Photography For Beginners Complete Guide: Master Photography

1. Photography For Beginners: welcome to our photography course for beginners. My name is Dave Hole, and I'm a professional photographer based out of Toronto. I have been asked literally hundreds of times through my social media channels how I capture images, how I planned for creative shots. This course was created to address those questions. It has taken me several months to organize all my thoughts into an easy to follow curriculum. I've done all the hard work for you. If you're just starting off in photography, we'd like to learn more about photography. This is the course for you. There's tons of information such as how the aperture, shutter speed and I s O all work together to expose an image how to use compositional rules to better frame a subject for more professional looking results. I even go as far as teaching you the editing side of photography in my process to turning a great captured raw image into a finish and stylized published photo. By the end of this course, you will have a strong understanding of the fundamentals to photography such as the different exposure controls and how they impact an image, or how and when to leverage the manual focus controls and the auto focus controls. You'll know all about photography lighting, such as using natural lighting, how it can impact your seen to an intra into flashes where we will talk about leveraging artificial light and so much more. This course is any aspiring photographer or for anyone looking to simply take better photos , utilizing the principles that photographers use. Photography is about expression and turning your creative ideas into a reality. I've prepared this course with that in mind. I believe the photographer just starting out and within a few hours drastically improved the quality and professional look of their photos. I'm really proud of this course. I prepare for any aspiring photographer to take advantage of there's tons of value, including several PdF resources quizzes and behind the scenes videos where I walked you through my entire photography process. Thanks for checking out this course. Enroll now, and I'm excited to help you take your photo game to the next level 2. David Paul's Photography Story and The Creative Process: how I gotta do photography was My mother had bought me a camera. She saw that I was kind of stuck in my life and feeling like I needed a new outlet. A lot of people talk about art being something and comes from yourself, your soul. And I think that's a really important aspect to really consider. You know, like art is your own. You have to really make it your own, and so is your photography. Everyone sees the world differently. Your eyes are unique, just as everyone else is. So you have to really own that. You can't just sit back and deny what you see. There's a difference between passive seeing and just going about your day and being actively seeing so paying attention. Listening to noise is looking for the sun looking for actions around you. It can be really anything. It doesn't really matter. It's just life. It's about being present in your life. Photography can do that, and I'd love to be able to teach you more about that. Now there's so much you can do. You can take a thought in your mind and recreate that through your camera. That's an incredible power photography has brought me such wonderful expression. It's given me the ability to have a creative outlet again. I can't tell you how much I needed that my own life, and I know the exact moment that it happened for me. I just picked up a camera and I just kind of had a lesson with a friend. It wasn't a big deal, and I took this picture and I had this idea in my mind, and it actually came to fruition once in the camera and I couldn't believe it. I was. I was truly amazed. And just from that moment, Ford. I've been absolutely enthused with photography. I want to do it all the time. There's never a bad time to do it. You can take photos of anything is just about being out there and experiencing life in the most present way. So don't think that since you know I shoot a certain way, I'm better or something that that's not in at all. You have to respect everyone shooting perfections or imperfections because it's about a process. You don't give yourself time to fail. You're never gonna give yourself time to succeed either. I know I take probably 4 500 shots in and evening and I end up with maybe five that I'm like, I really love this, but then maybe I go back a different period. Time in my life and I looked back at those and I realized, Oh, there's so many other shots here that we're just a good but I wasn't giving it value at that time. So you have to really give yourself time and space to really start to understand your eye and your creativity. Even as a beginner photographer. Once you learn those basic skill sets, it really gives you an uncanny ability to express yourself. Let's get rolling with this, you know, like you deserve it. I want to help you get there, so let's get started. 3. Introduction to Photography Fundamentals: Welcome back in this section will be covering all the definitions in terms that an aspiring photographer should learn. These photography fundamentals are important as they provide you with the knowledge to understand all of the options you have available to you when planning and executing any of your photography. We have included slides, charts, images and footage to help make the learning process as easy as possible. If you aren't quite sure about something after watching a lesson, just reach out in the question and answer section. We're here to help. If you have a camera, we encourage you to pick it up and experiment with It has been progressing throughout the course. All right, let's dive right into the photography fundamentals. 4. Photography Exposure: your camera is a light collection box or a data collector. The amount of light that is collected is controlled by three settings on your camera, known as the shutter speed, the aperture and the I F. So these three settings can be combined in various ways to adjust the length and the amount of light collected in an exposure. Depending on the creative elements you are trying to achieve. You will adjust these accordingly. This may sound confusing, but you must understand each individual setting and how it works to understand how they work combined. So let's start with the definition of exposure. Exposure is another term for the word picture. Exposures can be defined as the amount of light that is recorded by a digital sensor or film. In automatic mode, the camera calculates the exposure or the amount of light to capture in manual mode. Users control the exposure by adjusting the cameras. Three settings which are the shutter speed, the aperture and the I S O images can be in three states overexposed. The camera captured too much light and lost details of the scene in front of you. This means the image will look washed out and the color's look off good exposure, meaning the camera collected the right amount of light to show the scene as if it were seen by the naked eye. In the third exposure state, This is called under exposed. This means the camera didn't capture enough light to show the details of the scene, resulting in a darker image in the shadows. They're completely black, and there's absolutely no detail there. This is common to an under exposed image, so similar to the over exposed image, the image is incorrectly exposed. 5. Photography Shutter Speed: as we discussed, there are three aspects to exposing an image. These are your eyes, so shutter speed and aperture. Let's focus on the shutter speed pun intended in your camera. There is a mechanical curtain that opens and closes that is known as your shudder. How quickly and slowly this opens and closes is known as the shutter. Speed in image is captured by the shutter being open for a period of time, which allows light to hit the sensor, and ultimately this creates an exposed photograph. This is used in a variety of ways to produce different effects, from freezing motion to blurring motion. The shutter speed displays the length of time the shutter is open in fractions of a second or whole seconds. Examples of this are 1 2/50 of a second or one second. This is also the way it is displayed on the camera. Most cameras will have a shutter speed range of 1 4/1000 of a second as the fastest shutter speed to the slowest shutter speed of 30 seconds. 1 4/1000 of a second will barely let any light in, whereas 30 seconds let's in half a minute of light so think about it this way. So if you pressed the shutter button down and you held it for 30 seconds keeping it open, that would mean you're letting in tons of light. Now, think about If you just held it down and let it go, that would mean you just let in a small amount of light. So think about that when it comes to shutter speed. Also, some cameras, including bulb mode, that allows you to keep the camera shutter open for periods of time longer than 30 seconds . An extremely common issue people have when first starting off in photography is they end up with a lot of blurry photos. Ah, lot of people just don't understand why there two possibilities here. One is when you're shooting and held and the other is, well, shooting on a tripod. When capturing a photo handheld meaning without a tripod or some sort of stabilizing support, you can still end up with a blurry photo. That's because you've probably set your shutter speed too low. As a general rule of thumb, that would mean you've set your shutter speed below 1/60 of a second to get around this. We recommend setting your shutter speed to at least 1/60 of a second or higher when capturing images and held when capturing a photo with a tripod, you can also still end up with a blurry photo. That's because as much as a tripod provides stability, if there's high winds or the ground isn't as completely solid as you would like, or you have just pressed the shutter button to take a photo, the resulting image maybe blurry because the camera moves slightly. This is also known as camera shake. The solution to these situations are either wait until it's less windy. Move your tripod to a new, more stable location or for the situation of your hand, causing the camera to shake. When you press the shutter button, set a two second timer or higher. All cameras in their menu options have a timer setting 6. Photography Aperture: The next aspect of exposure is the aperture, which is controlled within your camera's lens. It is a Siris of mechanical blades that foreman opening or a whole that can adjust larger or smaller in size, similar to the shutter they both open and closed toe. Let light in, however, the aperture stays open all the time, compared to the shutter that opens and closes at the time of an image exposure. The aperture is measured by F. Stop. For example, a lens might have an aperture f stop range of F 2.82 F 32. The F stop can be shown on the lens or camera screen. Each DSLR camera has a dedicated button on the body for controlling the aperture. The bigger the F stop number. For example, F 22 the smaller the opening within your lens. This smaller the F stop number. For example, F 1.4, the bigger the opening within the lens. Commonly kit lenses have a nap richer range of F 3.5 F 5.6. So don't confuse me using 1.4 here if you can't find it on your lens. It's just an example Ultimately, this means the F stop number influences the amount of light traveling through the lens. So again, the bigger the opening, the smaller the F stop number, meaning more light is coming in. The larger the F stop number, the smaller the opening, meaning There's last light coming in. So why would you change your aperture? Well, the number one question I get asked is how to get that blurry out of focus background that professional looking photos have. The answer is simply by leveraging a small F stop number of F 3.5 or less. And by getting closer to your subject, which produces that blurry, out of focus background, this is what is known as a shallow depth of field. Here are a few tips to getting a shallow depth of field. Get closer to your subject. Zoom in on your subject or make sure there is considerable distance between your subject and your background. For the purposes of this beginner photography course, all you need to understand is the more open your aperture is the Lasses and focus the less open. Your aperture is more that is in focus 7. Photography ISO: The third and final aspect of exposure is the I S O. The eso is the sensitivity of your camera's sensor to the incoming light. There may be a situation for example, where you have set your f stop and shutter speed to specific settings and your image is steel under exposed by increasing your I s o, your sensor will become mawr sensitive to light, thus exposing your image properly. So why would you change your eyes? So is a general rule the darker your lighting environment, the higher eso will have to be. For example, the image on the left shows an ISO of 100 because it was shot during the day with bright lighting conditions, meaning that the sensitivity of the sensor did not need to compensate for the lack of light . Whereas the image on the right has ah Hirai s o because it was shot where the lighting editions or low, resulting in the sensitivity of the sensor needing to be adjusted to compensate for the lack of lighting as you'll notice in the image on the right, grain and noise have been introduced due to the increase of the I s o So the higher your eyes so goes the more grain and digital noise that will be introduced 8. Photography Exposure Auto vs Manual : in automatic mode. Most cameras have a light sensor that reads the incoming light from your scene and determines the best setting in that condition. In addition, your camera will come with a couple of presets settings for different scenarios, like portrait or sport mode. In portrait mode, the camera prioritizes aperture to keep a shallow depth of field by keeping the aperture as open as possible. Typically, this will be around F 1.2 F 3.5, depending really on the lens that you have. So I want you to keep that in mind. Maybe just take a look at your lands Right now. Sport mode prioritizes shutter speed to keep the fast action sharp and free of blurring within your image. This is commonly known as freezing your subject or keeping your subject frozen. Here was a photo shot in manual mode. We just turned the camera on and took a photo with whatever settings it had. As you will notice, this photo is not exposed properly. It simply just doesn't look right. The sun is over exposed, the ground is overexposed and all over the image there is over exposure. Take note of the aperture the ISO and shutter speed here, the second image was taken in automatic mode. The camera chose the settings for you based on the lighting environment, and you will notice the picture is exposed. Better take note of the settings again the aperture, the I S. O and shutter speed. Because the sensor in the camera assessed the images a hole and produced a better exposed photo, the sky is not as blown out. However, there isn't much creativity to this. It's simply just a regular photo. The third image is shot using manual mode, but this time with specific settings to expose for a silhouette ing around the subject. As you can see, the creative choice here was choosing to expose for the sun and the sky. This resulted in the subject being a silhouette and under exposed. This was a creative choice for this shot, and the only way to ensure that the result I wanted was by thinking about how the isso shutter and aperture work together. End by considering my lighting environment, the point being that an automatic mode, it's great. It's easy. It's simple. However, if you want to have full creative control of your camera, you have to be using manual mode 9. Photography Manual Exposure Unlocking your Creativity: in manual mode, your camera can become an extension of your creativity. This results in you being able to express your scene slash photos in a variety of ways. By taking advantage of manual mode, you become the driver by understanding how I s o aperture and shutter affect the exposure of your image, you're able to decide what settings are best for your photograph. In fact, you can get the same exposure using different combinations of aperture shutter in I A So so how do we bring this all together as an example? Consider this scenario You want to photograph escape order performing a trick. You can predict that the skateboard will be rotating quickly. The goal is to freeze the skateboard with sharp focus, meaning there is no motion blur in this scenario. The shutter speed is most important, since it directly affects how sharp or blurry your subject is. Now that we've decided that the shutter has priority over the I e. Isso and the aperture, this provides a starting point somewhere between 1 5/100 and 1 1/1000 of a second. To prove this, we have taken a series of photos at different shutter speeds to demonstrate what has impacted in the image. This shot was taken at 1/30 of a second. As you'll notice on the skateboard, there's a lot of blurring of it, and it's not very clean or crisp now. This could be a creative choice for you, but in this scenario we're looking to freeze it. The second photo was taken at 1 2/50 of a second. Now you'll notice that it looks like it's almost frozen. If you were to zoom in on it, you'd notice that it's still bit blurry. The third photo was taken at 1 1/1000 of a second. You'll now notice that that skateboard is completely frozen, crisp and absolutely, and focus. So just to recap here at 1/30 of a second, they're still going to be some blur. So you have to go faster with your shutter speed to ensure that fast moving objects are frozen. Keep in mind as the shutter speed increases, we adjusted the F stop. Accordingly, you will have to compensate by opening your aperture to a lower number, depending on your lighting conditions. This is not to say this is will be always the case this is just to keep in mind that lighting conditions vary and your settings will be dependent upon that. We're now going to prioritize the aperture or the F stop number in order to demonstrate the differences in depth of field. To remind you, depth of field is the amount of area or spacing your photo that is in focus. We will now show you two photos to exemplify this in the first photo. There is shallow depth of field in this photo. We have set the focus point to the subject, and you will notice that the subject has a very shallow depth of field, meaning that there is only a very small amount of the photo that is in focus. And of course, this means that the rest of the photo is completely out of focus. This was accomplished by utilizing a low F stop number. Now we will go over the second image, which demonstrates a deep depth of field. In the second photo, the focus point is set to the same subject as the first photo, but you will notice that mawr of the images and focus because we used a higher F stop number, this resulted in the subject being in focus but also the background being in focused as well. In addition, neither images correct or incorrect. These decisions are creative and a choice In this scenario, we chose to prioritize the aperture to produce a desired focused depth, and in doing so, to expose properly, we had to adjust the I S O and the shutter speed to accommodate for the desired aperture. Thirdly, we have the I s O in. Typically, you'll set your eyes so as low as possible to ensure that your images have as little grain and noise as possible as discussed in the definition section. In some cases, such as shooting and low light, it's better sacrifice, a bit of image quality to properly expose an image. And ultimately it's better to have an image with a bit of grain than an under exposed image that is unusable. In addition, it may be possible to reduce grain during the editing process, so that's something to keep in mind when you're shooting. You may have noticed that each setting may affect your image in a different way, as we discussed earlier, the higher I s. So the higher the amount of grain and noise in your image for your aperture in F stop number F 22 will make most, if not all, of your image in focus on the other side. In aperture of F 1.2 will create a shallow depth of field, meaning that only a small area of the image will be in focus regarding the shutter speed. If there is a moving subject, a lower shutter speed will cause the subject toe. Have some blur. This is also known as motion blur. If you want to freeze your subject, meaning there is no motion blurt in your photo, you will have to increase the speed of your shutter. 10. Photography Light Meter: your camera has built in ways to analyse light to come to an exposure you are happy with. The one I prefer to use and teach is the light meter, because you can utilize it as a guide to quickly identify if the scene you're looking at is exposed properly or not. In other words, based on what your current exposure settings are, the light meter is a quick reference to assist you in adjusting your settings to find the proper exposure. Where do you find your light meter? It's usually in the viewfinder or shown on the digital screen on the back of your camera. Depending on the manufacturer of your camera, the light leader may be displayed differently. Typically, light meters will look like a horizontal scale, with a plus and minus on either side of that scale. In the middle of this scale is usually the number zero. This indicates proper exposure to help you understand how the light meter works. Move your camera from bright conditions to lower light conditions. Pay attention how the meter changes as you move it from that dark area to a bright area. If you're at zero, the camera has determined based on your manual exposure settings that you were properly exposed. If the meter shows you are in the minus side, you're under exposed. If the meter shows you are in the plus range, you are over exposed. For example, if you're in the plus ranged and this means you should just the f stop the shutter speed or eso accordingly to get back to zero, and the same process applies to the minus range in your light meter. Think about your F stop your I S O and your shutter speed. As a team, they work together to enable you to capture a scene and accomplished this by compensating one setting for another. The light meter is a tool to get you there more efficiently and quickly. Keep in mind this is just a starting point for you to hone in the exposure you want. And in low light conditions, the meter may have trouble providing you with a reading as you use the light meter. More often, you will become more comfortable and efficient at exposing images. Eventually, over time, you will learn toe leverage, this tool to arrive at whatever creative exposure you wish. That's really the power of getting comfortable with your light meter 11. Photography White Balance: white balance refers to how your camera sensor handles the color temperature of the light in an environment. The white balance function adjusts the image, so let the whites are exposed as white, meaning this creates a color balance so your image looks natural. All light is measured in a color temperature on the Calvin scale, and your camera can adjust the white balance automatically or manually to the light in an environment. Typically, there are two white balance settings, one for outdoor and one for indoor daylights. Color temperature is measured somewhere between 5200 kelvin and 5600 Calvin, depending on the time of day. Since light bulbs are artificial light and can be manufactured at many different color temperatures, it can be confusing to understand indoor lighting when it comes to photography. Typically, indoor laying refers to a color temperature of 3200 Kelvin, which is known as tungsten. When I mentioned indoor lighting in this course, I am Onley, referring to tungsten lighting, which is 3200 Calvin on the scale. At this point in the course, we're providing you with this information because we'll be mentioning some of these terms throughout the course. The Calvin scale and thinking about color temperature can be confusing or intimidating. So think of it as too common things outside, light or daylight, an indoor light or tungsten. Once you complete this course and start experimenting with the main two types of white balance settings on your camera, you will start to understand how color temperature works. You can set your white balance to any color temperature, but for the purposes of this course, we're only going to focus on outdoor and indoor lighting to demonstrate how white balance impacts your images. Here are two images of the same outdoor scene. One is set to daylight white balance, and you'll notice that the color looks normal and more natural compared to the second photo where the white balance was set to an indoor setting. You'll notice that the image with the indoor white balance setting looks far more blue, and it's almost a ziff. It was captured at night, even though this was shot during the middle of the day, the key being, for example, if you set your white balance to indoor setting than take photos outside in daylight, the result of your images will be unnaturally blue. You do have options to manually select the white balance of your choice in your camera will have other presets for different lighting situations that you can experiment with. It is important to understand that white balance can affect the look of your image. However, the auto white balance feature in your camera will produce an accurate result most of the time. That being said, I rarely white balance my camera manually because I shoot in a raw file format, which we will cover later in the course color, temperature and white balance or a part of photography. But don't be too concerned with understanding it right away in your photography learning process, especially since the auto white balance feature on your camera does an excellent job and will produce accurate results most of the time. 12. Photography Focus Modes Auto vs Manual: In order to focus with your camera, you have two options automatic in manual for manual focusing. This is accomplished by turning the focus ring of your lens. This way of focusing is the hardest because you have to use your own. I do constantly adjust the focus to ensure your subject is sharply in focus. However, there are situations where manual focus is the only option, such as when there is low light in your scene for auto focusing. There are several different modes. They have slightly different names and slightly different functions. However, in this beginner course, we will talk about the two most known focus modes that are single point auto focus and continuous autofocus. Now let's dive into the basics of how you use your autofocus system. Cameras will have a different way of displaying the auto focus system. Commonly, when you look through your viewfinder or in some cases on your screen, you will see several dots. Don't worry, you didn't buy a defective camera. These air called auto focus points, typically when half pressing the shutter button, you can see which one of the auto focus points are selected because it will be highlighted or illuminated, depending on the camera model you have. These auto focus points can be displayed a small boxes, boxes with thoughts in them crosses, lines or singular dots. And also there can just be a few or many of these points displayed based on the capabilities of your camera. Now let's talk about the mod called single point Auto. Focus. Typically, when you have pressed the shutter button, you'll notice at least one of the points will be highlighted. This means that this is where the focus has been selected. There will be a dedicated button, joystick or touch screen option that will allow you to change the focus to another focus point or area of your scene, meaning that as you've changed the focus point, this means the focus is now in a different area of your image. Single point auto focus is primarily used with a static or non moving subject because it locked the focus to whichever focus point you have selected. In other words, think of it this way. Single point means you selected a single point of focus within your image, and you can adjust that single point of focus accordingly. Toe wherever you want it to be next, we will talk about another mode called continuous autofocus. For this mode, your camera tracks moving subjects and continuously focuses on them. You would use this when you're shooting an action scene, such as a sporting event or a dog running, or perhaps a car moving past you basically any fast moving object. The idea here is when half pressing the shutter button. If you have successfully adjusted the focus point to the moving subject, this continuous autofocus mode will keep the subject tracked and in focus. The point being here is that when you have a static subject, there's no point in using continuous autofocus mode. It's better to use single point auto focus. However, when your subject is moving, it's better to use continuous auto focus. So when is auto focus best used? The answer is in good lighting conditions. As a professional photographer, I tend to use single point auto focus mode as it's proven to be the most reliable. I find there are a lot of factors at play that impact the focus in your camera, like your lens type, the camera body type, the shooting environment and even your own skill level. Overall, it's about getting out there and testing the different modes available to you and seeing which one works best for your ever growing photography style. 13. 14 Photography Composition: you've probably heard the term composition before in photography. Composition refers to the arrangement of visual elements in a scene. There are multiple ways to compose a photo. However, you choose to compose your subject or visual elements in your photo. There is no right or wrong way. I'm telling you this now. So you keep in mind that photography is about expression and specifically your expression. There are certain compositional rules or guides to follow, and most of the time they will produce an interesting photo. As much as I hate rules, you can't really escaped. Um, fortunately, in photography, these rules are more of a starting point or a suggestion. Let's discuss the most well known way of composing your images. The rule of thirds. Here is an image that has the rule of thirds over laid take notice of the horizontal and vertical lines and how they divide the image into nine boxes or Izon Tole. There are three sections which divides your image by three vertically. There are also three sections which divides your image. Bright three as well. The idea of the rule of thirds is to place certain elements in your image to give you balance an interesting composition in your photo, take notice in the displayed photos, how the rule of thirds and the horizontal and vertical lines worked with subject matter in these photos. Each photo has a certain visual element that is meant to be the focus of the image, which is why the visual element was composed on the rule of thirds line. Now let's have a look at this cityscape image where you'll notice the horizon in the image sits along the horizontal top line. Placing the horizon line along the bottom or top line or close to it will give emphasis to what matters in your photo. In this case, you'll notice that the city skyline runs along the top. There are many other aspects to composition, such as combining visual elements in a scene to create a sense of balance, such as this image where the sun is near the top left third and the focus is on the ice chunk in the bottom. Right. Third, beyond this, you'll notice the horizon line in the background sits across the entire top thirds, and the focus point in the image was set at the bottom thirds. This provides a sense of wholeness and balance throughout the image. Here's another image with a background subject, which is The CN Tower in Toronto is being framed by the buildings on the left and right, which fall in left and right vertical rule of thirds lines. Here's another image at night, but at the same location this time I wanted to capture a streetcar going by with a long exposure effect which created a blurry streetcar. This image could have just been the CN tower being framed within the buildings at night, However, I planned for a long exposure of the streetcar to add an extra element of interest to the photo. Take note that the streetcar falls along the rule of thirds bottom horizontal line to show another example of composing an image by framing a subject. Here's an image I captured of a swan where I used tree branches that were covered in ice to frame this one. In this example, the swan is in the center of the frame. I composed and framed the subject in this way to draw your eyes into the middle. This method created a reason to break the rule of thirds compositionally you normally want to place the swan at one of the rule of thirds intersecting points. However, this framing method created a reason to break the rule of thirds. This is just one of the ways to think about utilizing the rule of thirds, but also to remember that you don't have to stick to this. Here's another capture of the same scene. Where have this time placed? The swan on the rule of thirds is to express the idea that either can work. Some people will prefer the 1st 1 Some people refer the second. Ultimately, it's your decision as a photographer. Next, let's talk about using size in your image to give you the effect of scale between objects in your image. In this example, I purposely moved away from the people to scale them smaller in the scene to highlight the size of the trees. I also framed the people between the trees, which first captures your attention. Then, as you continue to stare, you notice the height of the trees as we mentioned before. This creates a sense of balance in the image making ITM or interesting. We have provided several examples for you to study in reference so that you can start to think about ways you can creatively composed your subjects within your image to create greater interest. The more you experiment and practice composing your images in different ways, the more creative options you will have within your skill sets. We encourage and want you to upload your photos to the question and answer section. We would be happy to provide feedback on any photos you share. You have to make your photographic journey your own. But don't be afraid to break the compositional rules in order to express a creative idea. And also don't be afraid to take advantage of our professional feedback in order to take your photograph game to the next level. We're here to help. 14. 15 Photography Shooting with Raw vs Jpeg: In this lesson, we will discuss to picture file types that are known as J. Peg and Iraq. J Peg is more user friendly in most new cameras will come set to J. Peg as a default mode because camera companies assume that people are not very interested in post production work Immediately. In this lesson, we will define J peg and raw file types and give you the pros and cons to each. Let's start with the advantages of shooting with your cameras default mode, which is J. Ping. When shooting in JPEG format, the camera compresses the images data to create a smaller file size. Smaller file sizes mean they take up last room on your camera's memory card were on your computer's hard drive. Also, since J pegs air smaller in size in our A universal file type, this allows you the ability to upload in transfer and share to mobile devices, computers or social media Quickly. Many entry level DSLR cameras now have APS that connect your camera that will send J pegs wirelessly via Bluetooth or WiFi. For example, shooting in JPEG requires less camera processing power and therefore prolongs battery life . Now let's talk about J. Peg disadvantages. When your camera captures an image as a J peg, your camera compresses the image, and you lose image data or image quality. As a result, this may not be an issue unless you plan to further at it your images. Since we mentioned that compression removes data. If you would like to further edit your J pegs, you will be limited with the exposure and color temperature options. Okay, now we'll move into the advantages of shooting and raw. When shooting images in a raw format, the camera captures as much image data as a sensor will allow, which means that you will maintain the highest quality image free of compression since raw files air minimally processed. This means MAWR information is kept in your image, resulting in the ability to change settings such as the white balance or exposure settings , or even fix and over or under exposed image. Raw image files give you more creative control to adjust the raw image settings to drastically change the look and feel of an image, for example, allowing you to take an ordinary scene and change it to a futuristic, surreal scene. Now we will discuss the disadvantages of working with a raw file image. When capturing a raw image, the file size will be much larger compared to a J peg, resulting in needing larger memory cards in hard drive space. J pegs are a universal file type, which means all websites except, um, and all computers and mobile devices convert you them, whereas raw images can come in a variety of proprietary file types. And this may cause compatibility issues because you may need specific software APS to open and use thes raw files. In most cases, raw files will not be accepted when uploading to social media, so you'll need to convert them to a compressed file type like a J. Pay. For this reason, this extra step slows down the process of getting your photo from the camera to your posting destination, such as social Media, where your website in summary J pegs might be a better option for you. If you have limited memory card space or, if you're traveling, have limited time to edit. Capturing raw images will always produce a better image, but requires more time overall, as well as more processing power and hard drive space. It's really up to you to make that decision based on the situation what your plans are with your photos, I suggest trying out both JPEG and raw file types in order to understand which works best for you. As technology advances, it will become easier to process and edit raw images directly from your camera. Also, it is important to note that many smart devices have the possibility of capturing raw images, so this is not limited to only DSL ours. 15. 16 Intro to Mobile & DSLR Photography: Hey, everyone, In this lesson, we're going to talk about mobile photography and DSLR photography. In this day and age, so many different devices take photos. Photography has become a really essential part of our lives. We have our phones in our pockets at all times. Maybe we don't want to carry around or DSLR. Maybe We just wanna have our phone on us. With that in mind, we're going to break down what a DSLR does its pros and cons, and we're also going to look at mobile photography. What I want you to remember is that seeing is about being present and photography is about being present, so it doesn't really matter. The equipment you have being able to see better will make you a better photographer. This is the act of being present. This is the active learning and teaching your I to see. There's a difference between again passively seeing and actively seeing. So I think those are important things to remember. Also, I really want to emphasize how important your own eyes are. If you're walking around and you're not paying attention and you're not noticing these scenes, you're gonna miss out. It doesn't matter. how good of a camera you have, whether you have your mobile phone on, you were not. Take the opportunity. If you see something that you want to shoot, shoot it. Look at it. Stereo. Maybe there's a texture. Maybe there's a shadow. Maybe there's certain light coming off something. It's really about noticing your environment because your equipments only so good. It's really you that does the work, so it's very, very key to remember that your equipment is only as good as your eyesight. 16. 17 Photography Mobile Device Pros and Cons: in this lesson. We're gonna talk about mobile photography rolling in touch on this, the pros and cons of this right now. And we're gonna use this as a Segway in understanding the limitations of mobile photography as a safe way into DSLR. So the first pro of a mobile device for photography is that it's simply convenient. With that convenience, it's always in your pocket that means is readily available to you. Anytime you see something you need to take a photo of, you can pull your camera out and you can take it. Another advantage using your mobile phone from photography is that it's quick and easy to share things on social media. If all you're looking to do with your photos is, just get them quickly to instagram Facebook, Twitter. Whatever you may be using for social media these days, it's simply easy. So it's a simple as a few buttons and then, boom, you uploaded that image. It's ready for your friends to share. It's ready for everyone to view like comment, so that's another advantage to this. Mobile devices typically have smaller file sizes. This makes it easier to store these files because it's gonna be right on your phone and readily available anytime you need it, and it's always on you and it saves you the cost of potentially purchasing, online storage or a external hard drive. Mobile phones air lightweight and very portable. So if you're traveling or if you're on the road and you don't wanna have to lug around a larger camera, this is a great aspect of a mobile phone. So many people there taking this course will already have a mobile phone, which already means you have a camera, which means you do not have to purchase anything. You can get started with all the information in this course right now. In addition, your mobile device comes out of the box in automatic mode. This actually gives you the freedom to really focus on your composition, which is fantastic because that is a big part of your creativity and understand how photography works. So take advantage of that. Don't think that you have to be in manual mode on your phone. The automatic mode gives you the time and space to really focus in on composition. Develop that skill set, and that skill set is essential to great photography mobile phones are also a great backup . If your camera just goes, could put on you and you're somewhere you know that you have that camera. So if you're in that moment, say your child's running around or you're in Ireland on the cliff somewhere, boom, you have your phone with you. That's an amazing backup. There's also many APS available out there for you that are on your mobile device, many of which have the editing capabilities of almost a pro level. They provide lots of filters there, very specified, and they also give you the creative ability to adjust. Your photo, maybe was under exposed. You could increased exposure. They're very powerful is what I'm saying. Another pro to your mobile device is that it has editing software natively, which is fantastic because you don't have to download any app. Nothing. It's already there, so you can go from taking the photo to immediately editing it and then immediately sharing , which is incredible in terms of workflow and speed. Okay, now we're gonna get into the cons of mobile devices. One of the many cons of mobile devices is the image quality. Unfortunately, the image quality is less in your mobile device. This doesn't mean you still can't take a good photo. It just means that the limitations of that are that say you wanted to print that photo you can maybe put it is a screen saver, but it's still gonna look not as crisp, comparatively to like a DSLR. Something like that. Another disadvantage to mobile devices for photography is they don't have an optical zoom. They use digital zoom, and essentially, what that does is it zooms in on a picture as opposed to optically zooming. All this means, and you will understand this later in the course is that it decreases the quality of your photo. That's a bad thing, given that your mobile device comes in automatic mode on your camera. It's like you become dependent on that mode, which limits the creative ability of your camera, which I think is a con because you didn't to the habit of this. So we're trying to break these habits to make sure you open up the creative potential of all of your cameras. Now we've gone over the pros and cons of your smartphone. It's important to note that all the rules and definitions and everything that we've learned and are learning in this class. Apply. So please take notes. Be present, pay attention. Let's keep moving. Let's keep learning. 17. 18 Photography DSLR Pros and Cons: All right, Welcome back in this section, we're going to talk about the advantages and disadvantages of your DSLR. The reason we're giving you pros and cons Disadvantages. Advantages of both of these types of photography is so you can make better decisions. So, you know, when he use a DSLR And when you maybe just want to use your phone so you can make just a better informed decision. Okay, so now we're going to start with the pros of DSLR cameras. The very first is also a very big one. That's the sensor size, larger, the sensor, the mawr light or data that it can collect. This produces a higher quality image and gives you MAWR information. Toe work with Another big advantage to your DSLR is that you have tons of lens options. There are literally hundreds of options for each camera manufacturer. This gives you the creative ability to shoot any shooting scenario. Mainly, there are two types of lenses. A prime lens, which is a fixed lens, and a zoom lens, which allows you to adjust the focal length in and out, zooming in and out. This is advantageous for you so that when you're shooting in certain lighting conditions or scenarios that require you to shooting action. Sports where you can't get is close to a subject as you need. Teoh. You're going to need a telephoto lens or a zoom lens or say you're shooting a portrait later on that day and you have to get very close to your subject. You're gonna have to change back to your prime lens, so you see what I'm saying. There's advantages and disadvantages to each lens, but it depends on your shooting scenario, so that flexibility allows you to be more creative and to make sure you get the shot that you want. Another advantage to having a DSLR is that it makes you feel more professional. I know I've been approached simply because I have my camera. Carrying your camera on you makes you feel professional makes you look professional. It also gives you the mindset that you want to be more creative. So it's really important that you carry it around with you at all times because you never know when you're gonna want to take that shot who were an opportunity might arise for you. All right, let's jump into the cons of DSL ours. One of the biggest cons of your DSLR is that it's quite expensive, and lenses can get even more expensive. This is a barrier to entry for a lot of people, So if you can't afford one fully understandable, it's an expensive hobby can still use your mobile device. In that case, so another con is fear. Ah, lot of people are actually fearful of their camera. They start getting frustrated. They don't know what they're doing there, scrolling through settings. They missed the shot, they get blustered, and then they just put it back down. So that's fully understandable. A lot of people come up to me in the street, and they're like, Why is my picture blurry? Why in this low light scenario is it streaky? There's so many scenarios that deter people from not wanting to take the next step with their DSLR camera. Another con can be that your camera is intimidating and a lot of people just get flustered when they're using it, and they don't know the settings or they miss a shot or they're like looking up and down, wondering what they did, and that's a real point of contention. I think for people they can't get out of automatic mode. The try and learn manual doesn't work out, so they just put their camera back down. Or people are so intimidated by their camera that they don't even pick it up. They get it is a gift for Christmas or they get is a gift for their birthday, and it's literally sitting in the room in somewhere that's you know it in. They don't want to think about it. So it's a big deterrent. Intimidation is something that you have to get over when you're a photographer. You know when you're out there, you're going to feel intimidated. So if you don't do these things, you're not gonna unlock that creative ability that you have and your cameras. Second to that DSLR zehr delicate and can be prone to damage. They have a lot of moving parts and big pieces of glass that can make them maybe fragile. This is not to scare you into treating your DSLR like it's your firstborn or something like that. Your camera can take some punishment. It's just you want to be careful with it. During the transition from my mobile phone to my DSLR. I was not knowingly training my eyes and becoming more aware of my environment. I was not knowingly seeing the world in a different way. Ah, more creative way. The reason I'm sharing this with you is that everyone's journey is different. All of our experiences in life give you a vision or unique set of eyes that let you see things differently. It's all about learning as you go with whatever equipment you have, an understanding that for every good photo you take, there's likely 10 bad ones. 18. 19 Photography Intro to Lighting: Let's not make this complicated. Let's use common sense when it comes to lighting. We all love a sunset because the light is soft, the colors are rich and vibrant, and you usually don't need sunglasses to experience it. However, we all know that one. In the middle of a clear, sunny day, the sun is far too bright to look at because of its strength and intensity. The reason they tell you this because we all experience lighting in our daily lives without really thinking about it. We normally are used to reacting to light, such as squinting your eyes on a bright day wearing a hat or lowing the blinds to limit the incoming light into your home. With photography, it's important to try your best to anticipate the lighting you will be in. Fortunately for all of us, we have a base understanding about lighting by just walking around. I think a lot of people that are just starting off in manual mode have a hard time focusing on the scene in front of them and then saying in themselves, what are the settings? How do I make sure I get what I want? I want you as a student to get into the habit of learning about different types of lighting throughout the day and how that impacts how you will shoot. A great example of this is to shoot directly into the sun and then turn around and shoot directly away from the sun. Your settings will drastically change. Sure, you can rely on your automatic modes to do all the thinking, but this will prevent you from utilizing your cameras creative capabilities. Ultimately, this will prevent you from becoming a more versatile photographer as well. Lighting can be intimidating. I know from when I started, I struggled with understanding even why lighting was important. Eventually, I realized that this is something everyone experiences and that it will take time to figure out. The idea is to keep practicing and to not get discouraged. Let's start with bright daylight on a sunny day where the sun is directly above you and there are no clouds. In this scenario, the starting point exposure settings are an aperture of F 11 the shutter speed of 1 2/100 of a second in an eso of 200 or again as low as possible with these settings in place, point your camera toward your scene and check your light meter to see if the settings air over under exposing your image and correct them accordingly. To get your light meter 20 in cloudy conditions, the lighting will be less direct, which means it will look much softer. And this is because the sun is traveling through the clouds is being diffused. For example, soft, diffuse light produces a more pleasant look. When capturing images of people. I want you to use these exposure settings as starting points. This should be your first test shot in these lighting conditions from there, with the skills you have learned earlier in this course in the exposure and light meter lessons, you will want to adjust your settings with the help of the light meter to arrive at a desired exposure. Probably the most popular time to take a photo is one hour before sundown or one hour before sunrise. This is known as Golden hour or magic hour. When the sun is low in the sky above the horizon, sunlight must travel through the atmosphere at a greater distance, which creates the light to appear redder and softer in this scenario when capturing a photo of a sunset. The starting point exposure for one hour before sundown with a clear sky is an aperture of F eight shutter speed of 1 5/100 of a second. And I s O of 100 where as low as you can possibly go. The starting point exposure for a few minutes before sundown as the sun has begun. Going below the horizon is an aperture of F four, a shutter speed of 1 1/100 of a second in an I s O of 400. Once the sun has completely gone below the horizon, the starting point exposure settings are an aperture at four, a shutter speed of 1/60 of a second in an eso of 800. As you will see, as the sun sets and disappears below the horizon, you have to adjust your settings accordingly. And as we've said in the previous examples with e settings in place, these air starting points 19. 20 Photography Natural Lighting: in photography. Natural light typically refers to the sun's light in an environment such as the natural light from the sun. When you're walking through a park or the natural sunlight shining through the window while you're reading a book in your room, natural light can come in. A variety of brightness is such as if it's an overcast day or if there's a beautiful sunset to demonstrate this, we're going to go through A few natural lighting conditions were also going to provide you with starting point exposure settings to use as a guide. To be clear, these will probably not be your settings to expose her image. Rather a starting point to remind you these exposure settings are your aperture, your I s O and your shutter speed. Keep in mind it's always best to adjust your aperture and shutter speed first, and then your I s O. Because Hirai esos get introduce more grain and more noise into your image. We will include a pdf cheat cheat resource for you to take with you so that when you're out shooting, you can reference it to help you identify exposure settings quickly. The reason why we're doing this is twofold. One is to get you used to adjusting your exposure settings, which are your aperture, your shudder in your eyes. So and to to give you a general starting point for you to arrive at a desired exposure, setting quicker so that the more you do this, the less you'll need to reference the cici. 20. 21 Photography Intro to Flash Lighting: most cameras have a built in flash. This can be used to increase the amount of light in an environment in order for you to exposure image in situations where the lighting is dark, built in flashes do not allow for a lot of creative control. As the light is fixed in direct, there are external flashes as well. That can be sink to your camera. That will trigger when you take a picture, and these can be used creatively. Camera flashes produce a short burst of artificial light, which is very different from natural lighting, which is constant if you think about it. The sun's light it's always shining. This is what we mean by constant. If you think about a flash during a lightning storm, it's quick and lights up the sky for only a brief period of time. This is similar to how your camera's flash works. It helps you expose a dark scene When using flashes, your camera will have a limited range in your shutter speed. In order for your flash to light up your scene at the exact same time as when the picture was taken, the shutter speed has to be limited, so that the flash in the shutter can sink together. For most cameras, the flash can sync properly upto a shutter speed of 1 2/50 of a second. This is culture maximum flash sync speed. You like to find out what your maximum flashing speed is. Enable your flash, Then try to increase your shutter speed when your camera no longer allows you to increase your shutter speed. This will be your cameras maximum shutter speed that you can use with your flash enabled. 21. 22 Photography How to Shoot a Portrait WORKSHOP: Welcome to this portrait. Letting lesson. This is our model today, Ali. Thank you. Rally for being here askew Comptel were in an open concept kitchen here with some exposed brick. The natural light that's coming in here is coming in through two big windows behind us, even though it's a bright, sunny day outside because we're inside. The light is softer because it has to travel through a pane of glass and in an indirect way onto our subject. Today, we're going to be using a 50 millimeter F 1.8 lens, which is a great portrait lens because it allows us for a shallow depth of field that gives you that nice milky background which is gonna make your subject pop. First thing we're going to do is take a couple of test shots of Valley. Make sure that we have the exposure right, just as we've taught you before will be adjusting our settings accordingly. After that, we're gonna check our composition to make sure that light is hitting Aly the way that we wanted to. And then on top of that, we're also gonna be using an external flash to help us illuminate the scene a bit more and maybe provides mawr creative elements to what we want to do here. All right, let's jump into this portrait lesson. We're gonna get alley in the chair here. Here you go. Most welcome. Welcome. All right, we're gonna take a couple of test shots now, okay? Ali, I need you to straighten up your back a bit. Yeah, that's it. A little straighter chin yet? Okay. Looking right at me. Awesome. It's looking okay. It's a little dark, but that's all right. Another thing you want to keep in mind is that you want to make sure your cameras at eye level with your subject don't want to make sure you're not above or below them. Okay, We're just gonna change the exposure setting a bit here just as we take some test shots. Okay. Ali, I need you to look past the camera this time like you're looking out the window or All right. Perfect. Okay. Well, back towards me a little bit. Yep. Alright. Awesome. Big smile. Yep. Awesome. Great. Let's try a vertical shot here. See what it looks like. You know what? I'm not I don't really know. I'm not really liking the vertical shot. There's too many distracting elements in the background. Let's stick with the horizontal. I'm liking the composition in the eye line right now. I think we can add another visual element to this to make it a little more interesting. We're gonna add in a light tree and put it behind Are subject to give them a little balance . It'll look fantastic. Okay. As you can see, we've added a light tree to our subject. Here. Behind the flat back wall is kind of boring, per se. So we're gonna add this light to add some intrigue and some mystery into this photo. With these lights in the background, we're going to try the on body flash, and we're going to give that a go and see how our subject looks and see through like it. Kayleigh. Yeah. Okay. Cool war. Okay. As you can see that the exposure here is a little better. The photos brighter. So that's good. However, you can tell that it's kind of harsh delighting when the flash goes directly at your subject. This just makes the skin tones look a little washed out. It's not the exact exposure we wanted. You have to reconsider the type of flash we use here. We're going to switch to an external flash and see what that does. All right, So it just goes on the hot shoe on the top of the camera here. It just slides. Kind of in. You'll see it. Most cameras have this. If you don't know worry, it's going to turn it on. Look. Okay, We're just gonna take our test shot here and see how that turns out. Okay, Allie. Up exactly. Looking at out the window. Still perfect. Came Just gonna move slightly here to recompose my subject in the frame k perfect. Right you are, as you can see in this image, that the subject is very bright. And that's because this external flashes a lot stronger than than the onboard flash on your camera. We're gonna have to adjust that, And the way we're going to do that is by adjusting it upward. What this does is it makes the light bounce off the ceiling and back down onto our subject . That causes a diffusion that makes a late, softer and nicer on the skin. So that's exactly what you want for a portrait or at least that I want right now in this portrait. Okay, so it's gonna go ahead and take that shot now. K a l e up perfect. Shoulders up. Yeah, it's re composing. Okay, As you can see in this image, her skin tones are extremely nice. They're nice color. They're perfectly lit. The background has a nice bow. Okay, Background also is filled with light as well. So there's a nice balance there. Its not too dark. It's not too under exposed, so that mixture of natural and artificial light from the flash really helped make that happen. So you can tell from just the skin tones alone. The natural late coming in really fills her face, but also from the bounce flash that really fills up everything else. So I'm really happy with this image. The bow k looks fantastic. You can introduce this into your photos as well. You could use something like Christmas lights can also think about cars that are in the background. They would produce an interesting Boca effect. Any light that's really behind your subject far enough that so it won't be in focus. So that's what we mean here again. That's that shallow depth of field. That's because of this lens. That's a 50 millimeter 1.8. I'm really happy with this image, and we're gonna jump right into the next lesson and keep you learning. 22. 23 Photography How to Shoot a Landscape, Sunset WORKSHOP: welcome to this lesson on landscape photography. In this lesson, I will cover the process I used to capture a sunset landscape photo. Let's start this lesson off by giving a short definition of what a landscape photo is. Most of the time, landscape shots consist of wide views of forests, mountains or where shorelines meet tall buildings in a city. Typically, landscape photography captures the essence of nature or cityscapes. I know this is a vague definition. It's purposeful to ensure that you have a wide array of options when thinking about shooting a landscape shot, say you're looking over a beautiful vista or an amazing skyline, or even just a simple farmers field. You can apply photography rules from this course to help you capture these scenes, using the rule of thirds by placing the horizon on the top or the bottom line off this rule of thirds. Keep in mind that the rule of thirds when composing your beautiful vistas, amazing skylines or even a simple farmers field can be used to help frame the horizon in your shot and in many cases will give you a great landscape photo. However, this can also be a starting point for you. This can help you find a really interesting subject to including your photos as well. In many instances, adding an object to your foreground will create interest in a sense of balance in your composition. Think of finding a great composition for your landscape shots as an adventure. Experimenting with different angles and viewpoints, or with compositions that you aren't comfortable with, will keep your photography process fun. For this lesson, I will go over the process I used in order to decide on a location that had several possibilities for capturing a great landscape photo. The first step in my process was visiting a website I regularly used to determine where the sun is rising or setting in order to plan ahead to find the best locations to shoot. Since I was in Hamilton, Ontario, I placed the sun angle location pointer in an area that I felt would work with where the sun was setting. I chose this spot because it had a bay of water with other scenic elements, such as to piers and a couple of bridges nearby. This created a starting point in a purpose to begin exploring this area with the intention of finding a nice landscape and a setting sun. Once I got to the location, I immediately began snapping photos in various directions and reviewing them as I explored the area. This creates the best chance of finding the angle and subject matter for your landscape photo. As I headed toward the piers, the closest bridge became more prominent in my photos, and I started to like the idea of featuring it. The sun was about 45 minutes before setting, so I had a little bit of time to explore the area and test different compositions and viewpoints. I noticed on the other side the bridge that in a few moments the some would be low enough in the sky that it would start to appear between the second bridges support pillars. I initially thought the first bridge would be the focal point for the image. However, after exploring the whole area, I decided the second bridge would be the best location to capture my landscape photo. At this point, there is about 30 minutes left before sundown, which created optimal lighting. So I pulled out my camera and began taking test shots. I pointed my camera towards the sun and adjusted my aperture eso and shutter speed. Accordingly, as we discussed earlier in this course, the starting point exposure settings for a lighting environment where the sun is within one hour before sundown is an aperture of F eight, a shutter speed of 1 5/100 of a second and an I s O of 100. After a few test shots, I was happy with the location I chose and began to experiment with different angles by moving around slightly. A unique perspective was being created from the sun being framed by the bridges, pillars and the size of the bridge as a whole. Also, you'll notice there's a few elements that split up the scene, the bridge from the left to right, the horizon below it and the water. After a few test shots taken vertically, I decided to try a few photos horizontally and, after reviewing, both, decided to stick with the horizontal view. The long bridge that runs through the entire shot from left to right was more important to me than capturing the cloudless sky or more of the ground on a different day. For example, if there were many clouds, I may decide to capture the photo vertically instead to feature these clouds. Once I knew that I preferred the horizontal view, I took out my tripod and set it up with my camera. The tripod provides support and removes or reduces camera shake because of the added stability to the camera. This allows you to set up the camera exactly where you want it to be. In order for you to hone in on the focus, composition and exposure settings that you'd like with the camera tripod, I adjusted the ball head to keep the horizon. His level is possible since there is limited light remaining, and I was satisfied with the location and the elements in the scene for this sunset photo. I made the decision to focus on capturing as many photos as I can with the intention to decide later on which photo I liked best. In this scene, the bridge sits on the top thirds, and the Horizon line sits on the bottom thirds compositionally. This follows the rule of thirds, as mentioned earlier. I chose this unique perspective with the sun between the support pillars of the bridge because it acts as a natural frame for the sun framing is a compositional tool that you can , including to any photo within the rule of thirds. A frame can be anything from a tree branch, two buildings or, as it is in this photo, the supports for the bridge that frame the sun. As the sun started to go below the clouds, I adjusted my settings to allow more light into the camera as daylight started to drop. While taking all of the photos, I felt that I had captured the one I wanted to use. So with the remaining sunlight, I continue to take more photos with different compositions and angles just to experiment. To sum up this lesson, the idea is to plan ahead, especially if you're capturing images of a sunset or sunrise because of the limited optimal lighting, you may think in hours a long time. However, there are many things that need to be considered, such as finding parking, exploring an area, discovering interesting elements to capture, setting up your gear, changing batteries and so on. Beyond that, it takes time to decide on the composition and exposure settings or even the lens you'd like to use. Once you found a place that works for you. Take many photos in the moment as you can, and experiment with different lenses, compositions, exposures and angles. Review your images every so often to make sure you're getting close to something you like and adjust accordingly. Even if a location seems to suggest shooting vertically, try horizontally as you may end up discovering that it works better for the angle you're shooting at. Once I have finished shooting, I often find it's best to wait until I get back to my computer or even wait a few days before reviewing everything as it will then have a fresh perspective on the images and will be able to decide on the ones I'd like to edit. Sometimes taking a few days to allow yourself some space between the photos you just took will give you some much needed clarity. As mentioned, it's important to spend the majority of your time capturing photos instead of over reviewing, because you can spend as much time as needed later when you're sitting in front of your computer. Later, in the editing section of this course, I will walk you through the editing process to take the raw image to a completely edited photo. Knowing this, I will remind you that photography is a learning process and everyone's will be different. This is the process I use, and it might not fully align with how you like to take photos and review them. So please experiment with your camera and the processes you used to get comfortable doing this. You will see better results with planning ahead in getting an understanding of what works best for you. 23. 24 Photography How to Shoot a Long Exposure of Light Trails WORKSHOP: Have you ever seen a photo of a highway with red and white streams of light? This creative photography trick is known as light trails is done. By taking a long exposure. Photographers can use this trick to produce creative images of pretty much anything that moves as long as it has some sort of light. The results can be really beautiful and unique. This style of photography can completely transform the look and feel of an environment. Ultimately, this is what made me fall in love with photography. In this lesson, I will explain what a long exposure is then will provide a step by step on how to capture a long exposure in a highway scenario. From there, we'll end the lesson by providing you with some tips to help you take better long exposures . So what is a long exposure? Simply put, a long exposure is any photo taken with a slower shutter speed to reduce a desired blur or light streak effect, such as smoothing out water on a waterfall or showing the blurred motion of traffic. A slower shutter speed involves the shutter being open for a longer period of time. This causes a motion blur effect where the subject is blurred across the image because it was moving when the exposure of the image was taken in long exposures, the priority is your shutter speed, as you can not get the same blurred effect by altering your aperture or your I S O Onley. A low shutter speed can cause motion blur of a subject. The creative advantage of using this method is that you can take a regular looking seen, for example, a highway with cars and transform it into a beautiful stream of lights, creating a surreal light show effect. From a technical standpoint, what causes this motion blur is light traveling across your sensor as the subject moves across the exposure. The sensor of your DSLR records this moving light and paints it across your camera's sensor , resulting in motion blur. When I first started with photography, long exposures blew me away. I didn't realize the potential of cameras and the different setting combinations and their effects. I started understanding how to take long exposures through trial and error, and I suggest you do the same experiment with um and have fun, get creative with that being said, let's dive into this long exposure lesson, as we have mentioned in the prior lesson doing some preliminary research will be instrumental in your photographic success. Spending time. Finding an area where there's lots of traffic will provide many opportunities for getting a light streak photo. In this case, I decided to find a bridge over a major highway in Ontario with lots of traffic, even though it's late at night. Finding high traffic areas is a good starting point for this type of long exposure. Because you don't want to be sitting on an overpass bridge where there's little traffic, it will take forever to get cars to fill up all the lanes. Also, keep in mind that highways are a dangerous place when taking photos, so be safe and aware of your surroundings and Onley capture photos where you will be safe. We are on a sidewalk on a bridge above the highway, which allows us to not be anywhere near actual street level of the highway. I began by setting up my camera on my tripod because taking a photo handheld in this scenario would result in a blurry image due to the lower shutter speed since the leading conditions at night at this highway were very dark. The light meter had a hard time producing an accurate reading. Therefore, long exposures at night require a different approach in terms of coming to an exposure that works for the image we're going for in this lighting environment. And considering that the shutter speed is the priority here, the exposure setting starting point was roughly and I s O of 100 in aperture of F nine and a shutter speed of about 10 seconds for the shutter speed. 10 seconds means leaving the shuttle been foreign entire 10 seconds rather than 1/10 of a second. This is what allows the moving light and objects to blur over a certain period of time similarly to the light meter. Since it was a dark location, the autofocus system had trouble focusing. So most of the time it will be better to manually focus the lens in a dark lighting condition. I used the street lights in the background to set my focus, and then I pressed the shutter button to take a photo. After I had my starting point exposure settings in place, I waited 10 seconds for the camera to expose my first test shot and reviewed the photo. The result was in the right direction, but the cars were not blurred enough to my liking. But this test shot in my starting point exposure settings gave me a much better way of getting toe a final image. I was happy with much faster. As a general rule of thumb, It's best account how long it will take for the subject to move throughout the frame in order to arrive at a desired shutter speed. For example, since I am getting a long exposure of cars traveling on a highway, I would count how long it takes for the car to move across the shot before it either disappears or becomes small enough in the distance that it no longer is important in the scene. Since this location had a curve highway just ahead of the bridge, I counted how long they took for the cars to go beyond this point. It totaled roughly to about 25 seconds. I changed my shutter speed to 25 seconds, and because of this, I also adjusted my aperture toe, a higher number to compensate for the extra light as a reminder With every adjustment you make to one setting, you will need to alter another. In this case, the shutter took priority and I was already at the lowest I s O of 100. So the only remaining setting I could adjust to limit the light was the aperture. Most cameras will need time to process an image. And typically the longer the exposure, the longer the amount of processing time. Since it was 25 seconds of taking a photo, The processing time for my camera was roughly another 25 seconds. This meant there was around a minute of time between taking each photo where I had to just wait around and let the camera do its thing. So I got some exercise in it made the best of it. You know, jumping jacks, running back and forth, push ups, various other activities. Unfortunately, the photo process, just as it was about to do some squats. Well, all right, back to taking photos. Once the image had processed and I had almost worked up a sweat, I reviewed the image. The result worked great and created a beautiful light streak of car and truck lates across my photo Now that I had my settings in place, I could experiment with different angles and compositions. I moved my position a bit and took another photo. I was happy with the overall exposure and the angle. So now all that was left was waiting for the right amount of traffic to pass. Depending on what you're going for, maybe one car just passing through will be enough, however, I was looking for three highway lanes of light streaks to show the full effect of what long exposures conduce at night. So I took many photos over the course of about 30 minutes until a large group of cars and trucks passed along the highway. I knew this would be a great shot because of how many red lights there were in all three lengths. I cannot wait to get this into the editing room. Now that you understand what's involved in capturing a long exposure of a highway with cars at night to produce a light streak effect, I want you to remember that you can use this method in many differing scenarios, like blurring a group of people walking, for example. Another example would be capturing long exposures of airplanes at an airport. The lights on any aircraft can create a beautiful light streak that goes into the sky, which produces a three D effect of colorful lights. Long exposures open up a wide variety of possibilities. Instead of vehicles moving, you could have people standing in one spot like this photo here of people spelling out the word love with sparklers. This was one I created by a group of people that had each of their own sparkler in a letter they had to draw in the air. The only trick was that they needed to draw their letter backward. Otherwise, the resulting image would have had the word flipped. Each person repeatedly drew the letter they had in the air with their sparkler as they took a long exposure with a shutter speed of eight seconds. This is a great example of another creative way that you can take advantage of long exposures and also have a great time with your friends. I took this photo while I was at a cottage. I brought the sparklers and all of my friends together. It was a fantastic moment. This also reflects back on the idea of planning ahead I knew I was going to a cottage and where I could accomplish this type of shot. I brought the sparklers, and it was a fun idea to interact with friends with To recap this lesson here Some of the main long exposure tips to remember. Use a tripod or a flat, stable surface to rest your camera on while you're taking a long exposure so that you aren't introducing camera. Shake into your image. Remember, long exposures require a stable camera in most cases, such as creating light streak effects with traffic. However, not using a stable surface can also produce an opportunity to capture more creative and abstract shots, depending on the type of photo you are going for. Count. How long it takes for the moving object to go across your photo. This will create, in most cases, in accurate length of time to set your shutter speed, too. If you're capturing vehicles, look or wait for trucks as they usually have more lights, which create mawr interesting light trails. A great tip is to enable the shutter timer on your camera, such as a two second timer, so that when you press the shutter button to taken image. The camera will wait two seconds before the shot is taken. This will move any possibility of the camera shaking slightly as your hand comes into contact with the camera. There are also longer shutter timers, usually five or 10 seconds that you can enable. If you find that you are still getting blurring in your image, I highly recommend setting it to second timer when taking long exposures, unless you have a remote system set up like a WiFi connection on your smartphone or interval meter. In the editing section of this course, all provide the raw image file so you can follow along as I go over my process for editing this photo. So stay tuned. And also remember, you can engage in share your photos in the Q and A section for feedback and to show off your awesome long exposure shots. Take advantage of this. This community is here to help and you have access to it. 24. 25 Intro to Photogrpahy Editing: Welcome back. Almost every professional image that you've seen on social media or on a website has been edited using software, whether the colors were just enhanced or the subject itself was altered. There are many software options available to edit your photo. You probably are familiar with APS you use on your mobile phone, such as Instagram, where they have a series of filters where you can adjust your image, which with one or two clicks. Or they have manual options where you can go through a list of Siris of settings such as contrast, brightness, highlights, shadows, colors and so on. Alternatively, there are many free options available. Such a snap seed, light room, mobile photo shop express or raw therapy. It's important to understand that photo editing software are all very similar, and anyone will do. We will include some free editing, APS and software in an attached PdF resource. Personally, I use the paid subscription program from Adobe called Light Room. Basically, it's the industry standard, and they've done a great job making it very user friendly. It is all the tools I need to edit all my photographs, and I've been using it for years, you'll notice that when you take a photo most of the time, the colors look more flat or the image looks more dull in comparison. To publish photos you may find online, let's check out a before and after of one of my photos to help show you the impacts of what editing conduce to your unedited photos. Here is a fully edited photo I stylized. Using Adobe Light Room. You can see how vibrant and surreal this photo looks. Take note of the red and blue colors, and how have created a very cold winter snowstorm feel that almost looks like a snow globe . I planned to go out and take this photo for the reason of showcasing a different aspect to a commonly captured building in Toronto. Let's cut to the unedited version in a few seconds that will reveal how much can be done during the editing process of an image. Keep in mind here that I return to this building during several different snowstorms to capture the image I had in mind, and also the editing required more advanced knowledge and techniques of light room. So we're showing this image on Lee for the purpose of comparison between an edited and unedited image. You'll notice right away that how different the image looks compared to the edited one, it's almost lifeless and lacking any style or color. It's very boring. In contrast, as much as I enjoy capturing an image, the editing process is just a sfar un and allows me to be just as creative, if not more. Photo editing is about you and what you want to accomplish. You can spend just a few minutes increasing just the brightness of some photos for a slideshow. Or you can spend a few hours adding a photo to the point where the look and feel has drastically changed. It's really up to you. The point to remember is that editing provides you with MAWR creative options. If you don't have light room, you can download a free trial off adobes website where you can install it and follow along . The trialist typically have good for 30 days, which is plenty of time for you to test it out and develop your editing skills 25. 26 Editing a Portrait Photo in Adobe Lightroom PART 1: welcome to this reading lesson. We're going to use the program light room to edit the portrait shot from the lesson earlier in the course as you'll notice the file that is selected has a dot Any F file type? This is a raw image file type. Okay, now we're going to just select the portrait photo. Just by doing that, we can double click on it. You get the full image rate in your screen here. This is our model alley from earlier in the course. As you can see, we place that light tree in the background to add that beautiful Bo. OK, this is going to be a fun, fun experiment to edit this photo with. You guys hope you're following along. We're gonna go over all the steps I take to edit this portrait photo from beginning to finish from the importing right now to a finish photo light room has several features that can aid you in correcting skin imperfections. Secondly, to this, you can completely change the color schematic of your photo. Okay, now let's import this photo into light room in the bottom right corner as you'll notice there's an import button. Let's go ahead and click that now, After importing your photo into light room, this arrives at the library tab. As you can see here, as you will notice, there are two locations where your photo is visible. One here is a navigator which we will go over later in the course at the bottom. Here is the previous import. If we had imported other images in the past, they would show up in this timeline. Here is well, however, since we have only imported one photo, that's the only photo that shows up here now. So now that we have our photo imported toe light room, next we'll go to the developed tap. As you can see, the photo is much larger now. This is the place where you're going to do the majority of your editing. For the purposes of this course, I will only be using the tools I normally use to edit this photo. Whoever light room has many other tools and functions. I love light room. I find it very easy to use and it's also simple. I use it 99% of the time. When I'm heading all my photos, I'm rarely using photo shop. You can do everything pretty much in light room. Okay, let's explore some of the panels on the right hand side that are used to edit your photo. The 1st 1 we have here is the basic tab. As you can see, you have many options to adjust your photo here, including the temperature, that tent, the exposure, the contrast, the highlights, shadows, your whites, your blacks, your clarity, your vibrance and your saturation. Overall, in this tab alone, you congrats, sickly change the look and feel of your image. As we mentioned earlier in the course, raw images have much more data for you to use, and this is specifically related to the editing process. More data means more options. While you're editing your photo, here is an example of that. Over here on the right, you can see this temperature slider. Since this photo was shot as a raw image, all the color temperature data was stored within this photo so I can easily adjust this photo to make it cooler or warmer like this. On the other hand, if this was a JPEG file and not a raw file, the JPEG file would only have one color temperature baked into it. Think of J pegs as storing one color temperature so it would be either here or there or over here. The reason I'm saying this is because it becomes more difficult with a J peg to accurately adjust your color settings. Because there is no stored color temperature, it stores all of the color temperature information. The same goes for the exposure. Whatever your exposure was set at with a J peg is what it will be in light room. You can adjust it, but it's based off the one stored exposure compared to a raw file that has all of the exposure data saved within it. A. J Peg Onley captures one instance of exposure compared to the raw file where much more exposure data is captured. So now that you understand why we chose to shoot this photo on rock, let's move into editing the actual photo. Okay, so the first thing I normally do when I import my image and I begin my editing is I slide the highlights all the way to the left in the shadows, all the way to the right, and it gives me a better sense of what I'm working with within this photo. As you can see, the photo is much brighter at this point, and you can see a lot more than details in all aspects of your image. So one more time if we just double click here, this resets the highlights double click here that resets the shadows. As you can see, this dramatically impacted the image, and this makes it more dreamlike. But it's also kind of dark and hard for me to tell what I'm potentially need to work on. I definitely like the direction in which this photo is headed right now. However, for the purposes of editing this photo in this beginner lesson, we're going to reset thes settings and start over because this is a beginner lesson. We're going to focus this photo on being more neutral and not so stylized. Okay, so let's go back to where we were before by lowering the highlights completely. As you can see, the things aren't as vibrant. There's Mawr detail in the book, a behind and more importantly, as you can see around the skin around her eyelids, it's about a little bit overblown there, and now you can see a bit more that detail right here in there. As I opened up the shadows or increase the shadows, you'll notice that the photo overall becomes more bright, especially in the background and under her chin. I would say 100 is a bit too much, so let's roll the shadows back a bit. Say there's something around 75 see what happens. Okay, maybe it's still too bright. Let's keep going. I'm more comfortable with that. It really makes you focus on her face. Next, we're going to set a waypoint on your Mac. It's your option key on a PC. It's your old key, and then you're going to hold this button down. Next, you're gonna pull the slider for the white and just pull it over. The screen turns black, and, as you can see, as we're adjusting, the white white begins to show up on the screen. This would be too much you only want about just as it comes into the frame. So about there that's a good amount of white in your photo. Light room automatically tells you that by doing this, the reason this is important is because we're clipping the whites and Onley, allowing the true whites to appear in our image. Okay, Now let's do the exact same thing with the blacks hitting option or altogether in a holding that down and then sliding the blacks until you start to see it turned yellow. Here. Now, with the whites, we only pushed it very little. However, with the blacks, we can push this just a little further. Just about there. Okay, so let's start with the exposure. We're gonna increase it a bit. That really brightens up her image, washes out her face a bit. Maybe we don't want that. Maybe we'll pull back a bit. Perhaps that's a little too dark. But maybe we want to go down like this. We can open up our shadows a bit here. Now. Okay, now that we've fiddled with our highlight shadows, whites and blacks, we're gonna move on to the exposure slider here. As you can see, we can push this all the way up here and it will be completely overexposed like that or all the way down. It will be completely dark. We double click here. It takes it back to the setting in the middle because we exposed this image with the right camera settings. This gave us the optimal conditions for editing as well. This allows us to have complete flexibility because we properly exposed everything in our image. Nothing's blown out or under exposed. Typically, if my photo was under overexposed, I would be, firstly adjusting the exposure slider. Since this photo was properly exposed in camera, I don't have to adjust the exposure slider too much as I just analyse the exposure a bit there. I'm quite happy with it. Said it zero. And that's because we got the exposure right in camera when we took this shot for the contrast slider. Think of it as adding more color or taking more color away or making it look more flat. Let's put that back in the middle for this photo. Let's enhance it just slightly. Okay, so we're gonna just adjust this slightly a little more. Okay, you can see it kind of gets really punchy. All right. Maybe just a little less. Okay? I'm liking that. It's a little more natural looking. All right? I like that there. So it minus four. Ok, moving on. We're gonna go to the Clarity slider here. Think of this is adding sharpness or softness. For example, you put it all the way, the right. As you can see, it's really sharp, and you're losing a lot of color with you go all the way to the left. It looks really soft and almost like it's, Ah, animation or something like that. We don't need either extreme. Okay, so say for this photo we wanted to add a little softness, which is typically good, just something like that to give a dreamy feel. Not a lot that would be way too much and similar to the contrast. I think we'll bring the clarity down slightly to give the whole photo a little bit of a softer feel. Next, we have the vibrant slider. This gives your colors more punch and mawr Lew minutes. So, for example, if we go all the way to the right, as you can tell, a lot of the colors look not over saturated but really punchy. We go all the way out, it turns black and white. Let's go back to the middle. I think in this case we probably just want the vibrance up slightly. Okay, Next we have the saturation this slider here. Can you can think of it as a combination between your vibrance and your contrast? This adds a lot of color or can take it away. And this is the last step for color is under the basic tab, so we're gonna just take some away a little bit. As you can see, it makes it black and white. If you went all the way to the other way, it would make all your colors super vibrant. Now that looks terrible. We put it back to the middle. As you can see, it's a little more natural looking. In this case, if we went up a bit, you'll see that the colors are a little bit more punchy. Her skin tones change a lot, or if we went just slightly down, those colors seem to disappear bit and she becomes more white looking. In this case, I'd like to add a little bit more saturation to her skin tones and to the overall feel of the photo itself. So let's go toe about plus five. As you can see, the colors are a little bit more rich Now. There's a little bit more pink in such in her skin tone, but it's still natural looking, and it doesn't look like it's fake with the tent slider. As you've set your color temperature here, what this does is kind of finally adjust those colors. So if I go to the right, as you can see, there's a lot of red and purple tones into this photo. That's not really what we want Now. If you went back the other way, you'd see a lot more greenish yellow, and it's it covers the entire photo, so we don't really necessarily want that. So we're just gonna set that back to the middle by double clicking. We're back to the starting point of where it was. And if we wanted to adjust, it would be ever so slightly like that. Dad, I'm a little bit more green or that tattle more purple science. Look, in this case, I'm pretty happy with it, not adjusted at all. Typically, for Portrait's, you're not going to be using 10 too much. We just want to keep people's faces and their skin tones as natural as we can tow accurately represent who they are. We don't wanna overdo it too much. They look fake. Okay, Now that we've covered all of the basic tab, let's move on to the tone curve in the tone curve. What you can do is really zone in on individual parts of your photo in the mid highlights, darks and shadows. As you can see here on this line at the very top, this is your Brightpoint sore. Your highlights are down here in the bottom left corner or where your dark points are so I can click here, there, in there. And this creates points for me to manipulate the darks as you can see, the darks or the blacks are becoming darker, or the whites where they get brighter. Now that's not what we're looking to do. I'm just showing this for effect. So we're just gonna go ahead and reset all of this right click reset all regions. So really, all you're going to do with the tone curve is that in a slight up for especially for a portrait, slight up or a slight downward curve, and what this does is spread that tonal curve across your entire image. This tends to give an overall balance in color and exposure throughout your photo. It's a really subtle effect, but I've really come to enjoy using this effect on my portrait images. In some photos, it may be necessary to adjust the darkness or brightness of your photo in the tone curve. You can adjust the blacks in the bottom left here like so you can see the blacks have all been adjusted. Here. It's gotten a lot darker. That's pretty back up or in the top, right? You can adjust the whites by taken back like that. We're adding more to it like that. It's just reset that. Okay, so just undo the last two steps. Okay, now we have the image back to where we want it. That's the tone curve. Now let's move on to the H SL color tab. Also, if you prefer, you can use sliders to adjust these regions. So, for example, your highlights here, just as we did earlier. Just double clicking to reset your lights, which is a little further down the curve, or your darks, which is even further down the curve or your shadows, which is at the very bottom. As you can see, the tonal curve can be highly adjusted. Now that we've gone over the tone curve. Let's move on to the color tab. As you can see, there's the hue saturation loom in its were all feature. In this case, we're going to use the all feature because everything is available to us. Since the color in this photo is pretty good, we're not gonna just too much. But say you wanted to adjust the oranges or the reds. As you can see, the background will turn completely red. But this will also impact the orange that's in her face. So we don't want that. So in this instance, only slight adjustments are necessary for color. So I want this to be slightly more orange. I don't like the red in her skin, so well, exaggerate that, so you can see where it is. Okay, Now we're going to find Tune it okay about there. As you can see, there's a little bit more consistency in the color of her skin. Now I'm happy with the color of this photo now, so we're not gonna go into the saturation. Luminant stabs here, but feel free to mess around with that and see what they dio as the saturation in luminant sliders here will control the individual colors 26. 27 Editing a Portrait Photo in Adobe Lightroom PART 2: moving on. Now that we've worked through the basic tab, the tone curve tab and the coloring tab and we're happy with the way her skin tone looks, we're now gonna move into fixing the imperfections in her skin. Okay, so we're going to close the color tab and we're going to go up to the top here, and you're going to see these six different buttons. The first button here is your crop tool. As you click it, you'll see that a grid of the rule of thirds show up and you can adjust your photo and crop it as you'd like. Okay, this is the clone, and he'll brush. Clone is here. He'll is here. They do basically the same thing, but with different impacts. So in this case, we'll zoom in on her face just to show you. As you can see, there's an imperfection here. We're gonna make this brush smaller just to about the size of that imperfection. We're gonna increase the feather size slightly, and we're just gonna click here and just move it around. Just about there. As you can see, light Room has selected an area that it thinks is close in similarity to everything around it. So if you click H on your keyboard, this will remove this view here. As you can see, we can kind of tell that it was there, but not really. So if I click h again, we're just gonna delete this and you can see it's back. So again, we'll do this one more time. Run, adjust the size slightly smaller. We're going to go just to the edges of it. It's gonna select somewhere. It's hard to tell again. So we're gonna hit H again. That looks great. You can't even tell that that was there. As you can imagine, this is a very powerful tool. You can use this to remove marks on the street, whole people, or even just simple marks in somebody's face. This is an extremely useful tool to really hammer out the details you want in your photo. So let's now continue with roofing all the imperfections off of her face. - Okay , so the hell brushes better at blending as opposed to the clone stamp, as you will see right now. So if I just went like this around the edge of this, you'll see that that edge just completely disappears. Now let's move on to other areas with the heel brush in the navigator panel. Over here, in the top left corner, you'll see a box around her face. You can use this to move throughout the image like this. This is useful for when you're zoomed in or at this here ratio of 1 to 1. If you want to zoom out, you could go toe 12 1/16 like that. If you wanted to fill the image within your screen, you'd hit Phil. If you want to fit the image within this box here, you'd hit fit. This gives you some options to zooming in and out of your image. Now, let's go back into the image with the heel brush and fix up some of the imperfections that we missed. Okay, now that we're done with the heel brush, I'm going to turn it on and off just so you get a better sense of what we've done here. So by clicking this here, this turns off everything you've done within that tab. Let's show the results of the healing brush now, So we're just gonna turn this off for a second? This shows the before, and now we're going to show the after now we're gonna move on to the brush right here, so you're just gonna click it? The brush is a useful tool because you can really isolate where you want to impact your photo. I often use the brush tool to add some clarity and brightness to someone's eyes, or I can also use the clarity in the opposite direction. This way to add softness to their skin this way makes it a little brighter. And pop yer this way makes it softer and dreamier. So we just put that back in the middle. Now let's start with the eyes. With the brush tool, you can paint over specific parts of your image. Let's zoom into the eyes now and make this easy for ourselves by clicking here with the show selected mask overlay. What that does is show you where you're painting with a red overlay. Don't worry, you're not adding red to your photo is just showing you where you are painting. So let's click that now. If we just go into her eyes and we just paint, you'll see the red show up. So this helps you accurately paint exactly where you want to go. Okay, that's when I let's do the other. Okay, now that we've finished selecting the area we wanted painted, we'll turn off the red paint. Well, now go over to the clarity Slider in slight it all the way on the right. It's gonna be too much, but just to show you the impact it has. As you can see, it's added a lot of clarity to the eyes. Now let's zoom out to the full shot. So you have a better idea of what it looks like. So we're just gonna turn it on and off. So you have a good idea of what we've done. That's off. And this is on the eyes, really pop. But unfortunately they look unnatural. That's not what we're going for here. So let's slide it down to make it look just slightly poppy so that you can really zero in on the eyes. So let's turn it off and on again, just so you can see what we've done off on. It's subtle, but it makes a big difference. Now let's add some clarity to her lips to see what happens with zoom in we're gonna move down to her lips, we're gonna turn on the show overlay mask again. We're just gonna paint in over her lips. So we're gonna turn off the mask. Now we'll zoom back out, and we're going to turn it off and on again. This is off. No, this is on. Next. We're going to soften her skin. We will use the brush tool again. So let's click into that. Okay? In the brush tool, it has multiple settings, as you can see here, from 10 to exposure to blacks. Clarity, saturation. All of this. It also has some specific ones, such as skin softening or soften skin. As it's labeled here, we're going to click that. As you will see, there is an increase in sharpness and a reduction in clarity. Now for my taste. This is too much. If we go to her skin tone and we just overlay it here, you'll see how much it impacts it. We'll zoom in now, watch what happens. As you can see, it greatly impacted her skin. The skin looks smoother, but it's a fine balance when working with somebody skin tone. You don't want to overdo it because it will look unnatural. In this case. I don't like this, so we're going to adjust the clarity to make it look more natural. So let's go ahead and delete this. You can do that by right clicking on this and then hitting delete. We're going to go back over to the Clarity slider. Put it around, let's say 28. Now we're gonna paint over her skin and see the result. So now we're gonna compare. So let's just paint over here a bit. So now you can see that there's just subtle differences, very subtle. It's much more easier to control, and it's much more natural. And it takes away the hardness of certain lines in this skin. Whereas earlier when the clarity was all the way down, it completely removed all of this. I like this subtle softness. I don't enjoy too much softness on the skin, so let's continue with just doing this now. Okay, Now we're just gonna turn off the mask that we painted over with the red. Okay, Now we're gonna turn off the brush, and we're going to show you exactly what we've done here to soften the skin. So this is off. And this is on. As you can see, this is more of a look that you would see in a magazine or like, a commercial. Okay, now we're gonna hit, done and move on. So I'm pretty happy with what we've done with the image. Now, now we're just gonna go through and do some final touches to just clean up the image and make everything look real nice and crisp. So now I'm going to zoom in and check for great and noise throughout the image. All right? We're just gonna look all over the image, okay? There's a little bit of noise there. That's these specks of different coloring. In order to clean up the noise and grain in the image, we're gonna go to the details panel. Great here. As you can see, we have three things we can do here, which is sharpening noise reduction in color noise reduction. What you can do here is simply slide these over and you'll see the grain or noise disappear . In this instance, we selected the correct noise reduction type, which is the Luminant slider. As you can see, it's disappeared. In some cases, you may have to adjust the color one as well. Let's zoom back out now. Okay, Now that we're done with fixing the noise and the image, we're gonna move on to fixing some of the loose hairs around her head here. So let's close the detail panel, and then we're going to select the hell brush again here. And then we're going to zoom in on the image right here, and we're gonna remove this hair. Great there. So we're gonna make the brush a little bigger. As you can see, we've removed the hair. It looks a little awkward, so we're just gonna go through and clean up those imperfections. So there little there, there's a line here over the shoulder here. That one right there. - Okay , so we removed the majority of the loose hairs. For the purposes of this course, we're not gonna go through and do every single piece. It's just to show you that you conduce this in light room. Now that we're done with the heel brush will click done here. And just before we move into one of the final stages, which is potentially cropping the image we're going to go to the Lens Correction town right here. Now let's click roof chromatic aberration and enable profile corrections. As you can see, our image brightened up a bit and you can see that it sort of flattened out, so we'll turn it off. I normally do this to all my photos to correct lens curve issues. Also, I find that this tends to slow light room down if you click this first. Okay, as you will notice, it did brighten up her image a bit. But in this case, I'm okay with that. I actually like it a bit brighter. If you're not okay with that, you can go back to the basic tab. So you would close this Go to the basic tab. You would just lower your exposure ever so slightly like that. Personally, I liked it as it was, So we're just gonna go back next, we'll go into the cropping of the image. So we're gonna close the basic tab and we're going to select the crop. As you can see, a grid has shown up. This is your rule of thirds and we're pretty close to having her. I exactly where we want it. But we're not precisely on that rule. of thirds line or cross line. So all we have to do is drag here in the corner down rate to her. I just like that hit done boom that's done. Now we have a perfectly composed portrait photo. Next, we're gonna convert this file toe a Web friendly file type that you can export and use on social media such as a JPEG. So we're gonna right click on the image we're gonna go down to export and then select export here. Once this export window panel opens up, you can select a specific file folder or put it in a specific sub folder to your choosing simply by adding in the name. Here I have Dave's photo selected. Next will go down to file settings. The image format we want is J. Paige. It's already selected. The quality is at 100%. Perfect. If you wanted to adjust the image size, you can do so right here. Ok, moving on, we're going to scroll down here right to the bottom. And once you're finished, all your hitting his export 27. 28 Editing a Landscape, Sunset Photo in Adobe Lightroom: Okay. Welcome back in this lesson, we're gonna go over how to edit a raw landscape image. Let's click here and import this into light room, just as we did for the portrait. Okay? Just as we did before, we're gonna click here, and we're gonna move to the developed tab to edit the photo. As you can tell in this image, the image is dark. And that's because I exposed for the sun and this created a silhouette of the bridge. So I'm gonna go over how I would edit a sunset landscape. Now, let's dive into the basic tab and start off with lowering the highlights. Okay, Maybe a little bit too much. Okay. Increasing the shadows. And as you can see, we've brought a lot of the detail back from the bridge. It's no longer a silhouette, and you can see a lot of the foreground here. The detail from the nub here. Now we're gonna set our white point option or halt on a Mac and PC. Drag it over. Okay, that's good. There may be a little less. Okay, Now we're gonna grab the blacks and trim these. Maybe about there. Now, we're gonna adjust the exposure a bit just to see what that does. Okay, maybe about there, down the highlights? A little. All right, now we're gonna go down to the clarity, Just increase it slightly. Now, I personally like to increase the vibrance about 25 or so, and I like to decrease the saturation by about 10. I don't like oversaturation in my images too often. Okay? Next, we're gonna go over the temperature slider. We're going to show you what this does with warming the image and cooling it down. So as you can see, there's blue and yellow. So let's warm the image up all the way. It makes it super yellow or super cold and blue and purple looking. Obviously, that's not what we want to do here. So let's go back to where we were by double clicking. All right, now, let's increase yellow a bit. Now this image was shot in Ontario, Canada. We were capable of warming up this photo so it looks like it's almost like in Miami or something like that. So that's the power of your temperature slider. Here is you can really adjust the feel and look of your image with this. Now we're gonna address the tent just to see how that looks. You can see this way. Adds more of a green look this way. Adds more of a purplish pink look. So I'm gonna just start over again. All right? Maybe you just add a little bit of the pink purple. I'm happy with that. Now it's adjust the contrast. You can see how that kind of crushes the blacks a little bit, and your shadows become more pronounced. Maybe we want to just lay off him a bit. You can see that the sun rays become a little bit more pronounced, so let's just start that over. So since I want to feature the sun here since its frame nicely by between these two pillars , I'm gonna crush the blacks a little bit with the contrast. And as you can see, the shadows here and here and in here have become darker, Which is exactly what I want right now. Okay, Now we're gonna close the basic tab and moved to the tone curve case. We're gonna just the highlights a bit. All right? I don't like that too much. Let's maybe increase them slightly. So the sons. Razor. A little bit more pronounced. Now, we're gonna adjust the lights right in the photo up slightly. Okay, Now we're gonna pull down on the darks a little more. Okay? Que increase the shadows. Okay, I'm happy with that. So we've adjusted our highlights. Our lights are darks and shadows. So we're gonna go to the color tab now, and we're gonna go over toe all which shows every color. So now I'm going to adjust my colors to how I like thumb for a landscape shot. Okay, So, firstly, since there's a lot of orange in this photo and that's really the color of the sun, I'm going to adjust that color. This is the hue. So as you can see, it turns a little bit more orange. Now we're gonna just the yellows. See, I don't like that. That's too green. So let's go back this way. Just like that. Not gonna touch the greens yet, But since there's a lot of orange and blue teal in this photo, we'll focus next on the blues. So that puts a purplish tint. We don't really want that. I want something that's a little more teal. Generally in this tab, I pull the color sliders from one side to the other to really see the impact it's having on the image. So I'm gonna pull this back and make it a little bit more teal. Something like that. Okay, Next, we're gonna move to the saturation. We're gonna add a little bit of punch to the orange, maybe reduce the yellow just slightly and increase the blue sea. That's too much. That's not enough. Read about. So I'm just trying to see how much saturation I want in this photo. Since orange is the primary color here, let's adjust the secondary color of blue and see what that looks like. Okay, that's too much. But d saturates and takes the color away. We don't want that. Let's go about there. Next. We'll go to the loo minutes panel. As you can see, that has a big difference. And what this looks like? That doesn't look good, Kate Boat there. And right there. That brings out a lot of detail of the sun. I like that. Okay. All right, Kate. Now we're done with the coloring. Okay, So next we're gonna add a graduated filter to this. So that's the fourth button over here, The one I just clicked. So let's reset every slider in here by hitting the effect. Here we go. OK, now we just drag down from the top here. Typically, for a landscape photo, you want to put it on the horizon line? What this does is create a Grady int from the bottom of this to the top. Meaning if I trim the exposure, it goes from dark to light, creating a really dramatic effect. In this case, we might actually brighten it up a bit lower. The highlights increase the shadow of Bet To really emphasize a bit more of the sky here and the sun. We can also adjust the color here so I might add some more blue. And as you can see, that's really added some dramatic color shift from orange to blue Here. I'm just going to exaggerate the color in the sky a bit here. So, as you can see, it's like super blue now. Okay, So as we can see, the color on the bridge is also what's in the sky, and we don't necessarily want that. So we're gonna go down here to the range mask We're gonna go to color, grab the eyedropper and click the sky. As you can see, the color has been removed from the bridge. Okay, so we're gonna turn this now, on and off, so you can see what I mean. See, it's blue. Now we're gonna turn it back on, and now it's not. So we've isolated the colored to just the sky, and that's what we want here. We're gonna click. Done now. All right. So now we have this nice Grady int coming from the bottom of the horizon all the way up to the top. We have this orange and this blue. Now we'll go up in a just blue because right now it does not look realistic at all. Go to you about That's too far. Come back to read about. That's good about their All right. I'm happy with that. Done. Next, we'll move on to the lens correction. All right. We're gonna click remove chromatic aberration again and enable the profile corrections. That's gonna brighten up her image and straighten out the bridge a little bit more Now we're gonna go to the radio filter. We're gonna put this over top of the sun to give it a little bit more pop. Generally, I may put one or two for the 1st 1 We have to invert the mask here so that it's on Lee impacting the inside of this circle. So we click this year. Now we can really make the sun pop. Watch this. All right. That's obviously not realistic. So let's roll it back. Kate, that there, let's pull the highlight back. So we get a little bit more definition in the sun. Maybe the shadow up a bit. No, that's okay. Drop the black. Increase the exposure a bit more. Okay. Next, I'd go back down here to the range mask, and I'd click the luminous, and then I next click the show selected mask overlay. So that'll show me where everything is being impacted. And I want this to be less on the bridge and more behind it. So, as you can see, it fades away a bit. Okay, so we'll turn the mask off. Now. This is before and now this is after, See that we've added some brightness to the rays of sun. I'm happy with that. What's finish that off now? We're gonna get out of the radio filter and into the brush. Now that we're in the brush tool, this time we're going to use the brush differently than we did for the portrait. This time, we're gonna use it to emphasize the sun's rays here. And what we're gonna do is add some exposure to this area to make it feel like the sun is coming directly into you. First thing we're gonna do is add some feathering to the brush and maybe decrease the size a little bit and decrease the flow. So it's not so intense. Well, just bump it up a bit so you can see as I'm painting the exposure. So if I just go like this, you can see that it's adding very slightly, gonna increase the exposure just a little bit. I think that's good. It's just subtle, but we're gonna turn it off and on so you can see a difference here. Moving on now. We're finished with this. Next, we're gonna go into the detail tab. We're gonna first check for any noise or grain that might be in the image. So we're just going to zoom in and just scan the image just as we have done in the portrait lesson. There's a little bit of noise in the sky here. A little bit here. A little bit there. Okay, so we're just gonna go up to the sky here where there is the noise, so it's easier to tell. We'll just adjust the luminant slider first. That does a pretty good job. All right, let's keep scanning here, But Okay. Here, we can tell that we need to adjust the color noise that took that away. Let's zoom out. Awesome. This is looking great. This probably could be a finished photo, but I'm gonna take this a little bit further. We're gonna close the detail tab. We're going to just fit this to the screen. Let's go into the basic tab now, and we're going Teoh, crush the blacks a bit to really make it a silhouette there. Okay, Next, we're gonna drop the exposure a bit just to make it more of a silhouette. Very dramatic about there. Okay, now that we have silhouetted the bridge pretty well and the sun looks great and the colors are awesome, I really like this photo. Now. Next, we're gonna crop the image. I think the goal with cropping here is to really bring the sun into focus here. I think it's competing with the bridge and a little bit too much. And since it's framed within here, I think it's really beautiful. So let's scale this down a bit. All right about there. We're just gonna crop a bit more here. All right, Raid about there, it's it done and see what the image looks like. Now. I really like this. The emphasis here is on the sun. As you can tell, the sun is much larger in this image. The bridge is a bit smaller. Looking before this, the bridge was very prominent and we didn't want to take that away from the sun in our foreground here we really wanted to highlight this shadow here and not have anything else distracting from it. It also makes it appears if the sun is coming directly into us here. Adding to that dramatic effect, this line of the bridge runs along the top third and that adds a point of interest in it also keeps you within the photo. I really think the main feature of this is how the sun is framed by these pillars here. I think that is amazing. I can't believe we actually witnessed that. I'm really happy that I continue to explore this area and that we came across this angle and where the sun was just setting right here. I think it turned out fantastic. All right, now that we have a cropped image, we're going to clean up the sky a bit Here. As you can see, there's some dust dots from our camera, So we're just going to zoom in on that. As you can see here, it's just a little dot here that's not desirable. The way we get rid of this is with the clone or he'll to in this case, we're gonna try the hell tool first. And what you want to do with these dots is trying. Keep it just outside of the actual dot for the feather. Okay, that got pretty much rid of everything. Okay, Great. We're just gonna scan the sky here once, just to see if we see anything else. No. Okay, that's good. Done. Okay, so we're gonna really effects tab now. This is where we can out of and yet to the photo. So we're just gonna add a slight than yet show you what it does with the feather. Okay, we're gonna pull that back about there, and now we're going to show the difference. What this creates is a feeling that the sun is really going down as it darkens the edges of the photo. And that really creates a mood and feeling within the photo itself. Now that we've finished this photo and I'm very happy with it, we're gonna show you a little before and after. As you can see in this photo on the left, it's dark, it's bland and it's not stylized. It's lacking color detail, and it's lacking any life to it. If you look on the right here with a little bit of color and working through all the tabs in light room, you're able to really bring photos to life and really change the mood, atmosphere, composition and really anything you want. 28. 29 Editing a Long Exposure in Adobe Lightroom: in this lesson. We're going to use light room again to edit the long exposure photo we took earlier in this course. So we're gonna go ahead and select it here, and we're gonna import it into light room again. Okay, let's move into developed tab. Let's start to talk about what this photo consists of. We're gonna move into the crop tool. This gives us an overlay of the rule of thirds. Okay, First thing we're gonna do is crop the image of it. Okay about there. The point of cropping the image is to align the top right thirds with the curvature of the light trails, which is the primary point of interest in this photo. Next, we're gonna crop the bottom of the image. As you can see here, the light trails go off to the left side of the photo. We want them to line up completely with the bottom half of the photo. So I was gonna bring this up a bit to rate there. We're gonna hit done this now, lines up with the corner, and this leads your eye directly to the spot where we want you to see which is the curvature of the lake trail. This creates better composition in this photo, you may notice that the horizon line here is not on the rule of thirds this line here. Now, that is because the point of interest is this line here. And it's been creative choice that I chose. This guy was kind of boring and there wasn't many clouds, so I decided to really focus in on the leading lines in the Vanishing point and the curvature of the light trails. Okay, now we're gonna jump into the basic tab. First thing we're gonna do is adjust the exposure because this is a really dark scene. As you can tell, there wasn't many street lights, so let's just do that. And we're just gonna exaggerated a bit. So, like there, and you can see that it almost looks as if the sun hasn't gone down yet. And that is because we're working with the raw image. It stores a lot more data than a J peg, and this allows you the flexibility and exposure. We're gonna leave the exposure here for now. We're gonna just the rest of the sliders, and then we'll come back to the exposure afterwards. to fine tune the image. This will allow us to work with shadows a bit easier because this is such a dark image. We need to be able to see what we're doing for now. All right, so let's go ahead and just lower the highlights. As you can see, it looks a little blown out and you can see that the red starts to come into more focus. There's less haze over here. We're gonna up the shadows a bit. And you can really see all the detail there that's in this image. You wouldn't be able to see that with the J. Peg. This is simply because of the raw image. The reason we lower the highlights and increase the shadows is to increase the dynamic range in your photo. This increases the range within the photo from dark to brightness and creates a higher definition image. Okay, Next we're gonna just are whites. We're gonna hit Ault again or option on the PC. Okay, It looks pretty good already. So we actually don't really need to adjust it and moving on to the blacks were gonna do the same thing here. We're gonna bring it down a bit. Just ah, about there. Okay. I like that. Next. We're gonna move on to the clarity. We're gonna increase this a bit. It adds a little punchy nous. You can tell we're gonna just the vibrance up of it and then lower the saturation. But there, all right, I'm satisfied with saturation. We're gonna move on to the color temperature. Now, since it's in a raw state, we have a lot of flexibility and how we can adjust it. Typically, since this is a night scene, I prefer toe make the scene more blue. So let's go ahead and do that okay about right there. Okay, so we're not going to touch the 10 because I don't think that will do anything to add to this photo. So I think we're done with the basic tab. Now we're gonna move on to the tone curve. As I mentioned earlier, we increase the exposure to really see what we're doing in the photo. But since this is a night scene and I want this to look like it's a more at night, we're going to decrease the exposure to the look that I would prefer. All right, so let's move the exposure down a bit. But there, Right there. Okay. Perfect. So next we're gonna go into the cloning, he'll brush to remove these signs. So it's like clone. Okay, First, we're going to zoom in to the sign, All right? We're gonna make the brush just slightly bigger than the sign. That's okay. There. All right. Perfect gun. Next, we're gonna remove MAWR. The other signs here again, adjusting the brush to make it about the size of it. So let's zoom back out. Okay? As you can see, we remove this sign here, and over here, they're kind of distracting to the I. Now that we're done with the healing and clone brush, we're gonna move on to the radio filter. As you can see, these lights are a little bit distracting. They're very bright and the take away from the eye following this line. So what we're gonna try here is putting a radio filter around it. This will be the same process that we used in the landscape photo. Just this time, we're going to be reducing light as opposed to adding light. So we're just gonna put it over top of here like that? We're gonna increase the size slightly. All right, there for their bet. Okay. Okay. As you can see, when I put my cursor over top of this, it shows you what will be impacted in the image. Since we don't want the outside of the radio filter impacted. We have to invert this mask here. Now, this will be impacted on the inside only. All right, let's lower the exposure slightly. You will just increase the shadow slightly. Now we're gonna take down the highlights, so they're not so bright and distracting. Now we're going to turn this often on just so you can see the difference. Here's off. Now, here's on. As you can see, the lights have dimmed slightly. What that does is allow your eye to focus simply on these red lights, which is the primary element in this photo. Okay, now that we're done with the radio filter, we're gonna move on to the tone curve. First thing we're gonna do is increase the highlights to give the entire photo a little bit more pop. All right, we're gonna increase the lights slightly, but there going to decrease the dark's about there. Okay, Now we're going to increase the shadow slightly. Vote there. All right, I'm happy with that. Okay, Now we're going to cycle through the differences here, so this is going to be off now. This is going to be on. As you can see, there's a slight difference. There's a little bit more pop in the red and the image overall in a little little bit more contrast, cause we decrease the darks and increase the lights. But we also increase the shadows of it. All right, let's move on from the tone curve and into the coloring here, we're gonna go right into the red color here, which is here. It shows everything, but we're just gonna work with the Reds here. All I'm going to do is increase the loom in its This is going to increase the brightness of the red just lately. Just adding a little bit more pop. But there. Okay, we're done there. Next thing we're gonna go on to is the lens correction. So we're gonna ruv chromatic aberration and enable profile corrections. This is gonna make our photo a little bit brighter. Okay, done with that. Overall, I like the look and feel of this photo However, I think we can do something to make this road pop a bit more. So what we're gonna do is add some exposure to the actual road by using the brush tool here exactly as we did in the landscape photo. All we're gonna do is paint in some exposure. So what will do? Just so you can see it as I'm painting is add the exposure already, so we're gonna increase it more than we actually would. Well, Deke, decrease the feathering a bit and increase the brush size. Maybe lower for us. Okay? Now, we're just gonna paint in exposure. Kate will increase the size of the brush. Now, let's make sure we're not missing anything, So we're gonna click on the show selected mask overlay. All right, As you can see, I've missed a little bit here, so we're just gonna paint that in, All right? Okay. Let's add in a bit more at the end toe. Plead it. Okay. Now that we've selected all the road, I'd like toe isolate the road itself from the red light trails. The way we do that is by turning on the range mask and setting it to color grabbing the eyedropper. Now we're going to select the road right there. Okay, now that we have the road selected, let's turn the mask off. This will be easier for you to tell the impact. All right? We're gonna turn down the exposure to about there. Let's turn it off and on so you can see the difference that's off. And this is on. Now that we're done with this tool, you'll notice that the road is extremely dark and this makes the red pop. This is exactly what I wanted. Now that we've almost got this to a final state, let's move back into the basic tab to make some final adjustments. First, we're gonna just the exposure slightly just upward. Vote there Next will bring down the shadows slightly, but there and move the blacks a little upward. Okay. But there, noticing a few dust spots in this guy. So we're just gonna go ahead and clean those out. We're going. We went into the hell brush here again. We'll zoom in as you can see this dot Here, let's go like that. Okay. I completed that. It was a small in here. Get rid of that. We're just gonna There's another one there. Right? Scanning across your now. Okay, that's good. Zoom back out. It done fit that to the screen. And lastly, will go into the detail tab and we'll get rid of some of the noise in this image. Okay, so we're just gonna zoom in to where the noise was again. All right, in the sky. Here, we'll just adjust the Luminant slider. Okay, We're at 48 or 50. Okay. Next will reduce some of the color noise by adjusting the color noise. Slider. All right, let's just take a look here, okay? It's done a pretty good job. Now we're going to zoom into the image further so you can tell what's happening when we reduce luminous and color noise. All right, so we'll cycle through this, turning it off and on. So this is off now. This is on again one more time. As you can see, there's a bunch of discoloration here. We can get rid of that easily with just adjusting those sliders. Now, this is on again. There is still a little bit of noise left. However, this is because we're zoomed in. So let's zoom out now. and you can't even tell now, over done with the detail tab. This image is complete. Okay, now we'll click on view and we'll go to the before and after now you can really see the difference here. As you can tell, the before image was shot in the middle of the night. It's very clear that you can't see anything other than the red and white lights. You can't see any of the details in the back. There's no atmosphere to this image. The red lines don't Pappas much in comparison. If you look here, they pop a lot. They're actually the primary feature of this photo. The guide, your eye all the way to the Vanishing point. Second to that, there's a ton of detail in this image. Now you have the grass here on the sides in the background, you can see a lot more of the details. This provides depth in the image. If you look at the before, you can't even notice this back here. Really, all you can see is the red and white in this image. Your eye leads from here all the way through, and then you're looking around the horizon and you're coming back down. So that's a way more complete image. This line here is on the rule of thirds. Again, this is the point of interest. This curved line is very interesting to me. So this is the power of editing your photos. I hope you were falling along with the raw image that we provided. I really encourage you to not just accept this photo is final for you. You should get back into the basic tab and run through everything again and adjusted to whatever you may like. I personally like this image the way it looks, but maybe you have a different take on it. I'd love to see your creative style with any of the three images that we worked with. So feel free to export them and upload them to that Q and A section. And I can't wait to see them just to remind you on how to export. Your photos were gonna right click here on the photo. We're gonna go down to export. We're gonna select this export here, clicking it. The export dialog box appears. We're going to scroll down here. We're gonna make sure the file is exported to the location we want. In this case, it's in the right spot. Now we'll scroll down to check the file settings. All right, The former, It's J. Peg Perfect. You want the quality of 100? Great. That's all we really need to do right now, and now we'll export. 29. 30 Photography Capture Better Images: in this section, we will provide several different photography tips. Let's start with the common idea that most people tend to think they need the best camera or they need a ton of accessories when in reality this isn't true. It all All you need is a camera and the lens. In an understanding of photography fundamentals, I have spoken with many other photographers, and the common theme is that they've purchased a ton of gear that they hardly use. And this is because they typically only use one or two lenses, yet they own several. You can take really great shots with just an entry level DSLR or even your mobile device, often times by having too much equipment. You miss out on a great photo opportunity whose you're too busy setting up the camera and accessories. It's important to understand the type of photography you are first by going out and taking photos instead of worrying about equipment as you're progressing with your photography skills, you'll get to understand the advantages and disadvantages of your equipment, and you will realize when you need to upgrade. If you find your image not visually appealing, often times moving slightly to the left or slightly to the right can improve your composition or the interest in your image. Also, it's important to scan your entire scene just before pressing the shutter button to make sure that you don't have a distracting elements in the background. Take many photos so you have more options during editing. Inform a habit of reviewing all of them to try and determine how you could make the photo better Or more interesting, Think about picking more interesting subject matters, which can be done by traveling to a new area in your city where you aren't used to your surroundings. This will force you to think more creatively. I live in Toronto, for example, which is a large multicultural city, and this provides me with a variety of photography opportunities simply by traveling to different areas in the city. I can capture many different interesting images most of the time simply by separating your subject from the background. We're changing your angle to create a sense of depth will result in a much better image. Don't have distracting images in your frame. Keep things simple, clean backgrounds. Keep your lens clean by always having a micro fiber cloth handy so that if you notice your lens is dirty, you can quickly clean it. Get used to checking your lens, often as certain shooting environments can introduce dust or unwanted marks on your lens. And ultimately in your images, you can purchase micro fiber cloths inexpensively at your local camera store or online. Be prepared. You'll need to have backup batteries or an extra memory card to make sure you're able to continue taking photos instead of running out of card space or power. Because your battery died, the same goes for being prepared. If there is poor weather, take with you Ziploc bags, garbage bags or a poncho, just in case it starts to rain and you need to protect your gear. Everyone has a busy life in their own regard, so plan ahead in scheduling time to shoot on a weekly basis. So let your always practicing and progressing. Another thing to consider here is doing research on events and keeping an eye on the weather forecast. Often times just before or after. A storm creates amazing opportunities to capture great images, usually because the sky looks very interesting and dramatic. As a reminder. Shooting during the hour before and after sunrise and sunset provides optimal natural lighting conditions. Think of photography as telling a story. Leverage the composition, lighting subject matter and the actions, and you're seen to express a vision. You have, for example, a close up of two people holding hands where one hand is of an elderly person and the other is of a child. This tells a dynamic story that anyone can associate with in summary, all of these tips or suggestions to help you think about your photography and to help you experiment to become a more versatile and experienced photographer. 30. 31 David Paul's Creative Process Featuring a Silhouette: every photographer will come up with their own creative process. And I'm gonna take you through a couple of my photos just to give you some more tips off the cost of how I think in the moment I went to this location with the idea of shooting the CN Tower. This is looking westward, and the sun always sets in the West, so looking east, there would be a nice glow on the city skyline. However, I noticed that the sun was setting in between the two buildings, so it kind of added an element of framing that I thought was super interesting. And as you'll notice, I happened to capture this guy walking, framed within the building itself and then a frame within the actual bridge. And then the sun was setting and there was a silhouette, and I captured his shadow very nicely coming rate in towards me, and I thought that was just something spectacular. So I really thought it was going to get something else and then ending up getting something completely different is pretty normal. It's actually probably the most normal thing to happen. You think one thing and something else happens, that's just kind of photography, and that's just kind of life in a lot of ways. What I'm really doing here is just paying attention to my surroundings and ensuring that I'm looking around at everything that's happening. So be open to your surroundings. Make sure that you really immerse yourself in what you're doing. And I always say that you dedicate some time that is specifically to shooting and nothing else that makes you focus in and really captured things you want. And it will make it more enjoyable because you're gonna actually get a shot that you love. What was really intriguing to me in this spot was shooting the shadows. Coming at me specifically, something to do with photography is shooting shadows in a certain way, this long shadow That only happens while the sun is super low in the sky throughout the day . You can follow your shadow as it goes short when the sun is high and really long when the sun is low. So that's another really good tip. You could be in a really boring spot at noon, but come sundown, it becomes amazing simply because of the shadows itself. So don't think that some spots air bad. You know, it might be something you visit at a different time of the day, and it may be to be absolutely magical. So don't limit yourself. A lot of people shoot away from the sun for whatever reason, I enjoy shooting right into it. I enjoy silhouette ing people shooting in a certain lighting that creates. That is when that sun is really low in the environment is longer shooting directly towards the sun and your subjects right in front of you. You should be getting a silhouette as long your settings are correct. Of course, you'll also notice that the colors in this photo, the blues and the oranges reflect onto the ground. It gives it a mood as you can see the lights hitting on the railings here as well. It kind of adds mawr to the scene itself, gives it more color, gives them or atmosphere. Another interesting element in this photo that I really enjoy is this light around the subject himself. It's almost like a glow that encompasses his entire body in some way, just like a light around. His body is not encompassing him completely. Just the silhouette and it really exemplifies him as the subject, but it also adds to the highlights that are on the railings and also on the tracks in the background, as you can see as well. So it's almost gives it some depth. So it's really awesome. I enjoy this. 31. 32 David Paul's Creative Process Featuring a Waterfall: for this photo, I had to come prepared. The reason I chose to talk about this waterfall photo was actually because I think there's a large disconnect between how to use long exposures. So in the longer exposure lesson in this course, we taught you how to create light trails with your camera, and in this instance you're going to use the same process. It's literally the exact same. Just It smooths out the water because the water is moving very quickly, as you can see. If you look down into the river bed here as well, you can see rocks very clearly in the water where the water's not moving, but you look to the right of the photo with waters rushing down the side. Here, you can see that motion coming through here. It'll be displayed as like, white and kind of greenish in a way, but also on the waterfall itself. That's the effect that happens with motion blur from water. It's kind of this soft look, so I'm just gonna go over again my settings here, cause I know a lot of people are really interested in how to capture a waterfall. So I was at I s 0 100 f 7.1 with a shutter speed. And this is the key to capturing this waterfall. This way. My shutter speed was 1.6 seconds. That was for this scene specifically to smooth out water, you typically need it for about half a second to a second and 1/2. It all depends on how fast the water is actually moving. I had to take a few test shots also because I had to capture the river in front of me as well. So there was a little bit mawr to consider than just the water in the waterfall itself here . So that's how he captured this. Now you need that longer exposure to make sure that the water smooth and that you're not capturing it at, say, 14 thousands of a second, which you would just capture the water as you're seeing it with your eye longer. Shutter really allows you to smooth out that water and get that really dreamy, awesome soft water look that everyone's looking for. If you're out traveling and your I don't beautiful waterfall somewhere in Thailand or something like that, use this exact principle test your settings and make sure that you take a bunch of test shots to really figure out how to get the impact that you want. And remember, the most important key here is your shutter speed. You need it to be longer than, say, half a second. Also, another really key element to this photo is that you really need to make sure you're setting a timer, a two second timer, a five second time or a 12th timer. Whatever it may be to ensure that you don't have any camera shake when you're taking this type of photo, remember, a camera needs to be still, it can't move at all, or else your picture will be blurry. You're not gonna get this in one go. You have to really take several shots to make sure that you're capturing everything in the scene properly. So maybe one shot you overexposed the sky, maybe the other one. The water is not blurred out enough, and then you get to choose your kind of happy medium between the two, so just keep that in mind when you're shooting this type of photo, it's really important. I'm gonna hammer that in here you have to set a timer, and you absolutely have to use a tripod or if you can find a really stable surface that safe. But I would highly highly recommend you using a tripod here. 32. 33 David Paul's Creative Process Featuring Reflections: now that we've gone over a silhouette at a sunset and we've also gone over a waterfall, There are many ways to get creative, just using everyday elements that you have on. You say you're carrying a water bottle. For example, in these two photos, the 1st 1 here on the left, I took this shot while we were filming. For this course of Allie, you could be really creative. Pouring water on any surface will make it reflective. And the way you actually get it to be reflective in the way that I have captured it here, is you actually put your camera on the ground rate in front of that puddle itself. Say you put your camera into live use. You can see it on the little LCD screen because it's gonna be right on the ground itself that only get easier to see what you're doing. The point here is that you can take in everyday location and turn into something great, and you can also just create a really good photo anywhere simply by pouring water onto the ground. So it's just another way that you can be creative. Don't think twice about the water ball in your pocket. You can use that or anything with you. You can try and incorporate that into your photographs. I recommend trying this technique out with your reflections at night time because I find that the contrast of dark and light in your reflection make the reflection a lot more prominent, a lot more interesting. For example, I took this photo at night. It was super dark out. I found a really reflective surface. I noticed that the bright lights of this overpass bridge was quite bright, and I thought it would be a really interesting element for the lines with the people walking across. And I just happened to get really lucky with this person falling rate in between these two people, which kind of added a different element of intrigue. There's a lot of questions you could ask yourself, with someone coming in between you and so on and so forth, and then a reflection itself, being something you'd have to do as a person. So to say I've gone deep on the reflection here is an understatement. I would say you want to highlight your subjects within. That puddle is well, so the puddle can be just a accent, but it can also help highlight what's important in your photo. 33. David Paul's Creative Process Featuring Fast Shutter Speed: I went to a beach in Toronto called Ontario Place to get this shot, and I was really looking for something unique in this spot. The sun was melting a lot of the ice. There's a lot of elements of, like fire and ice in this photo, which something, I guess you could say, is popular to shoot. And this water was just dripping down continuously, and I noticed that the sun was also framed. So I started shooting that. Then I start to think to myself, What if I could capture that droplet in perfect focus and captured just below the horizon or just below it? As I was taking the shot, I realized it was difficult to get the focus, so I was experimenting with different techniques to adjust manual focus. It dawned on me that I could focus on the tip of the ice, and as the water was dripping down, I needed to use a really fast shutter speed to make sure that since the water droplet was dropping really quickly, it was really difficult to capture it somewhere before the horizon. Initially, I wanted to capture the droplet within the sun, but that wasn't working out. So what I did was just move it to the side of it and try and interplay it as like a balancing between the sunset and the actual droplet itself. So with patience and probably several 100 shots after reviewing these photos later because it was really difficult to see if I got in focused within the viewfinder. I got the shot a few times, maybe five or six times in different ways. So I was very happy about that. And this is something you can use another technique. So you want to free something on the subject, and you notice that it's say it's a wave crashing up against a rock. Focus on the Rock. Don't keep trying to focus on the wave Focus on the rock. So it's just another way of thinking about doing something creative within the environment you're in. So I took something that was just a droplet coming down, and I thought of a interesting wavin incorporating it into a sunset. Okay, so I really hope you enjoy these tips, and I hope you can incorporate thes into your photographic journey. Please enjoy them and please feel free to share them with us in the question and answer section and continue to expand your creativity with these tips 34. Final Thoughts and Inspiration: Okay. Welcome back in this section will give some final thoughts, ideas and inspiration regarding how to think. Have fun and be proud of the images you create on your photography journey. This journey is a part of who you are. In your unique perspective, thinking and planning is a being part of taking your photography game to the next level. You give yourself context or reason to shoot. You will start to think that way while you're shooting. If the weather forecast says it's going to rain, you can start thinking about how people will be reacting to these weather conditions. In this example, people will most likely have umbrellas because it's raining, and these smaller details in your scene help communicate the mood or atmosphere and creates more of a story for your viewers. I want you to be thinking about the photo. You want to take a step away from the idea of just snapping a photo to snap a photo. Be patient, calm, visualize the scene, have an idea in mind and make sure you are present and aware what's happening around you and in your scene. Think about how to capture it. Photography is an art, and it's unique to your own experience. Think about the past experiences in your life and how they've come to shape who you are today. Your unique perspective gives you the ability to see the world differently. Sometimes you may find yourself lacking inspiration. We're being frustrated with photography. This is perfectly normal. This still happens to me as an established photographer. The creative process often involves uncertainty, and this should be expected. Through my experience, I've realized sometimes you simply can't get the photo you were hoping for. This could be for a variety of reasons, such as the weather changed, subjects in your scene's changed or the location just isn't that great. The point here is if you stop and think you can change the situation and find a way to make it work by thinking outside of the box with some final thoughts. I would like to remind you that photography is about having fun, exploring new environments, seeing the world differently, interacting with people, and ultimately it's about your creative expression. So make your photographic journey your own and remember, reach out in the question and answer section. Let us know how your journey is going? We're here to help. And don't forget about all of the pdf resources we have attached in this course with that being said, Congratulations on making it to the end of the course and thank you for enrolling. You now have all the knowledge required to take your photo game to that next level. So congratulate yourself for completing the course. So get out there. Never leave your camera behind and taken many photos as you can. Because, as Wayne Gretzky said, you miss 100% of the shots you never take. He was a photographer, right?