Outdoor Photography: See, Shoot & Share the Beauty Around You

1. Introduction: What I love most about photography is to be able to capture that moment in time for all eternity. It is almost having this superpower. Hi, my name is Minh. I'm a photographer from California and my specialty is capturing architecture, lifestyle and just beautiful moments that's all around us. Today's class is using photography to find beauty in the mundane. In this fast-paced world where everything is changing and social media is constantly showing you where else you should be. I think it's important to take a pause be in a moment to really capture that beauty. Today we are going to walk through the entire process by first going to, two totally different locations to learn how to look and shoot and then go back to the studio and make our edits. I'll be shooting on a DSLR but you can use any device that you have. It could be a camera film. It doesn't really matter. And you don't have to be a photographer to take this class and feel like this is something that accessible to everyone. If you leave this class with one thing, I hope it's just a height in the sense of noticing the presence, the moment that you're in. And beauty just discerned a beauty that exists within that moment. I'm excited to have you along, so let's get started. 2. Finding Beauty Everywhere: Welcome, I'm so glad you decided to join the class. A lot of people think that my style of photography is architectural photography. But I feel it's slightly different in that I infuse a sense of emotion that is typically not present in traditional photography and architecture. My photography Germany has been a long winding road. When I was in high school, I was really into the arts and drawing and illustration. However, I went and studied engineering because at that time I thought that the only way you can make money is to pursue a practical degree so I went and study structural engineering. After that, I went and I got a graduate degree in architecture. A few years ago, I started posting on Instagram infusing fleeting moment of light, of shadow of this sense of ephemeral. It really took off and it took a life on its own and now I have a whole new career. There's so many great photographers capturing, documenting photography of architecture. I feel that I can bring to the discipline something new five years into this journey is still a pretty short period of time and I don't know what the future holds, but I think that's the exciting part. I'll be sharing my techniques with you today, but infuse it with your own personality and make it your own journey. The first step, learning how to look at the world by this, I mean, paying attention to what's around you and really be in a moment and notice all the small things that you can capture. Next, we'll head out to an architectural environment and see where we can find a great moment to capture. Then we're going to head out to someplace completely different. We're going to head out to the beach where we'll be using our principle but in a totally different environment in a natural setting. In the final steps, I would take it all to the studio and we will make our select and edit our final imagery. In terms of equipment, you can use any camera equipment and you do have that could range farm a mobile phone to a DSLR. I personally will be using a DSLR with a telephoto lens, but anything that you have would do. People may think that to photograph architecture, you need great architecture, a great building to shoot. Whereas I think great architecture exists in smaller moments that add up to a bigger picture. It could be how a corner meets the wall, how the lights hits a space. I would suggest that you go to someplace that you haven't been. Challenge yourself. Go out of your comfort zone and train your eyes to find these moments in a new place, in a new setting. Enough talking, let's head out and scout our allocations. 3. Learning to Look: Here we are in a community college and I think this is a great place for us to find some amazing locations and unexpected things. I think with the knowledge that you can find beauty everywhere, you can find it wherever you go and this place would be a great challenge for us to find some amazing location that doesn't seem like it's so obvious. What I'd like to do is usually just walk through and just observe the spaces, not necessarily taking any photo yet. I can use my iPhone and just capture little snippets, little vignettes that I see. Usually, I don't pay attention to the entire building, but just the smaller moments within the structure or within the space that speak to me. It could be the light, it could be the shadow, it could be small compositions that just strikes an interest. Just avoid the places that you see tons of people at such as tourist attractions or major Instagram spots that you've seen that a million time. Challenge yourself to go out of their comfort zone and find someplace that are unusual. A time of day where you go scouting could make a huge difference. I like to go in the morning if you can possibly do it because you can get that nice soft light or at the end of the day. However, the time of day that most people avoid, which is midday, could be very interesting because you get these really strong graphic shadow line that could really make your image come alive. Let us go and see what we can find. I think this building is really interesting, it has amazing line and angles and I think this could make a really great image. For example, if you take a typical shot it maybe looking something like this. But if you zoom in and if you isolate the elements and just focus on those angles and line, you get a totally different, more graphic image, such as this one. You can also pay attention to smaller details such as the light and shadow, for example, this bench here is very sculptural and I think that could be very, very interesting. So pay attention to things that are large scale as well as smaller, look far and look close. I use my iPhone a lot to sketch before I actually do a shoot because it's just a quick way to test out different compositions without committing to a full frame high-res image. It's just much more flexible and nimble as this wall. Sometimes shadow could be quite interesting too and here I'm just focusing on the details of the shadow on the steps. That could be quite a graphic image. This is an interesting shot here. I really like how the red element really activate the image, just by isolating into the detail, you get a really graphic pattern. The idea is just distilling the scene into smaller elements and simple geometry. For example, this Coca Cola image, you see the triangle and you see the red shape and so this fewer elements make for a very strong and graphic image. I think by going up, you get a whole new different perspective. For example, you can see the larger space and as you get closer, you can isolate the elements into fewer elements and it become more graphically strong. I think I'll come back here and do a shoot maybe with the model and I think it'd be a great image. So definitely come back here. Typically, you see a building, you may just want to focus on it. But if you actually introduce an element that is nearby that frames, it makes for a much more interesting composition, such as this column here it frames the whole image and it makes for a beautiful baseline. Then here we are at an upper perspective looking at the building that we've seen before, and it has a totally different angles. I can introduce the palm trees as another element that we'll play with the hard lines of the building and you see the light of day. It's midday now and you can see it create a beautiful strong diagonal line on the surface of the building. Let's walk around and we could see what we can find. It could be a very interesting. Yeah, this different grid and layer, so as you move through, you start seeing patterns and repetition. As I turned a corner, I start noticing these pattern and it's actually created by the reflection of the glass on the building. It's like modern art. I think this is what's exciting about scouting and different time of day. You can just totally see something unexpected and just allow yourself to have that experience such as seeing something that you didn't anticipate. I think that's the wonderful part about just being open and see what you can find. Actually really like how this pattern play with the blades of plants down below. Even introducing that light bar above as part of the composition. As you can see in this image, there are three elements such as the light pattern, the plant, and the light bar. But if I want to reduce it down to a few elements such as two, this light pattern and release, that could be a very strong just two elements playing with each other. So here we are on top of a parking garage. It seems like a very unusual place to find some great images. But I think all around me I can see so many different and interesting thing that I could take pictures off already. These pattern underground here is what immediately caught my eyes. I think I found some really great spots up here. So let's get started undershooting. 4. Equipment and Settings: Before we get started on shooting, I want to show you what kind of camera I use. I use a Sony mirrorless camera. I think any camera that shoots RAW would do for any purpose. It doesn't really matter what camera you use as long as it should RAW I think is really the key. I chose 2470 zoom lens today. I think it's a great versatile lens, for me to shoot up close as well as faraway. I also have prime lenses, but I feel like when I'm out and about and I want to capture a great range of imagery. I want to have a lens that has a lot of flexibility and I think that this lens, I can do all of that 90 percent of of the time. I also have a macro lens that I use sometimes to kind of capture the close up details. But most of the time, this is kind of like my go to and I feel like it served me pretty well. The setting that I use are usually one over 125 shutter speed unless it's something that involves a lot of motion, then I probably bumped it up to one over 500 or something like that. In terms of aperture, I usually set it at F5. Typically, I let the shallow speed dictate the imagery and the aperture can vary. I usually keep the ISO 100 or 200 if I need to I can bump that up to 400 if it's low light or anything like that. Follow along with whatever camera that you have and let's go shoot. 5. Capturing Architecture: From here I could really see the different pattern that's created by the sun. It is like a graphics abstract painting. I think that's really great, see how the lettering, the topography works with the light. I bet you every time I come back here today, it'll be a totally different pattern. A lot of the time I'd like to introduce, I'll admit to give a sense of scale to this pattern, and not only that, it gives us a sense of story, a sense of that human element is always an element that I go to to give that mood, that sense of emotion to the image. I'm going to introduce that element into this pattern and see how it works with my photograph. Lucky enough I have the Skillshare crew here who's going to help me as a model, and I think anybody can be the model, it can be your friend, it could be yourself, if you have a self timer. But I think it just give that human element that could really activate and it should make it come alive. I'm going to have Arianna walk through the image and maybe like high speed, so that reflection look like she is zooming through, that gives a sense of excitement. I like in this image, the human body really give a sense of scale to the graphic line, and without the body, you may not know how large or how small is, and that could actually be an advantage. Maybe you don't want to use the body because you may want to make these lines seems extremely huge. The body may actually distract or give too much information. But in this case, I wanted to have that body to give a sense of scale through the image. Let's go back to the building we saw earlier and see what images we can take over there. Here we are back at a spot where we scattered earlier, and I think this would be a great photo. I really like this angle because it's really dynamic over these diagonal line. I think diagonal line always make your image feels a lot more exciting and alive. I feel like a strong diagonal is going really make the image more impactful. Especially, I'm going to introduce the model walking through the space to give the sense of scale, also just to give it a sense of story. This feels like it could be a train station or like a scene of a movie, you can play all the scenarios in your head, clear storyline. I think this character could be something that you could add to make the image more exciting. I'm using a zoom lens here, a 2,470 that allows me to take in quite a large image. However, I'm going to bring it a little closer, just make this dynamic diagonal shape as a main element in the photo, and I'm going to have the model walk through this element. I think it's cool. I'm just going to have her stand there, just to give a more moody feel. I feel like some time when the subject is just standing there and having this tranquil moment it gives a really nice, calm mood to the image. Really nice. I'm also going to capture the image without the model. One of the things that I think that makes for a very interesting image is, you don't have to always have the focus of the frame in the center of the image. You can shift the focus to the side and use more negative space, for example this. Instead of focusing on the object or the building itself, you can focus on the connection, like how the different materials meet, how the edges of the building meets something else. It could be the building meets the sky, the building meets the ground, but that connection is a really interesting thing to focus on, instead of the object itself. I think I got some really interesting shots here, and so let's see what we can find in another location. I immediately saw this very strong diagonal line in the building, and it reminds me of this famous photograph by Fan Ho, this photographer from Hong Kong. He did this amazing image from the '50s that has this very strong dynamic diagonal line. I feel it capture the idea that this ephemeral shadow is almost like a physical architectural feature. That's really a great thing to think about, even though they're just ephemeral and changing all the time, you can treat it as a physical feature and play with it. I'm going to have our models do a very strong walk to toward the shadow side. I like that. I'm going to have her come back again and interact with the line. I'm going to have her like baby doing some things like this, like lean, touch. Just doing fun things, but trying to create a moment. That's how you interact with a shadow element and create something interesting. Her body becomes this punctuation against this line, it's almost like modern art, like how you have this line, there's really strong body shape. You could also lean your head to one side, just like we would really dribbling and maybe dropped one elbow. Drop one elbow further. Create a beautiful shape, and just direct your model to create something different, something iconic. That's great. I think I got it. When I'm traveling, I don't have a ton of time at a location, so obviously I have to be prudent about my time and just focus on the angles that I would really want to capture. I don't take a ton of images out there, as you can see, I only shoot a few images. I don't just spray and pray as some people use it, and just really pay attention to my composition and really take a moment and compose and slow down, so you can get that image in last fewer shots. Obviously, I can shoot here all day long, there was so many great angles to capture. However, I think we're going to head to the beach and see what images we can capture there using the same principles. 6. Capturing Nature: This is one of my favorite places to go to in Southern California. This beach has so many great nooks and crannies. I think it's a great place for us to practice some of the principles that we have learned before that applied to Architecture and see how that can be used in a natural environment such as this one. Here, I'm off to use the 100 millimeter. I think it's a great lens to capture close up as far with some of the details. It also allows me to zoom in to some of the angles to get a more simplified version of the landscape but I think it's a great use of this lens. Since this is a longer lens, the setting is a little different. You have to really open up the lens to let more light in. But since we are out here in the bright sunlight, I don't think I need to set my ISO too high. ISO 100 is good enough for this location. I'm bringing two cameras with me today because we're out here in the sandy environment and I don't want to open my lens up and have all of the dust fly into the lens element. I could easily swap without getting the dirt into my camera every time I change the lens. But if you only have one camera and one lens, that's totally fine. But if you're going to do that, just make sure you take extra care because in a windy environment like that, with the dust and the sand, it could be pretty detrimental for the camera. My philosophy for shooting landscape is very similar to architecture in a way that I'm distilling the scene down to the fewest elements, maybe two to three elements that can work with each other into a very simple composition. In this case, it could be the ocean versus the rock or the edge of the rock versus the horizon line there. I'm using the Rule of Third. I'm trying to place the edge of the intersection at about two-third because when things get off center, it feels a little bit more interesting. One of the thing I like to look at is how to observe things from far away as well as up close. I also like to get up really close to a rock and study the lines within it, and see how it create almost an abstract pattern. When you get close, you discover a totally different level of detail that you didn't see before. Right here, I just notice a strand of seaweed that just washed up from the ocean and I feel that, that's almost like a nice punctuation for this image, so I'm getting really close to it and capturing that strand as if it is an element in my photograph. Notice in this thing that just happened to be maybe an accident, that with closer inspection, they become something really beautiful. When I'm shooting a landscape, it could be very busy because there's so much more detail in nature. What I'd like to do is basically simplify the image into simple geometric shape. When I'm looking at the scene here, you can see the rock as triangles and the horizon as almost like a box. I want to simplify, visually, triangles against box. Make a composition mentally with these elements, inductively helps simplify the elements and make a really strong image. I also really like shooting into the sun because it really helped further abstract and simplify the shapes even more because everything become a silhouette. With this way, you can really see how nature can become geometry almost. I'm going to use my 100 to get close to the detail of the plant life that's washed up on the ocean here. See here, I can really get really close, shifting my focus to the edges of the item, so it's not smacked in the middle. I'm focusing a lot on the small elements on the beach because there's a lot of life forms that are very small to the eye. When I'm shooting Architecture, there's not as many elements of nature that you can really get close to. I think when you're out shooting in a nature setting, you can really look at a very, very close proximity to the image and really discover something new. I'm seeing these different patterns created by the ocean and I think these are great opportunity for you to discover something that just created at this moment, and you're here just to capture that. I'm just going to dig in here and see what kind of macro I can find. I feel free to move the objects around as long as I'm not plucking it out of its natural environment. I feel like it's totally fine for me to reposition and to isolate things physically so that I can create a very clean composition. The reason I like to shoot both in a wide angle as well as macro is that both elements tell a complete story, because this is how you see the world. You see things far away as well as you see things when you're close to it. The way you touches, the way you feel on a very personal level. Of course, a lot of people asked me if I consider Instagram when I shoot the images. Even though I say that I like to just shoot the image and be in the moment, and create whatever image that I want at that moment, it definitely comes to play. Having a series of images to tell a story is really helpful, especially nowadays with the Carousel, you can show multiple perspective into a story and really help it unfold in a complete way, so you don't have to limit yourself to just like a wide or an up close. You can have both to tell your story. I switched over to my other lens just to see the landscape that I'm in in a totally different way, because when I'm using the long lens, I can cut elements that are far away into composition. That's not possible with the other wide lens. Here I am with the 100, I'm just cropping into the composition so I can see how the lifeguard station plays with this other shape that's in the foreground. Just take a moment to take it all in and see what else that you may not notice. From this perspective, I can see the people on the top, and in this case, the body really give the landscape a sense of scale. I feel like now is a great time to go above and get a great wide shot of the beach. This is where you can get that great epic moment. I just came up here to get this epic shot. This is the very popular vantage point for this beach. It's obviously a very beautiful spot, but it's also super crowded today. For my technique of how to find great imagery, you don't have to come to epic, beautiful places like this one. You can find any beach and find these beautiful moments within it, and not having to fight with the crowd or the long lines, the parking, anything like that. Just have your own experience and your own secret place. While I love shooting at location that are obviously very beautiful and many others have found the same obvious location, I think it's much more challenging and rewarding to find these other locations that have not been discovered that you can make it your own. I think with these principles of learning how to see, you can find these locations everywhere. I'm pretty happy with what I shot today, but let's go back to the studio and see what we've shot. 7. Making Selects: We're back in the studio so let's dive in. I have my MacBook laptop here, as well as the Wacom tablet. This is my setup for when I travel. When I'm in my studio at home, I usually have a larger screen and a larger tablet. Because usually I am excited to go edit my images right away, I don't go through and make all my select, because I want to get to the editing process and create some images. I usually select what I like right off the bat, so that I can have a chance to edit them. Then I'll go back again on the second round. Surprisingly, sometime the second round, I find that I'm more adventurous in my selection. I would totally see something that I did not even notice on the first round, and that could be very exciting. Let's look through the images that I've shot here at our location, in the architectural setting, as well as the natural setting. I'm just going to go back and see what images do really strike me here. As you can see here, these are the shot from our parking lot shoot. I'm just going through and see any of these one that really caught my eye. For example, this one, this light pattern really create an abstract, almost like a painting, Kandinsky-like pattern. I really like that one. I just hit P for make a selection and I'm using Room here to make my select as well as do my initial round of calling. That was one. I'm going to go through, and here are the ones that we used our model. I do really like these. I like the one we're just showing her feet. I feel it create a nice abstraction against those graphic lines. Here's one I like. I really like the movement of this, maybe this one. Then I think I also really like some of these shots from the architectural setting. I really like this one where the model is standing there having this contemplation moment and I feel there's really have an amazing mood. Very tranquil. I definitely like to consider one of these as my selects. Having a wider one will just give me more room for working with the images so when I straight in a line, I can crop in further. Instead of using one more crop in, I'm going to pick one that's further back, so I have more room to play with. These other shots are when we're working with the model and she's walking against his very graphic line. Again, I mentioned this shadow line, you can think of them as almost an architectural detail, as a physical element. It's really fun to play with. I really like this energetic vibe that she's exuding with her body language. I like it when entering into the shadow line in-between state. That's really nice. This is when we're playing with the line, interacting with it. These are really fun, that one has nice energy. I think these are really great. This have a very classic, timeless vibe and the way that she's composed at one-third across the frame, it's a nice position for the placement of the model. She's working really well against that diagonal line. I'm going to make that as one of my possible selects. Modifying the bodies to create a unique shape. This is always fun to ask the model to come up with something new to create a moment that is unexpected. This is really fun when she's moving her body and arms in different ways. The next part of the images are when we were at the beach and we were just capturing the landscape. Using this very simple technique, for example, this rock. My first instinct is to capture the whole thing, showing the entire rock, but it feels very static and it's not very interesting. But as soon as I shift my composition to one side and focusing on the edges of things and how it connects like for here, it will be the intersection between the sky and the earth and it create a much more dynamic photo. Also, this line could be the shadow line of the rock against the shadow. Again, these edges are really interesting to pay attention to because they can make a really great image. Then, I also was observing when the waves crashing against the sand as we see they create this really beautiful, abstract pattern as it washes away these lines of sand. I feel like this is something unexpected. I have never actually never really pay attention to this bubble as it washes away. I feel like this could be something that I can add as one of my images from that shoot. A lot of these smaller moments, they're not enough to make one epic image, but I feel collectively, they can work well to tell a story as a series. These smaller moment, they were definitely better as a series. They could work as singular moments as well, but it's great to think of them as a family of images that together tell a greater story. These are just bubbles again, and they just look so graphic, almost like polka dots. I mentioned to focus on patterns that you notice existing around you because they just create an interesting visual language and these bubble are a pattern onto themselves and I think that's very interesting. As I was shooting, I also saw human elements that was really interesting. Against the human element, I had that sense of emotion and excitement. The way I framed this as you can see, it's the girl is not in the center of the frame, I always waited the image so there's plenty of negative space and it makes for a much more interesting and dynamic composition. Also, notice patterns such as clouds and treat them as almost geometric shapes. These clouds, these oblong shape against the horizon, these two objects. They're counterweight to each other. They're having a dialogue. That's very interesting, as well as this landscape is simplified into three simple shape, the horizon, the stretch of cloud, and an another puff of cloud. This simplification together, they create a very interesting composition. As the sun was going down, shapes becoming more like silhouettes and these landform becomes almost triangular and playing against the horizon line. This is my method of simplifying the landscape. Just think of them as shapes and how you can place these object into a frame next to each other. From here, let's see what are some of my favorites that I have selected so far. These are the ones that I will start editing and see how I can transform from here onto the next stage of the images. I'm going to look at the first set of images from the architectural setting. I think I like this image because although I like this very graphic pattern, it doesn't have a sense of scale. By having that human element in there, it really gives a sense of scale to the photo. My library is something that I revisit over and over again. It's not I just go through once and I put it away. This is something that I may revisit again in a week or month or maybe in a year and then see something completely new. This is not something that is done once and over with. Let's bring it onto Photoshop and continue with our editing process. 8. Editing Architectural Shots: My editing process tend to go back and forth between Photoshop and Lightroom. I used Lightroom primarily to do color adjustments, but in Photoshop for most major editing processes. For example, this one here, this some really blown out white light. Sometime, I like to make them really graphic and bright, but I think in this scenario, I'll bring back a little bit more details into the highlights. The shadow, I want to bring the shadow really dark to make this really graphic light against dark. But it can't be too dark because I want the figure still to be visible against this dark background, so I drop the shadow as well as drop the highlight to bring out more details into those light patterns, and a bit of clarity. With Lightroom, there's a feature to enable profile corrections. I'm going to select that and it automatically adjust to the camera lens that I was using from Lightroom is opened into Photoshop. I'm just going to remove the most offending blemishes on the ground. I'll just go to edit fill and content-aware fill. This will automatically remove the areas with the Lasso tool. I can do many spots at the same time, just to save time. It doesn't have to be super perfect because it's still the ground. But I think by removing these distracting elements, it will make for a much cleaner image and just a much more graphic satisfying image. I'm just highlighting these areas again. I hold down my shift key so I can do a multi-select on this area with the Lasso tool and edit fill content-aware and magically, they will disappear. If you are selecting multiple areas sometime the content-aware tool doesn't work as you intended to. Just have to pay attention that it's not messing up some other areas. I think everybody's definition of how much editing is acceptable. For me, I don't want to take it out of reality, but then, I'm not a documentary photographer. I don't have to adhere to the rules of not Photoshopping or not editing. I just create what is necessary or what I feel is sufficient to tell my story. Is personal and for you it maybe different. Another thing is that maybe at the top of the image, I feel it's not enough contrast, what I do is actually make another layer. I will pop-up the contrast at the very top of the image, and I will mask that off. I will use the masking tool and use a gradient tool. I masked the layer that I just darkened, and then bring it back so we can see it has a little bit more contrast at the top of the image, because I just want this pattern to continue across the entire image of these light dashes. Maybe do a final levels adjustment to bring even more contrast. I feel this one is a pretty good image, I will save it. I'll just save as a JPEG. Another question that people always ask me like, what image size should I use when I upload to Instagram? There is really no best practice, but for me I usually just resize it smaller, maybe to 16 or 1,800 pixel width. I would just save as JPEG. This is a smaller version. I will then bring that to my phone where I do to find upload to Instagram. This next one is one where it is going to be a little bit more editing. I'm going back to live room, and this is where I make my initial round of color adjustment and lens adjustment, so I'm in the develop mode. I'm going to select my lens correction, enable profile correction, and it automatically select my lens setting, which is the Sony FE 24-70. As you can see, this setting fixed the barrel effect that the curvature onto the image. It also washes out a little bit off the image. You got to pay attention to that. I can see that the dark areas is quite dark, so maybe I'll bring up, to bring back a little bit of details in the dark area. Just a tiny bit. Then I'm bringing down the highlights, so that I could retain a little bit more detail in the bright areas of the photograph. I usually use this White Balance tool, this automatic White Balance tool, and see how the initial adjustment comes up as I select maybe make this, have the white balance based on this neutral area of the concrete. I sought a pig uses picker and then put it on to the concrete. You can see the image warms up quite a bit, which I do like to warmer tones. I'm just trying different areas and see where, as you can see, a more yellow area, the image becomes more blue because it assumed that area is the white balance. It's best for you to select a gray area as your white balance that give the most true to life coloration. This concrete area was probably the most neutral area from that scene, and you can see that it gives the most realistic rendering of the light. Or bringing up a little bit more clarity to you bring a little bit more sharpness and pop. Overall, I feel like this is good. The brick is a little dull looking. Maybe I'll bring out a little bit more red on the burke. By going to the red orange and then just bring up the saturation. I'm opening it up in Photoshop. I want to fix these converging lines. You can see that the line 6 converging at the bottom. I'm going to straighten them out. First thing I'm doing, I dropped a couple of vertical lines along where those lines I will fix. You can see here. I dropped one line here and one line on the right edge, maybe one more here. I just pull them from the ruler from the left end. You have to have the ruler activated, in order to pull these lines in. To bring up the ruler, you do command R. When you remove the ruler, you really don't have an area to pull these lines out off. But when you do command R, you can actually pull onto the ruler and put into the image. That will create a line. You can also drag them out of frame. You can also clear them out by do command semicolon. That will just momentarily we move them off the screen so you can see the image. I'm going to use the transform tool, so edit transform, and then do a distort. When I do that, I hold down the Shift key and I drag these corners, so that the vertical line in the photo is straight, follows the guidelines that I've dropped down. Suddenly removed the guides to see what it looks like. It's still not completely straight, so I go back and try to distort one more time. Both the lines on the right and the left are parallel to the guides, and you can see the before and after. I'm just going to make a copy of this layer because I want to work on a copy of it just in case I messed up, I still have the original version right below, I can revert to it. Again, using the fill tool to content-aware tool, I'm just going to select the offending items on the screen and then just last so that I can do multiple items to make this workflow a lot quicker. I'm going to remove a couple of more things down here. I like to have a very clean geometric image, so I tend to not have these smaller elements. Some people may back at that, but again, it's a personal decision. I'm not documenting reality, so I have the freedom to interpret it in a way that I want to. These object here, it's harder to use content fill, For example, if I do this, I just Lasso the object and is doing content fill. You can see, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. You can see it mess up a little bit and see all the lines. I don't think that's as effective, so I use it a Lasso tool, just so a selected area below. I'm selecting maybe an area of two brick Y and five bricks high. It doesn't have to be perfect because I'm going to blend this into the area above. So I'm cut and paste; control C, control V. I move it up and you can see it doesn't require line up. I do transform, distort. It can be reposition. You can see the edges. This is hard to tell because this pattern is pretty random. This is pretty good. I could stop here, but I'm going to blend it in a little bit so it gives a more realistic rendition. I'm going to select the item, and then by command click on the layer of the items that I've just cut out. It create a Lasso around the selection and I'm going to hit the Mask tool, which is down at the bottom here. Basically create a mask around it, and I'm going to blend the edges in. I just brush using the gradient toothbrush in to the mask, bring back some of the original brick, to blend with my new selection, and to make it more seamless, so the edges are soft and you don't notice where it begins and ends. That's what I would do here for this other exit sign. I wouldn't make a selection. How many bricks? It doesn't really matter. I can even choose a selection that's further away. You can see this area becomes super clean, all you see it's just the brick, which is really nice. I'm going to do a final cropping. Just remove that exit sign at the top. I think that's going to be pretty good. I'm going to save that, as a JPEG and then also make a smaller versions so that I can upload to Instagram. I'm going make the width 1,800 pixel, so that is a smaller JPEG, so that when I bring over to my phone, it's not a huge 24 megabyte file. It may be like 1.5 megabyte file. It's very personal, how much editing you want to do to your image. But of course, with Photoshop there's so much that you can do, and it's really up to you how much you want to utilize the tool. Next, we will be editing some of the nature shots that we have taken. 9. Editing Nature Shots: For the shots that we've taken at the beach, I will be editing a series of images that I feel like together they tell a larger story. One that I really like is this image of the waves versus the sand, where as it was receding and it creates this disbursed bubbles. There's not a ton of editing that you have to do on these images, just mostly color adjustments. I want to make these super graphic just to create a sense of contrasts. I'm just going to make the sand almost black, as if we we're in Iceland or something. Bring down the luminance. I'm going to put the white balance onto the foam so that it makes that area the white value. I'm actually going to take the color down, so that makes it almost like a monochromatic black and white photo. Then I open it up in Photoshop just to remove a couple of sand specs in the ground, just to make it really clean. That's distracting only a little bit. I feel like this is one of my images. I'm saving it as a JPEG. This is almost like a study of these little bubbles. That in itself is like a mini series that I've just come up with when I was there creating. These patterns are really great and you don't even have to crop them in. This is my series number two. I edit in Photoshop. I mean, if I am picky, I would possibly remove all of these little tiny bubbles because they wreck the pattern overall. But I'm just going to keep them for this purpose. Putting it into my folder, my select folder where I'm keeping all my images after they had been edited. I'm going to do something a little different to clouds. This is a very unusual composition that I spotted. It's almost like abstracting this scene into a very modern composition of three shapes. One of the tricks that I do is to take the blue to almost dark blue so that it really gives a lot of contrast to the sky. I just select the blue in the color section here, and I bring the luminance down to pretty dark. For the blue, I'm going to change the saturation to make it if not so bright, because I like the more muted moody tone. I'm going to bring up the clarity to bring even more contrast to the clouds. I'm going to select that, and you can see the lines are straightened out a little bit. It's brightened out a little bit. I can see already a couple of problems with this. There was some dust on the lens as I was shooting, so I will be bringing it in to Photoshop to remove those elements. I can also adjust the temperature to see what it looks like if it warms up a little bit. I'm actually may like it a little warmer because we were there at the end of the day and the light was really warm and we were close to golden hour. It was actually much warmer than the blue. I'm going to make it warm. From here, I'm going to bring it into Photoshop and I can see that there're two big dark spots here. That's easy to fix. Just using the Content-Aware tool, select, and fill it to remove. This is, I think, pretty good composition. If I was going to alter nature a little bit and make it a really even more graphic image. I may remove this puff of clouds so that it just sky over here. Let me see if I'm going to be successful with that. I duplicate the layer. The easiest step is to select this area and try to do a content fill. I just remove how it touches the right edge and it give a more surreal feeling to this cloud as if it's a standalone puff over this line. This nature become abstractions, and I really like this one. I'm going to save it as one of my images. Here's another one of when I was at the beach. In this one moment, it's all of the excitement of her being on the beach on a warm day that sends a fun as really palpable. I think this one was the time where golden hour was pretty strong, so I'm going to bring more warmth onto the image by turning up the temperature. Usually my nature shots don't get edited a lot because there's not much to change. I mean, I take nature as it is. However, I always like to add an element of surreal perfection onto the frame. For example, I feel like the footprints, although could be playing into as part of the composition, I want to remove them. Just using my Lasso tool and just remove some of the more prominent footprints. I can just leave these. I don't like that much too. While I was at the beach, it was really beautiful out there, so obviously I wanted to take it all in and use a wide angle lens to capture the moment. This is definitely a great moment when the sun was coming down and looking really beautiful. However, I feel like this image could be taken by a lot of people at the beach at that time, because it's not enough of my own lens and filter added to the location. I feel like with a little bit of cropping, I can bring my own personal touch to this photo. By looking at these silhouettes in the water as objects, I can just pick them out and create a composition with them by cropping this horizontal into a vertical image. They become like this shapes in the landscape. The square crop was where Instagram started on the early days. But since then, vertical images have taken over because it goes with the proportion of the phone. This gives the largest area. Vertical images are the most highly engaged imagery on Instagram. This is something that occurred to almost all photographers nowadays is that everybody starts shooting verticals because where they end up is on social media, Instagram, and vertical format are the one that gets the highest engagement. People shoot more vertical images. Maybe I'll crop in even further to make it more abstracted. Maybe that's too close. I like this reflection here, so we open that one back. Although I can do this with my lens camera onsite when I'm shooting, I can also do this reduction, the simplification, when I'm editing the photos and crop into the details that I wanted. You see the original photo has the entire landscape, but I'm just going to crop into the little details. That makes for an interesting composition. I actually really like the golden quality of this image. I'm actually going to reduce the blue, a very warm image. Also bringing up the weights. I feel pretty good about what I've shot today and I think it's a good time for me to stop and turn it over to you. I'd love to see what you have produced in the potrait galleries. Upload your best work and I'll see you there. 10. Final Thoughts: Congratulations, you made it through the end of the class. I hope that now you can see the beauty all around you wherever you go. I love to see what you have created following these participles in the party galleries. I hope you have taken on a new perspective of seeing the world in some larger, small A's. I hope to see some of your work in the partly gallery. Thanks so much for taking this class. I hope that you can stay in the moment and take in the beauty all around us.