Photography Basics: Becoming a Professional Instagrammer

1. Introduction: Hello everyone. My name is Paulo del Valle. I'm a 26 year old Commercial Travel and Landscape Photographer from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I also have this very cool job of being a Professional Instagrammer. That means that I get the chance to work with a lot of brands through Instagram. Either advertising about them on my Instagram or creating content for their profile so it looks great. So, this course is called How To Be a Professional Instagrammer, where I'm going to show the right path for you to become one of yourself and make an income out of it. Instagram is a great market for everyone. In this course, first, I'm going to teach you how to choose the right camera. Then, I'm going to teach you about basics of photography. I'm going to teach you some photography skills. Then, we are going to talk about professional editing using an Adobe Lightroom and some smartphone apps. Then again, we're going to talk about Instagram. We're going to teach you how to Instagram like a professional so you can call Brian's attention and you guys can work together. Later, I'm going to take you guys to one of my favorite beaches in Rio, which is my favorite place to shoot. In the end, I'm going to ask you for our student project, for you to create three photos using some of the techniques we're going to learn in this course. So, I invite you to enroll this course and I'm sure that you're going to love it. 2. Equipment: So first, we have to learn how to choose the right camera. So, if you want to be a professional Instagrammer, the clients expect no less from you, then you doing a great work. So, you have two options. You can choose to be a mobile photographer using a smartphone, or you can choose to be a photographer using your camera. So, if you want to be a mobile photographer using a smartphone for your work, nowadays there is a great market for that. So, I recommend you using one of the latest models of smartphones in the market. So, in my hand I have an iPhone 6S, and there are many other great smartphones such as Samsung Galaxy S6, and brands like Sony and LG they have great smartphones as well, but I recommend you using a smartphone that has a camera with eight megapixels at least, but the new trend that you have cameras with at least 12 megapixels. So, make sure that you have one of the latest smartphones models and that you change every year. I know that sometimes that's really difficult but, you can't go more than two years without replacing a smartphone. You must make sure that you have a smartphone that takes amazing pictures. Together with smartphones, you must have the right accessories to go with it, and I recommend you getting a mobile tripod for your smartphone. That's really important for you if you work as an Instagrammer, that doesn't mean that you want to take pictures. Sometimes you can take videos. So, using a mobile tripod is really important for taking videos, doing time laps or even for taking photography sometimes. Sometimes you want to take a long exposure using the right app, so you must have a mobile tripod. Another option you have using a camera. There are many cameras. There are entry DSLRs from brands like Nikon and Canon. There are semi-professionals like this one, the Canon 60. There are also professional cameras like Canon 5D or Canon 1DX, and there are mirrorless cameras from Sony, Panasonic that you can use. This is a mirrorless camera, sony A7R II, which is also a great camera. So, you just have to choose a very good camera that would guarantee that you're going to take sharp pictures and that you're going to deliver the best from you. With cameras, it's also very important that you have the right accessories. So, I recommend you getting a very good tripod. So, when you're getting a new tripod, you make sure that you go to the store, you hold it and you feel it. You have to feel that the tripod is really steady, because if you don't get a good tripod, it's possible that your images are going to shake. So, make sure you get a very good one. There are many other options of accessories like lens hood that you put in here on your lens. Sometimes you're taking pictures against the sunlight and you want to make sure that should all have lens flare on your photos, ao lens hood are really important. What are you going to do is just put the lens hood in front of your lens, and when you're taking picture, make sure that you're avoiding the sunlight getting into your picture because sometimes you see the lens flare, those green yellow things in a picture. So, when you're taking pictures against the sunlight, just make sure that you put your hand over your camera trying to avoid it. There are other accessories like remotes that allows you to take pictures without being close to your camera. There are wireless remotes that you can be like two meters from a camera and take a picture. There are remotes with wire that allows you to do time lapse as well. The newest camera models, they have Wi-Fi built in. So, you can download an app and use your smartphone as a remote which is great, and which is the best option in my opinion because they allow you to see the live view of a camera on a smartphone even when you're far from it. So, sometimes you don't have anyone with you and you want to be in the picture, you are the model of the pictures. So, you just get ready, see how it looks on your smartphone, hide your smartphone and take the picture which is great. Professional photographers use filters as well for their cameras. So, there are filters like polarizer for you to avoid reflections on glasses or if you want to give a great look for your pictures. It's amazing for landscape pictures, and filters like ND filter if you want to do long exposures during the day with strong sunlight. So, if you want to be professional photographer, professional Instagrammer, just get to make sure that you have the right accessories that make you a pro. Of course, a photographer must have a lot of lenses depending on their needs. So, it's important that you learn what you need and what kind of lens you need. So, if you want lens for portraits, if you want lens for lens for landscape, if you want lens for architectural, there are right lens for everything. So, just make sure that you have the right accessories, the right camera for you to do the best of your work. 3. Basics of Instagram Photography: Before we get into some of the photographer techniques, I want to teach you guys how to control your camera manual mode. So, using camera manual mode, means that you have complete control over the settings of the camera. So, that's ISO, aperture, shutter speed, white balance, and much more. I wanted to talk to you guys about these three important things. ISO, aperture, and shutter speed. First, you have to understand how to use the ISO. The ISO is the sensitivity to light of a camera. Usually starts at 100, could be less in some unprofessional cameras, and it goes up to over 5,000, 20,000. It depends on your camera. Although there is this possibility of using high ISO, I don't recommend using over 800 during the day. The smaller the better, because pictures with high ISO get a lot of drain or noise. So, if you want a picture with a smooth sky, for example, with no noise at all, go for something close to 100. As you can see in the live view, when you increase the ISO, everything gets brighter. That's because I'm increasing the sensitivity to light. When you're shooting during the golden hour without a tripod, you need to use the highest than 100 while you're compensating with two other very important things that we're going to talk about now, the aperture and the shutter speed. The aperture has a hole or an opening in your lens where the lights go through. If you leave this hole with a small opening, less light gets inside, if you leave this whole wide open, more like gets inside. The aperture is represented by the letter F in your camera as you can see here. The pen on the lens you're using usually goes from 2.8 to 22. There are lenses they use apertures like 1.2, 1.4 and 1.8. In my case, I'm using a lens that goes from F4 to F22. So, the smaller the F number, more light gets inside, and my picture gets brighter. The higher the F number, less light gets inside, and my picture gets darker because of my aperture is small now. Then we have the shutter speed which sets how fast your camera is going to capture a photo. In other terms, it's also called exposure time, because it's how long your sensor will be exposed to light. Right now, my camera is set to 1/100. That means that my shutter will only allow light inside the camera for a 100th of a second once I press the button. You can see in the live view, that if I make it slower, like fortieth of a second it gets brighter, and if I make it faster it gets darker. That's because the faster the shutter speed, less time for the light to reach the sensor. One last important thing I want to talk to you about, is the light meter inside your camera that measures the amount of light that reaches your camera sensor. When you press your button half way, your camera starts reading the light. You can see the light meter right here on the screen. When your settings of ISO, aperture, and shutter speed are perfectly combined together, your light meter will be reading zero, like you can see here. I recommend that you always change these three settings and try to leave your light meter reading something close to zero. If you want a brighter picture, leave at one, or two maybe, and if you want a darker picture, leave it at minus one, or minus two. Just don't overdo it, otherwise your photo will be too bright or too dark. So, the first photography technique I want to talk to guys about, is shooting movement. It's either shooting someone jumping, running, cycling, a car movement. There are two very important things you need to know. So, the first thing that's really important for you to set while you're shooting movement, is set your camera for continuous shooting, that's also called burst mode. So, that means that when you press the button and hold it, your camera is going to take a lot of pictures at the same time. Second, it's the shutter speed. When you are shooting movement, I recommend you use the at least 500th of a second. Of course, that depends on what's your subject, if it's something moving really fast, I recommend using a 100th of a second, maybe 1,000, and you have to always remember to press your button half way, so you light meter reads it. As you can see here, it's underexposed. So, I have to compensate with either my aperture, or my ISO. As you can see, my aperture is set to the minimum of my lens which is 4.0, so I can change that. I can't make my photo brighter with my aperture, so I have to change my ISO. I press half button, it's over minus one, so I increase my ISO to see, let's see, 100. That's close enough, just a little bit more, and then I have it set to zero. So, now I have the perfect settings for shooting movement. So, get ready, anticipate the moment, hold your button and shoot in burst mode. So, let's talk a little bit about the basics of photography. First, I'd like to talk to you guys about shooting raw. So, your camera allows you to shoot in two image files either JPEG or RAW. I recommend using JPEG for personal uses. Like, you're shooting at party, you're shooting some event for personal use, or maybe you are traveling, and you don't have enough space on your memory card, and you know that you are going to take a lot of pictures. So, shooting JPEG allows you to take more pictures, in case you don't have enough storage. But if you're shooting professionally, I recommend you shoot in RAW. Because RAW, as the name says, it doesn't matter which white balance you use, you can change that using a professional editing software such as Adobe Lightroom, and it guarantees that you're going to have the best quality from a camera. There's also the option that you can choose to shoot with RAW plus JPEG. So, your camera is going to create two image files. The same photo, one for raw, and one for JPEG. You can choose to do that in case you are afraid that your computer won't open a RAW file, but if you use it with the right software, your computer is going to open a RAW file, just fine. But in case you want to have both of them, you can choose that option as well. Remember, it's going to take more space inside your memory card. Another thing I want to talk about, is the rule of thirds. So, it's really important that you got your camera, go to the settings and turn on your grid. So, your camera has this option that you can use a grid in your live view that separates your image in nine spaces, three vertical and horizontal. You just got to make sure that you place your subject into just intersection of these lines. Another very important thing that you have to remember to align your horizon, it's really common for us to see on Instagram, for example. A lot of people with crooked images, because they just look horrible, they don't look professional at all. So, make sure that you align your horizon in your image. Another important thing, is that you have to know how to use a camera, and you have to practice a lot. So, practice, practice, practice is the best way for you to learn photography, is going out there shooting every day, and if you practice a lot, you're going to master photography real quick. Another very important thing I tell people, is the key of being a great photographer, is having patience. You really have to be patient. Sometimes you are waiting for something. Sometimes you have to wait 5, 10, 15 minutes to get the great picture you want. If you want to be a professional Instagram influencer, stand out from the others, you really have to be creative because you have to do very different work from everyone. Nowadays, with social media, everyone has a camera to use their smartphone. So, everyone goes to the same places and take the same pictures. So, how do you stand out from them? You just have to be creative, and what I tell people how to be creative, how to stand out from the others, is placing people in your pictures. So, take a friend, take a girlfriend, take a wife, take someone with you to take pictures, and ask them to do things. If is either jumping, or running, doing something different, because when you use people in the pictures, you give a new meaning to that place. Because, you changed the landscape, you place someone in there doing something, and when it's something really different that that person is doing, you surprise your followers when they see that picture. So, sometimes you can take different things like a alonzo, or an umbrella. You can take different objects to create great pictures. These are some of the basics of photography that's really important for you to know, and it really helps you to be a really great photographer. 4. Photography Skills: So, right now, we are in Joatinga beach. It's one of my favorite places in Rio to take pictures. Now that you have learned how to choose the best camera to take pictures, let's learn how to use them. So, if it's either your smartphone or the SLR muralists or enter the SLRs, you have to learn how to control your camera in manual mode. So, if you want to be a professional, your clients expect no less from you than professional work. So, it's really important that you as a photographer that you learn how to use a camera in manual mode. So, all you've got to do is just choose the M option in your camera. All cameras have a manual mode. So, you just put in manual mode, and let's see how it works. So, when you're shooting movement you have to make sure that you have a fast shutter speed. So, I recommend using at least 500 of a second, but it depends if the person is jumping, running, cycling. So, sometimes you have to use up to 800, a thousand of a second. So, right now, I'm going to shoot him jumping. So, I have to put my camera in burst mode, set a faster speed. Get ready. So, make sure you have a faster speed to freeze the moment. So, this is the best time to shoot. It's also called golden hour. It reaches either the sunset or the sunrise. So, when you go out shooting I recommend you shooting up to three hours after sunrise and at least three hours before the sun set. It's the right time of day that you get the best light. So, you have to try to place the person right in front the sunlight so you get a nice silhouette effect. So, you place the person in front the sunlight, you have two options, you can either underexpose a picture. You can do that by increasing your shutter speed your pictures are going to be darker and when you see in the light meter, the arrow is going to be on the left side of the zero. So, if you want to under-expose it, you're going to get a really strong silhouette. But you can also choose overexpose it like a lot of people do nowadays that you get the sky really blown up, almost white. So, you can't do that either by increasing your ISO, decreasing your aperture or making your shutter speeds lower, you have a lot of options. So, in here right now, I'm using my aperture set to 8.0, I'm going to set my ISO to 400, and my shutter speed is 100 of a second. So, right now, my lighting is reading exactly on zero. So, I'm going to take my picture. The third photography technique you're going to learn in this course, is how to do a long exposure, and for that, of course you need a tripod. As we said before, you need a really good one, that feels really steady. And when you harvest your camera set, you need to know a few things. So, as I said before, the golden hour is sunrise or the sunset is the best time for you to shoot long exposure because if you want to do long exposure during the day you need a filter, ND filter, that makes your lens darker, so it allows you to get a long exposure. Right now, since it's getting dark, we can do a long exposure without the use of a filter. So, a few things that you need to know, you need to get your picture as dark as possible so you can do more seconds. So, you have to set your camera to the lowest ISO possible, and that's usually a 100. You have to increase your aperture. So, your aperture number, your AP number. So, you have less light going inside of the camera. So, the aperture closes you get less light inside and your picture in your live view gets really dark. Then, you have to set your shutter speed to something around one second or two seconds when you're shooting in a beach like this, because you have to get a really nice effect in the water, the blurry effect that looks like a milk effect, you have to set your shutter speed to something like one second or two seconds. So, right now, I have here one second set. My ISO is 50, and I set my aperture, my AP number to 16. So, if I press my button half way, my light meter reads the light. It shows here minus 0.3. So, I can increase my shutter speed a little bit and make it a little bit slower, so I can get close to zero. Right now, I have 1.6 seconds, I press half button and I have my light meter reading zero, so it's the perfect setting for this photo. So, you can zoom in and really focus on the subject you want, if it is either a rock, a person. Another thing that you've got to do is set your camera to a two second delay. You have to look in your camera how you do that, it's usually in the settings. So, you have to set it to a delay of two seconds and when you press the button, you remove your hand and two seconds later the camera is going to shoot the picture. You have to do that because if you don't do it, you're going to shoot your picture and the camera is going to shake and the picture is going to be shaking. So, set your camera to a two second delay, make sure that you have two seconds or three, four seconds depends of how you want the water to move in the picture, and then you're ready to take a picture. Something really important is that you have to anticipate the moment. If you want, you have to wait for the waves to hit the rocks. So, since you have a two second delay, you have to anticipate the waves two seconds before it hit the rock. So, you wait, when it gets really close, something like two seconds it going to hit the rock, you just press the button, and then it take the picture. 5. Making Selects and Backing Up Photos: So, after we are done taking pictures, and before we started talking about editing, I would like to talk to you about selecting and backing up your photos. This is just something I like to do, but before I transfer my photos to the computer, I take a look at all of the photos in my camera before I send them, because there are some that I know that I'm not going to use for sure. Sometimes you just takes a lot of pictures, and you don't notice that some are out of focus, some are blurry. Sometimes you just take a picture you had no idea you took. So, it's really good that before you transfer all the files, you take a look one by one and select those, and delete the ones that you're sure that you're not going to use it. Then, you just get a memory card out of the camera and transfer to your computer. Another thing I really like to do before transferring my photos to the Adobe library is taking a look at each one of them and choosing the ones that I'm sure I am going to edit, because if you transfer all the files, it's going to take too much space in your computer because your Adobe Lightroom creates a library, and it backs up every now and then, so it's going to make your Lightroom library even heavier. So, what I like to do in the Mac, I just press Space and see all the photos I took. Then, I start tagging them with a color. Tagging those ones I'm sure I'm going to edit, because I really liked that picture. Sometimes, out of a 100 photos, I select about 30. That's even better for you because you don't have a lot of work to edit a lot of pictures, and it takes less space inside your Adobe Lightroom library. So, I just get an image and I tag them with the color, and then I future these photos with the ones I tagged, and then I transfer them to Lightroom. Another important thing that I like to talk to you guys about is about backing up your photos. A lot of photographers forget to back up your photos and only trust backing them up in one external hard drive for example, and if that hard drive breaks is going to lose all those pictures. So it's really important that you have your photos back up in more than one place. So what I do is I transfer these photos to my computer. I have many external hard drives. This is a two-terabyte hard drive. So, all the photos I take, I create a folder in the hard drive, I send them from the computer to the hard drive. So I have it here, I have it here, and I also send them to a Cloud service like Dropbox, so I have a third option on the Cloud, so I can access for anywhere in the world. So, it's happened a lot that a client asked me for a photo and I don't have it in my hard drive, neither on my laptop, but I just got to Dropbox, I find it, and then I download it and send it to my client. It's really important to have a lot of options to back up your pictures. 6. Editing I: So, let's start the editing process. The software I used to edit my photos is Adobe Lightroom. In case you don't have it in your computer, you can go to adobe.com and download a trial version of it for 30 days. So, let's open Lightroom. After I selected my pictures, I come here and open Lightroom. Here it is. In the library it has all these pictures I uploaded the last time. There are two ways for you to transfer your photos from your computer to the Lightroom library. You can come to file on the top of the screen. You can choose to import photos and videos, and it's going to open the import screen. Then you choose where your photos are on your computer it could be an external drive, your SD card, some folder you decided to save your photos, and then you just choose them. You can just click the ones you want, the ones you don't want, and then you click import. This is a way to do it. So, another thing I do, which I think is faster, I open for the folder where I saved my photos. As I told you, I selected the ones I want added, the ones I liked the most. I tagged them with the great color on the Mac. If you find another way of tagging your photos, favorite them somehow, you can do it. So, I filtered only the ones that are tagged in green. I just come here select all of them, and then drag them to be like Lightroom icon. It's going to open that same screen I showed you guys before but with the pictures I selected. So, I just click on import. What I want to do is not exactly teach you how I added, but teach you to understand how Lightroom works in many ways, so you can achieve what you want. But of course, I'm going to tell you what I do. So you can understand. You can look at my photos on Instagram and see how I do it. But also, I want you to do your own thing. So, I have open my photo here. We have the example we shot earlier with the movement, my friend jumping. We have many many photos of the beach, we have the silhouettes photo, and we have the long exposure photo. So, let's start with the jump. I double click on that image and then I click here on develop. So, Lightroom opens my photo and all my editing options are right here on the right side of the screen. The first thing I do, as you can see, the photo is really crooked. So, you just come to this icon right here. This icon gives you the possibility of cropping your photo anyway you want. But what I always do is, I choose to crop it as a shot because it locks my cropping to the same format of the original photo. So, this is really important when you're cropping. But the first thing you've got to do is align the horizon. So, you have this grid with many little squares that allows you to see if your horizon is aligned to the lines. So, you just align it and then you press enter, and then your photo is aligned. So, one thing I want to do is, as you can see, he's not exactly in the middle of the picture. It's just a little bit off. So, I set to as shot, as I told you before, and then just come a little bit here, and then that's it. So, we have this photo and we have this one. This photo is a little bit crooked as well, so we just align it and press enter. So, I'm going to edit this one. So, here are my options. First, I have the temperature. If I want to give a look to my photo with more blue, I can put it to the left. If I want more more yellow, warmer, I put it to the right. That's given a little bit warmer because we were close to sunset, the light was really warm, so let's make it warmer. Second, you can tint it. You can either give it a green tone to your photo or a purple one. I like to leave it close to zero, not very green, not very purple. Here, you can tone your photo, you have exposure. So, when you increase the exposure, you make your photo brighter. When you decrease, you make up for the darker. You have always to pay attention to the histogram here. Because when you increase exposure, you see that all the things are going to the top, it's because your photo is overexposed. So, just make sure that your exposure is close to zero. The contrast, you can increase the contrast and you can decrease it, depends on what you want. I like to leave it just a little bit. Then we have highlights and shadows. The highlights, you can increase the things that are really bright in the picture. So if I increase it, you can see that my horizon over there which is the brightest part of the picture, it gets really bright. If I decrease it, my white goes off, and I can see just like the same tone in the horizon. So, I'm going to decrease a little bit and if I increase the shadows, all the things that are dark, I can see now. So, since he's jumping and the sun is to the right, it makes a shadow on his left side. I'm going to increase just a little bit of the shadows. I don't recommend increasing the shadows too much. Because if you increase it too much, it's going to create noise in the picture. It's like when you're shooting your photos with high ISO. Because the Lightroom is going to create pixels in there, because it's not the real things, it's just going to simulate how it should be. So, just increased a little bit, so you can see more details of his face and his left side of his body. Here, we can control even more the white and the black. So, if you Increase the white, just the white in a picture is going to be really bright, and if you think something is really, really bright you can just decrease the whites, the same goes for the black. One thing that I always use in my pictures, but you have to be really careful is the clarity. Because if you increase the clarity too much, it's going to be exaggerated. So, you just increase it just a little bit, so you can give a nice effect on your photo, it gives more details to each thing like the ocean, the rocks. There is vibrance and saturation, this is going to change how your photo looks with the colors. So, if you increase the vibrance too much, the cars are going to be a bit exaggerated, and if you decrease, it's going to look like desaturated. A lot of people like desaturated tone. So, if you like that way you just decrease a little bit of the vibrance, a little bit of the saturation, but if you like really colorful images, you increase both of them but just a little bit don't do it too much because otherwise it's going to make your photo look strange. If you do it too much like this. I'll like to decrease the vibrance a little bit, and leave the saturation set to zero. Then a tone curve, we have basically the same options we have up here that we can change a little bit. I always come to the highlights and I increase a bit of the highlights because I like a really strong white tone. I always increase the lights so have a brighter picture. But since I use the shadows up here, I usually don't change the darks and the shadows here, but you can change it according to what you like. Here we have three options: we have HSL that you can change each color, the hue of each color, the saturation, and the luminous. There is also the color that you can choose to change it by color. It's basically the same thing, but you do it more separate each of them, change the hue saturation and luminous. I like it this way because I can see everything. If you like photos in black and white, you can just choose black and white here, and change it for each color, everything that was blue i can make it brighter, I can make a darker. So, let's come to the HSF, and change the hue of each color. So, as you can see down here, I have a really strong yellow in my rock, so I can get my yellow a little bit of an orange tone, and I can desaturate a little bit, so my rockstone look really yellow. But you have to be careful because his skin tone is also a little bit yellow, so you can't change too much. I can choose here luminous to make it brighter just the colors I want. So, I want to increase a little bit of the orange, which was my color of my rock, I can choose to make it brighter a little bit. Here, I want to change my blue, so I can choose a different color. If you like a tone of blue kind of green or kind of purple, you can change it here. So, in my case I like the blue a little bit green, and then I can choose to, in luminous I can make my blue brighter, and I can make my blue darker, but don't do it too much because it starts to create a white line around your subject. So, if you bring the blue a little bit just do it not over minus 40 or minus 30, because it's going to look strange around your subject. In my case, I like to make my blue a little bit brighter, increase a little bit of my colors, and that's it. Another thing you can do, you can come here to choose how to use detail. You can sharpen your photo a little bit, make it a little bit more sharp, but don't overdo it, and it can also use noise reduction. If you're taking photos with high ISO, you can come here to noise reduction and choose a little bit of luminous, so it's going to kind of blur the noise in your photo. So, you have to analyze if this is going to look well in the photo because if you use a lot of luminous in a noise reduction, your photos are going to look a little bit strange. So, make sure that when you're taking pictures and are using high ISO, so we don't have noise, so we don't have to do this, but in some cases you're taking pictures close to when its dark, and have a little bit of noise in your photo, so you can use a little bit of luminous to eliminate that. So, when you come here to lens corrections, what happens is when you're taking photos with a wide lens like a 24 millimeters, this lens distorts a little bit what actually you are seeing because our eyes see something close to the equivalent of 35 millimeters in your camera. So, when you use a 24 you can see that sometimes your horizons is a little bit distorted, so you can enable profile corrections. So, Lightroom is going to try to correct those distortions for you. Also I always click on Remove Chromatic Aberration, because when sometimes you're taking pictures, and sometimes have too much detail like you're taking a picture of a tree that you have a lot of leaves. If you look really close, you can see some lines that are purple and green. So, if you click on Remove Chromatic Aberration, Lightroom eliminates that for you. You can also correct manually your lens distortion over here. If you think your photos are too distorted, sometimes you take a photo with a fish eye, for example, and you want to correct your horizon manually, you just come here to lens corrections, choose manual, and we can change the distortion. You can't change how it looks vertically, horizontally, you can rotate it, you can do a bunch of stuff so your photo looks nice. Sometimes you're taking pictures of a big building, and you can see that since you are too small according to that building, you can see that the perspective is not right, so you can't just come here and bring the perspective correctly to align the lines of the building. So, it's basically this, and we're going to take a look at the other photos. Another thing you can use is this option right here to remove things you don't like, maybe you have a dust spot or you have a bird flying that you don't want over there, so you just choose this option right here, and you just click it, and Lightroom is going to replicate another part of your picture to cover that. 7. Editing II: Let's see some of the other photos we took. So, here we have a long exposure shot, and I'm going to teach you how to transform this picture in a completely different picture because as you can see it's really dark. It has kind of a blue tone, and I'm going to show you how I edit my photos in my way so you can see personally how I like to edit my sense of photos. And I love long exposures because it gives a nice effect to the water, kind of milky, but this photo is too dark right now. So, what I do is, I always increase my yellow in the temperature, so I can make it warmer. And as I told you, I like to increase my purple, but if you like the sunset photos, yellow, you just leave it like this and you start changing other things; but I like to give it a nice purple effect. And then, I come here to the highlights. As you can see, the spot right here where the sun sets, it's really bright. So, I can bring my highlights down so I can see more details how it actually- how I actually saw with my eyes because my camera captured really bright. So, you just bring the highlights down, so you can see more details, how the sky actually looked. And to resolve this problem that it's really dark, I just can increase the shadows a little bit in here and a little bit in here. Don't overdo it, as I told you, otherwise your picture is going to look really noisy; but increase it just so you can see the rocks just the way you want it. And then, I increase a little bit of the clarity, so it gives an even nicer effect to my photo because my water looks even brighter. It gives a nice white effect, like milky. So, it brings my highlights to my rock so I could see more where the light was hitting the rocks. So, I do this. I always come to the lights to make all the parts of my photos a little bit brighter, but I try not to leave this too bright, so I compensate it with the white. So, you have to try to compensate things, so you can achieve what you really want. So, I want to see the rock a little bit more. I can increase a little bit of the shadows. I can increase a little bit of the contrast in here. So, I think this colors are a bit too vibrant. As I said, you can just come to vibrance and decrease a little bit. So, if you want your yellow in here to look more orange, you just come to the hue and you go a little bit to this side, so it looks more orange or I can go all the way if you want to look more green. You just put it to the right side of the bar. I want to leave it a little bit more orange. I can come to the luminous and increase the yellow, but this is going to make it too bright and decrease it a little bit as you can see, but don't do it too much because it's going to look strange. So, I can just bring it a little bit of each of it of each color. So, I can have it just the way I want it. So, this part of this sky right here is made of magenta. So, you can see that I can change it here. So, I can make ait bit brighter. And here, I can choose the saturation for each color. I can desaturate the orange, for example. If you wanted to make more colorful, you can do it. The same goes for the yellow. Sometimes I like to saturate a little bit of the orange and desaturate a little bit of the yellow, so I don't have two very strong colors, I have just one in case of the orange. And I guess that's it for me. I have worked my yellow, my orange, a little bit of my purple and it looks just like I want it. So, my profile corrections are enabled here to correct my horizon. I'll make sure to remove my chromatic aberrations, if there is any. I don't see any, but I just click on it just to make sure. And so, my picture is ready. So, as you can see, the difference is huge of the last picture to the ones. So, as you can see, the final picture is really different to the initial one. It's just a matter of you editing in the right way. So, to export, I just right click on the picture and choose export, and that's it. Sometimes you take a lot of pictures that are really similar according to the light. Sometimes it takes like 10 pictures in two minutes and they look really similar. And you do not have to edit each one of them, you can just right click in one of the pictures, you go to develop settings and you can just copy the settings you did. You can choose which things you want to copy to the next one, you just click copy, you go to the other one, you come back to develop settings and just paste this settings and it's going to do the same things to the other pictures. So, we have these pictures that are different. The waves look a little bit different here, and I want to copy the same things I just pasted, and it's going to look the same thing. So, this is a nice way for you to copy the same editing you did in one photos to the others that it took more or less during the same time, so the light was more or less the same thing, so you can paste the same settings for all those photos. So, we can just right click, choose export and then you have your export screen. So, here, you can choose how you want to name your file. You can choose to JPEG, TIFF, DNG. You can choose the quality of it if you don't want to have your file. If you want a live file to send via email, you can reduce the quality, how much it's going to be. You can resize your photos right here before you save it to a certain dimension that you might want. So, you just choose the right settings, and choose export, choose the folder you want and that's it. So, this is just a little bit of how I edit my pictures. I hope you guys understood how I do it using Lightroom. So, how you use shadows, how you use highlights, how you can change each color, so you guys can have your photos just the way you want for your Instagram. 8. Instagram Strategy: For you to work as a professional Instagrammer, it's really important that you have a professional Instagram profile and that you treat your profile as your portfolio because when a brand finds you, that's what is going to make them want to work with you or not, it's really simple for them to just tap on the back button and forget about you. So, it's important that you bring to their attention that you have great work and that you're worth of their time to contact you and try and work with you. So, it's really important that you, first of all, have a good Instagram profile picture, that really tells a lot about you actually, and if you try to create artistic Instagram profile picture, that's really good because they can see how you look because sometimes you're not just an Instagrammer, you are an influencer, and sometimes they want to use your image for something, not just for you to take pictures, but sometimes they want to hire you for a campaign, to film you. So, it's important that they can see in your profile picture that you're young, how you look and also it has to be artistic, that shows that you are an artistic person, that you care about this. So, being professional is key, you have to think beforehand how your pictures are going to look together in your profile. You have to think very carefully if they look nice beside each other, and they have to be consistent. All your pictures have to be, must have a same look. One thing I always tell people is never mix your personal life with your professional life. So, if you're creating a professional Instagram profiles, no selfies are allowed, or nothing from your personal life. You just post your professional work, if that's landscape pictures, portraits, writing, photography, but never your personal life. So, avoid posting selfies, parties, things like that. If you want do that, create a personal profile for yourself, but keep it separate from your work. Something that is really important is that you write about yourself in the bio. So, you have a space in your profile that you can write about yourself. Use keywords, in my case, I tell that I'm a photographer, that I'm an Instagramer, I'm a traveler, I'm a storyteller, and an influencer. So, use this kind of keywords to describe yourself because sometimes these companies are just looking for, they're looking really fast for people and keywords help them. So, just try to think the keywords that describe you and putting your profile. Another really important thing is that you put your email there because that's the only way that brands can reach you. Sometimes brands don't like to send you a direct message Instagram, they want to write a lot of things, they want to attach files, attach PDFs like briefing, stuff like that, so email on your profile is really, really important, and it's really important for brands to see as well that you post really frequently, that you connect with your audience. Answer all of the comments individually, give your full attention. Show them that you care about them because if it weren't for them, you would be nothing. What made you what you are, what made you get where you are today, in my case, it's because of my followers. If I didn't care about them, they could just unfollow me, so I make sure to answer all their comments individually and give them attention. So, my followers can see that they're somehow close to me, that we are somehow friends. I made sure to visit the profile of those followers that comment on your photos every day, like these people they really like your work, they're fans of your work. So, if you see that someone comments every day, and is always liking you pictures, sometimes just make sure to visit their profiles, give them some likes, some comments, show that you care. You won't believe how this can make a lot of people really happy. Another very important thing is for you to get your work out there, so research, try to know those famous hashtag from accounts that might repost your photo, and if you try to do your best and use these hashtags, it could happen that a lot these accounts can repost your photos, and it's going to bring a lot of attention to your account, and a lot of people can follow you. It's also really important that you share the photos you post in Instagram on your other social media profiles, such as Twitter, Facebook because even if you don't have a lot of followers there, some people are going to see it and some people are going to engage with you. When you do that, and you use the right hashtags, you might get a lot of followers on there as well. When you use other social networks, it's really important that you make cross platform posts. For example, if you have Snapchat and you're trying to get a lot of followers there, you can start telling people about your Instagram, about your Twitter, about Facebook, and you can start posting your Facebook about Instagram, about your Snapchat, so if you make this cross-platform posts, you can start getting a lot of followers on other social media as well, and you can become an influencer. So, from brands, this is really important. One last thing that's really important that I tell people is for them to be a storyteller because there are a lot of people that take great photos, but they just post those photos and they don't tell anything about it. They just post something and they write nothing to caption, sometimes they just put a bunch of hashtags and that's it. But, for you as an influencer, as an Instagrammer, it's important for you to tell a story because this is really important for brands, it's how you connect to your audience, it's how you talk to them. So, even if you don't know how to talk about that specific photo, try to tell what happened that day, what that photo means. Try to tell a story, you can start practicing writing stories in a notebook, for example. You have to practice your writing because your writing is also really important. A brand is not going to hire you just to post a photo, they want you to talk about their product, for example, and you have to know how to write about it, so it doesn't look like completely advertising. 9. Working with Brands: So, we talked about how to Instagram like a pro, so let's talk specific about how to work with brands. It's really important that you think outside the box, try to be as much creative as possible, try to do something really different in all the Instagramers are doing. So, in case this brand choose to work with you, they might think about working with you again. So, try to impress them and try to do your work as best as you can. Accept all of the campaigns that you like and only products that you relate to, that you really think that you use that. Even if you don't use their product and if you're seeing that product for the first time, only talk about it if you really like it because otherwise it's just going to be a lie and you're not going to do the best you can because you don't relate to it. Because when you get a product and you're going to advertise about it on Instagram and you like that product, you're going to have to try to do the best you can. It's like working with a brand you really loved for a long time. If a brand that you never heard about it contact you, don't do it if you don't relate to their product or to their way of doing business. Try to work only the brands that you can relate to so you can be truthful to your followers. Because otherwise you're going to suggest something that you don't like, and then you're going to pretend that you like it so your followers can buy it. So, be truthful to your followers, only tell the truth about the things you are advertising about. You got to make sure you know how much of work it's worth. You got to know that you're charging those companies the right amount according to your followers, to your engagement, to your number of likes and comments. So, try to learn how to charge them right. In case you don't know, I don't know why a lot of people are afraid of asking other people how much they charge. If you know of any Instagramers, make sure to go to them personally and ask them how much you could charge because they could help you. I've helped a lot of people about that. If you have any questions you want to ask me, you can reach out to me via email, via Instagram that I can try to help you with that. So, if you know any Instagramers and you don't know how much you could charge for your work, just ask them. This should be something people should be talking about. In case they're not getting any offers, don't be afraid to go after them. Sometimes you see that you're doing great work, that you had great engagement, but no companies come to you. Just don't be afraid to go after them. Try to find their email or their contact and send them a proposal. But just don't send them email saying, "Oh, let's work together." Try to create a project, try to think what you can do together. Sometimes these companies, it's really hard to find people, there are a lot of Instagramers out there, and maybe they just did't find you. But if you can go to them and can offer them a really cool project for you guys to work together, create a briefing like if you think, "Oh, I think we can do a campaign like this and I think you're going to like it. I think my followers are going to love it. Your followers are going to love it as well." They're going to be really happy about it because some companies they have to think about campaigns. Sometimes you have a really nice idea that they didn't have, and you guys can work together. So, make sure to go after these companies if you're not getting any offers because it's completely normal to do that. 10. Wrap Up: I hope you guys have enjoyed this class, that you have learned how to choose the right camera, how to shoot, the basics of photography, some photography techniques, and how to edit your photos using Lightroom. Even if you use a smartphone, make sure to transfer your smartphone photos to Lightroom and add it down over there. I want to invite you guys to do my student project. I invite you to create three photos. So first, I want you to create one of the techniques you learned in this course, which is movement, so make sure to use a fast share speed to freeze your subject, it could be someone running, someone jumping, someone cycling, a car whatever you like. Second, I want you to shoot during sunrise or sunset, the golden hour. It could be see you had a long exposure. You can use one of those techniques we learned in this course as well. Third, I want you to do a creative photo so I can see how creative you could be. It could be anything, this is a free photo. You can try to be as creative as possible and include in the student project as well. So, three photos, movement, golden hour and creative photo. So, make sure to post your photos in the student in project on Skillshare and I can't wait to see them. Thank you for watching this course.