Fast Photography Mastery: ISO, Aperture & Shutter Made Simple

1. Welcome! Start here: What if you could finally take control of your camera? I capture photos you are proud to share in just a few hours. Whether you should a di CLR, a mirrorless camera or even a phone, the principles of great photography never change. Welcome to the Fast Photography Mastery. This course works you step by step through everything you need to know, from exposure triangle to composition, light, editing, and master manual mode with ease. Stop relying on auto and understand exactly what every setting does. And it's not just theory. You'll get hands on practice, real world prompts, and personal mini projects to apply what you learned right away. I've condensed over ten years of photography experience into the single course, so we can avoid wasting time and create powerful artistic images. At the end, you'll know how to shoot portraits, street photos, nature, events, and even mobile photography that looks like DSLR. And if you're looking to build a portfolio or earn income from photography, we'll cover that, too. In this class, you'll go from mature beginner to confident photographer, no matter what camera you use. You'll also get hands on practice projects, cheat eets and tools to support your progress. I recommend watching videos and audio because every lesson builds into the previous one. Control the volume and the playback speed of every video to learn at your own pace. If you get stuck having questions, be sure to drop them in the Q&A section below. Just make sure to check the existing questions first because there's a good chance that the question you want to ask has already been answered in detail. At some point, you'll be asked to leave review. Please wait until you've had a chance to really experience the material. Your feedback, helps me improve the course and better serve you refugee students. Thanks again for joining this class. Let's dive in and start creating photos you are proud of. 2. Photography Basics Explained: ISO, Aperture & Shutter Speed: Let's begin by talking what is photography in one sentence? It's the process of creating an image by capturing light. We'll talk about the brief history of photography and how it's all done technically in a couple of videos. But first, in order to capture light, we need to learn three different settings. Of course, we can use the auto mode, which is going to be the green button here, but we are going to focus on the manual mode, which is going to be this button. And your camera it might be slightly different. But in anyway, instead of going into auto, we'll go into fully manual. And if I turn on the camera, we'll see the three characteristics here at the top. The shutter speed, the aperture, and the eye soap. Now, these three create a very important triangle. It's similar to cooking where you have to balance the flavors, for example, the salt, the peppers, the acidity, the sweetness of something, then you have to also put it in the pan and cook it. We have more than triangle there, but we have our triangle here that we will have to lower and balance. When you hear it for the first time, I can totally understand that a little bit overwhelming. But once you learn the basics, it's going to be super easy. If short, all three of these are responsible for how bright or how dark the image is. Aperture is responsible for the blurriness of the background or the foreground. The shutter speed is responsible for motion blur. You choose your moving subject to be super sharp or slightly blurry. And the eye is responsible for the sensitivity of the sensor. In order to create the balanced image will influence all three of these. If you have any questions, let me know. Other than that, I'll see you in the next video. 3. Quick Camera Setup: Start Shooting in Just 60 Seconds: Now a lot of the people when they hear aperture, shutter speed, ISO, they get the settings paralysis, and we don't want that to happen to you. So for now, and for the first practice, instead of going into Manu, we'll go back to auto. And therefore, you will not have this paralysis. In the couple of videos boomster shutter speed, ISO, and aperture, but for now, don't get scared. Whether you're using a phone or you're using a dieselar camera, have everything on auto and take the pictures. If you have any questions, let me know and that's see the next video. 4. DSLR vs Mirrorless vs Phone: Which Camera Should You Use?: Welcome. In this video, let's talk about the camera types comparison, identify which camera you use and which camera you should use. Long story short. All the cameras nowadays are so great that you can take great pictures with any camera, but it's good to walk through the difference and to understand the difference. So let's begin by talking about the DSLR, which is a digital single lens reflex. It uses a mirror and an optical viewfinder. As we can see from the image, especially if we zoom in, we can see that there is a mirror. This mirror allows us to see through the viewfinder in real time. So through the viewfinder, we can actually see the real life reflection. Typically, these cameras are bulkier. They have a longer battery life, great lens ecosystem, and it's excellent for learning the manual controls. Now, when it comes to DSLRs, there are two types of sensors. There's a fuller frame sensor and there's a crop sensor. And as we can see on the screen, this is the full sensor, and this is the crop sensor, the biggest difference between them is the size. And then because of the size, we have a couple things that we need to pay attention to. So as we can see here, the full frame sensory, it is larger, so it can capture more light. Better flow light photography, night photos can give a blurry background, a shallow depth of field or so called bouquet. It has a wider field of view, which means we can see more. And the reason for that is because it literally is bigger. This one is a little bit smaller. We can see less with this one. It is usually found in more advanced, more expensive cameras. So we're talking roughly, we're talking about cannons, like $700 just for the body of the camera. The crop sensor or so called APSC or Micro thirds, it is a smaller sensor, so it kind of zooms in, or it crops. So literally, if we were to overlay, we would crop the big sensor roughly like so. Well, it's great for telephoto shots because it crops, zooms in. It's a little bit worse with low light performance because it gets less light than the big sensor. It's usually lighter and cheaper, and it's absolutely great for beginners who want great quality but don't want huge costs. Different brands have different crop sensors. So we're talking about cannon, NicansnyFuji, et cetera. All of them have different crop sensors, but all of them have those. If we're talking about cannon, we're talking about 1.6 crop. So if we were to see an image here, which would be one, this one would be 1.6. We have to multiply every single image by 1.6. Basically, we need to crop it by 1.6, and we will see the difference between the crop and the full frame sensor. If we're talking about NicansniFuji, they have a 1.5 crop. For Panasonic limpus that would be Turks crop. And the idea stays the same. Full frame equals big sensor. Crop small center. And the biggest take is that both types can take amazing photos. Once again, the biggest difference is that this one has a bit more light. This one has less light. When it comes to, let's say, good lighting, the only difference between these two is that this one is going to be a little bit more cropped. That's it. So it's going to look as if it's a little bit zoomed in. Now, there are also mirorless cameras, which means that these cameras do not have a mirror. They use an electronic viewfinder or screen. We don't actually see the actual reflection through the viewfinder. We see a screen. So it's not natural what we see through the viewfinder. Usually, these are lighter and smaller in size. They have a faster auto focus. They have a silent shutter, and that's why they're better, better for video, and for pictures as well. If we're going for silent shutter, that's going to be very convenient in aage photography because we don't want to disturb the nature. It has a slightly shorter battery because it relies on electronics, and it is becoming new standard absolutely. When it comes to the smartphones, even though these take great pictures in comparison to DSLRs or mirrorless cameras, so in comparison to the big ones, these have such a tiny sensor that the pictures are definitely behind, especially if we are talking about the bouquet. It's very hard to get the blurry background to foreground with these phones because we don't have much space between the lens and the center. And that's the way we can create B. Although there are some advantages. It's always with you. You can still learn light and composition. If you're using the original apps, for example, iPhone is just a photo app on Android. It's also a photo app. If you're not using specific apps in order to control, for example, the aperture, the shutter speed, the ISO, the technical stuff, the technical settings, then you would not be able to control that. You need a separate app for that. And you will oftentimes find that it does do computational photography. The pictures that you take actually look slightly different from the ones that you've taken because there's some computational AI boosting results. But you can still use it, and we'll talk about that a little bit later. Then action cameras. Still a camera still has a sensor, but usually these ones are ultra white. So it's great for immersive shots. The older models do have a limited manual control. New ones do have a bit more control. It's not ideal for all types of photography because you only get a white shot. The quality is not the very best. Usually it's used for behind the scenes videos or time lapses. But still, you can take pictures with action cameras as well. And some final notes. Any camera that lets you control the exposure in the focus is good enough to learn with. The key is to master how to see the light, not to chase doesn't matter what kind of equipment you have. You have old cameras, you have new cameras, you have the most expensive cameras or the oldest, cheapest DSLRs or mirror less cameras or just an old phone, you can still learn to be a great photographer. It doesn't matter the gear. So if you have the questions, let me know. Other than that, let's jump into the next video. 5. Auto Mode Practice: Build Confidence with Simple Photo Prompts: In order to become great at anything, we need to take a look at some of the lessons from James Clear and this book called Atomic Habits. One of the ways to become better is Habi ton of practice. And one of my favorites graph from this book is 1% better every day will be equal to 37 times better by the end of the year. But if you become worse by 1%, you'll be almost equal to zero. So in order for you to become better, I recommend you to practice. The current goal is for you to become familiar and build comfort with your equipment. So here's a quick practice. Let's take four pictures. One portrait. Object picture, one indoor, and one outdoor. And when you take these pictures, think about the decisions that you make. Why did you choose to do that? Why did you choose to take a picture of that certain object? Why did you put your camera in this certain position? It's important to build vigilance so that you don't just flow with the river, but you understand every decision that you make. Once you do that, we'll jump into the brief history of photography. If you have any questions, let me know. Other than that, I'll see you in the next video. 6. Photography History: How Light Became Art: In this video let's talk about the brief history photography. The way taking pictures work is by having a light sensitive material. We have a little hole in between and we have the light that's coming into the hole. This light is projected onto the light sensitive material, and therefore we get the picture of light sensitive material. It's called a camera obscure. It's natural phenomenon in which light passes through a small hole of a dark chamber or box that will project an image of a scene outside the chamber or the box onto the surface opposite to the hole, resulting in an inverted, upside down or reverse projection of the view outside. Now, this little hole is called the aperture by making the aperture smaller, we can control the amount of light that passes onto the light sensitive material. Another important aspect is how long the light passes onto the light sensitive material because the longer the light shines onto the light sensitive material, the brighter the image will be. And the last time it does, the darker the image will be. And then I saw is basically how sensitive this material is. And I'd like to take a look at the first ever taken picture, which was taken in 18 39. Now, this picture seems empty. Aside from the person in bottom left corner, if we zoom in, we can see that the person is not clearly visible. A little bit blurry. And some of the other parts are a little bit blurry as well. And there's a good explanation because this picture wasn't instant. It took some time to take it. And all the people that were in this picture were moving. But because they were moving, they're not visible here. The only thing that's visible is the person who stood in the same place for a long time. So we can kind of see it if we zoom in onto the trees. The trees are a little bit blurry, as well. Kind of see the person who's cleaning the shoes of the person who's standing there. If we had other people standing there as well, then we'd be able to see them, too, but because they were moving, the reflection of their light wasn't projected to into the light sensitive material long enough, so that's why we cannot really see them. And it kind of helps us to understand, for example, if you want to take a picture of the sky, the night sky, if you want to take picture of the stars, because there's very little light, we need to put the camera for a long time. But if we put it for a long time, it means that we have to put it on tripod so that it doesn't move. Because if it does move, then we would not be able to see light because there wouldn't be enough time to get that light onto the light sensitive material or the sensor. Quite easy nowadays because we have the digital cameras. We have our phones. We have the sensor, and then we have light, hit the sensor, almost instantly. But before that, there were film cameras. And you know to take a picture with a film camera. It's a very similar process, but instead of the sensor, we had the film. When you're pressing a button, to take a picture, the shutter would open. So light would get onto the film. The film would get the light from the outside, and then it would close. After have to go into a very dark place because this film is still very sensitive to the light. And you have to go through a three step process of doing all sorts of chemicals and putting it together, then mixing that with the film so that you would get your film wet incomplete darkness so that there's no light at all. It's kind of an interesting process. Takes quite a lot of time, and it's not always precise. You can easily damage the film, and then you have to go and print that. It's a long process. Nowadays with the camera, once again, we have the sensor, and we have the shutter and we have light passing through the shutter, through the hole onto the sensor. It's almost instantly doesn't take a lot of time. And so that's the very great part about the digital cameras. In 2039, it will be 200 years since the first picture was taken. But the camera obscurity technique was actually developed a lot earlier, hundreds of years ago. If you have any questions, let me know. Other than that, I'll see you in the next video. 7. Camera Anatomy: How Your Gear Works: Welcome. In this, we want to talk about the camera anatomy, what the cameras usually consist of, what buttons exist, and how to use those. So first of all, usually with the cameras, with the big cameos, you have your body, and then you have the lens, and you can disconnect them by pressing the button. For example, on Cannon, like my version, you can press it here, but then on the other models or other brands, it's a similar button which we can just take off, and there you go. So we have the lens, and we have the body. For the body, as you can see, we have a mirror there because it's a DSLR. It uses a mirror in order to take a picture, but you want to make sure that this mirror stays clear because if you get something onto this mirror, it will reflect in the pictures because it's going to abstract it. So we have also different mounds. For example, on this camera, we have this red mound and we have the white mound. It's about the different lenses. And on the lenses, for example, on this one, we have this red button which you need to align here. And by that, you need to just screw it in, and that's it. It's going to. Stay in place. On a lot of the lenses, you have this wheel, which is going to help you zoom in and zoom out if you do it manually. But there's also this button called AA or MAP that's going to zoom in automatically or manually. Now, some of the cameras have the screen. It can be touchscreen, can be not touchscreen, but some cameras have a screen that's going to pop up like this, and you can use it in different locations. It depends on the camera. It's useful. A lot of the times, for example, if we get down on the knees and then I can kind of if I want to take a picture like this and I want to preview it, like so you can see that it's really useful because I'm looking at, at the top down view, and I can really, like, zoom in and see what I have in front of me. So this is very useful. Then we have our mode selector. We have the on and off button. We have a wheel. It's going to allow us to make our life a little bit easier if want to scroll, like, to the right or left. So it's kind of convenient. Then we have our viewfinder, which has this thing on top here. You don't necessarily have to have it. It's just something that's soft so that you don't bump your eye into it or something like that because this one is quite rigid. Then we have our flush, which is going to flush. Like so. We can close it. Usually there's a button on the side in order to open it, so just click on that button. That's it. Some cameras also have a display on top so that you don't have to look at this display here in order to put the settings in, and it shows you the ISO, shows you the aperture, the shutter speed. Then on the sides, usually have some sort of ports. So for example, here, I can connect the microphone and the headset in order to listen if we are recording the video. On this side, we can also connect it to the computer, although if you have an old connector like this camera, then it's not the very best basically with the new cameras, you can use the Type C with the old ones. You cannot use it, so it's not very convenient. At the bottom, we have our battery, which is kind of obvious, but then at the same time, we have the SSD drive, which we have to use in order to take pictures. Then we have the mount for the tripod. Literally, we just need to screw in, and then the camera is going to hold very well. Our shadow button, which is located here, this is in order to put, for example, the microphone, put this microphone that I'm recording with. So it has this thing here that I can just slide in, like, so that it's going to stick here. But we can also put an extra light on top, and then we can connect the light to the camera instead of using this built in light we'll be able to use a different light, which we'll talk about later about the different light options that you have. Then usually on the sides, there are these handles in order to put the rope through to get it, like, on your neck or on the shoulder. I don't like using it because most of the time it's just getting in my way, taking pictures or videos. So that's why I never keep it on. Although you can definitely put it in it's going to be convenient for some people, but definitely not for me, I just like to hold the camera in my hand, and it's the most convenient way for me. Some of the cameras have big attachments at the bottom, which would be a separate handle, which would make the camera square, and it would allow you to take pictures like this. And then if you switch, you can hold it like this, also, almost like horizontally. That's going to allow you to take vertical pictures. Those do come at an extra cost, and for some people, it's useful for some people not. I never purchased it because I always kind of liked this version. I mean, it's not a problem for me to take a picture like this instead of this. That's most of the cameras that's going to have 99% of the cameras are going to have all the stuff. Some of the cameras might have a couple of extra stuff. But if we're talking about the main usage, then that's 99% of what you will ever need. Actually, 99.9%. If at any point, you have any questions, be sure to reach out. Other than that. See you in the next video. 8. Essential Photography Equipment: Lenses, Tripods, Batteries & More: Welcome. In this video, and talk about the supporting equipment or the equipment that can help make your photography better. It's going to allow you to do more things, better things. And let's begin. The first one is going to be lenses. Lenses is a really, really good investment because they hold their value very good. That's in terms of the money. But the second thing is that it takes away the technical burden, and it allows you to really use your creativity to the maximum. So, for example, this is the lens that I got started with, and then I purchased this lens a year later with this lens because it has such a good aperture. I was able to get this very beautiful bucky in the background in the foreground. Lenses are super versatile. They're for absolutely different things. And depending on the type of camera you use, you'll have different lenses. There are even lenses for the phones. So lenses are always always a good investment. The second one is going to be separate batteries. I have this battery here, and then I have the second battery, which is the one in the camera. So two batteries. Before, I actually used to have two more batteries. These are official batteries from Cannon. But I also bought some batteries from another manufacturer. I don't remember their name, but it wasn't original, so it wasn't by Cannon. And Long story short, the original ones are definitely a lot better, so you should definitely get the original ones. These are a little bit more expensive. That are not original will also work. It's just not going to work as good or as long because after a couple of years, those became, they didn't hold the battery very well. But anyway, the second one is going to be the batteries because it's going to save you in many, many different situations. Next, are going to be lights. So we have this light here, which is very small, very versatile, very powerful. By the way, you'll have a PDF in the resources section with all the equipment so that you don't have to search for it, and I don't have to tell you the so, this is by GaxThi is by aperture, and then I have a very big soft box. These are used for different things, which I'll explain in a second. So first of all, like, for example, this very small one. The light from this one is very harsh. So we can kind of see a very oops, let me turn it like this. So we can kind of see very harsh shadow. Although with this one, it's not super harsh, but we can kind of see the shadow. However, from this very big one, if I put my arm here, you cannot really see the arm, right? It's very soft. We cannot see individual fingers almost. I mean, if I put it like this, then of course, we can see it. But if I keep a bit of a distance, then we cannot really see. It's super soft. This very big soft box, and these are called soft boxes for the reason because these are very soft. It's almost like a cloudy day. Was this one is a little bit more harsh. Specifically, this model, we have a light, right, where we can make it. W we can make it cold or we can set different colors, which is kind of useful as well. For example, like this, we can set all sorts of different colors, super useful. Then they have different modes. So that's going to be also useful for different applications, which would be like candle or fire or fireworks. Or police ambulance, things like that. Anyway, super useful, super great, very small. And the difference between these two, for example, is this one doesn't have colors. And for example, the Gax one, it has the battery inside of it's like a phone. But with this one, the battery is actually outside, so I can take the battery away. And if this one runs out of battery, it's a bit of a problem because I have to put the charger to it to like to the part, and then I have to charge it. But with this one, I can just swap the battery. It's going to be useful. But at the same time, this one also works from a cable. So from an extra charger, if I connect it turned on, this one is also a little bit soft because it has a soft plastic on top, like a filter. But if I take it away, it's going to be a lot harsh, harsher. And this is what it looks like super great, super convenient. Although I don't like the fact that it has the separate battery. I actually prefer it to be like this because I never had such long extreme shots that I ran out of battery for this one because this one holds, like, very long battery. And then the big one, obviously, it's huge, and that's the disadvantage of that. But it's really good. Has a very soft light, which is very bright at the same time, so it's super, super convenient. Then we also have tripods which actually have a huge one here, which records the top down shots, and for photography, can be very useful. So let me show it to you here. You can see it's giant. So I cannot even put it into the frame all the way because it's like 2 meters long. There you go. This is how we record the top down shots with this tripod, which is also very useful for a lot of photography, a lot of the times when you do especially the top down shots, although we can't really fit it here. It doesn't have enough space anywhere, I'll keep it. Little bit to the side, but you get the idea. We have different tripods. The tripods are extremely, extremely useful. There are small tripods. There's a tripod that I'm recording with right now. There's tripod that's holding the soft box. There's tripod that can hold these lights because these are very versatile as well. By the way, these lights as well as the camera, they have the mounts for the tripods. So you can mount it, and then this light, for example, has, like, the spin here. So you can put it like this, and then you can rotate it and put it in all the different positions. With this slide, you can see there are also mounds like here and here, super convenient. Pipod super useful, especially if you take pictures during the nighttime or when you take pictures of the waterfalls, for example, super, super important. And the last one is going to be a reflector. Reflectors look something like this. Reflector means exactly what it means. It's reflected. It reflects. For example, we have a cloudy day, but you only have this light with you. And it's not always the best, for example, to put it on this side of my face because the type of the light is different and we can really see that in the picture. So instead of having that, we can put a reflector over here to illuminate this side of my face. And you can kind of tell, like, for example, here, you can see that there is a reflection, which if I take it away, there's going to be none of that reflection over here. So this one reflects, and then it becomes very small. I got this one from Amazon very, very cheaply and then for less than 20 pounds, I believe. And we can also customize it. We can use it as a soft box as well. You can kind of see my hand. So it's going to really help. Want to use the light, the harsh light, put it here, and then it's going to become a soft box, right? Super great. And then we can also change the color from the gold one to the silver, I just wanted to quickly add that SSDs are also really important. Of course, it always depends on the budget, but the faster SSD can get, the better it's going to be. So, these are the tools that will really help you ton. The most expensive things here would be the lights and the tripods, although you can get started with the very cheap ones because I also have very cheap tripods. This very big one is super useful, but it's not always the case. For many years, I had very cheap plastic tripods that I still got a lot of great shots with. So once again, you can get the PDF with all the necessary equipment and the download loadable resources terms of the camera equipment is going to depend on the camera that you use, so I'm not going to include that. Add than that, go ahead and explore the PDF. If at any point, you have any questions, let me know. Add than that, see you in the next video. 9. Aperture Explained: Control Blur and Background Depth: In this video, we'll talk about the aperture. Once again, the aperture is what controls this blurry background or the foreground. This aperture is controlled with the lens. So if you want to get a specific aperture, then you will need to upgrade your lens. Usually, when it comes to lenses, the bigger the aperture. So the blurry the background can get, the more expensive the lenses are. And the aperture is measured in Fstops. So if I turn on the camera, so we can see this is the shutter speed. This is the aperture, and this is the ISO. And if I click here, I can click here or move with my finger, we can see that I can control it. And for example, in these lens, I have an F stop of 1.8, which means it's going to make a bigger aperture, and the background to the background is going to be blurrier. At the same time, I can set it to, for example, F 22, and it's not going to be blurry at all. Even if I set it to eight, there's going to be very little blurr. But the same time, we allow less light to pass through. And it's quite important because if there's less light, then we need to add more light through other properties, for example, shutter speed or the ISO. And so that's where this triangle balance will come in in the future. So you can see very big difference in the examples. The smaller the F stop, the blurrier it is. And the bigger the F stop, the less blurry it is. For example, for portraits, I would recommend using a wider aperture, Less F stops. Therefore, we'll make the background or the foreground blurrier. It's going to really isolate the subjects from the background or the foreground, for example, for landscape photography, it's not always the best case because you don't want certain parts to be out of focus. The reason you are taking pictures of landscape so that everything is a focus so that you can see the landscape. Although a lot of the stuff is personal taste, this artistry is all, so subjective. I'm going to tell you one thing, but then you will like the other thing, you'll do the other thing, you'll become great and famous for the other thing, and there's nothing bad with it. Overall, in photography, because we have frames, we are able to frame the picture or frame the story. Photography tells the story. By framing something, we're able to frame specific parts. And one of the components of telling that story is through aperture because you are able to isolate certain parts part. So aperture is very important for storytelling because we're able to tell the story with the aperture because we're able to isolate or put in focus certain things. And it's our decisions as photographers as to what kind of story do you want to tell? Do you want to keep that in the frame? Do you want to keep that in the frame in focus or out of focus? It's these little decisions that will shape the kind of photographer that you will become. But there's no right or wrong. There's just whatever you want to do, even if most people disagree and there's 0.001% of the people that will like your style. You might think such a small amount of people on the planet. But if we take that 0.001, and we multiply that by the amount of people that exists on the Earth, then that's going to be these many people. So that's quite a lot. So even if 99.999 9% of people disagree with you and don't like your style, there's still going to be this very little percentage of people that's going to love your style. So remember, aperture, aperture comes through your lens. You can see it says here, for example, can 50 millimeter, 1.8, 50 millimeter just shows how zoomed in the picture is, and the 1.8 shows the aperture. So remember, if you want to change the aperture, you can do it with lens or you can do it on your camera. It also influences how bright something is or how dark something is, and it really helps tell the story. If you have any questions, let me know. Other than that. I'll see you in the next video. 10. Shutter Speed: Freeze Action or Show Motion: In this video, let's talk about the shutter speed. The shutter speed is how long do we open the shutter and let the light in onto the sensor? That's all it is. We control here by going into the shutter speed, and you can see we have different shutter speeds. We can even set a shutter speed of 30 seconds. And whenever we get to, for example, 1/4, it shows 1 second divided by four. So that's going to be 0.25 seconds. Then when we go into 1/60, that's 1 second divided by 60. So that's how fast it's going to be. But then if we want, we can go into one or 4,000. So if we go into 1/4000, it's not even possible to see with an eye, like how fast the shutter speed opens up because it's just too fast for humans to see. But if we set, for example, to 1 second, we can definitely see it, even if we set it to, like, 1/4, which is going to be 0.25 seconds, we'll still be able to see it. Now, if we want to do sports photography, for example, it is extremely important so that we set our shutter speed higher, for example, to 1/200. And if we take a picture, the movement of our subjects is going to be sharp. But if we set it to, for example, like, 1/30, then the movement of our subject is going to be blurry. Now, also another important note is that if we set it to 1/30, it's going to let more light in than if we set it to 1/320 because the difference is ten times. We get ten times the light if we set it to 30/320. We can get to a point where the image is over exposed by having a very wide aperture and having a slow shutter speed. So if we have a very wide aperture, we might need to make the shutter speed a little bit faster. If we have a very slow shutter speed, we might need to decrease the aperture. So once again, as an example, if there's something that we want to take when it's dark, for example, in the evening, if we want to take pictures of the stars or if we want to take pictures of the waterfall, we will need to use a slow shutter speed. But if we want to take a picture boards or when it's very bright outside, in those cases, we would use a slow shutter speed because it's all about controlling the amount of light that gets into the center. So we are just able to control it this way. If at this point, you get a little bit confused, don't worry. It's totally normal. It will all come together in a couple of lessons when we learn all the techniques together. If you have any questions, let me know. Other than that, I'll see you in the next video. 11. ISO Settings: Control Light and Image Quality: Welcome. In this video, we'll talk about the ISO and the noise control. Once again, ISO is how sensitive your sensor is. By controlling the sensitivity, we're able to control the brightness of an image. However, if we're talking about ISO, then there's one very important thing and that is noise. The higher the ISO, the less crisp your image is going to be and the more noise your image is going to get. So for example, with ISO, we can set it to 25,600. And if you take a picture, it's going to be very bright, yes, but it's also going to be extremely noisy. You will get this very annoying grain that will completely destroy your image. We don't want that. Zerothum, I never put IOSO higher than 800 unless it's absolutely necessary and without the images, you will not see anything in the image. So 800 is the maximum that I set it to. Because if we set it to 1,630 200, even though it's still not going to be super super visible, you'll already see a very good amount of noise. It's not good, especially if you plan to print your pictures like big wall, it's extremely important. So my role is to always try to keep ISO as low as possible. And with Aperture shutter speed, we'll be able to control the other parts. ISO can kind of save and break the image at the same time. You really need to be careful with it. One thing that's kind of bad about the automot, for example, is because it really raises up the ISO, doesn't always control the shutter speed or the aperture that much, but it really plays with the ISO. And on this very small screen, you might be able to see what's happening may look okay, but then when you open it on a big screen, big computer, the quality is going to be super bad. Let's do a quick recap. ISO is how sensitive your sensor is. You want to make sure your ISO is as low as possible. You can raise it up in certain situations, but you don't want it to go over 800 roughly even expensive cameras, you see a little bit less of the grain, even though you get a higher ESO, but you can still see the grain. If you really zoom in, you can really see it, especially in the very dark places. So try to keep ISO as low as possible. So if you have any questions, let me know. At that, let's jump into the next video and talk about how to balance the three, the ISO, the aperture and the shutter speed. See there. 12. Exposure Triangle: How to Balance ISO, Aperture & Shutter: Now, a very important question, how do you balance this trio, the aperture, the ISO, and the shutter speed? And the answer really depends on the settings that you have and the amount of light that you have, and what style you're going for. For example, I absolutely love the blurry background foreground, which is called buche. And so I always try to open the aperture as much as possible, let in as much light as possible and therefore, get this very blurry foreground to the background, especially for the portraits. It's just it's absolutely un the only downside of that I see is sometimes, if I set the focus point slightly incorrectly, then some of the images might become a little bit blurry, and that's kind of the disadvantage of it. Other than that, if you like the blurry background or the foreground, then you can really get with the lers, not like with the phones, with T lars, mirrorless cameras, like the big cameras, you can really get that perfect blur. In terms of the ISO, I try to keep it as low as possible at all times. And then with the shutter speed, I'm able to control the brightness of the image and then choose if I want to go for a sharp subject or a blurry movement. It really depends on the situation. For example, for portraits, open the aperture as much as possible, get the ISO as low as possible. I mean, you can get it to up to 800 if you want to decrease the shutter speed. For indoors photography, there's usually not enough light. So once again, open the aperture as much as possible. For outside, sometimes you may want to close it down a little bit because there's too much light from the sun coming in. And one very important thing when it comes to the cameras and the helper that's going to really help you is a meter. You have a built in meter into your cameras, and whenever you put it onto certain objects, this meter will tell you if your settings will make it too bright or too dark. And going to tell us specifically focusing on a specific area. You can see examples on the screen. It's the slider at the bottom that shows, for example, minus one. It's going to be lower by one stop, minus two, it's lower by two stops, so it's going to be pretty dark. And anything below that, it's even darker, at some point, you will not be able to see anything. And everything that's above that is going to be too bright, so it's going to be overexposed. And we don't want that. We don't want it to be overexposed or underexposed, because we start to lose details. We will be able to edit the pictures later, but it might get to a certain point where it's too dark or too bright, and we will not be able to get the information. Like, we will lose the information forever, and we will not be able to revive it. At some point, yes, we will be able to revive the image, and sometimes you know, there's a trade off and you decide on, okay, certain parts can be a little bit bright, certain parts can be a little bit dark, and then in the post edit, you'll be able to kind of put that together and change that so that looks perfect. If it's underexposed or overexposed, like dramatically, you might lose the information, you will never revive it. And so it's important to use the metering. Conclude, you want to make sure that your me ring stays exactly in the middle. So it's not overexposed or underexposed. And if I go into the settings of my camera, I'll be prosingt the menu, for example, here, I have the met ring mode. I can select it and I have different meter ring modes here. So evaluative, partial spot metering and center weighted average. The one that I use the most was the spot metering because I can go into certain spot, check the amount of brightness of that is, go a little bit to the right, left, bottom, top, whatever, and then check the metering of that point. And then I will know, like how bright how dark that is. The spot metering for me is the most convenient one. But then you can experiment and see whichever works best for you. Once again, there is no approach that just want approach that works for everybody. You definitely need to experiment with this a little bit. Just remember that metering is really going to help you with this and really save a lot of the pictures for you. And one live hack, for example, if you take the pictures indoors with just the same settings all the time, like, you close the windows, you close the shutters. You have some sort of light indoors, then you can always just remember those settings and never change the settings. You set them once, and then you never touch the settings of the camera again. If you never go to another place. Like, for example, in the photo studios, that's how it's often done. But if you frequently change the locations where you film, then yes, you will have to play around with this a little bit. If you have any questions, let me know. Other than that, I'll see you in the next video. 13. RAW vs JPEG: Why Shooting in RAW Changes Everything: In this video, I want to introduce you to the raw files. Now, usually when you take pictures with the camera, you get a JPEG file. It's a regular file that's used everywhere. However, there's this specific file format called Raw. Basically, the difference between raw and the JPEG is JPEG is a type of file that is processed with the camera and Raw is a file that's not processed with the camera. Because it's raw, it weighs a lot more and therefore, contains a lot more information. So for example, a JPEG picture can weigh 6 megabytes while the raw picture can weigh 30 plus megabytes. So it's like five times the size, sometimes even more. This saves us in a number of ways. If we take a picture in the poor lighting conditions, and the image looks kind of dark, then we might be able to save that image by using the raw file because there's going to be more information. Like, it's not going to be as limited. We can stretch it a lot further than the JPEG and at the same time, the image is a little bit too bright, then once again, because we have more information, we will be able to bring it back. Let me show you how it's done. So once again, let me turn on the camera. And if I go into the settings by pressing on the menu, we'll see the image quality, and if I press here, you can see, I already have raw plus JPEG. So initially, it was like this. It was just the first setting here. But then if I go to left, we can select raw, and then we can select Raw plus JPEG. And it's great because I can take a quick look at the JPEG files and see if it's good or not on my computer later. But then if I need to customize it even further, I can always use the raw file and it gives us a lot more room to breathe a lot more flexibility. And trust me, when it comes to taking pictures, you want to make sure you're not limited by not being able to influence the image that you've taken. So it's super important. Once again, it does take a lot more space, and therefore you might need to upgrade your equipment, to have more storage, and then we'll have a separate video on all the necessary equipment a little bit later. But anyway, having the raw plus JPEG is going to absolutely save you in so many situations. So really recommend you to set that and take pictures that way. So if you have any questions, let me know. Other than that, I'll see you in the next video. 14. Manual Mode Challenge: Try All 3 Settings with One Object: Let's do a quick practice session. You need to take three different pictures of the same object by using the manual mode. So go ahead and set the manual mode on your camera just for the sake of practice, which you'll be able to change. Later, set the aperture to be as wide as possible in the very beginning, set the ISO to be as low as possible and try to make the image brighter or darker by using the shutter speed. For the second image, decrease the aperture and then customize the shutter speed or the ISO. And for the last one, increase the ISO to 800 and then customize the aperture and the shutter speed. So take three pictures of the same object. I recommend doing it indoors by the window during the daytime. You will have some natural light coming in. Just make sure not to take a picture against the window because it's going to be too bright on the outside and a lot darker on the inside. So everything that's on the background is going to be overexposed. So try to get the light from the window, but not against the window. If you have any questions, let me know and see you in the next video. 15. Camera Modes Explained: Manual vs Auto vs Priority Modes: Now that you're familiar with the shutter speed with aperture and the ISO, let's explore the different modes that your cameras have. You might have slightly different modes depending on the camera, but most of the cameras have the same main ones. So we have the Otomde. The camera does everything by itself. So it says the shutter speed, the ISO, the aperture, the bounce. It says absolutely everything. With the OT mode, you have no control. The only thing you have the control of is of the frame. So you can frame the composition, isolate subjects, things like that, but you don't have much control. Honestly, when you take the camera for the first time, it's a very great start in order to have the paralysis, but if you really want to accelerate and become better, the manual modes are super important. So then we have our manual mode where you set the aperture, the ISO and the shuts B yourself. And then we have, for example, this AV mode, which is aperture priority. And if you take a look at the settings here, so as you can see, this is the aperture priority. Let person. We set the aperture and the ISO. Right, we can set specific ISO and we can set the aperture, which in this case, we can lower as much as possible. And then the camera is going to change the shutter speed so that based on your spot metering, it's going to be at zero. It's not going to be overexposed or andro exposed. Then if we go into TV, there's going to be shutter priority. And here, once again, we can set the ISO and we can set the shutter speed, and then the camera is going to alter the aperture. Then for the last one is going to be the shutter speed and aperture is set automatically. So here, for example, if you don't want your camera to go over a specific ISO number, then you can set it in, and then the camera is going to adjust the shutter speed and the aperture. Long story short, I never use anything aside from manual because manual gives you the most flexibility and the most control. Sometimes it can be useful, especially if you're getting started to learn those modes and experiment with those modes if you don't want the ISO to go like, over a certain amount. But oftentimes you'll find yourself trying to achieve a specific look or specific effect. And not being able to do it because you'll be limited by just the camera doing its thing. I recommend putting it into the manual mode. If you want to explore those modes, sure. But then eventually, let's say, in a month, in a couple of months, next year or in a couple of years, most likely, 99% of the time you'll be using the manual mode because you'll be going for the look that you are trying to achieve. So that's why I recommend the manual mode. If you have any questions, let me know. See you in the next video. 16. White Balance, Metering & Drive Modes Made Simple: This video, we'll talk about metering, white balance, and the different modes that you have in your camera. If I go into the metering, we have different metering modes evaluative metering, partial, spot metering, and center weighted average. Let me explain the difference to you. Evaluative means the camera is looking in the whole frame. It looks at the colors, brightness, distances, faces, it looks at everything. And then based on analyzing the whole frame, it sets the exposure or the brightness center weighted metering also takes a look at the whole image, but with priority to the center. It will check everything and it will think about that, but it will give priority to the center. Spot metering mode only meters the exact center, the exact point of the sensor, it's just 1% of the whole frame. It's actually my favorite one because you are able with that spot, go ahead and precisely measure the metering or certain things. Like if something's bright and something's dark and you are able to choose whatever you want. So you don't give any guesswork to the camera, you do everything partial metering is a less extreme version of the spot metering, where it still does take a look at the spot in the very middle, but it takes just a little bit more space around that as well. Depending on what you're shooting, you'll be able to choose whatever works best for you. I would encourage you to experiment and use all of those. The more you learn, the more experiment, the better you will become. And then, based on your workflow you will choose your favorite one. Now let's talk about white balance, which is also a huge thing when it comes to photography. Long story short, it is so easy to later change it in the software. Like for example, in the light room that let me quickly show you this. I have a set to auto so if I click here, it's going to be white balance at the top, right? It's this button here. So I click, and then you can definitely set it, for example, to daylight, Shade, cloudy, Tison light, white fluorescent light, flash or custom one. Or you can set it to Auto. Auto is pretty good. Like, it's not a problem at all. And even if it's still off, you can change it later in the software with the click of a button because it's done with the software once again. It will take more time for me to set it here than to later change it in the software. If it's like a lot of the times it's not wrong, but even if it is wrong, it's not going to decrease the quality of the image, and you're able to use it quickly. Then if we go into the shooting mode, we can set different modes here. We can do a single shooting. We can do continuous shooting. If I take a picture, and then press, it's going to continue taking. It's taking it slowly now because the memory card speed doesn't have enough time to process the raw files and the JPEG files at the same time. So that's another disadvantage that we need to pay attention to. And if you take pictures of the sports, for example, then you might need to have a way faster SSD card because right now, if I disable the raw and I enable just the JPEG and then there's no pause. It's like it's quite quick. One thing that's pretty good as well, if let's say you take pictures of the stars, you will need to put your camera on the tripod. Your camera might shake a little bit after you press them on shoot. And so you might want to do a very slight delay by coming here, and then self timer, you can do like 2 seconds, which is pretty good or 10 seconds if I click here, and I take a picture of you it took 2 seconds to take a picture of you, but most of the time, it's just a single shooting. So depending on what you're shooting, depending on the settings and the situations, you have different modes here. We also have the silent single shooting and the silent continuous shooting. Some of the other settings that you have here is, for example, setting the exposure. So you can set it to be underexposed or overexposed by specific number if you want to. Then you can set the flash exposure. You are able to change it by going there. Then you have the Auto lighting optimizer, which honestly I, never, ever use. Then we have the AF operation, which tobians never touched this one, but I'll explain to the autofocus part a little bit later in a couple of videos. Then we have the AF point selection, autofocus selection, which once again, we'll discuss in a couple of videos, and that is it for all the custom manual settings. So, if you have any questions, let me know. At that. See you in the next video. 17. Autofocus Modes That Actually Work for Sharp Shots: Video, talk about the different autofocus modes that you have on your cameras. So if we take a look at the lens, you will see that we have AF and MF. So autofocus or manual focus. Let's say, let me open the camera and let me visually show it to you. So for example, here, I can either do the autofocus, and by pressing a little bit on the shutter button, it will automatically focus on what's in front of it or what's behind it. But if I switch it to the MF, then by pressing, it's not going to do anything, and I will have to change it manually by rotating the w. So if we do clockwise, we put the focus further away anticlockwise. We move it closer. Most of the time, the manual one is not needed unless there's something specific, and the AF is better. And there's also one advantage of using the autofocus because when you have lens like for example, 1.8, it's pretty blurry in terms of the foreground to the background. You want to make sure you absolutely nail that focus because it might look on the screen that it is in focus. Like for example, it is here. Let me focus on the candle, for example. It looks like it is in focus. But then when we open the picture and really zoom in, it's out of focus. I mean, I can set it to being in focus, but this is just a quick example that you cannot really properly see anything on the small screen. So therefore, it's unbelievably useful to have the autofocus because it's really going to help. With the manual focus, I remember I had many times where I thought things weren't focus and they weren't and it wasn't pleasant. Now, if we come here and I press on C to select the different modes. So we can set which points we should focus on. For example, I can set the center point. You can see that we these little dots. And so it's going to focus on the one that's in the very middle. Now, one more thing is that, for example, if I switch to this view because I have a sensor screen, I can press with my finger where I want to focus. For example, I can press here. It's going to focus there. We can press here. It's going to focus once again. That automatically, which is also quite handy because if I put it here to the candle, press there, it's going to be super sharp. Let's take a picture. Perfect. Really good. So once again, to do a quick recap, the Atomde is better, in my opinion, than the manual, although there are settings when you need to use manual, so you just switch it on the lens here or you need to go into the settings and customize the settings even further, like for example, the points on which to focus on. And the only way to understand which option works best for you is to practice because the more you learn your camera and the more you understand it, the easier it will become. Especially with time, you will not even think about this. You will just automatically click on the button. I will do it automatically. And so that's how you do it. So if you have questions, let me know that see the next video. 18. Mode Match Challenge: Choose the Right Settings for Any Scene: Now for this practice session, I don't have any specific assignments aside from play around. Literally, open the settings, play around, click on all the buttons and just get familiar with the camera. You already know how things work, why they work. And so go and click around. Click on the buttons. You can always reset your camera if you click on the robbing button or something like that, so don't worry about that. Click around, experiment. Try to switch between different modes and see how it performs if you like it or not. Basically, you need to build the neuron pathways in your brain and not to just familiarize yourself with this. And the only way to do it is to play around, so go and do that. If you have any questions, let me know and see you in the next video. 19. Composition 101: Framing, Leading Lines & What Works Today: Let's talk about the modern compositions that work. And by modern, I mean, classic composition because there's no such thing as modern. Usually, everything that's new and modern it well forget and pass Away. The first one, the most famous one is the rule of Thirds when you divide the frame into nine different pieces and then you place an object roughly in these four places. Doesn't matter what the object is, can be landscape, can be person, can be something not alive, doesn't matter. And works both vertical and horizontal. In by practicing. I'm going to put the camera, first of all, I'm going to put the settings in, and for this one, I'm going to because it's bright outside, I have to put the ISO to 100, the aperture to 1.8 just because I want as much blur as possible. And then for the shutter speed, we'll put it roughly at 500, 1/500. And then, looking at the rubbish bin, I'm going to put it roughly in that position of the rule of thirds. And take a picture of that. We can do it both horizontally and vertically. And there you go. Well, I don't like the car, but yeah, this one is good. The second biggest one, my opinion, is the leading lines. The meaning is straightforward. The line that leads the viewer to somewhere. And I prefer to put it somewhere at the corners of the image so that it leads the viewer from the corner of the image from corners of the image towards, like, the cena or towards the role of tours if the object is there. So, if I was to take a picture of the same rubbish bin, I would use this as a leading line because this line is going to lead towards the rubbish bin. So let's see So these are the two in action, both the leading lines and the rule of thirds. And it doesn't have to be these lines. It can be the trees, it can be the buildings. If you want to point something towards the sky, then you can use the building, or you can use any kind of structure, any kind of line that leads somewhere is going to be a leading line. The next one is going to be angles, high angle, low angle, the eye level, angle. It's kind of simple as well, but then each line gives different meaning. For example, if you take an object that's above you, so you get on your knees and then the object is above you, it means that the subject has power. If you take a picture from high angle so that the object is below you, it means that you have power over the object and the object is kind of weak. But if it's at the same level, then it's kind of the same for both parties. Okay, so for example, let's take a picture of a leaf that's below us. Something like this, super simple. So that's the leaf below us. But if we take a picture of, let's say, an airplane that's above us, then that's going to be a low angle. But in all the cases, you have to think about the framing because photography is a frame. You frame an object, and then you frame a story. All the three tools that I gave you, those are tools, but those are tools within the frame. Some of the other great ones are symmetry, for example, when it's the same at the top and at the bottom or right and left. So let's try to find symmetry here. Well, the rubbish bins are kind of in a good position to take a symmetrical picture. Okay, so we have a symmetry of both of the rubbish bins. They're kind of using the rule of third, we place them at those four specific points, and then they're kind of symmetrical on the right on the left, maybe not super symmetrical, but in any way, it's pretty good. And the best thing about photography is that there's no right or wrong. Everything I just covered, like, you can break every single rule. A picture might still look great, because there's no right or wrong. It's all subjective, it's all artistic, and it's just your choice of whatever you want to do. Some of the best artists, achievers, whatever you want to call it, a lot of the success that those people had comes from breaking the rules and doing something new. So this is a great place to start. You don't have to follow the rules all the time. Break the rules, experiment, and you'll find what works for you. And the last one is the use of negative space. So the positive space is your subject. It's what you take the picture about. And then the negative space is everything aside from that. For example, if our subject is a bench, we have a lot of the tweets on both sides, then I can just go back a little bit and then take a picture. Actually, I have to go back more. Okay, there you go. So we have a dog as well there. And take a picture of the bench with the trees on both sides. And those trees kind of lead us towards the bench. Even though it's a negative space, it kind of it helps us as well. Sort of like deleting lines, although it's not leading lines, but it adds a bit more depth to the image, and that's how you can do it. If you have any questions, let me know. Other than that, see you in the next video. 20. Lens Basics: How Focal Length Affects Composition & Storytelling: Welcome. In this video, let's talk about the kind of lenses that exist. Let's begin with difference between the autofocus and the manual focus lenses. So the autofocus lenses focus for you. And we can see the difference here in the pictures the difference between the AF and MF. MF is manual, AF is autofocus. Some lenses don't have the switch, and so that would usually mean that it's just the MF. Autofocus will always have the MF, but the ones that have MF will not always have the AF. So sometimes it's either both or it's just manual. The manual lenses require you to adjust the ring, which is this ring here by hand. It's oftentimes cheaper and it's popular for a lot of the creative work. However, it's definitely a lot faster to work with the autofocus ones. It's more reliable but moving objects, and both lenses can produce professional results, but the AF is definitely going to make your life a lot easier. Let's talk about the prime lenses, which is going to be the fixed focal length. Basically, there's a difference between fixed and not fixed, and we can see here. This one is 24 to 70, so this one is not fixed, and this one is just 50 millimeters. The fixed focal length is going to require us to have a fixed millimeter number in this case, for example, 50. It's usually a little bit sharper with a low light performance. It's definitely lighter and simpler than the ones that zoom in. It's great for any type photography, just depending on lens, but it can work for portraits, streets, and even cinematic videos we're talking about videos. Because this one is fixed, you do have to move around. So it definitely encourages you to learn the composition by moving your. Then the variable focal length, which is the zoom lenses, you can zoom in and out, for example, the 24 to 70 millimeter like this one. By literally saying the same place, you'll be able to capture more or less. It's very flexible for travel and events and it's very, very useful. A bit heavier sometimes less sharp than primes. It's pretty useful when you cannot move around, so you use the lens to zoom in and out. Round, it's a very great choice, but you can still grad images with both of these lenses. It doesn't matter. For this one, if you want to take a variety of different choices, for example, white shot and a telephoto shot, you would need to have let's say one lens that's going to be at 50 mil, the other one's going to be at 80 or the one that's going to be at 15 or 20. So there are some advantages in these advantages, and it's just something for you to decide whichever one you have or if you want to buy a new one, it's going to be in terms of the aperture differences, lenses also differ in aperture. We have a white aperture, for example, 1.8, which is going to open up more and is going to allow more lighting and it's going to make a blow rear background. There are narrow apertures, for example, a four, which is going to allow less light and more focus. White aperture lenses work better in low light. Narrow aperture lenses usually a lighter more affordable, and these can work really great for landscape photography, for nature photography. The aperture affects both the exposure and the depth of field. And another important aspect is the image stabilization. Some lenses do have a built in stabilization to reduce the shake. It's quite convenient because if you do handheld shooting and low light photos, it's important to have the stabilization because if you don't have it and you shoot in low light, you need to have a slow shutter speed, which means that a slight movement is going to disturb the image or a handheld with slow shutter speed, once again, exactly the same problem. It's unbelievably useful telephoto lenses because slight movement with the telephoto lenses will do a massive jump in the image because we're so zoomed in, a slight movement in our hand is going to make a giant movement in the picture. Different brands have different names for it that you can see on the screen, and sometimes it works with built in in camera stabilization when ever lens you have, even if you have a cheap one, it shouldn't stop you from taking pictures. Of course, the better, more expensive equipment is going to allow you to do more things. It's going to amplify your creativity, but it shouldn't stop you there. Oftentimes, even if the quality is bad, the creativity is a lot more important. People will really, really prefer the creativity over the quality, even though the quality is still really important. If you have any questions, let me know. Other than that, see you in the next video. 21. Lighting for Beginners: Master Natural Light in Any Situation: Welcome. In this video, I want to talk about light, specifically about natural light. As we can see, right now, it's sunny. And that's why we get a very harsh light. We get very long shadows. You can see very long shadow behind me on the wall here. And at the same time, you can see it on my face because if I turn a little bit here, then you can see the reembrant lighting, which is kind of used in photography quite a lot. And right now, it's kind of the morning getting close to the afternoon, but it's still the morning. Like, it's not the day because when the daytime comes, then the light will be shining from the top to the bottom, and it will have a very different effect when it comes to the lighting. However, if I come to the room, I have a different kind of light, which is a soft light. And soft light is very different from the ad light. This one is very similar to cloudy day, but with the cloudy day, everywhere around you, it's going to be the same. Like, you will not have any harsh shadows. Every single picture will have a very different feeling. Let's talk about the different types of natural light. The one that you saw outside is called the golden light. It is soft and warm. You get long shadows. Texture. It's best for portraits, travel, and street photography. Here's an easy hug. Try to avoid lights that's directly above you because you will get very weird shadows and it's not going to look as good. So try to get light that's either onsite or if you have light that's above you, which is going to be light number two, which is going to be hard mid daylight, then you will have a very strong contrast. It's going to be flattering still work for street photography or for some high drama shot. However, I would still avoid the light hitting from the top. And so in those cases, try to find the shade. It's always great to shoot under trees, for example, or under buildings. And in the shade, if there's not enough light, there's a very good thing called a reflector. So you can use a reflector or you can use something white, for example, that reflects the sun that's going to illuminate your subject, which is going to give the soft light instead of being very harsh from the third natural type of light is a cloudy day. So this one is soft, diffused, and it's just even. If you turn 360 degrees, it's going to be more or less the same depending on the direction of the sun, but you will not have a very harsh shadow because there are no shadows almost. It's great for portraits, products, and nature close ups. This one is really good because you don't get blown highlights or very dark black. Means that we don't lose information in the picture because if you get too bright at certain points, you lose the information. If you get too dark, you lose information. And by not having this much contrast, you get all the information that you can get. And depending on the type of sort, can be very, very useful. Now, in terms of the other tips, if you get a golden light, you can back lead the subject, which means your subject will have a light outline around them. And you also get a lens flare, which is something you never get in Cloud. The harsh light, which is usually going to be from the top, you can use that deep contrast to your advantage. That can be silhouettes or specifically on purpose blown highlights. And on a cloudy day, you can get really close to the subject and get something very vibrant in the shot, and it's going to really stand out because everything else, aside from that vibrant object is going to be not as vibrant, so it's going to really stand out. When it comes to light, if light is direct, then you get a very flat if it's from the side, then you get a lot more depth and a lot more texture. So the difference between this shot and if I had a light in front of me, I would be very flat if I had it in front of me, but because it's from the side, then there's a lot more depth and it looks a lot more cinematic. If something is back lid, it also looks very nematic, but at the same time, also looks a little bit, like, dreamy. And for the top light, once again, something I would recommend avoiding, but if you do want to use it, then use it creatively and just make sure that there are many disadvantages with that. So now, whenever you see any kind of light, you are outside or you're looking out of the window, pay really close attention to what it looks like. Pay attention to how the light hits the leaves or hits people or certain objects, how the reflections work. It's really going to help you understand that when it comes to taking pictures, you'll just be able to refer back to the memory and know how things will perform. So, if you have any questions, let me know, other than that, see you in the next video. 22. Posing People for Photos: Real-World Poses Without the Awkwardness: Welcome. In this video, we'll learn how to pose people. So we have model behind us, and let's begin. The very best approach to posing people is to not ask them to pose, because whenever people pose, it doesn't come naturally to them. What do you have to do is ask them to do some sort of movement or sit, walk a certain way, or walk towards you, but you don't want to tell people like, Hey, get into certain position because it's not natural for them. The best and most natural thing to do so that we get the most natural movement and positions from people is not to ask them to get into those positions. So, for example, in this case, we take a picture of the model, and instead of her just standing, I'll ask her to walk towards me so that we get this natural, natural look. As you can see, the model started to move around and I asked her to get into the same position as when she started to move around because that was the natural movement that we got from her. Then I asked her to spin around because once again, that's something she did naturally. At some point, you put the arms into the coat and then asked her to just keep it there because once again, that was natural. So we're just trying to find the natural movement that the persons doing. And then while the person is doing that natural movement, we're just trying to capture the moment. There you go. If you have any questions, let me know. A than that, seeing the next video. 23. Recreate 3 Compositions: Use Light, Framing & Intent: Do some practice. You have a choice to me. You can either use these three images to replicate or you can choose your own three images to replicate. Try to replicate the positioning, the light, the framing. And the reason we're making it so that you create new brain pathways, and you put it into practice because unless you do that, you might understand, Okay, I understand how that image is made. But then when you actually do it, trust me, it's such a different process. When I was just getting started with photography, I would keep on delaying that, and that's actually where the most progress comes from actually doing the work instead of just seeing how it's done. So, either choose three of your favorite images or choose these on the screen and go and do those. If you have any questions, let me know that see you in the next video. 24. Congratulations!: Congratulations. If you're watching this, it means you've made it halfway through the course content. I know we've covered a lot, so congratulations to you for making to this point. And there's a lot more valuable content coming soon, but before we get to the next video, I want to simply ask you if you found value in this program up until this point, I take 60 seconds to leave you honest feedback? Of course, I will immensely appreciate this and your feedback will massively help future students in deciding the best program for them. So leave you feedback now, and of course, if there's anything I can help you with, please let me know when the Q in section below. You're doing great. Keep going. Without being said, let's get to the next video. 25. Portrait Photography Basics: Poses, Lenses & Expression: Let's talk about the portrait photography basics. When it comes to any kind of photography, Bouche can play a really big role, but specifically with portrait photography, you want to isolate the subject because you want to focus on the subject because that's what people come there to do. They won't take pictures of themselves and not of the background. So that's why when people take pictures in some beautiful places or special monuments, like I never really understand that because if you take a picture of the person, then you should take the picture of the person, not of the background. Because if you want to take a picture of the background, that's why Boke can really help us here because we can isolate the subject from the foreground and the easiest setup that we can get in terms of lighting is just the kind of weather that we have today. It's a little bit cloudy, sometimes we get the sun, but most of the time it's cloudy because we get a very soft light from all the ages. The subject is very well lit. Now, when it comes to the background, the foreground, I like to keep things simple, but at the same time, we can add a bit more of the story, for example. Currently, we have a lot of the leaves on the ground, and so we can use those leaves or leaves on the trees, and we can use those leaves to tell a bit more of the story so that it's autumn. And so we can actually just pick up some of the leaves, put it in front of the camera, get some behind the camera, and then get the portrait done. So let's do that. Y. And now a lot of people prefer different lenses, but in my experience, I didn't have a lot of lenses to choose from, and so I had to work with what I had. In the very beginning, this is the first lens that I ever got, and I worked with this lens for a long time. I'll show you how to take great pictures at the with that. Because this is different lens, I have to change the settings, how the wise is going to be too dark. Yeah, it's like, too dark. This lens, the previous lens really zoomed in a lot, and this one is sort of like a wide angle in a way. And so we'll see how it goes. The lens is actually pretty bad for the shot that I want to take, which was going to be a very wide shot. So we would get the foreground, get the background, get the model, but it doesn't work. So I'm going to take a picture from the phone, which has a lot wider lens, just to get the shot as an example. Now that you saw that these lens didn't work, that worked a lot better. But then the phone lens worked even more beautiful. I think a lot of the time lenses is something that can stop us, but we shouldn't let them stop us because we should just use whatever we have. The phone can work great, and the camera can work great, as well. And it's just experimentation. Finding deleting lines, going high angle, low angle, high level angle, and just experiment. See what works, see what doesn't more mistakes we make, the more we learn. If you have any questions, let me know and let's see the next video. 26. Sports & Event Photography: Capture Fast Action Like a Pro: When it comes to action event and sports photography, we're talking about some sort of movement all the time, whether that's going to be an athlete jumping, whether that's going to be a speaker on stage, it's going to be kids dancing in the kindergarten. There's going to be movement, and it's really important to set the right shutter speed because if you set it to just completely freeze the moment, it might look a little bit dull. But if you set a shutter speed where it's going to be too blurry, then you will not have sharp images. So you need to kind of play around, I think, 1/30, 1/50 is going to work really well. If you really want to freeze the moment, then of course, you need to bump it up a little bit more, but having just a little bit of that motion blur will allow for the liveness really come. Now, because there's going to be some sort of moment, it's best to follow the subjects. So you just select your certain subject, whether that's going to be an athlete, kids, speaker on the stage and they'll be moving a little bit. Make sure to follow them with the camera. And then on your cameras, you have a burst mode where you just hold the trigger and then it's going to take a lot of pictures. Oftentimes, when the person is speaking, for example, they're moving, whatever, you'll probably get one out of ten shots that's going to work because most of the shots are not going to work because the face of the people is just going to be a little bit off. Because there's going to be movement, it's not going to look natural or good. That's why the first mode is really important because with that mode, you'll be able to find the moment when people have this like phase that's good to use. It's also important to understand when action is going to happen and that most of the time comes with experience. You can probably tell when something's about to happen a finale of a sport and you might expect a crowd to jump, then it's better to not miss that moment. Or when speaker coming onto the stage, you want to make sure you don't miss that moment because you will not get that. There's only going to be the exit and make sure to not miss the exit. It's definitely better to take more pictures than not enough. And especially in the beginning, you'll be getting, like, too many images sometimes going to be a little bit overwhelming in the post production, but it's better to take a little bit extra than not enough. To these kind of movement events, it's really important to prepare in advance because you simply don't have time to think about things, and it's better to know the type of shots that you're going to get. It's better to know kind of the right settings, which you can experiment and advance a little bit. When you come to the event, just put the settings in, see if it works, and if not, then try to adjust it before because the last thing you want to happen is to have some sort of technical issue or you just thinking, Okay, what do I want to do with this? Preparation in advance is unbelievably important. Specifically, I'm talking about research on the Internet. You probably have some people whose style you like so you can try and replicate their style. Even if you don't have anyone, then you can go ahead and do a quick Google search and you'll be able to find so many great artists who you can replicate and steal like an artist from. It's also a good idea to be ready to move, literally like move around the set because you don't want to get the same angle all the time. You might have different people in different locations, so just be ready to move. But the same time, try to be very loud when you move. For example, if it's like a political event where people are speaking, you want to make sure you don't disturb the speaker or you don't disturb other people who are listening to the speaker. You're sort of like a quiet mouse who's running around and taking pictures of the event. If you have any questions, let me know than that see you in the next video. 27. Travel, Street & Landscape Photography: Shoot Anywhere with Style: Let's talk about the street photography. When it comes to street photography, a lot of the times you can take pictures of the architecture of the lines. But I think what can really separate you is by telling stories. And the way you can tell stories is by using the shutter speed. By using the shutter speed, you can show the movement, the movement of people, the movement of cars, animals, trees, whatever. It doesn't have to be a very long shutter speed. You can set it to, like, 15th or one tenth. You can put it in a tripod to make sure that the important parts are sharp, and then the parts that are not as important are a little bit blurry. And by having that blur, you can really tell the story. So instead of it being just a generic picture of a house, for example, although they can still be beautiful, you can really tell the story with a motion blur and get great results. So if you have any questions, let me know. Other than that, see you in the next video. 28. Wildlife & Nature Photography: Settings, Patience & Composition Tips: Now let's talk about the wildlife and nature photography basics. The first and most important thing to understand is the mindset. It's all about patients because nature doesn't pose, nature doesn't wait. In this case, you're not directing, you are observing just like a documentation of this. And if you get 1 gray trot out of 200 trots, then it's good. With wildlife, it's actually really good to set the shutter priority mode with birds because they have such a fast movement, it's better to put it like one or 1,000 with other animals like one or 500 can work well as well. But the idea behind this they move so fast that you want to make sure you have a fast enough shutter speed to capture their movement. Otherwise, it's just going to be a blurry picture. If your camera allows, setting an auto ISO can also be very helpful because if the light changes going to automatically do it, you don't have to mess with the camera because wildlife, you also don't have a lot of time. The animal can really get out of the frame very quickly. But this type of photography, the burst mode is also really important. You'll be able to capture the right movement sometimes if we're talking about birds like a bird can get the wing and really hide themselves behind the wing or there's going to be a tree in front of him. So the burst mode will really allow you to get the right picture. Of the gear anywhere 70-300 millimeters is going to be really great. When you are just getting Sart, of course, you don't have the lenses, and so it's better to work with something than with nothing, and you can always work with whatever you have. Yes, you will not be able to get very long shots from the very far away. But, for example, you can definitely get Spot squirreels in the parks, which is still going to be nature and animals. Tripods are really, really helpful as well. It's going to give you that stability. And because it's all about patience, you'll be spending a lot of time in nature. It's just going to be a little bit easier for you physically because you don't have to carry the heavy camera, especially if you have a telephot lens, which weighs a lot, then the tripod can really, really help you with that. Take a look at this in the settings. If your camera has a silent shutter speed, really helpful as well, because you will not be making noise. Nature is very sensitive to humans, so if animals hear you, they will just hide away. Also, going in the morning and in the evenings is better because during the day don't always see the animals, but I would say it depends on the animal, which you can definitely research, but most of the animals wake up in the morning. They start their day, wash up, clean up, start looking for food, and running around some early morning is the best. Try to be quiet, try not to make a lot of noise and do not wear something that makes a lot of in terms of what you can shoot, you can get started with many things. You can shoot trees, you can shoot light rays from the sun, reflections, all sorts of different patterns, insects, animals, birds. You can use both vertical and horizontal depending on where you'll be using the images. Rule of thirds works really well, and having some sort of negative space in terms of, like, the foreground elements really helps it just adds a lot more to the story. In terms of the lighting, the golden hour or the cloudy days work really well. If it's light that comes from a top, then it's not always as good, but the sidelight or the cloud days are really, really good. If you want to go for nature, just understand that a lot of the time is going to be observing, and it's like, if you don't like spending time in nature, then it's probably not the best choice for you because you will have to sit for, like, hours and hours to get the shots. And if you don't like it, it's probably not for you, but if you do like it, trust me, it's going to be unbelievable. Like with anything, get better bit by bit. Try to observe, see patterns, and then learn from those patterns and those mistakes. If you have any questions, let me know. Other than that, see you in the next video. 29. Pick a Photography Niche: Try It and Share Your Best Shot: Now it's time to practice. After learning the different types of photography, which is going to be portrait, landscape, nature, travel, identify which one you like the most or which one you won't try the most. And if you don't have one, then just literally pick randomize it. Ask Chad DPT to choose one or flip a coin, something. Over the weekend, go ahead and practice that. And remember that we're not going for perfection. All we're trying to do is become a little bit better. So start at whatever level you are, take a picture, take the second picture, take more pictures than you think you might need. The more pictures to take, the better you'll become. Try to experiment, move around, see what works, see what doesn't see what you enjoy. If you have any questions, let me know. Other than that, see you in the next video. 30. iPhone & Android Camera Settings You Need to Know: Welcome. In this video, let's talk about the phone photography. Specifically about the settings when it comes to phone photography. Long story short, the phones are so good nowadays that you can get away with the general camera settings. You can absolutely go with the same settings as you have on the Di SLRs, for example. You can customize the shutter speed, the aperture, the ISO, and there are definitely applications for that. However, those applications are usually paid, and they're definitely great ones. There are applications like reflex, halide, obscure. Those are really good. If you want, you can explore those. But honestly, most of the time, for the iPhones, that's not needed. However, one thing that's really important is that if we go into settings, and if you scroll down a little bit, then we go into camera formats, specifically on an iPhone, if you are on an Android, then just follow these steps on the screen. But if you are on iPhone, you can turn on the Apple Pro for photo capture, not the pro ras for the video, but the pro for the photos. I will say that each file is approximately 25 megabytes. Indeed, it increases the size of that. So once you have that, you come to the camera. Let's quickly explore what we have in the camera. First of all, depending on your device, you might have a different number of cameras, both on Android and on iPhones. So three cameras, one telephoto, one regular one, super white one. The regular one has the best quality. The tele photo is okay, and the white one usually has the worst quality, especially in the low light settings. We can kind of get away with the regular came if we don't do it. So for me, this is going to be like one X, and I can definitely use it in the low light mode, but if I go with the super white, becomes pretty bad. So in terms of the settings, what we usually have on iPhone, we need to turn on the raw. So we have to do it here. If we swipe like this, or if we use this button here, which is going to be the wall. Then in terms of the other settings, you know, there are usually like some sort of filters. I never use filters. It's just it destroys it. Then we have a timer, something very similar to the DSLR, which is pretty good. Then we can use the exposure, so we can overexpose or underexposed, which sometimes can be very, very useful. Then we have the aspect ratio. So if we go off a square, it's going to cut it. If we four by three on iPhone, it's going to be the regular one, and 16 by nine is going to cut it as well. So I prefer to take 4.3, and then if needed, I can zoom in, crop it, but that's what we do it. In terms of the live video on iPhone, depends on if you want to take it or not, but basically just remember the last couple of seconds. It can be good sometimes, for example, if you didn't have time to take a picture of some sort of event, but then you can go back into the live photo and then go back and it will take you like a second or two back, and you'll be able to use that moment. So it's really then for the night modes, yes, we have it as well, so we can customize it here. So it doesn't give us to control the aperture and the shutter speed the ISO here, and you have to use different applications. For example, one application I use for the video, which is going to be very similar to the picture ones is the black magic, and you can control, for example, you can control the lens here. So this is the telephoto. This is the regular one. This is the super white one. You can control the white balance. You can control the brightness of the image. And then if you want, you can go ahead and customize, for example, the shutter speed. I can definitely increase it and set it to 1/4000. But then, as you can see, it becomes like incredibly dark. You can barely see anything on the screen. So there are these applications that you can set this for. However, on the phone I would definitely recommend to just leave it as it is. In terms of the mode that we have, we have the portrait mode, which will create this artificial bouquet, which we'll talk about in a second, as well. Then the panel, which is just taking lots of pictures and putting them together, the photo is the regular one. The video is video when we come to pictures, I would always just use the photo mode. I usually take away the flash because the flash usually isn't really good. For the night mode, yeah, it's pretty good on niPhone. The raw is really good as well. So if you think about this very similar to dielar is something that we've already discovered. Let's get into the next video, talk more details about the phones. If you have any questions, let me know. That. See you there. 31. Phone Photography Tips: Composition, Light & Depth: When it comes to taking pictures with the phone, I do recommend taking pictures during the daytime. Specifically, the golden hour works really, really well. But when it comes to dark photography, the phones are just not good yet. The phones are a lot more versatile, but the quality is going to be a little bit worse. We will never be able to get that really good bucket that we get with DSLRs. Of course, we can use the portrait mode and then it's going to artificially do it. But it is it is not good. If we really zoom in or if we want to print the picture, it's not going to have the same quality as a proper DSLR camera. The edge is not going to be perfect first. Secondly, the book is not going to be as good and as progressive. Although it's getting there, it's 19% there, but it's still that 10% that if we really zoom in, then we can definitely tell that it was taken from a phone and not with DSLRs or mirrorless cameras. Although we can still get that depth. So if we want to take a picture of something, for example, the candle and if we really zoom in, the way to get bouquet, the best way to get it is to get very close to the subject and have a lot of space behind them. So that's how you can get that bouquet. Like, for example, here, you can really see that we get the bouquet behind the subject. However, if we go a little bit further and try to focus on the subject, we will not have any bouquet at all. If you really want to get the bouquet, then you or this blurry background foreground, then mirrorless, DSLRs, the digital cameras is what to go for, especially the big lenses because the problem is with the lens, and not to get the boce basically need to have a lot of space between the lens and the sensor. But here, we don't have space. Like, it's absolutely tiny. However, if you take a look at the DSLR or the mirrorless cameras, like, how big are the lenses? Like this big, this big, big, this big depends, but some lenses do get that big. However, it's a lot more versatile because you three cameras in one system, and you can really use the ultrat because the ultra white is really good, especially during the daytime when you have a lot of light. The regular one is very good overall, good quality. The telephoto one, it's not as good because sometimes I don't really see the value of that. Usually with digital cameras, the big cameras, because we have lenses, we can get the bouquet when we zoom in, but with the phones, it's going to just crop the image. So if you take something from far away, yes, definitely you can take it, but then other than that, I wouldn't use it, so I use the ultrawide one. And the regular one, the basic one. Other than that, for the phones, it doesn't work as well. If you really want to see the difference, then I recommend you to experiment, take basically sort of like the same picture from both digital cameras and your phones, and you'll see the difference. The phones are good, but they will probably never kept as good as the cameras unless it's going to be fully done with AI when EI is going to add for example, booking in the background. But then if it's AI, then what's the point? Because we can just generate this with AI, but then we lose the whole idea of photography by people. So we are in an interesting age where technology and AI is both good but not good in any way. I really recommend you to experiment with this. So, if you have any questions, let me know. Add that, see you in the next video. 32. iPhone vs DSLR Shootout: Compare Results and Techniques: Alright. Now it's time to practice with your phone. And I really recommend you to see the difference, take a picture on the diselar and take a picture on your phone and then compare it. Take the same pictures, so take it up close, take it from faraway, take it on the telephoto, if you have the option to do that, and really see the difference. Try to understand which one do you prefer? Why do you prefer that? You might prefer pictures from your phone and then be like Peter McGinn who's taking pictures with weddings. With Nipa. And then try to reflect, what did you learn about the gear? What did you learn about the difference in the gear? What kind of results? What kind of different results can you get? Which one is better? Which one is better for which settings? Just try to kind of think about this as you are taking the pictures and seeing the results of these. If you have any questions, let me know, see you in the next video. 33. Edit Photos in Lightroom: Full Walkthrough for Beginners: Welcome. In this video, we'll learn Lightroom basics. Specifically, we will learn 20% of the tools that will produce 80% of the work. You know, this 20 80% rule, you can definitely learn every single button Lightroom, but there's just no need for us to do it. We'll use 20% of the tools to produce 80% of the work. That last 20% of the results gets 80% of the effort, 99.999 9% of the time. We will not need it. Let's begin by opening Lightroom. When you open Lightroom, this is what you're going to see. A little bit confusing. So let me introduce you to Lightroom. We have different workspaces at the top. We have library develop, map book, slideoPrint web The two most often workspaces we'll be using is library and develop. We can switch between them by just clicking them. And the library is where you are going to import the footage. So let's do exactly that. Let's go to the bottom left corner, click on Import. And now we need to select a folder on our computer. I'll just select one of the folders, so this is going to be kind of my profile then the desktop. This is a slightly different view compared to other applications that you had, and that's why it might be a little bit confusing. We just open the folders and search for the folder that we need, then we just select the folder. And from here, if you know there are specific photos that are really good, you can take a look at the names and then just click on the checkmark, and the ones without Jack Mark will not be imported, but the ones with Jack Mark will be. I recommend selecting pictures in Lightroom because it's a little bit easier. We are going to select all the pictures, and then in the bottom mark cornea, we need to click on Import. And so now we'll have all these pictures in our Lightroom, and we have different catalogs. So we have photographs, which means that if we import other pictures as well, other pictures will be in the old photographs, but then we can create collections, and it's going to sort them out basically just for organization purposes because when you get thousands and thousands, it's not very convenient. When we have these pictures, we have a couple of different views. The views are to switch here at the bottom. The grid view where we see all of the pictures, then there's view like this when we have one big picture, and then we have this one, which is the compare view. Basically it compares. Like we can select the two, for example, or we select basically the first one and then compare it to the other one, see whichever one is better. And for the survey view and the people, I never use those. When we select the picture, I do recommend opening it in a big view in a so called Loop view. The first thing we need to do is to select our pictures because if we edit every single one of those, it's going to waste a lot of our time. We don't want that. Like the good ones. When the person is not blinking, when the angle is good, things like that, we can do so by using these things here, like, we can use the flags. This flag basically means like checkmark, good to go. And this one means that we shouldn't use it. And then we have the stars as well. And I like to use both. For example, if I set the stars, five stars and then this flag, and then I go to the grid view, you will see that I have the flag here and the five stars here. But then if we open it again, and I set this one, go back to the grid, you'll see that instead of the white flag, we now have this flag, which is not to use. Although I do think that it's not very convenient to press the X flag. So if you want to select a picture, then you can just press on the white flag and not press on this one. And anything that's not pressed with the checkmark, basically, with the white flag, that's not going to be selected. It's also convenient because we will be able to later sort things, for example, by peak, by rating, by label, and it's going to be super, super convenient. So let's do a very quick setup. I can disable this by just clicking on it again and we can take a look and switch between the images using the keys or once again, just by clicking here. And at the bottom, we can use this slider to slide between the different images that we took. Let's quickly go through the images and see which ones are good. For example, I know right away that there is a picture that I really, really like, and let me quickly find it. I very much like this one. So I will flag it, and then a couple of others, let's see what we have. Actually, this one looks pretty good. So I will flag it as well. Now, let's go back to the grid, and you'll see that I have this picture flagged, and then if I scroll down a little bit, this one is also flagged. And now we can sort them out by peak and you'll see that we have these two in the very beginning. So it means that when we switch between these two in the developed mode, we don't have to kind of search for them and look for them over here. It's going to be right in the very beginning, which is super convenient. We selected those, we can once again, open that and then press the stars. In terms of the stars, you can use it to your liking. I kind of use stars to get a second decision or a second opinion on this. If I market with the white flag, then I can also mark if it's four stars and five stars and everything that's four stars, I'm not going to use it, for example. Three stars. You can use it in all the different ways, but it's just work that really works for me, and you can use as well that's going to be pretty convenient. Once we have our selection, we can easily go to the developed mode and start working on our images. And let me walk you through the tools that we have here. This very first one is going to be just a general edit. We have lots of sliders that we can move around. Then we can open other ones and then other ones. And we can go on and on and then we can close it so that it doesn't take a lot of space, because if we open every single one of these, then it's going to be kind of a very long slider, which is something I don't like. So we can close, like so. The second one is a crop or an line tool. It's pretty useful as well, because it gives us the lines. For example, like, if we had our picture a little bit, like so, it's a little bit on the side. We can definitely tell that it's on the side because if we once again come to the crop, you can see that this line this line and these lines are different. Like, these are not straight. So I can also press Command Z to just go back and then it's going to go back. Then we have the remove tool, which is sort of similar to Photoshop. Like, for example, if I don't like a certain part, if I don't like a certain leaf, like, for example, here, we can easily get rid of that. And if I zoom in, then I can press on Z to go back to the original zoom, so it's going to, like, fit the screen. And we can also at the top here, you can see fit or we can do full. So it's going to depend on what you like. And we can move around in the image by using the mouse and just literally clicking and moving around. This tool is kind of useful as well, let's say you have red eyes. If you take a picture with a flash, sometimes you get red eyes, so you can easily get rid of that by using this tool. And the masking tool is also very convenient and I'll show you how to use it. So let's begin. The very first thing I do is I go into the crop to make sure that everything is straight. It's more convenient for me to kind of set this first, and then if it's good, then I can go to other things because if it's not really straight, then it kind of bases my perception of the image, and I want to make sure it's straight from the a couple of things we can do. We can use this slider to once again, make sure that it is straight or not, or we can press on Auto, and it's going to automatically do it. And then just press on Enter and it's going to save it. So what we had before and what we have after before, after before, after. And if I close the presets here, you can also see our history. So we did our importing first, and then we did the straightening. So I can click here. Here and it's going to be basically the same thing as pressing Command jet or command shift et in order to redo. One great thing about this is that we can do automatic adjustments. So if I click on Auto, it's going to automatically adjust the whole image, and we might say that we like it, we might not like it. It's kind of an interesting situation here as well, because this part is so artistic and it's so subjective that some people might like it, other people might not like. And once again, there is no right or wrong. It's just, I'm going to show you how to use the tools, and then based on your preferences, you'll be able to customize it further. But overall, what you should strive for is just an image that easy to understand that you can see everything clearly. Things are in focus. And if there's anything specific artistic that you want to add, go ahead and add it. But everything that's artistic, that's your personal choice. Everything that's to make the viewer just understand the image that's done with the tools that I'm going to show you. Now, if we zoom in to the historgram, it's very useful in a lot of the points. What we see in front of us is a representation of the image in the histogram. And it's important for us so that we don't have any lost information, for example, like here, you'll see that we don't have any information here, like nothing at all, but we do have information here. These are the blacks. These are the whites. We can see that by hovering over. Like, you can see it selects and shows different parts. And by having information here, it means that we can actually add a bit more information there so that we have a bit more in the picture. It touching the black, it means that it's a little bit too dark here and there's no information when it hits blacks. It's going to help us to increase the blacks around this point so that the blacks just barely touching that around minus four is going to be okay. And for the whites, we can actually increase the whites a little bit. And so that's going to allow us to go from an image that wasn't superbly balanced before to being more balanced where we have information at the highlights and at the very darks so that no information is lost. This really helps us to understand how these sliders sometimes we're unsure if it's too bright or it's too dark or, like, how is it supposed to be? Well, the way it's supposed to be is just it needs to be visible. And the parts that you want to be visible should be visible. The parts you don't want to be visible can be not visible. And oftentimes it's personal choice. We can do the auto adjustment, but it's not always good, and we can always go back, by the way, we can also preview by just hovering over the history, how it was in the very beginning, and how it is now a little bit straighter and a lot more saturated. Let's go back to Oso straight. If we don't want to do automatically the whole image and want to isolate the automatic adjustments, then we can press on shift. So, for example, if I have exposure, I press on shift and I click, click on the slide here, double click. You can see moved a little bit, double click on this again. Boom, a little bit of movement. Double click again, again, again and again. And it's moving automatically. Like, I'm not doing anything there. And then once again, we can see kind of the preview of how things were before, after before, after. Or we can also do a comparison. For example, we can go to Y, Y, and we can see the before and after. We can all see it in different ways, for example, here. Now, the automatic adjustment only works for this part. And it also works for the temperature and the tint, but as you can see, it didn't work. Turned the person into some thus, who's purple. An important thing, something I discussed with you before, it's so easy to set the white balance that we can use the speaker to set the things that are supposed to be white in the picture. We need to find a spot that's white, for example, like, these parts of the hair are supposed to be pretty. Always perfect. And then we can go ahead and customize it even further. So I would make it just a little bit less in terms of the temperature. Instead of it being orange, I would make it a little bit less orange, and for the tint, I think it did a pretty good job. And what we're aiming for is just for a natural skin color. Now for the presence, which is the texture, clarity in dehaze, vibrance and saturation, to be honest, I would use this only for the clarity in order to make sure that the image is a little bit more clear. Like for example, before after before and after. You can definitely see that the before is a little bit less clear, specifically in the areas where it's a little bit blurry, like on the cheeks, on some parts of the clothing. For the texture, we can add a little bit more texture, but I don't really like it. Using the dehaze tool, we can get rid of the fog or let's say, add a little bit of the fog by decreasing it or remove everything, which would make it basically more contrasting. That's how we can get rid of that or add that. It's very similar to just increasing the contrast or by increasing the whites and decreasing the shadows. So we're just making things a lot more contrasting. Once again, we can see the before and after. So this is the before, and this is after. Now for the tone curve, a lot of people like to use these graphs, but honestly, I find it a lot more convenient to use the precise numbers and sliders instead of using this graph. This graph is a representation of this image in terms of the brightness or the darkness. You can see that, for example, if we take a look at the light, this is going to be kind of the top part. If we take a look at the dark, it's going to be the part at the bottom. Use this tool by, let's say dragging this one a little bit to the bottom, this one, a little bit to the top and by creating this sort of S curve, and it's going to just make a lot more contrasting. Honestly, I never enjoyed this graph, and so I always just recommend to use the sliders if there's anything specific that needs. This part is also similar to this part at the top, because we have the highlights. We have the lights, which is basically the lights are the whites, the highlights are the highlights, the darks are the blacks, and the shadows are the shadows, exactly what we here. Next, if we go into the color mixer, first of all, we need to select the color. So let's say we select this orange, and then we can decide what we want to do with it. So by selecting color, we can visualize the range and it's going to show basically the color that's going to be affected, and then we can make this color green, for example. And so it's going to be green. It's going to go from this one to this one. It's circuit useful when you want to manipulate the colors or there's, like, one color that's just catching the eye. That's not supposed to be catching the eye. Useful tool sometimes, if we have a little bit of green here, we can select the green. So let's select the green. Let's visualize it. We don't have much green here, but we do have a little bit. And let's say we don't want the green color to be in this image. So we can, for example, like, shift the hue a little bit to the left. And it's going to make everything just more autumn like because right now currently we have both the yellow and the greens, but if we don't want the greens, this is the way we can do this. We can do it even further. And so if we compare it before and after, this was the before with quite a bit of green, but this one is, like, super autumn like, right? Different field that we get from this image. For color grading, it's kind of interesting because we can isolate specific points, for example, the mitons, the shadows, and the highlights, and then we can influence specific colors through that. Like, for example, if we don't want the highlights to have specific color or we want specific color to be adjusted in the highlights, we can isolate that. It's not used very often, but we can influence, for example, the brightness or the darkness, basically playing around with the blacks. And if we make the blacks brighter, then the image becomes a little bit, like hazy. If we increase it, you can see this is the effect that we can set specific colors in specific areas, as you can see on the screen. Like, we can move all the highlights to blue or we can move all the shadows to blue or the mid tones to blue, right? We get different effects by playing around with this one. Then we can go in further by just going into the mid tones highlights. For the detail, we can once again, if we zoom in, kind of play around with the detail, we can increase the amount, but you can see we kind of start losing quality a little bit. So not always recommended to really do that. You can do that a little bit, and you understand how it works with just playing around with the tool. So that's why I would really recommend you to play around with the stool. For lens correction is pretty good as well. We can set which parts we want to remove, so if we want to remove basic profile corrections or if we want to move the chromatic aberration. Basically, chromatic aberrations on the edges, we get a slightly interesting is not something we have in this picture, but sometimes on the edges, you'll be able to see slightly different color that's like, weirdly there, like a purple one, and then you can easily get rid of that. And for this one, for example, we can choose the cannon, which is the camera that I have, and then we can choose the lens. Unfortunately, I don't have my lens here, but I do have 50 millimeter, but I don't have 1.4. I have 1.8. And you can see that it changes kind of the jump just a little bit. You can barely see the difference here on the edges. It jumps a little bit. For example, you're doing a very wide shot. It's going to really influence the edges. So this is really recommended. If we disable this, then we can still go and do things manually, do something like this, and you can see the before and after, before and after. So we can play around with settings here in order to customize how our lens distorts the image. Can do the transform, which is going to be stretching stretching horizontally, rotating the image, changing the aspect ratio, scaling up and down, using the offset of X and Y. Then we can use the lens blur, and if I click on apply, it's going to take some time to analyze it. And you can see that it's not adding proper blur in the background. It's not proper boquet because if we zoom in and we see the edge, it's cutting the edge of the person, which it's not good. Like, it doesn't look natural, and I would not recommend using the lens. In terms of the effects, you can definitely play around with this a little bit vignette, adding a bit of a grain to add this kind of effect, which is going to add just an old look. Kind of depends on what you're going for and we'll explore this a little bit more when we come to the presets, which can break or save the image in some cases. And then for calibration, once again, we can change the hue even further and then customize things even further. So this is going to be in the reds, this is going to be the greens, this us, I recommend just focusing on the top part. The lower down you go, the more customized it is, and I wouldn't go that far, especially when you're just getting started. If you want to learn all the tools, you can definitely go there, but that's not 20% of the tools that'll get us 80% of the results. In terms of the race mode, let's play around with this a little bit. So for example, we want to get rid of this leaf here because very bright, for example. So I'm going to click here and I can influence the size, we can make it just a little bit smaller. Select this part, and then it's going to do the adjustment. We can refresh it so that it'll do it again. You can see there's like a slight change or we can go back and that's how you do it. This is pretty convenient when it comes to the person's face, for example, if we have any imperfections on the skin, then we can easily fix that. So if I really zoom in, and let's say, by the way, I'm changing the size of the area that's influenced by using the scroll wheel on the mouse. So, for example, if I press here, and then, for example, press here, and then here, then we can even do this part. So it's not necessarily just kind of the dot, but there you go. Let's switch through different mode, and then we can see the difference, like before and after, before and after. And then we can go ahead and influence the other parts of the skin if there's anything that we want to clean up. So let's see before and after, before and after. And that's how you can do it very quickly. This tool is pretty, pretty good. I really like it. You can use this tool as well, which is going to be kind of similar. But this is where we select a particular area, and then we change which area we want to replace it with. So in this case, I'm replacing this part with this area. We can go ahead and delete it if we don't like it or we can keep it. We can select each of these selections, like, on the face and move them around even further. Like, we can put it to a different place. Like we can put it there, or Press Camachs going to jump back up there. And some of the recently useful added tools, for example, like reflections, if we press here, it's going to analyze it, and we will be able to get rid of the reflections. If let's say we take a picture through the glass, we can lower it down a little bit then we can get rid of the people and get rid of the dat which are useful tool. So we just need to kind of select that, and it's going to analyze that. And then we just go and click the slider and it's going to adjust it. In this case, because we don't have any distractions, we don't have that, but sometimes we do. Now, we get to the final part, which is going to be the masking. A masking is basically isolation. We tell the software where to focus specific edits on. Like the software you can do automatically, for example, select the subject, and by selecting it, then we can go ahead and change it. It's doing pretty good job. Or we can select the background, for example, and it's going to be everything out outside of our subject. For example, we can do it, so you Quin see, it did a pretty good job, if we zoom in, it's pretty good in terms of, like, the hair. It's not perfect. Like, he is not perfect in these areas, but overall, it's doing pretty good job. You can do a custom selection by pressing on the brush, and then you can brush and select specific areas. Like, for example, if you want to select everything like here at the top, and then, for example, we can decrease the exposure there a little bit so that it's not as bright. Right? This is pretty bright. You can see here on the left, it's pretty bright, but we can decrease it a little bit. That can be one brush, and then we can add another brush, which we can also do just a brush, and then we can select the other one here at the bottom, and it's going to be very similar. So we're just doing kind of a selection, doing it this way. The masking is pretty useful masking, you basically isolate the specific area that you want to affect or not to effect because we can also invert the mask. By clicking on the three dots near the mask, we can actually invert it. So everything becomes dark aside from that area of the mask or we can make something bright aside from specific area of the mask, which is super convenient. And then we have everything exactly the same as we have in the edits, right? It's basically exactly the same thing. But instead of influencing the whole image, we are influencing and altering specific areas of the image. So once again, in terms of the masking, you can create new mask. You can use the software to use it or you can do a custom mask, whichever works best for you, you can play around with this, and then let's say you select a background. You want to subtract, for example, in specific areas, you can do it. So, for example, we want to bit more space around our subject. There you go. And then once again, decrease exposure, and that's how you do the effect. So, let's take a look at the before and after. So this is the before, and this is the after. You can clearly see the difference, a lot more contrast, play around with colors, clean the skin a little bit, straighten the image which basically is non visible, and we can see the history of everything we did to this image here on the left, a very, very big difference. So this is how you use light from. If you have any questions, let me know. Other than that, see you in the next video. 34. Lightroom Mobile: Editing on Your Phone: Welcome. In this video I'll show you how to edit pictures on your phone. In this case, I'm going to use an iPad just because it's a little bit bigger and it's a little bit easier to use, but it's exactly the same as this new phone. So go ahead and open a Lightroom. And here we need to add a picture in the bottom mycorda. I'm going to click click on device. I'm going to select the picture, click on AD and it's going to add it here. Now, I'm going to click on the image, and here we can customize it. So we can go into the light and we can customize it, increase or decrease the exposure, the contrast, the highlights, shadows, and we can do everything exactly the same as I just shown you how to do on the computer in the previous video. So we have the same thing as the color, we have the effects, we have the details, we have the optics. Everything is very, very similar. Now, if we go into the crop, we can also do the crop and we can do the adjustment by just liking it or we can click on Cancel at any point, you just want to go back at the top of the screen, there's a button to go back a little bit, so we can go back until we go to the original one. And then if we want to clean the skin, for example, if we want to add masks, we do need to have a paid version of trom. So if I click on, it's going to prompt me to get the paid version, but I don't use it on a phone or on an iPad that much. So that's why I don't necessarily need it because I have to then we can also ask you to do AI edits, for example, in top left corner, if I click on Update AI Edit, it will also ask us to get the paid version. But once again, I didn't necessarily need it. If you do need it, then go ahead and use it. Other than that. It's absolutely the same. And then for the profile, we can also browse and we can add different profiles, basic monochromatic, you know, we can I set different profiles. Basically, it's like presets, and then we can customize the power of those presets in the bottom of the screen. Actually, this one looked pretty good, I would say. What if we know, this one is a bit too much, but in the middle, actually looked pretty interesting, I would say. Anyway, if you have any questions, let me know. Other than that, see you in the next video. 35. Editing Styles, Presets & Avoiding the “Overdone” Look: Welcome. In this video, I want to introduce you to presets. Let's jump into Lightroom. And presets something that we can find here on the left. It's about the history, about the snapshots. We have a number of different presets here. We can open the folder with the presets, and then we can customize it. Let's select a style, for example, like vintage style, and then coconut, and you can see that our picture changed from this to this. Well, this is the power of presets because you're able to change how the image looks like a filter on top. And sometimes presets can be super, super useful, but the other times they can break the image to some extent. We can control the presets power here at the top, so we can make it a little bit less, and I definitely would not recommend you to put it to maximum. Because it's just going to you can see it turns really, really bad. So it's pretty useful. My personal opinion on presets is that it's better not to use presets. The pictures usually look over edited, and if there is a specific effect that you are going for, absolutely, you can go and try that. But just because I jumped in photography like over ten years ago, I see when the presets are used, and it doesn't look good. Most of the time, people just overuse it, destroy the original perfectly tan picture and perfectly taking colors. So yes, to some extent, it helps to save us time because we can get a certain look from the very beginning. So, for example, let's take a look at this picture or this one, which is very similar. And we can, for example, like, put a specific. So this is vintage. Let's try travel So it looks interesting, honestly, I would prefer this one compared to this one. You know what I mean? Like, we cannot really tell that there is a prize here. We just worked with colors. But here, like, we can tell because it's like, it's overexposed at certain points, too dark in other points, too saturated in third points. In order for this to really work, we would have to click on the prize then customize it further, but then does it really save time and make our lives easier an interesting situation where in the past, presets were super, super popular. Now less and less people use presets and use more of an original look. So it depends. I would encourage you to go and explore, go ahead and click around, see what do you like more, and I'd love to hear from you. So definitely let the point I'd like to add is with presets, it's similar to receiving a general advice in terms of the diet, in terms of your health, just in terms of anything because presets change the settings, but that change is always the same throughout all the pictures. If we're talking about diet, advice that was given to a person who's twice as tall as me or twice as big as me will not necessarily work for me. It's a similar situation with presets where presets would be advice and you don't want to receive a generic advice to your very specific situation. So if you have any questions, let me know. Other than that, see you in the next video. 36. How to Export Your Photos the Right Way: This video, I want to show you how to export pictures from Lightroom. The way it works is you can come to the library or you can go from the developed mode, whichever works best for you. So for example, we can go into library, we can come to the review, can select this one. For example, this one, this is the one with the presets and this one which we have not edited, and we need to go into file. Export. And when to select where to export. So export to Desktop, which works for us, or you can go ahead and select specific folder, which is going to be a little bit better. I do recommend because if you have thousands and thousands of pictures, you can go organize your computer. It's a lot better. Then you can put a S folder if you want to, but I'm not going to. If you want to rename your file to something else, you can definitely go ahead and rename it too. If we scroll down a little bit, then we can take a look at the image format and select whichever one you want. JPEG is totally fine. PNG, there's something transparent, original, which is going to be the JPEG or the awfles. And if you take pictures of the raw files, then JPEG would be great as well. Then for the quality, the higher the quality, the more it's going to weigh. You can export it at 60, see if it works for you. If not, you can definitely increase to 100, which is what I'm going to do. For the color workspace, don't necessarily have to think about this unless you're going to print the images. In that case, you can do a bit of a research and then compress another and you can put more in here. Let's go ahead and click on Export and it's going to Export, though. So I'm going to go to desktop, and there you go. So this is the image. You can see the quality is at maximum, and we can switch between the different images here. If you have any questions, let me know, other than that. See you in the next video. 37. Before & After Challenge: Apply Basic Edits and Compare: Now, it's time for you to practice. Even if you don't have light foam, most of the software and 99% of them have exactly the same sliders, like, for example, exposure, shadows, blacks, whites, highlights, and so on. So you can go ahead and customize your image. And a quick task practice for you is to select one of the images that you've taken, put it in the editing software and go and customize so that the image looks a little bit better, so that it's not too dark, too bright, so that it's just you can clearly see what's happening in the screen. Then go ahead and export the photo and compare it. See how it looks from the original, see how it's different, how it's better. And if you have any questions, let me know. Other than that. See you in the next video. 38. How to Build a Photography Portfolio That Attracts Opportunities: Welcome. In this video and talk about your portfolio, what it is, how to do it, what to include, what to avoid. I'll share a little bit about how I got started and the current best practices. So the question is, what is portfolio? It's not a gallery, it's not just a photo damp. It is a strategic curation of your best work to show your style and to show your range. And this is to give others the reason to trust you and trust your eye, to trust your process, to trust you. Now, there are many places where you can build your portfolio, but the very best place where you can build it is on social media. And the reason for that is because it serves two points at the same time. First of all, you get people show you work. But the second thing is that whenever you post a new piece of content, new people see it, and those people give you potential clients. If we take a look at the statistics, then most of the posts are shown to non followers, which means that it's just free advertisement. That's why I recommend using social media, but there are other places like a website, for example, you can use online drives like Google Drive or Dropbox. And sometimes I recently discovered tools like Adobe portfolio, which is dedicated tools to building your portfolios, you'll never know what's going to work the best for you unless you try. So I really recommend you to just give it a try and my recommendation is go for social media. Then on social media, you can also link to your Google Drive or to your website, for example, if there's something you don't put on your social media, and this is something we need to discuss. What on Earth do you put on social media? What do you include in your portfolio? Well, first of all, I recommend putting the best images that represent your style, where it's going to show the colors, the tones, the perspectives, like everything that you want to show and that shows your style that's representative of you include that. If you're just getting started, then you don't have a lot of pictures. So you can start with a number of pictures from, let's say, one of your shoots, which is going to be basically one shoot, it's going to be your portfolio. But then once you take more pictures, upload those, delete or archive the old ones, and the more pictures you have, the bigger portfolio is going to get. Now, I don't recommend putting ten pictures from the same shoot at the same time because it's going to seem like there's less variety and it's better to have a bit more variety that people can choose from different things. It's another important aspect is that the more variety you have, the better in a way and I'll explain what I mean by that. Different people looking for different things. For example, one person will like your angles. The other person will like your styles. The third person will look for, like, overall thing, or company will look for the overall thing. And so you do want to include different varieties because people are looking for different things, but so that it's not drastic, like every single picture is a different style, which would look like clown work. But within your boundaries within your style, include different variations so that people can choose from that. So if that's portraits that can be children, that can be adults, or if you're doing only adults, then different kind of adults it only men? Is it only women? Is it different races? The phrases reaches her in the niches and pretty much true because the more niche you are, the less competition there is, and it means that no one else can do it. But if there's a demand for that, then it means the price goes up. Anyway, we're getting a little bit off the topic. Include high quality images, post those. I don't recommend to post all the pictures at the same time. I do recommend a little bit of space between the images. Give it at least 24 hours if you want to start with if you want to have, let's say, nine pictures, do it nine days in a row where each day upload one new image to your social media. In terms of the websites or the dropboxes or Google Drives, it doesn't matter as much. You can upload all the pictures at the same time. Now, in terms of the websites, it's good. It's a little bit more professional, but then it gives one extra step for people to go for, and if we want to increase the conversion rate, we want to decrease the number of people have to do one extra step, it means the conversion rate is going to be lower, at the same time looks more professional. So we need to identify whether that's going to be worth it or not, once again, it's just something for you to decide and to test whether that's going to work. But when it comes to the website and overall to social media, to the captions, you want to include some sort of culture action Here's here's how you can reach out to me. Here's how you can book me, things like that. Use HIGPT is going to help you or another AI tool. It's going to do way better job than I'll explain to you, and then you have to do it. Just ask AI, it's going to help you in 2 minutes to do it. I would recommend to reference Alex Homose and specifically the $100 million Leeds book to the AI because that's going to really, really make it better. Also, a couple of things of what not to include. Don't include anything that you wouldn't print or post proudly. You want to make sure everything you post is, like, very high quality. But at the same time, it shouldn't stop you. Like, if you are just getting started, it's better to post something than nothing. If you're a little bit scared of your work, like, don't worry about post. The more you post, the better you'll become. It's all volume game, volume negates lack which once again comes from. Zi. Try to not include redundant shots, so that will be using the same angle, the same subjects, the same edits, try to give a bit more variety. Also, try not to include the over photoshopped images. People can really tell that it's not authentic or something AI generated specifically. People want human connection. People want to see how it's going to look in real life. They don't want to see have AI generated or photoshopped image. They want to see the real part. Although, if that's your style, if that's what you're going for sure. I mean, with Advent of AI, things change very quickly. Some people might prefer it. Also, don't post any unedited or raw images. Make sure to edit the images first. Also, a good practice to think about this is if you ever heard about the elevator pitch, it's when when you drive with somebody on the elevator and you have, like, 30 seconds to explain to the person whatever you're doing to get them interested in your services, for example, that comes from the business. You kind of have a very similar situation here which it's sort of like a visual elevator page where you have to quickly convey your style and your professionalism to the person who wants to book you or to the company that wants to book you. And the second, is it easy for the clients or for the companies to find you easily? Like, can they book you easily? Can they, click on the button to contact you easily? If not, then go ahead and explore options, how to do it easy? Basically, just add a CTA so that it's easy to contact you and give clear instructions on how to contact you. And then the faster you answer, the more chance you get because the competition is pretty high, and so if somebody reaches out to you and you take like 24 hours to respond, it's better to respond, almost immediately. The faster you respond, the better results will be. If you have any questions at any point, be sure to reach out to LG in section below. Other than that, see you in the next video. 39. Get Your First Photo Client: Start Simple and Grow Fast: Let's talk about how to get your first paid shoot. I want to begin by explaining my storing how I got started, and then we'll go into the best practices that are currently working. So the way I got started and which is probably the easiest way is through connections. Specifically, I got my first paid shot at the age of 15 probably like nine, ten years ago. And specifically, that was for the fuel company because my relative worked there. I was really interested in photography. I was really passionate. They saw my passion, and so that's how I got started with them. At the same time, I did do a lot of free shoots for them as well. Before that, and so that's how we got started. And that's kind of the big lesson, especially in the very beginning. If you are really passionate about this, you don't necessarily have to get paid from the very first shoot that you ever do. Like, you need to have a little bit of experience because if you have no experience, then the pictures are not always that great. But once you get just a little bit of experience, it becomes a lot easier. And so the personal connections are really, really good. You can circle, the friends of your friends, your friends, your family, anyone, if they know anyone who needs to do a shoot or who needs help with the shoot and you don't necessarily have to be the one shooting. You can be also an assistant, and by being an assistant, you can learn a lot of the stuff. Personal connections is always, always the best, and I really, really recommend to start with that. So literally just ask people around. You probably know people around you who are into photography, who do photography, who just do shoots, and then you can ask to take pictures of those people if they like, they can share it. And then the first step is always the hardest. And if you really want to change your life, then it's better to do it now than. Second great way to do this is to reach out specifically with social media. Let's say you're building your Instagram account, you are ploading your images, and then with that account, you can reach out to whoever you want to take pictures of or whoever you want to work with. You can reach out to big companies. You can reach out to just local people. And once again, I really recommend researching Alex Romosi hundred million dollar lead. He has a free course online, so you can take a look at that. You can go to his website, acquisition.com, and then you can learn a lot about cold reach out and just overall how to advertise yourself. Reaching out to other people is really, really great. And hosting content is also really great because people can reach out to you when they see you content. The last way would be to do paid advertisement, which I don't recommend in the very beginning, once you get some traction, once you have a bit of experience, practice, things like that, great. Go ahead and do that, once again, research her music. But before you get any experience, don't do any paid ads. It's always better one to one, and then reaching out to other people and then posting content so that other people can reach out to you. And then you can think about that in many ways. So reaching out can be also through email, doesn't have to be Instagram, it can be through LinkedIn, can be through reaching out through personal connections to the companies as well or to the potential clients. So ton of different stuff, whatever you feel like is the easiest one for you, get started with that. If everything is very hard, start with social media. Social media is such a powerful tool right now, and you just have to start to see the results. Definitely websites where you can search for different photography gigs. Sure, you can search in different city. Literally just Google Photography gig, like in city or near me, something like that, you'll have the results on Google. I never used that approach. It probably works for some people. Just because you don't have experience with that, I can really recommend, but once again, personal connection, social media is the way to go. I believe in it's the best way to go. So if you have any questions, let me know. Other than that, see you in the next video. 40. Photography Career Paths: Find Your Style and Keep Growing: So what's next? Well, I recommend to just become better and to reinvest. You can always become a little bit better in many different areas. You can become a little bit better by taking pictures at a better angles by doing a slightly better post production, get better lenses or understand the settings a little bit better or just move around a little bit better or reach out to better people. Just become a little bit better in different areas of your life. Because once again, something we learned in the very beginning of this classes if you become better by 1%, you'll be equal to 37 times better by the end of the year. And if you become worse by 1%, you'll be almost equal to Remember that you're never staying the same. You're either progressing or degrading because even if you are staying the same, the world moves further. And therefore, compared to the world, you'll be falling behind, which means you'll be degrading. We need to work twice as hard to become better. But yes, becoming better in your personal skills and then reinvesting money into the equipment because equipment does matter. You'll get better results with the equipment. At some point, the equipment stops being as important when you have a number of lenses, when you have a really good body of the camera. If we're talking to these large in terms of the phones, there are also different phones with different cameras. So depending on what you're anyway, reinvesting into equipment that also includes the lights that also includes the tripods, also includes the reflectors and filters, all sorts of stuff. Really, you can reinvest thousands and thousands of thousands of dollars in euros, we're talking tens of thousands. There's definitely room to improve and room to grow, and you just have to do it step by step, one day at a time, just little improvements both your personal skills and then reinvesting back into your business because by becoming photographer, you kind of become a freelancer. Freelancer is a person who's almost like a business owner, a one man business or one woman business. Any questions, let me know. Other than that, see you in the next video. 41. Create Your Starter Portfolio: Select & Share Your Top Shots: Let's practice a little bit and create your first portfolio folder. So the task is very simple. Pick your five favorite chots from the previous practices. Make sure it's organized, so put it in the folder and name the folder, and then go ahead and upload it social media or to your website, whichever option you think works best. But once again, social media is a lot, a lot easier. So go ahead and upload that one picture per day. Don't upload everything at once, and then use AI to create the CTA, create the captions, as simple as that. If you have any questions, let me know. Other than that, see you in the next video. 42. Your Final Showcase: Submit a Portrait, Landscape & Creative Shot: Let's talk about the final three shot showcase. Below this video player, you'll find a place where you can upload your project, and I really recommend you to upload the project. I mean, if you want, you can keep it private, of course, the reason it's so important is so that you get the practice in. So for this task, take three pictures, one portrait, one landscape, and something creative, something that you enjoy something that comes literally from your heart. Upload it to the project section below and try to explain the image, how you see it. Literally, try to explain as much as possible. Try to talk about the lines, try to talk about the subject, about the isolation, about the framing, about the shutter speed, about the aperture, ISO, angles, anything, anything and everything that the picture has, try to put it from the brain into the text. That is such a powerful tool that will allow you to really understand the picture. Like, your brain will click. You will find things that you did not find unless you start doing the text. Go ahead and do that. I'll take a look at that as well. I'll give you feedback, and it's going to really help us to grow. We're not going for perfection. All we are going for is just practice because volume negates luck. With practice, we're doing the volume part. Go ahead and do that. If you have any questions, let me know. Other than that, see you in the next video. 43. Last step!: Congratulations. You are nearly 100% done with the Fast Photography Mastery. There are just two small steps you need to take. First, take action. As Kafuch said, the journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step, and if you haven't already, take your first step by taking your first image. All the best information in the world means nothing if you don't act on it, and even small steps lead to massive outcomes. Lastly, if you found value in this program, I would really appreciate if you could take 60 seconds to leave you on a I'll be immensely grateful to you and your feedback will massively help hundreds of future students to choose the best program for them. Although this course is complete, your journey has just begun. Be sure to keep me and fellow students posted. Remember, I'm here for your success. So if there's anything you need, don't hesitate to reach out in the Q and section below. Thanks, Ken for choosing me as your instructor, wishing you all the best and looking forward to seeing you in future courses.