Transcripts
1. Introduction: I think one of the things that you quickly realize when you first start shooting landscapes is just how massive and diverse our planet actually is. You learn that no matter where you go or what you see or what you do there are still so many more amazing places around the world for you to see. Hey guys, my name is Sean Dalton. I'm a travel photographer currently based in Bali, Indonesia. Bali is this incredibly beautiful lush little island situated here in Southeast Asia and it's full of some of the most amazing examples of mother nature I've ever seen. From the dense rainforest of the north to the sheer coastal cliffs of the south, and the massive volcanoes that tower over the entire island. It truly is one of the most beautiful places I've ever been to. I've spent the last year here in Bali trying to capture the true beauty and power of this island. Today, I'm going to take you to some of my favorite locations here in Bali and walk you through the process of capturing beautiful landscape photos. We're going to start things off here in the studio. We're going to discuss everything from what gear you might want to use while you're out shooting to finding and scouting beautiful locations for landscape photos. We're also going to talk about composition and how you can compose a beautiful landscape photo, as well as how to choose the best camera settings every time you go out and shoot no matter where you are in the world and no matter what the conditions are. After that, we're going to head outside to two of my favorite locations here in Bali. The stunning green rice terraces of Tegallalang to the north and the sheer coastal cliffs of Uluwatu to the south. These are some of my favorite places here in Bali and they truly are amazing and I'm super excited to show you guys how I would photograph those locations in the most beautiful way possible. After we finish shooting, we're going to come back here to the studio and I'm going to show you guys how I would edit those photos from start to finish with a focus of bringing out the natural colors and tones in our scene. This course is for anybody that just really loves being outside. Maybe you're an outdoorsman or you just really love nature and you want to learn how to better capture some of the things that you see while you're out and about, or maybe you're just somebody that's really drawn to the beauty and the power of a good landscape photo and you just want to learn how to better depict some of the places around you or some of the places that you might go in a more beautiful way. But no matter who you are, if you enjoy taking photos and you also enjoy being outside, then you will definitely get something from this course. I don't know about you guys, but I'm ready to get started on this course and if you are too and if you decide to enroll, then I will see you in the very first lesson where we're going to be talking about some of the core concepts of landscape photography and what it takes to be a great landscape photographer. I'll see you guys in the course.
2. What is Landscape Photography?: Hey guys, what's up? Thank you so much for deciding to enroll in the landscape photography class. I don't know about you, but I am super excited to talk about landscape photography today, simply because it's a form of photography that I really, really love. I started shooting landscape a few years ago, and since then it's really become my main type of photography. I'm always out shooting landscapes, I really love it. I love being in nature, and I hope that you will find that same passion as me by the end of this course. One of the first things I want to talk about in this course is just what landscape photography actually is. So let's define it and just talk about some of the core concepts of landscape photography before we start diving into the specifics. Now at its core, landscape photography is capturing an image that really embodies the spirit of the outdoors or the spirit of nature. The goal of landscape photography is to capture images that when somebody sees those images, it makes them feel the same emotions that you felt when you were standing there, surrounded by nature, and it allows them to imagine what it would have been like to be standing there where you were standing when you captured that photo. Now landscape photography comes in all different shapes and sizes and that's simply because our Earth comes in all different shapes and sizes. From the Avatar mountains of Zhangjiajie, China, to the Rolling Golden Hills of California, and the super dense, lush jungles of Borneo and the Amazon, there's honestly so many beautiful, crazy places on this Earth that deserve to be captured and that's what makes landscape photography so special. However, landscape photography isn't just confined to these grand landscape scenes like the most beautiful places in the world. Yes, those are amazing, yes, people love to see images of crazy tall mountains and just epic landscape and stuff like that. But smaller landscape scenes, smaller intimate scenes maybe in your local area, can be just as beautiful and just as powerful as a grand, beautiful landscape photo. For example, a landscape photograph of a small creek nearby or maybe there's a cool-looking tree down the street, or maybe you have some rolling hills near your house, those can be captured in a very beautiful way and I don't think you should feel like you need to go capture these crazy epic landscapes when there is really a lot of beautiful things anywhere you look in nature. Take the Windows XP landscape photo for example. That was captured on the side of a road somewhere in California and that is one of the most influential landscape photos of all time. That's not a crazy grand landscape photo. I mean, that was shot literally on the side of a highway where the green grass was just contrasting the blue sky really nicely. I think that's just a really good example to show that you don't need to capture these epic grand landscapes to take good landscape photos, you can really do it anywhere as long as you're outside and you're willing to look for new and interesting compositions. It really is all a matter of perspective. For example, where I grew up in California, I always thought that it was ugly. I always thought that I needed to get out to go take cool landscape photos, I just wasn't really inspired by the place that I was. But now after not living in California for 10 years, whenever I think about the place that I grew up, it's now one of the places that I want to shoot more than anywhere else in the world. Because now that I've been gone for so long, I have a new perspective on things and I can look back and think about the places that I grew up in, and I've finally realized that they're absolutely beautiful and there's nothing more in this world that I want to go shoot. I think if there's one thing that I want you to take from this course is to look at the areas around you in a different light, in a different perspective. I often get so many messages from people that are saying, Shawn, I want to become a landscape photographer, but I don't have the funds to travel or I can't get to this place that I really want to shoot at. My answer to them is always, just look locally first, look at the areas around you and try to view them in a different light. Try to view them as somebody that's never been to your area before, never been to your city or your town and try to think of new ways of depicting your town or your local area in a beautiful way. I promise you, no matter where you are in the world, there are beautiful landscapes to be captured in your area. Now what does it take to be a great landscape photographer? I think that there's a few different traits that all great landscape photographers share. At the top of that list is hands down just a really true love for the outdoor world, a true love for nature. As landscape photographers, we're going to be outside shooting. That's what we do. We go out, we find locations outside and we capture them with our cameras. So if you don't love the outdoor world, then you might not enjoy going on hikes or going on road trips or being caught in the rain or being baked under the super hot sun, which happens here all the time in Bali. Bali is ridiculously hot, 365 days of the year. If you don't love the outdoors, then maybe landscape photography is not for you, and all great landscape photographers share that notion that nature is beautiful and it deserves to be depicted. The second thing is energy and excitement. I think all great landscape photographers are really excited about the photos that they want to take. All the best landscape photographers that I know are just always excited about the photos that they are planning on taking. They'll come up to me and they'll be like, "Shawn, I have this location that I want to shoot. I don't think anyone's tried it before, I'm really excited about it." That excitement really shows in their photos and also in their persistency to go back to that location to make sure they get good conditions. That leads me on to point number 3, which is persistency. One of the things you're quickly going to learn about landscape photography is that it is heavily dependent upon conditions, and I'm going to talk about that later on in this course. But the best landscape photographers are willing to go back to a location 5, 10, 20 times just to capture the photo that they have envisioned. As landscape photographers, we're often battling against weather or seasons or other people that are at that scene as well. There's a lot of different factors that go into landscape photography and the best landscape photographers are persistent enough to continue going back to capture the perfect landscape of that scene. I think those three are really the biggest things that contribute to a great landscape photographer. It's not gear, it's not location, it's not anything like that. It's just a love for the outdoors and excitement to be outside to capture these photos and the persistency to keep going back until they get the photo that they want. I think that all just comes down to just a love of photography. Landscape photographers, great landscape photographers, love capturing beautiful photos and I think that's what it takes to be a great landscape photographer. But in short, that's landscape photography from a definition standpoint and also an emotional standpoint. I think landscape photography is an emotional thing. I think every form of photography is an emotional craft. So with this understanding of landscape photography, let's take that and start talking about some of the technical aspects of landscape photography and how you can make sure that whenever you go out to shoot, you're going to be in the best situation to capture the best photos possible.
3. Class Project: Now, this is an interactive course. If you guys have seen any of my other courses, you already know how important I think it is to go outside and capture photos. I think that's the most important factor to becoming a better photographer. You can sit in the classroom all day and learn all these concepts, but if you're not practicing them then you're not going to become a better photographer. In this course, of course, I'm going to be going out and shooting a few locations and taking you guys with me, but I also want you to go outside and capture some photos as well. The class project for this course is just to go outside and capture a few different landscape photos, and then come back to the course and share them here. I really want you to practice some of the principles that you learn in this course where you're out shooting, so maybe that's composition or really focusing in on the camera settings we're going to talk about later as well, or maybe it's just the planning phase and you really utilize the planning phase to go out and capture the photo that you want to capture. No matter what it is, I just want you to use something that you learned in the course and then go outside and capture some beautiful landscape photos. Once you're done capturing and editing those photos, come back here to the course and post one or two of those photos in the Project section down below, and also, just walk us through the shot. Tell us about where you were, why you chose that location, did you just stumble upon it or did you plan to do that shoot, is it an older photo that you captured? Whatever it is, just walk us through the photo, talk about it, talk about the composition, and just tell us why you captured it the way that you did. Now usually I say you do the class project after the course, so after you've watched the content, then you go out and shoot and capture your photos and then come back and post them. But if you're watching the course today and you just feel a massive sense of inspiration and you're just feeling really excited, then I urge you to just pause the course, grab your camera and head outside. Because if you're feeling the inspiration, it's really important to act on it because it's not going to last forever. So if you're feeling inspired, go outside, shoot, come back, finish the course, and then you can post your class project, and that's totally fine. But I really hope you guys do post a class project. Like I said, I love to see them and other students like to see them as well, so do that whenever you're ready. But with that said, let's move on to the next lesson.
4. Gear for Landscape Photography: Now we're going to talk about everyone's favorite topic, which is gear. In this lesson I'm just going to cover some of the basic gear that you might want to use or you're out and about shooting landscapes, as well as some things that really can make your life a lot easier while you're out shooting. Now, right off the bat, before we even get started, I just want to say that you really do not need expensive gear to capture amazing landscape photos. That really goes for every type of photography, but landscape photography in particular. One of the things I'm going to mention throughout this course is the most important factor of landscape photography is just being at the right place at the right time. Honestly, if you're at the right place in the right time, for the most part, any camera is going to be able to capture the beauty of that scene. All cameras made nowadays are great, we've been capturing amazing landscape photos for over 100 years on all the cameras. If those guys could capture amazing photos 100 years ago, then we certainly can do it today with pretty much any consumer camera on the market. One of the best examples I like to give is just the iPhone. I have taken some absolutely incredible photos with the iPhone that you would not believe were taking with this camera. There are landscape photos that look like they're taken with a professional DSLR. That just goes to show that the power that smartphones have. If you only have an iPhone or a Samsung phone, that's honestly totally fine, but this course is focused around DSLR and mirror-less cameras and interchangeable lenses. I want to talk about some of the lenses that you might want to use, some of the cameras that you might want to use while you're out shooting. Now, in terms of cameras, any camera is going to work. The cameras I'm shooting on now, that you're seeing me through, are actually full-frame mirror-less cameras by Sony. That means, the sensor, the thing that's actually recording the light on the camera is relatively big. This camera here, this is a Sony A6400 and we call this a crop sensor camera, which means that the sensor inside the camera is just slightly smaller than the cameras that you're seeing me through. What does that mean? Well, honestly, not a whole lot. A lot of beginner cameras that you buy are going to be crop sensor cameras, but that doesn't mean that they are bad cameras. The only thing that is really going to affect is it means that your camera is just going to be slightly more zoomed in. It's not a game changer if you have a crop sensor camera or an APS-C camera, that's what they call them. They're going to be just fine for taking landscape photos. If you're on the market for a camera for landscape photography or any type of photography, I urge you just to pick up one of the Canon Rebel series cameras. They're super cheap and they're really great cameras to learn photography on. If you have a crop sensor camera, that's great, if you have a more expensive full-frame camera, that's also fine. Either one are going to be able to take amazing landscape photos. Now let's talk about lenses. Lenses can be a huge topic for photography. Lenses are way more important than the actual camera body for photography for every type of photography. With lenses for landscape photography, the most important factor that you should be considering is the focal length. Now, focal length is essentially just how zoomed in our lens is. So the smaller the focal length, something like 16 millimeters, the wider the field of view is for that lens, the higher the number of the focal length, like 200 millimeters, the more zoomed in that lens is. Traditionally, landscape photographers shoot with very wide lenses, something like 16 millimeters, 24 millimeters, those are really wide and it allows us to capture a lot of the scene. But you can also capture some pretty amazing landscape photos with a zoom lens, a telephoto lens like this, which is 70-200 millimeters, which is really zoomed in. Now this is a big lens and it's not always easy to carry around. For first lenses, I don't recommend people buy a zoom lens like this. I think it's more important to focus on the wide side of lenses. My favorite landscape photography lens is the 16-35 millimeter F/2.8 lens, which is one of the lenses that I'm filming on now. This lens is great because I can zoom out all the way to 16 millimeters wide. The scene is really wide and you could just see so much and I can also zoom in to 35 millimeters, which is a little bit more zoomed in, but not too zoomed in. It's still pretty wide, so I can still capture a lot of the landscape. The lens that comes with most beginner cameras is usually an 18-55 millimeter lens, which is honestly really good for landscape photography. The reason for that is because it's still pretty wide. Even at 18 millimeters on a crop sensor camera, you can still see a lot of the scene. Honestly, I think that's a great lens for capturing landscapes. If you zoom in to 55 millimeters, you're going to be able to capture some details as well. So the kit lens that comes with your camera, although it's not amazing, it really does get the job done for landscape photos. In the camera setting section of this course, I'm going to talk about how you can make sure that you maximize your camera's potential by using things like a tripod. When I shoot landscapes, I'm usually shooting with one of three lenses, there's a 16-35 millimeter lens, a 24-70 millimeter lens, as well as 70-200 millimeter lens. That way, the 16-35 covers my wide angles, the 24-70 just covers a really good range all the way in from 24-70, which is just a good meter range, and then the 70-200, which is this bar ball here, can zoom in a lot and capture some more details. Now when considering a lens to buy for landscape photography, I like to recommend lenses on their wider side, like I said. If you can get 16-35 millimeter lens, that's amazing, that's a really good lens for landscape photography because it's nice and wide. Also if you just want to buy one lens for landscape photography, you can do that, you can get something like an 18-105 or just something that has a really big range, something that can go really wide and zoom in a lot as well. That flexibility is really important for landscape photography and so that is my best recommendation for lenses. Now, cameras and lenses aside, one of the most important things you're going to need for landscape photography is a good tripod. Tripods are absolutely essential for landscape photography because we need to lock our camera down so we make sure that it's not shaking at all, because if the is camera shaking and we're capturing landscape photos, it might turn out blurry and it's not going to look very good. I always recommend going out and investing in a good tripod. The one that I'm using is called the Manfrotto Befree. For the most part, I'm pretty happy with it. It gets really small and I can travel with it. It's just a good tripod to use, but there are thousands of great tripods on the market. As long as you have one, it doesn't really matter the brand, it's just more important that you have one at all. The next thing I highly recommend is a waterproof jacket. A waterproof jacket really is essential for landscape photography because we're going to be outside and we might get rained on. I use a Patagonia jacket that's great for pretty much anywhere in the world. I can put a down jacket underneath to stay warm or I can use it in tropical places like Bali where it's really hot, but it still rains a lot. I could just use the shell. I can layer it in cold places or just use the shell in warm places and that works for me and it keeps me protected from the rain. But while it's important to keep yourself dry, it's honestly more important to keep your gear dry. I like to carry one of these rain covers for my backpack. This is great because if it starts raining, I can wrap this around my backpack to make sure that all of my gear is nice and protected from the rain, so you can pick these up anywhere. A lot of bag brands will sell these or any kind of outdoor wear shop or you can also get them online and just make sure that it's the right size for your bag. I use this all the time because it rains a lot here in Bali, especially during the rainy season and this really does help keep my gear protected. Now speaking of bags, I do think it's important to have a good comfortable camera bag for landscape photography. Something that's going to protect your gear and something that's just going to be easy to carry. Now, I use a professional bag called Shimoda, and you can see it's quite dirty because I've put this thing through its paces. I've taken this thing across the world and it's held my gear so well. I keep all my lenses, all my gear in here and it also has good little hiking straps as well. This is a really useful bag, but any bag is going to be fine as long as it's comfortable and as long as it has a rain cover and it can carry all of your gear. Lowepro makes a lot of really great bags that are affordable and I always recommend their bags for landscape photographers. Another thing you're going to want to carry with you is cleaning gear. I always carry this little pouch with me and inside I have lens wipes by ZEISS, these are great. I can clean all my lenses to make sure that there's no dust or mud or water drops on them. I also use one of these to clean my sensor. This thing just blows air onto your lens or onto your sensor to get the dust off. Then of course, you need a good microfiber cloth. I have like 10 of these and they really are essential, especially if you're going to be shooting somewhere like a waterfall, where there's just mist all the time getting on your camera and you have to just continuously clean off that mist. That is really important to have. Another thing that could be very important depending on where you are in the world is just a good set of hiking boots. Now, if you live in a place where you're going to be hiking off road to get to the places where you want to shoot, I do recommend getting a good pair of shoes. Something waterproof is also very helpful. Not everyone needs to have a good pair of boots, for example, here in Bali, some places we have to hike to, but some places we can just drive up our motorbikes and just hike a little bit and we can capture our photos there. You don't always need to have good boots, but depending on where you're going to be going, you should be prepared. Another thing a lot of landscape photographers are shooting with nowadays are drones. Drones just are really a game changer for landscape photography because they open up so many different perspectives that you would never be able to access without being up in the air. Drones are amazing and I use one quite a bit, but honestly it's not my favorite way to shoot because I have to stare at my phone. In these beautiful places, I much prefer shooting with my camera because I can be there and just focus on capturing what's in front of me, but it is a good tool. This course isn't going to be focusing on drone photography, like I said, because you don't need one to capture great photos, not at all. The best landscape photographers of all time were not drone photographers. It is a cool tool, but it's not something that we're going to be using in this course. Now I also want to touch briefly on filters. There's a lot of filters that you can use for landscape photography, none of which are necessary at all. But I would say, if there's one filter that you might want to buy for landscape photography, it's a polarizing filter. Now, a polarizing filter is basically like sunglasses for your lens. You screw it to the front of your lens and it's going to change the way that light actually enters your camera and reaches your sensor. It's going to change the way the image looks a little bit. For example, it could make the sky a little bit bluer, a little bit darker, and it could also help reduce reflections on glass or on water. Sometimes it can be very useful for landscape photographers, but it can also be misused a lot. If you're not using it properly, it can make your image look a little bit weird, a little bit funky. It's not something I'm going to be using today. Maybe while we're out shooting, I might screw this on my camera, but we're just going to have to see what it's like out there. Certainly not a necessary piece of gear, but just something I wanted to mention anyways. Last but not least, I always recommend to have a spare batteries and spare SD cards. You never know what's going to happen when you're out there and you don't want to run out of battery in your camera. Also, you want to make sure your SD cards are always clear before you go out and shoot, because the worst thing you could do is show up in a location and have an SD card that's full then you have to worry about deleting stuff and the sun is rising and you're like, I'm not going to be able to get the shot. So just make sure you have spare SD cards or at the very least, make sure you clear your SD cards before you go out and shoot. But that's some of the basic gear you might want to use while you're shooting. Like I said, you really don't need expensive cameras and lenses. The beginner cameras that you can get from Canon and Nikon and Sony are all amazing and more than good enough as long as you have a tripod and you have a lens that can go somewhat wide, then you're good to go. But with gear out of the way, now I want to talk about planning our shoot and really preparing ourselves to capture the best photos possible. Let's talk about that now.
5. Location Scouting & Planning: In this lesson, I want to talk about the planning phase of landscape photography, which I think you'll quickly realize is very important for a landscape photography. But it also doesn't have to be. I know a lot of landscape photographers, they just really don't like to plan, and they'd rather let things happen organically. If you're not much of a planner and you just want to go on a hike and capture some great photos, that's totally fine. But if you are a planner and you want to really make sure that you're going to put yourself in the best possible situation to capture the best photos, then you can also do that as well. You can pretty much plan as much or as little as you want, but you're often going to be in just better situations if you do take the time to plan. Now hands down, the most important factor, the number one factor for capturing great landscape photos, is just being at the right place at the right time. Much of our planning phase really does revolve around that, just ensuring that we're at the right place at the right time. When we're planning, we're really focusing on two things. Number 1 is finding a location, and number 2 is finding the best time to go to that location to take our photos. Now in terms of choosing a location to take landscape photos, and well, there's a few different ways to go about this. Obviously, if you're pretty familiar with your area already and you know some good hiking trails and you have some ideas of good locations that might be good for landscape photography, that's perfect. I think you should roll with those and go out and try to shoot in those locations. You could also just talk to people that live in your area, people that are outdoors a lot and just say, "Do you have any idea of some good places around here that might be good for capturing landscape photos? I know you're often outside a lot, so have you ever come across any places that you think would be really cool in a photograph, or do you have any photos that you could show me?" That's a great way to find locations. Also just going out and roaming in your area, going on local hikes and just finding them naturally, come stumbling upon them, that is a really great way to find locations. However, if you're traveling and you really just aren't sure of that location, you don't know where to go, you really have no idea where to start, that's okay. A lot of the time we're in those situations and there's a few different resources that you can use to give you some ideas and some inspiration on where to go out and shoot. I'm going to cover some of the resources that I used to find locations to shoot in. Hopefully that will give you an idea of how you can find the areas around the world or areas near you as well. On the top of the list is Instagram. This is an app that I use quite heavily. I do post a lot on Instagram, but more importantly, I use it to just scout different locations around the world. Say for example, I'm going to Japan and I'm planning on going to Kyoto. I heard some cool things about Kyoto, and I really want to go there and shoot. But to be honest, I don't know a whole lot about the city, and I'm just not sure where to shoot or where to stay or anything like that. Instagram is a great place to start. You can type in Kyoto on Instagram and just scroll through the feeds. Then I like to save photos that I find interesting or inspiring, or just places that I think could be photographed in a really cool way. What's so cool about Instagram is a lot of the time people actually tag the location of that Instagram. Say for example, you're searching in Kyoto and you come across a really cool post of this beautiful landscape. You're like, "Oh, I wonder where that is?" Sometimes people can tag that location. Then you can type that in on Google Maps or on Google, learn more about that location and just do a little bit more detective research just to figure out how to get there and where it is and where to stay and things like that. Also, if you can't figure out where a place is, you can also send somebody a message. Just asked them nicely, "Hey, I was wondering, where is this? It's okay if you don't want to tell me." Some people just don't want to tell you where they captured their photo. I think that's okay, especially if they did all this research to find this incredible location to capture the photo. But most times people are willing to share the location. A friendly, nice message on Instagram can be really helpful in terms of finding cool location to shoot, especially when you're trying to flush out the details. Now one of the other reasons why I like Instagram so much is because it's often very current. For example, if you're not sure about the weather or the seasons, for example, here in Bali, there's a lot of rice farmers here. The rice fields can be either stunningly beautiful and absolutely gorgeous and green and golden, or they can be just pools of muddy water. It really does depend on the time that you're there. Just after harvest is not a good time, but just before they harvest, the rice fields turn this beautiful golden color and it's honestly stunning. I always want to make sure that I'm putting myself in the best situation to be there when they're blooming like that. You can check Instagram and check recent posts to make sure that location looks the way you want it to. Yes, the posts aren't always recent, but you can usually get a good idea, and you can also ask people like, "Hey, how did the rice fields look when you were there last week? Oh, you were there last week?" That means that they might still look at this week. Instagram is just a really great way to find locations, and also learn more about those locations and their current state. Now beyond Instagram is Google. Google is probably one of the best ways to find great locations around the world or near you. It starts with just a simple Google search. You can say, cool places to take photos in Kyoto or cool places to take photos in Saint Petersburg, Russia, or wherever you are in the world, you can type that in and just browse some of the websites. Often there's a lot of travel blogs, and they will provide a lot of great insight as to places to go or places to shoot. Some photographers publish blogs on the best places to take photos in this area. You can also access hiking blogs or nature blogs or a bird watching blogs. There really is just immense amount of information. You can go on Google and just sort through it and find images that you like and bookmark things and just paint this overall picture of what a destination is going to be like, and the best places to shoot within that area. Now YouTube is also really great. People like sharing their lives online. Often YouTube is just a great way way learn more about a location and just give you ideas on places to shoot. For example, if you're planning on coming here to Bali, you can type in Bali vlog or Bali adventure blog, or the best things to do in Bali, or the most beautiful places in Bali. Try searching for a bunch of different things and just watch some of those videos that you come across and take notes of some of the places that they're in, some of the places that they're visiting. It really is just a really great resource for finding locations around the world that are great for taking landscape photos in. Then the last resource I like to use for finding locations is Google Maps. Often I'll just sit there on Google Maps, and I'll scroll and just try to find cool locations. For example, we went to Lombok, which is an island near Bali. We went there a few months ago, and I had found some cool stuff on the island, but I just really wasn't sure where exactly to go. Often that's going to be a case, and that's fine. You shouldn't always overly plan your trips. But I was on Google Maps and I was like, "Oh, this whole bottom coast looks amazing. There's got to be some cool stuff over there." There's not a lot of roads, there's not a lot going on, but I'm sure there's some cool photo spots over there. I just started zooming in and scrolling through and just looking at the coastline. I was amazed at some of the stuff that I found. Often on Google Maps, there's little viewpoints and you can click on those viewpoints and sometimes they'll have photos, or you can also use the Street View, you can also find nearby establishments that are on Google Maps. Sometimes they have photos of just the general area, especially if you're in a rural area which has landscape photographers, we often are. Google Maps is probably, out of all the apps that I use for landscape photography, the most important for shooting landscapes, I use it for finding locations, I use it for finding hotels, I use it for finding coffee shops that I can go to after I shoot my sunrise, because I really do need coffee after I shoot sunrise. It really is just a really great comprehensive app for finding cool locations and also learning more about that area. But now that you've found a location to shoot in, now you need to make the tough decision as to when should you go there and shoot. Now I think I touched on this before, but landscape photography is heavily dependent upon conditions. You can go shoot a location 50 different times and get 50 drastically different looking photos. Not only do factors like the time of day affect your photos, but also the weather, the clouds in the sky, and the season as well. For example, autumn looks very different from spring and spring looks very different from winter. The season is very important, but also just every day or every hour changes in weather as well. Now in terms of the best time to shoot, most of the time as landscape photographers, we're shooting at either sunrise or sunset. The reason for that is because at sunrise and sunset, the sun is a lot lower in the sky and it's coming in at diagonal angle and it's creating a lot of really interesting shadows. It's also a lot softer and gentler, which makes it easier for our cameras to pick up the contrast, and it's also a much more beautiful color at that time too it's much more golden, and that's why we call sunrise and sunset golden hour. Then another great time to shoot is blue hour, which is about 30 minutes before sunrise and 30 minutes after sunset. For example, at sunset, that's right after the sun has set, the sky turns this beautiful royal blue, the blueish blue you've ever seen and it's absolutely incredible for taking photos. Sunrise, sunset, and blue hour for the most part is the best time to take photos as a landscape photographer. Besides using apps like Instagram to look at recent posts to get an idea of the conditions at that specific location you're going to go shoot in, there's a few different apps that I like to use to make sure that I'm putting myself in the best situation to take the best photos possible. The most important app among them all is an app called WeatherBug. This is just the weather app that I use, but you can use any weather app at all. The weather app is really important for landscape photography, because if you're going to go out and shoot, you want to make sure it's not raining. I always check the weather before I go out and shoot. I like to use the app called WeatherBug because it gives me the hourly breakdown of weather in a specific location. For example, if I'm planning on going to a place in Bali, I can go on my phone, type in that location and check the weather just to make sure that there's going to be at least decent weather that I can shoot in. The other app I really like, and this is a great app for photographers, it's called PhotoPills. Now there's a lot of features within this app that are great for photographers, especially landscape photographers, but I use it mostly just to check the direction of the sunrise and the sunset. For example, if I open up the app here, there's a bunch of different things here and they're all great, the only thing that I really use is just the little sun in the right-hand corner, so I tap that and it tells me basically everything I need to know about where the sun is going to be in the sky for the day. I can see here for example, sunrise is at 6:22, sunset is at 6:21, almost a perfect 12 hours, and it tells me here nautical twilight at 5:37 and then blue hour at 6:01 AM. I can go at 6:01 to capture blue hour, golden hour starts at 6:09, and then basically the good window to shoot is between 6:09 AM and 6:50 AM. Then for sunset, golden hour starts at 5:53 and then blue hour starts at 6:34. I have that window to take photos and it's about 40 minutes or so. This is a really cool app and also you can type in AR, and this is super cool. If you raise your phone up, it'll show you the direction of the sun. I can see right now it's about 3:15 and you can see the sun is right there in the sky. If I go outside this window, the sun will be right there. That is a really cool app and that is a feature that I like to use for shooting landscapes. I definitely recommend checking out the PhotoPills app and also just go through some of the other things that the app has too, it's a pretty cool app. The last thing that I like to do for planning out my shoots is to use Google Earth as well. Google Maps is great for finding locations and finding places to park and stuff, but Google Earth takes it a step further and it can be really helpful for choosing compositions as well as seeing how the light lines up in those locations. I like to use Google Earth just to look at how tall things are and also zoom in and figure out where the roads lead and where I can park and just give me a better overall idea of the location that I'm going to go shoot in. I definitely recommend getting the Google Earth map because it can be a absolute game changer for landscape photographers. These are just some of the apps that I use. I know that there's other landscape photographers that take it to the next level and they just completely plan everything and they look at the height of the clouds and stuff, I'm not like that, and some of the best photographers that I know aren't like that either. If you want to do that and you want to get these apps that show you the height of the clouds and you want to be very particular about your shots, that's totally fine, but if you're not an analytical person like that and you don't want to make it overly technical, you don't have to, you can still capture amazing landscape photos without completely planning every little detail about your trip, so you don't need to, like I said, I know some world-famous landscape photographers that don't take it to that level and they still capture great photos. Now let's take a look at some of the places that I'm going to be shooting later on in this course. I've been doing some research on places to shoot here in Bali, and I've actually been to those locations before, but I wanted to make sure that I was going to put myself in the best situation while I was going there to shoot. Let's use these as an example for this lesson. The first place we're going to be shooting out tomorrow morning is probably one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen it's called Tegallalang. It's about an hour drive north of where we currently are in Bali, and it's this beautiful green rice surfaces that flow through this valley and they're framed on either side by palm trees, and if you can get there at the right time in the morning, the sun will hit the palm trees and create light rays, and it's honestly absolutely stunning. We're going to be shooting that. I did a little bit of research on my phone, I looked at some of the photos from there, I got some ideas for composition, and I've also been there before. Every time I go somewhere, I like to look at it in a new light, I like to think, ooh, where could I shoot? What are some of the cool compositions in this location? I do have some ideas for compositions in mind before I go, but also am going to make sure that I check the weather app tonight and the weather app tomorrow morning at about 4:00 AM when I get up to show up there for sunrise, I want to make sure that it's not going to be raining while I'm there. The second location that we're going to be shooting at is one of my favorite places in all of Bali and that is Uluwatu, which is the southern part of Bali. It's this big rock and there's these massive cliffs that drop off into the ocean, and there are some really amazing places to take photos out there. It actually lines up perfectly with the sunset because the sun sets on the west side of the island and the light hits those cliffs perfectly, creating a lot of interesting shadows and beautiful lighting scenario. I'm excited to shoot there. I've been to Uluwatu a few times, but I wasn't exactly sure where I should go to shoot, so I did a lot of research using Instagram and Google and Google Maps to find a location and I think I found the best location to capture some pretty cool photos. We're going to go set up there tomorrow afternoon just before sunset and I'll walk you through the shots that I'm going to capture there as well. We have two more lessons to get through before we go shoot tomorrow, we're going to talk about composition and some of the compositional topics that you might want to know with landscape photography. Then we're also going to talk about camera settings and how you can choose the best camera settings to capture the best photos possible. With that said guys, let's move on to those lessons now.
6. Landscape Composition: Now that you've planned your location, you found the best place to shoot, and you found the best time to shoot, and you actually go and you show up and you're there, you need to set your camera up and start thinking about composition and how you're going to depict the scene that's in front of you in order to present it in the most beautiful way possible. In short, composition is essentially just how you arrange all of the elements within your scene. Every great photographer has a good eye for composition. One of the things you often hear people say when they're talking about a good photographer, is they'll say, "Oh, that photographer, they have the eye. They can see things really well. They just know how to capture great photos." When they say that they have the eye, they're actually saying, "Wow, that person is really good at creating great compositions." They're really good at arranging all the elements within their scene and capturing them in a beautiful way. When it comes to composition, there's so many different topics that you can talk about. You can talk about all these different rules and all these different topics, but I think that there's only a few topics that are absolutely essential to understand for composition and it's up to you to take those concepts and go out and put them into practice. You can easily over-teach composition, and that prevents creativity. In this lesson, I'm going to talk about a few very essential compositional topics that you can reference while you're out shooting in order to get the best shot possible. These are just guidelines. They're certainly not rules and you should not confine yourself to them at all, because like I said that's going to inhibit creativity. Composition is 100 percent going to depend on the scene that you're in, it's going to be different in every situation. I won't be talking about specific compositions in this video. However, I will be covering some important compositional topics that I think are essential to understand, as well as showing you some examples of some photos that I think just did a really great job at composition and breaking down why those photos look so good. The first composition or concept I want to talk about is probably the most basic of but the most important, and that is perspective. Perspective is essentially how you orient yourself in accordance to your subject. With landscape photography, it's essentially where you choose to stand to capture your photo. Depending on where you are, your scene can greatly change. For example, if you shoot behind a bush or in front of a bush, now you add a foreground element to your scene that you didn't have before when you were shooting in front of it. If you choose to climb a tree and shoot from a tree, well, that's going to give you a much different perspective than if you were shooting below the tree where you couldn't see the top of the mountain. I don't know if you're going to be climbing trees while you're out shooting, but I'm just using it as an example. The best advice I have for getting the best perspective is to constantly shift and just try new perspectives. One of the big misconceptions about landscape photography is it's always done from a tripod. You just set your tripod up, and take the photo. Yes, maybe some landscape photographers shoot like that, but for me I like to move around. Yes, I'll put my camera on a tripod if it needs to be on a tripod, but I'll be constantly moving around and just trying to come up with new and interesting compositions. Also, once the sun is up in the sky, I don't need to use my tripod anymore. I take it off the tripod because then I'm even more mobile, and I can make sure I'm getting a bunch of different compositions and a bunch of different perspectives. Perspective really can change the way your photo looks. For example, if you shoot from up high, you might be able to see more of the landscape in front of you which could show depth better. It can show just more of the scene, while if you shoot something from below it can make something look much more grand or much larger. If you shoot something close up it's going to look very different whereas if you shot it from further back, and also shooting from different sides can greatly change the perspective and greatly change the composition of an image. I also want you to keep in mind that the focal length of your lens is going to affect your perspective. For example, shooting something at 16 millimeters which is really wide, is a much different perspective than shooting something at 50 millimeters or 100 millimeters which is very zoomed in. Shooting something really wide, it is great for showing size and scale, while shooting something at 200 millimeters is really good at showing depth and details. They both have their place in landscape photography, and I want you to think about that when you show up to your scene and you're thinking about how to capture it the best way. Should you shoot it with a wide-angle lens, or should shoot it with a tight angle lens, or should you try both? That is going to play a big role in the overall composition, is your focal length choice. The second compositional topic I want to talk about is this idea of leading lines. Leading lines are basically just lines in your image that help guide the viewer's eyes to a specific part of the image or a vantage point in the image. These are really everywhere, they occur naturally all over the place. For example, the edges of mountains or where a lake hits the shoreline, or even a beach that wraps around and guides your eye to something in the distance. Leading lines are everywhere and they can really completely transform your photo. The best way to discuss leading lines is just to look at a few really good examples of leading lines. For example, this beautiful photo by Roby Alaria. You can see this main road here in the middle of the frame, it just winds into the distance and it just naturally carries our eye into the background. There's also all these other little lines around the image that are converging onto the main line, which also just help guide our eyes there. There's also a lot of natural lines in the vineyards here, and those just help guide our eyes to the background even more. This is just a beautiful photo and a great example of leading lines, and I also just really loved the light here. Regardless of composition, the light in this image is fantastic. You can see a lot of really nice shadows and just that beautiful photo. Here's another great example, it looks like it's also taken in Italy. This is Luca Micheli, and you can see this road just wrapping into the background with all of these beautiful lines. The horizon also acts as a leading line here, it just setting the stage in the background. The shadows and the lines of the hills also act as leading lines, which just help guide our eyes to this little house in the middle or whatever that is. It's stunning and the leading lines in this image are really great. Here's another photo, and this is one that I captured of a beautiful bridge in Vermont in the autumn. I made it there at the perfect time to see all the leaves. That was one of the most incredible things I've ever seen, it was absolutely stunning. But I captured this photo in the morning, some clouds went over the sun and it just made this nice, soft glowing light. The leading lines in this image are man-made, and they're coming from the train tracks. You can see, the train tracks just naturally lead our eyes onto this bridge and into the background there. Also the tree branches are to help navigating our eyes to the center of the scene, and also the lines on the bridge just make it very easy for our eyes to focus on the most important part of the frame which is just the bridge. This photo is also a really good example of our next compositional topic, which is depth. Depth is very important for landscape photography because it gives the viewer an idea of the actual size and scale of that location that you're shooting in. The best way to show depth in our landscape photos is to make sure that we have a foreground, a midground, and a background. Foreground elements are things that are closest to our frame. The midground is basically just the middle of our frame, and the background is something that's further away from the frame like maybe some mountains in the background. You can easily add depth into your scene by just stepping behind something. For example, if there's a bush nearby, you can step behind that bush and you can use that as a foreground element to just better show depth in your scene. This photo that I was showing you earlier is a good example of depth because we have the train tracks in the foreground and they lead all the way into the background, and we also have these leaves here in the foreground that are falling which gives us a sense of scale. The bridge is in the midground, and then we have these blurry trees out in the background. This is a good example of depth, and here's another photo I took in Vermont around the same time. I wanted to step behind these leaves here to show some depth, so I added that as a foreground element. This photo still would have been great without those leaves in the foreground, but I like that it just adds a little bit of depth to our scene. Here's another great example of depth. This is a photo by Samuel Ferrara, and I really love how there is just several different layers in the scene. Technically, there's no foreground. Maybe the front element here; the darker area, could be considered a foreground but I think it's more of a midground element. But there's just so many different layers in our scene that eventually got our eyes back into this stunning mountain with the clouds on top. I really think this is a beautiful photograph, and also a great example of depth. Here's another good example of depth of a smaller, and just more intimate scene in a forest. This is a great example of depth because of the way that the photographer uses light. You can see the light here is early morning light and it's coming through the trees and hitting this fog, which provides a lot of atmospheric light and also it just helps provide a sense of depth in the image. This photographer uses foreground elements here; the tree in the foreground, and then we have more trees in the midground and more trees in the background. It's really just a great representation of depth and this is an awesome photo. The last compositional topic I want to discuss is this idea of the rule of thirds. The rule of thirds tells us that we should divide our frame into thirds, and then place our subjects on the intersecting lines. This just makes it easy for our eyes to navigate throughout a photo, and also focus on the most important parts of the image. I don't know why they call it the rule of thirds, I think it's more of a guideline. I don't think we should confine ourselves to rules with composition, but I still think this is a really great concept to discuss. This is a really great photo to discuss the rule of thirds. This is a photo by Luca Bravo. First off, it's absolutely stunning. It's a beautiful image; the colors, the light, the edit, everything. But you can see our main subject here is very easy to identify. It's the subject here in the bottom right-hand corner, this little boat shack; I guess you would call it, and it's situated in the bottom-right corner of the frame; the bottom right third of the frame. It's situated in the foreground here and it's just very easy for our eyes to navigate and identify that, that is the most important part of the image. It's anchoring the photo and just allowing our eyes to easily navigate throughout the frame and see all the most important parts of this image. This is also a really great example of depth. You can see we have these plants in the foreground as well as the boat shack, which is in the foreground, maybe the midground. We have these mountains here; the green mountains which are in the midground, then we have these further mountains beyond which are at the background. That's a really great example to show rule of thirds as well as depth. Here's another great photo that shows the rule of thirds. This is a photo by Robert Lukeman, and you can see the waterfall here is in the right third of the frame. Then that allows us all this extra space on the left side of the composition to just see more of the landscapes. I really like how this image is composed, also I really like how the river flows creating these leading lines that lead us off into the distance as well as back to the waterfall. The leading lines on the top of the ridge also guide our eyes to the back of the frame, to the background. This is also a really great example of depth. But what originally drew me to this image was just the way the photographer composed it using the rule of thirds, and by placing the waterfall in the right right of the frame. But those are some of the basic concepts that I want you guys to think about when you're shooting composition, perspective, leading lines, depth, and rule of thirds. Those are just the most essential compositional concepts that you should know, and you can take those and go out and shoot and have those in mind while you're creating your compositions and use them as guidelines for capturing great compositions while you're out shooting in the field. But like I said, these are certainly not rules and I don't want you to confine yourself to them at all. I want you to be constantly shifting your perspective and thinking of new ideas and really exercising that creative side of your brain because every great photographer does that, and you'd be surprised at some of the stuff that you'll come up with when you you get creative with something and try out new things.
7. How to Choose the Best Camera Settings: Up until now, we've discussed planning your shoot, we've discussed composition, and now it's time to talk about camera settings and what camera settings you should use while you're out and about shooting. Now while camera settings are important for landscape photography, remember that the most important factor for landscape photography is just being at the right place at the right time. Honestly, as long as you're at the right place at the right time, you can shoot in auto and you're probably going to get a pretty decent photo. With that said, if you really want full creative control over your scene, over your image, then you should understand how to shoot in manual mode, and you really should have a good understanding of how your camera settings are going to affect the way your image looks. In this video, I'm going to give you guys a simple camera setting progression that you can follow to make sure that you're using the right settings every time you go out and shoot, no matter where you are in the world or what you're shooting, or what time of day it is. Now when we're talking about camera settings, we're mostly talking about three things. There's a few other things that I'm going to touch on later on in this lesson, but for the most part, there's three main topics that we're talking about, shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. Those three things comprise what we call the exposure triangle, which is just a nice little diagram that helps us understand that all three of these settings regulate how much light is entering our camera. Cameras capture light, that's how an image is actually created. The light comes into the lens and it's recorded on a little sensor and that creates the image. The amount of light entering our camera is going to determine our exposure, and our exposure is essentially just how bright or how dark our image appears. If there's too much light entering our camera, our photo is going to be overexposed, which means that it's just too bright. It just doesn't look great because it's just way too bright. On the flip side of that, if there's not enough light entering our camera, that photo is going to be underexposed. It's going to look too dark and we're not going to have a lot of details in that photo. Thus, it's very important that we strike a good balance between shutter speed, aperture, and ISO to make sure that there's a good amount of light entering our camera, creating a nice balanced exposure. That's exactly what we're doing when we're shooting in manual mode. Instead of allowing the camera to choose how much light is entering the camera by auto-selecting the camera settings, we're choosing and we're telling the camera how much light we want it to record. Now when we're shooting landscapes, yes, we want to make sure that these three settings are balanced in order to capture a good exposure. But that's not the main reason why we shoot in manual mode, that the camera is actually very good at auto-selecting the exposure of our image. That's not why we actually shoot in manual mode. The reason why we want to shoot in manual mode is because each of these settings, shutter speed, aperture, and ISO, also have a creative effect on our image that are super important for landscape photography. Thus, we need to make sure that we use the right settings yes, to get a proper exposure, but also to make sure that we're capturing our scene in the best way possible. Let's break down the creative effects of each setting and how they impact your landscape photos, as well as a simple progression that you can follow to make sure that you're using the best settings possible when you're out shooting landscapes. Let's start off with shutter speed. Shutter speed is essentially the length of time that your camera is opened and recording light. Whenever you hear a click, that's the shutter opening, the light is entering the camera and then it closes again. You actually hear two clicks. The length of time between the shutter opening and closing is your shutter speed. A slow shutter speed would mean that your camera is open to light for a long period of time, and a fast shutter speed means that your camera's open to light for a very short amount of time, which means not a lot of light will enter the camera. From an exposure standpoint, that's pretty easy to understand, but the creative effect of shutter speed is much more interesting. The creative effect of shutter speed is its ability to freeze or blur motion depending on what your shutter speed is set to. A slow shutter speed will result in more motion blur in subjects that are moving within your frame. Whereas a fast shutter speed will be able to freeze that motion better and create an overall sharper-looking image. For example, sports photographers often shoot with very fast shutter speeds because they want to make sure that they freeze those moments which are happening really fast. Which is just the swing of a bat or the kick of a soccer ball or something like that. Now, if you're using too slow of a shutter speed and your hand holding your camera, you can actually get blurry images from the shake of your hands. That's why we use tripods in landscape photography. We can place our camera on a tripod and make sure it's not moving in order to capture sharp images, even if we're using a slower shutter speed. However, even if we're using a tripod, if there's something moving within our scene, even if our camera is not moving, our image could appear blurry if our shutter speed is too slow. Thus, the first question that we should ask ourselves when we're setting our camera settings is, is there anything moving in my scene? If there's nothing moving in our scene, then it doesn't matter what our shutter speed is set to as long as our camera is set on a tripod. But if there is something moving in our scene, we need to determine if we will either want to freeze that motion or blur that motion. This is very much a creative choice. If we want to freeze that motion, we need to use a shutter speed that's fast enough to freeze that motion, and if we want to blur that motion then we need to use a shutter speed that's slow enough to make sure that we see that blur in the subject that's moving. This waterfall is a really good example of shutter speed. I shot this here in Bali. The first photo was shot at 1-100th of a second, and if you look at the waterfall, it looks relatively sharp. It's not super sharp. I think it would have been sharper if I shot it at 1-500th of a second. But in the second image you can see this was shot at 2.5 seconds. You can see how smooth this image looks when it's shot at 2.5 seconds. The reason for that is because the shutter is open for a longer period of time, allowing that motion blur effect to come into play, which looks really cool. Everything else in the image is sharp because those parts of the image weren't moving and the camera was on a tripod. A shutter speed is pretty easy to understand both from an exposure standpoint and also its creative effect. But after you complete step 1 of choosing the best shutter speed to use, now you're going to move on to step 2, which is choosing the best aperture to use. Now aperture, also known as your f-stop, is the little hole and your lens that opens and closes to let light into your camera. Aperture is also denoted by a number, and it could be anywhere between f/1.2 and f/22. The larger the number, like f/18 or f/22, the smaller that hole is going to be in the camera, which means less light is going to enter the camera. The smaller the number like f/1.2 or f/1.4 or f/2, the wider that hole is going to be, which means more light is going to enter the camera. But the creative effect of aperture is way more important for landscape photography. The creative effect of aperture is its ability to control the depth of field in our image. Depth of field is defined as the range of focus in our scene. A photo with a deep depth of field will have everything in frame and focused from the foreground all the way until the background. Whereas a photo with a shallow depth of field will only have one small part of that frame in focus. For example, just the foreground is in focus, or just the background is in focus. The smaller the aperture value that we use, like f/1.2 or f/1.8, for example, the shallower our depth of field will be. The larger the aperture value we use like f/11 or f/18 or f/22, the more depth of field we will have in our image, which means that more of our scene will be in focus. For example, if you have a scene with a foreground, a mid-ground, and background, and you want to make sure that you get the foreground in focus and the background in focus, well then you'd want to use a really small aperture or a larger aperture value like f/11 or f/16 or f/22 because that means the hole is going to be smaller and the depth of field is going to be greater. You're going to have more focus throughout your scene. Whereas if you shot that same scene at f/1.4 for example, and you focused on the foreground, well, the foreground would be in focus, but everything behind it would be out of focus. But if you truly do want the most depth of field in your image, you want to get as much sharpness from the foreground to the background, then you should use an aperture like f/22. Now just like setting your aperture when you're deciding whether you want to freeze motion or blur motion, aperture is very much a creative choice as well. There's no right or wrong with aperture. If you want to use a shallow depth of field than you're scene, you totally can. If you want to use a deep depth of field than your scene, you can do that as well. It's a creative choice and no one's here to tell you that you photographed it the right way or the wrong way. When you're setting your aperture, I want you to look at your composition and ask yourself, which parts of the frame do I want to be in focus? Do I need the foreground in focus? Do I need the background in focus? Don't want to create a little bit of blur, you can determine that and choose your aperture based on that. I urge you to experiment with this as well. You're not going to know right away, what I need to use is an aperture of 2.8 to capture the scene. Experiment, shoot it at 2.8 or F4 and also shoot it at F16. Just look at the differences between the two. That's the best way to understand aperture. But once you've set your shutter speed and your aperture, well, now you need to move on to ISO. ISO is essentially just the sensitivity of your camera's sensor, and it's also denoted by a number. The lower the number, the less sensitive your sensor is, which means it's going to record less light. The higher of the number the ISO, the more sensitive your sensor is going to be, which just means it's just going to record more light. However, the thing about ISO is, when you bump your ISO up, it reduces image quality quite a bit. As landscape photographers, we always want to keep our ISO as low as possible and we only raise it if we really need to, which is honestly pretty rare as long as we have a tripod. Ninety-five percent of the time, I'm shooting with an ISO of 100. As long as you have a tripod, then you should be doing that as well. But there are some situations where you might need to increase your ISO to make sure that you have a balanced exposure. Say for example, you're shooting a scene and there's a subject moving, and you want to freeze that motion, so you have to use a fast shutter speed. That means less light is going to enter your camera. But you also want to make sure that you have a deep depth of field. You have everything from the foreground to the background in sharp focus. To do that, you need to use a small aperture, which is also going to limit the amount of light entering your camera. Well, now your exposure is going to be too dark because you're using a fast shutter speed and a very small aperture. In that situation, you might have to increase your ISO up to 400 or 800 or even 1,000 in order to capture the movement and the depth in that scene. But honestly, that's pretty rare. Most of the time, we don't have much movement in our scene, so most of the time, we're not really shooting with a fast shutter speed with landscape photography. That's really the point of the tripods, we can use any shutter speed because our hands aren't going to shake the camera and create motion blur in the scene. But if you don't have a tripod and you're trying to shoot landscapes, there's a good chance that you're going to have to raise your ISO if you're shooting in a darker environment. Because if you use too slower of a shutter speed, your hands are going to shake and the image is going to come out blurry. But those are the three camera setting that you really should understand; shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. Understanding them, like I said, is important for exposure, but understanding the creative effects that they have on your landscape image are essential if you really want to become a great landscape photographer. Just to recap our basic camera setting progression. First off, ask yourself, is there any movement in my scene? If there is, then you need to determine if you want to freeze it or blur that motion. If there's no motion you're seeing, then it doesn't matter, we'll come back to shutter speed after we set our aperture and ISO. Moving on to step number 2, setting our aperture. We need to look at our scene and determine what we want to be in focus. If we have a lot of depth in our scene, we want to capture all of that in sharp focus. We need to use a smaller aperture, which is a larger aperture value like F22. But if we want to have more shallow depth of field in our image, then we use a wider aperture, such as F4, F2.8. Then moving on to step number 3, set your ISO to 100 and only bump it up if you really have to, but usually, you shouldn't have to. For the most part, that's it for camera setting s. If you follow this progression, you're going to be putting yourself in the best situation to use the best settings every time you shoot. But at the beginning of this lesson, I did mention that there are a few other things that I wanted to touch on. The first thing you need to do is make sure that your camera is shooting RAW photos. If your camera's not shooting RAW photos, it's going to be capturing JPEG photos. JPEG photos, while they look great out of camera, they just contain a lot less information than a RAW photo. I always recommend shooting RAW when you're shooting landscapes because it gives us so much more flexibility when we're editing later on. The other thing you should be thinking about is white balance. White balance is essentially what your camera understands white to be. For landscape photography, I always just recommend shooting in auto-white balance. The reason for that is because it's easy, we don't have to focus on it. and the camera really does a great job at capturing the white balance of a scene. Also for shooting RAW, then we can easily adjust the white balance later on when we're editing. The last thing I wanted to touch on was focus. I think a lot of people hear the words, "Oh you should shoot in manual" They also think manual focus, but to be honest, I very rarely ever shoot manual focus, and most landscape photographers will just shoot in auto-focus because it's much easier and it's also just super accurate. Manual focus isn't really used in landscape photography very often, unless you just have something very specific that you need in focus and you have a very shallow depth of field, or if you're shooting something like astrophotography, but that's a whole different conversation. I always recommend shooting with auto-focus. One thing I definitely recommend doing if you're shooting with auto-focus, is to disable focus with shutter. Instead of half-pressing the shutter to focus, you should just use the button on the back of the camera to focus, so then you can just focus once and take as many pictures as you want as the shutter, and it's not going to try to refocus every time you take a picture with the "Shutter" button. That's a pro tip and I definitely recommend doing that if you can. But that's it for camera settings, I know it might come off as overly technical, but it is very important to understand the creative effects of the exposure triangle; the creative effects of shutter speed, aperture, and ISO, because those really are going to have big impacts on the outcome of your image. Every great landscape photographer really does have a solid grasp of these concepts. But I don't know about you guys, I'm tired of talking about all these different technical things, I just really want to go shoot. It's about 5:00 PM now, I'm going to wind down the day because tomorrow morning we're getting up super early and we're going to shoot to go along, and then tomorrow afternoon we're going to be shooting at. [inaudible] I hope you guys are ready to join me on those missions. I want to check the weather tonight, and I'm also going to check the weather tomorrow morning to make sure that the conditions are good. But from what I've seen so far, the conditions look to be pretty good so I'm super excited to go shoot tomorrow. But enough talking guys, I'll see you in the next lesson, which will be out in the field. I hope you're ready to take some cool photos.
8. Shooting at Sunrise in Tegallalang: Hey guys, what's up? We're at Tegallalang here in Bali, and this place is absolutely incredible. We've set up the camera here on the tripod, and we're waiting for the perfect moment, for the perfect light to spill in here, and spill into our frame and produce a really nice composition. I've set up my tripod here, and I have my Sony a7 III with the 16-35 wide-angle lens. So I can zoom in and out and find that perfect composition for this scene here. How I've set this up is the plants in the foreground here aren't as I expected them to be. I was hoping they'd be a little bit more lush. I'm opting to not have a lot of foreground elements in our scene. There's a little bit of grass in the bottom of our scene here. But for the most part, it's just these rice terraces wrapping up into this little hut in the middle, which is really cool. There's a lot of farmers that live out here and they hang out in these huts during the day when it gets really hot. One of the things I love so much about this composition is just all of the different leading lines converging on our main subject there in the middle, which is that little hut. They're amazing. All these lines from the rice fields just perfectly lead our eyes to that subject there. I also really love the colors in this scene. We have a lot of natural greens. There's a lot of yellows, and there's also a lot of blues in those greens as well. We're going to have a lot of colors to work with when we're editing later on. Now the thing about this scene is the light gets really, really nice a little bit later in the morning. The reason for that is because we're sitting down inside of a valley, and if we shot it immediately at sunrise, it would be completely dark. There'd not be any kind of dynamic light. However, now it's about 7.30, and sunrise was an hour ago, so now is the perfect time. Maybe in the next 15 minutes or so, we're going to have these beautiful, hopefully, light rays spilling through these trees. One of the things that makes this location so amazing is when the sun hits the palm trees and spills out into these gorgeous light rays, and actually the light is changing before our eyes. I'm going to take a shot here. Hopefully, we'll get those light rays. If not, that's okay. Now just going over camera settings here. Let's go through our progression that we talked about before. The first thing I want to set is shutter speed, and I need to determine if there's any movement in my scene that I either want to freeze or blur. In this scene, there's no movement that I really care about. There's nothing I really want to freeze, and there's nothing I really want to blur. In this case, my shutter speed doesn't matter. I can use anything at all, whether it be fast or slow or just use it to adjust my exposure. But the second thing I want to set is aperture, and that is very important for this scene. I don't have a lot of foreground elements that I care about getting in focus, but I do want to just have nice sharpness throughout my scene. I'm choosing to shoot around F/11. My lens handles F/11 really well. The colors are really nice the sharpness is really nice. I think that's a good place to set my aperture at. Then my ISO is at 100. ISO 100 is the best to shoot at. I have a tripod, so I can shoot at ISO 100 no matter what. Then my focus point, I'm just focusing on the middle there in these rice terraces in the middle, because that's going to give me good focus closer to the camera as well as further away from the camera. It's going to give us a nice deep depth of field. Now, my aperture is at F/11, my ISO is at 100, and I'll just adjust my shutter speed to adjust the exposure that I need. I'm slightly underexposing here, because I really want to make sure I don't completely blow out the sky. I want to make sure I have a little bit of detail in the sky. I'm shooting at one-fortieth of a second shutter speed, aperture is at F/11, ISO is at 100. Now, a pro tip for shooting landscapes on a tripod is you need to be careful about hitting your shutter and actually moving the tripod. I have a 2 second timer on, because my shutter speed is a little bit slow. I hit the shutter and then it'll take the photo two seconds later, which eliminates any kind of hand shaking the tripod. One of the reasons why I chose to use this lens here, the 16-35 is because I have a lot of flexibility. I can zoom in, I can zoom out. Sixteen is very wide, so I can get more of the scene whereas 35 is pretty tight so I can get a little bit more compression and just focus on more of the things in the scene that I think are just more important here. I'm taking a bunch of different exposures at 35 millimeters, at 16 millimeters, at 24 millimeters, just playing around with it, and just trying to get a few different shots. Also, the light is changing by the minute here. It's getting crazy. The sun is going up higher in the sky and I'm really hoping that we can get these light rays coming through. One thing about landscape photography is it's all about patience. At some locations, the shot that you need to get is within the first 15 minutes of sunrise, and then after that it might just be too bright. But in places like this, where there's just so much dynamic vegetation and we're in this valley, the light can really peak a lot later in the morning. It's just about patience and just hanging out and enjoying the scenery, because this place really is a very beautiful place. Right now, because there's clouds in the sky, the clouds are going in front of the sun and it's causing the light to be really soft and essentially just put our entire scene in a shade. But the clouds are constantly moving, and when they move in the right way, the sun can really shine through these trees, and it just makes these terraces look much more dynamic. You're going to see in these photos, some of the photos look way more dynamic than other photos. That's simply because the lighting is just changing, like I said, every minute or two. We're just going to be patient here, we're just going to hang out. I'm going to just continue to look at my scene, evaluate the light, evaluate the composition, and just take a bunch of different photos, and I'm sure one of them is going to be pretty awesome. You might notice that before, my camera was actually in portrait mode. The reason for that is because I just thought that this composition worked really well from shooting it in portrait mode, which is the camera turned sideways. That is a better way to shoot for social media. However, I also like to shoot in traditional landscape formats, having the camera just straight on like this, and having a longer form shot. This scene looks good in both compositions so I'm shooting it in both ways, and just making sure I have a nice diverse amount of photos that I can take into editing later on. But now the light is really coming through, and this scene is just amazing. I think soon I'm going to be able to take my camera off the tripod, simply because we're going to have enough light to work with that. I'm not going to need the tripod anymore, but I'm going to take a few more here, still shooting at F/11. Now I'm at one-sixtieth of a second, ISO 100. The reason why I'm still underexposing a little bit is because I just want to make sure that the sky isn't completely blown out. We can rescue some of those shadows later on when we're editing, but it's a little bit more difficult to do that with highlights. Guys, it's about 08:00 AM now, and the sun is proper out. Honestly, I don't think I need to use the tripod anymore. I can hand hold and still make sure that my photos are sharp. I'm going to take my camera off the tripod, and just move around and try to shoot this scene in a more flexible way. Because I'm not on a tripod, I can just do a lot more creative stuff with a camera. I actually like shooting more without a tripod that I do with a tripod, simply because you're just a lot more flexible and you can try a bunch of different compositions. The light is really nice right now so we're going to get some photos, and let's see what we can come up with. Also really loved this scene here, it's actually crazy. I'll shoot a little video for you guys. The rice terraces just wrap perfectly up through the valley, and it's just absolutely gorgeous. I'm shooting this here at 16 mil to really make sure that I can get all of those different lines and interesting shadows in our scene here. I'll also shoot that in portrait mode. I'm going to put on the 70-200 lens now, because I want to zoom in a little bit more, and see if I can capture some really cool details just of this place, because there's a lot of really interesting details that I really want to capture. I'm covered in red ants because I sat down over there, and now they just keep biting me. Now I'm shooting at F/5.6, ISO 100, and I'm just shooting that lady over there, as well as some of these lines in the terraces. They just look really cool. It's very hot out here. I don't know if you can tell. Honestly, Bali is always hot. Year round, it's at least 85 degrees Fahrenheit every single day, doesn't really get colder than that. Right now it's been really hot. It feels like it's about a 100 degrees Fahrenheit, something like 40 degrees Celsius. It's been pretty brutal out here. That's just part of the game. You get used to sweating when you live in Bali, and I sweat a lot. It's just part of the process, I guess, but I'm really loving the scene. The reason why this location is so good is because it's still good an hour or two hours after sunrise. Some locations, like I said, after 15-20 minutes, you really can't shoot much anymore. I mean, you could still shoot, but the light just really isn't great. Yes, the light is getting a little bit harsh, it's getting a little bit strong, but it's still quite nice, and I still think that it's not going to be too strong when we're editing, so I'm going to keep shooting. Oh, that looks amazing. This might be my favorite shot of the day. I love that she's in the third of the frame, really using the rule of thirds here, and she's just walking along this perfect leading line, leading into the valley there. I'm shooting this at 35 millimeters, F/5.6 and one five-hundredth of a second, ISO 100. She's gone just like that. You got to be ready. You got to be quick. I got the shot, so I'm really happy with that one. But now I want to turn the direction over here. One of the things you should know about shooting landscapes, especially in a place like Bali that's just, there's so much beautiful culture here. It's just such an amazing place, and there's so many amazing people is, don't get too locked into the landscapes, because there's so many other amazing things to shoot, like portraits. We're going to shoot a portrait here of Wyon, Wyon lives here. He's been here forever, and we've actually been shooting here. We shot here before and he's always here. He's a farmer here, and I think it's just a beautiful thing to have a portrait of him and share that portrait of him with the landscape photo of his land. I think that's a really nice thing to do. It just tells a more courageous story. I'm going to capture some portraits of Wyon at 35 millimeters. Wyon says it's okay. I like shooting this a little wide at 35, because I can show his house. I want to show that, I want to show the scene. I don't want to just do a super tight head shot, because, I mean, look at his house, it's stunning. Oh he's got a hat on now. Love this so much. He's got so much cool things in his house. He's got all these really old pictures on the wall of him, and just different tourists that have come here over the years, him and his wife. Also really love this angle here. Okay guys, honestly I think we've got everything we need to get. I took a ton of photos out here this morning. I shot on the tripod, started off from the tripod. One it was a little bit dark. We got some great shots of the landscapes out here. Once the sun came up a little bit, I took it off the tripod, where I was just more flexible and I think we've got some really, really amazing photos doing that. Also I'm super happy that we've captured some portraits of these absolutely beautiful people here living in one of the most incredible places in the entire world. I think it's a blessing to be able to be here and shoot, and this is one of the reasons why I love landscape photography so much. It's just because we get to come out to these places. We're the only ones here except for the locals. We can really enjoy the nature, and just try to capture it in a beautiful way, in a way that tells a story as well. This morning was super successful. I'm glad that the son decided to show up, and I'm glad that Wyon was here to greet us and we got some great portraits of him. I hope you guys enjoyed this little lesson. We're going to go home and get some coffee, rest up, because we're going to be shooting sunset later today in Uluwatu. I hope you guys are ready for that. But that's it. We're going to hike out of here, and we'll see you guys later.
9. Shooting at Sunset in Uluwatu: Hey guys, what's up? Welcome to Uluwatu. It's about 5:30 now. I got here a little bit earlier. As you might be able to tell, we don't have the best conditions. Honestly, that's just a big part of landscape photography. Like I said, it's being at the right place at the right time, and it just so happens that this isn't the right time today. The weather in Bali is incredibly unpredictable, so you never really know. Even if the weather does say it's going to be okay and there's going to be some sun, it's not always that accurate. We decided to err on the side of hoping there would be good conditions, so we came out anyways and they're not great. However, we got here a little bit earlier before we started filming and I was able to capture some really cool shots of the cliffs with some decent light. I'm going to show you guys some of those photos as we shoot today. I'm still going to be shooting here today because I still think it's an amazing place to see and I want to show you guys how I would shoot it even if the light was incredible. I'm going to show you how you can still get some pretty cool photos even in bad conditions. I'm shooting with the Sony A7 III with the 16-35 millimeter lens. It's nice and wide. I can zoom in a little bit. I'm going to have a good range of focal lengths to make sure I capture these epic cliffs that are right in front of me here. I can't wait to show you guys those cliffs. We still have pretty good light right now, so I'm not going to start on the tripod. I know when we shot sunrise this morning at [inaudible] , I started on the tripod because we're starting off in the dark and then the sun comes up. But now we still have plenty of light, so I'm not in a rush to get on the tripod yet. But once the sun goes down a little bit more and it gets a little bit darker, I'm definitely going to put the camera on a tripod so we can slow down that shutter speed and make sure we still get very sharp photos. For now, what I want to do is just walk around this area and shoot this scene here. I'm just going to walk you guys through some of the shots that I'm going to take, go through the camera settings, and also discuss some of the compositions and why I choose to shoot them the way that I do. Now, there are other people here that's just what's going to happen. This is a popular sunset spot and that's simply because it's an amazing location, so there's other people here. One of the things you should know when you're shooting landscapes is not everywhere you go is going to be empty of people. If you're in a cool place like Bali, there's going to be other people around and that's just part of the game. You can't let it annoy you too much. You just got to take it for what it is and try to work around the people and start to get the shot. Let's get shooting and try to capture some cool photos. Okay guys, so I found a cool scene here and we're looking down on the beach here, these cliffs, and it just looks really awesome. We have a lot of good depth here, and that's one of the reasons why I like shooting at this particular location. You can see all along this ridge right here, there's different types of plants and there's a cool fence as well. We can use that as a foreground element in our scene to make sure that we're having good depth in our scene. When I'm shooting something like this, I like to shoot at a wide range of apertures. I like to shoot up my lenses. Maximum aperture for this lens, that's f/2.8. I also like to step down to like f/8, f/11, f/16, just to get more depth of field and more focus throughout my scene. I'm going to start shooting here. I'm going to shoot at f/5.6. I'm at ISO 125 with a shutter speed of 180 here. It's starting to get a little bit dark already, but I still can shoot handheld for now. What I'm trying to do here is just use this beach as a leading line to guide off into the distance. One of the things I also love so much about this spot in particular is the waves are coming in and they're acting as really cool leading lines that lead us off into the distance of the focal point of the image, which is that cool peak at the end of that mountain over there. I'm also just move around and use these plants here as a foreground element in my scene. Even with not great conditions, this photo just looks really cool, and that's because we have this gorgeous blue water contrasting these golden cliffs, as well as these beautiful green plants that are growing on the side of the cliff. Now this is also a really cool composition here. I'm using this green part as a foreground and then I'm wrapping up and using it to guide your eye up and around off to that point there. I'm going to shoot it both landscape and portrait. I'll shoot it portrait first, and I'll shoot it landscape as well. That's 16 millimeters, it looks pretty cool. I really like how that looks. Now here's honestly a really good spot because we have a ton of plants in our foregrounds, and they're really, really green. That'll give us a nice foreground element to give us some cool depth in our scene. Shooting at 2.8 because I don't mind that these plants in the foreground are out of focus. My main priority are these cliffs. Now I think I've shot that cliff quite a bit. Maybe I'll shoot it some more later with the tripod, but I want to capture some photos of these waves too. I'm going to shoot these at 35 millimeter. Zoom in a little bit, wait for the wave to break, and I'm also going to have some of these plants in the foreground shooting at 1/250th of a second, f/2.8, with an ISO of 125 here. Here comes the wave, so let's capture it. I really like the color contrast between the green and the blue ocean here. I've come down the cliff a little bit because I think I can get a little bit better of a vantage point for shooting like a traditional landscape photo here. I'm shooting wide at 16 millimeters with this little edge in the foreground. Problem is now it's starting to get a little bit dark. Even if I lower my shot at a 1/60th of a second, which is probably the slowest I would like to go right now, I can only shoot at about f/6.3. I'll try that. Now there is something I'd like to try here now that it's getting a little bit darker. What I want to try to do is see if I can get the water to be a little bit blurry and we can do that by using a long exposure. What I'm going to do is go get my tripod, put the camera on a tripod, and make sure my shutter speed is nice and slow so I can capture that movement in the waves. Let's go get the tripod now. There's honestly some really cool movement on those waves down there and I really want to capture it. But I want to bring my tripod low. I do not want to be high on this cliff right now. I want to keep my center of gravity low because like I said, I do not want to take any risks at all with this place because it is a far drop down to some gnarly ocean down there. I had a really scary experience at Yosemite National Park in California, and ever since then, I do not mess with heights. I'm just going to line up my shot here. I'm going to zoom in a little bit because I want to capture. My focus here is going to be on those waves a little bit. There's no foreground element, but that's okay. In order to capture this shot here, I need to make sure my shutter speed is slow enough. Now, I'm not sure exactly what shutter speed I need to use. But first I'm going to try one fourth of a second, I'm going to bring my aperture up to about F16 to make sure that I'm balancing out my exposure because now that my shutter speed is pretty long, one fourth of a second, that means a lot of light is going to be entering our camera so I have to balance out the exposure using a larger aperture value like F16. So let's try this now. I'm going to wait for some waves to come in because I want to make sure I capture that movement. Here comes some waves. I don't think that's going to be slow enough. That is not slow enough. So we're going go down to one second here. That means I have to raise my aperture all the way up to F22, which is not ideal. Simply because usually when you shoot at F22, optically lenses just don't perform that well, because of this thing called refraction, we're not going to get into that. But if you don't have to shoot an F22, I recommend that you don't do it, but we have to in this situation to balance our exposure here. So that's a lot better. That looks really, really cool. Also the clouds are slightly moving, so the cloud is like a little bit blurry too. However, there is something that you can use called an ND filter. I'm going to go grab that from my bag and I can screw that to the front of my camera. What that's going to do is it basically acts like sunglasses for our lens and it's going to block some of the light coming into our camera. Why we want that right now, why we want to block the light is because we need to make sure we have a balanced exposure. If I have a really long shutter speed, like 15 seconds, our photo's just going to be way too bright, even if I'm at F22 of an aperture. I'm going to go get the ND filter and throw that on. This ND filter is really cool because I can screw it to the front of my lens here. This is going to allow me to just block some of the light coming in. Ideally, you don't use an ND filter because it doesn't always look the best for your image. It changes the look of your image a little bit, but in this situation I think it's okay. Now this is going to allow me to shoot with a shutter speed of six seconds. I think I can do about six seconds, maybe even more. I think I can do eight seconds at F22, so I'm going to try that here. Now the camera is going to be open and exposed to light for eight seconds, which is a very long time. We're going to get some really cool motion blur in the ocean there. That looks pretty epic. Now when I'm taking these long exposures, I really want to make sure that I'm not moving the camera at all. It's very important that you don't move the camera because if you move the camera, you're going to get handshake in your photos and it's going to be blurry, so we don't want that. I'm going to shoot it portrait here too, because honestly, I think this just looks better in this scene and I'm going to keep it at a shutter speed of eight seconds. How does that look? That looks awesome. That is super, super cool. I really love how that image came out and I cannot wait to edit that photo. But now we're running out of light and I really want to get a wide range of shots. So I'm going to put on my other lens, my zoom lens and I'm going to try to capture some similar types of photos, but just more zoomed in so I can capture some of the details of those rocks over there. Let's get that lens on now and try to do that. Now I'm going to try to just capture some detailed shots without the tripod first. I really like how the water is hitting those rocks over there. I'm just going to shoot a F2.8 because it's quite dark and I'm going to raise my ISO to 200 because I'm hand holding the camera. My shutter speed, I really should shoot with a shutter speed of 1/200th of a second. Let's see if we can get some cool shots here. Yeah, I think these look pretty cool. I don't think they're insane photos, but they're cool photos. But I really like that rock down there. So what I'm going to do is try to capture a long exposure of that rock with the 7,200. Hopefully the tripod can hold that up. I don't know if this is going to work because the wind might blow this tripod around a little bit. I don't think we can use too slow of a shutter speed, but we're going to try anyways. Do F22, ISO 100. That will allow me to slow my shutter speed down quite a bit. However, the camera really wants to move it here in the wind. I don't think this is going to work because the tripod just isn't strong enough to support this heavy camera in this type of wind. Usually it's okay, but if it's really windy like this, it just cannot handle all that wind. Shoot it in portrait mode here, just to try to show more of that coastline here. That didn't look as good as I hoped it would be. That's just because this tripod really isn't a great tripod for holding up all of this weight in wind like this, it's quite windy out here. Unfortunately that photo didn't come out like I wanted it to, but that's okay. Honestly, I'm really happy with the photos that we captured so far. The sun is about to set in about five minutes. Unfortunately, because today is pretty overcast, the blue hour really isn't going to be anything spectacular. If I was shooting here on a sunny day and the sunset was over there, I think the sky would turn a really, really beautiful blue color just after sunset, during blue hour, which is one of my favorite times to shoot, especially things like portraits during that time. But for now, I think it's time to call it wraps, can see some rain coming in over there and we really don't want to be stuck on the top of this cliff face in rain, especially because there's a lot of thunder and lightening here in Bali as well. So with that said guys, I really hope you enjoyed this lesson. I always enjoy shooting at sunset. I got to say it was much more enjoyable to shoot at sunset today than it was this morning when it was super hot and I was sweating like crazy. It took all along. So it's a lot nicer to shoot when it's not so incredibly hot. But I do wish that our conditions were slightly better. With that said, I'm still really happy with the photos that we captured and I'm really, really excited to go home and edit those photos tomorrow. But that's it for this shoot guys. We're going to go home, upload the photos, take a look at some of them, and have some dinner as well. I really hope you enjoyed this lesson of shooting at sunset, and I will see you back in the studio, we're going to edit some of the photos that we captured this morning and this afternoon. So I'll see you there.
10. Editing Landscapes in Adobe Lightroom: Hey, guys. We are back in the studio now and I've actually already gone and uploaded all the photos from both of our photoshoots on the computer already and I've already gone through and I've selected a few different photos that I want to edit here today. Just a quick recap on the shoots. Overall, I think they went pretty well. Conditions-wise, it wasn't perfect to go along. I thought that there could have been a little bit of clouds in the sky that just helps soften the light a little bit. The light that came in was pretty strong, pretty harsh. If you see some of the later photos, there were really strong highlights on the rice fields. That just is a little bit difficult for the camera to pick up, and that's not always something that we like as photographers. With that said, I still kept some really, really cool photos which you guys are going to see and I'm going to show you how I can edit those images to really bring out some of the natural contrast, natural colors, and just make these images look really nice using Adobe Lightroom. Then [inaudible] , I thought, overall, it was a great shoot. The conditions obviously weren't that great. We didn't have a sun in the sky. It was just overcast, but we had a lot of detail in the sky and also the scene itself was just stunning. So it's hard not to take a good picture when you're there. Even if you had horrible conditions, you can get great photos, honestly, at either of those location. Overall, I'm pretty happy with what we got. Now, I'm going to jump onto Lightroom here. I'm going to show you guys just how to edit some of the photos that we captured during those shoots. I think when a lot of people approached Lightroom, they might be a little bit overwhelmed by all the different things that are happening in Lightroom. If you're not well versed in the software, you might feel like that, and honestly, that's okay. But today I'm going to show you guys just a basic editing progression that you can follow just to make sure you touch on everything that you need to touch on in the correct order in order to get a solid edit for your landscape photo. I'm not going to be editing with presets today. Presets are very useful for editing. It's a filter that you can apply to your photos using Adobe Lightroom and honesty they're great, and they save a lot of time. I saw presets on my website and you guys can check those out if you're interested. But today I want to teach you guys how to edit from scratch because I think you should learn how to edit from scratch. I have four photos here, and the first one that I am going to show you guys, right off the bat, it looks terrible. I think as a landscape photography, you need to be able to look at images like this and see something else. I'm going to show you guys how I can take this and turn it into something different. Our basic editing progression, I'm just going to break it down quickly and then we're just going to jump into it. Starts off with a crop. We crop the image, then we're going to edit the light so the tones, the contrast, the exposure, basic light adjustments, and then we're going to move on to color. Editing the actual colors in the image, doing a few things with that, and then we'll move on to some of the detail and the effects and the texture of the image, and then after that, we're going to finish off with the selective adjustments. We really fine tune the image by basically editing different parts of the image and really pulling out all the natural tones and colors and making it look really nice. This first image, let's just jump right in here. First thing we're going to do is crop. Now, I always crop my vertical images to a four by five ratio. The reason why I shoot four by five is for Instagram, for the most part, because four by five images perform the best on Instagram. I'm going to line this little thing up in the middle there. I'm going to hit Enter, and that looks like a pretty good crop. I'm going to crop it even more. I'm going to crop that foreground out completely. Now, I think that looks pretty awesome. It's super, super dark as you can see. The first thing I'm going to do here in editing light, I'm going to move to the basic adjustments here. I'm just going to drag that exposure up right about there. Then I'm going to come down here to highlights and drop those highlights because I want to pull out the details up here in the sky a little bit, and then I'm going to bring up the shadows a little bit as well. Just those three adjustments here are going to give us so much more information to work with. Actually, this is a pretty solid exposure, so we can do a lot with this photo. Now, I'm going to tick the white so I'm going to drag them up and I'm going to hold Option or Alt on my keyboard and basically move it up until I see a little bit of white, and then I'm going to let it go. What that's showing me is I'm making sure that I'm not clipping those whites. I'm not losing any detail in those white areas. I'm going to do the same thing with black and go right there. They would get some nice contrast in the image, and then I'm going to move down to presence here. Texture is going to like basically sharpen the image. I think it looks terrible. I never use texture. Clarity is cool. It basically adds contrast or contrast at the minute level, that's the best way I can explain it. It's a good thing, but it's also heavily overused. I think this photo, we can use it because of the fact that we lack contrast. I'm going to bring it up by maybe just around 10. But I'm going to show you in later photos why I actually decrease clarity in most of my images because I just don't think we need it. Then Dehaze here is really cool. What that's going to do is basically enhance contrast by getting rid of haze in the image. So I'm going to bring that up to 30 or so, or maybe that's a little bit much. We'll go up to 22. I'm going to come back up here to shadow and bring that up a little bit. I think for the most part like that looks pretty solid. I'm pretty happy with that so far. Now, I do want to talk about the tone curve as well. The tone curve is basically just gives us full control over all the tones of the image. Seems crazy. It's not that crazy. The most important thing that I like to do with this is just add a little bit of midtone contrast, and you can do that by creating a little S curve. So you can just drag one point here, bottom left, one point in the middle, leave it there, one point in the top-right, drag it up, and then I like to drag the corners up and down. Basically looks like a little S. If you do an extreme S curve, it'll be way more curvy, but our S is a very curvy because we want it that way. We don't need a super curve. Yes. I'm going to come up backup here, bring the shadows up a little bit more. I think our light adjustments are done. There's the before and after. That's a really great start. Now, we're going to come down here into color, and there's a few different ways to edit color. Two main ones. There's the HSL color sliders here, where we can adjust the hue, which is the overall tone of the color. I can make my greens blue or make my green yellow. Saturation, which is the pureness of the color. So I can make my green super green, or I can desaturate my greens, which actually looks cool. Then the luminance, where basically, it's the brightness of the color so I can make my greens really bright, all my greens really dark, and that's great for adding color contrast in your images. That's the HSL sliders, and then there's the color grading sliders. Let's actually edit the HSL first and then we'll move on to color grading. Overall, I honestly really like the colors in this image. There's not a whole lot I would change. One thing you're going to find out when you're editing greens is greens can be difficult, especially in a situation like this where honestly most of the colors in the image are green or yellow. Greens are often very yellow, and you can see here just these two sliders are going to have the biggest impact on our photo here. But overall, I really do like our greens. I'm just going to desaturate the green a tiny bit and then maybe adjust the hue of the green or the hue of the yellow maybe. One of the things while I'm editing colors is I don't always know exactly what I want right off the bat and I think that's okay. Just play around with it until you get a color combination that you really like. As I'm dragging down the yellow a little bit, I'm seeing that it's adding a little bit more color contrast in this area. It's giving us more color here. So it's helping it separate from the green a little bit more and I like that. Color contrast is great. I'm going to leave that there, and I'm going to bring the green up by maybe 10. That's adding a lot of really great color contrast. All right. Maybe bring the yellows up a little bit, bring the oranges up a little bit, and the greens back down. Honestly, I think that looks pretty nice. But we'll leave it at that. Now let's move on to color grading here. So color grading, essentially it allows us to add colors into the highlighted areas, into the shadow areas, and into the mid-tone areas. What does that mean? Well, essentially, if I go down here to the shadows, I can basically add a hue into any of the shadows. That's pretty cool. I can do the same with highlights, which is affecting mostly the sky. Then I can do that with mid-tones, which is going to affect the middle tones of our area. Overall, there's not a whole lot I want to do, but I do think adding a little bit of warmth into the mid-tones might be cool. It might add some interesting color contrast, so I'm going to do that. I'm going to just bring a little bit of warmth into those mid-tones and you can see just how it warms up our image a little bit and just add some nice color contrast that looks pretty nice. That's how I would edit the color here. Not much else I would change. Colors are on point, tones are on point. There's the before, there's the after. Now we're going to move on to the detail. In detail, we're mostly talking about sharpening and noise reduction. With the sharpening, I like to sharpen my images just a little bit. What I'll do is I'll just drag it up to 40 and then I'll drag the mask up and hold option at the same time. This is just going to show me, which part of the which part of the image I'm sharpening. I don't want to sharpen too much, so I'll drag it up to all the way up to like 83. I just know that it's sharpening only very select parts of the image. Now for noise reduction, this was shot at 100 ISO. I don't think, I need to reduce any noise. If I look at the shadow areas here, I zoom in, there's really not much noise, so I'm not going to touch that. But if you were shooting in a low light environment and you had a lot of noise in your image, that is going to basically help smooth things out a little bit. That will help with the grain. That is something that is worth to use if you do have a little bit of grain in your image. Now moving on to lens correction here, I always like to click "Remove Chromatic Aberration" and enable Profile Correction. What that's going to do is, just correct for any lens distortion that your camera might have, as well as getting rid of chromatic aberration, which is these high contrast areas, you get a lot of weird colors and tones. Obviously, it's not really helping us here, so I'm going to show you guys, how we can get rid of that after because that looks really bad. But nothing to worry about right now. For the most part, that's our details. Now in terms of effects, we can add a vignette or we can add grain. I am going to add a small vignette here by just dragging this down by like maybe minus seven. That's just going to allow us to focus more on this middle part of the image here. But I think that's good for the details and the effects. So now let's move on to selective adjustments. Selective adjustments in Lightroom are really what's going to set you apart as a photographer, especially landscape photographer, because they allow us to edit specific parts of the images. It really is a super powerful tool. Selective adjustments come in three different types. There is gradients where you can drag it up and it affects your image on a gradient level here. As you can see, the red areas of the parts that are being affected. There's also radio filters, which are these round things that you can grab. You can invert it to affect either inside the circle or outside the circle here. Then there's also a brush where you can manually brush over the image. You can adjust the feather and you can adjust the strength to see how much it affects. Overall, just all three of them are very useful tools. So I'm going to use all three of them now to show you just how I could help bring out that contrast in this image. The first thing I'm going to do is, just drag a graduated filter over this bottom here. Because I just don't think we really need to see all that detail there. I find the most important part of the image is in the middle here. So what I'm going to do is just darken that bottom part a little bit. Just to help make sure our eyes just naturally move into focus on this middle area. Then what I'm going to do is, go ahead and add a radial filter over this whole middle section here. This is the most important part of our image and I want to make sure that it's easy to see. So I'm going to go ahead and make sure I invert it. So I'm affecting inside. Then I am going to bring up the whites a little bit. That's just going to make sure that that area is very easily identified as the most important part. I'm also going to bring down the blacks just to increase contrast a little bit and then maybe bring the highlights up a little bit. Not too much, but a little bit just to bring up the overall exposure there. I think, that looks pretty good. Now, one more thing I want to do is use the paintbrush to do a little bit of burning and dodging. Burning and dodging is a very classic photography technique used by landscape photographers. Essentially, it means that we're darkening the darkest areas of the image and brightening the brightest areas of the image. Photographers have been burning and dodging forever. Even film photographers back in the day, that's where the term comes from. They used to actually burn the paper in order to make it darker, so pretty cool history lesson there. But I want to basically make certain areas of the image darker, especially these lines in the rice paddies here. I'm going to go ahead and I'm not going to zoom in that much, I'm going to maybe zoom in 50 percent. I'm going to create a brush here and drag the shadows down to maybe 20. Then I'm just going to paint over these areas here that I want to make darker, which is basically just these darker lines in the photo here. Just wherever there is a dark line and back here too. Don't need that. Back there, back there. Maybe even back here a little bit. You don't really need that. It's nothing too important. I'm going to drag it down even more. You can also drag the blacks down a little bit. Then I can do a new one and focus on the highlighted areas and bring those highlights up. Now this is dodging right here, so we're basically bringing out the natural highlights in the image here. We can also adjust the whites. I think our flow is very low. I need to turn our flow up here. There we go. I wonder, it wasn't doing so much. Back to the shadows. That's really strong. So we're not going to do that's wrong. I think, that looks pretty good. I might even make this whole bottom area even darker here. Not that much, maybe a little bit less. One thing about photo editing is you're always going to be moving back and forth and adjusting different things, it's all part of the process. Now, one more thing, we can also try to drag one more graduated filter over the top here and bring the exposure down. It might look a little funky, but we can do a little bit. Now, I think that looks, maybe a tiny bit, but it just doesn't look supernatural, so I'm not going to do that. Overall, I think that's a really solid edit. The last thing I want to try to do is, get rid of this, so I'll do a brush. I'm just going to paint over this whole area here. Press O to make sure I can see the area I'm affecting, and then I'm just going to completely desaturate it. Now, that's going to help, but I don't think it's going to completely solve our problem. I wonder if I could also use the dehaze and go the other way. Honestly, that really helped a lot. I feel super good about this image, I think this is the final version. There's the before and there's the after. I think that's insane, just goes to show you how much you can actually edit these photos. You guys remember the beginning, it was completely different, and that's what we came up with. I'm pretty happy with that image. Let's move on to another image here from the same place. This was a little bit later in the morning where the light was super harsh. You can see we have really strong highlights, really strong shadows, and all this weird information. It's hard on the eyes a little bit. But I want to show you how I can tone this image down a little bit, allow us to focus on the most important parts of the image, and overall make it a really nice landscape photo. The first thing I'm going to do, of course, is crop. I want to get rid of this foreground element and overall put it right there. The next thing is we need to get rid of this terrible power line. Yes, we're at this incredible location, but there is a small town right back there, and there's power. I'm going to hit Q here, and that's going to bring up our healing brush. Now, the healing brush isn't always perfect, but we can mess with it. I'm just going to drag it all the way down. Of course, it selects the field, I don't know why it does that, but I can drag that select and move it up to select a different part of the sky here. That looks solid, you can barely even tell. Then this part here, I'll drag another one right here and just copy it from down there. It's not perfect. You can use Photoshop to do a much better job at this, but nobody's got time for Photoshop. That's not true, I actually do use Photoshop quite a bit. However, I do think it's not always super practical, and I don't think we need to be focusing on that in this course because, for the most part, we can do everything we need to do in Lightroom. Now, I think that looks pretty good, let's move on to the light here. I'm going to drag our exposure up to bring out some detail on the shadow area, drag our highlights down to bring out detail in the highlights there, drag the shadows up to bring out more detail there. Now, usually I'd bring the whites up, but I think I might bring them down. Let's see here. Let's try to bring them up first. We'll just bring up to 18, not too much because there's a lot of brightness in our image that I think is a little bit too much. The next thing I'll do is bring those shadows down, not too much, but maybe just three. Now, clarity is something, like I said in the last photo, I like to honestly get rid of it in a lot of images because I find clarity to be adding a little bit too much texture, too much detail, and it makes it difficult for the eyes to know where to focus. In this image, I'm actually going to bring down on clarity by minus 25. It just really helps soften out our image and just makes it easier to look at, to be honest, easier to focus on. Especially when you're shooting in a high contrast scene like this, getting rid of clarity can really, in my opinion, improve your photo. You can also experiment with getting rid of texture. I might do that too, I might just get rid of negative 5 there. I think that looks nice. Dehaze, I'm not going to touch that, I don't think we need to touch that because if I do that, it's going to make the sky look super unnatural, not a fan. We'll add contrast later with the selective adjustments. Moving on to the tone curve here, we're going to do a little basic S curve as always, to increase our mid-tone contrast. Nice and simple. Move on to color here. Now, the color is very similar to the last scene, so I'm going to go ahead and do what I did in the last scene. Drag the yellow over a little bit, drag the green over just a tiny bit. We do have a blue sky on our image, but I like where it's at. I might make it a little bit more blue, no, I like the blue sky just where it's at, maybe I'll even desaturate it a little tiny bit. Then I'm going to experiment with the green, so I desaturate the greens, so I desaturate the yellows, I don't think I want to desaturate the yellows, but maybe the greens a bit, and then maybe bring the oranges up a bit. I think that looks nice, not so much. For the color grading, I might do the same thing with adding a little bit of warmth into the mid-tones there. But I don't think I want to add too much color into the highlights or the shadows, I think overall, our image looks pretty nice. This is something you can really experiment with. There's so many different cool color combinations you can come up with. That color looks cool, a little bit of green into the shadows. Oops. We'll leave it there, I think that looks solid. Now, moving on to the detail. We'll do our basic sharpening and leave it at 40. We actually do have a pretty sharp photo already here, so I'm not too concerned with the sharpening, but we'll just leave it there. Coming down to the effects, I am going to add, once again, a small vignette just to focus on this middle area. I'm going to enhance that middle area, even more, when we move on to the selective adjustments here, but I think that looks pretty good. Of course, last but certainly not least, selective adjustments. First thing I want to do is try to darken this foreground area because I want to make our eyes focus on this middle part. I'm going to use a brush to just paint over this entire front part here and maybe even over there a little bit. I'm just going to drag down the shadows and the exposure a little bit. Nice. Next thing I'm going to do is use a radial filter and just drag it over this entire middle area here. I'm going to make sure it's inverted, so adjusting the insides. I'm just going to increase our exposure a little bit. All the way across the middle. Bring up the shadows a little bit. Maybe increase the contrast a tiny bit. The image is looking a little dark, so I'm going to raise the overall exposure by just a tad maybe, right there, and then I'm going to darken that front area again even more. I think that looks pretty good. There's the before, there's the after, so you can see we brought a lot more focus to this middle area here, got rid of that ugly power-line. Overall, a solid image, and I really like how these lines lead us off into the background. There are so many different cool leading lines and I think it's a great photo. Let's move on to [inaudible] now, and this is one of my favorite images from the day. This was shot at 24 mm f/2.2. This was actually shot with my prime lens a little bit earlier in the day. It's super sharp, even at 2.2. I shot it at 2.2 because I actually wanted to make this foreground area out-of-focus. A lot of traditional landscape photographers will tell you, "Don't do that." I don't think you should be told to do or not do anything with photography. I find that this looks cool. This is a stylistic choice and it's something that I like to do and I urge you to experiment as well. First thing I'm going to do is crop our image to a four by five. Put the horizon there on that line. Nice. Moving on to light, I'm going to bring our exposure up, highlights down, shadows up, and then bring our whites up and blacks down to increase the contrast. Already looking pretty sweet. I'm going to leave clarity where it is. I'm going to bring the dehaze maybe plus 10, to bring out even more contrast, more detail in the sky. Then I'm going to move on to our tone curve and do our basic S curve here. Nice. That's looking really good. We'll move on to the color here. We have a few main colors in our images with the [inaudible]. We've got the blues here, which we can adjust quite easily. We have our greens here, and we also have a bit of yellows and oranges as well. Overall, honestly, I really like our colors. There's not a whole lot I want to do. I might make some very small changes to the colors, but I really like the colors in both of these locations. I don't think they need any crazy manipulation. I'm trying to focus on bringing out the natural colors in these images. I'm not too worried about making crazy stylistic edits with these photos. I want to bring out the natural color. Overall, I think I'm going to leave the greens and maybe bring the yellows over, minus five. Oranges, leave them there. The aquas, I'm going to bring the aquas a little bit to the right because I want more of a natural-looking blue, but then I'll bring the blues to the left. Actually, I'm going to leave the blues where they are. Not a huge change, but it looks nice. Saturation-wise, maybe bring the greens down a tad and maybe bring the blues up a little bit. I want to be careful though, I don't want to make my sky look too unnatural, so I'm going to bring my blues up by maybe 16. Then I'm also going to try to mess with the luminance here. I'm going to leave the luminance alone for the blue, bring it up for the green, and leave those there. Overall, it's looking pretty nice. Moving on to color grading. There's a lot we could probably do with the color here. We can really experiment, do different things, but I think what I'm going to try to do is add a little bit of warmth into the shadows because we have these rocks that could benefit from a bit of warmth, and then we can add some blues into the highlights there, just to really enhance those blues in the sky and in the water. There's with and without, with and without. Not a huge change, but it adds a lot of color depth and I like it. Detail, we'll do the same, sharpening at 40. Drag that up. Looking good. No noise reduction needed. Lens correction, both of those. Actually, in this case, I'm not going to enable the lens correction because I like the natural vignette that we have here. You can see what that does to our image. I like it with the natural vignette. The effects, I'm going to add even more of a vignette, minus 4. It's looking pretty good. Now moving on to the fun part, the selective adjustments. First thing I'm going to do is drag a graduated filter over our sky. I want to bring down those highlights and also add a bit of dehaze, and that's just going to make our sky super dramatic. However, now we're affecting this top part here. I can click brush here, and I can go down and hit erase, zoom in a little bit, and then I can actually erase the graduated filter on my rocks here, because I don't want my graduated filter to affect the rocks. It was designed for the sky. That's pretty good. Not perfect, but pretty good. The sky is looking a little bit unnatural, so I'm actually going to desaturate it a little bit. I'm going to do a new brush and I'm going to paint over our entire rock here. I want to make sure I'm adjusting the rock. We've got most of the rock area selected, just a rough adjustment, and I'm going to basically make this warmer and bring out the warmth in those rocks. The orange colors there. That's really nice. I think, alone, that adjustment just added so much to our image, and I think it's right where it needs to be. There's not a whole lot of changes I would make. Maybe I'll come back to the basic adjustments and edit the contrast a little bit, but I'm pretty happy with this image. There's the before, super gray, boring. There's the after, pops of color, beautiful color contrast. Nice overall contrast. We still have a lot of detail on the shadowed areas. Overall, it's just a great image. That's it, guys. If you follow this basic editing progression, I promise, editing in Lightroom is going to be easy. I know we started to go a little bit faster later on, but if you noticed, I followed my same editing progression from start to finish. Started off with the crop, edited the light, moved on to the color, effects, details, and selective adjustments. If you follow that basic order, you're going to be fine. You're going to do everything you need to do in Lightroom and you're not going to be missing anything either.
11. Next Steps: But that is about it, guys. We've covered a ton in this course. We started off here in the studio. We went outside, took a bunch of photos and came back here and edited, and overall, I really hope you guys found it useful. I really hope you learned something and came up with a few tips. But most importantly, I hope that this course has inspired you to go out and see the world and to go capture some of the areas around you. Like I said in the introduction of this course, there are so many stunning places on this planet and if you are interested in landscape photography, I hope you feel that sense of excitement in knowing that there's so much out there for you to see and so much for you to experience. That is one of the things that makes me get out of bed every day. I know my cameras, they're ready to be used, ready to go with me anywhere I want to go to capture these great photos and overall is a huge part of my life. I hope you guys have that same inspiration and that same eagerness to shoot landscapes as well. But I really have talked for quite a long time in this course. I think you guys are probably sick of me, so I'm going to wind things down now. I just want to say before you go, thank you so much for taking the time to enroll in this course and be here with me and learn from me and engage with me. I really appreciate it. I appreciate every single one of you and I love to see you grow. If you guys have the inspiration and you go out and shoot, I would love to see your photos. Please come back here and post some photos in the class project. I want to see what you're doing with landscapes. I want to see where you're from. I want to see the world through your eyes. Even if you only have an iPhone or something like that, it's okay. Go out and shoot and post those photos in the class project. If you guys want to continue to learn from me, I have a ton of courses here on Skillshare, from Photography 101, where I really cover the basics of how to use your camera to a more advanced Adobe Lightroom editing class. That one's great as well and for all you smart phone, iPhone photographers, I also have a super detailed class on that. I have a ton of classes and I urge you to go check some of them out, but that is it for me, guys. I'm going to wind down now. Thank you so much for watching this class and I really do hope it was helpful for you and I'm excited to see you in some of my future courses. Hope you have an awesome day and I will talk to you very soon.
