Transcripts
1. Teaser: Street photography at night has a very special appeal to it. The dark and hazy atmosphere
makes you feel as if you're living inside a
cinematic masterpiece. And you might think that
you need to be some kind of creative genius to
achieve photos like that. But guess what? Everybody
can learn how to do it. You just need the
correct ingredients. My name is Benjamin, and I'm
a photographer from Sweden. In this course, I will teach you what you need to
know to properly embark on your new
and exciting journey of nighttime street photography. I'll take you through
the entire process from preparation to shooting
to final result. This includes camera
equipment and accessories, special settings that are specifically meant for
nighttime street photography. Proper location research, and the concept of chasing
the light so that your nighttime street
photos can really stick out and be
unique from the rest. I will also teach
you some valuable mindsets to have in case you're feeling nervous or insecure about doing street photography. As well as the
various light room editing techniques that I use to achieve that
cinematic look in my photos. By the time you reach the
final chapter of this course, you'll feel 100% ready to pull yourself up
by the bootstraps, hit the streets and create some cinematic looking
street photos. And the best part is you're
going to achieve this completely on your own
and with minimal gear. So if street
photography at night is something that you've been
wanting to master as of late, enroll in this course today
and I'll take you through it.
2. What To Pack: Will my gear be enough? That's probably a
question you're asking yourself because
you might be thinking, I'm about to go out and shoot under very low light conditions. Will my gear matter? Yes and no. Okay. Because you might
have some gear that has features built into it that are going to make the jobs
so much easier for you. You want to be
looking for gear that has basic things
like auto focus, but as an added bonus
facial recognition, you want to look for gear that has good low light capabilities, such as the Sony seven S series. And you want to look for gear that has very fast shutters, so you can make
sure to really snap a whole bunch of
photos as quickly as possible so that you can get that one money shot that
you're looking for. Because in street photography, it's all about the passing
moments and whether or not you managed to capture
them at the same time. You don't really need
the perfect gear, you don't need the
most high end camera. The only difference
is that if you have a camera that doesn't
have all these features, you can still achieve
the very same things. It means that you're
just going to have to have better conditions
to shoot in. You're going to have to
plan more carefully. If you don't have
facial recognition and you don't have fast,
good auto focus, then it might take
an extra moment of two for you to be able to achieve the same kind of photo as with somebody
who simply points. The camera shoots 50 photos at a time and captures that
one specific moment. And if you don't have good
low light capability camera, then that means that
you're going to have to adapt yourself more to the environment around
you and more to the light so that you can get those low light
photos to look good. So gear does matter and
it also doesn't matter. It's just it's going
to make the job harder or easier for
you depending on the type of gear that
you have and the type of functions and settings
that that camera has. Another important
factor in all of this are the types of
lenses that you have. So think about it. If you want to go out and
shoot and you have a lens that the lowest it goes
to is like F seven, then you're going to
have a pretty hard time shooting in low light
situations, right? So you want to look for
lenses that are fast lenses. And by fast lenses, what I mean is lenses
that go at the very top, they should be at F 2.8
And anything below that is just a bonus you can
get away with doing night time street photography
with F 2.8 In fact, that's the lens that I'm using and I'm completely
fine with that. But F 2.8 F 1.81 0.41 0.2 all of those are
considered to be fast lenses. When you move from
F four and up, then it's going to be more
and more difficult for you to achieve the same kind of photos
in low light situations. And what about focal length? Focal length is not
really going to make the job harder or easier for
you in low light situations, but it will make things
harder or easier for you when you're actually
photographing your subjects. If you're shooting with a
lens that is 20 millimeters, that means you have
to stand pretty damn close to your subject to
get any kind of close up. And that will only increase the chances of you being
kind of, you know, confronted, If you walk
up to somebody like directly in their face,
they might react to that. As opposed to if you have a
focal length of 170 or 200, then you can stand
like really far away without ever
being discovered. So focal length matters as well, and especially if you're
looking for the sort of cinematic photos that have really creamy sort of
blurry backgrounds. The same thing applies there. You're going to need
some lens that is at least 50 millimeter,
85 millimeter. These are some of the
basic focal lengths that people use in
street photography. 50, 85. Some people even go 35. But remember, just the
lower your focal length, the closer you have to stand. That's in terms of
camera gear itself, like the camera you're using
and the types of lenses. How else can we
achieve this sort of dreamy cinematic
look in our photos, in our nighttime street photos? Well, with added accessories
and filters, for instance, you can put on a filter
on your lens that's called a pro mist or
a black mist filter. And what this will do is it will create your highlights are
going to be softened up. It's going to provide more
of a hazy kind of look. It's going to look kind of
foggy in the photos and that can make for some really cozy nighttime street photos. This is not an absolute
necessity of course, but it will add a little bit extra to that atmosphere that you're looking for when you
want to take cinematic shots. Another piece of gear that's going to make things easier for you is a strap on your camera. But specifically
a rounded strap. And round straps are pretty good because when you have them, when you carry them
around your neck, you're going to
have an easier time making smooth maneuvers, okay? Because when this
twists and turns, it doesn't really matter.
You can't feel it. But with a flat sort of
strap that you know, everybody else typically
uses when you're doing sort of awkward maneuvers and you're trying to
make them look smooth, that sort of flatness of the strap is going to
like hit your neck. It's going to feel kind of uncomfortable and you're not
going to have a good time. So I would recommend a
rounded strap as opposed to the regular sort of flat
straps to make things easier for you and to make things more comfortable for you. Final thing to bring up, which might sound obvious, but it isn't always, to be honest, is a tripod okay? Because when you use a tripod, the pros and cons of that is, the cons are you're
going to have to stand pretty still in
that one position. You can't really freely maneuver around and take photos as
you please, but instead, you're standing pretty
still to take that photo, you might be thinking, well, why would you even use a tripod? Well, depending on the
darkness in the frame, depending on how much
darkness there is, you might want to use a slower shutter to
let more light in. If you don't have enough
light compensation and other settings, then you're going to have to use a slower shutter to
achieve that effect. And as you know, when you
use a slower shutter, any kind of movement
in the frame, including the movement and
breathing of your hand, holding the camera is going
to create motion blur. And the photo will look very shaky and it's going
to look very bad. So you need to stand still
in order to achieve that. Either you can shoot with a relatively slow shutter
of say, one 20th, one tenth, and you could
get away with standing still just with your arm or your hands
holding the camera. But if you go any
slower than that, you're not going to have
a good time, right? You have to like stand perfectly still to take a photo that way. And that's when a
tripod comes in handy. And this is pretty much all
the gear that you need to be fully ready to go out and shoot nighttime
street photography.
3. Night Settings: When it comes to noise
reduction, right? You don't necessarily need
a camera that has real, really good low light
capability, okay? Because then you're
going to be looking at some really expensive prices and that might not be
something that you have. You could get away with doing some proper noise reduction by just being smart about the settings that you use and
where you place yourself. But we're going to
be talking about the settings specifically. So, obviously, when
it comes to ISO, you want to keep the
ISO as low as possible. The more you increase the ISO, the more noise you're
going to be introducing. Think about the limits
of your camera. First and foremost, understand
how much ISO you can push on your particular camera before the noise becomes
kind of unbearable. Because remember,
a little bit of noise is not that
much of a problem. You can probably push
it more than you think, especially if you're using light room and you're using AI, noise reduction in post, which is very handy and
very good at what it does. In that sense, you can
pretty much get away with, you know, a much higher ISO
number than you might think. I used to think that ISO on 12,800 or my camera
was unusable. It wasn't good at all, My camera wasn't meant for that. It doesn't have, you know, dual ISO, dual native
ISO or anything. But that's until I tried the new AI noise
reduction feature and I realized that, yeah, I could get away even with
12,800 It's not preferable, but I can get away with it. So, look at your camera and do some low light tests
to see naturally. How far can you push until
the ISO levels are so high that you think the noise is unusable and take
it down a notch. And just keep yourself at that level at most know your
limits before shooting. If that means that
for your camera it's 3,400 it's 6,400 it's whatever. Then you know at least
that that's the limit, and keep yourself to
that limit at all times. That's just to
understand how you can approach ISO in your camera, But as you know,
there's three ways of light intake in a
camera besides ISO. We also have aperture and
we have shutter speed. And what we want to
do is we want to avoid using that ISO to the best of our abilities and use
it only as a last resort. We want to look for the
two other settings and see what we can do with
them to really maximize that low
light capability. Starting off with aperture, open up that aperture
as wide as possible. That might be F
2.8 It might be F 1.8 as far as your
lens allows for it. Because when you do that,
you get two things, right? You get those sort of
blurry backgrounds. That can be really cool
when doing street photos. And that really enhance that sort of
cinematic feel to it. And at the same time, it lets a ton of light in so that you don't
have to sacrifice the ISO when looking to
the aperture at firsthand. The second thing is the shutter
speed you could get away. Let's say that you're
using a shutter speed of one 60th or one 50th. You could drop it down
to one 30th, one 20th, and I think even
one tenth by just trying to stand as still as
possible using your hands. And this is also when whether these rounded straps helps because you can sort
of rest the weight of the camera and
let your body sort of carry the camera mostly and just use your hands
as like a little bit of a stabilizer to
take those shots. But if that's not enough and you feel like you need
to go any lower, then you're going
to have a hard time doing handheld shooting. But think about it,
If you have one 20th of a second with an F 2.8 lens, you can get away with pretty
low ISO in most situations. And finally, when you
expose for a shot, always make sure to expose
for the highlights, because when you have
overblown highlights, when you're overexposing
the highlights, you will lose all of that information and
it's going to be much, much harder to bring
that back in post. So as you're shooting at night, make sure that your high
lights are not overexposed and allows or allow your
shadows to be dark, to be almost crushed. Because you will be able
and you're going to have a much easier time bringing
all of that back in post. And this is, and it's very important if you're
shooting using raw, which in my opinion, you should always do
because why not? You have all of
that information. You never know when you're
going to go back in a few years and revisit
certain photos. And when you do,
you want to make sure that they are
in raw in case you want to make some changes
in photos that you thought back then you
didn't need to edit at all. But maybe you will
need in the future. I always save things up and I would recommend
you do it as well. Shoot raw all the time, then you can have an easier time bringing those shadows up, really pushing it to the
limit so that you can even out the crushed shadows with
the evenly lit highlights. So expose for the highlights, together with all
these settings, together with all
these accessories, together with all this gear, and you're going to
have a good time shooting nighttime
street photography. And before we move on,
just an important, if you're liking the
information so far, please make sure to leave a rating and review
because this will really help the algorithm in pushing out this
course to more people. Now let's move on to the preparation and
planning process of nighttime street photography, and in this case, specifically,
location research.
4. Location Research: Now, don't get this wrong, You can totally get
away with doing street photography
without any planning, without any preparation, and just going out and
shooting spontaneously. Question is just how
prepared you want to be so that you can be as
effective as possible. And by effective, what
I mean is increase your chances of getting
some photos that day. And you will
increase the chances depending on how much
preparation you do. I'm specifically talking
about location research, mapping things out, and
outlining your shot. Before doing it, this is
just so you can avoid any unwanted surprises when you show up. So
let's talk about it. First of all, finding
a location is not just good for the
aesthetics of the shot, like finding a pretty location. But finding and
preparing for a location also has to do with the
lighting conditions. For you to show up and know exactly what's waiting for
you on that other side. Because some streets might
look amazing during daytime, but during night time
they look horrendous. And by horrendous, I mean
they don't have enough light, they just look bad
and you're not going to have a
good time shooting under those conditions. So you don't want to show up to a place and kind of
look at it and go, well, now I feel screwed right? This was not what
I expected at all. It looked good at 12:00
P.M. but not now. So this is why we do
preparations a lot of the times. But of course, you
can also just go out and shoot randomly by, you know, making it a habit to bring your camera with you
everywhere you go, then whatever, be spontaneous. When it comes to
researching a location, there's two ways you can do it. Either by walking
to that location or by doing research online. When walking around,
do it beforehand. So before you're planning
to actually shoot, just consider it
to be like a sort of research walk
that you're doing. Walk to the streets that
you're interested in, and create an album
on your phone called, you know, nighttime locations
or whatever you feel like. And for every location you
go to and take that photo, save it to that album
and write some notes. Write down specifically notes on how populated
are the streets, what are the
lighting conditions, and how long does it take? You go from point A to point B, because what you might want to avoid is finding
one good location, and then you go there,
you finally get there and you might get a shot
or two, maybe nothing. And then there's
nowhere else to go, because the closest
good location from there is far, far away. So map your entire sort
of walk beforehand. Mark all the locations
on the map and see if you can connect them
somehow so that you can see. Okay, if I take a
one or two hour long street photography
session walk, I can cover these 56
different locations. They're all sort of in the area. That will be the ideal
way of doing it. Because remember,
we want to increase our chances of getting
some good photos. And this is the way to do it, this is the way how
to prepare for it, and this is the way
how to sort of map out the entire walk so that you
have more and more people. Good light conditions,
good gear, good equipment,
good accessories. All to increase the chances
of getting some good photos. What's good about modern phone is that it's always
going to have some sort of geotag metadata
like built into it. So whenever you open up
that photo in your album, even three years from now, you're going to see the
name of the street, the exact location, so you can
always find your way back. This was in terms of
researching by foot, by just going there, finding locations and writing them down. What you could also
do is just find these locations online,
do some research. This could be either
your hometown or maybe it's a
different country or different city that
you're going to look it up beforehand and see what
other people have done. A really effective way of
doing this is by going on Instagram and looking
at location tags. So simply write down the
location, the city, the street, whatever on Instagram
and look at the photos that people have
taken using that same tag. Then you can find those streets and see how other people have taken street photos or architecture photos
in that location. What you then do, and
this is what I do, is I create collections
on Instagram. And whenever I see
a post that I like that's relevant to the type
of photography I want to do. So in this case, nighttime
street photography. I will simply hit
Save Two collection and put it in that folder. That way I can
either categorize by photography type like nighttime street photography
or portrait photography, or by location, city,
country, whatever. And you just have all of
these in your collection. And then you do the same thing
as with the previous one. You just open up maps and you start tracking all
these locations. Look up where is that
location and how long does it take for me to get there and to get from there
to the next one, and next one and next one. And keep that map with
you at all times. Some of the things that
you want to look for in cinematic street photos are
things like fog and rain. Rain can really account for
some really cool reflections, especially if you're
shooting window reflections. Or if you're shooting
puddles on the street. It can account for some
really cool shots. So look for things like rain, or snow, or fog. Anything that adds to the type of cinematic
feel that you want. That adds to the
sort of haziness, the kind of ambience that
you're looking for to make it look as much as a
movie as possible. But of course, don't overthink
this, because in the end, street photography is about
the subject that you're framing in the shot and
hitting that shutter button. That's what's going
to matter the most. And in order to achieve that, you have to, at the very least, have good enough
lighting conditions to make that photo
look the way you want it to look or to properly light up the subject that
you're trying to photograph. And how do you do that? What is the concept of
chasing the light to really achieve and maximize the quality of the street
photos you're taking? Let's talk about that next. As a first easy assignment, what I want you to do is
do exactly what I do. Open up Instagram and create various collections
of the types of categories that you want
in your street photos. This could be a
general category, like nighttime
street photography. It could be a location based, so the name of the city or
street that you want to go to and start filling it up by using the geotags on Instagram. Look at photos that
people have taken. They don't have to be
nighttime street photos, they just have to be photos of the locations
you're interested in visiting and save them to
the appropriate collection. And then finally, map out your very first street
photography journey using Google Maps or Apple Maps.
5. Chasing The Light: Before we get into the
concept of chasing the light, we have to first understand
why we're doing it, why are we chasing the light? Because if you think about taking dark night
time street photos, your logic might tell you, well, you're looking
for dark corners, you're looking for dark streets, you're looking for dark areas because you want to
get dark photos. But think about it. If you
take photos in the dark, in the actual dark, you're only going to
get a dark photo. That's not the same as
nighttime street photography. You're just going to
get an unusable photo. So what we need
to do is look for light sources to
motivate that darkness. So we're telling the story
of darkness by adding light, which sounds counterintuitive, but think about it
in a different way. Let's say you're
watching a movie and the movie represents a scene that's supposed to
be pretty silent. Like imagine a horror movie or something and somebody
sitting in the living room. And they're supposed
to represent silence. How did they do that? Same way if that scene had, you know, no audio at all. Because that's how you would
achieve silence, right? You just click the
mute button on the microphone and
you have no audio. That's going to do is
you would just look at a scene that looks
like a silent film. You're just going to
get a mute scene, which is not the
same as silence. So what do they do in movies? Well, in the instance of this, somebody sitting on the couch, it's a horror movie and they want to represent
that silence. They will add sound. You might add a sound
of water drops, like in the water
tap in the bathroom. You just hear a
little bit of drops. Or another way to represent this is if somebody
is walking down the hallway and you just hear the echoes of the
shoes in the hallway. So you see how that works. You're adding sound to
represent silence in the similar way we
have when we take photos and we want to do
dark cinematic photos, we're doing it by adding
light, not removing it. So we do need light
to take photos, and this is where the concept of chasing the light comes in. You have to have light in
order to represent darkness. Otherwise, we just have
an unusable photo. That's your primary motivator in going out and shooting at
night. Where is the light? You got to chase the light. The best way to do this,
especially if you're a beginner and you've never tried nighttime
street photography, is to go to a place that
does have a lot of light. This is typically the
center of the city. The night is the night that we see in the sky at
the time of day. But the light source,
they're going to be all around in the city. Go into the city where
there's a lot of people, there's a lot of light,
and take it from there. Because you might
be thinking, well, I don't want photos of a
lot of people in the shot. But by being in the city and with having access
to all that light, you can then pick and choose. You can either wait for a
particular area to be less populated or go there when it's less populated or
within the city, you can look for corners of streets with only a
few light sources. But it's always good to have that big backup where even if that one street
never has a person walking by and the lighting
conditions are kind of me, then you always just turn the camera around and you
always have the choice of having the big city lights just behind you or
to the side of you, besides just looking for
the places which have big light sources that sort of properly lit up
all the subjects. You can also look for so
called ambiental lighting. And this doesn't have to mean a big city with
lots of lights. Instead it can mean the
small light sources within that street that will help you achieve
the same effect. This can be anything from
neon signs on the street. It could be car head lights. It can be one or
two street lamps that are either lighting
up the subject directly, or you photograph the subject
using certain reflections, you can get some
really cool effects. Like I mentioned earlier, if
it's raining and you can get some really cool effects
with the light and rain, in combination, shining onto a window or by using
puddles on the street. This is a bit of a cliche,
but people still do it. Puddles on the
street where you can photograph somebody
through a reflection. That's what rain is
going to do to you, and that's what all these
ambiental light sources are going to do for you as well. Because the entire
background could be darker. And we can allow it to
be darker as long as the front or the main part of your photo is lit
up in some way. And this is either by using big street lights
or city lights, or the ambiental lights
of cars, neon signs, or one or two street lamps on the street or anything else
that you find on the way. But this is not to
misunderstand that your subject has to be lit up. They don't have to be
lit up whatsoever. Do not fear darkness and shadows because with
darkness and shadows, you get a lot of contrast. And with a lot of contrast, you can create for some
really cool effects. You can, for instance, not
have the subject be lit up. You can have the background
lit up, but not the subject. And in that way,
create a silhouette. And a silhouette is always a cool effect to have
if you want to add a little bit of mystique to the story that you're
telling at night. The subject is not, doesn't necessarily have to be let up. As long as there's
some light source in the frame and you know how
you're going to use it, subject to be in the
dark or in the light. The background could be in
the dark or in the light, but we need some light source
to motivate that darkness. That is how you understand the concept of
chasing the light.
6. Protect Your Gear: I mentioned earlier how rain and fog and even snow can make for some really cool additions to the ambience of the
shot you're taking. But that begs the
natural question of, will that not destroy
my equipment. To be honest, you might have some really
good equipment that has some kind of protection to harsher
weather conditions. However, even that
has its limits. A few raindrops here and there, a lot of cameras
can handle that. But if we're talking
about proper rainfall, like pouring of rain, blizzards, you know,
a lot of snow, not a lot of cameras
can really handle that. If you're not quite sure if
your gear can handle that, then you need to be able
to protect it somehow. Of course, it depends
on how much rain there is and how
much snow there is, but it's always good
to keep it safe. Keeping your gear
protected is very important and here's some of the ways that
you can do that. Either you can find protection within the street where you are actually shooting, so you can be standing
under a roof, or you can be standing
somewhere where that rain or snow fall cannot really reach your equipment and
you shoot from there. That way you're going to
be safe 100% of the times. However, it does limit you, it means that you're
going to have to standing still under those
particular spots, under those particular rooftops in order to get the shots. And maybe you want to
move around a little, maybe you want to be free
to move wherever you want to go and take
photos on the fly. What do you do in that case? That's when rain
protection comes in. And you can either buy like protective gear for the camera or you can create some at home. The best way that I
found that you can do this is simply by
using a plastic bag. A plastic bag that you
cut out a hole in, in the very front where your camera lens
will stick out from. But the point is
that the rest of the camera is protected
from that rainfall. Cover your camera
with the plastic, but leave a hole in the
very front so the lens can properly see
the shot as it is. You don't cover it with
plastic because then you're just going
to ruin the image. It's not going to look good. So you have to cut out a hole and protect the
rest of the camera, but leave the lens free. This way you get both of the best worlds you can
walk around freely. You will be protected
and you don't have to worry about your gear getting damaged or destroyed in the process of taking
night time street photos. A third way you
can do this if you don't want to sit at
home and like cut up plastic bags and use it that way is that you can
simply bring an umbrella and you can definitely maneuver around by holding an
umbrella at the same time. One way to do this is to place
the umbrella right here. Hold it like this, and you
have the umbrella above you. And then you can take
photos using that method. Or if that feels uncomfortable and you can't really maneuver around properly, what else you can do is you
can get a small umbrella. And by using a combination of a small umbrella in one hand, the rounded strap with your
camera around your neck, then you can get away
with actually holding the small umbrella up and lifting up your camera
with the other hand. Or the opposite,
depending on where your shutter button is
and photograph that way. Those are the three
ways to avoid damaging your gear under
harsh weather conditions. Either stand under rooftops
and photograph that way. Bring a plastic
bag that you cover your camera with or
bring an umbrella. The point is just you
have to play it safe because you never know when the weather conditions
are going to change. This is not just to
protect your camera gear, but also to protect
the time that you've invested in
going out and shooting. Imagine if you're
driving somewhere, it seems like the weather
conditions are fine, but you are unprepared. You haven't checked
the weather report. You show up, you take
maybe a total of two photos and all of
a sudden rainfall. What are you going to do?
Just call it a night. That's why it's good to always bring one of these things with you or prepare somehow
for rain all the time. Be prepared beforehand before the harsh weather
conditions kick in. So bring that with you.
Have it in your bag. And if you need to pull
it out, pull it out. And if you're happy with just standing under a roof, do that. But whatever you do,
protect your gear, it's worth going the extra mile.
7. Become Fearless: Walking on the
street with a camera at night and snapping
photos of people, random people on the
street can be pretty daunting or scary,
to say the least. I know I was terrified at
the thought of doing that. I spent so much time avoiding wasting so much time avoiding going out on the streets,
photographing people. You feel creepy, you feel like you're invading
people's privacy, you feel awkward, and you're
afraid that at least I was, that somebody might confront me. And they might kind of go,
what the hell are you doing? Why are you taking photos
of me? And that fear. If you have that fear and
you have those insecurities, trust me is completely normal and you should
have them right. Because it just means
you're probably a pretty decent person because
you worry about like a, am I bothering people, am I doing something
I'm not supposed to do? So it's good that those signals are being sent to your
brain and kind of warning you socially about
doing something like this. But on the flip
side, what it also does is it actually limits you. It prevents you and
might halt the amount of time that you have like to gather courage to
go out and shoot. And might prevent you
from doing it at all. So in that sense, it's bad
to have those insecurities. And we want to minimize
them as much as possible, and we want to prevent
them from kicking in when it's actually
time to go out and shoot. And how do we do that? How do we overcome these insecurities? So I'm going to give
you a rundown of all the tips that I have
of things that I did to overcome these fears
and finally feel comfortable in going out and
doing street photography. So when I first started out, I started thinking, well, what I need to do
first and foremost, is I need to be comfortable going out with a
camera on the streets. How do I become
comfortable doing that? Because me myself, I'm not okay or comfortable with just going out and
doing it on my own. But what if I brought
somebody with me? So what I did as
a very first step is that I either
brought a friend, a photographer friend, or my wife to come with me out
on the streets to do that. What this does is it removes sort of the burden that you
have placed on yourself in doing street photography and then being in an awkward
sort of social situation. It removes that burden
or at least has it. So it's 50% on you and it's 50% on the friend
that you're bringing, especially if it's a
photographer friend doing the same
thing you're doing. Because in that case you feel united and you feel less awkward doing it because you're
having a conversation with your friend at the same
time as you're doing it. And in the absolute worst
case scenario, right, if somebody comes up to
you and confronts both of you about photographing them or somebody else on the street, at least there's two
versus one, right? You will feel more comfortable and you
can kind of go, well, I'm just walking
around with a friend, we're taking some photos, and it's going to
appear way less creepy. As opposed to if you walked
alone and you got confronted, then that is a heavier load on your shoulders
because then you're the only person standing in a dark corner somewhere
pointing a camera at someone. And that was the part
that I was afraid of. So for me, step number one was to simply make
myself comfortable by bringing a friend with me on my first street
photography journey. The second thing I did, and this is more of
a mentality shift, is that I started
seeing things from a certain perspective when
I walk on the street, anywhere, any city,
anywhere in the world. When I walk on the street I see people carrying cameras
with them all the time. And a lot of the
times I've noticed them filming or photographing, you know, the scenery, people around them capturing kind of just sort of everything. And never once have I
felt uncomfortable. And never once have I felt like, what the hell is
that person doing? I'm going to walk
up to them and I'm going to tell them what's
what, you know, what I mean? So like a lot of
the times people either don't even notice
you and if they do, they kind of just go, oh, it's a tourist, like
taking photos, whatever. And this will bring us to the next point
in the next module, which is going to be
about blending in and seeming like you're just
a stupid tourist, right? You're just there and you're
photographing everything. You want to make sure
to not single somebody out, too obviously. But yeah, what I'm
trying to say, it's more of that mentality
sort of approach. People don't really care as
much as you think they do. And there's even less of a
chance that even if somebody notices and even if it kind of bothers them or makes
them uncomfortable, they're not even
going to walk up to you and actually
confront you. You're going to have
to be extremely unlucky to have
that happen to you. And I can speak to that from just based on my own
personal experience. I've been to multiple countries, multiple, many streets, taken thousands and
thousands of photos. Sometimes I've seen in the shot that I'm taking that
somebody's looking directly into my camera and they kind of even give me the
side eye, you know. But never once in
all my journeys, all my photography
sessions have I had somebody walk up
to me and confront me and tell me that
I shouldn't do that or to delete the
photo never happened. So this is something that
really comforted me as I was starting to create this
sort of mentality shift in me is that I thought people
most probably don't care, Let's go out and test
it with a friend. And then I did never got
confronted and it was fine. Then I did it again and again. Then I switched, I went to
Japan and took photos there. Nobody cares really. So it's not actually
going to happen to you. But if you do feel
uncomfortable, like I said, bring a friend for
the first few times until you really see that
it's not a big deal. And then you can start
going out on your own. And if all else fails,
think about it. You don't really have to do candid photography in order for it to count as
street photography. If you're seeing an
interesting shop keeper and you know that they're probably going to see
you 'cause you're the only one kind of standing there and you want
to take photos. It doesn't have to
be candid photos. You don't have to make
it uncomfortable. Simply walk up to that
shopkeeper and kind of go, hey, I'm walking around
taking some photos of the city and I thought your shop looked
really interesting. Could I stand back
a few feet and just like snap some
photos of you working? Is that cool? I
could even give you the photo like afterwards if you want to
take a look at it. If you want to keep it or use it for social
media or whatever, most of the time
people are going to welcome that and they're
going to be like hell. Yeah. And they
might even show off a little in front of the camera, but let them do their thing, take some photos and
doesn't have to be candid. Right. You could
just walk up and ask somebody for permission
to take their photo. If you really feel the
tension is strong and you feel uncomfortable in that
particular situation, taking some candid photos
of that person, ask them. It's not a big deal. But
if that's not you and if that triggers your
social anxiety even more, then the only thing
we have left is the thing that we're
going to talk about next, which is blending in, making yourself a ninja. So that you never, ever
attract attention to yourself. And you can always
stay hidden while taking your street
photos comfortably. So let's hop into
the next chapter and talk about blending in. So to really internalize what we've talked about
here in terms of mentalities and overcoming
this fear of going out, I think it's very
important to do what I did before actually
planning your first shoot. So as a second assignment, what I would like you to do is, based on the research that you've done from the
first assignment, find one street, one
location and go to that location either completely by yourself or bring a friend. Go there and make yourself
comfortable with bringing out the camera with you and
take photos of the streets. Now, for this second assignment, you don't ever actually have to include any people in the frame. It's not that important
to start with. This is just to make you
comfortable going out with a camera and having people
see you, take photos. And if you want to
include a person in the frame and you
feel brave enough, then certainly take photos
of people on the street. But it's not a necessity
for this assignment. And if you want to fake it, then you can have that
friend of yours walk in the frame and take a photo of them instead instead
of a stranger. So take photos of
the street based on the locations that you found from the first assignment. And make yourself
comfortable simply taking photos on the street with a
person or without a person. And when you do, make
sure to post this in the Facebook group
so we can take a look at together
what you've achieved.
8. Blending In: Blending in is
extremely important for street photography,
especially at night. Because you want to avoid
attracting as much attention as possible so that you can avoid the risk of somebody
confronting you. And you want to increase
your chances of getting those spontaneous
moments that you're going to have a harder time
getting if people constantly notice that you're carrying a camera and
photographing them. And even if confrontation, like I mentioned earlier,
is really not a big deal, it's still a distraction
and a waste of time for what you're there
to do, street photography. You don't want to
spend a lot of time just talking to people and telling them
it's not a big deal, I'm just taking photos and
like you don't want to end up in uncomfortable
situations for no reason. So if you can avoid it, do it. And these are some of the
ways that you can blend in so that you can really
take on that ninja role. And like I mentioned earlier, the sort of stupid tourist role. First of all, this goes back to the very first
point that we made, which is packing light. This actually helps more than you think, because
think about it. If you're standing on the
street with a huge camera and a three to 500 millimeter lens that's used for like
nature photography. And you're pointing that like
on people on the street. You're going to get noticed. Like you're going to
attract a lot of attention. You're just going to look like a buffalo and a chicken farm. So you want to avoid that. First and foremost, you want to pack as light as possible. One lens that you're choosing for that
particular purpose, a small camera strap around you and walk around and just
simply shoot everything. This brings us to
the next point which is don't just hone
yourself in on finding one person that you
want to photograph and stand still and just wait for that person
to do something. The longer you stand still pointing the camera
at one person, the higher the chance
that that person is eventually going to turn
around and kind of go. Are you pointing that at
me? So don't do that. What you have to do instead
is be constantly on the move. And by on the move,
what I mean is you don't have to constantly,
like, walk around. But at least make sure that
you're moving your camera around as much as possible so you can point at a building, you notice somebody in
the corner of your eye. And you don't really do this, like you don't
really turn around as quickly as possible
to photograph them. But you're sort of
moving the camera down, down the street, down the walls, all the other people
walking around, until you sort of
reached the point where you're pointing the
camera at that person. Snap a few photos and then back off and continue photographing. So you have to be
kind of dynamic in the process at the same time as you're also physically
moving around. But when you find a spot, a particular spot where
you want to take a photo, then just do that, do the
stupid tourist approach. Kind of look around,
look like you're in awe. And just lead the
camera sort of like a paint brush all
throughout that scenery. And then snap photos
on the way as you go. And what can really, really
make this work tremendously well is if your camera
has a silent shutter, some cameras and
look up your model, some cameras actually allow you a setting or
a function within the camera to turn off the electronic shutter so
that when you take a photo, it makes no sound. It doesn't do the
whole, you know, sound as you're
taking the photo. It's completely silent. And if you happen to have
that, then even better, then you can stand even
closer to people and the sound will not attract
any attention either. So that in combination with moving around
with the camera, will make you just
sort of look like you're there photographing
absolutely everything. No one person is going
to feel singled out, and that's one of
the key things in blending in when doing
street photography. This is when a flip screen
would be really useful. Because what you can do, what you want to do is you want to avoid bringing up the camera to your face and photographing. Because every time you
make that movement, you're being noticed by
people around you and they're going to sort of look at what it is that you're photographing. Because when you do
this, then you know exactly in which direction
the camera is pointing. And people standing on
the side or in front of you are going to
feel singled out. So if you have a flip screen, you can photograph either by not looking at all and
so called, you know, shooting from the hip or you can flip out that screen,
keep it sort of here, and as you're framing the photo, you can look around and snap those photos without
anybody noticing, right? Or at the very least, they might think that
you're walking around and you're shooting video because if you have
a silent shutter, they have no idea that
you're taking photos. And they might think you're
just sort of shooting video. And that helps because that
means it's not a frame, one frame of one person
being singled out. Instead, it's just a
video of the city. You're a tourist,
you're walking around, and it's going to look
as natural as possible. Look toward your gear
and see what you can implement in street photography,
how we can help you. Does it have a silent shutter? Does it have a flip screen? All of that stuff matters. Look to your camera and
see what's possible, and use it to your advantage. By doing all these
things in combination, we can achieve what
the next part of this process is, capturing
authentic moments. Let's talk about that next.
9. Capturing Authentic Moments: In order to capture
authentic moments, we're tying it back to what
we talked about previously, which is blending in once
you have managed to blend in properly and using all the precautions
that we talked about, now is the time
to really capture those intricate little moments
without being noticed. How do you do that?
What you want to look for first and foremost, are either interesting
or interesting actions. With actions come emotions. These are the three things, the three pillars of making
a good street photo. Just keep in mind that it's
not going to be easy, right? People are typically on their way somewhere when
they're on the street, Right. Rarely ever do people just
stand still unless they're out on a smoke break or
on the phone or whatever. But a lot of the times
people are on the move, so you're not going
to have a lot of time snapping the
photo that you want. You're going to have
very little time and it's going to
require you to know the settings in and out and be prepared for all
kinds of situations. So when it comes to these
three pillars, first of all, interesting clothing with
interesting clothing pretty much don't need any of the other aspects
because the shot itself is going to be
aesthetically interesting. It could just be a shot of
somebody walking or biking, or driving their car, or sitting on the street
doing nothing. But if they have
interesting clothes, that makes for an interesting
photo in and of itself. And interesting clothing is not something you
can really plan for, it's just something that
pops up in your frame. But the good thing
about that is that if somebody is wearing
interesting clothing, you will always
notice it because they're going to stick
out from the crowd. So look for that in
places where you can. And if not, look for actions. Actions are going to
be the next thing. And actions are anything that a person is doing as
they're on the street. Sure, walking is an action, but it's kind of
a boring action. Somebody biking is an action, but it could be a boring action. Other actions could be
somebody doing their job. It could be somebody, a construction worker
on the street. It could be somebody
working in a restaurant. It can be somebody face timing
their friend on the bus. It can be any kind of
action that you see that delivers a
story in the photo, it could be a father
holding the hand of his little daughter
walking to the park. Anything but with actions, a lot of the times you might get that extra added bonus which
is some kind of emotion. So let's say you photograph somebody face timing
their friend. But you can see that the
friend, like on the phone, on the screen you can
see that the friend is crying and the person face timing them
looks very concerned. All of a sudden you've created
a story there as well. Now remember, just because the emotions
displayed in front of you are mean one thing as
you hear them and see them, it doesn't have to mean
that those emotions translate the same
way to an audience. So somebody could be crying and you're
taking a photo of that. And everybody looking at that
photo or kind of thinking, look how sad that person is. But in reality, as
you took the photo, that person was crying
because they were laughing so much it could be something completely
different, right? So emotions don't
necessarily translate. So if you look for a particular emotion that
you're really interested in, you don't have to find
that exact emotion. You can find something that
represents that emotion. And in this way you're creating your own story and your
own interpretation. And the audience looking
at that are going to interpret it in their
own way as well. So if you manage to find, and this is when you
really hit jackpot. If you manage to find an
interesting composition with a person doing an interesting action with
interesting clothing, with a strong emotion, then you've really
hit the gold line, right then you've got a
fantastic photo most times, but that's going to
be extremely rare. And every few thousand
photos you take, you're going to have one or two that really stick out
that make you go, wow, this really hits
all the criteria that you can imagine for
like a fantastic photo. It doesn't always happen, but that's why it's good to know all these sort of
things individually, so you kind of know what
you're looking for. So you don't end up in
a situation where you simply walk on the street and you hope for
something to happen. Because what is that something? You got to know what
that something is, You got to know what
you're looking for. Some of the times you
are going to end up in just a spontaneous situation and you look at
somebody and you go, well, that looks interesting
and you take the photo. But it's good to know
what you're looking for, because then you can have
sort of a sharper eye in the process of walking. Because walking
for one or 2 hours for each session is
quite a lot of time and you can get all hazy in
the head and whatever and not really know
what you're looking for. You can get bored. But if you have an agenda,
if you have a plan, then at least you
know what kind of things approximately
you're looking for. And that's going to help
you in the process of capturing all these
authentic moments. Now, before we move on, please make sure if you
haven't already, to leave a rating and review of this course if
you like it so far. Now the next thing we're
going to be talking about is what to prioritize
during your shoot. There's a lot of
things happening on the street at the same time. What should you
prioritize and how should you approach
street photography?
10. Two Ways of Photographing: There's generally two ways that you can approach
street photography. Either by having something come to you and
happen spontaneously, or for you to compose
first and shoot later. What are the pros and cons
of both of these methods? And which should you
use starting off with? Which should you use?
We both of them. It depends on what
happens during your walk. Don't be closed off to
any of these things. Just be open to any kind
of possibility, right? And use it to your advantage. So in the first instance, you might just be
photographing spontaneously. You're just walking
on the street. You're waiting for something
interesting to happen. And might happen,
might not happen. That's sort of the con of it. It could happen, but also you could just walk
around and all you can really see is just people walking and nothing
interesting is going on. That's a bit of a con of that whole thing, but
at the same time, the good thing about
that is that if it does happen and you get this like magical moment
spontaneously, then you're going to feel that sort of authenticity
in that photo. You're going to
feel that it's very spontaneous and that could
really make for a good photo, because you might not get
the perfect settings, right? If you're spontaneously
quickly shooting something, you might not get the
perfect settings. You might, your shutter might be too slow and there's
some motion blur. There's a bit of a camera shake. There's something
you can see that the photo is taken sort
of in a dirty way. But that, believe it or not, adds to the authenticity
that could make for a really interesting photo because it's not overly planned, it's not like overly perfect. The second way you
can do this in approaching street
photography is by composing. First, it means that you walk on the street and you don't
even think about people. For starters, you look
at interesting things, architecture,
background textures, and you find something
interesting. And you go, this is
a good photo for me, like an aesthetically
beautiful photo without a single person having
to be in the frame. And then you set up your camera and you frame that composition, and it looks fantastic. And then what you
do is you wait. What this does is that
you will end up in a situation where even
if nobody walks by, nobody is interesting,
nothing has happened. You're still going
to end up with a Pre photo because you've composed first for an
aesthetically beautiful photo. And then whether or
not somebody walks in, it's kind of irrelevant. But of course, if they do
and they're interesting, then you're going to
get a fantastic photo. So either you can do this handheld or you can do this
by mounting it on a tripod. But you have those two ways of just spontaneously
taking photos, which may or may
not turn out good. Or you compose
first and you wait, you play a waiting game. So those are the two ways
that you can approach, you know, street
photography in general. But it does require you
to keep an active mind, constantly look for all
the things that we talked about earlier,
interesting subjects. And interesting subjects
doesn't just have to be people, it can also be buildings. It can also be
backgrounds and textures. Find something that is interesting within the
frame, compose for that, and take the photo, or walk around and
spontaneously take photos. The point is just use
both of these methods. Don't go out there
with just one plan and only stick to that plan. Things on the streets
are happening constantly at a fast pace and you got to be
ready for that.
11. All Choices Matter: Everything matters,
whether it be on during street photography
or any other kind of photography, any kind of art. Your intentions will matter. Every choice that you
make will matter. Because it will directly reflect on the end
result of that photo. And it will directly have an, a subjective impact on the audience looking
at that photo. When I say everything
matters, what do I mean? I'm talking specifically
about all the sort of choices that you make in
taking a particular photo. This could be everything
from the gear you're using, the settings you're using, to the more abstract things that you don't really
have direct control over, such as weather conditions,
such as season, such as clothing and color, and all the details
in the frame. They're going to affect
the photo differently based on the choices that
you make in the very end, how you graded and how
you color corrected. That's also going to matter, and we're going to talk
about that more when I start editing the photos
cinematically in light room. And I'm going to
take you through the entire process
of doing that. To put this in perspective, think about if you're
taking a photo, say during wintertime as
opposed to summertime. You want to take some
landscape photos or some forest photos. You go out in the forest
and it's wintertime, all the trees are naked. You snap that photo and
then you go back during summertime and you have birds and animals
and green trees, and they're all fluffy and big and looks like real nature. You take the exact same photo with the exact same settings, from the exact same position, and you show that
photo to an audience. They're going to react very, very differently to
both of those photos. In one instance,
during wintertime, somebody might experience
that and kind of go, this looks like a horror movie. Then they look at the
summer photo and they go, I feel all warm and
tingly inside. Right? And that's just based
on the choice that you made in one criteria
which is season. Now, apply all of this to
everything in photography. It will matter not
just the season but also the time of day. If you're doing nighttime
street photography, you're going to get widely
different shots if you do it on a Tuesday at 05:00
P.M. when the sun is just set and everybody's on their way back from work
and you get all these like tired people going
home or preparing and go to a restaurant and they're
all formally dressed. As opposed to if you do the very same nighttime
street photography, but you do it at 11:00
P.M. on a Friday night. And then you're going to get a wildly different
atmosphere out in the city. So all the choices
you make will matter. So think about the type of
photo that you want to take and the type of
subjects that you're looking for in your
street photography. In the beginning, you don't have to have a clear idea of this. You can just go out whenever
and shoot whatever. That's just an
experimental phase for you because you want to just sort of learn and feel comfortable in doing street
photography to begin with. But later on maybe you
want to hone yourself in on particular subjects,
particular themes. And then you have
to think about the choices that you make and how they are going to affect that
particular type of photo. You want to take it. Snowy. Is it rainy? It 05:00 P.M. 11:00 P.M. What kind of colors
are being shown? How am I going to grade this? Never underestimate the
choices that you make. Because somebody looking
at that photo and you looking at it or thinking or having an idea of that
photo to begin with, your two versions could
be completely different. And it's not always a bad thing, but it's good to keep in mind.
12. Color Correction: All right, here we are
in a Lightroom Classic. Now remember, if you're
using Lightroom Classic or if you're using the cloud
version, it won't matter. The same principles will apply if you're using any
other kind of software. Then I assume that all the terminology here
is pretty much identical to any other kind of software or have similar terminology. But for this purpose
we're going to be using Lightroom Classic, because
that's what I prefer. Here's a street
photo that I took at night on the streets of. Was this Tokyo? I think
this was Tokyo in Japan. As you can see, we have
very underexposed photo. To start with, the first
step of the process, what I usually do is I first have to correct
the angling of this. As you can see, we
have this dude, like walking by who's
ruining the composition shot and we have a bit of dead
empty space going on here. Let's try and fix
that first by going into the crop section here. I typically either
crop manually, like so, or I pick
a preset from here. Right now, I feel like I
want to go three by two. Then I'll just start working on the image until I reach a
composition that I like. Because when you do
street photography, you can't always get the
perfect composition going on. Sometimes you have to
correct it in post. This looks about right. I'm going to keep it
like, so we'll see if there's any
corrections to be made. In terms of angles maybe like. Yeah, that seems to work fine. All right, so we
have this dude sort of they're just chilling here
ordering something I think, or it is outside
of a restaurant. I can't really remember. That's what we've got
going on in this image. Now, the first thing to do when editing a photo is to look at what we have and all
the various colors. For a city like Tokyo, we typically have a lot
of you know, shop lights, a lot of neon signs
shining up the streets. There's a lot of colors and some of them can be
really distracting, or they can work in our favor. So first and foremost, the first step in the
process is to color correct. And I'm going to
take you through the process of color correction, and I'll explain why
that's important. You see, you cannot
begin the process of grading down here without fixing up all the technical
details of the image first. Like in this case, we have
an under exposed image and we have to even
out everything, bring down the highlights,
lift the shadows, make the image look correct
in its natural state. Only after that can we go
into the actual color. Because what happens if we start the opposite way and
we do the color first, is we're going to
introduce a lot of style. But then we would
have to go back and do the technical
changes anyway. That color might
look differently or that style might
look differently when we correct the image
in its natural state. So we don't want
to do double work. That's why it's always
recommended to do color correction first
and color grading last. So let's begin by talking
about color correction. In this case, we have to, first and foremost in this case, I want to bring down the
highlights a little more. I didn't properly expose for the highlights
in this frame. We're just going to bring it
down just slightly like so. Now the image is evenly dark. Now it's time to start
bringing those shadows up. Bringing that exposure up first. We're going to start
off with the exposure. We're going to start
dragging this lighter, see where we end up. We're going to always go
too far and then pull back. It's always the best
way to go about doing things in
terms of exposure. We're just exposing the image
by say 11.5 stops, cool. Then we're going to
go into the shadows. We see the shadows
are pretty crushed. And because this is shot in raw, we could pretty much drag the
slider as much as possible. And as you can see, we
can get away with a lot here because we shot this in raw because there's a
ton of information. We have so much leeway
here in playing around with the correction
aspect of this photo. So we're going to start
bringing the shadows up again, like go too far and then
start bringing it down because it's okay that some
of the parts are crushed. It's just in the natural
state of how the image is. We don't want to
overexpose anything. Now that we've done that,
you'll notice that what I do is I constantly go back
and I tweak a little bit. Now the highlights
are too strong. Again, I'll start
bringing those down. The exposure might
be a little strong, bring it down a
little more like. What you can do is
pay attention to the histogram up
here if you like. You can click the blue
show highlight clipping and shadow clipping and
highlight clipping. When you activate this,
the blue color is for when the shadows are crushed
with highlight clipping. It's going to be the
opposite and it will be a red line showing you
where the photo is clipped. And then, you know,
the overexposed shot. Now we're going to
bring this back. Okay, now that we're
satisfied with the exposure, we might change it up
a little bit later. Let's move on to the
following sections here. In terms of presence,
I typically, when I do these cinematic
street photography shoots, I like to bring the
clarity down a little bit. But if you go too far, you
see the images becoming all too hazy and all the information is blended together. It looks really ugly. What I prefer is I like to
bring down the clarity to maximum around -15 but sometimes
I go for just minus ten. Just add a little bit of the softness highlights
with texture. I actually like to bring
texture up just slightly. Maybe we'll stop
around plus seven now. Moving on, we have the haze. With haze, you can
either add haze or remove haze to
introduce more contrast. If I remove some of that haze, you can see the same
softness is appearing here. Or I can go the
opposite way and I can introduce a bit of contrast. In this situation,
I think I want to bring it down a
little bit and add a little bit more contrast
just like so not too much. I'm pretty happy
with that right now. When it comes to the vibrant
and saturation slider, I feel like saturation is
too strong of an effect. I like to first and
foremost bring down that saturation so the
colors don't pop that much. Then if I want to reintroduce
a bit of that coloring, I might add a little
bit of vibrancy. I'm not going to do
it in this situation. Instead I'm just going to
bring down the colors. Because when you bring down
some of that saturation, you are creating more of like a movie feel
into the photo. Because the colors aren't too strong, they're not too present. You feel like you're in
an alternate world when you do this now. Then I typically move
over to the tone curve. In the tone curve
I like to work on. If you don't know how
the tone curve works, I'll tell you real quick. You can see here
that this is pretty much identical to the
histogram up here. This area right here
is the shadows, and the darks here
are the mid tones, here are the highlights. What I like to do is pull this slighter until I
get the desired effect. To do that, we have
to create points. Because if I start moving
this around just like so, then it's going to
affect the entire scope right here. Which we don't want. I just want to affect, say, the shadows in this case. And bring them up a little bit more by introducing some fade. What I'll do is I'll create
a little bit of point here. Which means that
when I start lifting those shadows and
introduce that fade, it's only going to affect the dark areas there with a little bit of
that hazy effect, we're moving more
and more closer into that world of cinema. What we also could do is
make a point right here in the mid tones and
play around with that a little bit so we can
add more of contrast. You can see these areas and areas in the face and the
general midtones here. We can see that that's
being affected. As I pull this up and down and
it becomes more contrasty, I don't like to exaggerate this, so I'm just going to
move a little bit up. And same thing with
the upper areas here might introduce a
little bit more just like. So if I want to bring down
some more of these highlights, then I can start bringing
this down as well. So now you'll notice
that when you make these points as
you click on them, the curve might move. Now the curve move
just because I clicked on it and it
might mess up your image. The way to solve that is when you click on any
of these points, you hold in the Alt key. Because then you can
freely add as many points as you want without
affecting the curve itself. Here, I would say I'm
pretty happy with the overall color correction
aspect of this photo. Now if I want to, I can go back and I can check, is there anything
else I want to fix? Maybe I'll play around with the shadows just a little bit. Maybe I'll add a little
bit of manual contrast. Actually, I'd like to remove a little bit of that contrast to -13 just to soften the
image up a little more. This is now a photo that
I could say that I'm satisfied with
just when it comes to the color correction
aspect of this. What we're going to do next
is where I'm going to go into turning this into a style. I'm going to show you all
the various ways that you can use these color
panels right here, the color mixer, as
well as the grading here as well to
create an effect. For now, we're
going to skip this. I'm just going to
hop right down. If I wanted to, I can
reduce a little bit of the noise if we see any
noise going on here. I can just increase this
luminance lighter a little bit. So or I can use the AID
noise function for that, but it doesn't bother me too
much because I will actually be applying some grain to this. I'll zoom in, I'll add about, say, 20 inch grain. So I'll change up
the size a little bit, the roughness of it. I usually like it to
be fine like this. I'll leave it at
that calibration. We're not going to be
talking about calibration, that's more of an advanced tool. We're going to
leave that for now. Next up we're going
to be talking about color grading and the color
mixer to create a style.
13. Color Grading: All right, welcome
to part two of the photo retouching series
here at this Japanese photo. So first and foremost, I like to go into
the color mixer to just spot all the different colors
that we have to work with. We can see right
here that we have some greens, some cyan. We have some blues over here. We definitely have yellows. We have oranges and
reds automatically, just because it's usually what
the skin tones consist of. But we also have some
additional reds here. Additional oranges,
Additional yellows. Now, that's all fine and dandy, but if we want to
create a style, we actually have
to start removing or changing up some
of these colors. Let's say we're going for a blue cinematic
style in all of this, the first thing I'd
like to do is make sure the hues match. In this instance, for instance, we have these yellow lights. We can start pulling them
in either direction. To match it with the
rest of the photo, I want to make them
slightly more orange like. So then we have the greens. Some of the greens
as you can see, moving toward the warmer hues, and some of the greens are
more toward the emeralds. If we're making a
blue cinematic style, I want to push this
in the direction of emeralds. I'll take the greens. And as you can see,
if we go by left, we're making them more marsh
land, yellowish orange. And if we move in
the other direction, we're pulling more
toward the emeralds. I'm not going to go too far, but I'll push them up here
to maybe like plus 16. Then I'm going to
look at the aquas and the blues here because
they are two separated, I believe, channels right here. Let's see what happens if I
start changing up the aquas. As you can see in the
bottom part here, we get some effects
on this puddle. But definitely over here, I'm going to start moving them more toward
the blues like so. And then I'll grab the blues, I'll push them a little bit
back so that we even out. So we have approximately
the same color going on on this
stripe right here. Purples and magentas. If I move them around too much, I might affect some
parts of the skin tones. I don't like to touch
purples and magentas, but as you can see,
we also have it on the flowers here in case I want to do
something with that. In this case I don't want to, so I'm going to
leave it at that. After the hue slider, I typically move
over to saturation. In saturation now, we're
going to start deleting or reducing some of the
colors off of this image. We might take a look at the aquas and the blues here
and just see what's up. If I bring these down, they're not as intense. I definitely like the look of that because you can see it's distracting when I go to the
right and it's too intense. It's distracting. I want to
remove some of those aquas. Let's see what happens if I
do the same with the Blues. Yeah, we're let's
put this on Max. We're cleaning up
the sign here and we're cleaning up
the blues over here. That are distracting but
for all the wrong reasons, there's no reason for
me to have that there. I'm just going to
remove it like so. Then we're going to
move into the reds. We have some strong
reds going on here. I'll see if this has some
effect on the skin tones. I'll move it all the way down. Remember, always exaggerate
and then pull back and see if it had an effect on any of the skin tones here. Yeah, we can see it a
little bit on the ears. A little bit of the hands
don't want to go too far, but I'll bring it down to
the same amount as 60, so it blends in all
nice and clean. Next up, let's talk about the yellows, oranges
and yellows. Let's do the oranges first. If I start bringing
the oranges down, you can tell that's
typically the skin tones. I think they're
the most prominent in the orange sections. Oranges, I typically
like to leave alone, and yellows sometimes affect
the skin tones as well. But in this case, it doesn't
really seem to do that. Let me check that out. No, it doesn't touch the skin
tones whatsoever. I can freely play around
with the yellow tones, and those, as you can see, are really, in my opinion, ugly. We want to go for
that colder style, so we need to remove
some of that warmth. I'll start bringing these down, not all the way, so it's not
completely black and white, but definitely like
so like say at -70 we're cleaning up the
image of unnecessary colors. That's typically, for me, the first step in the process. Then I move on to
Luminance and I see if there's something
that I want to brighten up, for instance the hellos. If I bring them down, then I'm bringing down the
highlights in that lamp. Again, this is why you don't overexpose the high
lights because it can be very difficult to
work with them later on, I made that mistake
here and now I have to tweak and play around with
this until I get it right. As you can see, the middle part of this light cannot be fixed. It's just because the
highlights are too overblown and overexposed
in that area. But I can do this and
introduce a little bit of detail so we can see the
text here more clearly. Then I'll go over the greens. The greens are a bit too
strong in the background. I'll start pulling these down a little bit so we get
more of a dramatic effect. In terms of luminance.
I'll bring that down. We're affecting the
sidewalk over here, as you can see, like so. And then we'll take
the blues that are going to affect the
background over there, to darken it a little bit. Looking good. Now
what about the reds? Let's see, by darkening
some of these reds, we're actually making
them, which I like. I'll bring them down
to say -30 like. All right, now I'm pretty happy with the colors that
we have removed. Now we're going to
start introducing a style by using the
color grading function. And this is just
like with the tone curve up here divided
into three sections, shadows, mid tones,
and highlights. The same areas as you see on this tone curve right
here are going to be infected as separate channels
When we work on these, we're going to start off
with the shadows and see if we want to play
around with the shadows. I actually like the naturally
looking black shadows. Some people like to go for
the Tl and orange look. In this case, they
will just go this way. And I do the same thing here. I just pull it all the way. Then I slowly bring down that saturation until we
have something going on. Now we could introduce
a little bit of blues or cyan here. A little bit of
teal may be a two, but I'm not going to
go for an overly teal and orange type of style. Then we move on to the mid
tones and the highlights here, depending on the style
we want to go for. If we're going for
that colder style, we could start introducing
some harsher blues like so, and bring down that saturation and start working our way up again just so we get a bit
of a cooler feel to it. We don't want to go too far. Typically, when I grade, I leave it between
saturation eight and say 20. That's usually the limits. For me, it's not too obvious, but I'll stay at around
saturation 11 on this one, I don't want to go too far. And with the highlights,
we can do the same. We can either go for
some blues and make it really icy emerald blue like so. Or we can create some, a split toning effect. In this case, we could be moving more toward
the warmer tones, to respect the natural
colors of the lamps, of the light sources,
and of the skin tones. I might just introduce a
bit of warmth right here. Let's say plus 15 or so. We have a style going on, right? Because if we look at
the before and after, this is the photo
we started with. This is how it ended up. Very mute colors, very pushing toward the
emeralds, toward the blues. And this is the way you
would create a style that's not overly exaggerated
in your street photos. Now, we could also
reset all of these, because now that
we have our base, we've already
corrected everything to the best of our ability. We've already corrected
the tone curve as well, so that we're satisfied with the exposure and the overall
technical correctness. We've removed the
colors we didn't want, we've introduced new colors. Now let's start playing
around with, say, a warmer hue To all of this
shadows, a leave as is. But if I wanted to
create a little bit of a warmer feel overall
to this image, I would then start playing
around and start moving in the direction of the
oranges, yellows like. So. Then I would bring it down and introduce it
just a little bit, so we introduce some
of that warmth. And it's not too obvious either. We can do the same with
the highlights here, but we could do it maybe more toward the yellows instead
of the same oranges. We could even out the
colors a little bit. In this case, let's
say saturation eight. In this case, we're
creating more of a warm tone feeling to this. Here's the before and after. Here we have the warmer image. The previous one was a
colder version of it. But you see how much
creative freedom you get after you've already corrected and done things
correctly over here. In that case, you can
create a whole bunch of styles just by playing around with the color grading
and the color mixer. That's how you do
it step by step. This is how you color correct,
this is how you grade. Then when you move further down, you could choose the noise. Using the AI or the manual
slider can choose to remove some potential chromatic
aberration which is just color cast the appear in the separation
between colors. We can see a little bit of chromatic aberration right here. As you can tell that function helps to remove that or to mend it to the
best of its ability. We're not going to do any of these special effects or anything because maybe not
every software has it. But here you can
add some fake blur in the background if
you want to create a, as if you were
photographing with like an aperture of 1.2
or something like, you can fake that effect. Then we also have the grain
right here that we added. We could add a bit of
vignetting like so, because for this photo, I think vignetting would work. Typically, I don't
like using vignetting, but as you can see,
you're creating this dark mask in the corners. We really want to
drag the attention of the viewer from this light
shining up on the subject. It might actually help out with that if we do add a little bit, say -15 right here with the
post crop vignetting effect. Now we have a pretty cool photo. All right, that's
pretty much it in terms of color correction
and color grading. The point is just to
look at the photo, see what you already
have to work with, and decide what you want
to do with those colors. Then add or remove colors
using the color mixer. And finally start adding that style using the
color grading panel. All right, so that was the overall crash course process of my workflow in light room to create a little bit of a
movie feel in my photos. Hopefully you can
use this at least as inspiration.
Good luck to you.
14. Finding Inspiration: Becoming better at your
craft is like a muscle. It's something you
have to constantly entertain and
constantly work on. One way to do it
besides the obvious, which is continuously shooting and continuously
trying to be better. The other half of
that is inspiration. Finding inspiration and using that in your own craft or
in your own photography. And there are several ways
that you can achieve that and find inspiration for the type of street photography
that you want to do. I'll take you through some of the ways that I
personally do it. First of all, we go back to
one of the previous points which is creating
Instagram collections. This is where I will create
collections of certain styles or certain colors or certain photographers
and their photos. Whenever I scroll down Instagram
or I do an active search and I find a creator that I like or I find
them through reels. I will then save their photos on their profile
to those collections. They might have a
particular style in color grading that I like. They might have a
particular style in the themes and the
subjects they're picking. They might have a particular
style in where they take the photo and what kind
of weather season. And I will save all of those photos in these
collections to look back on and use as inspiration when I go out to shoot
something similar. One more thing I do
when I actually save these photos is that I
actively analyze them. I will literally take
out a paper and pen, and I will start analyzing why their photos turn out
the way they did. So I might like something
about that photo. Or I look at the photo and I go, I like this, why do I like it? And I ask myself that and
I start writing down, is it just the color grading? Is it the subject? Is it
all things in combination? Or maybe I just like a part of that photo and not
a different part. But I have to
understand what it is that I like and
don't like and why. Because this will help
me later on when I take photos to create more of an intention in the
photos that I take, I'll be able to either
recreate something that a different
photographer has done or to create something
original based on various inspirations
from that photographer and three other people. But I have to know why
what they did works. But keep in mind
that, for starters, it is okay to steal. If you find a
photographer that you like and you want to recreate an exact looking photo as
that photographer and you want to grade it in
the exact same way, go ahead and do that. It's completely fine.
It's going to help you in the process of
discovering your own style. It's going to help you, you know, analyze
inspirations better. And by recreating
what somebody else has done and you do
it well as well, then you can use
that same sort of technique or that same
sort of mindset in taking photos and create
your own styles in your own versions and your
own twists and things. So steal if you have to, don't feel ashamed of it. Besides saving things
to collections in terms of still photos from other people that
you're inspired by, especially if you're aiming for the visually strong
street photos that remind you of movies. What you can do then is watch movies that have a
distinct style to them. What I do is I open
up a site called Letterbox.com which is
essentially just a website, like a social media website for people who like
to watch movies. Where, amongst other things, you can save like
Instagram collections. You can save lists, lists of movies in
a particular style. So you can just go
to the search bar. You can search for any query, and you can find lists of
either a particular style, a particular director,
or movies similar to the kind of the one movie you're thinking
about that you like. There's lists that are super
creative on any topic, on any director,
or on any actor. People will create these lists. And what I do then is
I create my own list, my own sort of visual
style inspired list. Personally, I really enjoy, for instance, the
movies by One Car Y, and I might be looking at movies like In the Mood for Love
or Chunking Express. And I will use them as
a visual guideline. In my grading process, what I can do is I can
take one of these photos, like a still frame
from that movie, and I can implement it or
import it into light room. And as I'm retouching my photo, I can use that other photo as a reference point and grade it. Similarly, you can do this
in any other kind of style, any movie that you like that has sort of a distinct style to it. You can take Barbie, you
can take Oppenheimer, you can take the Matrix
Bladerunor, anything you like. But in your photography journey, it's not just about looking
at other people's photos, but it's also about
watching movies. All of these things are part of the research and inspiration
process in taking photos. So don't shy away from watching movies because movies
are not photos. Because think about
it. Movies and photos are closely related. They're sort of like cousins
to each other, right? The art itself is different, but the ingredients are similar. You're using similar
composition techniques when you take a photo
versus when you do movies. You're using similar
lighting techniques. Like the way you place your
subject in relation to light, the way you create
style with silhouettes, all of that is just
similar ingredients of the same or of a different
art. So they are related. So don't shy away from watching movies and saving photos
and going to galleries, and going to the cinema. All of this is going to be important for that
inspiration process. Because in the end,
you've got to keep your mind sharp and
you've got to always look for inspiration so
that you can see how you can improve your own
nighttime street photography. We can't always produce completely original
work on our own. Sometimes we have to look to other work to help in the
process of making our own.
15. Hit The Streets: All right, now finally
we're reaching the final and most interesting and exciting assignment of all. Now it's time to actually, with your preparations and with your warm up that
you've had to go out, hit the streets,
and start taking some proper cinematic
nighttime street photos. There are no rules to this. I want you to just use your entire creative freedom and achieve any kind of
looks, any kind of styles. Anything in street photography that you take that you
think is a good photo, And we'd all love to see this. So when you're
taking these photos and after you've graded them, after you have like a final
photo that you're happy with, you can post it in
our Facebook group. We're going to give you
feedback if you ask for it, or you can simply
share that photo with us and share your
socials so that we as photographers can
follow each other on social media and help each
other out on the journey. Also as a final reminder, please make sure to leave
a rating and review for this course as it helps me tremendously with the algorithm. And with that I leave you. I wish you best of luck on your journey and I hope
to see you another time.