But because the color ah, went a bit blue and strange, I decided to change it into a black and white works well And yes, I think it does. But some people are not happy about the horizon halfway up this people, sometimes you can get divorces. Well, if you can break the rules and it works doing that, rules aren't that rigid. They they're just there to help you. Really? And this again was taken very early in a very cold morning and the sun adjust peep through in the background onto the lake and it gave the lovely soft light to the snow on this tree . In fact, it was almost golden. Look about it. This was taken on the continent. In fact, it was taken in Austria. Andi, maybe they have cold mornings there. I don't know, but I wasn't too happy to begin with about the pier on the left, with the bars on it. I wished In a way, the fencing hadn't been there. But I had to take the picture because I thought the light and the sun it was so gorgeous. You could have always gone along with a screwdriver and take taking down the French and then put them back again. This again was taken near to home on the river, whose on did it was? A very, very cold day. One of our cold winters we've had recently And it was at the end of Ah, a photo shoot going along by the river. And in fact, here the river is frozen absolutely solid across, and this is one using the frost. In fact, the frost looked like little bits of rice that somebody had stuck around the branches. But I took this with a close up lens and it threw away the background out of focus and just had a little bit of light on the branch, and this again is photographed into the river. The background is the river on willow trees with the sun on them, and it sent them this sort of rather strange gold color. In fact, the picture looks rather CPO color, but in actual fact, it is color because the white on the brown tells you it's a MoMA CPM. Sometimes when you go get up early in the morning, you can see this wonderful of fog and missed on a lake. This was in the Lake District. Andi. I got went out very quickly and started photographing and realized I'd almost gone out too early. Because you are beginning not to see the details in the mist that you were looking for. It was almost too foggy. The next picture you'll find there's a little bit more detail in the water here on dure, beginning to be able to see things a little bit better. But a foggy morning is always good again here. I've put the horizon halfway, partly because I wanted to get the reflection in the water and the tree above, and I wanted sort of similar distance between them. This was a narrow so later, with the sun starting to come up, which made quite an interesting shot, you can photograph water with a fast shutter speed on. Did it freezes A with water, um, the waters quite crisp over the rocks here. In the next picture, you will show it. If you do a slow shutter speed, you'll get movement in the water. Sometimes you can have too much movement. You want enough to be able to just see all the strands of the water. This is another example of moving water. It sometimes has a nice effect on Dino. This way of photographing water is more popular these days than the crisp water. But presumably you need a tripod to do. Oh, you you would need a tripod. Yes, because it you really need it around about 1/15 to 1/8 of a second. This is quite an interesting way of taking a photograph. This was taken a round about 11 12 o'clock in the morning. As I walked along the beach, I saw this silver edge to the water and wondered if I turned everything on my camera as lows. I could You would be ableto haven't sort of dark effect off this silver, and it actually worked quite well. So basically that's, you know, a couple of stops, some too exposed. Oh, yes, yes, yes, Yes, it is. This is why sometimes you have to wait around for a while because you can see the sky is starting to form, and then you suddenly realize that they might go with the landscape. Sometimes they shape themselves up to something that is in the landscape. And here I thought it was well worth waiting. Um, I must have waited about an hour or to maybe to get this guy coming over. I could see it starting to form Andi. I thought it was well worth waiting for him here. Of course, if you're photographing this type of sky, it's a good idea to use a polarizing filter. This picture is very much on the thirds. I've used the pier coming in on the right as a sort of an eye into the distance because the view in the distance was quite pretty. Andi. I also liked the reflection of the sky in the water. In the foreground, I felt that was fairly important. This again is using curves. If you see curves in the landscape, do try and use them and put them into some sort of shape. This was taken in francais. I think it's the river dog doin again on I was standing quite high up on a castle wall and realized that the river snaked round through the landscape on did. It was a glorious day on. The light was good. It was slightly dappled light, obviously a few clouds in the skies you can see towards the distance and then right in the distance you can see the sun again. So it's made the picture more interesting. And this is another one. Late afternoon. And although the sun was just going down, it was just catching the tips of these trees in the foreground. Without a few moments, the son had gone on, the whole picture disappeared. So that's about it. Have you enjoyed those few? So I'm talking to the camera. Yeah. Yeah. Uh huh. We'll have to include that in the film. Yeah, so that's about it. I hope you enjoy those few tips and found them useful. Don't forget the best way of learning those remembering them. It's a go out and practice bye for now. 17. Basic Camera Settings For Flash Photography: I'm often asked, what is the best exposure Moti use indoors with the flash? It's a good question, but obviously the settings will very depending on the subject on the ambient lighting on the type of shot do you want to take? But for what? You might call standard photos, indoor parties or family and friends get togethers or even say, at a wedding exception. The answer is really simple, so I'd like to share with you what I do in those circumstances. In fact, it's very easy, and I just pretty much used the same settings every time. First of all, though, I should say you'll get much better results if you have an external flash gun like this to bounce the flash off a nearby wall rather important in the flash flash directly at your subjects. And that's because instead of this tiny flash head being the light source, the wall becomes your light source on. Of course, the larger light source in relation to your subject, the softer on more flattering the light. But this video isn't about bouncing. There's another complete video about that already. This is just about the flash settings on. In any case, the camera settings I'm about to show you don't really change when you use bounce flush, so this information applies to both Direct on bounce Flash. Now, when using any of the auto mo's indoors, regardless of your current settings, the moment you pop up the flash or at an external flash, your camera will automatically change the settings. The actual settings that he chooses will differ depending on which alter mode urine as usually the camera tries to honor what you already have set. For example, if you have the camera set, Teoh say, aperture priority mode to save their fate, the camera will probably leave the camber F eight and just change the shutter speed. But as you'll see in a moment that's a little relevant. Now let's assume you're in the P mode on. You haven't bothered to change any settings here. You pop up the flash on a straightaway. Most cameras will switch to the settings that you see here on the back of my neck on camera , that is at 3.5 or F four on a shutter speed of around 60th of a second. By the way, I'd already set the I Soto 100. Try out for yourself and see what your own camera does. But most cameras will use approximately those settings or something very similar. Now. Unless you have deliberately change something, your flash will still be in the default E T t l or TL mode, that is, It's also mode, so that means you should get a reasonable exposure even if your subject moves nearer or further away from the cat from the camera. The exposure should still be okay, even though the same settings, because the camera adjust the flash output automatically. That's why you generally get decent exposure with flash regard of the regardless of the shutter and aperture settings. Now I touched upon the subject in a video, put my other course, but now I want to go into more detail about the actual settings. So I'm going to use that video footage I took this first shot of Jane inside a pub with some lovely warm ambient light around the bar area, actually shot it in the manual mode, but deliberately used exactly the same settings that the camera would have given May. In a program mode that is a shutter speed of 60th of a second aperture F four Popping up the flash doesn't usually affect us, so so I manually set it toe eso 100. So those with a settings that was my starting point. The trouble with those settings is that although your subject maybe properly exposed, they might also look like they've been photographed inside a cave with a very dark background. Now, how dark depends on the ambient light levels in the room, however, and this is the important bit. If you were to increase the I, so to say, 100 there would be very little difference to the light on your subject, but you would bring in more of the ambient light in the room on it, end up with a photo to look less like a simple snapshot. Taking in a cave for this show, I kept the same settings but bump the I. So up to 800 which had the effect of bringing in more ambient light, quite a big difference between those two shots. The background looks a whole lot better, but Jane looks pretty much the same. But why did Jane turn out the same? You have thought that she might have been overexposed, considering that everything else seems a light it up. The reason is Aled down to the TT all mode of re flash because the flash was in its default auto setting. I t o r e t t l whatever your camp because it the camera compensated for the extra sensitivity of the higher so on just put out less, like so, keeping the exposure on Jane the same. Don't forget that the background wasn't Liberte flash hardly at all. So these are the general settings I use when I'm at an indoor gathering or party Manu Exposure mode Aperture F 4/60 of a second on our switch, the appetite of 5.6 if I'm taking a group photo. So I have a larger depth of field to make sure I get everyone in focus and that's it. Sure, using the highest. I will give me a little more noise in the image, but I'd rather have a slightly noisy image with nice light rather than a clean image with light. It's not so good. Another way of achieving a similar effect is to slow the shutter speed down to allow in more ambient light But then you're getting into the realm of a technique called dragging the shutter. Now there's a lecture about that coming up. But what happens if you take a shot with those settings and your subject is a little too light or a little too dark? Well, I'll be covering that in the next lecture with tips that should give you a better understanding of how best to control flash exposure Bye for now. 18. Soften the Shadows: Better Results Using Your Cameras' Built-In Flash: generally speaking, when I take photos indoors, I much prefer to use natural life, bother them, putting the flash on. But obviously, that's not always possible. You may be at a family gather in or party. What? Maybe these people seated around a table on a sofa and it's just too dark or no light coming through a window to use natural life. So you have to put the flash from now. The problem. We're using the flashes. You're trying to light up a whole area with what is really a very small light on. Regardless of whether you're using a compact camera or an SLR camera. The light source either flash is still very, very small on the smaller the light source. The heart of the light. Just what do I mean by hard line? Well, if there's a wall behind your subject, you'll get a shadow thrown against the wall, and that shadow will have a very hard defined edge to it. Just like the shadows you get outside when the sun shining. Now. Although the sun is quite a large light source relative to us on planet Earth, it's a long way away, so it becomes, ah small light source and so produces a hard light with very hard edged shadows. Hard light is also a very harsh kind of life, and it reflects easily off of surfaces. So your subjects may have shiny bits on their forwards on a cheek, so only on their noses. It's not really a flattering lock. I'm gonna take a photo now with Flash, and I'll show you what I mean. Let's hear this looks taking a picture of Giant. Now let's try one more for a better expression. No small joint. Yes, you can really see the shadow when the war will go on the mouth and chin area. The light on her face is a bit harsh, but to be honest, I've seen a lot worse with faces having bright, shiny reflections. But we haven't got those today. A lot depends on the type of makeup on just on the person's complexion. Or maybe if they're sweating. If you're using a camera with a built in flash, be a combat camera, SLR bridge, camera or even one of the new Millis types. You are limited in your options. To be honest, you're never going to get a fantastic creative shot using a bill in flash. But there are a few things you can do to improve matters. Andi, to make your photos a bit more flattering to your subjects on this film deals with the first of these tips. So what you need to do is get some tracing paper on. What we're going to do is cut out a bit of the tracing paper and cover the the flash of the camera. Here's how it works. So you just cut a piece out of the trace in play, probably about an inch and 1/2 a couple of inches wide. Now the length of the car depends on the type of camera you're going to put it on. Here's a couple I made earlier site on Blue Peter in the UK Let's try first of all, putting the on the SLR so we just tape it to the fun There, bring it around the back and there it is. You don't want the tracing paper directly in front of the flash. I mean, right up against the flash, as you want to give the light to kind of spread out so the light will travel through the through the tracing paper, and it will be slightly diffused, but very importantly, that the light will travel out to the sides. Andi bounce against the walls on the wall, then becomes part of your light source on Because the walls are so large you'll get a larger a larger life source on a softer light on the compact camera. Now I've got a little extra piece out of this because this camera is particular. Camera is so small, I don't want to obscure the lens. So let's bring this down the back and again is kind of bowed out. So the tracing paper isn't flat up against the against a flash. If we extend the lens, that's fine. The tracing paper is and isn't obscuring the lens. I Can we try another shot of Jane Now? The light should goes through the tissue paper or the tracing paper, and it should shoot out through the sides around the walls on give us a softer light. Let's see how this looks. Yes, I would say that's a more flatter in shock, but the devil is in the detail. Jane Skin does look a bit softer on, although we've still got that shadow behind her. It doesn't have quite the hard defined edge to it, so the tracing paper has made a difference. But admittedly, you do have to look quite carefully to see it. By the way, this will only work if you're indoors with fairly light balls nearby. We haven't changed the laws of physics, so that flash is still quite small. But you do need the walls to bounce to bounce the light bomb. So if you're outside and there's no wars, you will you want really hardly notice any difference. Don't use tracing paper that's too thick. Otherwise it won't let enough light. This particular tracing paper is about 60 70 grams, and it works perfectly, so that's about it. I've got a couple more tips on improving your bill in flash photography, and these films will be coming up soon. Bye for now, 19. Get A More Pleasing Background Using Flash: Here's another great tip for improving your flash. Photography on this tip works great regardless of whether using a building flash on your combat camera or pop up flash like this or an external flash on top of you SLR before we start, I'm just going to take a quick picture of Jane Jane. There's always occasions where you need to put the flash on to take photos indoors. The trouble is, in most cases, just keeping the camera on its auto setting, like in this shot, is not going to give you the optimum results. Now we're in a local pub on We're not using any video lights or anything on or no, I'm not brilliantly lit. You can still see me along with the lovely lights from the bar behind me. What I'm going to do is take another photo with this camera, and I'm going going to keep it on the equivalent of the auto settings. The only difference is I'm going to turn the flash off, so it's a typical kind of point and shoot photo, but I'm going to trick the camera into turn in a flash off. I just want to show you how this looks okay, Giant. You just started everything, right? So no surprises there Hidden. You can see that this photo is way to Dark. Jane is completely under exposed, and you can just about make out some of the brighter lights in the background. But that's about it. Even the nice warm lights around the bar haven't really come out. This Selves is something really important, which is this? We're depending on this very small flash toe lights up everything in the picture. So what? What's the problem? Well, it is a problem, because although the room will be lit, it's going to be a very dull, boring, flat kind of life on the light that does exist in the bar. You won't even you won't even see it. You may actually see the lights on the bulbs off the bar, but you won't see the light just given off. But a bulbs. I'm going to take another picture this time keeping exactly the same settings. But I'm going to change the I. So which is now on 100? I'm going to change it to 800. Let's see what difference it makes. Okay. Now, when I 100 still keeping the flash off. Jane have you again? Yeah, he's looking good. Light levels in the park are quite low, and the picture is still under exposed, especially Jane. But you can see that the photo is a lot brighter than the 1st 1 just by increasing the I. So from 100 to 800 I've allowed in more the ambient light. Now, other settings on the camera were changed if I keep these settings and just take another shot. But this time popping up the flash but you'd normally do on an indoor photo seen will not only be lit by the flash, it will be lit by the ambient light that you just saw in the previous photo. When I say ambient light. By the way, I just mean the general light from the bar, you know, and the warm lights from the from the ceiling and the spotlight ambient light can be used to describe, say, for example, sunlight. When you go outside. In this case, it's just a light from the bar. So let's just try taking another shot. See how this looks OK? Compare this photo with the one I talking beginning, although although you can see that Jane looks pretty much the same, which is what I would have expected. The background looks a lot better. The cameras, now bought in the ambient light as well as the light from the flash on the whole photo looks better. A za result There is a little more grain or noises is now called in the second photo. And this will be especially true if your camera is an older model where the senses weren't as good as they are now. But in my opinion, the noisier photo with nice lie will look much better then a photo with less noise on rubbish light. If you look at your indoor flash photos that you might taken in the past, you may find that the Civil Dota subject looks OK reasonably were exposed. It looks like they've been taken inside the inside some kind of cave where the background is completely dark. Well, this tip is designed to get over that problem. It balances out the light from the flash with the ambient light from of them. Also, if you combine this tip with the previous one on using tissue paper, that should give you even better results if you're not sure how to change the eye. So there is, Ah, film on that subject, and I put a link to it further down on the page. Well, that's all for now. I hope you enjoy this tip. Remember, Go out and practice here or stay in and practice it. It's a really easy 11 to do. And as with all of these tips, if you don't practice them, they'll go in one ear and out of the other. So pick up your camera, go out, take a few photos on practice. Some of the techniques in these films 20. Bouncing The Flash: Better Results Using An External Flashgun, Part I: one of the great things about SLR cameras. Or in fact, any camera with a hot shoe that's one of these little connectors here usually sit at the top of the camera is that you can then use an external flash gun, and he's a great because most of them you can swivel the head left and right and up and down, and that means you can then bounce the light off of nearby walls and ceilings. Now, when you're using the bill in flash of a camera, or even one of these external flashes on is pointing directly at the subject that's called direct flash. On Direct Flash gives you a very harsh light on and create hard shadows on walls behind your subjects. If they're standing near to a war now, the smaller of the light source the heart of the light. I've said that nearly every film so far, everything with that light in So it must be true. Now, if you ever seen any films or images inside a photographic studio, you'll see that they're using these really large kind of light boxes. Here's an example of one of me, one of them here. This is called a shoe poo umbrella. The way this particular envelope works is quite simple. The flash fires in from one side and from the other side will get a much larger light source, which will give us a softer life. And very importantly, it will be a more flattering light. Now, in the studio, professional photographers uses Khan. A trickle of the time on unless they're using small flashes deliberately for effect was, for example, for a flash and shoe. They'll use every trick in the book to get large light source on. There's lots of different ways of doing it, and this umbrella is just one of them. So back to our flash con. Now, instead of pointing a flash directly at the subject, Weaken swiveled a flash head so it bounces off a nearby wall on what we've done. There is very simple, but it will make a dramatic difference to the picture because in served this been our light source. The wall is now life source on the wall is much larger and will give us a softer light. Let's see how this works in practice. Okay, Jane has reluctantly agreed to be her model again for today. Now I've got the flash on the camera and it's going to be pointing directly at Let's see how this looks. I'm just gonna try another one. Turn in the camera the other way, this time before I take some with bands flash. Just take a look of these. Here's the 1st 1 taken with the camera in portray orientation. Not only is that a hard shadow, but a shadow is right in front of her face. It looks terrible if you're if you do have to shoot like this, maybe with a bill in flash term a camera the other way around, at least so that the shadow is behind the subject. So now keep in exactly the same settings. I'm going to bounce a flash off of this wall now. We'll start off by taking a photo in landscape orientation because it's much easier to direct the flash this way. I'm living a minor flat is going to the light, is going to travel in a straight line. We kind of wanted normally about 45 degrees. Yeah, this shot looks a lot nicer compared This with the first shot. Quite a difference. The shadow behind Jane is hardly noticeable. It's a lot softer, and when you go in for a closer look, look at the difference in our skin as well. Looks much softer in the bounce shot. One thing you do have to be careful of when bouncing the flash is the color of the walls. Now these wars on off white collar, so they're perfect. But let's say you had, for example, at, for example, green walls. Well, it might mean that your subject space maybe tinged with green, so you have to be careful of that on easy way around. It is just a bounce. The flash off the ceiling, most feelings of wire. You can even bounce a flash. Maybe put it about 45 degrees or 30 degrees, or your flash may have one of these little white cards inside them. Have a look. Yeah, this one has one, and you can just bounce. The flash straight up on the white card will throw light forward if he doesn't have one of these cards. Sometimes you can just put it a bit of white card with elastic band around it. So let's try taking another shot of Jane now. This time I'm gonna bounce the flash off the ceiling. Lovely smile. They're gorgeous. Yeah, Yeah, bouncing off the ceiling and has given us quite similar results. But the one we bounced off the wall has a little more modeling on the face, and I'll be explaining that in more detail in the next film on Bounce Flash. So that's about it. In the follow up to this film, I'm going to be showing you some or slightly advanced techniques when using bounce flash to give you even better portrayed. So stay tuned, but for now, 21. More Creative Portraits: Better Flash Portraits Part II: in the previous film about using flash you saw bouncing. The flash off walls and ceilings can really help to improve the quality of light on your subjects on it. It's a great technique for using that family get togethers and parties and so on, and it gives you an all down nice nice light, certainly a lot better than direct Flash, where the flash is pointing straight at the subject. But what if you wanted to take a more creative portrait something a little bit more dramatic? Take a look at some of the photos you see in magazines and Pore Trait, and what you might notice on some of the photos is that the subject's face will. One side of the face is kind of got more shadow on it, and that kind of lighting effect is called like modeling. Andi gives a photo more of a more certainly more depth and looks a lot more professional. Take a look at some of these photos from recent covers of the radio times, and you'll see what I mean. Look at the subject faces and you'll see in each one. There's a more of a shadow on one side of the face. Here's a recent photo that I took up my local camera club. You can see that the side of the model's face new the camera is Maurin shadowed on the other side. Looks nice, doesn't it? Now that photo wasn't actually taken with bounce flash, but you can get a similar effect when bouncing. The problem with the standard method of bouncing like I showed you in the first film is that most of the light goes off the war or ceiling. Some light is still hitting the subject from the flash head. So although the light is generally much softer, it tends to be a little bit flatter. You don't get any of this kind of modelling Gordon eye shadow on the face because there's still light coming off the flash head. So, having said all of that, finally, here's the tip I want to show you instead of the balancing that flash. Normally, all you need to do is put your hand in front of the flash so that it's delight still going off to the side. But now there's no light hitting this object. Let's see what difference it makes so long it has agreed to be a glamorous model for today . We're gonna you do a couple of shots, the 1st 1 just using standard bounce flash on the next one. I'm going to cover the flash head like I sit like I said, and see if we can compare the difference in the photos. This is an 85 million, so it's gonna going to give us quite a close up type of shop. So here's the 1st 1 just bouncing the flash. Normally. Now that's pretty nice. Nice, soft light on his face. But let's say we know happening now if I cover up the flash head or the front of the flash in with my hand now the light is still going off to the side, but no light is going to be reaching him now. From the front of the flash, you can see that the left side of his face has a lovely soft shadow, which, compared to the previous bounce photo, has more depth to his face and makes him look even more attractive if that's humanly possible. Here's a comparison between the two shots. The difference is easy to see, and I would say the second shot looks far more professional, and all I did really was prevent the light from the flash hitting him directly. That's all well and good, but you saw how tricky it wants for me to use my hands to cover the flash while still taking a photo on some of you who are not so live when supper was myself might have difficulty with that. In actual fact, if you're bouncing off the other the other wall, then it's a lot easier to cover your head covered a flash with your hand. But really, it's not something you want to make a habit off. A much better and certainly more comfortable way of achieving. The same effect is to use what photographers call a gobo or flag. Here's the one that I use. It's made out of black, foamy stuff that you can buy from craft shops. You can find details about the material when it's time mentions lower down on this page. They're also very easy to attach. Just put some sticky Velcro on your flash head on someone the gobo on. Just place it on one side of the flash head. One of the problems with using this approach that is creating light modeling on a person's face is that the shadows tend to show up the wrinkles on the blemishes on your subject's face. So you have to be careful before using it for, say, mature women. To be honest, it is best used with youngsters and maybe mature men like myself who don't mind the lived in look, here's a shot of my friend. Peter is an example. You can see the shadows and lines on his face have been exaggerated by the type of light in anyway. Do give this a try. It's very easy to do, and it can make a great difference to your indoor portrayed by for now. 22. Flash maximum sync speed and High Speed Sync: have you ever noticed when you pop up your flash or put an external one on top of the camera, the setting sometimes change without you actually doing anything. You may have a shutter speed of, say, 5/100 of a second golden, but then you pop up the flash, and suddenly it changes to 250th of a second. The information in this lecture applies to all DSLR cameras. On most Miller's cameras. They will have what's called focal plane shutters. Now the reason for the change of shutter speed that you just saw is that these cameras have been in heaven maximum shut shutter speed limit when shooting with electronic flash on that limit is called the maxims. Maximum sync speed. It's usually 250th of a second, sometimes a little slower than that, maybe under knighted for two hundreds of a second. If you have a flash unattached, many cameras won't even allow you to set the shutter speed faster than the maxing speed. Although some may lower in the manual exposure mode, my Nickens don't allow it. Some camera systems have a way around this limit, using something called high speed sink, But I'll ignore that for the moment and talk about it later in this video before looking up . Flash photography. Let's take a quick look at how focal playing shutters work. Here's the sensor at the back of the camera. If you remove your lens and lays a mirror, you'll see it in real life. These two curtains, called First and second curtains or front and rear curtains, form part of the focal plane shutter. And in their home positions, they protect the sensor from the light. Here's the sequence of events during an exposure the second cart and raises just to get ready. The first curtain loves to expose the sensor toe light on. After a certain amount of time, the second curtain comes down to end the exposure and then finally first cuts and goes back up again to atone position, I must admit, Before I even started looking at this in depth, I just assumed the curtains move quicker when a faster shutter speed was selected. But no, that's not how it works. The curtains always move at the same speed, regardless of the selected shutter speed. Yeah, I was a bit supplies by that, too. What actually happens is that depending on the shutter speed, it's the time lag between the motion of the two curtains that actually varies. But as you can see here with Shudder speech faster than 250th of a 2nd 2nd curtain starts his journey downwards to cover the sensor even before the 1st 1 has time to complete its movement. For really sure exposures, this slick can be very now. Sometimes a small is one millimeter as it moves down the sensor. So that's the basic sequence of events when taking photos using just natural or ambient light. Let's now take a look at what happens when you pop up your flash or use a speed light and see how it synchronizes with the shutter. Once the first curtain is loath, flashes fired and soda sensor is exposed to both the almost instantaneous light from the flash on from the continuous ambient light. Finally, the second curtain closes, assuming your camera and flash exposure settings okay, that all works great. The problem is that the sensor is only completely exposed to the light and shutter speeds up to 250th of a second got whatever to sync. Speed is on your camera. When using shutters Base farce of Matt, There will always be a section of the sex sensor that's covered by a part of the curtain. That's because the second curtain has already started covering a sense when the first court in is fully open to trigger the flash. In case you blinked, here's a freeze frame from that exact moment, when the flash fires you can clearly see that part of the sensor is covered by the second curtain. Most cameras won't allow it, but if you do use a camera that will allow you to manually set high the maximum sync speed when using flash, the consequences will look something like this, assuming that the subject is only lit by the flesh on that, there's no ambient light. A dark band will appear covering part of the image, and the faster the shutter speed, the wider the band will be. If there is any of available ambient light, then the band may not be completely dark, depending on your settings. By the way, you may be wondering why the band appears at the bottom of the image instead of at the top . That's because the focus on the sensor by the lens is upside down. Interestingly, in the days of film cameras, the shutter curtains would go from side to side instead of from top to bottom. And because the shutter had further to travel, the maximum sing speed on many older campus was only 1/60 of a second. And if you did exceed the if you did exceed the sync speed, the black bart would be in the side of the image instead of at the bottom. When taking fotos indoors, you usually don't need to exceed the maximum. It sinks speed, so it's generally not a problem. But if you're working outside during daylight hours and you need to use fuel flash or want to be creative with off camera flash, the maxims sync speed does create problems. For example, you may want to add a touch a fill flash for a paltry and also want to use a large aperture to blur the background. But even at the lowest I so settings, the correct exposure might be something like F four shutter speed 1/100 of a second. So you're stuck because 1/100 of a second exceeds the maxing speed and you can't use a slower shutter speed unless you close down the aperture, which defeats the object. By the way, see my film on fill. Flash brings up for an example of this. However, as always, technology has come to the rescue. There is a way to safely exceed the maximum sync speed, but but you have to have the right equipment. Some cameras have some very clever internal gadgetry called high speed sink, but it can only be used on certain cameras on with either that manufacturers own external flash guns or with specialist for flash guns from third party suppliers. The focal plane shutter behaves as usual, But instead of firing a single flash, the flash gun fires a series of bursts of life throughout the shuttered slits movement down the sensor. It's a great system and very clever. It works very well, but it is a bit of a compromise because the amount of light hitting each part the sensor from the flash is much lower due to the brief, lower power pulses of light. I forgot to say that this is only part of the reason for the low flash power. The main reason is that the flash has now become a continuous light source just like that on, because the shutter speed also controls the amount of ambient light, the higher the shutter speed, the less effective will be the light from the flash. This means you lose a stop or two of power from the flash, so the range of the flash won't reaches far. But hey, that's life bye for now. 23. Brighten Up Your Portraits With A Little "Fill Flash": have you ever noticed when watching a new story on TV, where there might be lots of news photographers jostling for position, taking photos outdoors of Maybe, you know, a politician or celebrity that even though it's outside, they still have their flushes on. Now you may have wondered what I do that bearing in mind that there's plenty of light. The reason they're using what's called a fill flash, generally speaking, that they just want to brighten up their subjects. Faces, maybe put a little color a bit of a color in their eyes, or maybe just fill in a few shadows. Now you can do feel flash with either the pop up flash or an external one. External is better because they're more powerful and also they're easier to control. And that's why you see all of the news photographers using them. Check out my film on pop up versus external flashcards Elsewhere on the course. Anyway, there are There are several reasons why you'd want to use the flash outside, and I'll show you each one in a moment. But first, let's look at the technicalities now. Years ago, with older cameras and flashes, you needed the brain the size of a small planet toe workout, the settings for the camera and flash in order to use fill. Flash. It was dreadfully complicated, but now it's much easier on modern equipment. Takes all of the hard work out of it. Honestly, it's very simple. And although you can use manual flash guns for this, it is much easier to use flashes that have a t t l mode. That could be I t t l or E t t l or even PT tail, depending on the manufacturer for the way I'm describing. Fill flash. Here you can use 33rd party flash guns, for example, Sigma or young? No, as long as they have a T T L mode. Also, on most of these external flashes, you can increase or decrease the power output to make your subject lighter or darker. So you'll need a flash gun that you can vary its power output. Most of them can. It doesn't matter what mode the cameras in. It can be an aptitude, poverty, shutter, speed, party or or even manual. Now our position will be on the bench with the sky behind him, and I know that's going to fold a meter in system on without any feel flash he's faced should be a little bit too dark. So let's give that a try, first of all, without any flesh, you can see that, although describes reasonably, what exposed office faces too dark? This is typical of what happens when taking a backlit portrayed Let's try some exposure, compensation toe lighting up the whole image. So I've now got a plus one doled into the explosion computation. Let's see how this looks again against aspire. His face is now better exposed, but the sky has gone a lot lighter and so now look washed out. Now that's because exposure conversation lighting up the whole image. So now, instead of using exposure conversation, I'll use a little bit of Phil flesh. Well, we certainly exposure compensation back to zero, and I'll put the flash on and make sure it in the TT L mode. Now I'm using a nick on speed light, and they have a special mode called Titi L Bill, which is meant to balance the light from the flash with that of the background. I always use that mode for feel flush, but it doesn't matter if yours doesn't have that setting, just use playing TL or detail E T tell or PTL. I'll leave the flashing its default power setting and take another shop. So I've now got the flash on the camera and it's set to its default power setting. Let's give this a try. See how it looks again against the sky. So now we've got a properly exposed sky on Wolfy is now a lot brighter but in fact is too bright now I can easily dark in his face in photo shop, but it will still look a little bit unnatural with a kind of over flashed look. And now finally still will fill flush But with the power setting dull right down to minus 1.7, See how this looks. Yeah, that looks a lot better now. Good color in the sky, on a better light on his face. Notice also too small catch lights in his eyes But you know, looking that this shot again afterwards I thought I should have used a little less power on the flash. The light on his face still looked slightly unnatural to my eyes. Now I had the flat exposure dial down to minus 1.7. I should probably have used minus two or minus 2.3, by the way, the actual proper term for the plug for the power setting its flash exposure compensation or F E C for short. Even if you don't have an external fresh con, most DSLR, we'll allow you to adjust the flash exposure compensation on the pop up flash. But you know whether using your pop up flash or external flash con, you'll still have to experiment a bit with the amount of adjustment too much and you get the unnatural looking flash type of over over flash look too little, and you may not notice very much different. Now. Pop up flashes are not as powerful as external flashes. So when the situation requires more power, for example, in bright sunlight, they may not have enough power to overcome the sun on this one. Unless you're very close to the subject. That is, by the way, your notice. I didn't have any type of modified on the front of the flash. Some people like to use one of these diffusers, but all they really do a scatter the light natural light source size is the same. So although they haven't affect indoors because the light is bounced all around, they don't really do anything for you. When used outside. Some people also flip up a white card and point the flash in the air. But again, I haven't found this makes much difference. Both of those methods just lose you Power on the flash and drying your batter is a bit quicker, so I personally don't bother with them outside, and I just point the flesh directly. The subject. Because a load of birth flashes a small light source, it's only adding a hint of flash and not creating any of its own shadows. The main light source is still the natural ambient light. So, in my opinion, fulfill flash. There isn't really any need to stick bits of plastic on the flash head went outside. So when else might you want to use fill Flash? Well, there are many uses for, and I'll run through some of the more popular portrait uses Well, when you got a day like today, when it's quite overcast and you haven't got the benefit of top shade on, you don't have a reflective with you. People's eyes can start looking a little bit darker and you can get shadows under people's eyes. And it doesn't matter whether you're three or 93. You still get them because of light coming from overhead. So fill flash can remedy that and put a little sparkle in your subject's eyes. Let's give that a try. First of all, I'll turn off the flash and we'll just do a straight shot. Come back a bit for this, Okay? We just tried out again, this time with Phil Fresh. I've got the food, the power on the flash dole down to minus 2.7. This is the first shot with no fill. Flash on this is the next one, taken with an F E C of minus 2.0. The difference is quite subtle, but if I zoom into wolf his eyes, you can clearly see more color in them. Another great use of feel flashes when your subject is wearing a hat with a brim that create a shadow over the eyes. So we're going to spoil. The look of Wolf is great hair now, but put in a baseball cap on about two prime a bit more to do this. Okay, so this is with that any Phil flesh come back a bit. This is the first shot with no fill. Flash on this is the next one taken with an F E. C of minus 2.0. Yeah, you can clearly see the difference of al move his eyes between the two shots, by the way, also makes a difference if the brim of the hat is not too low. So sometimes it helps to ask your subject just to raise a boom or slide the hat back slightly on their head. So far, all of the photos are taken have been a 250th of a second. That's the maximum sing speed. And that's meant that my aptitudes after has had to be quite small around FAA Andi. That has also meant that the background has been quite sharp. So what I'm going to try now is going toe high speed sync mode. And that means if I use the shutter speed of, say to thousands of a second, I can get an aperture of F two oh, around F two on that should give me a nice, blurred background the first of all. Try take another shot of will free this time at the maximum sync speed of 2 50 the second at F eight. Let's see how this looks. First of all, think I'll get the nice red door in as well put welfare on 1/3 couple of shots. Yeah, the feel fashions work quite well here. I'm quite pleased without a light. Looks on will face face but the red door is a little sharp because of the smaller aperture Now that I've got high speed sink on which, by the way, is a setting on the camera. I've set the aperture two F two and I got a shutter speed off to thousands of a second. So we should get a nice blurred background. That red door at the back should look quite nice as well. Come back a bit for this. The higher shutter speed of two thousands of a second, which is way beyond the normal flash sync speed allowed me to use a wider aperture which then change the look of the background. The light or move His face is actually about the same. But the second shot taken with high speed sink, and using a large aperture has a much more pleasing background. The other problem. But that was very small apertures, which, which you need when it's very Bryant and you're working at a maxing speed of 250th is the small apertures. Your flash is going to work very hard on a pop up flash probably won't be powerful enough. Not unless you're very close to your subject. There's more information on those topics in my films about sinks, bees on pop up versus external flashes. Sometimes you can find yourself taking photos in the full glare of the sun, and you just have no choice but to just go with the flow and carry on knowing that you're not going to be getting any award winning images because of the harsh shadows caused by the sun. Now fill flash can help you here to the sun. The sun wasn't out during the filming of this video earlier today, but it came out as we were walking home. There's a first shot I took with Wolfie facing the sun. Clearly, it's not wonderful, but here's the next one with some fill flash again. Not wonderful, but the flash did open up the shadows and give me a more acceptable image. And finally, it must be said that even if the light and requires it using fill flash is not really always appropriate for every type of poultry. I'm referring to images which might be more about the mood or maybe those with a lovely gesture. Sometimes you can spoil things with too much light. Anyway, that's all for now. See you in the next film.