Photography for beginners - made simple

1. Introduction: Hi there. In this class, I will teach you the basics of photography. You see, when I started out myself, I got really confused about technical stuff. So I wanted to say that out and make it super simple for you to go out and shoot as soon as possible. My name's Alex and I'm a full time travel photographer. I've been doing this for quite a while now, but I've been shooting photos my entire life. I think everyone should be able to capture photos and make memories that last and eternity. So that's why I want to share my knowledge with you so you can get out there and learn photography. This class is for beginners. If you have never touched a camera before, this is definitely the class video. If you touch it before, maybe there are some tools and tips that you didn't know already, so we could probably learn something as well. You don't even need to have more than just your smartphone, but having an actual camera definitely helps. Throughout this class, I will teach you about the basic settings, light, shutter speed, aperture, ISO, how to get ready for shooting as fast as possible. What kind of lenses you need, the composition if you need a tripod and then some bonus lessons on specifics about landscapes, portraits, and products. So as you can see, we will cover all the basics and get you ready to shoot photography. You need to practice. It doesn't just come by listening to what I'm saying. And that's why I've prepared a class project that helps you apply what you learn in the class. Width, going out shooting yourself and thereby learning. Instead of only listening, you don't need to take any amazing photos with these lessons. You just need to apply the knowledge that you learned and put it in your fingers, put it into action and I'm sure it'll help you before we jump into all of that, I have a short lesson helping you determine what kind of camera you need from the beginning if you haven't gotten one ready. So hope to see you in the next class and I'm super excited to teach you Photography and have you with me for this journey. 2. Class Project: Alright, let me explain to you what the class project for this class is. Essentially the only way to get better at photography and the way to learn it is to go out and do it. So in this class project, that's exactly what you're going to do. I want you to go out and shoot seven different photos and you can do it. Now. Basically, I would recommend you wait till later. You can do throughout the course, or you can do it at the end when you've learned everything that this course and this class in sales. First of all, the first two photos that I want you to shoot is based around shutter speed. So the easy way to do it is to put your camera into shutter priority and then play around with the shutter speed. I want you to try and shoot with a low shutter speed. It can be 1 second, it can be one hour, 20, but don't go higher than 120. Putting in shutter priority, we'll just make sure that the camera takes care of all those settings that you have. And if you don't know what shutter priority is on the camera, It's the one that's called T. So the second shot I want to shoot is with a high shutter speed. And the idea behind this exercise is that you get to understand what and how the shutter speed influences your camera and your photo. I want you to shoot a moving subject because that's where the shutter speed becomes more. And now you don't have to go out and shoot anything in particular doesn't have to look good. It's basically just for you to understand how the camera works and how it influences your photos. So what I want you to do is just go out and your street, wait for a car to pass by. Shoot one photo, Let's say when I was 20 and then wait for another car to pass by and shoot one over a thousand if you can do that, if you have enough light, otherwise go a bit lower, but go at least like one or 200, right? So that's for the first exercise for the shutter speed. Now the second one is for Aperture. And I want you to understand with this one how it works and how you create depth of field. So take an object, it can be anything basically, let's say a pair of outputs or something like that. Whatever you have your phone, something, put it up in the scene. And for the first shot, you want to have the aperture as low as your camera allows you to. If you have a kid lands, it might be a fall, it might be a 4.5. That's completely fine. Put your camera as close to the subject that you can, the object, whatever, and focus on the object with the low aperture. And then for the second shot you want to keep the aperture at a higher number. So do if a to F 11, but trying to keep the same distance from the object. And I'll take a little bit you to photos and see what difference it makes in terms of how blurry the background is and how the aperture influences the photo. And as we get into the aperture lesson, there also know that this is highly subjective setting on your camera. So this is just to teach you how it influences your photo and how you can make your subjects stand out, but also how you can get a lot more in focus in the shots. So just to recap to one photo with the lowest number aperture that you can. So f 1.8 is 2.8. If for whatever your lens can do, It's all good, It's perfectly fine. And for the second shot, try to shoot FA F 11, maybe go a little bit higher, but if 11, if H should be fine, just to see how it influences your photo and how you get a lot more in focus when you go with the higher number and how you have way less in-focus when you go with the low numbers. Now for the font size is ISO. I wanted to go somewhere where there's not a lot of light. And I want you to shoot two photos. I want you to shoot one that is ISO 100, or the lowest ISO number that your camera can go. Usually for my cameras, at least the canon, It's been 100. And just shoot a photo with that. Just see how everything is not that noisy and how it works out. Well now that you're in a dark place, you want to shoot something with higher ISO. And the idea behind this exercises that you get an understanding of how the ICER works. We'll go more into that in the lesson of course. But it's essentially to teach you and make you understand how much noise your camera producers with a high ISO tries to go an ISO of two thousand, four thousand just to get an image that shows you how much noise you get in that certain situation. And it's basically just an idea of pushing your cameras boundaries and levels. We can also do more shots in between like ISO eight hundred, four hundred. Just to kind of get an understanding on where the noise level is, I'll talk more about the ISO in the lesson about that and why shouldn't be afraid of it? As a lot of photographers tend to put fear into new beginners. But that's the third exercise. So two photos with ISO, as low as possible. So 100 probably, and one with the highest. So it can be ISO 800 up to maybe 4 thousand, just to see where the noise level is. Now, for the last photo, put everything together that you've learned about shutter speed, aperture, and ISO, and composition for the composition, listen and try and play around with the best possible shot that you can get. If it's a moving subject, if it's a product, it fits a subject like a person. Just try and go out and play around with it, get it nice composition with some depth of field and makes sure that your shutter speed is set correctly, your aperture and your ISO in terms of the kind of photo that you want to capture. Now I want you to upload the last photo, the composition further away, you put everything together into the class project. I want you to do a short description of what your idea was and how the experience went throughout this exercise. So help you. What was your experience with focusing on the different features, the different settings, and how did it help the last photo that you took, the composition photo, how did they actually make your photo better or worse for that manner, if that's the case. And I'll throw that to the project folder and I'll give you some feedback in terms of the photo and in terms of your intentions. And maybe it has some tips on how you can improve that as well. So that's the class project for this class, and I'm super excited to see what you create. But first and foremost, I just really hope that you wanted to do this exercise with me because it just brings out a loved one standing for your camera. And it's not about creating something super beautiful. This for these exercises, It's more just understanding your camera. Because when you understand your camera, when you understand the settings and when you start to shoot different things. Even though it's not the prettiest than the wealth. That's when you learn to understand your camera. That's when you allow your creativity to become it with the camera. So as soon as you understand the settings and how they influence your photo, you'll be much more comfortable in the field and you'll get the shots and the photos that you want. Instead of playing around with the settings and not really knowing what you're doing. So I hope you want to play along. I'm super excited to see what you create and what ends up in the project folder. So I'll see you in the next lesson where you jump into the class. 3. Cameras Choosing The Right One: In this lesson, we are just briefly talking about how to choose the right camera for you. And a common saying, a common question is, does schemata? And as soon as you start taking really nice photos, the first question that always comes as, you must have such great camera. And in all honesty, that doesn't really matter. You don't make a really good omelette because you have a really nice pen. We probably make it pretty good omelette because you're pretty good at making food and you know the recipe and you know how to do everything, right? So the gear does matter in some degree. But when you're just starting out, It's all about just learning the settings and learning how to work the camera. And then when you know that, then you start to have your creativity to do and to form the kind of content that you want or the kind of photos that you want to create. So there are three questions that you should ask yourself. What is your budget? What do we want to shoot and how much do we want to bring with you? So for the first one, what is your budget? Are you just starting out and you know nothing about photography really. This class is definitely for you, but I'll suggest that you just start out with what you have. If you have a phone with a great camera or just bone in camera, basically, that's all fine to begin with. You can also buy a entry-level camera, and I have one right here. Is a Canon 5D. A great camera to begin with. It's portable and go out and shoot. You can change the lenses, you can do all that. So that's a budget friendly camera. But there's no reason and going out to invest everything into camera because you won't produce good photos before you understand the different settings and before you worked, you can obtain good photos photography in general, it's just a skill that takes time. You need to learn from your mistakes and you need to go around and play around with it basically. And I know from my own experience that going out and buying a lot of gear will not make your photos great. So that's why I'm telling you that. Now the second one is, what do we actually want to shoot? Because if you want to shoot something like street or landscape that usually has a wide crop, or you want to go in and shoot something details like close up. Then an iPhone or any phone with a good camera, which is the decent camera, basically will be more than fine because usually those cameras have a wider lens and that's usually what you want to go for, especially for street and landscape, and that's usually fine for shooting portraits as well. On the other hand, you want to shoot something like sport of birds. We need to come in obese, most zoomed in. Even though the software in our phones these days are pretty good at handling these kinds of things and assuming it's a digital zoom. So it basically means the same as if you take a photo with your camera and you then crop in, just take out the middle of the photo. That's basically the same as what the phone does when you start zooming because There's no actual moving parts in the camera on your phone. It's just the sensors and then you have different ones. So maybe you have a tilt Zoom or Zoom links on your phone, and then you go to two or three x and that's it. And it still produces a good photo. But as soon as you try to zoom in more than the quality becomes lower and lower. And even though software tries to help you, It's not ideal, at least from my perspective. So if you're going to shoot birds or sport or something like that, then you might consider getting an entry-level camera with a tiller zoom lens and we'll get more into focal lengths and assumes later on in the lenses lesson. But just consider that watching wants to shoot. Then the last question is, what are you going to bring with you? So depending on your situation and what kind of photography wants to do, he wants to do travel photography and you're going to travel a lot and have your gear with you, fine. You can go and invest in a lot of gear if that's what you want. But if you are considering going, let's say shooting everyday stuff, then you might need to bring something lighter and you might not want to carry around a big camera bag with a lot of gear all the time. So in that case, a phone is more than fine. A common saying is the best camera is the one that you bring with you. So if you just have your phone with you, then that's probably more than fine. If you want to buy an entry-level camera. That's actually why I bought this one, the M5, this because it's just a small one, It's slide and with this lens on, it doesn't weigh a lot. It doesn't take up a lot of space in my bag, so I can always bring it with me and I can just snap some photos if I want that. But to be honest, most of the time I ended up shooting with my phone, I just recently started to take on this camera or more and use it more because as I'll show you right here, my phone has gaffer tape on it right now and that's because it was in a bit of an accident and the main camera is broken. So this is not the best camera that I have with me because it doesn't work. So I go to the second best, which is a little more inconvenient to bring around and actual camera, but it's still better than bringing around what I'm recording on here, which is a candidate R6 and a big lens. And I have different lenses for it and it's always a hassle when I have to bring around with my camera bag. If I'm just going out with, let's say going shopping or going to a cafe. Don't necessarily want to bring all that gear with me. It's easier to just bring a small camera and I don't know if I'm going to shoot anything, but they don't have that small one with me. Now if I'm going on trips, then I'll bring the big camera. And the big camera, essentially, it doesn't necessarily take much better pictures than the small one. It's just more convenient because the autofocus is better. The settings is easier to dial in. I don't have to use the touchscreen as much as I do on the small camera. But essentially, it's not that big of a difference, at least in terms of composition and story, then we can talk quality, but we're just starting out this new idea in investing in such a lot of money in a camera. Let's just recap. Consider your budget, how much they're willing to spend. Do you already have a camera that can learn on? Great, I'll suggest probably that you get a small, cheap, affordable camera just to learn the settings and to start dialing that in, because that's where your phone will help you out a lot more. You won't necessarily get the understanding of the settings and how the camera actually works. But if you don't want to do that and you just want to get started with shooting and play around with compositions, then the phone is smaller than fine. Secondly, what they want to shoot. If you want to shoot things where you need to zoom in more, I would highly suggest that you get a camera and a lens that can do that. But if you just want to shoot wide landscapes, you can get any camera, basically get one with a wide lens or you can just use your phone that's more than fine. Then the last question, what are you going to bring with you? Would you always have your phone with you? Consider just starting with that. I will not going to bring around the camera and actually gotten shooting than there might not be an idea and actually buying that. It can be fun for the weekends if you want to go out. But just consider this. Your phone will still take amazing pictures. So don't be scared of using that when you go out, even though you've bought a camera that you've just left the home, the most important thing is to go shoot photos, to go learn different compositions, different techniques, different styles, and get better. That's the only way, basically to learn photography. Now with all that said, let's jump into the good stuff. And for the next lesson, we'll jump into first the basic settings and then into the more essential settings of the camera. So I'll just see you in the next lesson. 4. Basic Settings: In this lesson, I want to walk through just a few basic, essential settings that you need to know of before we jump into the three main settings that you need to know. The first one I want to talk about is white balance. White balance is essentially how cool or how warm your photo is. So if it's very warm, you will see all the tones and if it's very cool, you'll see more blue tones. And now you want to get this right in terms of your white balance. Otherwise your photo will look weird. And personally, when I started out, sometimes I got the white balance wrong. And that's an I didn't figure out that was what was wrong. So I tried to fiddle around with the settings and trying to get all the colors corrected and stuff on solar realized that it was just the white bands. Now there's different ways to go about this. So a common way to do it is just to shoot all the white balance, which means that your camera is just deciding on the white balance itself, depending on the situation and most often it does a pretty good job. Now, one thing that I will say is that if you shoot auto white balance, it means that the camera determines itself, as I've just said, but also means that it will change throughout the scene, throughout the day, throughout wherever you're shooting. And while that might be fine if the camera is doing good job, it might be a little bit annoying when you come into the editing process afterwards, because if you have a lot of photos, let's say you shoot a wedding or something like that. You have a lot of photos and you want to change all of them. But maybe the camera didn't get it quite right and it changes a little bit, then you had to change all the photos individually. But if you set your camera to shoot in one specific white balance, then you don't have that problem anymore because now all the photos will have the same strength in terms of like how warm, how cool it is, and that makes up for any changes that you might do. So when you come into the editing, you can just select a lot of photos and then adjust the white balance however you like, then that might help you out. In the end, I realized this at some point and from there on, I haven't shot auto white balance very often. Now, I wouldn't suggest that shoot where to custom white balance because that means that you have to learn what Calvinists and how the different things are with that. But you can run most often has different, a few different settings on boats that you can shoot in in white balance, you should have something like daylight, shade, cloudy, something like that. And daylight, I find works most often. So you can just choose daylight and then the camera will still do some work for you, but it'll be more consistent in what it does because you've already told it what kind of environment you're shooting in. Remember if you're shooting raw, or at least when you're shooting photos, you can always change the white balance afterwards in your editing software. So it's no big deal if she were all white balance, if you select the wrong one, you can change that up. Just be aware that the white balance is a pretty significant setting that you need to be aware of. The second thing that I want to talk about before we jump into the main settings is raw vs JPEG. And I think we will hear this a lot depending on causes and people that you talk with. And most common thing is shoot Roy always wants to shoot RAW. Now there are a few different scenarios where you want to shoot JPEG. Let's say you're shooting for a client or someone and they want the photos immediately like they need to use them now, shooting a sporting event. The client wants a now so they could post something live as the sporting event is happening. You don't want to shoot RAW in this case because if you should run in this case, you will have to edit the photos and you don't have time to edit the photos when you're in the field, when you need to shoot more photos, and it just takes too long for the clients again. Now this is like a small portion of scenarios where that will happen. So my recommendations will still be always shoot role because it gives you a lot more information in your photo. If you don't know what row means, it basically just means that your camera shoots in a more flat, less contrasty profile, but it captures a lot more information. So you have a lot more room to edit. You get into the editing software to explain it really quickly and really easily if you shoot a photo and it's overexposed, meaning that the bright areas are way too bright. So there's no detail. You can see the clouds in the sky because it's just all white. If you shoot in JPEG, you might be able to save some of it, and you might be able to save all of it depending on your camera and depending on how we're exposed to shut the photos. But if you shoot RAW, that's a even higher chance that you might be able to save it by just bringing down the highlights and then bringing back the information, bringing back the details into the sky because the camera actually captured those details. It just doesn't show it from the first initial view that you get a few further in terms of the exposure. So if you're joining ball, you get a lot more detail. You get a lot more information into your file, and that will help you work with the file later. And then you have to do a little bit more work and the editing. But to be honest, it gives a lot more flexibility, at least from my perspective, and makes it a lot more fun to edit because you have a lot more room to work. So my recommendation, shoot in one of the white balance modes, daylight, shade, wherever you are in, I'll just choose one and always shoot in that. And then the white balance in post and shoot raw in as many situations as you can because it just helps you later on with files a little bit bigger and you have to do a little bit more work, but it's definitely worth it. And if you're thinking won't be doing much editing and stuff in the beginning. Trust me, when you look back at your photos years ahead, you wish you've shut them, enroll at this point in time because it makes it possible to re-edit them. When you've gotten better at your editing skills and you're now more comfortable with that, then you can read them and probably get some really amazing edits out of your photos that you weren't capable of doing when you just started. So should roll. In all the situations that you can. If you are in a situation where you can suggest that it should roll and JPEG, because then you have both. You have the roster later when you want to do your own editing, your own style, when that changes. And you have the jpegs, if you are going to deliver that to a client immediately. What J peg means is basically just the camera puts a color set on the photo immediately and chooses that for you. And it's more or less just ready to go out of the camera. You're going to still edit it, definitely, but it's more ready to go out of camera. Alright, so having these two things in place, now we come to the really good stuff, the exposure triangle. And what the triangle is, is consisting of three corners. It's the shutter speed, the aperture, and the ISO. Because it's a big topic. Each of them, I've decided to split it up in three different lessons. We'll start by jumping into the shutter speed and talking about that. Then we'll jump into the aperture and focus and then we'll jump into the ISO at last before we continue with other themes in this class, I'm super excited to help you out with understanding these settings as these are the main things that you need to know with working with a camera. I'll just see you in the next lesson. 5. Light: Alright, this lesson before we dive into the exposure triangle, I just briefly want to talk about light. This is not a technical course, I said before, but we just need to understand quickly what light is in this case, of capturing a photo. So essentially, without being technical, the camera captures light and you can look up on the internet what that means if you are interested in that, personally, to me, it just confused me more than it ever helped me. So I won't go into that and I still don't really understand exactly what it does. But it's capturing light. And what that means for us as a user of the camera, as a photographer, is that you will need light in your scene to take a photo. And essentially, it's the most important thing to know at all and to understand is how light affects the photo. So when you're out shooting and you're shooting in different conditions, then the light will have influence on how the image looks. If you're shooting in bright sunlight, middle, middle of the day, there's no clouds, the sun and the light will be very harsh and it will look very, very contrasty. So there'll be clean cut between what's dark and what's bright, and that doesn't look too flattering and to analyze in terms of photos. So what do you see a lot of people shoot often is at sunset or sunrise because the light is more soft. Now if you have a cloudy day as well, that can work because the clouds kind of cover the very harsh light and that helps us well. But of course, if we're trying to capture light, the more light, the more we have to work with. So in case of that, that also depends on the day of the time that you shoot and what you're trying to achieve. Just a brief example for you is that if you are in a room that's really dark, there is nothing much to see, right? You can remind actually be able to capture more than you think, but it still needs just a little bit of light. So this is an example of a very dark room. You can see there's almost no light and therefore there's almost nothing to capture. Now on the other hand, this is a very, very bright room. And depending on the settings on the camera, we can definitely work with this. But just for this example, this is what happens when there's too much light let into the camera. It all just becomes wide and overexposed and it doesn't look very nice. It's no details. It just looks like there's too much light basically. Now when we're just starting up. Because the way you want to capture light can be subjective. But when you're just starting out, we actually have some tools in our camera to help us determine if there's enough light in the scene or if there's too little. And the camera is doing a pretty good job of doing this in this day and age. And if you just get these settings right, then you can do a lot in post in the editing to work with the photo as how you like it. If you want, like a bright light field or if you want this more moody dark tones that you often see an Instagram, especially if you're following any landscape photographers. But the tool in our camera to help us, it's called the light meter. And basically it ranges from usually 0 and up to plus three and minus three. And it shows how the exposure is in the camera right now. So what you want to aim for, especially when you're starting out, is to have that in the middle in 0. That is the camera telling you. Now I think that the photo, the scene is correctly exposed in terms of what you're focusing on, in terms of what is in the scene. And the more harsh light and contrast and shadows that have, the more difficult it might be for your camera to determine what the right exposure is, but that is where row again comes in. You have a lot more information, so you are probably more likely to actually save the photo afterwards if you happen to shoot too much in one or the other direction. But just as a really nice guideline to begin with, the light meter probably at the bottom of your screen or your viewfinder, whatever you're looking in, will show you where you are to each side. You can shoot a little bit underexposed, which means that you go into the minus side or you can shoot a little bit overexposed, which means that you go into the plus side. Now, usually what can be difficult to recover in post the details in the shadows, some people shoot a little bit overexposed. But then if you have really, really bright scene, then you might want to shoot a little bit underexposed to maintain some more detail. The highlights in the bright areas of your photo. Now, it's just important to understand that light influences what we should. And when you look in a scene, try and look at the light and how it plays around. If you're shooting a landscape where the sunlight come from, if it comes from behind, you're more likely to get like a nice glow. If you're shooting directly towards the sun, then everything will do a little bit more contrast it because there's a lot of light lead directly into the camera. Is shooting portraits, shooting this shape. That's more policing because there's not a lot of contrast and there's not a lot of light-like influencing the photo, but just to get you started, the light meter is your friend. When you get more advanced, you can just look at the image and there are some other tools as the histogram and stuff that has a little bit more advanced to understand. So the light meter is your friend. Start by using that. And then as you get more comfortable, look into the histogram, we know your settings, then you are able to play around with the light a lot more. So that was just a quick talk about light and how important that is for your photo and for your understanding. Now let's jump into the next lesson where we will start talking about shutter speed. 6. Shutter Speed: Welcome to this lesson on shutter speed, and now we'll go through how the first corner shutter speed of the exposure triangle influences your photo. Now, shutter speed actually refers to speed in different ways in your camera. So first of all, it's determining how long the shutter in your camera is open and thereby how much light you let into your camera. So it's basically, you can think of it a little bit like blinking. If you're just pulling in quickly, you just see a moment really quick. If you keep your eyes open for longer time, you'll let a lot more information enlightened. So just a quick reference. But essentially what it means is that when the shutter is closed, there's no light into the camera. But then when it opens, the shutter, light is let in and then the closest it again, then it stops. Now, if you have a shutter speed of, let's say 1 second, then it means that it opens the shutter for 1 second and then close it again. Now if you shoot high shutter speed like one over thousand will go really quick. Now, it's much faster than what I can do. It's one-one thousandth of a second, but thereby also its name. So the other way that it influences is that of course, if you have a lot of light in your scene, it allows you to do a higher shutter speed because it opens quickly and it doesn't let a lot of light. And now if you have a really dark scene, it can be difficult to shoot with a high shutter speed because there's not a lot of light in the room already. So if you just open up really quickly and close it again, it doesn't have a lot of light, so let into the camera. So that's usually when you shoot with a lower shutter speed. Now, let's say you shooting a runner, someone who's moving speed actually also is in that way affecting your photo in terms of the shutter speed. So when you're shooting someone who's running, they are moving in the scene. And if you shoot with a slow shutter speed, meaning that let's say 1 second, it's opening and then it's closing again. You also capturing a lot of movement as the run-on will run through the scene. That will make the Ronald look very blurry. Now if Schubert a high shutter speed, let's say one or 2 thousand, you just capturing that split second of the moment that the runner is running. And that makes him look really sharp and really crisp. Went out the other day and I shut few examples for you to see how the shutter speed works. The first photo we have here, I shot with one over 20. And you can see that the guy in the scooter is quite blurry because we have him moving to what's awesome past us. I tried to capture in with a lower shutter speed, and that just means that he is blurry and we've kept too much motion. I move up that you can see the different shutter speeds that I've shot with here. Let's look at one over 100. That's a lot better, but it's still not perfect as he is moving. And I'm also holding the camera, which also influences the movement because not only is he moving, but I'm also moving in camera. And even though I'm trying to hold the camera where it's still it's still moves a little bit because I'm a person and I'm briefing and everything, and I just can't keep it completely still. So let's say we move up a lot higher on the shutter speed. You can see that the high shutter speed first, we have here both the car and the scooter is in-focus and it is sharp because we've only captured a brief moment. And that's when does that kind of like how we've just frozen the moment in time and be frozen the movement as well. Now it's not always bad to shoot with a low shutter speed. So we have a few different examples. But if you shoot a grant landscape somewhere where there's no movement at all, It's fine shoot with a low shutter speed, it doesn't really matter that much. But I will say if you shoot hand-held, you still have some movement in your hands. So consider that. That's why I recommend you shoot with a shutter speed of one over 100. Always if you shoot hand-held, That's that's be the lowest that you go because that will counterbalance the handheld motion that you do. And that makes it so that your photo is actually captured sharp and nice, even though it's landscape and there's not a lot of movement, you will have some as well. Another way to counterbalance this is if you put it on a tripod and that will just counter every movement that you do. And if you have a scene when there's no movement, then the shutter speed doesn't matter anymore. Then it's just a matter of getting the exposure right with the two other settings, aperture and ISO that we'll get to in a minute. But if you put it on a tripod and you don't have any motion at all, any movement in your scene, then the shutter speed doesn't really matter that much anymore. But if you have movement or you have anything that you would like to capture that way, then it matters. If you want to capture the movement really crisp and sharp, then you want to shoot with high shutter speed. But another example is if you want to shoot movement that is meant to be buried. So I have this example of the photo that I shot in Iceland where I wanted to do what's called a long exposure. You probably, maybe heard of this before, but it means that the shutter speed is open for a long time, therefore, long exposure, we exposing for a long time. Usually you had to put an ND filter or something in front of the lens, kind of like sunglasses for your lens. So your camera to make sure that there's not a lot of light London. So that when you shoot with a really low shutter speed, that captures a lot of light into it over, I'll catch light into it over a longer period of time. That's intentionally shot so that the motion of the water looks all soft and kind of like magical almost because we've capturing so much motion that it just softens everything out. So that's an application where the shutter speed is actually okay to shoot at a low one. So just to sum up this lesson on shutter speed, I recommend if you shoot hand-held, you shoot with at least one over 100. Shooting a scene where there's no movement and you can put it on tripod, then the shutter speed doesn't matter that much anymore, and you can shoot with whatever shutter speed that you want. Now, in the next lesson, we'll talk about aperture, which means how much of the scene is actually in-focus and how to focus it. So I'll see you in the next lesson. 7. Aperture: In this lesson, we are jumping into this second corner of the exposure triangle, aperture. And what aperture does is that it determines how much of your photo is in focus or is sharp, you can say. So. A very common thing that you will see is when you see portrait shot, they have this really nice blurry background where you can really see what's going on just looks really nice, especially when there's some lights in it and stuff. And it makes the person that's the portraits of stand out a lot because they unfocused and they are really sharp. That is also referred to as Spokane. Now, on the other hand, on the other side of the scale, we have landscapes where you usually want to have everything in focus, or at least that's the most common understanding of landscape photos. So in this case, we want everything to be in focus and therefore we shooting with a high aperture number. I'll come back to why I'm saying it like that in just a second. Whereas in the first one with the portrait, we're shooting with a low aperture number. Now, aperture is probably the most subjective of all three corners of the exposure triangle because there is no right or wrong. There is no right way to have the focus and there's no wrong way. Of course you can focus on the wrong thing, but that's kind of like a different thing. So if you want to shoot with a shallow depth of field, meaning that there is just a little bit in focus and everything else is kinda blurry that makes it so that you feel that there is some depth in the field or you want everything to be in focus, That's all up to you and that's completely subjective. Now, aperture is also the most technical of all, free, and this is a non-technical Call. Saul tried to keep it super, super simple. But one of the first things that always confuses people and confuses me a lot is the way that you talk about aperture because it's determined by an f-stop and f-number. And you'll see that on your lens and you'll see that on your camera when you're working with the aperture, it's usually called F4, if 2.8, if aid, if 11, something like that. That is the aperture. Now why it's confusing is because and high aperture actually means a low number. And a low aperture means a high number, which doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense. And without making a technical, let me just briefly explain why. So a high aperture is a low number because the low number opens up the lens a lot more, meaning that there's a lot more light lead-in through the lens. Whereas a high number, a low aperture, means that the whole is really small and there's not a lot of light live in. Now all the technical details of the Y, that means that more is in-focus and more. It's not that I won't go into that personally. I don't completely understand it and it's some of the things that confused me a lot in the beginning. So I suggest that you just don't care about that in the beginning and just know that the low f-number means less in-focus and the highest number means more in focus. That's all you basically need to know. And then there is some pointers on where and how you should shoot with and how you should set up your aperture depending on the scene and depending on your own subjective feeling on how it should look, but that's a different part of it. Now, determining your aperture is subjective as set. Just finger fit like kind of like a cake. So the lower the number, the smaller the piece of the cake you're getting. The entire cake is the entire scene. Then if shoot with a low number, you're only getting a small piece. But if you shoot with a high number, you're mostly getting like a really high number. If 22, let's say that then you're getting the entire cake. Now, you don't necessarily need the inside K to be in focus. And I suggest that you should FATF 11 as highest because the smaller the hole in the lens, meaning the higher number. So if 11 will mean a very small hole in the lens, also means that there's less light let into the camera. And that of course, effects the light meter and how much light we have in our scene. So if you don't have a lot of light in your scene, you might want to shoot with a lower f-number because that lets more light into the scene. But if you have a lot of light in your scene, you might want to shoot with a higher f-number. Now, of course, you can combine this with the shutter speed. So if you want to have a low f-number because let's say you're shooting a person and you want them to be in focus and you want a blurry background. Then you can put the shutter speed up high. And then you can keep the aperture low F-stop number, right? So that's the way these two work together. Now, I suggest that you should also focus 99% of the time because that's just the easiest way to make sure that your things are in focus and you don't have to like control everything yourself. And especially when you're just starting out, it just helped a lot that it will determine what's in focus. Now, what you focus on should always be your subject. If you're shooting grant landscape will probably be barely a tree, something in the scene or waterfall, something that is the main focus. That's where your eyes should be drawn to and that's what you want to make sure is in focus. Now, if you're shooting landscapes and you're shooting with a high f-number. Say if aid or if 11, then it still matters that you choose the subject. So it makes sure that that's in focus. But you'll have a lot more in focus as well. But if you shoot with a low F-stop number, it's even more important that you shoot that specifically. Focus on specific things so you make sure that that's in focus. And just a quick tip that we will mention on the go through in the portraits lesson as well is that if you shoot a portrait, you want to make sure that you're focused on the ion because the nose is a little bit further in front. If you focus on the nose, the face might not be in focus if you're shooting, but a very low f-number. But if you focus on the eyes, then the phase will be in focus as well. So just a tip. Now you also have something with focus that's called servo versus one shot. And when you have one shot, you just focus on the scene and then that stays there and you shoot your photo. If you shoot with servo, That means that the point where you focus will change throughout the movement. So if you focus on me and I move forward, then if I shoot server, it will keep the focus on me. And if I move backwards, the same thing will happen. Whereas if I just set the one-shot, it would have, let's say we set the one-shop now and I move forward, then I will be out of focus. So sensitive, that means I should 99% of the time when Servo, just because it mason so much easier that if I move the camera around also because I'm shooting a lot of handheld, that just makes it a lot easier. Now, the arbitrary is a creative tool to gather a lot of depth in your field. And you can make the background blurry. And even if you're shooting landscapes, it makes it so that you can create even more depth. So if you get low and you have some grass in the foreground when you're shooting with lower aperture, then you get all that blurry. And maybe you have a tree in the foreground and you want the mountains in the back. If you have something like that, to be a little more blurry than that's a subjective thing. That's how I like shoot a lot of the time. But if you want everything to be in focus, crisp, sharp, then a higher f-number is the way to go. So as it's a subjective thing, I just recommend you to shoot and try and play around with it. Figure out what works, what doesn't work. And you've seen a few examples in this lesson on how it can work and how it doesn't work. And just to quickly show you again, this is with a low F-stop number. And this is what? A high F-stop number. And you can see the range for that. I shot a few different photos and you can see with the higher F-stop numbers, more in focus. But because I'm close to the sharp jag, it still blows the background a little bit because the focus is right in there in front. But if you shoot a grand landscape or street or something like that, you have a high F-stop number. That's still fine because then you will have you don't focus on something that's right in front and you will still have the entire scene in focus. So just to quickly recap for you, a low F-stop number means that less in-focus, high F-stop number means that a lot Morrison focus. And you want to set the focus point where you subtract this. If that's three, a person, a product, something like that. And you want to make sure that you capture enough in-focus that it doesn't look too weird or that's corners stuff that's not in focus. For example, if you're shooting a product, you might want to shoot something like a four, just to have a little bit more in focus and makes sure that that's all they're. Very last example I will tell you a quick story about how I fail to understand aperture and the different settings. In the beginning when I started shooting, I went on a trip to Scotland. And the only thing I remembered from all the courses and all the things that I saw and heard was that I should shoot one hundred, one hundred. And so I just put my camera into shutter priority and I put that on the fault. Now all my photos will just be in progress. It will be nice or be crisp and sharp. Very good. And because it's put it in shutter priority, the camera itself determined the aperture and it went all over the place. Sometimes when there was a lot of light, then it will go with a higher f-stop number. And if there was a lot of light, they will go with a small lives of number when there wasn't a lot of light. I didn't have a lot of things in focus in my scene and it was landscapes that are shut in Scotland. So a lot of them are just blurry and it looks weird and it wasn't really that nice. So that's why it's super important to understand these settings, understand how it works together. And said, I said before, if you want to shoot a person with a low F-stop number, but you have a lot of light in your scene. That's when you just crank up your shutter speed. And that helps you with countering that. And it also means that if you're shooting in person, you might want a high shutter speed anyway to just like freestyle movement. The other hand, if you have a low shutter speed and a high F-stop number, that could be good for shooting long exposures like the waterfall chart I showed you in the previous lesson. So just a quick story on that and why it's important that you understand all three corners of the exposure triangle because they all work together and help you balance out your photos and make it look best possible. So that's it for this lesson. I'll see you in next one where we talk about the last corner. Iso. 8. ISO: In this lesson, we are talking about the last corner of these posts to triangle ISO. And I think this is the most misunderstood setting of the camera because a lot of people will tell you, don't use the ISO or don't crank out the eye, so don't increase it Cupid low always. And to me that's just wrong. It actually ruined a lot of my photos and a lot of things that I have done with my photography career because I got kinda scared of using the ISO and using that part of the exposure triangle as well. Now, I will say it should be your last resort, but you want to try and fix and change the shutter speed and aperture first. But when you tie those into your preference to the photo that you want to shoot, that's when you start bringing in the ISO to just fine tune that and make sure that you have enough light in your camera that you need. Now a set, this is not a technical course, so I actually don't know what ISO stands for. I've looked it up multiple times and it's something that I always forget. And it's not really important for the actual feature, what ISO means is the sensitivity of your sensor. So just to quickly recap what we've gone through with the exposure triangle so far. We have the shutter speed with determines the small port in front of the sensor, how long that is opened or closed. We have the aperture that determines how big or small the whole of the lenses, determining how much light let in that way and how much is in focus. Now the last thing is the sensor that is in your camera. And there is a sensor even if it's your phone or if it's a small camera or big camera. And the sensor size and stuff like that also varies. And there's full frame and there is crop sensor and all that. And we'll talk briefly about some of that later. But the most important thing here is that ISO is determining the sensitivity of your sensor. So when you're shooting at the lowest ISO that your camera can, then it's the lowest sensitivity to light as well. And that means that it's taking the best possible photo without being more sensitive to light than it is at its base. But if you increase the ISO, the number here, you increase the sensitivity and you also introduce the possibility of having some noise into your image. That means if you're shooting something dark and you want it to be lighter, you will have already shot with the lowest possible shutter speed. You can, let's say one over 100 because you're shooting handheld, you put the aperture as low as the number you have. Let's say F2, 0.8, and it's still not enough. Your photos that looks dark. Your light meter is way off to the side and the negative is underexposed. It's not nice. That's when you turn up your ISO. And it's super important to play around with this and to learn how much you can use increase the ISO of your camera. Because it also determines how much or how little noise there is and that is different from its camera and each brand as well. And it has a lot to do with megapixels and sensors. All that stuff doesn't really matter that much. What matters is that you try it out and you figure out how your camera works and how much your ISO can be increased without introducing too much noise. Now, if you get noise in your photo, the most important thing is that you have frozen the motion that you want to freeze, the shutter speed, you have as much in focus as you need. And then if there is some noise because you need to increase the ISO as well, you can remove and fix a lot of that imposed in your editing software. So don't worry that much. But if you have a photo that is blurry because there was not enough light for you to have a fast shutter speed. Now the photo is just too dark, Dennis, unusable probably, even if you shoot in RAW, you might not have enough information. If you shoot with too low and aperture number and you don't have enough in-focus, the photo might look nice, it might not be what you need it, and that could ruin the photo as well. So increasing the ISO and turning up the sensitivity of your sensor is super important to know how to do and know the limits of your camera. And most modern cameras today have a pretty good sensitivity for that. So I've seen, even with my small entry-level camera here, I can easily go up to ISO 800, sometimes 1600, without any issues that don't really get any noise. And even if I get a little bit of noise, I can just adjust that inside of my editing software and then it's all good. It's not really a big problem. So that's why I'm telling you it's important that you use the setting as well and don't think of it as just your last resort and I shouldn't go around and cranking up the ISO at the time, but it can make it so that you don't get the photo that you want if you are afraid of using ISO. And a really quick story around this is I went out to shoot in a forest, my dad at some point and we saw a lot of deer. Now it was raining, it was cloudy, it was early in the morning, so there wasn't a lot of light in the scene and I put my aperture to the lowest number that I could because it was okay that the DEA was not as much in focus, but I think the lowest aperture that I could go at the time was a four. So we're still not that much light I could let into the camera. And then I tried to shoot with a lower shutter speed, which is resolved in all the photos being blurry. And it wasn't until I got back home that I realized, oh my God, I could just have increased the ISO and then I would have been all fun. Maybe the photos would have been a little bit more noisy, but I could definitely change that in post and try to work with that in the editing software. What I couldn't fix emotion being blurred because I was moving a little bit and they were moving a little bit and rain coming in and all that. So I couldn't save the photo because I shot with this wrong settings in terms of shutter speed and aperture. Now, if I just increase the ISO, I wouldn't say that photo. And at least it would have a sharp photo even with some noise. That's better because that was actually felt like gears. Now I ended up with photos that were blurry and that's not usable, at least not from my style photography. And then we get into a whole other artistic field if you want blurry photos, alright, I just shot a few quick examples just to show you what I mean when I talk about the ISO, I've got this first photo in a room where it's really dark with some settings, that means that there's not a lot of light. And you can see that let's say these are the settings that I wanted for my photo. And now I have the ISO at 100, which is the lowest at my camera can go. And it doesn't look very nice. It's too dark right? Now it's y to crank up the ISO slowly and you can see what happens now in the end, I cranked up way too much and that's not necessary at all. We can see with these photos in the middle there, get some nice, but it's not too bad. And I can actually quite easily fix that. So I've just shown you a photo where I've just tried to fix it in Lightroom as well. And it's much better to have this photo. They're not have a photo at all. Now, this was a kind of extreme situation. Just to show you this, I would probably have played around a little bit more with the shutter speed and aperture if it had been a real situation or move to somewhere else where there was some more light. That is also a possibility, at least in this case, well, we're shooting kind of like a product photo, but this just goes to show you that this is how you can work with ISO and it's super important to not be afraid of it. So just to recap really quickly, ISO is the sensitivity of your sensor in your camera, which is essentially what is capturing light. So the higher the ISO number, the higher the sensitivity and the more potential there is to introduce noise new photo, especially in the dark areas. Most modern cameras don't have an issue going with a higher ISO. Iso 800 should be more than fine for most cameras these days, even at an entry-level. So don't be afraid to increase it a little bit. But the most important thing is play around with it and understand where your boundaries and your limits are with your camera and try to use it in a, in an editing software as well to see what you can do with the noise. So main point here is, don't be afraid to use the ISL. Now, we've talked a lot about the different corners of the exposure triangle. So in the next lesson, I'll just try to quickly put it all together and recap so that you understand all in context of each other. So I'll see you in that lesson. 9. The Exposure Triangle: This lesson is just a quick summary of what we've just gone through and putting it together. So the exposure triangle consists of the aperture, the shutter speed, and the ISO. And as we've gone through, the shutter speed is how long the camera that's enlight. The aperture is how much light, depending on the size of the hole in the lens. And the ISO is sensitivity of the sensor, getting any kind of artificial light from increasing the sensitivity. Now ideally, you want to shoot at least one hundred, one hundred for the shutter speed. If you're shooting handheld, the aperture is very subjective, so you can shoot with a low F-stop number if you want a shallow depth of field, meaning you want the background or the foreground to be blurry depending on where your subject is. All you might want to have more in-focus, so you want to go with a higher f-stop number. Now there's also all these in the middle. Those are of course, the middle ground and can be played around with a lot. I use the middle ones a lot for product photography, food photography, all that stuff where I want still some depth, but I want more of my subject of my product or my food to be in focus so that it's not just like a little bit He's situation where you might want to increase the shutter speed. Let's say you're shooting a landscape and it's really cloudy day. So you don't have a lot of light. You want to shoot with aid because you want to have a lot in focus. You want to shoot with at least one over 100 or the shutter speed because you shooting handheld. But now you don't have enough light. Then you crank up the ISO and don't be afraid to do that just as we went through in the past lesson. Now, all these settings and these three corners of the exposure triangle confused me a little bit in the beginning, I will be honest and say that and that's why it's tried to make it really simple for you in this class. But I will say that the most important thing is just to go out and shoot and try. And at some point it will become tacit knowledge that we just know what you're doing, you know what you're shooting for this scenario. And if this shutter speed, I need, I want this aperture, then it all comes in really easy and you can start using the ISO really nicely. And It's not until you understand and you have all these settings style into your kinda like your subconsciousness that you will start being super creative about it because you overthink a lot if you are focusing too much on the settings, or you might forget some settings and then might ruin some of your photos as examples that I've talked about in the previous lessons. So I hope that this really helped you to understand it better. And I just want to talk about how you can now work with these settings in a super easy way, because most cameras have some modes that help you shoot without having to finger up all three settings at once. So I'll see you in the next lesson. 10. Get Ready To Shoot: In this lesson, I just want to help you with understanding and learning how to use the different corners in the exposure triangle. So a common question is, should you shoot manual or what mode should you shoot in with your camera? And let's just clarify upfront. Do not shoot in full Alto. That is not a good idea. You don't want to leave everything up to the camera, you should fill. Also, a camera completely determines on its own what to do and how it should be all these settings. And then it kinda doesn't really matter a little bit the same thing that your camera on your phone does. It just makes it all up to itself how to shoot. But the cameras on your phone is a little bit more intelligent because there's a lot of software that helps to determine what kind of scene it is and what it does. So that's a little bit different from shooting falls on you came up with just don't do that. Now. I haven't shot manual up until very recently. Actually. I shot in something called aperture priority and also known as an a and B on your camera. Briefly talked about earlier shooting in shutter priority, which is something that I did for my first trip and messed up all my photos because shutter priority means that you determine the shutter speed and then the camera works out either both the aperture and the ISO or just the arbitrary if you set a fixed nicer. Now, if you're shooting sports or a lot of movement, that might be an option for you. And you just want the camera to handle the other settings, that's all fine. But if you're shooting a lot of diverse things and you want to control the more subjective part of your photo, which is the aperture and Watson focus. How much is in focus? The depth of field and all of that. I recommended you shoot in aperture priority. What that means is that you set the aperture on your camera. Let's say you shoot a fall and that's the aperture to want to shoot in. Now, you can set up your camera to have a fixed ISO, all that, it just does that. And also as well, I recommend that you set it to a fixed ISO of 100 and then you can adjust that. And then what you will live up to the camera is the shutter speed. Now, when you shoot a photo and you are an aperture priority, you just determine what kind of aperture do I want for this photo. Now before you shoot the photo, you will hold down the shutter halfway, probably to focus the image, and that will have the camera determine what kind of shutter speed do I need for this photo? Then you simply just take a look at that and you say, okay, what is the shutter speed I'm shooting handheld. Is it more than one over 01:00? Am I shooting something that moves? Does it need to be even higher now, depending on what you see, if you see it being lower, that's when you can just increase the ISO. Let's say you go up to ISO 400, and now we have plenty of light. The camera will still determine the shutter speed itself. But now you've said, Okay, I need the sensitivity of the sensor to be even higher. And that will allow the camera to increase the shutter speed as well, because now the camera is capturing more light. So that's a really easy way to understand these things. You just start with one setting, you determine the aperture, then you look at the shutter speed. Is that good enough? If it is good enough, fine. Check your shot. Now you've got the photo. You can play around with the composition. If it isn't good enough, you can either consider lowering to a lower number aperture if you need the shutter speed to go higher. Or if you are really happy with the aperture that already regard, then you can increase the ISO and that will help you get more light into the camera and get a higher shutter speed without having to adjust the shutter speed itself. Basically adjusting to settings out of the three, but you're keeping an eye on the third one. So that's an easy way to shoot. And some people might tell you, oh, you need to shoot manually. We have so much more control. But to be honest, I think when you're out shooting and you want to capture a moment, especially you want to capture some movement or something like that. It can be really overwhelming to figure out all the settings and you're dialing everything around and you're figuring stuff out and then the moment has passed by. So you want to make it as easy as possible to you. So to shoot when you're out in the field, when you're out in the moment that you actually want to shoot. And I often still shoot aperture priority to this date. If I am just wanting to focus on the moment I dial in my aperture and I make sure that my shutter speed is good and then I click away. So there's no right or wrong here. But I really highly suggest that you start with using aperture priority. That's much easier to get started and it's much easier to shoot with. But as I notice, you can definitely start shooting manual as well if you just want to dive into the deep end from the beginning and you want to learn the settings and dial it all in. Now, you might encounter some differences in terms of cameras. As I said in a previous lesson, this camera that I have, my small camera, I need to adjust most things on the screen, which makes it a little bit more difficult to shoot fast. So I need to dial in the settings. That's why I always shoot in aperture priority on this camera because it's just easier. Whereas on my camera that I'm recording on now have a title for everything. So I have a dial that chairman's the shadow speed. I have a dial that determines the aperture and then I can dial another thing that determines the ISO. And that makes it really easy because I hadn't have a finger on each setting and then I can do it really quickly. But I said I only did that. I'll switch to shooting manual really recently. So I definitely recommend that you shoot in aperture priority. Now in the next lesson, we'll talk some more about lenses and focal lengths. So we've gone through all the basic settings now and what you need to know to go out and shoot. But there are still a few things left to talk about. And lenses are one of them where depending on the kind of lens that you have on those changes the scene and what you're focusing on how far away it is. So it's quite important to know in case of what you want to shoot, what kind of lens you should be using. So I'll see you in the next lesson for talking about that. 11. Lenses: In this lesson, we'll talk about lenses, which I think is the thing that sets apart phones and cameras the most, apart from some sensors and some software. First, let's talk about focal length that is determined in millimeters. So you've probably seen the lenses that has 15 millimeter or 50 millimeter, 70 millimeter or something like that. That's determines the focal length. Without going into any technical details of why that is. It's basically how light, the shortest, or how soon did it is. So when you're shooting at a low millimeter, so let's say 15 millimeter. You will have a lot in your scene. That's the lens that I'm shooting or recording this on right now is 15 millimeter. And if you shooting, let's say 200 millimeter, that will be really zoomed in. Now, I have shot a range of shots to just show you how that works. And I'll show you those on the screen here. So we have all the way from 15 millimeter, I'm pointing the focus point at the same tree in the background. And then we move to Thirty-five millimeters, 50 millimeters to 70 millimeters to 100 millimeters, and then finally to 200 millimeters, which is the range that I have currently in my setup. You can see that we're shooting a low millimeter number. We have a lot in our scene, but also means that the tree we have in the background is really small and almost a noticeable unless we zoom in a lot. As we move further up and we increase the millimeter number, the focal length, we also get closer and closer to the subject. So at 200 millimeters, we're pretty close to the tree and we can see that as our subject is in focus. And it's in fact in focus and all the photos. But it's just really difficult that in the first photo where we were using 15 millimeters, now, 50 millimeters is what we're saying, is what the eye sees. So that's kind of like the distance of everything that we are seeing is 50 millimeter. So if you want to shoot what looks normal, That's the focal length that you want to shoot it. And then you have to be aware of if your camera is full frame or a crop sensor on what kind of camera it is. So my camera that I'm recording on right now is a full-frame camera, which means that the millimeters on my lens is the actual millimeters. So 15 millimeter is 50 millimeters, and 50 millimeters would be 50 minutes. Now, on my smaller cameras that I've shown you a few times, this is a crop sensor. And on this camera particularly, and I think most Canon brands that a crop sensors, we have to multiply the focal length of the lens with 1.6. So this is a lens that is 22 millimeters and that has to be multiplied by 1.6. That's around 35 millimeters. So that's something that I had in mind when I bought this camera and when I bought this lens, because I wanted something that was 35 millimeters, I just bought a 35 millimeter lens. I would have been closer to something like 50 millimeters or even higher, which is not what I wanted. So that's just something that you need to be aware of. Lookup if your camera is a crop sensor or if it's a full-frame sensor, before buying your lens and determining what kind of lens you want. Now, there's another difference between lenses that you need to be aware of. So we have two different types of lenses. We have zoom lenses and we have prime lenses. And let's first go at primates. So it's just just showed you this camera. This is a prime lens. This is 22 millimeters and it doesn't change between two millimeters all the time. And now it's on a crop sensor. So it's actually around 35-millimeter in reality. Now, this is a set focal length, so it doesn't change, but it means that it can go into a lower aperture because there's not as much glass in it as if it was assumed. So without going into technical details, usually when you see a prime lens, you can usually go lower into the apertures, into F1, F2, F1 point for something like that. But getting extremely expensive. Some of them are still really expensive, but that helps. But what you don't get, assume, which is what you have. On the other hand, let me just quickly show you what that means. So, for example, on the camera that I'm shooting on right now, I have assumed lands on which 15 to 35-millimeter on a full frame camera. So that's equivalent to the actual millimeters. Now we're talking about what that means is that I can turn the zoom on this camera, so now it's on 15 millimeters. But if I turn this, you can see actually get into 35 and now you're really close to my face or zoom out again. But that's basically what that means. Now, up on some super expensive lenses, that means that they can go down to F2, 0.8, all the way through from 15 millimeters to five millimeters. But usually what you get with at least kit lenses and lot of manufacturers lenses, if you want something affordable, then you'll probably start from like a four. And then at the most zoomed in that you get it might be higher. So I used to have a dense that was an 18 to 135 and it was even on a crop sensor. So it is more like. 24 to 200 or something like that because I had to multiply it by 1.6. But what it meant was that when our shooting at 18 millimeters, meaning the widest that it could get, all 24 equivalent to when you multiply it, I could shoot a fall, but when I turned all the way up to 135 millimeters, the lowest aperture that I could get was F 6.3. So that meant that when I was assuming in letting less light than now when we're talking about zooming in and higher millimeters, that is where we set apart the phones and your camera. And I'll talk about it briefly in a previous lesson. But what it means is that when you zoom in on a phone, It's basically taking a photo and then cropping into that area. Now some phones have multiple cameras, which means that one of them might be with a higher millimeter, but it's usually not a really long telephoto lens. It's usually still pretty wide, to be honest. Now, if you're assuming and beyond what it can, beyond its millimeters, It's basically just taking a photo and then cropping it so you get a smaller portion of it. But if you put on a zoom lens, on a camera, it's not the same thing because the sensor is still capturing the full quality at the image. Just getting closer to your subject but without losing inequality at all. Now another thing that's important to know is that the wider you shoot, the more light you let in to the photo as well, because you get more of the scene, you allow more light and the most zoomed in, you get less light you get, even if you're shooting at a low aperture. If you're shooting at the same aperture at 15 millimeter as you are at 200 millimeters, you will have less light in and you might need to adjust your settings a little bit to get the same exposure for those twofold rulings. So what should you choose for lens? Now, if you want to shoot birds or sport or something like that, you might want to get a telephoto lens just to have a variety of how much you assume you could also get a prime zoom lens. You know that let's say 200 millimeters of 400 millimeters is what you need for the bird photography or for the spots which are clean, you need something that's more zoomed in shooting landscapes, you might want something that's wider, but a mistake that I made when I upgraded to this camera that I'm using now is that the first lens I bought? 15 to 35 millimeters. And I fought our shoes to having the low ones. I thought I was used to having 18 millimeters, but forgetting that I was actually shooting on a crop sensor, so it's more like 24. So when I got this lens and it was the only lens I have this camera, I had only 15 to 35 millimeters, which is really wide. And I didn't realize because now I actually have the actual millimeters of the lens on my full-frame camera. So consider what you need. I would suggest you get a zoom lens when you start out. Probably a kit lens, something like an 18 to 135, just to play around with different focal lengths and different compositions you can get from the different things. Now, on the other hand, if you get some prime lenses, those are usually really good for portraits as they can get a lower aperture number, lower F-stop number. And that means you can get more bokeh in the background. So the most common and most popular focal length for Portraits is an 85 millimeters. And usually you can get those down to F 1.8 or At 1.4. And sometimes even if 1.2, but those are really expensive. That means that you get a really shallow depth of field. So you need to focus on the eye and you need to make sure that your face is in focus, but then everything else would be super blurred out because the a five millimeters is a little bit more zoomed in then the 50 millimeters as we talked about being kind of what the IC in terms of distance. Then you get a really nice look and you'll get some more compression of the background. So if you have a prime lens that can sue, you need to move your feet a lot more, which can be fine for a lot of scenarios. But you-all shooting landscapes and you want just a little bit more zoomed in, a little bit more zoomed out, then you might want to have as sediments. So that's why I personally use zoom lenses, but also bought some really expensive ones that has 2.8 all the way through, which means that I don't lose aperture throughout the Zoom which you will probably be doing are losing if you using some little cheaper lenses. But it's all fine. It just limits a little bit of your aperture, but you can still get amazing photos. Now, just talked about compression in terms of the 85 millimeter lens. And let's just, let me just quickly show you what I mean by that. I've shot range of photos here of my water bottle. But what I want to show you is that as we increase the millimeters, we also get more compression. So even when I'm shooting at a higher aperture, let's say if eight, I still get more blurred background, but I'm shooting with a 200 millimeter lens. Then if I'm shooting with a 35-millimeter. And that's because when you're assuming things in the background become larger. So you can see the bushes here in the background much larger. Whereas when I'm shooting with a lower millimeter, the foreground is big, but the background is smaller. And that's the same thing we saw on the first photos when we had the tree. The entire foreground was pretty big. It was really small, really far away in the background. Whereas when we're shooting with the 200 millimeters, we're way closer to the tree. The tree looks much bigger, but everything behind the tree will also look bigger. So that's just something to consider when you're shooting just for your knowledge as well. Then the last thing I want to mention is that there's also something called focus distance. And that is something you can see on your lens, usually tells you a number millimeters or in meters. It determines how close you can focus with the lens that you use. One of the lenses that I have is 0.7 meters, which means that the closest I can focus on something is 77 meters away from the camera. Now when I say away from the camera, It's not away from the lens, it's from the sensor. So it's from the center and not from the end of the lens. And a lot of zoom lenses are assuming out and getting larger. So that wouldn't make sense if that also impacted where you could focus on. So that's just for your knowledge that when you have a zoom lens, it doesn't matter. It's from the sensor of your camera. And then forward from that, that minimum focus distances essentially means that I cannot just put my camera really close to something and then focus on it because the lens determines what the minimum focus distance. They're just need to be aware of that. And you can see it because if you're using autofocus or even manual focus, you will see that the lens won't focus on what's right in front of you until you're far enough back that the lens allows you to focus on that thing. That was a lot of talk about the lenses. But just to recap really quickly, it's in millimeters. The smaller number, the wider the higher number, the most zoomed in. If you're using an actual camera and you have different lenses, it won't impact the quality if you're shooting with your phone and you're going beyond whatever the highest millimeter lens that your camera or your phone has. It will be like taking a photo and then cropping in. But the software and the phones are really good at helping with that. All said that it probably won't be as good as if you're shooting with an actual camera, then you get less light into the camera when you're shooting with a longer focal length, meaning higher millimeters number, getting more light in when you're shooting with a small unlimited number, have primes which can be zoomed, but probably can go with a lower aperture for an affordable price. And you have zooms where you can zoom in and out in a range of millimeters depending on the lens. But it also usually means that if it's affordable than you probably have some restraints in terms of the aperture. Now running and gunning, it's probably easier for people to have assignments where you have some variety and you can still move back and forth. Whereas if you have a prime lens and a focal lens that doesn't change, then you have to move your feet and you have some restraints in terms of its all creative freedom and there's no right or wrong. I personally prefer zoom lenses by know a lot people prefer prime lenses. So go ahead with whatever you want. If you're shooting portraits, maybe want a prime lens to begin with. If you're shooting landscapes, maybe a zoom lens is more for you. In the next lesson, we will talk about composition, which is something that highly influences the quality of your photo, not in terms of the actual quantity, but in terms of how good the photo is looking at, pleasing to the eye when you're looking at it, when other people are looking at it as well. So I'll catch you in the next lesson. 12. Composition: In this lesson, we are talking about composition. Now I want to make it really brief because you can look up a lot of different guidelines and techniques for composition and everything. And to be honest, I haven't used any of them myself. I find the more distracting and more confusing than anything else. Trying to line up a photo with different lines and rules of third and whatever, but maybe you are struggling with it more. And in that case, I will just recommend you to look up the nine composition techniques or photography or something like that. And you will find something on Google and you can see some guidelines on how to do composition. But what I do, I am mostly just playing around with it. I find these techniques and rules and guidelines limiting. So what I usually do is I tried to send her my subject in the middle of the frame. I like that kind of competition. Sometimes I'll have it in the side depending on what the frame is like or the scenery. But most often I just tried to send the things. Now, that is just one part of composition in terms of where you have your subject in the frame. But something that's super important that I want to mention is that don't just shoot from your eye level of from your chest. I see a lot of people and I probably did it a lot myself as well when I started out with just shooting from this angle or this angle. And you're not really getting a lot of competition out of that. Well, you might be looking at the scene and you might be thinking, this looks pretty good. This is not bad, but in reality, it's just usually gets a little bit boring. But what you can do to change up the composition is try different angles. Try to go to a different spot. Try to lower your camera, try to get low to the ground. Try to get close to a tree or something in the foreground, create a bit of depth in the fields and create some more Play and some more interesting compositions and areas around your photo. Instead of just snapping the photo directly where you want to try to play around with it. Try different angles, try and link the camera a little bit different as well. I just play around with it. Basically, you more or less just want to pay attention with and to what is around your subject. And if it looks good or not. Now, it definitely depends on what kind of photos you're shooting. If you're shooting landscapes, you might want to get low to the ground or high up, or try to find different unique perspectives and angles that you haven't seen before. That is not just something that you see with your eye when you're standing there, you're shooting a person. Usually you like to shoot with some bokeh in the background that we talked about earlier. And for that you want to kind of look around and see what's in the background. Is it nice colors as it contrasted to watch the person that you're shooting? Is it too bright or too dark, like these kind of things around Watson, the background and what's going around. And then follow the person that you're posing. You want to make sure that you're not cutting off, limps that shouldn't be cut off. So if you're shooting full body, makes sure that you include the feed. Otherwise, it'll look weird if you're shooting for Instagram, if you know you're shooting for Instagram, leap some more space at the top, on the bottom. Because you know, you're going to crop it, I'm shooting horizontally. It just makes sure that you have that frame in the middle. If you shooting products, the things that you put around your product, and the angle that you have made a huge impact. Now, one example is, again back to my water bottle that I've shown in some previous lessons as well. This is what you would typically shoot. Maybe as a beginner, it's just like thinking, Okay, I just need to shoot a photo of this product. So I'm just shooting it from where I'm standing. I'm pointing it down. I'm just shooting. Now. The light is a little bit bad. The background doesn't look good, the shadows too wide, it doesn't really look that pleasing. But just from turning to the other side, inkling, they are turning around the bottle, bottle as well and then shooting a bit lower. So now get the eye level with the product and the camera. That just makes a huge difference. And then of course, playing around with the aperture and the focus and the different focal lengths. So you can see a difference between what I've shared here wider versus what abstract here at 200 millimeters, you can see the compression and it just separates the product a lot more from the background. Now if you're shooting down towards the surface, let's say a table, something that you want to have here. Maybe you're shooting a camera. Then you want to add some context around the photo as well. So you might want to shoot with some apples lying around a notebook, MacBook, something that makes, that tells a story around the subject of the product that you're shooting, something that isn't unfocused, but just this around the frame to give it some, some environment and some, some idea of context of what the products. So yeah, for composition is actually really simple. And here are some examples of what I usually do when I shoot landscapes. You can see I get low to the ground. Another unique perspective you can get is if you get a drone at some point you get these top-down shots and you can do some creative angles with that, which is something that people haven't seen before. And when you go low with your camera, the reason why it looks good, at least in my opinion, it's because it's an angle that people usually don't see. It's not a lot of people who go to a beautiful place and they lay down on the ground and they can look at the horizon off the ground. So it just creates a different experience and a great, some more depth into the field. If you have some foreground and then you have some middle ground and maybe in the background as well, or just some foreground just kinda separate your subject and the middle ground. Just looks so much better. And it brings more attention into your subject. And it feels like the photo is more alive than just flat. So try to get some depth of field. Try to play around with different compositions. And I'm sure you will create something really cool. 13. Tripods: In this lesson we briefly talking about tripods. When do we need one? When don't you need one? And isn't necessary at all. Now if you don't know what a tripod is in the first place, it is. These kind of three-legged things, thereby tripod. This is a small one, this is a gorilla pod. And what I'm recording on right now is a proper tripod that can extend much further. It way small and it's not as handy to carry around. But if you have a small one like the one that I showed before, that can be really easy to travel to take around, but it doesn't extend as much. You have to put it on something in a lot cases. Now, when do you need a tripod? As we've talked about earlier, if you need to eliminate the need for your shutter speed to be something specific. It can't be because you don't have a blood flight and there's no movement in the scene and you want to keep your ISO low, then you can lower your shutter speed and you can get the aperture that you want. Now, in some cases you will hear landscape photographers talk about the need for tripod and setting up the sharp nicely and making sure that everything is perfect and in-focus and sharp and everything because they've put it on a tripod and they've used the remote shutter and all of this stuff. But to be honest, I love to shoot landscapes and I'm mostly just shooting handheld because I feel like the freedom, as we talked about in the previous lesson of the composition, It's just so much nicer to move around, in my opinion, to move around and play around with different compositions. And of course you can find a composition and then put it on a tripod and then have that composition that's super handy. But in most cases, I just like to hand pose my camera, basically follow a lot of other people who like to put it on a tripod and put up the perfect composition dial in the settings and get that one shot. So it's all up to preference in terms of what you like and how you like to shoot. So there's no right or wrong here. Just different ways of shooting is different ways of highlighting go about it. I'm more kind of like run and gun. And some people just like to get on the composition and have it more stable. I get that one shot that I have in mind. And sometimes tripod helps with that because you can control everything. You don't have the shake. Now, just shooting something like long exposures that I showed before in a previous lesson with this shot that I got from Iceland with a long exposure at a waterfall, you need to have a tripod. You can put your camera on a rock or something, but it's just not as secure as if you lock it into a tripod. And you need this if you need the longest shutter speeds. Another case is Astro photography. If you want to shoot the Milky Way and stars, and you need to put it on a tripod as well because you need the long exposures to actually get that. Same could be if you're shooting a time-lapse, you know, these shots where the clouds just moving by or the sun is setting or something like that. You can do allow that and your phone as well. Usually they have a time-lapse mode. But if you're shooting on your camera, you need to make sure that the camera stays in the same place at all times. So again, it's all up to preference. And as we talked about in the first lesson about whether or not you should get a lot of gear and what your budget is. A tripod is something that don't necessarily carry it around with you all the time. So it's more for specific users. Or if you're going to shoot landscapes, going to shoot Astro, if you have a specific composition in mind, otherwise, so lot to carry around. Usually they weigh a bit minus a travel tripod. So it's pretty it's not very heavy, but still I don't carry it around with me. A lot. Gets down to preference. This is just from my perspective, of course. But you don't necessarily need a tripod. You can shoot handheld and you can get really nice photos, even landscape photos as well. Just makes sure that you understand the frame main settings that we went through for the exposure triangle and you'll be all good. There's the specific cases of long exposure and Astro and stuff like that. You definitely need a tripod for that, but make up your mind of what you need and figure out play around with stuff, and then you'll find out if you need a tripod or not. Now, the next free lessons, I kinda bonus lessons where I just briefly want to give you some pointers in terms of the settings and ideas for when you're shooting different styles photography. So we'll go into landscape, portrait, and product photography just to give you some pointers as when you're starting out what to look for, house dialing the settings, and then you can be created from now. So I'll catch you in the next lessons. 14. Bonus: Landscape tips: In this lesson, we are talking about landscape photography. And the first thing I want to say is, you want to shoot wide, at least most of the time, because you want the grandness of the landscape and the scenery and you want to capture as much as possible. That's at least the usual thing. Now, you might want to have a tailored suit with you as well, which is like a 100 millimeters, millimeters millimeters. We're sometimes you want to zoom into the details. If it's a mountain far away, if there's like a waterfall, but you can reach it sometimes that's nice. For most photos, at least from my own perspective, I actually shoot with my white lens for landscape photography. Now, as we talked about before in the previous lesson as well, you can shoot with a tripod to eliminate the shutter speed. As with a lot of landscape photography, you don't have anything moving or maybe you have some leaves and start moving. You can decide that it's really important that those are in-focus and they're super sharp, or if it's okay that they are a little bit blurry. Also depending on how far away from the camera and they are, the further away the less noticeable it will be. Shooting on the tripod, takes more time and you can set up your shot entirely new settings. It limits a little bit of your composition, or at least the speed of your finding compositions. So I highly suggest that you find the composition handheld and then you can put it on tribal or you can just shoot it. Without that. Usually you want to go for a higher number of aperture because you want a lot of the scene to be in focus. Now, this is the general assumption or the general rule for landscape photography. Honestly, for my own perspective and my own personal experience, I like to shoot F4 and below. Most of the time, I do shoot if eight and f 11, which my usual high number aperture settings, but I like to play around with a fall even lower F2, 0.8, just to get some more depth in the scene depending on what I'm shooting. So if I'm shooting a really cool tree, I like to isolate that with the focus as well. Just kinda draw away attention from the other trees that might be, or anything else that might be in the scenery. So that's a way to do that. But if you want it to be a print that is printed on really big or just like a nice poster. Sometimes it's really nice to just have it all in focus, everything looking sharp. So that's something to consider that as well. Now, really fun things to play around with is long exposures. As I've shown you this photo from Iceland a few times. This is a really fun thing to do and it's a whole different part of photography and then just the normal run and gun and shooting. But it requires an ND filter, which is kind of like sunglasses for your camera. I won't go into details with this because I think it's a little bit more advanced. But you can definitely find guides and videos elsewhere on how to work with ND filters and how to do long exposure. It's really fun. And if you aren't close to the sea, waterfalls or something else that's blowing, it's definitely worth playing around with. Now, to recap real quick, you want to shoot wide. Most of the time, you can shoot suit. Then if you are capturing some details, but mostly why it works really well for landscapes, you want to shoot with a high number aperture to get everything in focus, but play around with the low one, low numbers as well as that can be really fun and you can create some really cool compositions. You might want to use a tripod if you want to eliminate the need for specific shutter speed or in all but be aware that if anything is moving in the scene, that will still be blurry when you shoot the photo. It's not necessarily just the handheld part of it as we've talked about previously as well. So shoot wide sued high number aperture. Play around with the ISO if you need to. And just be aware that when you're outside and shooting landscapes, the conditions that are around you can be anything. If you're going for a nice sunset, it doesn't necessarily get nice sunset. You might just get clouds. But one thing I will tell you, don't be discouraged. Play around with it anyway. Maybe look for different compositions, maybe look for different details shots that you wouldn't look for otherwise, because you're looking for this specific shot that you had in mind with the sunset and there's always something to capture. I've really rarely went to allocation and garden, only bad photos. I always get a few good ones, even though it wasn't the concedes conditions that I needed. And the conditions is just something that you can control when you're outside and the nature. So habit as a part of the geography and know that you're capturing this specific moment and that can be beautiful in itself. The next lesson, I'll go into a little bit of portraits. I'll see you there. 15. Bonus: Portrait tips: Let's talk about portraits. So the first thing I want to tell you that I find the most important part of photography is nothing about the settings or anything. It's actually communication. If you shoot him with a model, a person, and you want to get some nice portraits. It's really important to do good communication from behind the camera. Because when you're standing in front of the camera, you don't know what it looks like. You don't know if it looks good, if the background is good, if you're Harris old place or it looks good. However it is, communicate what you're thinking. Communicate what kind of composition your fingers. Nice. And this can be really difficult in the beginning depending on what kind of person you are. I am in some ways a little bit introverted. So to me it's been a little bit difficult to shoot portraits with other people that I don't know that well. Because posing them and communicating with them and saying stuff like that just didn't come natural. But I found out from being in front of the camera itself, that it's super difficult to know what it looks like or if it looks good. So try and find a composition. Try and show the model what you want. Maybe have him or her safer if you first and then talk about what it is, maybe find some photos from Instagram or Pinterest or somewhere else of different poses and different compositions that look nice with a portrait. And show that to the model as well. And say, okay, this is one of the things we should try to create or as the model even to find something beforehand and then agree on, okay, this is what we're trying to shoot now. And then in terms of communication is not only verbal. If you want the model to do something, to show them how to do it, It's not awkward. It's just like if you want them to put their hands in the face, something like that they think will look good. Just show them with your own body because it's easier for them to mirror that. Dan from just hearing what you're actually trying to say because the image that you have in your head of what you think you're going to shoot is probably different from what they are thinking when they are seeing or hearing what you're saying. So try to be as visual and verbal as possible in your communication. Now, with that being said, settings, you probably want to shoot with a higher shutter speed because the model might be moving a little bit. You might be doing a little bit if you shoot health. So at least one hundred, one hundred, maybe more if you can, that's always nice. You want to freeze that brief moment at really nice position, pose whatever he or she is doing. So that's definitely prefer to have that, in this case, higher shutter speed, that's good. Now for aperture, we've talked about this before, especially when we talk about prime lenses, but a lower aperture will give you more of this bouquet. Blurred out background that can look really nice and it's really pleasing for portraits. It's not necessary to go low. I've seen a lot of really good portraits and I've shot so myself at a four. And those have been really nice too. So it's not a problem. If you're shooting a fall. It's also easier to nailing the focus as you won't have to carry as much about hitting the eye as you can just hit the face as that will all be in focus. Now, she's going in lower abs, you're going into F2, 0.81.81.41 to some lenses even allow you to go even lower. You really need to be aware that you focus on the I allowed cameras have high detection and that works really nice. But otherwise, just put that little focus point on the AI that will make sure that your photo is in focus and that the model looks really nice. But I said a lower aperture number is preferred. That will give you that blurry background. And then usually an 85 millimeter or 100 millimeter will look really good as well because that gives a little bit more of that compression and blur in the background. But if you want more your scene, if you want the distance feeling of your eye, then 50 millimeters, very good. And if you want more of the same kind of lifestyle shots where you want some of the scenery as well. Thirty-five millimeters can be really good. 3550, Eighty, 500 millimeters are really, really good things for portraits. But that being said, you don't need to get a prevalence. You can definitely use a zoom lens as well. So don't be discouraged. Just remember communication, composition and just play around with it and make sure to have fun because there's nothing worse than going around shooting and being uncomfortable and the model is uncomfortable, just makes sure that you're comfortable, you're having fun, and it's nice and communicate what you think. Show the photos. Figure out if there's something you like, something you don't like. And make sure to talk to the model as well. If there's something they don't necessarily like about themselves, maybe the right side of the face or the way that the hair looks. Sometimes something you have to look out for to help them get a nice photo. Because if they think it's a nice photo, then you're more likely to like the photo as well. Now, if you are going to shoot portraits, That's a different thing because then you don't both have to be behind the camera and in front of the camera at the same time, which can be quite difficult. Now, there's different tricks that you can use. One is having a remote shutter, something that you connect to a camera, and then you have this small device in your hand, but you can click to set up the composition you've died and the focus, and then you go to that spot. Another way with a lot of mountain cameras is camera apps, where you can remote connect to the camera for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and then you can remote shadow from that. My experience with those are really bad. I don't think they work very well, at least not the ones that can enhance at when you get too far away from the camera, it all gets like lackey and it's not very nice. It can necessarily recommend using those if you don't have anything else, then of course, try it out and play around with it. It's always better than nothing. But my preferred way of doing is setting up the composition, figuring out where I'm going to stand, sit whatever, dial into focus and makes sure it's looking nice. Maybe putting a bag or something in the spot first, taking the photo, making sure everything looks good. Maybe you dive in with the autofocus first, but then you turn off the auto focus to make sure that the camera doesn't all of the sudden focused while you're moving into the shot. Then if your camera can do it, then shoot intervals. That means that it needs to be a setting that your camera has, but then you can set it to shoot, let's say ten shots with three seconds in-between each of them, which means that it shoots ten photos three seconds in-between. So you can start doing that, then you can move into the scene and probably the first two shots might miss you. But then you can set up, you can do different kinds of poses. You can look around. You can try different things out. And then you will have at least seven or eight shots of you sitting in that spot, being in that spot. And that can hopefully be something that you can use or you can go back and review those photos. Let's see what you need to do differently. Getting a lot more to work with than just trying to set a one-shot or working with an app that doesn't really work. Or even with the remote shutter that just eliminates the need for going there, then you can click it, but then you might have that in your hand. And that can sort of look bad as well. So it's all up to preference, but that's just some guidelines and some help on how you can shoot. So porches, the interval timer is super nice. And for me it's worked pretty well. Some recommendations on how to shoot portraits. Remember shooting when a model, good communication is key. In the next lesson, we'll touch upon how to shoot products. 16. Bonus: Product tips: In this lesson, we're talking about products, product photos, and specific. Now throughout the lessons, I've showed you a few examples of how you can shoot products, but they have not necessarily been really good because it's just been playing around. And that's again, something else say to you, play around with it, figure out what works. But here are a few pointers of what I would do if I was shooting products are. So one of the most important things is that your product is actually in-focus, at least the parts of it that you want to have in-focus. So I don't necessarily recommend you're shooting with a low aperture number because that might make sure that not everything is in focus and that doesn't really look too nice when it's a product. So I usually shoot a four by 5.6 personally, when I shoot products just to make sure that some more in focus, but the shutter speed, that doesn't often really matter that much. Unless you're moving the product around, it's usually going to stay stable on your table or wherever you're shooting it. And that eliminates the need for the shutter speed to actually be something. Particularly, of course, if you have a background where everything moves, it might be a little bit blurry and you need to think about that. But if you're shooting down onto a table, then that's not that big a problem because usually it's needed. And then I'll say the surroundings of product is probably one of the most important thing. So don't just, unless you're really into minimalism, then you might need to ignore this advice. But if you are shooting down towards the table and you're shooting something, don't just leave that one thing on the table. While Kendrick, minimalistic, it might be a little bit boring, tried to play around with putting things around it. So if you, for example, shooting a notebook, put a pen, put some paper, put maybe a MacBook, small back in the corner. Some things that might be associated with that notebook, the back because it might go into their computer because you might be taking notes while you have your computer there at Penn, because obviously you're probably using that to take the notes as well. Our parts. You're listening to music while it's there, try to play around and put down a composition that looks nice. Then makes sure that you have some good light. You might have the light coming in from the side to kinda like sidelight, the product, which can look really good, but play around with trying different angles. And depending on the kind of product that you're shooting, you might be aware that you can get some glare, especially if you're shooting watch us, have experienced that. You get a lot of glare into that you might want to move into the shade or tried to eliminate that glare by blocking Windows and blogging, that kind of thing so that you don't get that glare. The same could be if I wanted to shoot this camera. You can already see now that we're moving it around, there are some glare because there is a screen here and that will make it a little bit more difficult shoot. So be aware of your angles, be aware of where that is. I'll put a few photos I've taken here on the screen so you can kind of see what kind of compositions and styles that I've tried to do. But I find product photography to be one of the most fun things to do, except from landscapes for me. Because you can play around with so many compositions and you can put up the composition yourself. Whereas in landscape, you had to work with what's already there. But for products, you can actually create a narrative and a story around the product just by putting different objects around the scene as well. So that's just a few tips on shooting products. Get kind of like a middle aperture. So you still have some things that's not in focus, but then you make sure that your entire product is in focus. Shutter speed might not matter that much. You can put it on a tripod. So just make sure that you have full control with the shutter speed as well and then you can keep the ISO low. But if you're shooting handheld, don't be afraid to crank up the ISO will open. In the next lesson, we'll do a recap of everything you've been through in this class, just to give you a sum up and something that you can write down so that you have it all together. So I'll see you in the recap lesson. 17. Recap: Alright, so this lesson is just a quick recap of everything we've just been through in this class to help you remember and summarize everything and you can write it down if you want to. And then I hope it really helps you understand everything and get out shooting. So let's sum it up for the gear and consider, what is your budget? What do you want to shoot and how much are you going to carry around with you when you are shooting, when you're going around your every day, if that's your case, photography for you choose a camera. A better camera won't give you better pictures before you understand the settings and how to work it. It might make it easier, but it's definitely not going to produce amazing photos in the beginning for white bands. Leave it at daylight and adjusted in your editing. That's my recommendation to cancel auto white balance if that's more comfortable. Shoot role. In most cases, as we talked about, you might want to shoot JPEG if your client wants it right now, but otherwise shoot role and you might want to shoot RAW and JPEG at the same time for the light meter, it's your friend here in the beginning, and probably throughout all of your photography, aim for having it in the middle of a CRO to begin with, to make sure that you have the highest possibility of having your shot probably exposed for shutter speed, keep it at one over 100 for a minimum. If you're shooting handheld, if you're shopping, is moving, increase it. If there is no need for it, then you can do whatever. But if you're shooting handheld, keep it at one hundred, one hundred and five butcher. A low number means a smaller area in focus and everything else is blurred, whereas a high number means more in focus but less light. So keep that in mind. Fire, so do not be scared to crank it up. The ISO means sensitivity of the sensor. It might introduce some nice, but you can remove a lot of that in the editing. So play around with it and understand where and how much the noises produced in your camera. So you're not afraid of using the ISO in situations where it actually counts in the beginning shoot in aperture priority in that way, you don't have to focus on all three sayings, old ones, you can limit it to choosing your aperture, looking at the shutter speed is okay. And then you can increase the ISO if needed. It will give you a lot more flexibility to shoot here and now, and then you can always move to manual later if you feel like you want the full control over all the settings. But it's definitely not necessary for focal lengths. 50 millimeter is what the eye sees if you're on a crop sensor, be aware they have some multiply the number of your millimeters with 1.51.6 or 1.8 depending on your camera brand. But the smaller millimeters gives you a wider view. And things in the foreground will do bigger. Things in the background will look smaller. And when you have a high number of millimeters, things in the background will look bigger. You will be more zoomed in, but we won't lose quality. If you have a zoom lens on your camera for competition, get low and use something in front of your camera for foreground and foot depth, move around, move behind something, a tree, whatever, try different things and remember to do a free 60 once in a while to look what's behind you, what's in front of you, What's at the side of you. Sometimes you might be surprised of what something else Look, don't just look at the sunset. Look at what the sunset is actually shining on and what the colors bring out for that as well. Another thing is think about the Instagram crop. If that's something that you need. If you're shooting for Instagram, then be aware that if you are uploading at four bonds, five, then you might need to crop off some of the top or bottom if you're shooting vertical and if it's shooting horizontal BY their zone, the middle of your photo that you will get in your posts. For tripods, they are not a must, but in some cases they are perfect to eliminate the need for the shutter speed. If you have a scene where there's no movement, and if you don't need to shoot hand-held, then it's super easy to eliminate the shutter speed and get exactly the settings that you want, giving a low ISO and getting the exact temperature that you need. If you want to shoot something like long exposures or Florida or Astro or something similar, then you definitely need tripod because you can have any shape in your camera. For landscape photography, you want to shoot wide, usually with a high aperture number to have much more in focus. But again, you can play around with that. The aperture is a subjective thing. And you can use a tripod to eliminate the shutter if there's no movement, but it's definitely not a must. For portrait photography. Communication is key. Talk to the model, help each other, have fun with it. Makes sure that you're both comfortable. That will make the shoot so much better and the photos so much better as well. Might want to shoot with a high shutter speed and a low aperture number for the bokeh effect and make sure that there's no blur. False self portraits. You can use a remote shutter camera app for your smartphone or the incivil shut mode that most cameras have these days. To just make it easier for yourself. Start by focusing on the composition and login the focus, and then turn off autofocus to make sure your camera does not change the focus while you are posting reference atrophy, sued but albatross around if fall to F6, F3 to have the product and phobias, but makes sure that a little bit of the surroundings and not in burgers and your eyes drawn into the actual product. Play around decompositions and use prompts when you can, if you're shooting on tables, something like that. That gives a lot of concepts to your photo and it makes it look much nicer than just being isolated on a surface. Use these pointers to improve your photography and figure out how to get to your creative style with it. These are all pointers, guidelines help to make you have an easier time with these settings. And I hope I made it easy for you to understand. I hope you want to shoot the photos for the class project as well. You can go back to that lesson. If you missed one it was, but essentially that is made to make you aware of how the different settings influence your photos. And as you've shot a few of those, it will definitely help you when you're out in the field because you know from seeing with your own eyes and from using the camera, what different settings mean and what you need to be aware of. Instead of only hearing me say it, it's really important to go out and actually shoot. 18. Thank You: Thank you so much for taking this class with me. I really hope to see you in the class budget and give you some feedback on the shots that you have taken and the ideas that you had behind it. I tried to make this as much as a beginner course has occurred and take out all the difficult technicalities that there might be that confused me in the beginning. But if you have any questions or anything, you're more than welcome to reach out to me. You can do that instagram and put my link here and follow along with my Skillshare as well. I'll be posting a lot more courses on photography and editing in the future. So if it's something that you like, please leave a review and follow along for more content until the next time. Take care.