Beginning Photography: A Comprehensive Start

1. 01 - Introduction: Hey, guys, welcome to Beginning Photography Comprehensive Start. This class is designed to launch you into the photography world, providing you with the technical knowledge and creative techniques to create your first desired result from Capture to publish. In this course, you will learn all the fundamentals you need to know to start your photography journey, such as exposure control, in manual mode, white balance for color correctness, and then from composition to simple lighting fundamentals and editing. Of course, we live in a world where documenting has never been easier. Technology is getting better and efficient. It makes your life easier in taking photos. Unfortunately, those technology is somewhat a double edged sword too for those who understanding in fundamentals. And that is why I'm here to help you gain more camera confidence as fast as possible. We'll be giving you both theory and how to apply the skills in practice to save you time. With that said, no prior knowledge beyond basic photography concept is required, making this class accessible to a broad audience and ideally from a total of bigous into aspiring photographers. My name is Edwin, and please enjoy the class. 2. 02 - Class Prep: Hey, guys, for you to effectively going through this class, you will actually need a few things such as any cameras. You can use your phone or compact cameras, DiselR, or even mirrorless cameras. For those of you who actually use mobile phone, I do recommend any kind of app available that allows you to modify your ISO and or shut a speed for your phone camera. You will also most likely need other basic photography gears such as lenses, tripod, and memory cards to do the exercises. For editing, you may use editing suites such as Canva or Snap set, which you can also get for free. Now, without further ado, please enjoy the class. 3. 03 - What is Photography?: So, what is photography? In most cases, photography is the ot of capturing a still image using light and a medium such as sensor or film. Photography is a powerful and versatile art form that has the ability to capture the essence of a moment, convey emotions, tell stories in a way that transcends words. It can also capture something that is not seen as usual, such as soft water streams, aurora, star trails, and minimo. The only problem is, photography requires so many things from planning, capturing, editing, publishing and printing, which is why it can be confusing from time to time. Let alone, we often get helped by our automatic settings in our phone, which can lead to a lot of confusion when we are trying to get to a more advanced manual settings. Now, as we don't want to deal data into history and how great photography is, let's move on with the next. 4. 04 - Whole Approach: In this lesson, I want you to understand a whole approach in photography, which includes four step iteration process called Plan, Capture, edit, and publish. This approach is necessary to get a bigger picture of how to come up with a cohesive workflow from the first step to the end. Now, a lot of beginners tend to be one sided with the mindset of fix it and pose a separate process to fix all of the mischief they have done on their camera. But I want you to have a concept of editing as an extension of the camera as it allows you to be more creative during capture. Now, let's go through it one by one. Shall we? The first one being plan pre production. In planning, you would be asking questions like, where will this go? Social media, Whatsapp, prints. What is the format? Is it going to be landscape or portrait or square? What is the mood? Is it happy or sad or cool or mysterious? What about color? Which color should I choose to incorporate the right mood? Where is the location? When is it set? L lighting direction and quality? Now, you want to incorporate as many questions in the planning phase so you know what you want to achieve in capture and editing. Number two, capture or simply production. This is where your camera and lighting skills are tested to the limit? It is often required for you to be flexible with how you set them up as different areas will require different settings from time to time? This course is mostly intended for you to be more confident in this section of the production. Number three, edit or post processing. An edit may not necessarily mean to make your photo better, but also an extension of your camera by using softwares like photoshop, light room, Capture one, and more. Now, it might sound new to you, but there are a lot of things in the camera that you cannot do, such as scrambling your face parts around, removing unwanted colors or objects, et cetera. Most people get it wrong here, where they say, fix it in post instead of enhance it in post. Yes, of course, you can fix it in post, but that gives us the mindset of being sloppy during capture is okay. And I don't want you to be sloppy because it removes a lot of homework in post. Number four, publish. Learning where you are publishing it on will, of course, give a lot of decision making pointers in all the previous steps, because sometimes you may need a landscape format, another more portrait, square, and so on. Now learning the final engine is a mass for most photographers as it will dictate how we capture and edit for these mediums. 5. 05 - Exposure: In this lesson, we are going to learn all about exposure. Now, exposure refers to the amount of light that reaches the camera, sensor or film, determining how bright or dark an image will appear after we capture an image. The main reason to nail this is due to the fact that exposure is a fundamental concept that affects not just the quality, but the look and feel of an image. It involves balancing three main elements, Io, shut a speed, and aperture, which are often referred to as the exposure triangle. Each element has its own impact on the exposure and the final look of the photograph. Now, most classes out there will have different ways of explaining this, but my version goes a little bit like this. This is the same exposure triangle as per user, but I want you to know that since we will be dealing with full manual exposure, not even semioo, I want you to know that each of these parameter has two traits. The first being each and every one of them, able to make a picture look brighter or darker. The second one, as stated before, has different unique effect to its own. So in short, we can make any kind of settings we so desire as long as we know the unique results that we want or can achieve by adjusting the unique look first before the exposure or brightness. The brightness pot can be achieved later with the settings that are less prioritized out of the tree. For this part of the class, since we will be using manual mode in our camera, I will briefly explain how to achieve that in both pro camera and on your phone. For your pro camera, simply find the knob at the top with all the different dials and then select the appropriate mode usually seen as M. Which stands for manual mode. Now, don't forget the fact that manual mode can still be semi auto if you set your ISO on auto that is, simply move the ISO setting to anything other than auto, and we are good to go. Now, we need to identify each of the nobs by moving them to one direction and seeing which one of the settings are affected stated in the title. Usually, the ones in fractions are shutter speed, the ones in commas are apertures, and the ones in hundreds or thousands are ISO. As for the foam, it is a little bit tricky, and I want you to use an app that can make you able to set your camera setting manually. I personally use mera, not because it is the best, but because I already own its full feature. Now, as soon as I start the app, I can see that there is an exposure setting, so I'm going to go there first and set it to custom mode. Now, notice that there is no apter setting as this is one of the downfall of having no adjustable lens in our foam. Not because it can, but because of the sheer amount of buck it creates. We are starting to see foam with lens attachment, but it is still debatable whether the function really will beat its portability function. Now, we are starting to see phones with lens attachment, but it is still debatable whether the function really will beat the function of having a portability of a phone. So now that you know how to set up your camera manually, let's move on with the next lesson. Shall we 6. 06 - ISO: In this lesson, we're going to talk about ISO and how it affects our brightness and also a unique effect called noise. The ISO is just basically stands for international organization of standardization. And in our camera, it basically controls how much our sensors absorbs light. So the ISO in our cameras can be numbers like 100, 200, 400, 800, 1,630 200, and it can be up to like two thirds of a value of these, right? You can find them in your own cameras like we previously did in our previous lesson. And this means that we have the ability to control how much amplification we actually apply to our image. Now, as the settings go higher, of course, the brightness of the image will go up, and so does with the thing called the digital noise. So this is the unique effect of what I so will actually do towards your image. It will affect the amount of digital noise that is in your pictures. So the more value you put in your amplification, you get more noise in your image, just like the analogy of sound, when you actually amplify sound a lot, you actually get a lot of noise in the background. So it also happens here when it comes to light because light is also energy, and when we amplify, we get a lot of noise, okay? Now, the thing with noise is that noise is very different when in comparison with grain when we actually use film back in the days, because noise is simply just a variation of brightness and color in each pixels when they are placed next to each other. So noise is a little bit more nasty compared to grain, whereas it is a little bit more random, there's less variation of color, just lots of scratching like grains. That's why they call it grain. And noise is just nasty because of the variation of color, and it degrades the quality of the picture by making it look like there is less and less and less of quality or sharpness due to the fact that there is a lot of variation with color and also brightness. Now, so if you want to have the best looking image, it is often desirable to actually only use the lowest ISO possible. So, of course, using the lowest ISO possible, will really depend on where you shoot and the amount of light that is available in that location. Now, as explained, we're actually trying to say that ISO can actually absorb more light, but in fact, it cannot. What ISO does to your image, it actually just amplifies. So it does not actually do an enhancement or make more light into your sensor. It just means that there is more light being amplified in your image. 7. 07 - ISO Exercise: All right, guys, this is going to be the exercise for changing ISO. Now, for those of you who has a mobile phone or even a pocket camera or even a DSLR, just like this or a mirrors, we will get through them one by one, and for now, we're going to do with the pro camera first. Now, with the pro camera, a lot of the dials are already built into the system itself. So there's a lot of buttons here like the ISO, the, the front, and also iris at the back. Now, what I want you to do because we're changing ISO, you need to press and find a button within your camera, either a mobile phone or a pocket camera, or even your mirrorless, and it's usually located somewhere within the camera. What I want you to do is now to choose a low ISO and a high IO and make a picture for each one of these settings. So you need to set your ISO at a 100 or even at your highest ISO available inside your camera, and see the result for yourself. So I'm going to take a picture right now with my ISO 100. I'm just going to take a picture over here. Although this is a very boring scene. However, I just want to show you what it means to have high ISO and low ISOs. So I've taken a picture of the bushes right here in ISO 100 and ISO 16,000. And as you can see, the result here, that both pictures have different qualities in terms of their digital noise. Now, before we continue, I want you to be able to set your own ISO and figure out which highest ISO that you're comfortable with a lot of the photographers out there, they like to debate whether or not to use the lowest setting or even the highest setting. The noise itself, it really depends on where your end result will be, usually if it's on Instagram. Noisy images tend to disappear when you compress them into a smaller image. So another tip that I would like to give is this Sonny 16. And usually whenever you're outdoor like here in the middle of the day, you would usually use an ISO over 100 and shut a speed 1/100 and in F 16. Just bear that in mind that when you're outdoor, you're going to be using low ISO most of the time. Play around with your image, see which one is good for you and good luck. That will be the exercise that's continue on with the lesson. 8. 08 - Shutter Speed: In this lesson today, we're going to learn all about shutow speed. Basically, shuto speed is just all about the amount of time your camera accepts light. Now, a camera have many parts included in them, which is a lens and a camera. But inside the camera, there exists a lens, an aperture, a shutter, and also a sensor. Now, the light actually goes through them one by one. And there's this thing in the middle here just between the aperture and the sensor is called the shutter. Now, this shutter right here, this box is actually something that will block light out from the sensor, and it actually has a door in the middle that can go up and down. By the amount of light that is required for you to capture light. And it can also close back down. And as Shadow Speed deals with time, it is Ashley counted with time denominator, which is seconds and is usually denominated in 1 second, half a second, 1/4, 1/20 fifth, 1/100, 1/1000, et cetera, et cetera. Now, the thing with time is that the lesser diffraction is, there will be less and less and less and less. This is where most people get it wrong. I'll tell you later in the future lessons, why? You need to get this straight. You need to know that if you actually increase the fraction, you are actually getting less and less light. So, in a sense of way, right, because we know that shutter speed involves duration. So the more duration we actually put in our shutter speed, the the more brighter the picture gets. And the faster that we actually open up the shutter, we will actually get a darker image. However, the opposite is also true when it comes to the unique effects. When you actually open up more with more time, you actually take in more motion blur because you're opening up more lights to have more streaks in them. And you will actually get less motion blur if you actually have less duration. And this is called the freezing of motion, and the opposite is motion blur, right? So just like this scenario where I'm actually taking a picture with less and less time, you actually start to see the freezing of motion of this swell, and this will be very handy when it comes to shuto speed. So simply put, if you want more motion blur, you simply open up a lot longer. And if you want less motion blur and get a crystal sharp image of a moving object, just reduce the amount of time you require for you to capture an image. Now, there is another name for a slow shutow speed, which is called the long exposure. Is kind of the same. But anyway, let's move on with the exercise. 9. 09 - Shutter Speed Exercise: So now we're back in the exercise, and this time, we're going to be changing shutter speed, which is our second parameter in our exposure triangle. These settings, you can find them in your pocket camera. You can also find them in your mobile phone, but of course, you would need an app to actually change it. Pro cameras like the A seven here, you can actually change your shutter speed in one of these dials here, whichever has been set to set your shutter speed. There's a lot of cars coming here and I'm going to take a picture of them with a slow shutter speed first. I'm going to go slow shutter of one tent. Alright, here comes a car, and I'm just going to take a picture of it. And it's gonna be a bit blurry from my experience. Now, he's actually a bit blurry. Now, there's another car coming. I'm going to actually make it faster. So now, this time, this car is not actually having any kind of motion blur. So you want to play around with the motion. There's, of course, from the slowest, which is not moving at all or stationary. And then there's people walking around. There's also people running, there's cars moving. You need to get yourself familiarized with how the objects move. Also, how when you're moving, let's say when you're in a car, or even when you're on a boat, this will definitely affect the way that you want to actually use your shadow speed depending on your situation. Now, since this is a perfect spot for me to pan a bit, I'm just going to try and wait for a car. I know there's a tree here, but we're going to try and do some panning with a slower shutow speed. There's one going there. Almost got that motorbike in terms of panning. He comes the another car. All right. P. Alright, I actually got that. As you can see the result, you can do this kind of panning. Of course, you can actually do this kind of effect inside the editing as well. Practice and get yourself familiarized with this parameter called the shutter speed. All right. I'll see you again in the lesson. 10. 10 - Aperture: In this lesson, we're going to talk all about aperture, and this will be our final parameter in our exposure triangle. Now, aperture is very similar to shutter speed. However, it is a hole that is in the middle, and it can actually make itself bigger or smaller depending on how much light we actually want to go through the lens. Now, when it comes to aperture, the number is represented with an F at the front. Now, it's a little bit different when it comes to everything else. It just seems that when the number is smaller, it gets bigger. That's because this is also a fraction. So F is meaning focal length divided by two, so let's just say the F is one. So 1/2 is half, 1/16 is, of course, a lot smaller. Now, back to the topic at hand, aperture, when you actually open up, right, you will get a brighter image. And when you close down, well, of course, you get a darker image. However, there is a significantly unique effect that is done when it comes to aperture. When you open up your aperture, you actually get a shallower depo field, meaning that anything that is not in focus of the lens will not be in focus. But if you actually close down your aperture, you will actually get a bigger dep of field like shown here in the diagram that you can actually start to see the duck more and more, even though the duck at the back is not being focused. Now, as you can see, the picture on the left shows a very shallow depo field, and the picture on the right shows a bigger depo field. Now, in this case, we want to be able to control our depo field, not because we want shallowi bouquet or anything like that, but we just need to know whether the things that we are capturing is crystal clear, sharp, and in focus on it. So a lot of the time, people actually get confused whether they should be in Shallow Depo field or bigger depo field because bigger Depo field just sounds like capturing image from a mobile phone, which is not interesting, but trust me, there are times when you need a bigger depo field, depending, of course, on what you are shooting. So let's continue on with the exercise, shall we? 11. 11 - Aperture Exercise: So in this exercise, we're going to change our last perimeter, which is called the aperture. And frankly speaking, for those of you who are using mobile phone, most of the time, this is not available yet. I know there's actually a student of mine, who actually told me that there is the one with the lens attachment. But of course, it is still a bit bulky, and there's not enough lenses out there that can actually give out good result in the end. But overall, you can actually change it in your pocket camera. You can also change it in your pro camera, and most of camera, other than mobile phone, of course, has this setting. Now, I'm going to use the Shallow depo field, which is going to be on F 2.8. I'm just going to take a picture of this camera right here with a shallow depo field. So I'm now on F 2.8. I'm going to take a picture of this and boom. There you go. Now, I'm going to use a deeper depth of field this time, and I'm just going to shift in between. So I'm just going to go from F 2.8 to F 5.6. And then I'm going to go F 11. And then I'm going to go to F 22. Now you can see a lot of changes within the depo field. So there's a few other things that you do need to know about aperture is that when it comes to having very sharp images, you really need to be picky about your focus point, and you really need to nail that focus. And not to mention that you actually need to also not forget about thing called aberration. Now, aberration is basically when an image goes a little bit more not sharp and you get a lot of purple fringing, and then the edges get a little bit unsharp. Now, this is because some lenses needs to be adjusted with a software, or you can actually bump up your aperture up from your highest opening. So let's say you have a 2.8, you need to go from F four or F 5.6 to actually reduce this aberration and increase sharpness of the edge. Of course, aberration happens a lot when you have a reflective object such as diamonds or even glasses, anything that is very shiny and highly reflective. This often happens to jewelry. 12. 12 - Exposure Triangle: In this lesson. We're finally going to get to know how to put all the three parameters together inside the exposure triangle. Now, an exposure triangle is just basically this triangle right here on my right now. The problem is that there's three parameters that we need to set. Now, this is a bit problematic when it comes to newbies or even newcomers like you, basically. Now, you need to choose two out of the three, that is the most priority when it comes to the unique effect. Now, let's just forget about the brightness first. Like I've told you in the previous lesson, we want to know which one that we want to prioritize. Is it noise? Is it motion blur? Is it depo field? Now, out of the three, let's just say that I've chosen, I need to have the best quality picture. So I do not want to know. So that's my first priority, which is IO, right? So I put my IO down onto the lower setting. Now, my next one would be, Hey, I need to have a shell de field, so I'm going to set that into a let's say F two inside my camera. And that will be two most prioritized parameter inside my setting. Now, the least prioritize in this case would be shutow speed. Now, I would find my brightness using shutow speed this time because I've already set my ISO, I've already set my aperture. And then now I'm trying to find my brightness using the shuto speed. Now, It can also be the same if you prioritize IO and then shadow speed, then you would need to sacrifice your aperture, and if you sacrifice IO, then you can also prioritize shadow speed and aperture, and so on and so on. It's just make things so much easier because you don't really care which one should I adjust according to the situation. You just want to be focused on the unique effects that it creates before you move on towards adjusting your brightness using these settings. Of course, there's a couple of tricks and also a couple of things that you might have to adjust during using or, you know, when you're using this technique, we'll get to that in the exercise, all right? 13. 13 - Capture Modes: So in this lesson, we're going to talk about capture modes and how our camera behaves, when we actually use them, so we don't want them to misbehave, only. Okay, let's go Now, as I've simply explained, a capture mode is just basically how a camera behaves, when we are taking pictures. Now, in a capture mode, there are three main things that you should know, which is shoot, drive, and focus. And in shoot is just basically how the exposure behaves. In drive is how the capture rates behave, so how many frames, et cetera, I focus, it's just basically how focus works, right? Now, The first one being shoot. There's actually a lot of mode, you know, in shoot in drive and focus of obviously. But we want to start with shooting mode first because this is important on how we handle our exposures, right? So shooting modes, right? There are three major groups, which is auto, scene program, aperture priority, shadow priority, manual, memory, et cetera, right? But the big groups are, there are full auto, semi auto. Full manual or static and memory. Now, the thing is that most of the time when you start, you always start in full auto, and there are things that are called the aperture priority AV, TV, name it, right? These ones, they are called the semi auto because some function of the aperture or the parameters are being set by the camera. And it can also be when you are also under manual settings, because sometimes when you're on manual settings, you can still set your ISO as automatic. And this can be considered as semi auto. And the camera will actually behave very differently when we are on different modes. So, you got to be careful here when we're choosing the modes, right? Now, when we are doing full auto, you can either select auto or scene, right? And this is basically just automatic versus pre set automatic. Right? In semi auto, it's just basically aperture priority, shatter priority program, or manual when you are under automatic ISO. Now, this is where everything begins to shine. You want to control everything, and all the parameters, the triangle, the exposure triangle is all being set manually according to what you want. Course, you can also set them up in a static or memory. Usually in canons stated as C one and in Sony, things like that, it's stated in M. Camera behaves differently. They have different abbreviation, they have different numbers, they have different letters. But of course, the function of this mode is to store a setting either on auto or on manual, and you get to recall it at the memory side. You actually store the setting first and you can recall them in the static or memory. Now, drive is very important. Because Ashley defines on how you take your shots. You can either take a single shot, you can either take continuous time shot or even bracketed shots. And it's just basically the amount of clicks that you make during your shots. Now, I personally like single shots, and I like continuous shots. Of course, if you want to do selfie, you can do time shots, right? Te shots can often be used as a remote trigger if you don't have one, and you don't want your camera to shake whenever you press that shirt button. Usually, we use continuous shot when we shoot moving objects that are really fast or even events that doesn't happen twice. It just happens once, right? And you want to take as many pictures as you can get during those momentous events. Of course, back then, when I used DSLRs, I can use single shots like a continuo shot. You just keep clicking and click and clicking. But nowadays, a mirror list is a bit more clunky, and you might want to use continuous shots, but on a lower setting, so you actually get lower frame rates when it comes to how many shots you get, right? Of course, sometimes it just gets really crazy. You can do like 100 frames per second, or 60 frames per second with the A nines and the higher N mirror les these days, right? Sometimes you don't want to do that. Next one, being focus mode, you want to be able to control your focus as well in terms of whether you're moving or the object is moving, you want to be able to control that. So it really depends whether the subject will move or stay, or you, the photographer will move or stay, or both of you are moving. If none of you are moving it's best to stick with single focus, because you can select a single point, and that will be it. That will be the end of the focus. If one of you is moving, it's actually best to stack with a continuous focus mode. And basically, it just goes like this. Single focus, when you press it, it finds it once, and continuous focus, whenever you're on the half press, it's always looking for a focus point, and basically hybrid focus and many more focus modes are in there obviously in cameras these days. But the best part for me in my experience is to stick with single or continuous from time to time. So, that will be all for focus at this stage. We will be dealing more with focus later in the lesson, but I just want you to get through so that you're able to handle your camera really well before, you know, moving on to more advanced features. Of course. This helps in exposing image, but for now, let's continue. Shell. 14. 14 - 6 Unique Effects Exercise: Now we've come to this and you've already known all the three parameters. You need to be able to make images that are low noise and high in noise. And then you will need to make images that has a lot of motion blur and also no motion blur such as freezing motion, and you need to be able to make images that has shallow depo field and also deep depo field. So what usually happens in the field? This is the kind of common cases that you would actually met. Hey, man, what's your setting? Am. My setting is. All right. Let me try. It's dark. It's not what I wanted. Nana, I got it right. It's okay. But it's not right. It's not right at all. I'm getting it dark. Are you sure it's not your camera? I think your camera sucks. Now, of course, it doesn't have to be this way, does it? So we're going to do something like take two and then forget one set your two initial parameters according to your unique effects, and then you will actually use the last parameter to find the correct brightness for the image that you are looking for. 15. 15 - Lighting Basics: In this lesson, we're going to learn lighting basics. Now, lighting is important in imaging for photography or videography because light is basically the paint that we want to paint on our canvas, which is our camera. But the problem with lighting is that it can be misleading time to time, and it's hard to analyze if you don't know what you're looking at. Now when we want to learn lighting, we actually have to know these five properties, which is direction, quality, color, power, and fall off. But for the sake of it, being basic, we only need to learn two right now, which is called direction and quality. Now, the thing with lighting, I really like this sentence. It's called the shadow. Never lies. And most people, when they first try to analyze lighting in an image or even in an environment, they always look at the light, but never or ready see the shadow. Now, The shadow never lies because the opposite of light is always shadow, and the opposite of shadow is the light. Now, if we actually try and analyze this ball, the light actually comes from the top left, just like this, right? So there's the light, and then there's the shadow right there at the back of the ball, directly the opposite of the lighting. And the same is also true if there is a shadow, and there's always the opposite side is where the lighting from. Now, if we actually want to analyze this picture, we can do so by looking at the shadow first. So now let's look at the bottom left here where my mic stand is. There's the high light here at the top, and there is the shadow. So the direction of the light is actually from above me, right? And if you can see how my face is shaped, the shadow is directly underneath my chin. And also underneath here. So this high light here. So obviously, the light is coming from here. Okay? So, and this is where my lighting is actually coming directly from 45 degrees up here, right? So you can actually analyze lighting of how things are. The second one, being quality is not really about brand. It's not exactly about power as well, but it gets a little bit difficult unless you truly understand what it is, right? So there's two main variations of quality when it comes to light, which is heart and soft. Heart, being heard itself will actually create a shadow that is not graduated, is just a straight cut, okay? So soft being soft itself, the shadow that is casted on anything has a little bit more of a gradation. So it's not a very hard edge, it's a very soft edge. You got to look at the edge, not the actual shadow. So the edgia, right is very edgy. It falls straight away from dark to light. Okay? But this one, has a little bit of a gap, right? So it's a lot more wider, and the shadow itself is a lot softer when it comes to the edge. The thing with art and soft is that hot lighting is created by a small light in comparison with the object. So if the lighting is actually a lot bigger compared to the object, it will be soft. Now, soft boxes can also be hot. And that's a problem because sometimes we actually take a photograph of something that is a lot bigger than the soft box. Yes, it's very misleading because it says soft box, it should be soft. No, wrong. If your soft box is smaller than the object you're taking photograph of, let's just say a human. Of course, your image or your lighting will be hard. Not as hard as it used to be, but just harder. Also a second variation when it comes to lighting. There's specular and diffuse. Now, the true difference is that when it comes to specular lighting, there's a lot of more hot spots involved in these lighting. Whereas diffuse, it sort of looked like that everything is more spread out, and there's less high light being formed on one spot or any kind of form because in lighting, you can actually have a specular hot lighting, and you can also have a specular soft lighting. Can also have a diffuse hard light and also a diffuse soft light. Now, the thing with this is that that's why it kind of makes it hard to actually analyze a light because there's actually four variations that you can make depending on what you use. Now, let's just say that we actually have our torch and our soft box, right? And the thing with torches and soft box is that they have different materials on how to handle light. So the torch itself, being a torch will actually direct light directly straight forward. That's why this actually creates this specular look because the direction of the light is actually moving forward straight into the object. This is how it becomes specular. While the soft box being diffuse, will actually spread the light beam around, creating this fill in look when it comes to having use a diffuser, right? So again, because of the material that is being used inside a soft box and inside a lamp, you will actually get a different result. Usually, the one that is more specular is usually being reflected directly while In soap boxes or a diffuse setting, the light gets spread around, something like this, right? Where the light is coming, it gets reflected straight away in a straight line. Whereas, if you are reflecting it on a white background or a diffuser, you would actually spread the light around. So you have a direct reflection and an indirect reflection that actually spreads the light everywhere. So that's why when having a directly reflected right, you would get a specular light, where as if your lighting gets spread around, either being bounced off a non reflective material or going through a very diffuse material, you would spread the beam around. Now, the number one denominator that will determine the softness of the shadow is the area of the lighting in comparison with the object, like I said, previously, if you actually have a big lighting that is a lot bigger than the object, you would actually get a soft light. In this example, we actually have a large diffuser, lighting, a small subject, meaning that we will actually get a soft diffuse lighting. If we actually make the soft box smaller, we actually in turn, make the lighting a lot more hot, but it is still a diffuse lighting. Now, there's another factor that will determine on how soft or how hot a lighting will be. And that is the distance between the lighting and the object. So if you actually increase the distance, it will actually make it a lot. Harder in comparison with the ones that is closer. So let's re analyze my photo again. We actually have a soft lighting because of the gradation of the shadow. And when it comes to specularity, it's not exactly that specular, because, as you can see, it's a lot more diffuse because I actually have a decently large soap box right in front of me. 16. 16 - Torch Light Photography: So, we are back in the studio, and we are going to do slow shutter light painting exercise that I'm going to show you just to show the power of lighting and how it can make a difference in your picture. So we actually have a simple object right in front of me, and I've actually set up my camera right here to be capturing this in front of me, but without actually using any kind of, like, funky lighting, but we are going to actually use the small ing. That big lighting is only for the sake of this video right now. This one will be mostly the one that we are going to use to light up this subject to make it look like there's a softbox lighting this subject. And of course, we're going to need to have some kind of editing later to combine them all together. But before we do that, we're going to make it look like there's going to be a big softbox coming right out of it. Okay? So let's get on with it. Now, I'm going to turn the light off here. Put in the darkness. I think we're going to need to use a very high ISO. Whoa. Even even the camera right now, I can't even see it because it's just so dark. So, we're going to use a slow shutter speed of 1 second, and we're gonna put this on a timer. Okay, we're going to have to put this on a two second time, and then it's going to take pictures for us for a duration of 4 seconds, right? Now, I'm just going to take a picture first and get the result straightaway. I'm going to play. It's still dark and nothing is inside. Okay. Now, I'm going to start the timer again. But this time, we're going to use our lighting, okay? Like this. So we're going to use this lighting to actually light up the sides, and then this side as well. Okay? So we're going to do a bit of light painting. Now we're going to press the shutter. We'll see the result. Whoa. Look at that. This is madness. Alright. If you guys can't see it, I'm gonna show it to you a bit. There you go. Wow. This looks like it's been caught by something that is not with a torch light like this. And this is just showing you that even with something so simple, you can get something so amazing that it looks like it's been caught with a true soapbox. Now I'm going to try and do this, right? And I'm going to try and get it like it's gonna be back lit a bit. So I'm going to take a picture here. All right. And then I'm going to see what's happening. This looks like so back lit. Okay? I'm going to take another picture, and then I'm going to back lit everything, okay? I'm going to play around and see whether or not I can actually use a longer duration, and I'm going to use 8 seconds this time. Okay, so we have more exposure time. I'm just going to put the light down here. And I'm gonna expose more of it to the life. Ah, I still had more time, okay? So I'm sorry it's gonna be a bit dark looking at this because, you know, Things are things, right? Ah. Fantastic. So I'm just gonna get more exposure out of this. I'm gonna take my one last chance on this, right? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. I still had more, but it's all right. We can be done with that, okay? So, This one is actually a single exposure because I've only taken a single exposure. So I'm just going to do 8 seconds on the left. So I'm going to do a back light here. And then I'm going to do actually You know what? We're going to do a three point lighting with this, and then we're going to edit it inside Adobe photoshop. Okay? So we're going to take first picture. Here's our first exposure. Our first soft box. All right. We're going to take another one. Here's our back light. Alright. And then we're gonna take one last picture. And it's gonna be our other back light from the other side. All right. I guess we are done with that, guys. Let's go to Photoshop. Shall we? All right. Now, I guess we're done there. Now, let's go to photoshop and edit this ph so we can get a looking image with just a fight. 17. 17 - White Balance: In this lesson, we're going to talk all about white balance. And pretty much, white balance is just about how to make white becomes white, and white balance can make white more bluish or red. Now, in our camera, there's three main groups of white balance that exists, which is auto, preset and manual. Basically, in automatic mode, you basically let the camera take care of it for you automatically. In presets, there's an amount of preset based on the situation according to the description that has been given by the manufacturer of the camera. In manual, we actually choose a nominal value according to the available option based on something called Kelvin. Now, in auto, of course, the option being auto, there's usually AWB or Auto. And in preset, there's Tungsten, Florsen, Daylight, Underwater, cloudy and Shade. And of course, these are names of lights. Of course, also names of condition like Underwater, Cloudy and Shade. But in Manual, there's Kelvin. Calvin is just a name of a person who invented this nominal, right? And it basically is a measuring unit of light temperature. Now, when it comes to Kelvin, the problem with this is that I often find my student tend to be a little bit flip flop when it comes to understanding this. The reason for that is because the lower value it is, the colder it is, but our humans, our humanizes, are actually seeing the light as reddish. But when it's actually hotter, is actually bluish, as you can see on the chart here, with the fire on your stove are actually bluish if you do notice. But in something like campfires, you would see the flame to be red. Now, this is because the flame on the campfires are actually a lot colder, even though it's red, right? And The ones in the stove are actually blue because it is actually hotter. Now, the basic sense is that you would actually cook a lot faster if you are actually cooking it with a stove or, you know, cooking your meals. And this can be a little bit confusing when it comes to imaging. So just just hang on tight, make sure that when you see a bluish light, right, it can actually mean that it is a hotter temperature, so you want to crank up your light temperature on your white balance if you see a bluish white. Even though even though you're seeing it like white, but the camera is a little bit less sophisticated than the eye. So yeah, just crank it up or crank it down. Now, the way we do this is either we remember the presets of each light, like the ones here, like candle, Tungsten, flucen, daylight, shade, and Cloudy. I usually typically remember only tungsten, flusen, daylight and shade. The rest I don't really remember. I just do it like this, right? So you have the white balance of your light in the middle, and then you have the correct image at the top. And you also have the white balance that you sat on your camera at the bottom. If you would get the same white balance on the image, right, you would actually get the correct image, just like so. However, if your camera is lower than the actual white balance of the light, you would get something a little bit more blush. So you make a cross like that, right? And also, you can actually do the opposite as well. So if your camera is a lot higher than the light white balance, you would get a reddish picture. Now, it is also true. So and vice versa. So let's just say that you have a reddish kind of like white, then, yeah, you're a bit too high. And if if and if your picture is bluish, you have a slightly low white balance that is set on your camera in compared with the light that you are currently using. Course, you can actually make effects such as using false white balance. In here, we're actually using the white balance of 3,200 on the camera. And the front light that is lighting up the couple here at the front is changed with a gel to be 3,200. So that means we are leaving the sky to be 5,600, which is a lot higher in comparison with the camera. Now, this effect gets used a lot when we are using the technique called day to night, and we're basically turning daylight or broad daylight into night time. So that will be it for this lesson, and let's continue on with the exercise. Shall we? 18. 18 - White Balance Exercise: This time in this exercise, we're going to talk about white balances and how to change them. Now, in most cases, all of the cameras out there, including your mobile phone and your pocket cameras, and even your professional camera has a white balance setting. Now, just like we previously mentioned, they all come in three different group, which is called Auto preset and Manual. Since we are in daylight at the moment, we want to use the daylight balance as I'm going to actually take a picture of this park surrounding this parking area. Now, I'm just going to set my white balance from auto white balance, AWB into daylight. Now, I'm just going to take a shot right here. So we actually got the correct white balance for this daylight settings or sunshine in the middle of the day. Now, what usually happen is that when you are actually doing manual, you often get into problems like when the scenes are too blue or either too red. When we get to a scene, we don't actually know what kind of white balance we actually have, and we actually want to identify it if it's too red ish. That means the camera is a lot higher than the needed white balance. And vice versa, if we actually getting the image too bluish, we are actually using the white balance too low. So I'm just going to use the lower white balance right now, so we're just going to go to Kelvin, and then we're going to go to Kelvin 3,300. I'm going to take a picture. All right, and it's going to be a bit bluish, and I'm going to change the Kelvin again 8,000 this time. Be daylight is 5,600, and I'm just going to take a picture bang. It's going to be a lot redder. It's going to be a lot more orange because the Kalvin itself is too high in comparison with the sunlight. Now, you can actually use white balance to your advantage depending on how you want to use it. A lot of people actually in the filmmaking industry, they actually use a lower white balance to actually make day to night. So let's just say, I want to take the scenery and turn it into night scene. So I'm just going to under expose it by a lot, right? So I'm just going to put this on minus three, right? And then I'm just going to change the white balance to Tungsten, which is incandescent, which is obviously 3,200, and I'm just going to take a picture again, and it looks like it's going to be like moonlight. Although it's not moonlit. So it's going to be really bluish. It's going to look like it's almost dawn or even like in the middle of the night. And this is how cinematographers use these kind of techniques to actually fool you into thinking that this is actually nighttime. So hopefully, you get to exercise a bit and see in the next lesson. 19. 19 - Basic Composition: Composition can be really powerful in photography and videography because it's not just all about perspective. It's not just about making an image looks good, but it can also tell the story very, very differently with different angles and also different perspective. Now, when it comes to my composition right now, because I'm on a wide setting, it's generally be It's generally going to feel like I'm inside my own studio, and it has a different feel to it. And it actually tells a different story. When it comes to the close up, however, I'm actually trying to emphasize me and the background here, having the condition that, Hey, you know what? I'm powering up your idea. So because I'm actually limiting a lot of information out in the image, the story, the feeling, and the information differs a lot, a lot more, okay? Usually, when it comes to composition in photography or ideography, people tend to explain it with the rules first. But I really want to explain in a very different way where the word composition really comes from is just basically composed of. So, let's just say that we have a picture of a spaghetti, right? The spaghetti itself is composed of pasta, meatball, tomato sauce, and basil. But since this is a meat spaghetti, would it be okay to put a fish in there or even a dead fish? Not really, right? So, we want to say, that composition is just basically what your picture consists of inside the frame. Now, composition itself inside the frame can be anything. Now, let's just go back to that spaghetti example, right? So first, we have a spaghetti. And then apparently, we have a fish on top, so this is a spaghetti meatball with fish on top of it. And apparently, it's a dead fish, so it's a stinky dead fish spaghetti meatball, which has a different feeling towards what you're looking at. So it's got to do with that emotion, it's got to do with information, and it's got to do what we are seeing currently, right? But let's just say that the composition now has become, Hey, someone is being served a spaghetti meatball with a dead fish on top. This, in turn, will create a different feeling and a different emotion, of course, when it comes to the image itself. Thing with imaging is that content will be equal to information and information will be equal to emotion and emotion will be equal to perception. So whatever you put inside this frame or the picture itself, you really need to choose wisely, what should be in the picture, and what shouldn't be inside the picture. So let's just go through that picture once again. So let's just say that this time, I'm actually more focused or more zoomed in towards the fish, even though that exists, someone sitting right next to it, the information will only apply towards the dead fish spaghetti, right? Now, we are actually reframing our camera. Now we're actually taking a picture of Bob. Now Bob has become the subject, and the dead spaghetti fish does not really matters anymore in this picture, because it just has a different information. But we can actually start asking question, what is Bob doing in this picture? Because no other information is actually included in this composition. We could also go down, and we start to wonder, what this picture is all about. But apparently, Bob is eating dead fish spaghetti meatball on top of Mount Everest, and we did not know because there's a lack of information inside the picture. This is why we really need to choose our composition really wisely. Now, when it comes to perspective, we can also turn around and see it from the other side. But because we are seeing it from the other side, the dead fish is now less seen, and the information itself can be a little bit different when it comes to what we are looking, because it is less seen, so therefore, the information is less, and there will be less perception. So we can say that when it comes to composition, We can make an illusion happen. Now we're going to start talk about the rules. When it comes to the rules, there's just too many of them out there, but I want you to know five of the most common rules that I do use myself. And they are Rule thirds, center framing, negative space, and leading lines, which can also be sometimes the same with forse perspective. When it comes to composition, there's always lines that are forming inside the picture, and there is always a hot spot that people generally tend to see because of these lines meeting with the other horizontal or diagonal lines. And we can actually put stuff inside the hot spots or we can put lines on one of these horizontal or vertical lines to actually make the image more appealing. We can also use center, which is generally just putting stuff in the middle, generating a perception that hey, this is the most important topic of the image. We can also put framing inside a frame. Basically, a photography or video is a frame, and we can actually deliberately put a frame inside these frames, creating a very hot zone or an area that is perceived to be important. Now, negative space gets used a lot to depict the environment around the subject. However, negative space can also be used when we want to input a lot of text inside our photos. So just bear in mind that having enough space for a background will actually tell more information about the subject. Leading line, usually lines that are being formed around the environment will generally make the eye lead towards something. So it can be used with So it can also be used with forced perspective where there is a line forming a perspective, sort of like going inside an object or a subject. But usually, we can actually get this effect when we have a hallway or anything that is very long, and we can use a telephoto lens to create this perspective. So those are some of the basics of compositions. Let's move on with the exercise. Shall we? 20. 20 - Compose & Recompose: So now we've come to this exercise of composition. Now, I've explained to you before that composition involves a lot of rules like rule of thirds, center, yada, yada, whatsoever. However, what I really want you to focus on in composition is how the image gets done and what is inside the image and what is not inside the image. And it also involves a lot with zooming in and zooming out, and of course, composed recompose. You got to move a lot of the time, so you can't just stay still in one position. You got to move up, down left and right, and really depending on how you want to take the picture. Everything will change when it comes to the context, when it comes to information, when it comes to the look and feel, et cetera, right? So I'm just going to go and turn this camera around, and I'll get you to see what kind of picture we are actually getting when we actually move around. So I'm just going to take a picture of my camera right here, and we're going to go from above, mid level and lower level, and you can see almost the difference when it comes to changing perspective at all the time. So I'm just going to take a picture of this from high above. Okay. And then I'm going to take a picture here. I'm going to take a picture like this. Okay. We're gonna pan. The side. Now, since I'm on the other side of now since I'm on the other side, it's going to look a lot different. So the context of the image itself is very, very different. Now, I'm just going to go in and take the picture. Now, as you can see, there's going to be a car at the back, there's going to be different kind of, like lighting as well. And of course, the scenery is a lot different in comparison to before. And of course, you got to move around. You got to look at your background. This is a reminder when talking about composition, every time you recompose your shot, always make sure you also adjust your exposure settings accordingly, or you would get a result like this. So, of course, you're going to need to look at your background, you're going to need to look at your subject. Of course, the higher the subject is, you're going to need to actually level up with their eye level. Of course, this is why I'm squatting down, right? So when I'm actually at the eye level, it is actually desirable, and you often quite see the image as the same level as you. And when I'm below, it's actually going to be a lot lower perspective. So it's like looking down on a child, and when I'm higher, it's going to be like you looking up. So Just a tiny bit bit of movement left and right, up and down is going to change the image by a lot. All right? So we're going to move away to the next lesson. Bye bye. 21. 21 - Focus Mode: Now, if you get your focus wrong, you might have the wrong context of the image, and you want to avoid this at all costs unless it is intentional, like this video. This lesson, we're going to talk all about focus and white matters. So first of all, you actually have a choice where to focus on, depending on your context, right? So a lot of the time, when we're actually taking pictures, we actually need to select, which are the subject, especially when it comes to shallow depo field. It really matters which one you choose. And the ones that are in focus are generally to be called the subject. Now, let's just say that we have the camera, flower, diamond, and the background the mountain. So we have the foreground, subject and background. Now, we actually are in focus right now for three of them. But as we move the focus forward, we are actually not focusing on the background. And so forth, when we are actually moving the focus further away, the ones that are in the foregrounds are not actually in focus. Now, the question that you should be asking when we're dealing with focus is that, will the subject move or stay, or will you, the photographer move or stay or both? Now, it is crucial to know that inside our camera, there are multiple focus modes that we can choose, either single, continuous, hybrid or even manual, like the ones that I use for my camera. Now, inside our camera photography cameras, usually, we have the single focus mode, which actually tries to find the focus once you half press your shutter button halfway through the shutm. Now, usually, you can find your focus by pressing your shutter button halfway on your shutter button. And this will actually find your focus depending on the zones and depending on your modes as well. And if you're on continuous focus, when you're actually halfway, it keeps continually trying to always find focus for you. And this is really helpful when there's moving subject or when you're moving inside the vehicle and or running, depending on the situation. So it's really good for let's say sports or wedding, et cetera. Now, single focus might help you when it comes to doing product photography or things that are just not moving, and the camera just simply doesn't move at all. But a lot of the time, they find the focus first using the camera's help or intuition, and then they manually refocus using the manual focus ring. Now, of course, there's also manual focus like the ones that I'm using on my video camera right here. And it really helps when the movement of the subject is never moving at all. And you don't want it to kind of, like, refocus all the time when you're recording or even stationary when you're doing photography. So now, let's get on with the exercise for focus mode, shall we? 22. 22 - Focus Mode Exercise: So now we're going to talk about focus mode for those of you who are new, don't worry about this device right here, it's basically going to record what I can see inside my camera, and you can see all of the menus that I'm actually fiddling with my camera. Now I'm going to actually shoot the camera again. So we're going to go here. Now single will actually get you a single point. Now once you half press, we'll actually stay locked there, right? So it doesn't move anywhere else again. Now, if we actually change this one to AFA, which is automatic. Of course, it's going to relock itself again once you get to somewhere else. So it's automatic, and then it's going to keep finding the scene around you, and it'll just keep on doing that. Now, of course, you can actually do this with other stuff as well, like AFC and DMF, and manual focus. Now, manual focus, you're going to need to use the lens, and it's going to actually help me with the Zoom as well. So this is built in, and once you find no focus, then you can take your picture, and then it will be done. For those of you who are actually doing this inside a mobile phone, of course, you need to tap on your screen on whichever zone that you actually want to select as the focus if you're actually taking a picture of somebody, you would actually need to tap on their eye or their face. Now, for pocket cameras, of course, there's also this kind of like focus modes as well. If they're not available, you can always use other focus modes just depending on your situations. Now, for those of you who doesn't actually have focus modes that can help you. Let's just say manual focus mode, things like that. And you actually need to shoot to a certain distance. Let's just say something like my camera right here. I need you to find a distance that is equivalent towards the subject that you're looking for. So, for instance, in my case, it's going to be this ground right here, so I'm just going to turn this into single focus again, I'm going to find the focus here. And then I'm going to recompose to my camera and then take the shot. Now, it's going to be pretty perfect when it comes to the focus, not just because I'm actually using deeper dep of fields. I'm also using the distance and the focus point that is closer to the distance within the intended subject. Now, of course, you also need to switch around depending on what you do need. If the subject is moving in and away from you. Of course, you're going to need to be in auto mode I really like to use single mode a lot of the time before I actually get into the shot. But of course, if it's a moving object, I get into auto focus continuous straightaway from the get go. See again in the next lesson. 23. 23 - Focus Zones: Now, this one is important because sometimes when you take pictures, you actually have typical spots where you want to search for focus four. And sometimes things can get in the way when you're actually using automatic modes or a very wide zone. So, let's say, for example, in this picture, you are actually looking for me. But since there are also other images on the back, it might look for images other than me. So zones are really important if you want to nail your focus depending on your framing all the time. Now, for focused zones in our camera, we actually have a few ones that we can actually look for. Usually, in general, there's white, medium, small spot, and track. The thing with white, it usually covers big area, medium, some area, and it gets smaller and smaller until you get to a point where nowadays, cameras can actually track something within the frame. Now, the problem with this is that as wide as you go, sometimes wider areas look for areas that might not be suitable or the exact subject that you are looking for. So it might actually look on this side instead of on the subject. Now, when it comes to medium, you can actually select zones like these as well. And there are smaller spots and smaller and smaller zones that you can choose from within your camera. I like to use the spot better because it actually pinpoint a lot of the subjects that you try to find. And usually it's really helpful when it comes to searching for eyes and et cetera. As well, when you actually take pictures, you usually use a composition rule such as Role thirds. Now, you can actually put the spot on a single spot near where the hot spots are, and you can actually find those spots to be focused on when you're actually using spot focus zones. You can always track as well. So let's just say that the subject moves, and the tracking of these focus zones will actually help you to keep track within the subject to stay in focus. And this can be really helpful if the subject is moving away from you or coming into you, but tracking can be a little bit tricky when it comes to multiple subjects inside the frame. And just something extra when it comes to focus is Ashley has two different methodology when it comes to searching for focus. First one is being face detection. And the second one is contrast detection. And usually, the first one will actually be more useful when it comes to fast moving subjects, and contrast detection will be helpful when it comes to non moving and contrasty objects that appears to have more contrast with colors and also brightness. So the cameras that we are using, such as our mobile phones are mainly using contrast detection. Now, this is Why? A lot of the time when you're actually against a background, let's say, like a dark background like me, it is a lot harder to find focus because there's not a lot of contrast in between me and the background. And thus making automatic focus seems to be a lot harder. And that's why we need to be in manual mode. So, let's get to the exercise again. Shall we? 24. 24 - Focus Zones Exercise: Now, we've talked about focus mode, but we haven't really talked about focus zone. Now, focus zones will actually help you determine which subject you actually want to stay in focus or which area you actually want to stay focused. In general, most of the time, your camera will actually be set on a white zone. If you actually see it here, we are actually on the white zone at the moment, so the focus area is on white. And as you can see, sometimes it may struggle to find which one we actually want to shoot either the car or the camera, the car, or the camera, and it gets really hard. Now, we actually need to determine which area we want to shoot in. So, we're going to go with a smaller zone. Let's just say this is the center. Now we can actually set this at the center or that at the center. Now we actually have other places as well like this zones. And we can actually move the zones towards where we actually want it to be. So we can actually put it back to the center or left, right? And it's still struggling a little bit because the car is still on the zone. But if we're going to move here, it's going to find the camera. It's going to find the car. It's going to try to find the camera again, and still struggling because the area is still quite wide. We're going to make it a lot smaller as well. We're going to choose a flexible spot, and we're going to use this. And of course, it's going to lock on all the time. We're going to move again, recompose. It's gonna keep on locking again. It's going to lock. It's going to lock. It's gonna lock. It's gonna lock. Now, this is really helpful for those of you who are actually want to shoot in a rule of that kind of like composition where you actually have a hot spot on the top left. So let's just say, we are actually going to put the flexible focus spot right here, right where the hot spots are. And then we're going to recompose, and we're going to shoot this and bang. Now, this is really helpful for those of you who actually want to shoot a certain spot, and there's a lot of background, there's a lot of noise, and the camera sometimes struggles a lot when it comes to finding focus for you. Now, you're going to need to be able to do this manual or even force kind of like manual override to your camera, so you can do this more sick. So you can do this much more effectively and efficiently. So the key here is to not go to white depending on how you want this. So the key here is never really go to white on your auto focus, as the camera really struggles to find a focus zone that you actually want. Or if you're actually using a mobile phone, just simply tap on the area that you wish to be in focus, and that will be your zone. There's no such thing as a white zone usually camera like mobile phone, auto focuses on a certain spot first, and it's usually on the wider area before you actually get into a smaller area when you actually tap on the screen. All right. Let's move on to the next lesson. 25. 25 - Changing Focus Exercise: Now, in this exercise, I want you to imagine the scenes that would actually involve you to change your focus a lot. Let's just say you're shooting a stationary object, you're on a tripod, and nothing moves around. What kind of focus would you actually need for that? Now, post this video for a moment, and I want you to look at your own camera to find which focus modes and zone is appropriate for a non moving object like this. The object is moving, but you're not moving, you're shooting something like a spot. You as the photographer, is not moving, but the subject is moving in and away from you. Now, what kind of focus would you need for this kind of situation? Now, what do you think you will set for this scenario where the subject is moving? Now, the third situation would be, there is a movement in you as the photographer, and also the movement of the subject. Let's just say you're inside a vehicle, and the subject itself is running around, let's just say a wild animal. What kind of focus would you need and what kind of composition would you need? So because you actually need to cater where the focus zones are supposed to be. Now, because this will actually depict on how accurate the focus will be in focus. Again, same with the previous, but this time, everything is moving. What kind of focus settings would you need to set? Now, of course, there's technology, there's better focusing, but I don't want you as the photographer to just depend on the technology as this leaves a lot of room and gap for errors. Now, this is where photographers need to be skilled in their camera handling, and of course, this is one of the key skills that you need to master because you need to be able to change focus modes and zones on the fly. The other trend that also happens within cameras like these is the face, auto focus function. Now, it is magical when there's actually only one person inside the picture, but trust me, if you're doing group shots where there's actually multiple layers of people, and there's plenty of paces. You don't want to trust this technology. You want to trust yourself as the photographer to actually set the depth of field and set the focus and nail it so that all of the faces that are supposed to be within the pictures are always sharp, no matter what kind of groups they are. So hopefully, folks, that helps, let's move on without a lesson, shall we? 26. 26 - Editing Basics: Now, in this lesson, we're going to talk about editing, and why editing can be important and also why it can also be neglected at some point. But in this lesson, we're going to talk about three main editing techniques. You will learn on how to crop your image to match your composition, color, correct your image, so it matches towards your style. And then we will add elements into it, such as texts or even frames. So, in theory, the reason why we edit is that we want to crop or recompose to what we actually need in our image, such as when we see this image,'s say we want to crop to where the person is still eating, and we don't want the whole mountain. We can do that straightaway in our editing. And of course, we can also do other things such as editing the whole look and feel. Let's say you want it to be more cold or even to be much warmer or even bold or muted, really depending on how you want this to be. And then you can also add elements like I've said, like, let's say we want to add a heart or even add text inside our image. Now, with those three things in mind, let's move on with the exercise. Shall we? 27. 27 - Crop Color Element: In this lesson, we're going to do all about cropping an image, correcting the color of an image and also adding elements to a picture that we have taken before like this one. So as you can see in this picture, the horizon is a little bit crooked, and the color is a bit muted, of course, and it's a little bit over exposed. We're going to add some elements to it, and we're going to put my name into this and let's go on to photo, and we're also going to do the same in C anva as well. So we are now in photoshop, and we are actually going to first crop this image, okay before we actually do the coloring and add elements into this picture. Okay? We're going to do it later again in Canva, but this time we're going to do it in photoshop first. So first of all, we want to transform the one here. Follow along here first. So we can do transform and We can actually set this to be like this, so it can be more tilted. Now, in photoshop, it is fortunate that we can actually have this tool such as the grids, so we can go to guide new guide layout. And this will act as if there is a rule third inside our image. Now, I'm going to try and crop the image again, right? I'm going to enlarge it. And then I'm going to set the horizon space according to the rule of third here, a. And also, I'm going to put the picture of the tree here according to the line, so it looks a little bit better, and then we'll just follow along there. Okay? So we're going to click Enter, and we'll have that as our first crop. Now, we actually want to adjust this image with a bolt look first. Okay? So we can actually go to filter camera row filter. I love camera filters in photoshop. And as you can see, the histogram is a little bit more towards the middle. So we kind of mean that we need to adjust the exposure a little bit, and then we're going to need to drag the shadow a little bit. And then we're going to need to increase the contrast. Now, as you can see, the histogram goes spread a bit more, and this will actually increase the difference between the dark areas and also the light areas. Okay? Now, we're going to increase the saturation. So we can increase two, such as to vibrant and the saturation of the image. We don't want it to be over saturated. So when we oversaturate an image, it doesn't look as good as when we just give it a little bit of a kick. And then, photoshop actually has a very advanced function such as the color mixer, we can actually go to this one on the color mixer, and we can put on saturation. Let's just say we want to have the red a little bit more popping out, the green and the yellow also pop out a bit more. So the grass and the leaves actually pops out a little bit more. And we actually want to put the red on aluminums, a? So if we actually can do the red a little bit more dark or a little bit more light. We can actually put it a little bit more lighter, and then put the grass a little bit more darker to give it a little bit more of a kick. Okay? So I kind of like that, and we'll set that as our bolt look. Now, we're going to do our muted look, okay? So we're going to duplicate that. And then this time, we're going to use a different look. So we've nailed our exposure with il a contrast, but this time we want it to be less contrasty to get a muted look, you want to lift your black a little bit. So you're actually pushing up. So there's less black that is visible. So you don't want to push it too far, but you want to push it up again, so it actually has a little bit more mute. Now, because this image on the first place has already been over exposed, we can actually have a little bit much more easier when it comes to the muted look. Now, the vibrant, we can actually reduce it a little bit more. Okay, we can reduce the saturation to minus this time, and then with the color mixer to, we actually want to reset everything, so we can just reset, reset can double click it and reset on saturation, et cetera. We can even decrease the saturation a little bit. Okay? So that's the muted look and the bolt look at the back. And now, we're going to add some elements here. Let's just say a text. We're going to click the text toolbox, text tool. And then we're just going to add my name here, k? You can increase the size. And as you can see, with pictures, sometimes you need a little bit more of an empty space where you can put pictures or other elements or even texts inside. And it's a good idea to actually think in the first place where you're going to put these elements inside the picture. Now, I only have space here where we can put a white text on top because this part of the background is actually more darker in comparison with the other places. So we can actually put it here down here. Now we can add more Stroke to increase the visibility of this text or we can actually add go we go layer. We can add drop shadow to actually increase the feasibility of this text because we're actually adding more dark areas behind the text. Okay? When it comes to editing, there's other suites such as Canvas, snap set, and they have a pretty common work flow when it comes to editing images like this, especially with cropping and editing colors and also adding elements. However, some tools might be limited when it comes to a more advanced tool such as grids, and some Tools may not have them just so you know. So we're going to go to Canva. Okay? So I've already uploaded the same image. We're going to put the same image, and then we're going to crop. However, because as you can see, I don't actually have settings that I can use, okay, to actually use it to have grids. I have no other choice when it comes to this. We can go rule of third. We can try a rule of thirds. Okay. Then we're going to add this one. We're going to add rule of thirds here. As our fake rule of thirds. Then we're going to position itself on back, and then we can actually lock it. And then we can do opacity at the front. Now, we can start to use this tool to actually do our editing. So we want to rotate this a little bit, so it is a little bit more straight. And then we want to use the Rule of third kind of like editing style. Okay. So we've done pretty much the same. So we're just going to go this, and then we're going to increase the opacity, so it doesn't show up. And then we're going to go to edit image, adjust select area, the whole image. As you can see, some of these sliders are pretty much the same like the ones that we have in photoshop. We can increase the contrast, we can reduce the highlights, the blacks needs to be reduced a little bit, but sometimes it's a little bit edgy when it comes to some of these tools. It may not look the same, but you can do pretty similar things when it comes to editing color. Now, that's the bolt look, and you can actually reduce the vibrans, and also the saturation to get a similar look. You can also reduce contrast to have a lesser muted look. And there you go. You have your muted look and your bolt. And you can also add elements, as well. So what I really like about this is the fact that you can add elements that is available in the market already. So we just want to go for a logo. Let's just go for a gimmick logo, right? And then let's just say we want to give it a shadow. Okay, shadow We're going to go for drop, and pretty much the same, using two different tools. So that's it for this lesson. Play around with the tools that you have, and I'm sure you actually have those tools that you need to do this exercise. All right? I'll see you again in the next lesson. 28. 28 - Combining Altogether: Now, as I've said in the beginning, we need to have an approach of photography as a whole process, not just capture. So we actually plan, capture and edit in mind before we actually do any kind of photography. Now, having a crop in mind, you can actually plan to have something like this, let's say, for instance, angle B, and also angle A within your perspective. Can also crop and recompose on how you want your image to be according to your composition or rules or where you want the subject to be in. Of course, if the color and the styles don't match to what your style, you can always edit in the end, not just in camera. So it's actually very crucial and important for you to know on how to capture correctly first in camera, so you don't have to do an extensive editing or you can actually apply your editing and styling to your capture, which is kind of back and forth, and you will get this much later on as you progress to your photography journey. So I do recommend for you to reiterate the whole process as much as possible so you can get used this whole process of photography. So with this in mind, we're going to close this class with a project that you can do on your own. And you can basically take a manual exposed picture from either your phone or your DSLR. But what you have to keep in mind is the end product where it's going to belong in. It's either Instagram, Is it going to be digital publishing or printing? It's really up to you, but you need to match your photo with the existing platform that you wish to post on. You may use any editing software as you like as this project requires you very minimal editing, and it's just basically as we want to progress more in the photography first, but not forgetting about the edit. 29. 29 - Prep Capture Publish: Welcome to Prep Capture and publish. In this lesson, we're going to talk all about how we're going to apply what we've learned so far, including the whole process, and also how I've taken the pictures from the Torchlight photography, and I'm going to edit them in photoshop and then make it ready for publication in Instagram as a square post. Now, if we actually look here, we actually have three different images that we've already taken so far. So we have the first one, second one, and third one. Now, we're going to put them all in photoshop, so we're going to do our first one right here. Just going to go click and drag, Pless enter. Click and Drag, plesenter. Click and dg, press enter. Now, they're all perfectly aligned images. And all we need to do in this photoshop is a little bit of magic called Blend Mode. Over here, there's Blend mode, and then we're going to choose lighten at the top. And then we're going to choose lighten again at the top. Walla, and we are pretty much done when it comes to our editing, okay? But we need to remove the camera at the back because We don't want that to be in there. So now we're going to flatten our image as a top layer. And then we're going to go do our selection. We're just going to go with object selection tool, okay, this time. So we are pretty much done with that. We want to select that and the carpet, but we don't want to select the risk. So we go to select inverse, and then we have the inverse of that. And we're going to go grab our brush, select size, k. Now we're just going to go with black, okay? So we're just going to paint over it, like, making it disappear, do a bit of a photoshop magic here. And a. So now, we're actually going to need to use our grid first, okay? But this time we can actually use our crop tool. Which can show our grids, okay? So we're going to have al thirds, and then we're going to have content ware fill if we are actually cropping it a little bit more further because this time we want it to be a bit straight, okay? We want it to be a bit larger. Now as you can see at the bottom here, there's more places where we can actually grow. So once we press enter, photoshop is actually going to fill that in for you. Okay? All right. Now that is actually ready for publication. So please do your own version of this, see what you can do, and let's move on with the lesson. 30. 30 - Closing Remark: So now we are finally at the end of our class, and thank you so much for watching until the end. My name is Edwin Offendi. You can always follow me on my social, which is always at Ed Ed Offendi, which is available here. And I'll see you again in my next future classes. Bye bye.