Beginners Guide to Photography (DSLR & Mirrorless Photography)

1. Introduction: Hi, my name is Chris and I'm a full-time filmmaker and photographer from England. In this course, I'm talking all about photography. If you're new to photography or if you're looking to get into photography a bit more seriously, then this course is for you. In this course, we're going to cover everything that you need to know, from getting started to camera settings to composition and framing. We're going to talk about lighting. We'll talk about the lenses and different types of lenses that you can get. Then we'll go on to talk about the different types of photography, so long exposure, portrait, low-light, sports, and action. Then I'll finish up with a small editing tutorial and show you how I would edit my photos in Adobe Lightroom. Grab your digital SLR camera or your mirror-less camera, and let's begin learning how to take amazing photos. Let's get into it. 2. Automatic vs Manual Mode: When you get your first digital SLR camera or your first mirrorless camera, it's very easy to put the camera in automatic mode, take a picture and it will look pretty decent. But the problem is, when you trust your camera's automatic mode, you're trusting that it's going to get the settings right every single time. Unfortunately, this isn't the case. Sometimes it can mess up and if it's a really important shot, so maybe you're a wedding photographer and you need that perfect shot. Well, if you're trusting those automatic settings, you can't guarantee that it's going to get it right. Chances are it might do, but you can't guarantee that. This is why we need to take full advantage of our camera sensor and what our camera is capable of by switching our camera into manual mode. First of all, what is manual mode? Well, manual mode is basically going to allow you to control all of your settings independently from one another. If you set an automatic mode on your camera, and you do so generally by turning the dial at the top of the camera to A. We can have different modes like P, TV, AV, B, and then a few other different settings. But if you set it to an automatic mode, your camera will analyze the scene and figure out which settings you should probably be using in this environment. But when you switch to M or manual mode, it means you can control the shutter speed, the aperture, the white balance, the ISO. You can control all of these settings independent from one another. This means you can capture specific looks that cater your style and your different needs. The reason why we want this control of the manual mode is because one, it gives us our creative freedom back. If we wanted a long shutter speed, then putting it into manual and changing the shutter speed allows us to do that. If we want the shot to look a little darker and a little bit more moody, then we can adjust the settings accordingly to get to that look. The problem is with an automatic mode, is it would just give you a pleasing photo most of the time. If you're trying to add style to your photography then automatic is a very difficult way to achieve that, so switch into manual mode. That's our first step. In the next videos, I'm going to talk you through all the different settings that you need to know about in order to take full advantage of your camera and its sensor. 3. Aperture: The first setting that you're going to want to know about is aperture. An aperture is going to control two things, one, it's going to control the amounts of light in the shots. Two, it will change the amount of the frame that is in focus. Let's focus on the brightness part first. When you see aperture on your camera, it will probably say F followed by a number, and this can range anywhere from 1.2, 1.6, 1.8 all the way up to around F22. Of course, depending on your lens in your camera combination, this will change. But the golden rule for aperture is, the love of the aperture, so the smaller the number. F1.8, for example, that will let in more light than a higher aperture. If you were shooting in a dark room, you would want to pull the aperture down to a smaller number of around F1.8. Now you're probably wondering what the aperture actually is. Well, essentially inside of your camera lens, there are these blades and they close down and they open up to let more or less light into the camera sensor. When you have a smaller number, the blades are going to open out and you will have a larger opening in your camera lens. This means you're going to let more light into the frame, more light into the camera sensor, and this means you're going to get more light in your photo. Whereas when you pull it down the other way, so F22, you're actually going to close down these blades and that's going to create a small hole in your lens, which means less light is able to pass through. By doing this, it means you get a dark image. First things first, if you want a lighter image, you pull your aperture down to F1.8, F2, F3, F4, and if you want to make it dark, you pull it up to around F22. Of course, you can pick the number that matches your scene, but darker is a higher number, lighter is a lower number. Now, aperture not only controls the lightness, it also controls the focus plane. Without getting too complicated, essentially this is the part of the frame that is in focus. If you have an aperture of F22, it basically means most of your frame is going to be in focus. It means if this shot was filmed at F22, I would be in focus and the background would be in perfect focus as well. Whereas when we pulled out the other way, so let's go to F1.8. It means if I'm in focus, the background will blur out and that will be out of focus. Essentially, you're just drawing a line between the camera lens and the back-end of your shots. If it's got a higher number, everything's going to be in focus. But the smaller the number, the smaller the amount of the frame is going to be in focus. If you have an aperture of F1.8 and I hold my hand up here, it means the focus plane is gonna be around this big neighbor. Only my hand will be in focus and then everything out of that area will drift out into out-of-focus or blurriness. Aperture controls the amount of light coming into the camera sensor and aperture also controls the blurriness of the frame, so how much is in focus? Now, there is no specific rule for which number you should set on your aperture. No specific scene has a preferred number. It's up to you and your creativity to figure out the appropriate number. Just remember, a smaller number, F1.8 is going to add more light and have less in-focus, whereas a larger number F22 will be darker, but more of the frame will be in focus. 4. Shutter Speed: Next up we have shutter speed and shutter speed, like the aperture controls two different things. First of all, it affects the brightness. If you have a higher shutter number, you're going to close down the light coming into your camera sensor and you will have a darker shot, and if you go to the opposite, if you open up your shutter so you have a longer shutter speed, that means you going to let more light in. But what is the shutter? Now essentially the shutter on your camera is a 'door' and it's closed by default, but when you trigger the shutter, so you take a photo, these doors, open up and close back down. The longer they open for, the more light comes into the camera sensor. If I set my shutter speed to 100, which is 100th of a second, that's really quick, the shutter is open for [NOISE] a very brief second, it's open and close. Whereas if I pull that down to one second, so one full second, it means when I press the trigger button, [NOISE] it's open and close so that staying open for longer with that longer shutter speed. The first thing that shutter speed controls is the light, so if you have a very quick shutter, it basically means a small amount of light will come into the camera sensor. But if you open that up and you have the shutter open for 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 seconds, it's going to open up and that's a lot of light coming into that one photo. But of course, shutter speed isn't just about brightness, shutter speed also controls the amount of motion blur in the frame. If you have a very quick shutter speed of 1/500, for example, it's going to open and close in 1/500th of a second, which is very quick. This means if you're taking photos of somebody jumping in the air, they're going to be very sharp and very crisp. But if I was to pull that number down to 1/10th of a second, it's open a little bit longer and this means when you take a picture of somebody taking that jump again, the shutter is going to be open for a little bit longer, so it's going to blur that movement into the photo. This is why when you're taking a picture of somebody jumping and there's a little bit of blur, it's because the shutter speed is set to the wrong number. The shutter speed needs to be quicker. Essentially, the shutter speed is just blending movement into the photo. If your shutter is open for one second, it means one second of movement is going to be baked into that photo. If you're doing something which is very slow and it doesn't move very much, then you can afford to have a slower shutter speed, so it can be open for longer, therefore getting more light in, and it doesn't really matter too much about the motion blur because there's not a lot of movements. Generally, if you're doing portrait photography, I would recommend probably around 1/100 or 1/150. But if you were taking a picture of somebody doing something explosive, so high-energy like a jump or a back-flip for example, you're going to be looking at 1/500, 1/600 somewhere a lot quicker. Of course, so you can get very creative with your shutter speed and you can keep it open for a longer period of time so you could do five seconds or 10 seconds. You can take advantage of all of that movement and you can create a longer exposure photos, or you could do some light painting. This is why you are just moving lights in the frame, and because the shutter is open, it's going to blend all of that movement into one photo. Of course, the longer the shutter is open for, the more movement is going to be in the frame. Therefore, if you're holding the camera and it's open for five seconds, it means you're going to have to stay perfectly still, and that's not possible. If you have a open shutter, a really long shutter, I would recommend putting your camera onto a tripod. But if your shutter is above 1/100 or 1/50 at a push, then you can get away with going handheld. Your shutter speed is controlling the light, and it's also controlling the amount of motion blur in the frame. 5. ISO: The next up, we have ISO. The ISO or the ISO is essentially just a digital brightening tool. The ISO doesn't control the look of the photo. It's just going to increase or decrease the brightness of the frame. Generally with the ISO, the higher the number, the brighter the image is going to be, so if you have an ISO of 100 and then you compare that to ISO 3,200, 3,200 is going to be much brighter. The problem with ISO, though, is it's a digital brightening tool. This isn't done in the camera sensor, this isn't done in the lens, this is done in the camera. Essentially, it's like taking a picture and then turning the brightness up in the editing program. If you pull the ISO number up too high to expose the image correctly, it means not only are you going to pull up all of the clean parts of the image, it means you're also going to bring up all the imperfections in the darker areas. This is that noisy or grainy pattern that you see across the screen. Essentially, because you're pulling up those dark areas of the frame, you're essentially revealing all of the imperfections of the camera sensor. Generally, you want to keep your ISO as low as possible. Think of your ISO as a last resort. If you can't pull your shutter speed down to let more light in and if you can't adjust your aperture to let more light in, then your ISO is your next place to go to. But if you can get more light into the camera sensor by either adding lights or adjusting the aperture or the shutter speed, then that's what you want to do first before the ISO. The ISO, nice and simple, it's essentially just a digital brightening tool. It just makes the image brighter or darker. 6. White Balance: The next setting that you're going to want to know about is your white balance. White balance is essentially just referring to the color of the temperature of the light. When you think about light, light is measured in Kelvins. If you've ever had to buy light bulbs then you are fully aware of this already. You might buy a light bulb that says 3200K or 5500K or 5,000K, for example, the K represents Kelvins. Essentially, this is just the color. We have a color scale and generally warmer lights are a lower number, and cooler lights or more blue lights are a higher number. If you had an orange or a tungsten light, one of those warm bulbs that you get, that would be somewhere around 3200. Then if you went the other way and you had a white light or natural daylight, for example, this would be a higher number, so it's more of a blue colder light, and this is 5500 Kelvins. You can go all the way to the extremes as well. You could go for a bright white fluorescent lights, which would be six or 7,000 and then candle lights at that flame color would be somewhere around 2,000. Now, how does that correlate to your camera? Well, it's really important that your white balance is set to the color of the scene. For example, in this scene, I'm using a white light. I would set my camera to 5500 Kelvins. Now, if I didn't set this to 5500 Kelvins, if I set this to 3200 Kelvins, then it means the color will be completely wrong. Even though it looks right to my eyes when I take the picture if I'm set to the wrong white balance, unfortunately, it would look either too orange or too blue. If you really want to get the color perfect, then you want to look at the scene, look at the way you're taking your pictures, and try to match the color of the light in camera to the color of the lights in the scene. Let me just give you a few examples. If you are taking photos outside in the middle of the day, it's a sunny day, you would want to set your white balance in-camera to 5500 Kelvins. Now if I was to go inside and it was dark outside and there were a few lamps with more of an orange tungsten light then I would want to set my white balance to 3200. Now, if you're taking single photos, then you actually can get away with setting your white balance to automatic and that will be fine most of the time. But if you're taking multiple photos in the same location, so maybe you're doing portrait photography. Then if you set this to automatic then every single photo is going to be a little bit different from one another. This means you're either going to have to fix this in the edit or that would just be no consistency to any of these photos. They'll all be a little bit warmer or a little bit cooler. A little bit more orange or a little bit more blue than the others. I would definitely recommend setting the white balance to the color of the scene. Of course, that you can actually break that rule and you can adjust it to a different setting if you wanted to manipulate the image to look different. For example, if I was outside and I wanted the image to look a little bit colder, a little bit more blue, then rather than setting the white balance to 5500, I will pull that the other way and go down to 4300 or even 3200. This would create a really blue image. Even though the white balance is not set to the scene by adjusting this to a different number, it means we can actually control the color of the scene and the photo. Now I'm fully aware that white balance sounds really difficult, to begin with. It took me quite a while to get my head wrapped around white balance and what numbers I should be setting in each different scene. But just have a play around with your camera and just try taking photos in a few different environments with a few different lighting setups in different white balance numbers and see how the images change throughout each different setting. It's all well and good me sitting here and talking to you and telling you what numbers to use. But until you've actually taken a photo and seeing the results for yourself, it won't fully sink in. I would definitely recommend just adjusting the white balance on your camera, taking photos and see how each photo differs from one another. Essentially to brown this video up, white balance is the color of the lights and you want to try and match the color of the light to the setting in camera. 7. RAW vs JPEG: The next setting that you're going to want to know about is RAW versus JPEG. RAW and JPEG are two different file formats that you can capture your photo in. RAW and JPEG aren't settings that change the look of your image, RAW and JPEG, are essentially just the file format that the image is in. Setting your photo to JPEG or setting your photo to RAW, doesn't make a difference on how it looks, it's just the amount of control you have in the edit. Essentially, JPEG is going to be the default file format that you're going to work with. If you're shooting in an automatic mode, JPEG is what's going to be selected. But the problem with JPEG is, it is intended for people who don't have a full understanding of photography or don't care enough to know about it, they just want a half-decent image out of camera. JPEG essentially just bonds in color, contrast saturation into the image, and then it just gives you a decent look straight out of camera. But the problem is it could overexpose some areas so it could completely blow out the sky, for example, so it could be completely white, or it could underexpose the shadows, so the dark parts of the image could be lost. The problem is that once you've taken an image in JPEG, all of those colors are burnt into the image. If an image is overexposed, you can't fix it. However, with RAW, you get a little bit more freedom. JPEG gives you a small access of what the camera's sensor and the camera is capable of, but RAW gives you the full potential. The RAW gives you all of the highlight detail, it gives you all of the mid-tone detail, and all of the shadow detail. When you load the photo onto your computer, the image will look very gray, but you will see all parts of the image are nicely exposed. Essentially, you're getting all of the information available to you, so you can make the decision to overexpose the highlights if you want, or underexpose the shadows if you want. But it's your creative decision and you get to make all of those decisions. The problem with RAW though, because the image file is keeping all of this data available for you, the image files are much larger. A typical JPEG image could be 5-10 megabytes, whereas a single JPEG file could be anywhere from 20-50 megabytes for one photo. If you're worried about computer space, then JPEG might be the option to go for. But if that's not an issue and you really want full control of how your image is going to look, then if you shoot in RAW, it means you'll have full access to the camera's sensor. Let me give you an example. I'm going to show two photos on screen now. The first one is a JPEG image, and the second one is a RAW image. Now, this is the same photo, I've set my camera to shoot a RAW and a JPEG at the same time. With this photo, I'm just going to pull down the brighter parts of the image. As you will see, the JPEG isn't really doing anything, that white sky is still very white. But on the RAW image that white sky has now become properly exposed, we can see the detail in the sky and we have all of that information retained for us. RAW and JPEG are two different file formats that we can shoot our photos in, but RAW gives us more information and JPEG just gives us a very quick, decent look straight out of camera. If you want a professional photo, I would recommend shooting RAW, but if you want a half-decent photo, which doesn't really require much editing, JPEG is the way to go. 8. Rule of Thirds: One of the major differences between professional and amateur photography is composition and framing. But what is that? Well, composition and framing is basically referring to how you're framing up your shot, so where you're placing your subjects within the frame. Now there's a few different compositional techniques and rules that you can use to frame your images to make your images look more professional. The first one is the rule of thirds. Now the rule of thirds isn't necessarily a rule, it's just a guide use to help you frame up specific shots or subjects, and essentially, all you need to do is draw two horizontal lines across your screen and two vertical lines down your screen. On most digital SLR or mirror-less cameras by the way, you can actually turn on an overlay so that you can actually see the rule of thirds over your image. This isn't baked into the final image, you just see this when you're taking the photo, so this is really going to help you to understand the rule of thirds. Once you've spent a little bit of time with the guide on now you can turn this off because once you've taken enough images, this will become second nature to you. You've got your two lines across the horizontal and two lines down the vertical axis. How do you use them though? Well, essentially you just want to place your subjects onto these lines so if you're taking a picture of a landscape, for example, then you can put the horizon on either the bottom line or on the top line. If you're taking a close-up shot of somebody, you could place their eyes across the top horizontal line, or alternatively, if you're taking a picture of a landmark, for example, you could actually use one of the vertical lines to offset it from the center so you could put it on either the left line or the right line and then you can line up the horizons to go across the bottom and you've got a really interesting and unique composition. Of course, the rule of thirds is definitely not a rule, you definitely can't break this and there are other techniques that you can use to frame up your shots. 9. Symmetry: Following on from the rule of thirds, the next technique that you can use is symmetry. Essentially, the goal for symmetry is to match one side of the frame with the other side of the frame. This can achieve a really balanced and really visually pleasing image. Generally, if I was taking a picture of a person, I would place them in the very center of the frame, and then I would have similar objects framed up behind them mirrored across from each other. Or alternatively, if you're taking pictures of a landmark, for example, you can place it perfectly in the center, and this will create a nice symmetrical look. The goal here is to just make this feel visually balanced between the left and the right or the top and the bottom. Now when it comes to symmetry, there aren't any guides or rulers that you can use on your screen. It's all just up to you and what you're balancing in the frame. Just make sure that the left and the right or the top and the bottom feel like they're symmetrical, make it feel visually balanced, and that is symmetry. If you use symmetry, you can get a really beautiful looking result. 10. Leading Lines: The next compositional technique is leading lines. Now, leading lines are essentially just lines in the frame that draw you to a point of interest. If you're doing street photography, for example, then you could use the landscape or architecture or maybe you could get close to a handrail, and this handrail falling off into the distance could point you towards your subjects. Essentially, a leading line is just a line in the frame that takes your eye on a journey to your subject. Now, of course, like I just said, you could use a handrail for this, and that could be the line within the frame or it could just be the way that you frame up an image. If you're taking a photo on a bridge, then you can use both sides of the bridge to take you towards the horizon where your subjects can be. The whole point of leading lines is too take your eyes on this visual journey through the frame and point you to your subject. You can get really interesting with this, and you can change your perspective and your angle where you're taking your photo from to really maximize the amount of leading lines within the frame. 11. Perspective: Next up, we're going to talk about perspective and angle. Now, when you're taking a photo, it's very tempting to just hold the camera, standing up, and just take a picture. But think about how it could look from a low angle, how could it look from a high angle, how would that make the image look or feel different. It's very easy and very safe and very comfortable to just stand there and take your picture, but maybe you could get low to the ground and you can look up towards your subject, and doing that makes the subject feel powerful, or it could just give you a really cool angle. Or alternatively, you can go for a high angle, and you can look down on your subject, and that makes them feel inferior. Or you could even play with the rotation of the camera. You don't have to be perfectly balanced, you don't have to have the horizon completely straight. You can maybe play with a Dutch angle, which is a 45-degree angle tilt so you could turn the camera, look up towards somebody, and that could create a really interesting perspective, and therefore, a really interesting photo. The next time you're taking photos, I really want you to think about what is the most interesting angle and perspective here. Don't just go for your typical standing up photo. Really think about where you could take the photo from different perspectives, different vantage points, different angles, and really try to find the best angle for your photo. 12. Depth: Next up, I want to talk about depth because it's all well and good, just framing up a subject within the frame. But it might feel very flat, and the reason why is because you're thinking about your photo in a two-dimensional space. Try and think about your photo in a 3D space, so what's in the foreground, middle, and background. If you have something in the foreground of your photo, it can really create an element of depth within your frame. Maybe there's some nice patterns in this railing. Maybe you could shoot through this pattern in this railing and that would give you a really nice foreground. Then you've got your subject and the background behind them. You've got three visual layers to your photo doing this, and therefore, you're creating that element of depth and space within the frame. You don't even have to shoot through things. You can just place an object close to the camera lens and that gives you that nice focus, and therefore, that gives you that nice depth within the frame. Don't think about your photos in a two-dimensional space. Think about your photos in a three-dimensional space. You're not just framing up your subjects, you're also thinking what's in my foreground, background, and the space in-between. 13. Frame within a Frame: Next up, I want to talk about frame within a frame. This is a simple compositional technique that can actually follow on from our previous video which was all about depth. Frame within a frame is exactly what it sounds like. It's using an object or a frame within the photo to frame up your subjects. A very easy example of this is, say, you're standing in a tunnel and your subject is standing outside of the tunnel. If you use the edges of the tunnel to frame up that photo, it can actually create a really interesting and professional look. You've got your subject and they're framed within a frame, so a frame within a frame. Now the whole point to this is to add depth into the frame. Going back on our previous video, the depth is the foreground, the subject, and the background so adding in a frame within your frame is a very quick and easy way of adding that depth. 14. Negative Space: Then lastly, I want to talk about negative space because typically when you're framing up a photo, you want to have plenty of space between the subjects and the edge of the frame. But you can actually play with your space and you can actually have negative space within the frame so you can break the rules, break what feels natural and have negative space. But how do you create this negative space? Well, if you're taking a picture of somebody, if they're looking off into the distance, rather than having loads of space in front of them, you can frame them up so that they're looking at the very edge of the frame. This all of a sudden feels very claustrophobic because you've got a lot of space behind the subject and if you do this correctly, it can feel very powerful and it can really help to make the photo feel uneasy and claustrophobic. Negative space is essentially just more space behind the subject than there is in front of the subjects. Normally you want more space in front, but with negative space, you can have that weird framing and you can do that to create a specific emotion. It's not just people that you can do this with though, if you have a landmark for example, you could frame up the subject to be in the corner of your photo. We could have it just on the edge of the photo and that creates a lot of negative space. Don't feel like you always have to stick to these rules or these guides, you can actually break these and be flexible and this creates a real element of unease in your photo and that again, can help to enhance the feeling of a photo. If you're trying to take a picture of somebody who's anxious for example, if you use negative framing and negative space within the shots, it can really help to accentuate that feeling. 15. Natural Light: When it comes to taking photos, you could have the best camera in the world, the best camera that money can buy. But if you don't have enough light within the scene, unfortunately, there will be a lot of grain, there'll be a lot of digital noise. You'll have to pull your ISO up, and everything would just get a little bit ugly, and a little bit amateur. It's really important that we focus on our lighting. Now, when I talk about lighting, by the way, I'm not talking about long exposure. It's very possible to be in a very dark environment, pull your shutter speed all the way down to 30 seconds, and you'll get a great amount of light hitting your camera sensor. When I'm talking about lighting, I'm talking more in particular about portrait photography, for example. This is where we're in an environment, and we need our shutter speed to be at around one over 100, one over 200. If we can't adjust our camera settings to add more light into the scene, this is why we need to add more light into the scene. As well as adding light to help out the camera and add more light into the shot, you can also shape your light to create character within the photo. There's a few different types of lighting setups that I want to talk about. However, before we get on to talking about lighting, let's just talk about working with natural light. You're taking a picture of somebody in natural light. What can we do in these environments? Well, when you're taking photos outside, fortunately, you've got the big light in the sky, the sun. You're going to have enough light in the camera to do what you need to do. However, the problem is sunlight can be a little bit unflattering if you're shooting in the wrong areas. The first thing that I would do is one, either shoot on a cloudy day. When the clouds are over, we essentially just have a big softbox over the sun, and you get really smooth lighting. However, if you have to shoot on a sunny day, then I would definitely recommend turning your subjects away from the sun, to place the sun behind them. The reason why I suggest this, is because if you turn the subject away from the sun, it means the sun will be behind them, and you won't get any harsh shadows appearing on their face. However, we can also purchase a 3M1 or a 5M1 reflector kit, and we can either bounce or soften the light. Or we could even use some negative fill to create some shape and add more light onto the face. This right here is a popup 5M1 reflector sheet. As you will see, we've got this big silver side of the reflector, and this is used to bounce the light. If I was outside and it was sunny, and I wanted to add a little bit more light onto my subject's face, I would use this silver reflector to bounce light back onto their face. As you can see, this is without, and then when I add this in, I'm bouncing the light back in, and it's just adding some more light onto this side of the face. Of course, though it's not just this silver reflector that you get in these 5M1 kits, you also have gold and white. As you can see, I can take this jacket off of the diffusion, and then on the inside of this, we have gold, and we have white. As you can see, this is the gold side of the reflector. If I just place this back where it was before, you can see I'm reflecting a warmer light onto my face. If you want a photo that's silver, you can add golden to add warmer light onto the face. Alternatively, though, that is quite dramatic, so we can use the white side of the reflector, to add a more subtle bounce of light onto the face. When you're holding one of these reflectors, you just want to hold it at around 45 degrees, and then just fine-tune that until you get that light bouncing back onto the face. Of course though, if you didn't want to bounce light, and you just wanted to soften the sunlight, alternatively, we could just use the diffusion. Inside of this jacket, we have this piece of diffusion. Essentially this is just going to act like the clouds over the sun, so it's just going to soften that light off. All you will need to do is just hold this above your subject, and you'll get really nice soft lighting. This is without, and this is with. Now I have a softbox light on my light, so you won't see a massive difference in this example. But softening the light is a very quick and easy way of controlling the natural light within the scene. Then of course as well, you've got the fifth side, which is the black side, and this is for a negative fill. Rather than adding lights, a negative fill is going to help to stop light. It's going to cancel some of that light out. If you hold the black side of this next to somebody, it's going to help to stop that light bouncing back and hitting their face. This is just going to help to give us a little bit more of a moody look, by canceling out some of that light on the one side of the face. If you're taking photos of somebody outside and it's a bright sunny day, then you either want to turn them away from the sun, or you can use the reflector and diffusion kit to either bounce or soften the light. That would give you a really nice flattering look in your photos. 16. Three Point Lighting: Of course, though, if you do need to take some portrait photos inside, for example, you're going to need some lighting. There's a few different lighting setups that we can use to capture great looking photos. The first one is three-point lighting. Now, when it comes to three-point lighting, you can either use continuous video lights. These are lights that stay on all the time. Or you can use a flash/strobe lights, which is intended more for photography. Essentially, when you take your photo, the light will flash on at the same time that you take the photo so the lights are there. It doesn't matter if you use a video lights or a photography flashlights. Either option works for this because it's more the positioning of the lights that makes up a three-point lighting setup. When it comes to three points, essentially, you just have three lights. You've got your key, your fill, and your backlight. This is two lights behind the camera and one light behind the subject. Your Key light, your main light, is going to be just on the side of the camera and it's going to be shining a nice amount of light onto the face. Then next, we have the fill light, which is on the opposite side of the camera. This is just filling in any shadows that the key light might have created. There's two lights so far. Then we have our backlight and this is one light position behind the person shining back onto them, and this is just going to give us a nice hair light. Hair hair light is there to separate the subject from the background. You've got three lights. Like I said before, these can be video continuous lights or these can be photography flashes or strobe lights. Our three-point lighting is our three lights, two in the front, one in the back. We've got key, fill, backlight. These three lights will give you a really nice complementing look that is great for portrait photography. 17. Two Point Lighting: Carrying on from our three-point lighting, we have two-point lighting. For a two-point lighting, we're going to start with our three points, but we're going to take out our fill lights. In our three-point, we had 1, 2, 3. Now we're going to take out light number 2. We've only got one light in the front, and one light in the back. When you're doing this, it's important that you have your key and your backlight on opposite sides of the subjects. If your key light is on the right of the subject, it's important that the backlight is on the left of the subject, so create a diagonal line between these lights. Removing one of these lights essentially create shadows on one side of the face. This is giving us a little bit more of a moody look, and therefore a little bit more intense. If you're taking portrait photos and you want them to have a nice edge, then consider using two points rather than three points. 18. Hard vs Soft Lighting: When it comes to lighting your photos, there are two different types of light sources that you can have, a hard light and a soft light. Essentially, the difference is one is diffused and one is not. A hard light is a really harsh light source, and this can create really harsh shadows. If you're taking pictures of people, you typically want to avoid this because you're going to get some really harsh shadows appearing on their face. But hard lighting can be very beneficial if you're trying to fill a space or create shadows within the space. Then on the other side we have soft lighting and this is exactly what it sounds like. You're using diffusion or cloth or white fabric to soften off lights. Having soft lighting gives you a really soft, natural look and you don't see any harsh shadows on the face. It's more of a gentle roll-off. This shot here is being filmed with a soft-box light and that's a soft light source. As you can see, there's no harsh shadows on my face. There's just a gentle roll-off on the side of my face. Generally, if you're taking pictures of people and you want the photos to look flattering, I would recommend using a soft light source rather than a hard light source. Now, if you look at a construction lights, that is a hard light source because it's throwing very harsh light. But a soft-box lighting kit that is a soft light is very soft and gentle. It's very possible to soften up a hard light. If you have a white t-shirt or a white piece of cloth or a white bed sheets, you can hold this in front of that harsh light to soften that up. Essentially, the sun is a hard light and the cloud soften the hard light. On a cloudy day you get soft light and on a sunny day you get harsh light or hard lighting. Remember, whenever you're lighting people, you want to try and stick to soft lighting, but if you're lighting spaces, you can use hard lighting. 19. RGB (Colour) Lighting: Next up, we have RGB or red, green, blue, or color lighting. Color lighting can be used in a very creative purpose. Color lighting, we can use for portrait photography, we can use this for product photography or any sort of photography that can be captured in a closed environment. Our starting point for color lighting is to just turn off all lights within the space and try and block off as much natural light as possible. We're starting with a really dark room, then we can either convert our normal lights by using a colored gel or alternatively, we can access RGB lighting, which are LED lights, which can go red, green, blue or any color that we want them to go, and then we can just build up and add color on. Now typically, when working with color, I would always recommend using contrasting colors. If you look at the color wheel, you want to take two colors that are opposite sides from the color wheel and use those within your photos. You could use orange and blue or purple and yellow or red and green. Using these opposite colors creates a nice level of color contrast within the image and that's going to give us some really interesting looks in our photography. Typically, I would advise against just using one color because if you use three lights and they're all set to red, then unfortunately, we're going to lose our definition and there'll be a lack of depth within the frame. But if we use two colors that are opposite sides of the color wheel, you can create a nice level of color contrast. Maybe two lights in the front are set to red and the one at the back is set to green so we get that nice color contrast, or maybe we're just using two lights, maybe one can be orange, one can be blue. That will give us that nice contrast again. It doesn't matter what color scheme you're looking at, but I would definitely recommend using the color wheel to have opposite colors. Color is something that takes a little bit of practice so I would definitely recommend setting up a practice session and just getting some colored lighting, taking loads of photos with different colors and figure out what you like the look of and what types of looks that you can create using RGB or color lighting. 20. Flash Photography: When it comes to adding extra lights into your photos, one of the quickest and easiest ways for a photographer to add that light is to use a flash or a speed light. But the problem is if you just put this onto your camera and you face this light directly towards the person that you're taking a photo of, the photo is going to be really overexposed, and it's just going to be very harsh and direct and it won't look very flattering at all. It will look really amateur and that is not what we're looking for if we want to take professional photos. Now there are many different ways that we can use a flash to add extra light into our scene. First of all, we just want to start by adding the flash on top of the camera. We'd use your hot shoe or your cold shoe adapter at the top to add this on. Then you just want to make sure that it sinks to your cameras so that when you take a photo it actually does flash. Like I've already mentioned, the first way of adding lights is to directly shine this flash towards the subjects. But the problem is, this does create that really harsh look. The first option is to soften the light. Typically if you have a flash, you get one of these caps. This is just a diffusion cap. You would place this on the front of the flash, and this is just going to instantly soften that light, therefore creating a bit of a softer look. Again, though personally, I feel like this is just a little bit too dramatic. This is where you can angle the flash up. We'll pull the diffusion off, and then we can access these cards. These cards here are bounce cards, and they should be at the top of your flash. You pull this out and as you can see, there's this plastic bit here. This is just going over our light to angle the light towards the bounce card, and then the light is going to come up, hit the card, and bounce back. Rather than directly hitting the person, this now with the bounce card is going to hit this first and then bounce off onto the subject. This is a great way of softening that even more. Of course though, if you don't have a bounce card, you could just bounce it off a wall or the ceiling. Rather than having the flash facing directly forward, you could angle this up and bounce the light off the ceiling, therefore, filling the space. The problem is though if you have a dark ceiling. If you have a black ceiling or if you have really high ceilings, then that light is going to get lost and you won't see that. This only really works if you have lower ceilings and it is a white or a brighter color. If you do have high ceilings or dark ceilings, alternatively, you could turn the flash and bounce it off the wall. You can pretend that the wall is a light so you're bouncing off the wall and then it's hitting the subject. The problem with bouncing though is when you bounce the light onto a wall, it will take the color of the wall and put that onto the subject. If you've got a white wall, that doesn't matter because you've got a nice white light and you can just adjust the white balance in the camera to compensate for that. But if you're bouncing off a wall which is bright blue or bright green, you'll get all of those colors bouncing back onto the subject. It's really important that when you're bouncing the light, you're looking at where the light could be bouncing off and figuring out if there's any color spilling onto the person. Then last but not least, I have my favorite way of adding flash and that is to actually take the flash off of the camera. You'd have to make sure that you had a wireless flash in this example. Then generally what I do is I pop the bounce card up and I use the bounce or I bounce it off the ceiling. I take the camera, I take the picture and I'm holding the lights up here. This is essentially now going to look as if I've got a light setup on a light stand. You could set this up on a lights stand if you wanted to add multiple flashlights in. But if you only have the one, just hold this roughly arm's length just over to the side, and that's going to give you a nice look, and it's going to give you a little bit more shape. Of course, that option is dependent on whether or not your flash is wireless. If it's not there, you can buy adapters that convert this into a wireless flash, and I would definitely recommend that. Now with flash photography, you can also take full advantage of color lighting. You can buy colored gels, which are essentially just little bits of plastic that stick onto the top of the flash. Again, you can recreate that same colored look using your flash, rather than continuous video lights or big setup lights. Regardless of whether you are using a flash on your camera, you're using external video lights, or you're just taking advantage of the natural light and using a reflector kit to control that light, it's really important that you think about lighting because one, you need to get light into your camera sensor. But two, you want to control light, to control the look and the feel of your image. There's no point just throwing light into your photo because you need to add extra light. You really have to croft this and develop a look that works for the tone of your photo. Think about lighting from a technical point of view, but also think about lighting from a creative point of view, because you can really help to create a mood with your lighting. Unfortunately, when it comes to photography, one of the things that people always overlook is lighting. Just adding an extra light or two in the right angle can really be the difference between an amateur and a professional photo. Spend some time getting to know your lighting and do some experiments with your photography and lighting. 21. Focal Length: When it comes to taking photos, people typically believe that everything is controlled in the camera. But the thing is though there are two parts of the camera package. You have the camera body and then you have the lens, and the lens can actually make a massive difference to your photos. A great example of this is your focal length. Now your focal length is essentially just the number on your lens, which represents the zoom. If you look at a zoom lens, for example, it will say 18, 24, 32, 50, it will go all the way up to a number. Or if you have a prime lens, this will be set to a specific number. Your focal length is essentially just how zoomed in the shot is. When you have a lower number, 16, 18, this means you have a very wide field of view. But when you pull it up to a higher number, so let's go 105. This means you're going to be very zoomed in, so you're focused on a very specific area of the frame. It's not just zooming in and zooming out that the focal length controls. The focal length also actually controls the characteristics of the shots. If you took a closer photo of somebody with the focal length set to 18, you'll notice that it looks completely different to a photo taken at 105 or a higher number like that. The lens can actually change the shape of the image and it can change the shape of the subject in front of the camera. Let's take three photos. We are going to frame these all up as close-ups, there will three photos of me. The first will be 18 millimeters, the second will be 55, and the third will be 85. So we've got three photos all set to different focal lengths, and you'll notice that they all look very different. The camera settings are the same throughout all of these, the lighting is identical. The lighting hasn't changed whatsoever, but they all look very different. This is because of the distortion from the focal length. I look very thin in the 18 millimeter version of the photo, but when I change that up to the 50 millimeter, my face is filled in a little bit more. Then when I go all the way up to 85, my face is starting to look a little bigger. This is the focal length at play. The distortion from the lens created by that focal length is what's changing the shape of me within all of these different photos. It's really important that when you're taking photos, you fully understand how your specific lens and the focal length that you choose is going to distort the subject. If you want somebody to be a little bit thinner then go for a smaller number. If you want someone to be a little bit more full in the face, go for a high number. Typically if you're taking pictures of people, you want to be at roughly around the 50 millimeter area. Because around the 50 mark is a pretty natural look. So not only does the focal length control how zoomed in or zoomed out the images go into be, it also actually controls the amount of distortion within the frame. Pick a focal length that you're happy with and understand how that will affect your image. 22. Prime vs Zoom Lenses: Now when you're looking at buying lenses, you'll notice there are two different types of photography lenses available. You have a zoom lens and you have a prime lens. Essentially a zoom lens has the option of changing the focal length so you can get a 18-35, a 24-105, a 35-50. This is just the range of focal length available for these lenses. Then you have a fixed focal length lens or a prime lens. This is just a 50 millimeter lens, a 30 millimeter lens, and 18 millimeter lens. This is just one focal length, so you can't zoom in and you can't zoom out. Straightaway, the main difference between these two lenses is that the zoom lens has more flexibility, the prime lens you've only got one focal length. You would typically think that the zoom lens is the way to go. Well, even though you have less flexibility on a prime lens, there is definitely a benefit to using a prime lens because, one, you're going to get a very consistent look. Because the focal length is fixed, nothing is going to change. The only thing that is going to change when you have a prime lens on is everything you do in the camera so the lens isn't going to change anything. The problem is, when you're on a zoom lens is zooming in can actually change the aperture on the camera. If you're set to F2.8 on a 24-105 lens, and you're set to 24 on the focal length. If you zoom into 105, your aperture will actually pull up to F4. This is the problem with some photography lenses. You don't have a consistent setting throughout all of the different focal lengths which means if you're not careful and you're not paying attention, some photos will be brighter than other photos. Having a prime lens means your aperture is not going to change without you knowing about it. Obviously, you can still change the aperture, but it's not going to be different between each frame. It's up to you to manually adjust that. There's definitely more of a consistent look and an ease of use with prime lenses over zoom lenses. Prime lenses as well generally produce a nicer image. Most photographers and most videographers as well would lean towards a prime lens rather than a zoom lens because you get a nicer image out of a prime lens. The problem is though prime lenses can get expensive if you have to buy a set. A zoom lens is a very nice and affordable way of getting all of the focal lengths that you might need. 23. Filters: One of the great ways of altering your photo is to use filters on your lens. If you look at the very front of your lens, where the glass is, you'll notice there is a thread and this is why you can screw on a filter. There are different types of filters, and they're all intended to do different things. In this video, I'm going to run you through some of the most popular ones and why you might want to use one of these for your photography work. The first one is an ND filter, a neutral density filter. The easiest way to describe this is a pair of sunglasses for your camera lens. As you can see, this is a very dark filter and this is because this is ND 1000. Now, NDs are rated in strength. An ND2 is not as intense as an ND 1000. The higher the number, the darker the filter. But why would you want to remove light from the frame? Why would you put something dark in front of the lens? As you can see, if I put this in front of this video lens, you can see it's basically just completely made that frame black. Well, removing that from the frame basically means that you can let more light in through your other settings. If you wanted to do a long exposure photo in the day, so you wanted to keep your shutter open for around 20 seconds. If you did not have an ND filter, your image would completely overexpose, and you would just get a white photo. But when you remove the light coming into the camera lens, it means you can take advantage of that longer shutter opening, and therefore you can get a longer exposure photo. Essentially, this is just removing light coming into the camera sensor so that you can open up the shutter for longer periods of time. It's just controlling that light coming into the camera. The next step, we have a polarizing filter. This is filter number 2. A polarizing filter is going to bring your light down a little bit, but that's not what this is intended for. A polarizing filter is going to increase the saturation in your greens and your blues. If you face away from the sun, and you put a polarizing filter on your camera lens, if you turn it around, you'll notice the sky will become more or less blue. The same thing works for grass as well. If you're filming a field, and you turn this, it will become more or less green, more saturated. If you angle your camera towards the sun and you do the same thing, unfortunately, you won't see much of a difference. This is only really when you're facing away from the sun. But the beauty of a polarizing filter as well is it can actually remove reflections from your photo. If you're taking a picture of a building and there were reflections of the sky on the building, and you want to remove these. If you use a polarizing filter, you put this on, turn this around, and you'll notice those reflections disappear. That is very handy. Filter number 3, we have a tiffen black pro mist. This is like a special effects filter. Now a pro mist is essentially just that to bloom the highlights. If you feel like your photo looks a little bit sharp and a bit clinical, then you can just pop a tiffen pro mist filter onto your lens and that will soften everything up. Now, this is a black pro mist quarter. You can get a half or you can get a full. The higher the number, the more intense the look is. If you go all the way up to the full one, then it means it's going to look very dramatic and very dreamlike. It's a very stylized filter, but it can really help to enhance your photos. Then lastly we have another special effects filter. This one is the cinepacks clear streak filter. If you look closely at this lens, you'll notice there are lines down the middle of the lens. The whole point of this is to change some of the lights and create some light streaks. Again, we'll place this in front of the lens. As you can see, looking back there, you're getting these nice streaks across the lens. Of course, this is very stylized and very particular, but it's really awesome to have that option when you're taking your photos. Then of course as well, I don't have one with me here, but the last filter is probably the most basic one, and that is the UV filter, the ultraviolet filter. The whole point of this is to basically stop UV rays damaging your camera lens and your camera sensor. But most people just use this as a way to protect their lens. You screw the UV filter on. It looks completely clear. It doesn't affect your photos, but it's protecting your camera sensor, and people like to use it to protect the end of their lens. If you scratch your lens, there's not a lot that you can do about it. But if you scratch the UV filter, you just buy a new filter and your lens is still safe. You've got a UV filter which protects your lens. You've got a neutral density filter which darkens the image. You've got a polarizing filter which removes reflections and enhances the saturation. Then you've got a pro mist filter which blooms your highlights. Then you've got a special effects filter like this clear streak filter, and that's just going to manipulate the lights in the frame. Now, it's really important that you buy the right filter for your lens. If you look at your lens at the end of the lens, there should be a number. It should say 77, 72, 68, somewhere around there. Make sure you buy the right number. Because if you buy a filter which is 77 millimeters and the diameter of your lens is 72, these won't screw on. It's really important that you find the diameter of the lens, and then you match that to the filter. That is really important. You can't actually buy stopped down filters, which basically means you can convert a larger filter to work onto a smaller lens. This is a 77 millimeter and the lens I'm on at the moment is a 72, so I can buy stopped down filter, so I could use this on this lens. But the problem is you can't go the other way. If the lens is too small for your camera lens, there's nothing you can do about that, unfortunately. There you go, filters are a great way of controlling your image and giving you more flexibility and creative options when you're taking your photos. 24. Long Exposure Photography: Long exposure photography is a photography technique that is used to create beautiful images. But what is it and how do we do it? Well, longer exposure photography is essentially taking advantage of an open shutter. It's just going to blur all the movement within the frame to create one beautiful photo. Now, the typical example of a longer exposure photo is traffic. You take a picture of the traffic with a long shutter speed and you'll see all of the tail lights and the headlights all blurring into this really nice streak of light. That is a long exposure photography at work. But how do we capture a long exposure photo? Well, first of all, you want to get your camera, make sure it's in manual mode, and then pull your shutter all the way down to a larger number. Somewhere around 10 seconds, 20 seconds, or 30 seconds. Then you want to get your camera onto a tripod. It's really important that you do this, because if you're holding the camera, all your tiny movements will be baked into the footage, and you'll end up with a messy result. You'll want to put your camera onto a tripod, pull your shutter speed all the way down to a long shutter speed, and then adjust all of your other settings accordingly. Now, you want to set the timer on your camera for two seconds if you can. Essentially, this means once you press the shutter, it takes two seconds before it starts to take the photo. The reason why I suggest this is because the physical action of pressing down the Shutter button could add shake into the photo, which will ruin your results. Set a two second timer, and then let your camera take its photo. Now, if you're taking longer exposure photos in the daytime, you're going to need to control the amount of light coming into the sensor. This is why we would use our ND or our neutral density filters. Pop an ND filter on the front of your lens and then adjust all of your settings that you get the right exposure. However, if you're doing a long exposure photo in the evening when it's dark and the street lights are on, you won't need an ND filter unless you're going for a really long shutter speed. But by default, you probably won't need your ND filter, so you can take that off if you're capturing your longer exposure outside at night when it's dark. That's essentially it. You just have to make sure that you've got an open shutter speed, your camera is on a tripod, and you've got an ND filter if you need to control the light. That is your longer exposure photography. Now, it's really important that when you're taking long exposure photos that you have movement within the frame. There's no point of taking a longer exposure photo of a photo at an art museum because unfortunately, nothing is changing and nothing is going to happen. Make sure that you have movement in the frame in order to see that. If you were taking a picture of a river, the ripples in the water will create a really nice smooth photo. Or maybe you could take pictures of cars on a road that traffic is going to give you that really nice blur and you'll see the lights blurring in the frame. Alternatively though, if you're at a busy landmark in a busy town center, then you can actually use long exposure to get rid of people because people are going to be moving around so frequently. If you set your shutter speed to 30 seconds, in 30 seconds, all of the people would've moved around and change their positions. As long as nobody hangs around for too long, then they should completely disappear from the photo. Because they are here one one and then they pass across the frame and disappear, it's not long enough for them to be baked into the image. Of course, if they're standing there for 20 seconds or 30 seconds and they're not moving, then they're going to be in the frame. But if they're just passing by, then just having that long shutter speed, having that long exposure effect, that's really going to help to get rid of them. If you want to make it like there's nobody at this landmark, if you have that longest shutter speed and that's a great way of getting rid of those people, so long exposure is a really awesome technique that takes full advantage of the shutter speed on your camera to create some beautiful breathtaking results. 25. Sports Photography: When it comes to taking photos of sports or action, you want to make sure you're paying close attention to two settings in your camera, shutter speed, and your burst modes. First of all, shutter speed, we know what that is. This is how long that shutter staying open for, and we know the higher the shutter speed, the crispier the action is going to be. If you're capturing sports or anything action, you want to make sure you have a high shutter, because if you have a lower shutter, you'll see motion blur in the frame, and that looks amateur. You want to make sure that you're at a suitable shutter speeds, so 1/200, 1/400, 1/500, one of these highest shutter speeds should do the trick. If you're seeing blur in your images though, then you want to increase that to an even higher number. But of course though, you also want to make sure that you're paying attention to your burst modes. You don't want to be set to single shooting, you want to be set to multi-shooting or multi-frame shooting. Essentially this means if you're set to single shooting when you take a picture, it will take one picture. But if you have this set to a multi-shooting mode or a burst mode, it means when you press the shutter down, if you hold it down and don't let go, it means the camera will take as many photos per second as the camera is capable of. The number of photos that it can take per second will vary, but this can be anywhere between four and maybe 15 photos per second. If somebody jumps in the air, if you just hold down that button with that burst mode enabled, it means you'll get a certain number of photos per second, so you can see every single part of that action is captured. This means you're not trying to get a single photo of the perfect moments. You can just hold down the shutter button and chances are you'll get the photo you're looking for. Then of course, once you've got the photo, you can get rid of the rest of that burst that you don't actually need. Having your cameras set in a burst mode is a great way of making sure that you don't miss the shot that you're looking for. If somebody's doing a back-flip, you want that perfect moment when they're in the air. If somebody's kicking a ball on a football pitch, you want that moment where their foot just touch the ball, and the ball is starting to travel. With a burst mode enabled, that is very possible to capture. 26. Portrait Photography: When it comes to portrait photography, there are a few things that you want to pay close attention to. One is the camera's settings and two is your lighting. So let's jump into our camera settings. Your shutter speed doesn't need to be too high, but it also can't be too low. If the person in front of the camera is doing some poses and some movements, you want to make sure that you're not too low to the point where it could blur. So generally when I'm doing portrait photography, I set my shutter speed to around 1/100 or 1/150 somewhere in that area. So if they move, there won't be any motion blur but I'm still letting enough light into the camera sensor. Then the aperture can be whatever it needs to be. This doesn't matter for portrait photography. It can be open or closed, high or low, it doesn't matter. Your ISO as well can also adjust to where it needs to go. But generally, I would always try and keep this as low as possible. But your white balance is what's really going to matter here. You want to make sure that you set your white balance to the color of the scene because if you set to auto white balance here, it means when you are editing all of these photos from the same location, they're all going to be slightly different colors. So if you set the white balance to a specific setting, say daylight or tungsten 55 or 32, that means all of your photos are going to have that same look and that same color applied to it. This is really important if you're in one location and taking potentially hundreds of photos of the same person on the same background. You don't want to have to go in and make those fine tune adjustments in the edit for every photo, just set your white balance before you start taking the photos. Then next up you want to pay attention to the lighting because shaping your lighting here is really important. So for portrait photography, I would normally recommend either three points or two-point lighting. I would definitely recommend having a softer light source rather than a hard light source because a soft light source can give you really beautiful flattering results. Then of course as well, as the photographer it's your job to make the person in front of the camera feel as comfortable as possible. So you need to have an open dialogue with them and make them feel comfortable with the process. It's also worth noting as well that you might have to adjust them and move them and get them into different positions. Just make sure there is an open line of communication between you as the photographer and the model on screen. It's really important here not to be afraid to tell somebody to try a different pose or to move their head in a certain way. It's really important that you get the right photo rather than looking back and it not looking quite right. So don't be afraid to move somebody or tweak something or ask them to do something slightly differently or try a different pose. The whole point of portrait photography is to try different looks, different styles, different poses, until you find the right few photos. So have that open dialogue between you and the person that you're are taking the photos of to make sure you get the best results. This really is a collaboration here, you have to trust them, they have to trust you. So it's really important that you listen to them and figure out what you need in order to get the best photos. Portrait photography can be really great fun, especially if you've got somebody that's great to work with. You just put some great music on and away you go. It's a really fun process. Just a reminder though, just make sure you set your white balance beforehand. Use complementing lighting, so three point or two points, and then make sure you're having that open conversation with the person you're taking pictures of. 27. Editing in Adobe Lightroom - Part 1/2: Once you've taken all your photos, you now need to get these imported into Adobe Lightroom. So let me run you through that process now. As you can see, we're inside of Adobe Lightroom, and in order to import your photo, you first just want to go into the bottom left corner and select the Import button. Then you just want to navigate through on your hard drive, your folder, whatever you have, you want to navigate through to where those photos are. As you will see, you'll get all your photos loading up. Now as you can see, mine are saying.CR2 and that is because I'm editing raw files in this example. Now as you can see, some of these photos are starting to gray out and that is because I have previously imported and exported these from Adobe Lightroom. If you haven't done that before, if this is the first time you're importing certain photos into Lightroom, they'll all just appear in full color. You can either just import them all or you can select uncheck all and then you can just go through and tick the ones that you want to import. I'm just going to import this one, so I'll select that, and I'll press "Import" in the bottom right. That would just take a second to get those imported. Now as you can see, if I double-click this photo, it is rotated around the wrong way. I can either rotate it here like this or alternatively, I can go back over into the main view and I can just rotate it like this. This is generally what I go for because it means you can highlight specific photos. So I'll select the first one, hold Shift down, select the second one, and just rotate them at the same time. If you've got 300, 400, 500 photos, you just Command A or Control A to select them all and then just rotate them around in the right way. You just rotate them all in one go. At the moment we're in the library tab, but we can't do any editing in here. We need to double-click the photo and go into Develop on the top right. That will load up the develop or the edit tab. Now as you can see we're inside of the develop tab and over on the right we've got all of these different selections. Over on the left, you can see as well, we've got all of these presets. You can add a preset on if you wanted to. Now these come pre-installed on Adobe Lightroom or you can install your own presets. You can select one that works for you. I quite like the look of this one CN18, that looks really nice. But I'm not going to add a preset. Instead, I'm going to go over to the right to these folders. I'm just going to go through these one by one and explain to you what they do and what I would be doing along the way. In the basic folder, we've got our basic temperature and tint, so this is all white balance. If you wanted to warm this up, push it towards the higher numbers. If you want to cool it down, push it towards the lower numbers. I'm just going to warm this up a little bit. Then you've got the tint. If your camera shoots more green or more purple, you can shift this the other way to correct for that. Canon is a little on the green side, so I'm going to push that towards the purples just to balance that out a little. Then you've got your exposure, which is your brightness. I'm just going to pull that up a little bit. Now you've got the contrast. As you can see if I pull this up, it's just going to make those darks more intense and the brighter part is more intense. I'm just going to add a little bit of contrast. Then you can see this sky is completely blown out, it's overexposed. We can go to the highlight slider and we can pull this over to restore those highlights. Now, if you had a JPEG image, this wouldn't be possible. This is only possible because of the raw format that I'm editing. Then you've got your shadows. This is the darker part, so I can pull the shadows up to bring those up as well. But as you can see, if I pull up too high, we're exposing all of this noise and grain, so I only pull it up a certain amount. Then we've got the whites. This is pretty self-explanatory. You can see the white parts of the image or the clouds in this example, so I pull those down, pulls the brightness of those down. It just exposes this a lot nicer. Then you've got the blacks and you can either make them more intense or less intense. Then generally, once I've balanced all of this out, I'll go back up to contrast and I just add a touch more contrasting. I think it's looking really nice. If you wanted to compare this to the original, by the way, then you could go down to the bottom left down here and you can press YY. Say this on the left is the before and this on the right is the after. You can see already we've made some nice changes. Then down here we've got presence, so you can add some texturing, which if we zoom in, you can see it's just going to intensify that detail. But personally, I find that it gets a little much so I'm just going to keep that quite low. Clarity does a similar thing. It just intensifies those details. Then the Dehaze slider is perfect if you are taking photos and it was a little bit smoggy or a little bit hazy. You can just pull the Dehaze slider across and it would just restore some of that detail. Then you've got vibrance and saturation, which is just the intensity of the color. Generally, I like to keep the vibrance higher than the saturation. I have the saturation at around plus five and the vibrance can go up to around 30 or so. Of course, this will change depending on your photo and what your style is. If you wanted to go full black and white, you can just pull that saturation slider all the way down or you could pull it all the way up, but that feels a bit intense. Personally for my style, I like to keep it somewhere around there. Then the next one is your tone curve and if you're familiar with curves in Adobe Premiere or After Effects, this works exactly the same. If not, I'll run you through. You've got your RGB1, which is your white, so this is your red, green, and blue channels. If we were to pull the top right over to the left, you would see it's going to increase the brightness in the bright parts, the highlights. Then if I pull the bottom left up, it's going to increase the brightness in the shadows or the dark areas, and then the middle is going to be your midpoints. If you want to make an area brighter, you push it to the top left and if you want to make it darker, you pull that to the bottom right. Because we've got RGB, we can go over into the individual channels and we can pull the brightness down or up on each individual color channels. You can get really specific with your color correction and your color grading here. Generally though, I skip that part. I feel like I do much more of the heavy lifting in the HSL and color slide up rather than in the tone curves. In HSL secondary, you've got hue saturation and luminance. As you can see, I can select specific colors here. I'm going to start on the hue, which is your color, and we target the blue. We've got the blue sky here. If I pull the blue slider over to the left, it's going to change the color because hue is color. Then if you go to saturation and we target that blue again, you can see it's going to increase or decrease the saturation on the blue channel only. As you can see, I'm increasing the saturation on the blues, but the rest of the image is staying put, it's not changing. Then your luminance is essentially just the brightness on that color channel, so I can pull the luminance down to make that sky pop or I can pull it up to make it feel like it's correctly exposed. But personally I feel like it's a little bit annoying having to go through these different tabs, so I go over to the color tab. You can select your color and you've got hue, saturation, and luminance all in that same window. Let's focus on this building, it's an orangey-yellow color. I want to pull that down a little bit. I can go to the hue slider and I can just pull that around. Let's make that more of an orange and then I'll just pull the saturation down a little bit so it's not as intense. Then we'll go to the blue and we'll just make the blue a little bit more aqua-blue like this. There we go. I feel like that's really starting to come together. Next is color grading, and this is your highlights, mid-tones, and shadows. See your highlights in the bottom right, shadows bottom-left, and mid-tones on the top. You're separating all of the bright parts, the dark parts, and parts in between. You can change the color of these areas. A highlight would be the sky up here. If I changed the highlights towards red, you can see the brighter parts of the image will go red. But if I push the shadows towards blue down here, you can see that's going blue, but the sky is red. So you can get some really interesting and creative color grading here using this tab. Again, I generally avoid this or if I do use it, I'm only using it a little bit just to lean a color a specific way. Then we've got detail and this is our digital sharpening and noise reduction. If I zoom all the way into detail, keep close attention to the details in this image. If I pull the amount of sharpening down to zero, you can see it looks a little soft. But if I pull that all the way up to 100, it feels a lot sharper. The problem is that when you add too much digital sharpening, it can start to feel a little unnatural, especially if you pull the radius and the detail up. You can see that's really starting to look not great at all. Now because of the compression of uploading this file to Skillshare, you might not be able to properly see this. When you're in Lightroom, pull your sharpening slider all the way up and just see how intense this can be. Generally, I like to keep the amounts at around 20 then I pull the radius and the detail all the way down again. That feels a lot more natural. Then you've got your noise reduction. If we go to a dull part of the image, and if I just pull the exposure all the way up, you can see this is all of the noise. But if we go down to noise reduction, you can see I can pull the luminance up and that's going to start to eat away at that noise. I can also adjust the detail and the contrast sliders and then I can also go into color, detail, and smoothness and that will really smooth that out. The problem is though, if you go too intense on this, then it really starts to soften the image. As you can see if I pull the exposure back down to where it was, you can see the image looks very soft. If you are applying noise reduction, I would generally keep this quite subtle to keep the numbers small if possible. But I don't need any noise reduction in this, so am just going to pull mine all the way down, and then I'll just adjust the exposure again. I'll just pull that exposure back up to where it was. Then below detail, we have got lens corrections and this is essentially correcting for any distortion in your lens. So if you had a wide-angle lens, a fisheye lens or if you had a telephoto lens that was distorting, you can distort the lens to go where you want it to go. For example, if you had a really wide angle like this and you can see your horizon is starting to bend, you can just pull that slider back across so that you end up with a nice straight line like this. This would be before and this would be after. Of course, you can pull it the other way as well, but this is essentially just compensating for that lens distortion you'll get on your lenses. This is primarily for your wide angles or your fisheye-type lenses. Then of course you can add some defringing, which is essentially just any small imperfections that the lens might've created to the color. Then below that, we have transform. In transform, you can see we can adjust the vertical slider to add some rotation. We can do the horizontal slider to add some rotation or some skewing to the horizontal axis, then we can add some rotation. We can change the aspect ratio of this, we can increase the scale, we can offset the x and the y. But this image doesn't need any of that so I'm just going to undo all of those adjustments and that looks great. Then next up, we've got the effects and you've got your vignette and you've got your grain. If we pull the amount on the vignettes all the way to the left, you can see we get this really intense black vignette. But if we go all the way to the right, we get that same intensity but with the white. I'm just going to pull this towards the black and you can see if we adjust the midpoints, it's going to change where that vignette sits. You can have a really nice subtle one in the corners or you can make it very intense. Then we can change the roundness so we can have it more of a circle or we can have it more as a nice border. Then we've got our feathering, which is just the softness. So zero is going to be quite intense, 100 is going to be very soft. Then we've got our highlights and as you can see, it's just going to feather off the corners on those highlights. But I'm not a massive fan of having vignette so I'm just going to keep that at zero and we'll move down to grain. Now grain is going to actually add grain rather than taking your grain away. Even if you've got no grain in the image, if you wanted to, you could pull your grain slider all the way up so that you can add a fake grain into the image. You can also change the size and the roughness of this if you wanted to adjust the look of this. Of course, you don't have to add this, this is completely stylistic and it's your choice as a creative. But generally, I like to keep my images as clean as possible, so I keep that at zero. Then the last setting we have here is calibration. This is just adjusting the shadows, the red primary, the green primary, and the blue primary. This is just another way to make any adjustments to the color. So if a color feels slightly out, you can just pull the hue or the saturation of a specific color channel around to make those fine-tuned adjustments. But generally, that's a tab I always skip. 28. Editing in Adobe Lightroom - Part 2/2: Then if we go up to here at the very top, you can see you've got this crop icon, so we can actually crop this. You can make those adjustments and then you can see you've got your angle here so you can change the angle of your photo. Then you can go into aspect ratio and you can actually adjust the aspect ratio, so you can go for custom, one-by-one, which is square, four-by-five, or you can change it to a specific aspect ratio there. But once you're happy with that, you can just close that and that will make those adjustments. Then next to that we've got this little plaster or this band-aid icon, and this is just to fix any imperfections. If you were trying to remove a spot from somebody's face, you could use this. Let's just zoom in on the image. Let's say, we'll just draw around this here. This is what we want to remove. Now if I move this circle over to the left, you can see I'm copying what's on the left and I'm adding it in on the right. Now, I can adjust the size of this, I can adjust the feather, I can adjust the opacity. But once I'm happy with that, I can close that off and that should get rid of that. I would need to do some more work though, just to blend that out and make that look a lot nicer. Next up we've got the red eye or the pet eye corrector. If you've got red eye on one of your photos from using flash, you can just use this option. You would just select the red eye, draw the circle around and it would fix that for you. They can just adjust the pupil size, the darken slider and make those adjustments. Then the next option across here is this circle. As you can see, this is a way to add masks onto your image. You can select subject, which is going to find somebody in the frame and it's just going to draw a mask around them. Now as you can see, it just said detecting subject, but because there's not a subject in the frame, you probably won't find them. Instead of doing that, we can go down to select sky. As you can see, Adobe Lightroom is going to figure out where the sky is. As you can see, it's figured out this is the sky. Then you can make any adjustments to that specific mask, so you can change the tint, temperature, exposure, contrast, highlights, texture, and you can adjust all of these other settings in that specific area only. Then down there you can see you've got the brush tool. Rather than trusting the AI to figure out what needs to be adjusted, you can actually go in and just paint over what you feel like needs to be adjusted, and of course, you can change the size of the brush by going down to here and you can adjust the feathering, the flow, and the density. Then once you've done that, you've selected your area that you want to adjust, you just go into effect and you can change all of those settings again. That is terrible though so let's just go back to this area you, can see next we've got a linear gradient. If we select that, we select and hold at the top and then drag down. You can see, you can have this nice linear gradient traveling down. We can go into our sliders again. We can adjust the temperature, the tints, the exposure, the highlights. As you can see, it's only affecting it on the top part of the image and then it's feathering down as the image progresses downwards. If you had a really bright sky and you couldn't pull it down with your exposure tab, you could just add this linear gradients effect to the top of the image just to bring down the intensity of those highlights. Then of course we've got a radial gradients. You can just draw a mask in the sensor. If we select radial gradients and draw a circle here, you can see it's only going to affect what's in this circle and we can move the circle around wherever we want. Again, exposure, tint, temperature, we can do all of these settings here. But that's just going to be this circle. You can select a specific color. I've got the eyedropper tool loaded up. I'll select this blue in the sky. As you can see, it's going to figure out what is blue in the frame and this is where we can go in and we can change the temperature of the blue, we can adjust the tints of the blur, we can go in and adjust the exposure, contrast, highlights. It's only going to affect that blue channel. I feel like this has done a really nice job of that. We close that down and then we go to our last masking option. Because I've applied this mask, as you can see, I can't actually add another mask in through here. I have to go up to this option here and select, Create New Mask. Now we'll just do the last one which is a luminance range. This is just, again, we're going to get the eyedropper tool. We're going to select a color and it's just got to figure out what is that intent in terms of brightness. You could adjust the luminance. As you can see, everything red is going to be adjusted. If I pull this across, you can see I'm isolating the buildings and leaving the sky on its own. You can see, again, if I pull the exposure down, that's going to make these adjustments. But I'm not a massive fan of that, so I'm just going to delete that. Now, if I wanted to copy this color grading and put it onto my other image, there's two ways of doing that. I could either go into the bottom-left and so let's Copy. I can check all if I wanted to check all, or I could turn crop off if the other image is framed slightly differently. I'll select Copy, go back to this view on the library and I'll just go onto this image, go into Develop and will just select Paste. As you can see, that color has now been added in. Of course, if I wanted to, then I could just make some adjustments just so that this color, now works perfectly with this image. It was a little dark before, so just pulling this up makes that a little nicer. This was the before and this is the after. All I've had to do was adjust one of the photos and it's adjusted that onto the other one. Of course, though, if you didn't want to do it that way, maybe let's say you've got 100 images, well, all you would have to do is just go back to this view. Let's say there's 100 images there. You just highlight them all and making sure the adjustments run that first one. You then go into the bottom right, sync settings, synchronize, and it will take all of those settings from the first image and paste those onto the other images. Again, we can go into that second image and we can just make those adjustments to the exposure and we've got our image perfect now in Lightroom. That's it for the color grading and color correction in Lightroom but how do we export this? Well, you can either select a single image or you can select multiple images. Then we'll go to the bottom left and press Export. Then you can see you've got export to specific folder, so we can choose where this is going to go. I'm just going to put this in my Photography Course folder. Then we'll just scroll down and you can do file renaming, you can rename these files to something specific. Custom texts could be Photography Course, as you can see, this is an example Photography Course.JPEG, and you can have a lowercase or an uppercase extension, but I'm just going to keep that as lowercase. Then scrolling down here, you've got your file format. I'm going to export this to a JPEG, I make sure the quality is all the way up to 100. If I pull that down to 10, it's going to be really small image size, but the quality is not going to be there. I've pulled it up to 100 and that's going to be really high-quality. Then everything else here is completely fine. If you wanted to add some watermarks and then you could do so by adding in your watermarks. But I'm not going to bother with that for now. We'll just press Export. As you can see, Photography Course A has loaded up, those two images have now been exported from Adobe Lightroom. If we just get the info on this, because the quality was on 100, you can see this image is 25.8 megabytes, so it's really high-quality, but it's a large file size. If you wanted a smaller file size, then just export to a quality of 60, 70, 80. But there you go, that is how you would import your photos into Adobe Lightroom and edit them using all of the different settings available to you in Adobe Lightroom. 29. Outro: There you go. That is it for this photography course. At this moment in time, you should be feeling pretty comfortable operating and capturing photos on your digital SLR camera or your mirrorless camera. My challenge to you now is to use all of these techniques that you've learned in this course and go and take three photos. These can be anything you like, these could be long exposure, they could be portrait photography, they could be night photography, sports photography, whatever it is, just take three photos that you're proud of and upload those to the students' projects section, and I will comment my thoughts and opinions on your work. Of course, if you are interested in learning more about filmmaking and photography, then please do consider checking out one of the courses on my profile. But thank you ever so much for watching this course. I really do appreciate your support and hopefully, I will see you on the next course. See you there.