Photography Masterclass: Your Complete Guide to Photography

1. Welcome to the Course: welcome to the photography masterclass. Will Sam and I are so excited that you decided to enroll in this class and that you want to learn all about photography. Our goal is that by the end of taking this class, you're taking better photos than ever and that you feel comfortable using your camera in any situation. For some of you, you might even want to take it to the next level and make money with your photography or turn it into a full career. We've designed this course for complete beginners. Perfect. If you're starting from scratch, if you're a bit more advanced, that's great, too. Throughout the course, we've included advanced lessons to help take your skills to the next level. Over 100,000 students took the first version of the photography masterclass, and we learned a lot from them. We learned that it wasn't fair for us to teach concepts with a specific camera brander model. We learned that you want mawr demonstrations and thorough explanations. We learned that you want an engaging class with assignments and feedback. We learned that you may want to jump around course two topics that interest you instead of taking it chronologically. After learning all of this, we've put together this brand new photography masterclass. Take some time to check out all the sections of this course. We've organized it in a way that we believe makes sense for most beginners. Starting out, jumping right in and learning your manual settings and how to compose better images. Moving on to things like camera, anatomy and settings. Focus and lighting. We have a section specific for mobile photography and sections on purchasing cameras, lenses and accessories. In the middle of this course, you'll see a bunch of sections on different photography scenarios. These air really fun sections where we put together all of the basics. Put ourselves in different situations like shooting landscapes, portrait's or NYTPhotos. And in these sections you get to see our entire method later in the course, we have a number of sections on photo editing. We've chosen some of the most popular and professional applications to teach you this way. Instead of having to buy multiple courses, you can learn multiple editing APS right in this course, or pick the one that's right for you. Finally, we wrapped the course up with taking your photography to the next level, sharing your photos online and building an online presence through your photography, making money with your photography skills and even starting a business. As you can see, there is a lot in this course, so please feel free to jump around toe lessons or specific sections that interest you most and take the course at your own pace. If you have any questions, feel free to post them to the course where other students and we can help you. And if there's anything we can do to make this course better, please let us know. Thank you again for enrolling, good luck and most of all, have fun. 2. Skillshare Course Overview: Phil here, and I quickly wanted to walk through how this course works. It's a very long courses, over 16 hours of content, and we're going to be adding more content as we go and we've broken it down by section. And that's what I really want to have you understand is if you look at this list of all the videos in this course, you'll see that it starts out with these section title. So, for example, the second section of the course or the first riel section after the couple intro videos is all about exposure, so you'll see that all these videos that say exposure are about that. Then we move into composition, focus and depth of field camera, anatomy, white balance, etcetera, etcetera. If you go to the about page of the course and scroll down, you can see all of the different sections of this course right here. Other than that, I just hope that you really enjoy this class. If you go to the community tab, I will have started a discussion once this course launches that links over to our Facebook group. This is a group specifically created for students of this class and it's awesome because we have hundreds of members signing up who are participating in this class, and they're posting photos, asking for feedback, giving other photographers feedback. And this is also where we can provide better support. And also we're going to be doing live Q and A sessions, and the three instructors of this class myself, Sam and Will were all on this group. Participating ends a little bit easier for us to interact with you here on the Facebook group. So if you are interested, please head over to Facebook, search for the photography Masha Class group, or go to the link that will be in the community tab in one of the discussions that I started, we can't wait to see your work. If you have any questions or feedback for how we could make this course even better, please send me a message or post it here in the course community tab and I would love to hear your thoughts. Thanks so much 3. How Does a Camera Work?: to start off this photography masterclass, you need to learn. How does the camera work? This probably isn't a question you've thought about too much with digital cameras. You just press a button in the picture of Here's Right. Well, we aren't going to dive into a long history of photography. It's important to understand the parts of the camera and how it actually works before moving on. Nowadays, cameras air everywhere from the street corner to your pocket. And while bigger, more professional cameras like DSLR mere lis may look quite different than a smartphone, they work very similarly. At its core, photography is about capturing life. Your camera can tell if there's bright light or if there's an absence of light. It can see colors, too Lycos into your camera through the lens, which has an aperture inside an opening that lets light inside the light passes through the camera shutter, which in many cameras opens when you press the shutter release button toe let light in, and the light hits your camera's sensor, where it is digitally captured and saved as an image. While digital photography is a lot easier than photographing with film, the way the cameras work are still similar and as one of the most important inventions of all time, we're excited to have you in this class to learn even more so thank you for being here and let's learn how to take better photos. 4. Exposure: Intro to Exposure: Welcome to this new section of the photography masterclass. In this section, you're going to learn all about exposure, what it is, how to use your camera to properly expose and even some advanced exposure concepts. First, what is exposure? Photography exposure is basically how bright or dark your images we call a photo that is too dark under exposed. A photo that is too bright is over. Exposed a photo where your subject is not too dark and not too bright. But it looks natural, is properly exposed, and your subject could be anything from a person to a mountain in the distance. Depending on your photos, composition and your situation, not everything will be properly exposed. Sometimes your background will be too bright, or sometimes one side of your photo will be too dark. The important thing we want you to remember with proper exposure is that it's partly up to you. As the artist. You may want your photo to be a little dark or to be a little bright. That can create some interesting and creative shots. As a beginner, it's good to learn how to properly expose so that the viewer can easily see what's in your photo. Now, how do we change our camera settings to expose properly? This is done with a few key settings. Aperture, shutter speed and I. So, with most DSLR muralists and point and shoot cameras and even mobile phones, you'll be able to adjust these settings manually. And that's what this course is all about. Dropping auto and understanding how to photograph with your manual settings even if you use auto settings in the future, which is sometimes a good idea. Knowing how your camera works is so important to understanding how to take great photos. Thes three settings. Aperture, Shutter speed and I so make up what's called the exposure triangle. Each setting can make your photo brighter or darker, and each setting also effects different aspects of your photo. Like the depth of field and motion blur, things will cover in future lessons. There's also one other thing that dramatically changes how bright or dark our photos might be. Can you guess what that is? Lighting photographing in bright sunlight is a lot different than photographing a candlelit scene. Properly exposing is a balance of the settings in the exposure triangle and understanding how light works. So let's get started with aperture 5. Exposure: What is Aperture?: In this lesson, you'll learn what aperture is and how it effects. Exposure. Aperture is the first part of the exposure triangle, and the first part of your camera that controls how much light enters and is captured inside your lens is ah whole. This whole can go bigger and smaller. And this is the aperture, which is sometimes called the iris, similar to the iris of the pupil of your eye. Now, if you make the aperture larger, do you think more light is let in or less light? That one is easy. More light is let in when the hole is bigger. This means that increasing the size of your capture will make your image brighter. Decreasing will make it darker. So when you are in a darker location like shooting inside a building, you might want to increase the size of your aperture to expose properly. Think about what happens to your eye when you turn off the lights. Your pupil gets really big to let in more light so that you can see when you go outside in the bright sun, your pupil will get smaller toe let unless late, so depending on your situation, you can have a perfectly exposed image with different aperture size is how do we adjust our aperture? An F stop, also known as the F number, is a method of describing the size of the aperture in each lens. This F stop scale goes from F one to F 1.42 F two to F 2.8 to have foreign beyond. There are two potentially confusing things about this F stop scale, though first the smaller the F number, the larger the aperture vice versa. The larger the F number, the smaller the aperture. So in F 2.8 is actually a larger aperture and lets in more light than an F 11. Does that make sense? The other confusing thing is that not all lenses are made equally. It takes a lot of expensive engineering to make an aperture that opens up really wide to something like an F 1.4 or F two. So if you're using a kit lens, the one that came with your camera, your aperture might not open to these wider F numbers. Similarly, if you're using a mobile phone or a point and shoot camera, you might not have these F number or F stop options. Here we are outside. We've got our friend William here who is going to be playing a big part in this class. And I'm using a basic canon t five I DSLR similar to the DSLR cameras that many of you might be using in this class. And now I'm going to show you how changing your aperture or your F stop will affect the exposure. And with this kit lens, which is the 18 to 55 that came with this camera, we can't even open up meaning increase our aperture whiter than 5.6 F 5.6 with this lens zoomed in like so So here I am at 5.6 and I'm just going to go up to 6.3 7.1 eight point. Oh, and as you can see, as I go up an f stop, the aperture is actually getting smaller and letting in less light. So if I go all the way up to 22 or even beyond its completely under exposed and if I go the opposite way, we're opening up again up to 10 F 9.0, you can see on the screen that the F stop number is represented by 7.1, not a fraction of F over 6.3, and now we're up to 5.6 and were generally exposed properly. But if we're still too dark, we have our other settings to get perfect exposure. How do you adjust the aperture on your camera? This will depend on the camera you're using, and we suggest checking out the camera anatomy section of this course where we will provide resource is on how to use all of the popular brands and models of cameras. Typically, there's a dial on your camera body or a button to press and toggle, which can change your aperture setting. So now let's put this all into practice in a real world situation. If I'm taking photos of Sam here and I want to be able to expose properly using my aperture , here's how I would do that. Right now my aperture is set to 2.8, and it's really really bright, so if I take that shot, it is over exposed, and I would make Sam smile. Perhaps so what I'm gonna do is actually closed down my aperture. I'm out of F 2.8. Now I'm going to go down to something like F five point. Oh, look here, Sam. Smile. So that's how just with the aperture, you can fix your exposure. Of course, this is all just one part of the exposure triangle. My shutter speed and I so settings will also affect the exposure, and we'll get into those in the next two videos. Following that, we'll see how we balance all of these settings to get a perfectly exposed shot. Now we know this lesson is getting a little long, but I want to talk about one other thing with aperture. Your aperture also affects other things, like depth of field, which will cover more in depth in the depth of field section of this course. Very briefly, though, the depth of field is how much is in focus. What plane of your vision is in focus is the entire scene in front of you and focus from three feet in front 2 100 feet or is just a sliver and focus. Perhaps what is 5 to 6 feet in front of you is in focus, but everything beyond that is really blurry. So how does aperture or your f stop affect this? A wide open aperture has a shallower depth of field, meaning. A smaller sliver of your scene is in focus. A smaller aperture has a deeper depth of field. So if you're shooting a wide open landscape and you want everything in focus, you'll want to close down your aperture, making it smaller. If you're shooting a portrait and you want a blurry background, open up your aperture. Make it whiter and just a reminder. If you are opening up your aperture, you're actually making your F stop number smaller. If you are closing down your aperture, you're making your F stop number bigger. This shallow depth of field is one of the things that can make a not so great photo look more professional. But remember, not all cameras and not all lenses can open up to vary wide apertures. So, depending on your equipment, this may or may not be possible. Here. I have a new lens on this camera. It's the 50 millimeter that opens up to an F 1.8. I'm going to snap the shot so you can tell with an F 1.8. The background is very, very blurry. So you can trust that I'm going to close down the aperture all the way to 22 and then to expose, I'm gonna adjust the shutter speed, which will get into in more detail in the next lesson. Okay, I'm gonna take the shot. So now when we review these two photos, you can see that the one that was shot with the F 22 aperture everything behind William is still in focus. The depth of field is very deep. It's five or six feet behind him, and it's still in focus compared to the F 1.8 shot where everything behind William is very , very out of focus by now. I hope you understand what aperture is and how it effects exposure. For now, go out and practice changing your aperture setting to see how it changes your exposure and your depth of field. And next, we're going to dive into shutter speed 6. Exposure: What is Shutter Speed?: In this lesson, you'll learn what shutter speed is and how it affects your exposure. It is also a way you can creatively blur or freeze motion in your composition. Once light travels through your camera's lens and through the aperture, it goes through your shutter. Think of a shutter as occurred in that is, blocking your camera's sensor from seeing the light when you pressure cameras, trigger release button or the shutter release button that big button to take your photo, the curtain or the shutter opens up and closes really quickly toe let in light. And this is different on different types of cameras, like a DSLR, a mirror, a list or a point and shoot or mobile phone. And we'll talk a little bit more about that in the camera anatomy section in broad daylight , your camera only needs a fraction of a second to capture the image, and that is how shutter speed is represented as a fraction 1/30 of a 2nd 1/60 of a 2nd 11 25th of a second, all the way up to 1 8/1000 of a second and beyond. And most cameras can even leave the shutter open for longer time, such as 30 seconds. And with many Disa, Lar and Mirrlees cameras, you can shoot at custom shutter speeds much longer than that. So how do you change the shutter speed on your camera? Similar to aperture? There will be a dial that adjust the shutter speed and you'll have to find that for your particular camera model. Here I am, and we have a shutter speed of 30 or 1/30 of a second on the computer. Its representatives 1/30 So you'll see that. But on the back of the camera, it just says 30. So I'm gonna take a quick picture at 1/30 of a second and with the same settings for aperture and I s so I'm going to increase the shutter like dragging this wheel at the top of this camera. This might be in a different place for you if you have a different camera, and by increasing the shutter speed, we're letting in less light. So now it's 1 1/100 of a second, even though on this camera it says 100 we know that it's a fraction so 1 1/100 of a second . So if I snap a photo here, that's that 1 25th of a second. It's a lot darker than the previous photo. Now, if we go up the opposite direction 1/13 1 10th 1/8 This could go even longer to something like half a second or a full second. But when we do that, it gets really over exposed right now. So the take away is that a faster shutter speed. Let's in less light, and a slower shutter speed lets in more light. Therefore, if you're in a situation that is too dark, you can slow down your shutter speed to expose more properly. But there's an important rule to shutter speed that has to do with motion blur. If you're photographing a moving object, you will need a faster shutter speed to freeze that object in time. It depends on how fast the object is moving, and you'll need to play around with the shutter setting to get it just right. Wave your hand in front of your face. This is called motion blur. You see how blurry your hand is and to capture your hand without any blur, you'll need a super fast shutter speed. Luckily, most cameras can do that. You might also get what's called camera shake from a slower shutter speed. This is that micro movement that has captured while trying to hold your camera still, and this is one of the most common issues for new photographers. Typically for beginners, we recommend shooting with the shutter speed faster than 1/80 or even 1 1/100 of a second to prevent that camera shake once you practice a lot and can hold your cameras. Still, you may be able to use the shutter speed of 1/60 or even 1/30 of a second without getting any of that camera shake. But this takes practice. Using a tripod is an alternative way to prevent camera shake when shooting with a longer shutter speed. So now you know what shutter speed is and how it affects exposure. Play around with your shutter speed settings to see if you can properly expose in different locations and lighting situations, and next will cover ice so or I s O, the last part of the exposure triangle, and then we're gonna put it all together. We're going to jump into different scenarios to show you how we would set our settings, forgetting the perfect exposure 7. Exposure: What is ISO?: in this lesson, you'll learn what I so is and how it affects exposure. Eso spelled out. I s o can be pronounced I s o or ice. Oh, and depending on where you are in the world, you might hear both and both can be used. Eso is the level of sensitivity of your camera to the light that hits the sensor. So the light travels through the aperture. Remember through your shutter and then it hits your camera's sensor. It's basically a digital way of increasing or decreasing the exposure of your image. Increasing the isso makes it brighter, while decreasing makes it darker. Eso options change depending on your camera but usually start at 100 go up by the power of to 102 104 108 132 164 100 etcetera or even some cameras have them in between. Some newer cameras can go all the way up into the millions. Here we are with our same set up as before, and I'm at an Esso 100 by increasing the ISO, which on this camera I have to do so either with the touch screen or going into the menu. I can show you that going up to 200 I s O increases amount of light or increases the brightness of the image. We're not actually letting in more light. It's digitally enhancing the image to be brighter. So now, at 3200 it's completely overexposed going back down 804 102 101 100 back to a relatively good exposure. So that's how I eso works as you increase your eyes. So you are doubling the sensitivity of your sensor. But increasing your eyes so has some drawbacks. Because you are digitally enhancing your image. Increasing too much can lead to digital noise or grain in your image. So let's look at that in this quick demo here, I'm going to take a shot at eso 100 were relatively well exposed. And when we zoom in on that, we probably won't see much digital noise or grain. But now I'm gonna go up to an I S O. Let's go all the way to 12,800 which is the max that this camera can go up to. Because I'm doing that. I'm going to have to compensate and adjust my shutter speed or my aperture to actually expose properly. And so now I'm going to snap another shot. And when we zoom in on those photos, you'll be able to tell that there is more digital noise and grain in this shot with the eso at 12,800 with your camera, you should go out and see what I esos are good and which ones have a lot of noise in grain . And for you as an artist, how much noise and green can you live with with your photos and know that you shouldn't go above a certain I s O. Typically with most DSLR cameras, you shouldn't go past 1600 isso. Some cameras and especially some new mirror less cameras can go higher. But that's a general rule you can follow to know that if you push it past that, you're probably going to end up with some digital noise or green. Some of the newest Mirrlees cameras can practically shoot in the middle of the night. This is one of the best reasons to invest in a better camera the ability to shoot in low light situations without having to use artificial lighting like flashes to expose. All right, so I just shot three of the same photo, more or less with three different cameras. The X t two from Fuji, the Canon Eos rebel T five I and the Sony A. Seven r three. And it's really interesting to compare the is So and so the noise digital noise that happens with each of these. We really pushed each of them all the way up to 12,800 ISA, which is extremely high. And typically I would never shoot at this eyes. So just looking through the images, it's pretty clear that the Canon EOS is struggling a little bit more at this is so, which is understandable. It's a much more economical camera. The Fuji X T two is did pretty well from all things that I can see. Ah, there is a little bit noise, especially when you zoom in a little bit more on then the Sony A seven R three, which is a full frame camera. So it's going to do better in low light automatically. There's still some noise in there, but all things considered, it still looks pretty good. One thing you might hear is based I s O what is based? I s o base eso is typically the lowest I so number of the sensor on your camera that can produce the highest quality image without adding noise to the picture. Most modern cameras have a base of 100. So ideally you'd be shooting at eso 100 to get the highest quality image. This might be different for your particular camera model, and you might have to do a little research to see what the best base eso setting is on your model. However, it's not always possible to shoot at eso 100 or the lowest level, especially when you're in a low light situation. So when should you increase your eyes? So if you're shooting inside or at night, decreasing your shutter speed and opening up your aperture might be the first thing you want to do. But it might not be enough to get a properly exposed image. So in this situation you may need to increase your eye, so to just get a properly exposed image. But how do you balance all of these settings? How do you know when to change each one that's coming up in the next lesson on the exposure triangle when we put it all together 8. Exposure: The Exposure Triangle: Now you know how aperture, shutter speed and I eso affect your exposure. But how do you actually decide what to change in different situations? This is what we'll call the exposure triangle and putting it all together. There is a balance between these three settings. Changing one might affect how you change the other. Also depending on creative choices like having an open aperture to get a blurry background or using a super fast shutter speed to capture. Still motion your other settings will have toe compromise to make sure things are properly exposed. So let's go out in the field in three different situations. Toe walk through how we make those decisions. So we're out here in this park. We're going to get a couple portrait's, But first I'm going to get a sort of a standard nature shot. This might be a great thing for you to try to go out and capture, go out to a park or in the city. Just get some shots of some plants. They're the easiest subjects toe work with. So I brought out the Canon Rebel T five I I'm on a 55 to 250 millimeter lens and I just turned on my camera and I didn't set the settings before here. So this is basically what you're probably going to be doing. You're gonna open your camera, see what the settings are. I'm at 1 2/50 of a shutter, F 7.1 and ISO 100. Since I am out side during the day, the first thing I it will do is typically drop my eye. So to 100 or two something very low. Whatever the lowest is that your camera goes to most go down to 100. So that is really kind of the first thing that I would do anyway, So that's on the right setting. And then I would just use my exposure meter. I'm gonna just see one of these kind of cool, bushy flower things get pretty close up and see where I'm at. So I'm pretty close. So I have to back up to get in focus. OK, so I'm very under exposed right now I'm at a F 7.11 2/50 of a shutter and ISO 100. Let's see what that looks like and it's way too dark. So the first thing I'm going to do is open up my aperture. I wouldn't mind a shallower depth of field Anyways, let's drop that down to F 4.0, which I believe is the whitest this lens will go open to. So now I'm gonna take another test shot. It's still a little bit too dark, because my shutter speed is at 1 2/50 I'm pretty confident I can drop that down and not get any sort of motion blur going to go down to 1/80 at 4.0, I s 0 100 that is actually really well exposed. So in terms of exposure, I'm happy with that. Next, I would play around with the composition a little bit, but for now I'm pretty happy with these settings on a zoom in just a little bit to get a little tighter, and it looks solid in the same setting. I like these plants, but everything is in the shade. I want a little bit more contrast, So I'm gonna go over there where the sun is shining on the leaves just a little bit more, and then we'll see what it looks like there. So it's pretty sunny. So there's a lot of sun on my eyes and I know automatically that I'm probably going to adjust my settings because there's a lot more light on this plant right here because I can't address my eye itself down any further to make it darker. I could crank up my f stop, but I don't want to lose that shallow depth of field. So what I'm now going to do is adjust my shutter, making my shutter even faster toe let in less light. I went from 1/80 to about 1 3/20 of a second, and that looks pretty good. The only thing or the only issue is that we're getting a lot of sunlight. It's very contrast to you. We got some shadows, which I actually like, But the reading on my camera was a little bit too overexposed, so I'm actually going to drop a little bit further. 1 5/100 of a second shutter speed. Take the shot. That's pretty interesting. So you can see that even just moving a few feet away with the same subject. The lighting was really different and I had to adjust my settings, but with this situation. I basically being outside with a lot of bright light My i s So I set to the lowest possible Then I adjusted my f stop to the depth of field that I like. And then I used my shutter to basically compensate to expose properly. Okay, so we're here on the other side of the park I've got will here, and we're gonna take a standard sort of portrait. I've still got my same settings from before. So 1 5/100 of a second shutter at four point. Oh, and I so 100. So since we're in the shade compared to the previous situation, it's way under exposed. So I'm going to drop my shutter speed toe, let in more light, so I'm slowing down my shutter from 1 500 Let's go toe 1 100 All right, that's actually exposed relatively nicely on will's face, but the background is completely overblown. But of course, in this situation, I do want to expose to will's face. I'm gonna take one more shot, and I'm also gonna get a little bit higher. And I'm going to slow down my shutter just a little bit toe 1/60 of a second. Still, I think I can deal with this. No camera shake. When were I might have got a tiny bit of motion blur from my hands, but the exposure was nice. So what I want to actually do is speed up my shutter toe one back toe, 1 1/100 But I need to brighten it up a little bit so I can't open up my aperture anymore. So the only thing I have left to do with my camera is to increase my eyes. So So I'm gonna increase eso from 100 to 200 and that's a lot better. The background is still really bright, but we're exposing the will, and the exposure on his face looks pretty good for me. So as you can see in this example, what I had to do was increase my eyes. So because I didn't have enough light to be able to hold my camera steady enough with that slower shutter speed. So if you run into that situation and you can't let in more light with your aperture, the ISO might be the only way to go. You were in our last location for our exposure triangle Demos Will is still my subject. We're gonna take another portrait. What's interesting is he's still in the shade, but there's a lot of light coming from behind him. The sun is a backlight. We're gonna talk more about lighting in the future section. I've also swapped lenses to this nice little pancake 24 millimeter lens, which allows me to open up my aperture a bit more. So I know for this portrait I'm going to open up my aperture as wide as possible so I can get the most shallow depth of field. So I'm going to start. By doing that, I'm going from an F 4.0, which were the settings from For the old lens opening up to an F 2.8. I already know that I'm going to be too bright. So what I'm going to also do is drop my eye so back down to 100 and then similar to the first situation, I basically only have my shutter speed to compensate and make it properly exposed. So I'm gonna address my shutter going from 1 1/100 to about 1 5/100 of a second. It's a little bit too dark. My camera meter is telling me that it's properly exposed, but because there's so much light coming from behind will, it's saying it's exposed. But it's actually a little bit too bright, so I'm gonna drop down my shutter speed will just look out over that way. Look right here. A little bit of light coming from behind wells. Nice one with your eyes open. All right, so with this lens, the F 2.8 looks pretty good. We got a nice blurry background with shudder At 1 2/50 and a nice of 1 1/100 We've got nice exposure on Will's face. So this was a quick demo of how I changed my settings to properly expose using the exposure triangle for me being outside. The first thing that I always do if I have enough light is dropping. My I s oas, Lois can go. I usually will also open up my aperture as wide as possible so that I get a shallower depth of field. And that was the case in all of these situations. If I was going for more of a landscape where I wanted to deep depth of field, I would have adjusted that first. And then lastly, I used my shutter speed to basically compensate and get proper exposure. Of course, if you're in a different situation and you need a fast shutter speed, then that might be the setting that you change first. As you can tell, every situation is different. So the best thing is to go out. Practice with your camera with your lenses. So you know that whatever situation you're in, you'll be able to get proper exposure. If you have any problems, be sure toe post a question to the course and will be happy to help you out. 9. Exposure: Modes: In this lesson, you'll learn about camera exposure modes on most modern cameras. Thes options will appear on a dialogue on the top, or it may be in the menu options. Not all cameras have these pre settings, but if you have a camera that does, it's worth knowing what each one does so you can start out. Let's start with auto mode. This mode is actually green on most cameras. When you place your camera on auto, it will do everything for you. By default, your camera will decide what I s o what shudder and what f stop to shoot with. It will also decide if it needs a flash. If your camera has one built in, it's basically the button you need to use if you want to take your camera straight out of the box and start shooting in any situation without thinking about a setting, using auto is great if you just want to clean overall exposed photograph. However, by using automotive, you will give up some control over the image. The camera will always expose toe where the meters telling it to sometimes using a higher ISO or dropping the shutter too low for a good shot. So be very cautious when using auto mode for this class will be shying away from auto as much as we can. You are learning the tools that allow you to control the camera yourself. We will start with the most popular and main exposure modes. P A. S M are the initials or it's an acronym, and it corresponds to the letters on Theme Odile or the options for modes in your camera menu. It stands for program aperture, priority shutter priority and manual program mode. In this mode, your camera will select the optimal shutter and aperture for you based on the type of meat oring you have selected. Remember when we talked about metering in program mode? You can quickly change either shutter or aperture, and the camera will adjust the other settings to expose properly. It's sort of a mix between aperture priority and shutter priority, which we'll talk about next. It's also a really good way to get used to exposure values and how the shutter and aperture effect on each other for optimal exposure. You can really see the triangle that Phil talked about earlier. Let's check out this demo so you can see now the camera is in program mode by looking at the top, we have peace elected and in your menu you can see the little pea and you can see right now are camera is a 5/100 of a second at F eight. It's getting a nice exposure based on the meeting that we've selected. If I cover up the lens and it thinks that the camera then thinks it's very dark, so just opened up our aperture to a 1.8 and used 1/15 of a second to try and compensate for that. So again, when I let go, it'll go back to what we have. Cool thing about program mode is that I can change either the shutter or the aperture, and it will adjust accordingly, the other one So we're not gonna be fixed at either one of the other. It's always going to changing. So let's try changing the shutter down to let's just say, for a 100 just for fun, see how it adjusted the aperture to 20. That's a pretty close down apter to keep that focus now. Adversely, I can go ahead and just change the aperture say I want to shoot at a four. It adjusted the shutter to 2000 of a second to make up for that four. So see, after we've taken the photo, it went back to the 5/100 of a second F eight. So really only adjusted for that specific photo. And then it will go back to what it thinks is a proper exposure aperture priority. This mode allows you to pick your aperture, and then the camera decides the shutter for the optimal exposure setting. I like this mode when I know exactly what f stop I want to shoot, and I have no time to select my shutter. For example, if you want a specific depth of field with a specific F stop, but you don't really care about the shutter speed, you would use this mode. Let's check out this demo, and I'll show you how to do it. So now let's shift our camera over to aperture priority. And on this camera, it's a V on other cameras, it's a P or just a so get an aperture priority. We select the aperture, and the camera will select it's own shutter. So right now, right in F 22. And to keep the exposure based on the meeting that we have, the camera has selected an 80th of a second. Now I want to shoot with some more things out of focus. So I'm gonna make my f stop. I'm gonna make my f stop A to eight. Which means I'm gonna get mawr things out of focus in the background. Now, the camera selected a 4/1000 of a second to keep up with that big open hole in letting all that light. And it wants to make the shutter faster to keep exposure. So this is really great when you want to select the f stop that you want to shoot in and everything else is kind of selected for you. Shutter priority shutter priority is the same concept as aperture priority. But you get to pick the shutter so the user decides what shutter they want to use, and the camera will select the corresponding aperture. Setting for the right exposure again, based on your meeting I use is mowed a lot when I'm shooting sports or I want to make sure to free something also like to high enough shutter so speed is guaranteed to freeze the action. Check out this demo so now have shifted the camera over to shutter priority. On this camera, the dial says TV, which also stands for time value or shudder value on other cameras. You'll see S or you'll see SP. They're all kind of different, so it depends on what your camera is. So right now we have a shudder at 1/60 of a second, and the camera has thought that shooting at an F 22 would be a great exposure for what we're doing. So now let's say I'm shooting sports and I want to make sure freeze the action or shooting water, and I want to freeze the action. I'm gonna move my shutter all the way up to 1000 of a second just to be safe. See how the camera has now selected a 6.3 F stop just to compensate again for the exposure that we've chosen based on the meeting that we're doing. So this works great for selecting the shutter camera picks CFC manual mode. This mode puts everything on the user. The user selects both f stop and shutter for the exposure as well as I s o flash everything . This gives you complete control over exposure, letting you to decide all the settings in this. You can use your light meter to decide how you want. Expose, or you can pick yourself. Check out this demo. So I moved the camera all the way over to manual mode. Now, this is the mode that we've been using most of the time in this class, and we will continue to use you, pick everything, everything's manual. You don't let the camera really pick anything other than telling you what is on the light meter. So here, I'm gonna pick my shutter and pick my aperture. I've selected a shutter of 1 25th And here on this camera I can use the touch screen to select my f stop. I'm going to select a F 22 make it really dark, take the picture and it stays the F 22. We go back to shooting, I'm gonna go back because it's too dark. I'm gonna shift my f stop based on the light meter that they're giving me down to an 11. Take a picture. Really? Is known really need for a demo here. Just when you have your camera in manual, know that it's on you to pick your F stop and your shutter for all modes. Except for manual mode, most cameras have what's called exposure compensation, which recovered in the exposure compensation section. This will allow you decide if you want your exposure to be over under what your camera believes is the perfect exposure. Check out this demo of me using exposure compensation. Since your camera is picking one of the variables in your exposure triangle, you can kind of tell it that you want it to be either a stop above or a stop below or any stoppage above or below what should be exposure? So let's take this picture right now. Right now we're at zero exposure compensation. I've decided to shoot an aperture priority. I'm shooting at a 2.8, so I get some stuff out of focus in the background, and the camera has now selected its shutter. Its selected 4000. Now we're not gonna correct anything, and let's go ahead and take a photo. So that's our photo of William. Now I'm going to change the exposure Compensation by clicking on this little icon or on other cameras. It might be different, but basically I can adjust exposure Compensation to tell the camera. I want this to be a stop or two Overexposed. I haven't set to two stops over when I take the picture. You can see the camera has now jumped its shutter up to 8/100 of a second instead of 4000. Because I've told it that I wanted to be two stops overexposed. This is really great when you're shooting a wedding and you don't wanna have to select your exposure is shooting an event. You can pick your f stop. Then you have the camera pick the shutter. But then you pick your style of shooting. Sometimes I actually like to shoot two stops under exposed so that really get deeper shadows next to a window or something like that. So see, now I've jumped down to two stops under exposed and I can take a picture now. It jumped back up to 4000 because that's as fast as this camera could go. So let's go ahead and change the aperture to of 56 Now you can see two stops under exposed has dropped the shutter down to 3200 at F 5.6. Let's go back up to three stops. Overexposed. At 5.6, it dropped a shutter all the way down to 100. It's really customizable, and you being able to tell the camera how to expose based on exposure compensation. 10. Exposure: Using the Exposure Meter: Now you know how changing your aperture shutter speed and I so can affect the brightness of your photos. But how can you even tell before taking a photo if it's going to be exposed properly or not , that's what your cameras exposure meter is all about. Where is this light meter? If you look inside the viewfinder of your camera, you should see a scale at the bottom, going from negative numbers to positive numbers. Typically, it is from negative three to positive. Three. You may also see this on the top of your camera in the display near the shutter release button, or you may see it on the back screen of your camera, depending on what display mode you're using. Usually there is a line or a dot that moves from left to right along this scale, depending on your composition, what you're looking at through your lens and the settings and lighting around you, this line will move around. A beginner's goal is to get that line in the center for a balanced exposure. If the line is on the left side of the zero in the middle, then your photo might be slightly under exposed If the line is on the right, you may be overexposed. The numbers of the scale signify how many stops of light are under or overexposed. So using your knowledge of the exposure triangle, such as F stops, eso or shutter speed, you can change your camera settings to move that line to the middle of the scale, achieving a good, proper exposure. Here we are back with William, and I'm using my camera light meter now to tell me whether it's exposed properly or not right now, at 1 1/60 of a shutter F 9.0, and I so 400 it's a little bit too bright according to the light meter in the camera, when I have pressed the shutter, I can see the little line, but beneath that graph pop up between one and two on the right side of that middle point. So if I want to decrease the brightness and make it more properly exposed, according to my camera, I can increase the shutter speed. And as I do that, the line goes towards the middle. If it's completely under exposed or completely over exposed, the line might not even appear on this little graph, it might show up as a little arrow to the left or to the right beneath negative three or beneath positive three. So that's where I am right now. My settings are crazy 1 1/1000 of a second for my shutter F 22. So if I decrease my shutter speed so it making it slower and lettingme or light in at some point, we can see the little line on the bottom of the graph get up to negative three than to than one and all the way up to perfect exposure, according to my camera. Is the light meter always right, though not always, depending on how you want your photos toe look, what if you want your photo to be a bit bright, Or maybe you want a photo that is mostly dark with just a single point of light. In these cases, the cameras light meter will tell you that your photo is going to be over or under exposed . Just like many of the rules of photography, using a cameras light meter is only a tool. It's up to you as the artist to use it to help you take better photos So go ahead practice taking some photos and using the exposure meter to see how it properly or not properly exposes your photos. There's also a way that you can change how your exposure meter reads the scene, and that topic is coming up in the next video. 11. Exposure: Metering Modes: Welcome to this advanced lesson on metering modes. If you aren't interested in this topic, feel free to skip this video and go to any other lesson that interests you. Most cameras have three options for how the exposure or light meter works. Spot metering, center, weighted metering and matrix metering, also known as value tive metering. We'll start with matrix or evaluative metering because this is the standard setting on most DSLR and mere lis cameras. In this mode, the camera reads the exposure from all areas of your frame based off the lighting in the areas of your frame. It will tell you a balanced exposure for the entire seat. This mode might be the best option when you are running around with your camera and a very diverse lighting situations. I use this mode quite a bit in shooting events, but with spot metering, your camera only evaluates the light around a single focus point. Typically, this will be the center point of your frame, but it can also be moved around to any other part of the frame with many different cameras . The camera will read the exposure of that specific point and tell you if it's exposed or not using the spot muting mode is good when photographing smaller subjects in a larger frame that has a contrast ing exposure, such as a bright moon in a dark sky or a dark animal in the middle of a snowy field. The spot metering mode also changes depending on where you are focusing. If you're focusing on something very close or very far, it will change the exposure. Reading. The center weighted metering mode reads the exposure of the center point of the frame and the surroundings ignoring the far corners of your frame. It doesn't take into account where you are focusing, but just what's in the center of the frame. This mode is great when you know your subjects are going to be in the center of your frame like portrait's. Now that you know what the different modes are, let's take a look at how they work with a demonstration. So let's take a look at what the meter ring actually looks like and how it works. So I'm gonna click on the value of metering and you can see it's getting a general meter for it and is very well exposed. All around. Let's take a picture you could notice. A little icon in the camera is a frame with a circle and 2/2 circles on the top and bottom . Now let's take a look at spot metering. You can see how the exposure brightened up because a spot on this camera is dead center, and it's metering for that back. Let's take a photo. Let's look at center weighted average and you see how got much darker. Now let's take a photo. Now, if you compare these three different metering modes, you can see how the so you can see how picking the metering mode really determines what your camera views as exposure. 12. Exposure: Exposure Compensation: welcome to another advanced photography topic called Exposure Compensation. By now you understand that when in manual mode you can increase or decrease your exposure whenever you like. This allows you to shoot more creative shots in terms of exposure. But what about if you are shooting with an automatic mode and your photos are always coming out to darker to write for your taste? Or maybe they're perfectly balanced and you want it to be a bit brighter or darker. That's why exposure compensation comes into play. Where do you find the exposure Compensation option. In most cases, your camera will have a little button with a plus or minus on it. You can press that button to turn the dial to increase or decrease the setting. Some cameras have a separate dial for exposure compensation altogether. Adjusting this will make your photos brighter or darker. How does exposure compensation change? The exposure is a aperture Shutter speed. I s O or what? Well, this depends on what automatic mode your on in your camera program. After priority shutter priority. When you won these, we explained these modes in the camera anatomy section of this course, so go ahead and skip to that lesson if you need to. In aperture priority mode, the exposure compensation changes the shutter speed in shutter priority. It changes the aperture in program mode. It changes the shutter speed. What about manual mode, though? Well, it doesn't make sense to use exposure compensation in manual because you can choose any of your settings to just your exposure. Let's see when and why we would use this option in a quick, real world demonstration. Okay, so we're here and we're inside a living room and I have Sam up against a really bright window, and we're gonna use exposure compensation. Now let's say I want to take a picture. Sam, in front of the window. I've got my Fuji X t to here. I'm at ESO 1600. I'm on aperture priority at a F, too. So that means the camera's gonna pick its own shutter. Let's go ahead and take a picture with exposure compensation just set to zero. Okay, cool. So I got a picture of Sam here. He's totally silhouetted because our evaluative metering is looking to expose the entire frame, and it's exposing for the outside, which is so bright where is on the inside. It's very dark now. I don't really care about the background blowing out, and I want to bring up the exposure. But I want to stay in aperture priority because I'm gonna be shooting a bunch of stuff inside with Sam. So I'm gonna bump my exposure compensation up by Let's try to stops. So now I'm telling the camera I wanted to be two stops brighter so it can choose what it needs to choose the last image aperture priority. It shows a 44/100 of a second to take it at, so let's go ahead and see what it chooses now with exposure compensation set two plus two. All right, here we go. See, has Sam as much brighter. The camera in Aperture Priority now chose a 9/100 of a second for compensating for that exposure. Basically, let's do plus three and add a little bit more. So now that's way bright. Basically have told the camera that I wanted to be three stops higher, and it shows a 1/50 of a second. Everything else stays the same, and you can see now that the brightness in the photo allows me to see inside and Sam the backgrounds totally blown out, and this is a very quick and easy way to use exposure compensation in a practical situation . 13. Exposure: Dynamic Range: Let's talk about another, more advanced topic that is becoming a commonly used term not only in photography but also with new television sets and professional video cameras. Again, if this topic doesn't interest, you feel for you to jump ahead to something that does. Let's start with the definition than break it down. Dynamic range is the ratio between the maximum and minimum measurable light intensities, the blacks and the whites. The darks in the highlights and low dynamic range Photo is one where the entire photo is relatively the same exposure. There aren't many bright spots or dark spots. In other words, it isn't very contrast. E. A high dynamic range photo is one with very bright parts and very dark parts. This would be called a high contrast photo. Now, don't get confused by what I'm talking about now with HDR photography. HDR photography, which also stands for high dynamic range, is a technique where you combine photos at multiple exposures of the same scene that results in a photo with good exposure throughout. We'll show you how to do this in the next lesson. Not all k Mazar made, even when it comes to dynamic range and it's something you might hear about when comparing different camera models. Some cameras are better than others at capturing very bright in dark exposures in the same photo. This typically has to do with having a better camera sensor. It also has to do with a file type that you're shooting in. Shooting in raw mode will give you more information in both highlights and dark parts of your photo while shooting in JPEG mode. Won't we explained these file types for them? The camera anatomy section? Why is this a good thing? It's good because you have more control of how your image looks. It's also good because there are a lot of situations where you need mawr dynamic range. Imagine yourself shooting a family photo during the middle of the day out of park with a lot of trees. So Mary's of your frame, maybe in the shade. Others may be super bright. The sky might become completely overexposed compared to your subjects. In this case, have a camera that can capture a high dynamic range is a good thing. Smartphones, point shoots and consumer and DSLR and mere lis cameras won't be as good at this as the higher end models similar to this idea and photography. It's the same as with buying a new TV. A TV with a high dynamic range will be able to show you Maurin Formacion in the shadows and in the highlights watching the same thing on another TV. Those highlights and shadows might just appear is purely white or black. All right, I hope this makes sense to you. If you have any questions, please let us know. 14. Exposure: Reading Exposure with a Histogram: so welcome to this advanced lesson on history. Grams basically using history and will hope we determine the highlights in the shadows and basically a really good exposure for your image. Most cameras will let you view a hist a gram after the fact, and some cameras will leave you a history. Graham. While you're shooting, you could bring it up by usually pressing an info or display button. Now the whole idea behind the hissed a gram is viewing the actual levels in graph form. On the left side of the hissed a gram, we'll see our shadows. And on the right side of the history, Graham will see our highlights up and down will be the levels of exposure in the graph. So you want to get a really nice healthy exposure by having a good medium fat graph in the middle between your shadows and your highlights. You can see right now are shooting William Shakespeare right now, and it's really heavy on our history. Ram on the left side, which means there's more shadows in the shot than there are highlights. Now watch is like cover the lens up. I let no light in, and it's all shadow, so that would not be a good exposure. Let open up and you see how went from brightness as the camera adjusted its shutter. Now we have a nice, fat hissed a gram. I'm gonna switch it over to manual so you can really see what we're doing here. Watches I adjust the shutter on William Shakespeare and it gets brighter and brighter That whole Graf is moving towards the highlights because we're blowing things out. We're making our shutter slower to let more light in. And, ah, it would not be a good exposure. So now let's go the other direction. So now we're at 2500 of us of a second in our shutter, not letting a lot of light. And you can see her hissed. A gram is showing a deep side on the shadows, not a good exposure. So I could go ahead and just stared a history ram without knowing any of the settings and understand what a good exposure is. That looks like a great exposure to me in manual mode. Now, if I don't have anything else to look at, and I was just looking at the history Graham or I was unsure if the highlights were gonna be blown out where I wasn't gonna be able to see into the shadows. I would use the hissed a gram to grant a great exposure. If I saw any of the graph in the far left, the shadows would be gone. If I saw any of the graph in the far right, the highlights would be gone. And that would not be good and post when we start to play with the photo. 15. Exposure: HDR & Bracketing: in the last lesson. We talked about dynamic range. In this lesson, I want to demonstrate what HDR photography is. As Sam mentioned before, it's a technique in which you take multiple photos of the same scene at different exposures . This works well when photographing a very contrast he seen with lots of highlights and lots of shadows. After combining the photos, you get evenly exposed photo that can look stunning. The best way to explain this is with a quick demo. Here's a quick example of an HDR photo or bracketing some cameras haven't HDR option within it, where it's taking multiple photos at different exposures and actually blending them all together into one photo so that it's all around exposed properly. This camera, the Canon t five I does not have that option, but we can do it manually with what's called bracketing. So I'm using a tripod because I want the composition to be the exact same so I can lay them on top of each other later on in post production. So right now I'm going to actually just take a couple of shots, one where I'm exposing to these rocks in front of me. One where I'm exposing to the face of the rock that's in the shade, which is a lot darker than the ground and the background, which is super overexposed. Right now I'm at an F eight point. Oh, so I have a little bit of depth. I'm in a nice So 100 I'm at 1/40 of a second shutter speed. I'm gonna take this shot. All right? So that is exposed to the shadow of the rock so I can see all of those details. I'm gonna drop down my shutter toe once 1/60 of a second to expose for the ground in the background. Now we're going to put these photos together in light room. My favorite editing application fill will do a complete walk through of how to do this in editing section of the course. But for now, just see the before and the after we took each individual photo and basically layer them on top of each other, combining them Now you can see how the resulting image looks. So now the contrast e individual photos are now combined in one photo to have a complete balanced exposure. That's HDR photography 16. Exposure: What is an Exposure Stop: So now let's talk about what a stop of light actually is. We're going to be using this term a lot throughout this entire course, and so we just want to define it for you more or less. A stop of light is a way to calculate light and how much is coming into your camera. So, in increasing by a stop of light, you're doubling the amount of light that comes into your camera when decreasing one some of light, you're cutting them out of light in half. So, for example, if we're talking about F stops going from F stop f two two F 2.8, you're decreasing by one stop of light. Meaning you're cutting the MAV light in half. If you go for a shutter speed from 1/30 toe 1/15 you're doubling the amount of light because, as again in show speed, one stop of light increase for I s. So if you go from I s 0 400 toe, so 200 you're reducing by one stop of light, which is cutting the moonlight in half. Now we have charts in the supplemental resource is we can see the difference of what one full some of light is for eso shutter speed and f stop 17. Composition: What is Composition?: Welcome to this brand new section of the photography masterclass. In this section, you'll learn all about composition. Basically what is in your photos frame? You'll learn some basic composition rules and styles that will make your photos more creative and interesting to look at. These rules will help you out whenever you go out to take photos, whether you're traveling or just snapping a shot of your friends. You'll also learn how to break these rules to get even more creative shots using things like symmetry and negative space. How you compose a subject in your frame can dramatically change how viewer sees your photo angle, perspective, size and position. All of these things help to tell the story of your photo. Let's dive in with the first rule of composition, the rule of thirds. 18. Composition: The Rule of Thirds: in this lesson, you'll learn what the rule of thirds is, why it is important and why it's a rule that's meant to be broken as a beginner photographer. When someone asks you to take a photo of them, what do you do? If you're like most beginner photographers, you'll set the subject in the middle of your frame and snap a photo. Hopefully, you've composed the image with enough headroom the space above the subject's head and the top of the frame, and you're not cutting off the top of their head. Also, hopefully, you're not giving too much room above the head with your subject floating at the bottom of the frame, centering your subject is the natural thing to do. But to create a more balanced photo that is more pleasing to the viewer's eye following the rule of thirds can help. What this means is placing the subject of your photo to the left or right of the center of the frame. More specifically, this means overlaying your frame with two horizontal and two vertical lines. Placing your subject near the intersection of these lines is what we mean by the rule of thirds. Let's do a quick demo to see what this actually looks like. Here we are photographing Sam, and right now I have him centered in the frame. Right now, I'm gonna take a quick pick, and this photo is all right. It's just centered. It's not really that interesting, but I think that by using the rule of thirds and just shifting my frame over slightly, it's going to create a more pleasant photo look at. So just gonna take that Putting Sam on the left hand side of the frame. There we go, even maybe zooming in just a little bit. I've put Sam's face in that intersection of the top left lines, the horizontal and vertical line, and I was also making sure that Sam's eyes were on the upper third of the frame, using the rule of thirds placing the main focus of your photo in this intersection. And it doesn't have to be a person. It could be. Whatever object you're photographing creates a pleasing balance that is more natural for your viewer toe. Look at studies show that people's eyes naturally go towards one of these intersection points automatically rather than to the center of an image so placing your subject there helps make amore balance and visually appealing image. Another use for the rule of thirds is where to put your horizons. Placing the horizon perfectly straight along the bottom or top line is a good rule of thumb . So next time you're taking a photo of a friend, try composing them using this rule. But like we've been saying, it's a rule that's meant to be broken in an upcoming lesson will look at symmetry, a style that breaks the rule of thirds but results in some very interesting photos. 19. Composition: Negative Space: In this lesson, you'll learn what negative space is. How to take photos using this compositional style negative space is one of my personal favorite styles of photography. Simply this is photographing a subject without a lot of distractions behind or around the subject. It might be easier to see an example. Check out this photo of these trees. It is composed in a way where the background is entirely the sky. There's no other distractions. The positive space. The trees is a lot less or smaller in frame than the negative space. In this other example of a pagoda, it's even Mawr dramatic. The photographers could have easily tilted down to see the horizon and perhaps people buzzing around underneath the trees or building. But they made a conscious decision to leave that out of the frame. Using negative space can draw your attention to the subject of your photo. Without having any other distractions. They can make a subject feel small or perhaps even more significant. In this example, the background isn't the sky shot from overhead. Thes surfers are so tiny in this photo with all of the negative space of the sand. But negative space doesn't just mean photos with a completely blank background. This photo of a man looking out over Yosemite Valley also uses negative space with a different kind of background. The subject still stands out without too much distraction. With all of these composition styles, we just want you to realize that there are different ways of shooting things that you don't have to stick to one traditional medium or close up shot, and hopefully this inspires you to take even more creative photos. 20. Composition: Leading Lines: In this lesson, you'll learn how to use leading lines to draw your viewers attention to the main subject of your images. This is another compositional technique that can advance your photography skills with leading lines were literally talking about lines that you see in your image. It could be a paved road that draws your attention to something in the distance. It could be placing your subject on the top of a mountain so all of the lines in that mountain range point towards your subject. It could be the petals of a flower pointing to its center. These lines create depth and connect what's distant toe what's in the foreground of your photo. They can be man made such as roads, fences, bridges, lampposts, doorways and windows. Or they could be natural, like rivers, waves, trees, shadows or sun rays. The way that you use these lines is by arranging your composition so the lines lead towards something that could be to a subject or even just to the distant abyss. This also reminds me of another compositional technique of framing objects within your photos frame. This could literally mean putting your subject in a window frame or photographing something in the distance through the frame of a window or door. Or it could be using natural lines in your image to create a frame around your subject. With all of this, the goal is to direct your viewers attention to the subject to give them more prominence. Let's go out and try to find a natural composition with leading lines. All right, here's a great example of leading lines that we found here at the park, where we're shooting some of the demonstrations. We've got this canopy over these picnic benches, and there's lots of lines going on, both in the picnic benches and also the bars, the beams that are holding up this canopy so they're all leading towards the playground behind, which I think is really cool. So I'm going to get down here, frame up, tilt up just a little bit to capture all of these lines, just going out into the distance. In this shot, I'm framing out the picnic benches. Actually, I took two shots, one with the picnic benches in the foreground, and then I tilted up just so I could see the lines from the beams and just the very far picnic bench at the end, which I think is a better composition. And it's a great example of how you can use lines just around your environment to direct your viewers attention to part of your frame. And with all of these techniques, you may be wondering. Fill our photographers really thinking about this when shooting or is it just accidental? Went out shooting. A lot of this might be a happy accident, but with time, if you keep thinking about these tips when out shooting, you'll gravitate naturally towards photographing scenes and compositions using these techniques. So leading lines and framing are two more techniques to add to your photographers toolkit. 21. Composition: Symmetry and Balance: In this lesson, you'll learn about balance and symmetry to things that can take your photo composition to the next level in terms of balance. What do we mean? Balance can mean level horizons and objects that are visually balanced in the frame. Photos of a building that is crooked is literally an unbalanced photo with balance. We also mean the size and number of objects in your scene. Is there one large subject on the right and a small subject on the left? Are colors more vibrant on both sides, or just one? Having a balanced photo isn't necessarily the right thing to do. It just creates a more visually peaceful image. Having tilted and crooked lines and different sizes of objects can create a more dynamic image, though perhaps to express some sort of meaning. Symmetry is balance where the top and bottom or left and right sides of your photo are visually similar or even identical. This could be something in nature, like trees or man made like a large building or reflections of landscape in the water can create a symmetrical image on top and bottom. This is a style that you may love or hate and it might depend on what and where you are shooting. So let's do a quick demo to see how we can go out and find a balanced or symmetrical scene . Here's another cool example of using leading lines and symmetry to compose your shot. So I've got will at the other end of this picnic bench. I've got these two lines in the middle of the picnic bench table that are going towards him , so I'm going to compose the shot like So what's also really awesome? Is this reflection off the table where it's actually reflecting will and we're getting a symmetrical composition horizontally as well. I'm seeing the top line, so I'm gonna actually cut that out by getting a little bit closer. Okay, go ahead and look away. So this is a cool example of both leading lines and symmetry. We've got the leading lines upto will we've got will centered in the frame, symmetrical. And we've also got the reflection of will, which is creating a lot of balance on the top and bottom of the frame. I hope you enjoyed this demo and we'll see you in the next lesson. 22. Composition: Perspective and Angles: In this lesson, you'll learn about wide versus telephoto lenses and composition. We wanted to put this in this section, even though we have a complete section that goes into more depth later. Because using wide and telephoto lenses can give you a completely different type of composition, there are a few key concepts that you'll need to understand. One is the term focal length. Technically, the focal length is the distance and millimeters from your camera's sensor to where in the lens, the light converges to create a sharp image. When the camera is focussed on a subject at Infinity Way, way off in the distance, the lower the focal length number, the whiter your image will be or the wider the lenses, the higher the number, the more zoomed in or telephoto you'll be. A zoom lens can shoot at multiple focal lengths, for example, going from 24 millimeters to 70 millimeters a prime lenses, one that is fixed at one specific focal length. This is something will dive into deeper in the length section. In general, lenses that are less than 35 millimeters are considered wide angle lenses. Anything more than 70 millimeters can be considered telephoto 72 300 millimeters is considered a medium telephoto, and anything over 300 millimeters is called super telephoto. It doesn't matter if it's a prime or zoom lens. Thes air still considered telephoto lenses. Choosing a wide lens is a great idea for photographing wide expanses and landscapes, while telephoto lenses are great for detailed and close up shots. Even with a wide lens, though, you can get very close to an object and get that close up detail shot. And similarly, you can use a telephoto shot to get great landscapes. But there will be a difference between the two close ups, one with a telephoto and one with a wide lens. And that's perspective. Another key concept and photography. Basically, perspective is having nearby objects appear larger while distant objects look smaller. Pretty simple, right? This is natural when you're looking out in the distance, Whatever is far away is going to be smaller than what's closer to you. But depending on the type of lens you use, this can actually change using a wide angle lens. Close up subjects are actually bigger and Seymour distant compared to the ones in the background this effect is called exaggerated perspective. A telephoto lens has a compressed perspective where objects look closer together and the distance between them is harder to distinguish. Let's do a quick demo so you can actually understand what I'm talking about. So here's the difference between a wide and telephoto lens. I'm on a 10 to 18 millimeter lens right now, which is really, really wide from right here. I can see all of Sam. I mean, I'm a couple feet away and I can see his feet. Okay, I'm gonna take a shot. All right, so we see all of salmon, the shot. And now let's switch over to a telephoto lens. Now I'm on a telephoto lens, a zoom that 75 to 300 and I can't even I can see Sam Space. But to get his whole body, I would have to back up really far. So I'm just gonna take a quick photo like this. So obviously we can't tell much of a difference between those two lenses other than one is very close up and one is really wide. So what I'm going to do is actually go back up really far. Take a photo that has a similar composition so we can see what the background looks like comparing the two lenses. So now from way over here, probably about 20 to 25 feet further away, Aiken, get about the same amount in this shot. All right, so I'm at about 75 millimeters now on this lens, and I got the similar composition. But when reviewing these two photos, you can really see what changes in the background in the telephoto shot. It's more compressed, and the things in the background, like the bucket with the plant, is much bigger than the one of the wide shot. With the wide shot, everything is really small, and that creates more distance behind Sam. So everything in the telephoto shot is more compressed. Everything looks a little bit bigger, the difference of sizes less extreme in the telephoto shot. Hopefully, by now, you can tell that by switching between a wide or a telephoto lens is more than just about getting a close up shot. The last concept in this lesson is angle and by angle. We don't mean in the sense of how wide but in the sense of where you are shooting from. Are you shooting standing up with the camera at eye level? Are you crouched down? Shooting low to the ground? Are you at the top of the building? Looking down? Most beginner photographers take 99% of their photos right here with the camera at eye level. A quick way to get more creative shots is to change your position and angle. Try to see the world from a new angle and capture it. Get down low to the floor or get up high and shoot down. Let's do another quick demo to see how we can capture the same scene at different angles. An example of how the angle from where you're shooting can change the story or the emotion of your shot is when you're shooting Portrait's If I'm shooting from up above, which it's usually more flattering when you're shooting from more of an up above angle. As a short person, this can be a little hard sometimes, so you might need to bring a step or have your talent cross down a little bit. So I'm gonna take a shot of Sam right here, smiling from above eye level. That angle is a little bit more flattering. Sam, can I have you Just turn your body just a little bit that way and then face me right there . That's a great standard sort of head shot angle. If I step back a little bit and get down, Sam, can I have you cross your arms? So from down here, looking at an upward angle, Sam, look down here. You don't have to smile. So this shot gives Sam a lot more power. But if you want to show a little bit more power for your subject, make them a little bit more domineering and get down at a lower angle like this one. While some of these ideas can feel abstract and there's rarely a right or wrong answer and photography by now you should feel like you know even more ways to get creative photos. 23. Composition: Backgrounds: this lesson is all about backgrounds. Up until now, we've mostly focused on how to compose our subjects with your camera. But a big part of advanced photography is knowing how to capture your subject in a great background. And getting that great background can often be a slight step to the side, crouching down a bit or blurring out the background completely. If your photograph that you're taking is about your subject and not about the background your subject is in front of, the goal is to try to eliminate any distractions. So, first, are there any bright spots or bright colors in the background that are distracting? If so, either move the subject or remove yourself so they aren't competing with the subject. Next, look to see if there are any lines protruding from your subject. If you're photographing a person, are there any tree branches, power lines or anything else like that coming from behind the person's head? Next? And similarly, where is your horizon? If you want the sky to be in your photo, make sure the horizon doesn't cut through the head of your subject. Drop down to get more of the sky and have the horizon lower or cut it out completely by getting up a bit higher. This goes for horizontal lines like buildings to don't have them go through your subjects head that could be very distracting. Next, create separation between the subject and background with space and focus. This could mean literally having your subject walk further away from the background. Or it could mean dropping your F stop to get a blurrier background. Remember, with a shallow depth of field in the section about focus and depth of field. We have specific lessons on how to get a shallow depth of field, so watch those toe learn all the different ways to get that blurry background. By blurring out the background, you can remove distracting details to increase the literal focus on your subject. So by using these rules, you should be able to capture less distracting images that truly focus on your subject. Also, be aware of what the background can say about your subject. If doing portrait's, make sure the person wears clothes that contrast with the background, for example, wearing brown or green and a forest might not look good, where something that stands out like red Or perhaps you like the idea of your subject matching the background, and you want them to blend in. The choice is yours. Lastly, different locations and textures can create different moods for your photos. A brick alleyway says something different than a wood paneled wall. A bright beach says something different than an office building. Those are examples of how a background can change the story of your photo. So keep all of these things in mind on your next shoots, because backgrounds do matter. 24. Composition: Shooting Portraits with Wide vs. Telephoto Lenses: one other quick tip that Sam brought up was, If you are shooting portrait's, it's typically better to shoot at the more telephoto side of zoom lens or choosing a telephoto lens vs a wide angle lens. If you shoot with a wide angle lens and you're really close up, you might get a little distortion. It might bend their face and not look as flattering as if you are using a telephoto lens. So let's using this 24 to 70 see the difference. So I'm going to compose in the same framing here. I'm at 24 so I'm relatively wide. So I have to get close to Sam. Smile. All right, so now I'm going to zoom in to the 70 millimeter side. Okay, Sam, smile. All right, so let's compare these two photos. So, comparing these two photos, you can really see a difference in actually the shape of Sam's face. And in my opinion, the telephoto looks a lot better 25. Focus & Depth of Field: Intro: welcome to this brand new section of the photography masterclass. In this section, you'll learn all about focus and depth of field. These two concepts kind of go hand in hand and can truly change the quality of your photos . With this section, you'll learn that it's not just about what's in focus, or even the fact that is sharply and focus, but also how it is in focus and what is it in focus? So without delay, let's go to the first lesson on depth of field. 26. Focus & Depth of Field: Understanding Depth of Field: In this lesson, you'll learn what depth of field is for many when they hear the term depth of field, they think of a blurry background. We'll cover the ways you get a blurrier background in the next lesson. First, let's understand the definition of depth of field depth of field is the zone in your photos that has acceptable sharpness. What's appearing in focus this is own varies from photo to photo. Some have a small zone known as a shallow depth of field. This means only a sliver of the scene is in focus. Others have a large zone called a deep depth of field. This means more is in focus, sometimes from just a few feet in front of the camera, all the way to hundreds of feet in the distance. Let's do a demo so you understand what these zones actually mean. Here's an example of what focal plane means. I'm shooting Sam with our potted plant behind him right now. When I'm shooting, I'm focused on Sam, so he's in focus. He's in that zone, that focal plane that is sharp in our photo. What's behind him is out of focus. What's in front of him would also be out of focus. I can adjust my focus to the background, and now the focal plane is behind Sam Sam is out of focus on what's behind him. The pod plant is sharp in focus. There are three things that affect your depth of field aperture, the distance from your subject and the focal length of your lens. You already know what aperture is, which is the whole inside your lens that allows light in. Remember that a larger aperture, which is the smaller F number, or F stop number, has a shallower depth of field. A smaller aperture, a larger F stop, has a deeper depth of field. It may be easier to remember this by knowing that a smaller F stop means less step in a larger F stop means more depth. Next with distance, the closer your subject is to the camera and the further it is from the background, the shallower the depth of field is lastly, focal length also effects. Step the field. There's a bunch of math and how this actually works. But basically, the longer your lens i e. The more zoomed in you are the shallower, the depth of field you'll get when photographing from the same spot. By zooming in, you are crushing the depth of field. The Zone of Focus. What might have been in focus when zoomed out with a wide lens may not be in focus with a more telephoto or zoom lens. To clearly understand how this works, we're going to demonstrate in the next lesson how to use thes three factors to get a blurrier background. 27. Focus & Depth of Field: How to Get a Blurrier Background: one thing that can make your photos look more professional or better to most people is a blurrier background or having that shallow depth of field. In this video, I'm going to show you three ways that you can get an even blurrier background. So first I'm going to take a shot right here with Sam sitting about six or seven feet from the background. I'm at an F 14 aperture, and I'm shooting at 24 millimeters on my 24 to 70 millimeter lens. The backgrounds not that blurry. So the first up I'm going to actually do is drop my aperture. We know with a wider open aperture, we get a shallower depth of field, so I'm going to go all the way to the extreme right now. Two F 2.8 because I've opened up to an F 2.8 to expose properly, My shutter speed is now at 1 32 100 Take another shot, taking another shot at 1 2000 The background is a little bit blurrier, so that's the first thing we can do to get a blurrier background. The next thing is, if you can move your subject away further from the background to create more space. So let's do that. All right, So now we are farther from the background and we are about the same distance from where we were apart. If I get closer to Sam, that's also going to make the background a little bit blurrier because I am focusing on something closer. So the background is more. It's a even more distant focal plane, So I'm gonna take the shot. Comparing these two photos, you can see that the pots behind Sam and all that step behind him is actually really out of focus, and the last thing I can do, the third thing is really to zoom in. So I have my 24 to 70 right here. If you have a telephoto lens or a zoom lens, go ahead and zoom in or swap to a telephoto lens. Now my composition is gonna be a little different because I'm zoomed in. But that's really going to show how blurry the background can get shot. Now. With that, you can really see that those pots and plants behind Sam are completely blurred out. It's hard to tell what it really is, So with those three steps opening up your aperture, moving away from the background or getting closer to your subject, and then, using amore telephoto lens, you can get a blurrier background. 28. Focus & Depth of Field: Manuel vs. Auto Focus: somewhat related to this concept of adjusting your depth of field is your focus. It's something that we haven't really touched upon with this course yet, but is obviously a very important concept with focus were basically talking about adjusting your camera's lens to focus on what's important in your scene. Most lenses will have a focus ring that rotates and changes the focus from what's near to what's farther away, and most cameras or lenses will have an option for manual and auto focus. Auto Focus nowadays works relatively good on most cameras in most lenses and is one of the auto settings that we do usually recommend you use, especially when you're out travelling, doing event photography or even just snapping photos of your kids. Auto focus will help take sharper photos more quickly than doing it manually. For most beginners, manual focus is great when you have more time to set up your shot, and you're more particular about what specific part of your frame is in focus. For example, you might be taking a portrait and you want their eyes to be specifically and focus, and when you're using auto focus, it's focusing to their nose So this might be an example where you want to use manual focus to make sure you're focused on their eyes. Sometimes, if you're in a darker environment, your cameras auto focus won't work as well. So this would be a case for using manual focus. Right now, I'm in auto focus, and so you'll see that if I actually manually move my lens out of focus and then I press the shutter release button, the focus actually automatically changes. And now it takes a perfectly sharp photo of our subject. I can also change the manual focus, which will be a switch on most lenses going from F I M F. So now I can manually adjust the focus and rotate thief focus ring from left to right, and that's adjusting from in to out of focus. And you got to be very precise with this. Just a little bit can make the nose and focus, or the hair or the eyes or just slightly out of focus, so you have to practice manually, focusing. Now that you know the difference between manual and auto focus, what should you actually be focusing on? As always, there aren't any commandments that you can't break. One rule would be that when photographing people, you want to focus on their eyes. When doing this. Remember that aperture affect your depth of field as well. With a wide open aperture, you can be photographing a person and have their eyes and focus while their nose and ears are out of focus. Doing the opposite and having their nose or their ears and focus and their eyes blurry would look off to the viewer, so always try to get sharp focus on their eyes. If your photos aren't sharp or aren't focused on what you want them to be focused on, try increasing your F stop to get a deeper depth of field. This is also good win shooting landscapes where you'll probably want to use a larger F number soem or is in focus. See how focus and depth of field are intertwine In the next lesson, we'll dive a bit deeper into auto focus modes, which is how you can control what part of the frame your camera focuses on when in the auto focus mode 29. Focus & Depth of Field: Auto Focus Modes: In this lesson, you'll learn about focus points and autofocus modes. This allows you to change where in your frame and how the camera automatically focuses. Focus points are little points in your frame that the camera uses to choose what's in focus . Some cameras have lots of points, with the best professional cameras having over 100 while more entry level cameras have between 5 to 20. MAWR usually means your camera will be better at auto focusing, but it doesn't mean you can't get perfectly sharp images with a cheaper camera with most DSLR in Mirrlees cameras. When using autofocus mode, you press on the shutter halfway, you'll hear a beep, and some auto focus points will light up on your screen. That's really looking for contrast ing lines by default, the cameras using all those points at the same time. Each point is trying to find something in focus, and usually the first point to find something wins and the camera will focus on that specific point. This is why sometimes, even if you're framing up your subject and using autofocus, it will focus on the background. Most cameras allow you to change which focus points are being used. What this is called is different on most models and brands, so we can't explain everything in this lesson, and this would be a great time to crack open that dusty manual you got when purchasing your camera. In general, there may be a mode where you can select the center point. That way, the camera will focus on whatever is in the middle of your frame. Other times, you can choose different zones like the left or the right side of the frame, or even be able to move the zone exactly to where you want it to be. For example, if you're shooting a lot of photos using the rule of thirds and your subject is always on the right side, you may want to choose on auto focus mode, where the camera is always focusing on that side. Some cameras even have face detection now where will automatically try to focus on any faces in the frame. You can see this sometimes with a yellow box around certain faces. Remember, though these options aren't a valuable for all cameras, so do a quick Google search to see what options your camera has. Specifically different cameras will be different. But in this camera I want to show you how the autofocus points work. So I'm going to switch back to auto focus and you should see on the screen. Now different little squares show up. Right now, it's using all of these different squares to try to find focus. And so the 1st 1 that finds focus is going to be the one that focuses on your subject. But I can manually adjust that and you're gonna have to find the setting on your camera. But it basically press a button. And with the up, down or left right buttons, I can move it to a specific point. So I'm gonna go over to the very right most point to show you what happens now. Still on auto focus. What happens now? It's pulling focus on the background where that point waas say I pan over just a little bit , though now that point is hovering over our subject. So now I'm gonna take that photo and you should see that are subject which is now on the right side of the frame is in focus. So with this camera in this mode, I can pick any of those squares to use for auto focus. We can also go into the menu and choose an auto focus mode. This camera has faced tracking. So if I enable that now you see a little square around our subject's face and even if I'm panning left to right, it tries to track the face. And that's pretty good, even though that this is just a statue. This camera also has a couple modes Flexi zone multiple flexi Zone single. So if I do the flexi zone single now, I can move this specific square around toe any part of the frame that I want. And it's actually trying to auto focus as I do that. And finally it gets in focus. It's a little bit dark. You can see that I can move this wherever I want. So that's just a quick demonstration of some of the options you might have for auto focus modes. So check out your camera and see which ones you have, so that's autofocus points. What about Autofocus? Moz Again? This will be different for different cameras, but usually there's an option where your camera will always be searching and changing Focus when pressing halfway down on the shutter button. This mode is helpful when tracking objects moving towards you or away from you, like a car racing towards you under a bridge or someone running down a soccer field. Or there's an option that allows you to lock focus upon half, pressing the shutter button so that if you reframe, the focus will stay the same. Some cameras. You can change the buttons on the back to be that button as well, if you don't want it to be a shudder. But I personally of my camera on the one shot mode most of the time, unless I'm in a situation where I know I'll be tracking moving objects, kids running around stuff like that. Depending on what you're shooting, try out the different modes and play around with your points of focus. It really is about how you work with your specific camera. 30. Focus & Depth of Field: Getting Sharp Focus on Moving Objects: All right, So let's talk about using your shutter to freeze action. So right now I'm on the auto f stop, and I'm on auto I s O. Because we're gonna be talking mostly about shutter. That means we're on shutter priority right now, so we'll start at 1/60 because when you're at night, that might be something that you might start with. And let's see what effect that has on someone running. We have Sam running with a soccer ball on. We've got a long lens here, so let's check it out. Sam, You ready? Go for it. Do you see in these photos that it's a little blurry, the balls blurry. His face is blurry. We can't really see much. Um, and that is a product of our shutter being so low. So how to get rid of that? Make your shutter faster, which means the light coming in will be hitting your sensor for a shorter amount of time, thus creating a quick freeze frame as opposed to like a motion for your friend. So we're gonna kick it all the way up. So let's say I think you'd probably be fine of 500 of a second. That should be okay. Getting on shutter priority. So everything else is setting to the shutter that we decided to use, which is often a good way to shoot sports. So we're shooting 5/100 of a second. Come on down. All right, let's take a look at these. So 500 were pretty much freezing the action. As it goes, everything's pretty solid. We don't see a lot of motion. We see just very clear in focus Light as he's running by. Another creative way to capture motion with your camera is using the shutter so I can shut her down toe. Let's say 1/60 of a second. We're gonna try and match the motion of our subject moving so that he and I are in sync. We're able to freeze the timing as moving, but the background is sort of out of focus or blurry or having some motion to it. It's kind of a cool, creative way to shoot action. Let's go and have Sam Ron run bias for the 80th time. Go for it. So check out this shot. Basically, we're shooting in 1/60 of a second. I have it on shutter priority. So the camera's picking the aperture. It picked an F 16 because it's bright out here that picked a 200 eyes or 200 eyes. So because it's bright out here and we tried to match Sam's motion as he was running, and that has the effect of him and I being in sync, freezing that light between us. But as removing the background is moving much faster than he and I are. So we're in sync. Backgrounds blurred because of shutters, a little bit slower. You can see both these shots. His face is perfectly in in sharpness. He looks like he's in motion, and the background is all lines because it's getting that panning motion. This works really great for bicycles, cars, anything moving really fast that you can sort of time out and paying yourself with. And the better you get at that, the slower shutter speed you can shoot at and the cooler the background will look, and the more motion and and creativeness will happen in your photo. It's really about using your shutter. Using the tools. You have to say something in your photograph 31. Focus & Depth of Field: What is Bokeh?: Boca is a term you might hear a law within the photography world Pronounced Boca Orb. OK, it comes from the Japanese word meaning blur or quality of blur. Well, some people think of Boca Okay, as just the blurred out background do you see? It's actually more than that. It's how that blurred out part of your image looks depending on your lens. The blurred out part will actually look different, looking more round or more jagged, hexagonal in shape. This can Moyes Lee be seen in highlights like blurred out light bulbs, and the shape is created by the aperture of your lens. Lends with more circular blades have a rounder orbs, while others have, ah, more hexagonal shape. When people say, How do you get more Boca? What they're probably asking is, how do we get a blue your background? And luckily we had a lesson on that. In this video, we really just want you to understand the true meaning of Boca, which is the quality of blur and can appear differently with different lenses. So go out and try out your different lenses to see what kind of blur you have. 32. Focus & Depth of Field: Viewfinder Focus: if you're ever in a situation where your pictures air coming out sharp, but you're looking through your viewfinder and it appears blurry, this might be because your viewfinder, maybe out of focus itself. This is called the Diop Ter. The option to adjust your viewfinders focus helps you adjust the focus to your own eyes, especially if you wear glasses. But don't wanna wear glasses when looking through the viewfinder. Most cameras have a little tiny dial on the side of the eyepiece. Rotating. This doesn't affect the focus of your image, but just how your eye sees the image through the View finder to properly set the doctor. You want to set your camera on something solid like a tripod. Make sure it's on autofocus mode and press your shutter release halfway down, forcing your camera to focus without moving the camera. Turn the doctor until it is in focus. For you. That's pretty much it. This is a simple trick for people with not so perfect vision to enjoy taking photos more. It's also a little bit more convenient because having glasses between you and your camera may cause problems and you can adjust specifically to your eye 33. Camera Anatomy: Introduction: welcome to this new section of the photography master class, where you learn more about your camera. Like every tool an artist uses, you will have to learn the basics of your camera in this section. We're going to go over everything that is physically on your camera, as well as internal and digital aspects of your camera. Such a scene modes file types what your camera sensor is and how it works. Resolution and different burst and shoot modes. There are several type of cameras out there, and depending on what kind of camera you have, each 1 may be a little different. We will keep it general enough so that you can apply what you've learned here to most cameras, but with enough detail so that you can be well on your way to knowing exactly what everything does on your specific model. Before starting this lesson, take your camera out and get familiar with it by reading the manual and actually going into the menu and changing the settings so that you know where they are and you can reference them in this section. When we talk about them. The very essence of it all. The cameras just a box with a hole that allows light to come in and land on a sensitive object like film or a digital sensor. If you keep that in mind, all the technology will be less overwhelming. 34. Camera Anatomy: Common Camera Features: welcome to this lesson in this lesson. We're gonna go over the main camera, buttons and features of a typical camera. We're not gonna go too in depth because every camera is very different. What I'm going to show you is a general layout and buttons for what you might see on your specific camera. Keeping in mind that different cameras have different buttons in different layouts. So let's dive in. Here is the front of the camera. Typically, you'll find a button to switch out. The lens around the base of the lens could push. Move it. You can see lens camera. Here is ah, little dots on the front where you would line up. It's very different in different camera systems for this system. It's white toe white, so we line up the white white spin and it clicks in also in the front on camera, right. The right side of the camera is where you'd probably find the shutter release button, along with maybe dial to change the aperture setting or some other type of setting. Also on the right, really within shot of your front index finger, you'll be able to turn off and on your camera on most cameras. Also, there'll be a dial where you can change settings in the type of shooting mode you want to be in moving over the top. This is typically where you'll see a hot shoe mount for a external flash or a video shotgun recording mike. You'll also see an internal flash on some cameras on this camera. There's also a button on the side. You push and the flash will pop up again. Push now, on the back of the camera is where you'll find your view finder on a DSLR or electric viewfinder, or you'll find on a mere list camera and a screen. Some cameras have articulating screens like this where you can spin around, but most cameras will have a screen that's fixed to the back so you'll be able to see the photos that you've taken. Also, you seem or buttons for dials. For changing settings like that, you'll sometimes see another spinning dial back here on this camera. There isn't one, but you'll see it spinning down where you can change more settings. You'll also find your menu buttons, info buttons and a play button or a trashcan button to review photos typically on camera right, you'll find where you put your memory cards. A lot of times, it's just a door that you can open and you'll see a slot for the memory card. You can push in, and you can see this is where the memory card will go in. A lot of times will be a logo or assemble on how to actually put your memory card in on some cameras. You'll see dual slots and other cameras. You'll see compact flash lots, but a lot of cameras that will be talking about are using SD cards on the bottom of the camera is typically where you find your battery mount. Some cameras also, how's your SD card inside the battery mount? So if you can't find it, check inside your battery door. So here we have the battery door to put batteries in. You have a hole here for a tripod. This is where you're gonna fix your tripod plate to on the camera. Left side or left side of the camera is typically where you'll see all the ports for your camera. That's USB ports HD on my ports or microphone ports, depending on your camera. on this specific one. We have a microphone port the bottom here, and then we have many HTM I and a V video out. Also on the top of the camera are your lead strap holders, so in this camera is sort of built in. But this is where you would slide your lens strap in. You go through there and on the other side. It's on this side, and it's really nice on this camera because it's kind of built in, and it's seamless. On other cameras, you'll see them protruding outsides, the left and the right. So let's take a look at this other smaller, mere list camera very quickly, and you can see how similar it is. You can see both cameras have shutters on the top on the right. They both have dials up here on the front, and they both have lens release buttons on the front as well. This camera has a lot of dials up top to change settings. You can actually see the settings on top. You can see the back is very similar, has buttons again to change different settings as a screen. This screen is fixed, although it does come up like that doesn't swivel out like the other one again, like the other camera on the right side is the SD cards. This one has dual slots and again, on the bottom. You can see Battery Door Screw for tripod you can see on the left and the right side. This is where you would slide in your camera strap on the right side and on the left side. Basically, a lot of things are the similar and the same. Like I said, every cameras different. But you can see how similar, even though both these cameras are different in a mere list camera and a DSLR, so now would be a great time to pull out your camera manual and get acquainted with your settings for your specific camera. Like I said, each cameras different. So check it out and see if you can get familiar with everything that you need to know to switch and change settings. Check out the supplemental resource is to this lesson. We're gonna include links to the most popular camera set up, so you confined your specific camera or something similar to it. We'll be able to show you some basic camera set ups and go in more depth about what every button is 35. Camera Anatomy: Camera Scene Modes: on many cameras, you'll be able to select a specific type of scene setting. Each one of these settings changes the internal camera settings and exposure to achieve the best results for each situation. The way you change these modes is different for every camera. Sometimes it's a physical dial. Often it's in the menu. Usually they're represented by small little visual icons that look similar to the action that you're trying to shoot. Let's go over the common Modes portrait mode. This Moz likes a decently open F stop to achieve less steps the field and exposes for medium to close subject ideal for shooting people in lots of light. Sometimes certain cameras will pop out the onboard flash to fill the shadows in a darker situation. But it's great for shooting Portrait's. This is like using auto but a specific auto macro. This will usually pick a mid range F stop so more can be in focus and meter exposure for the whole image. The camera expects you'll be pretty close to whatever you're taking, so we'll try to expose for the entire frame landscape mode. The camera will be ready to focus far and set to a high F stop in order to get more things and focus and an overall exposure for a large wide area sports mode. In this mode, the camera will tend to pick a faster shutter speed so it can freeze the action. This works great when shooting kids and pets as well a bit of a warning on this one, since it will require a bright area to really function well, since it's picking a fast shutter and won't let a lot of lighting fireworks, This sets both the aperture and shutter to the best results for shooting fireworks. I've seen this very from camera system, the camera system and some cameras will also adjust the I s over this setting as well. So be cautious. It's not too high of a ni eso beach and snow mode. Knowing both e situations will be brighter than normal, the cameras will select a fast shutter and close down the F stop and sometimes like a very low I s O to make sure things will not be blown out or too bright night mode. This setting usually selects a high I eso and a slow shutter to get as much light in as possible for the night scenes panoramic mode. This setting will allow your camera to do a sweep across, taking multiple photos of a panoramic scene that'll then stitch the photos together in the camera. Be cautious because sometimes this mode on Lee just changes the way you're shooting. It doesn't necessarily change the way you're exposing, so you'll still have to figure out a way to expose correctly using your lightning. Every camera has different scene modes. Check out your specific camera model manual to see what scene modes you have and what your cameras doing specifically per those scene modes. 36. Camera Anatomy: File Types & Formats: In this lesson, you'll learn about file types. When a digital camera takes a photo, it will save that photo as a digital file. You can change the type of file your camera saves in your camera settings. But what do those file types actually mean and what are the advantages and disadvantages to each of them? Most camera systems will either save the photos as a J peg or a raw image. Raw images will be just what it sounds like they're raw and that they will preserve the native settings of the image. It will not be compressed or downsize or process by any other setting in the camera. It will be the full resolution the sensor in your camera can produce without any loss or change in information. This means when you start to edit the file in postproduction, you'll have the maximum amount of information to change and edit as you see fit. Raw images will be bigger in file size and also look a bit flat out of the camera, which means less contrast in Let's Saturation will include a link to the supplemental resource is of this section with a list of all the different raw file types, for example, can and raw files are dot CR two files, while Nikon Raw files are dot any F. Some cameras offered different sizes of raw images. This doesn't affect the quality or a compression, but the resolution of your image, the pixel width and the height. Unlike raw images, J. Peg is a standard file type that most camera systems have. Shooting J pegs will be the default from most cameras a JPEG images compressed and smaller in size than a raw image. It's also more universal file type that can be read by most computers, phones and applications. J pegs will tend to be processed a bit more by the cameras Well, so they will have more saturation. They'll be a bit sharper and have more contrast. Basically, they're the images that are ready to go right out of the camera. You may even have different options for how much J pic images are compressed and what resolution you want to shoot in. This is usually represented in your menu by L M and S. Ellis. The best quality M is the middle and s is the lowest large, medium small. There might even be to l or two M and two s options. The options with a curved symbol is a higher quality and does less compression than the stepped icon. Check out this damn about editing Iraq versus JPEG image Phil here, and I just want to show you the power of shooting in raw. First, I'm in light room and don't worry about actually what I'm doing. I'll show you how to do this. Later, in the editing sections of this course, you could pretty much increase the exposure or adjust exposure of images with any editing application. So first, this is an image that I shot of my wife, Isabel, on her birthday at Huntington Gardens in Los Angeles. And it's so dark, and I just didn't have enough time to properly except my settings to expose. But because I was shooting and raw, I can take an image like this and bring up the exposure. You can see that this photo has so much information that even in the shadows, where this is how it shot it, we have enough information to be able to expose properly to my wife's face, which is the most important part of this image. While we do that, we can bring down the exposure of the background so that that information is still there and it's not completely overexposed. And this is what you can do with a raw image before, after before, after now, to show you the difference between how you can edit J. Peg versus raw. Here's another image shot on that day I have the J Peg version and the rot version way too overexposed. So what I would typically do is drop the exposure. Now this is of the J Peg photo and again I'm trying to expose to their face, which is the most important part here is about where their faces naturally exposed best. But look at the sky. It looks like there's like a shadow over the entire image. It just doesn't look that good. But when I do the same thing with the raw photo, let me bring down exposure until their faces air well exposed. Look at that. The sky looks a lot better. You just have way more information in the raw photo, it looks way more natural, and I haven't even done any specific adjustments to the highlights or the shadows This is just a general overall exposure increase or decrease, and you can see that by editing in raw or having the raw version it gives you so much more room to play with. There are pros and cons to shooting either of these formats, but as a general rule, shooting in raw will get you the most out of your camera and photos. It is the preferred method for professional photographers because of just that they get the most out of their camera. Most cameras will allow you to record in both J peg and raw formats if you like. The benefit of doing this is so that you can quickly use the J Pic versions for reviewing or sharing online the same time you'll have the raw version for archival purposes and editing later on. Here are some tips for shooting in raw We will always be shooting in Iraq if we can. Here is an example of way raw image looks like straight out of the camera versus what a J. Peg image looks straight out of the camera. You can see how the raw image is more flat and ready for post editing, while the J peg images already processed. When you shoot raw, you have to be prepared to edit your photos to make them the best they can be. You will always need to make sure that you have enough card space. Raw images will take up the maximum amount of pixels and information your cameras capable of. So having a small size data card may not be enough. If you're out exploring, make sure to check how many photos you can get out of your SD card or whatever card you have in raw mode before deciding to shoot raw or buying a new, bigger card. You can do this by putting your card in your camera, switching your file type over to raw and checking the photo number on your screen. Here's a demo of how to do that, so I'm gonna go ahead and turn my camera on here and you can see in the upper right corner . It says I have 1714 photos left Now, right now it's in J peg fine mode. If I go in and I scroll up over to how to change my photos over to image quality and I change it to raw photos and we go back to the main screen. You can see now I only have 493 photos. You can also look up your specific camera online or check the manual. When shooting raw, You will have to make sure your computer slash post editing software will be able to read your specific type of camera raw. Each camera system has a different type of raw file type, and we will touch more on this in post editing section. But just keep it in mind. When I shoot raw on my camera and I want to send it over to my phone wirelessly out in the field, I will have to convert the raw image to a J peg because my phone won't read raw. Most phone APS will not receive raw files wirelessly from your camera and most editing app on smartphones. Will Onley edit J pigs? This is good thing to keep in mind when you're shooting raw. Here is how you do it on. My personal Fuji camera will be changing our photos from raw to J pigs. This photo was taken in raw, but if I want to send it to my phone. I need to turn it into a J peg in my camera now. Not all cameras could do this, of course, but this camera can We're gonna hit menu. We're just gonna go down to raw conversion it select. Basically, I can change the look of it inside this camera. That's a really cool future for this camera. I'm gonna hit Q. And now it's processing. Now I'm gonna hit Okay Store, and that will now store the new J peg in my camera. Here are some tips for shooting in JPEG. Sometimes I do shooting J peg to save space time and editing and or posting things quickly over my phone. If you do shoot in JPEG, here are a few tips When shooting in JPEG, you won't have as much room to adjust exposure settings in post. So I tend to make sure to keep an eye on the hissed a gram. You remember in the advanced section in the exposure section, you want to make sure it's a full history ram, and even between lights and darks looking like this, number two, you will want to make sure you're happy with your white balance and the picture settings more on white balance later. But keep an eye on your image because you won't have as much room to make changes later and post like you would with a raw photo. Use J pegs to shoot a lot of photos at once because they're smaller and your camera has less to process. You can use J pigs to shoot more frames per second and get that perfect shot, especially in sports. If you want to shoot a lot of photos at once, and your camera processor may not be as high or professional, use J pegs to shoot quickly. 37. Camera Anatomy: DSLR vs. Mirrorless: In this lesson, you'll learn the difference between a DSLR in a mere list camera, two of the most popular options for professional and amateur photographers on the market today, DSLR stands for digital single lens reflex, basically on a DSLR. Emir has to move for the light to hit the sensor in your camera. The mere sits in front of the sensor and allows you to see through the camera's viewfinder and through the lens. If you take off your lens on the DSLR, you can see the mere and the shutter opening as I press the shutter. But I can see that there's a mere right there. You don't actually see the sensor at all. You just see the mirror and you see it reflecting threw up into the viewfinder. I haven't bowled mode, so I'll be able to basically push down the shutter. And now you can see the sensor itself. That's the crop sensor for this DSLR by close it, the mere comes down. So let's break the shutter back up to something really fast, like 2000 of a second. When I take the picture, see how fast the mere moves, the mere moves out of the way to expose the light to the sensor. Pretty cool, huh? A mere. This camera is just that it has no mere. When you take off the lens, this camera, we expose the sensor in its full glory. Nothing is blocking it at all. Which means the viewfinder is actually a tiny little screen inside the eyepiece, allowing you to see everything the sensor is actually seeing. Including for most cameras, Theo exposure. The mere lis camera has no mere. So we're gonna push the button and I'm gonna take off the lens like before, and this sensor is exposed immediately. There's no mere there at all. And I can't even push any button to make anything move because the sensor is right there right in front of it. This cameras a lot lighter, and you can see it's much thinner than the DSLR itself because there's no reflex. Having a mere and not having a mere is the main physical difference between a DSLR and Emir Lis camera. But this changes a lot of things for both systems. Number one using the mirror allows a DSLR tohave an optical view of the action in real time , which means you see the light that's coming into the lens, but you don't see the actual exposure that will be captured by your camera. Based on your camera's settings on mere lis cameras, they're able to give you a preview of what your exposure is in the E V F Elektronik viewfinder in the eyepiece as well as the screen on the back. Today, most DSL ours will let you preview the exposure on the back screen, but you still have to move the mere to do that, rendering the optical eyepiece useless meal is cameras will tend to be smaller, since there's no need for that whole reflexive mere system, which means there's space for less buttons, making most of the controls menu based and digital on most Millis cameras. Size effects everything. Because of the smaller camera size batteries tend to be smaller. Mere list cameras will chew through batteries quicker because their sensor is constantly on , along with either the back screen or the E V F with your I currently the cost of mere lis cameras with the same quality settings of the DSLR. It will be a bit pricier, but those prices are coming down and by the time you watch, this might be more similar. Thes air the main physical differences between the two camera systems. 38. Camera Anatomy: The Camera Sensor: the camera sensor is where all the magic happens. The sensors were the light hits the photo sensitive pixels to create and save our images. Each camera has a different size and type of sensor, but how does it all work? The surface of the camera sensor is made up of thousands of photo sites. When light hits, each one of these photos cites a filter determines what color the light is. All the photo sites talk to each other and, in a flash, work with the CPU in the camera to determine what color each photo site should be and how light or dark it is. Based on the settings you've chosen for exposing, then boom. We have a saved image. All cameras sensors aren't made equally different cameras will have different sizes. Full frame. A full frame camera means a sensor is the size of a 35 millimeter frame. 35 millimeter being the size of most common size film used in film photography. Back in the day, this is going to be the biggest and most expensive sensor size in the pro Sumer camera world Cropped or a PSC, this sensor is a bit smaller than the full frame and is used in a lot of smaller DSLR in mere lis cameras. It tends to be a bit cheaper and generally has less megapixels than a full frame camera. Micro 4/3. This is a bit smaller than the A P S C size sensor and is common, and companies like Olympus and Panasonic one inch or 1/3. Sensors are very small and are normally found in point and shoot cameras and cellphones. So let's go ahead and take a look at sensors. In real life, I have a crop sensor camera and I have a full frame sensor camera. This is my Fuji X T two and let's take off the port cap. And there you go. That is a crop sensor right there. I'm using near Lis cameras right now, so we don't have to use the mere. We don't have to move the mirror to see the actual sensor. Now let's take a look at the full frame. Sensor will take the port cap off here. Bam. Look at that full frame sensor in all its glory. This is an A seven are. It's a full frame sensor inside a mere lis camera. Now, when I bring the two of them up next to each other, you can see the difference in size. It's quite a physical difference. There is also a relationship between sensor size and focal length and easy way to understand. This is with a small sensor, such as a crop sensor. It is literally cropping the image, which results in a more telephoto or zoomed in shot. So let's take the same lens and let's put it on a full frame sensor and a crop center now have Sam's a seven r three sitting in front of us. It has a 50 millimeter cannon lens with an adapter on it, and let's go ahead and take a shot nicely exposed in front and focus. Bam! 50 millimeter looks great. Let's swap this out for a cropped sensor camera the canon world and use the same blends. All right, so now I've put the same 50 millimeter lens on the cannon cropped lens. It's the Eos rebel t five I. I haven't moved the tripod, so I'm just gonna put this right back on, and there we go. So now you can see how much cropped in the crop sensor really goes in. It's the same 50 millimeter lens, but with the 50 on the full frame, it's sort of a true 50 millimeter lens. The crop sensor does actually crop it in quite a bit. You can see we're getting cut off on the side on the right side with the pot in the background, whereas in the full frame you can really see a big amount of difference. So why choose one sensor over the other? There are lots of reasons, but before we dive too deep into that, I want to make sure that you know you can create fantastic images with any size sensor. It's always going to fall on you, the photographer and artist, to find a compelling subject and capture it with the excellent composition and exposure that you've learned in this class. The greatness of your art and photography is not determined by what kind of equipment and censor you have. Typically, full frame sensors are used by most professional photographers. The reason being that the size of the sensor itself allows for better performance and low light. The larger the sensor, the easier it is for it to collect light. It also helps with the depth of field, the aesthetic of your subject in focus and lots of background out of focus is achieved better with a larger sensor. And finally, if you're planning on printing, large photos are cropping in. The larger full frame sensor will allow you to do that. Maury's Aly without a lot of loss and quality, a crop sensor or a PSC sensor is typically cheaper, smaller and lightweight, which is why most photographers would choose to use it. It would still produce excellent images, although the megapixel is a bit lower. Crop sensors air great for travel and will allow your camera to be smaller, making all the components smaller and easier to carry. So compare this Fuji camera to this DSLR. A lot has to do with the lack of a mere but also the size of the sensor. The smaller your sensor gets, the lower quality and ability to capture in low light will be. This is one of the biggest drawbacks to using pointing shoots and smartphones, although as technology gets better and better, smartphone sensors have gotten better as well. It's important to be very careful with your sensor. I cannot stress this enough. If you damage or scratch your sensor in any way, it can be very costly to repair and could potentially ruin your entire camera. I would not recommend cleaning your sense of yourself unless you've been trained and practiced on some dummy sensors. You will want to make sure you keep your poor cap on your camera at all times when there's no lens on it, and you don't ever want to leave it open to the air. Any bit of hair, dust, lint or moisture that lands on your sensor can affect your image and potentially damage it . It's good to get your camera sensor cleaned every now and then. If you do shoot a lot, I will always take my camera to be clean at my local camera shop for a big shoot. They'll have specialty tools and be practiced in it. If you do run into an emergency in the field and you see a bit of dust or air in your camera, the best safe practices to blow across the port never added. If you can use compress can of air or a hand blower, it'll be better if you do use your breath from your mouth. You will run the risk of a moisture spot coming out and landing on your sensor by now. I hope you understand the different types of sensors, pros and cons and tips about camera sensors. 39. Camera Anatomy: Continuous & Burst Modes: burst mode, sometimes referred to as continuous shooting, means taking a burst of photos at once. This is usually measured in frames per second. FPs listen to this camera as it takes about eight frames per second on most cameras. You can select how many photos you want to capture in a burst he considers continuous high and low. I have continuous low set on three frames per second and my continuous high said at eight frames per second. When I'm taking event photos, I tend to use three frames per second. I'll end up with more photos, but I use this spell to try and minimize closed eyes or other unknown mishaps that may occur. It's great for taking group shots as well. I use the high frames per second to shoot sports or high action eight frames per second or higher. Check out this sequence I shot of my nephew snowboarding here. I was able to just hold down the shutter and get covered in snow and go back to find the best shot later. Once you decide you want to shoot in burst or continuous mode, you need to make sure you have a fast enough media card. Some cards can't process the information as fast as your camera can. When your camera takes a photo, it sends that photo through its CPU processor buffering before it's safe to your card. Most edit cards will have numbers on it. That card will let you know how fast they are, such as 95 MBS. That's 95 megabytes per second. Newer cars can goes fastest 300 megabytes per second or 560 megabytes per second or higher . Refuse anything below that. Like 45. You may slow down your camera and run into some pausing while the camera buffers it in burst mode. 40. Camera Anatomy: Resolution and Quality: In this lesson, you'll learn what resolution is in photography terms. It is the amount of information or pixels that your camera captures in the photography rolled. This is measured in megapixels. Your camera sensor is made up of many megapixels. Sensor is a certain number of pixels wide and tall, which will be the resolution of the photos it can capture. One megapixel is one million pixels. The pixels, a tiny score that makes up the light, color and information of your photograph. It is created by the photo lights on your sensor. A 24 megapixel camera would produce an image that has roughly 24 million pixels. An eight megapixel camera would create an image that's around eight million pixels. It measures the width, the height of its image and multiplies it. So a 24 megapixel camera could shoot up to an image size of 6000 by 4000 megapixels. So how does that all translate? Well, the more megapixels there are, the more detail and quality there is in your photo. Another way to think about it is using another art. Medium like painting Compare painting that has thousands of small, detailed strokes with a small paintbrush. Now compare that to a painting with just a few strokes from a large paint brush. Which one will be more defined and having more clear image? The one with a more detailed strokes. More pixels. Your image will be the size of your megapixels when using the full resolution your camera has as you crop in digitally or if you zoom in when you're printing, you'll start to lose those pixels, seeing less and less detail as you crop in or zoom in. The higher your pixel count, the more you'll be able to zoom in without losing that quality and the bigger the physical print you can mate without seeing the pixels. 12 to 24 megapixel cameras are pretty much going to be the standard for most cameras today and will be the most photographers really need. Printing a decent sized photo or sharing them digitally will still look great within the sizer solutions. The immense amount of pixels is really only needed when the photographer will be cropping greatly or creating large advertisement size prints. It fun exercise to help determine the signs of your image is to compare the resolution of your photo to the resolution of your HD TV. Most standard HD TVs have a resolution of 1920 by 10 80. That's pixels. That's 1120 pixels wide and 1080 pixels tall. If you were to translate that into megapixels, we would multiply 1920 by 10 80 giving us 2,073,600 pixels, which is 2.1 megapixels. Compare that to 0.1 to your 24 megapixel camera. Even a 12 megapixel camera is giving you more detailed image than your standard HD TV signal. So this should give you a general thought on megapixels and how that relates to what you're going to be shooting if you're gonna be making giant billboard advertisements, maybe check out a camera that has a higher megapixel count. But for now, like I said, between 12 and 24 megapixels is perfect for most photographers. 41. White Balance: Introduction: hi, everyone, and welcome to the white balance and color section in this section. We will be going over how your cameras sees colors, what white balance is and how you can use it toe. Add different moods to your photos. We will dive a bit deeper into the light spectrum, which is all the light. We as humans are able to see how to read the Kelvin temperature chart and ultimately, how better understanding these elements of light will help make you a better photographer, So let's get started. 42. White Balance: What is White Balance?: as many of you now know or are at least starting to learn, photography is more or less the art of capturing light. And when you think about it every day, there are many different kinds of light that we all see whether it be light from the sun, lights in your house, the light off your computer or phone. These are all different kinds of light being produced in many, many different ways. The important difference between these various kinds of light for us as photographers is the exposure of brightness, which we've learned all about, and the temperature of light, which is measured in Kelvin's. You'll learn more about that in the next lesson, but at the most basic level, white balance is telling your camera or having your camera select automatically. What is true white in your image, meaning based off of what kind of life is in your frame? That that white wall should look? Wait or the clouds in the sky should look white. It's the base for how the rest of the colors in your image will look and can get fairly complex when you have multiple kinds of light in one image. Now most auto white balance systems have gone extremely accurate. But understanding what your camera is doing when white balancing is important because it can lead to some really cool creative choices. That being said, people that do a lot of post editing on the computer or phone can change the white balance and Cullerton's after they've already taken the photos. Here is what Y pounds does at the most basic levels. Here's an image with the correct wipeouts. Looks natural close to how you would see it in normal life. Here is what happens when that white balance isn't set correctly. Either the image appears to warm or almost orange or appears to cool, almost blew in some areas. Auto white balance on most cameras is gonna be really good. So we're out here in the daylight and it's set to auto white balance and you can see that it looks pretty natural. All the colors look right. You know, I'm comparing what I see on my screen to what William actually looks like, and it looks pretty good. So let's take a picture of this and you can really see that all the colors look right. They look natural Auto Y pounds is really pretty great on most cameras today, but with your white bound settings, you'll be able to make it warmer or cooler, adding your own sort of style to it. Ultimately, white balance effects the colors in your image, and that brings us to our next discussion, which is color color is greatly affected by having the correct white balance. This might seem simple, but colors are what can make your photos incredibly dynamic, like a person wearing red in a winter wonderland or yellow umbrella in a sea of grey, or having someone wearing camo in a forest or all white in a snowstorm. All these examples show how powerful color can be for a photographer, adding a color tint cheer Photo can also change the feeling or mood. A warm 10 with more yellows and oranges can feel happier or more like summer time, then a photo that slightly bluer or cooler by just in your white bounds. To read the light in different ways, you can give a warm or cool tent to your photo. Next, we will dive a bit deeper into what your camera is actually doing. When white balancing and why Calvin's are incredibly important thing for every photographer to understand 43. White Balance: Kelvin Temperature Scale: So now that we have talked about what Y pounds is, we're going to delve a bit deeper into the science of light and what it is that your cameras doing when you adjust the white balance toe. Understand this, however, you need to first understand what Kelvin's are. Here is the Kelvin scale, which ranges from around 1000 Kelvin to 10,000 Kelvin. As you can see, lower numbers on the scale are much warmer and color more orange, even red down towards 1000 Calvin A candle's light is probably the most common light we know in this light temperature range, which reads close to 2000 Kelvin up towards the top of the scale, it is blue. So now we're going to go through the Kelvin scale and show you the difference, actually through the camera. So currently we're set at Kelvin 2500 or 2500 Kelvin Rather, and you can see that because we're outdoors, where typically you're closer to 5600 Kelvin Ah, that it's very blue. Let's go ahead and move up in the Kelvin scale with our white balance. So we're at 2500 and let's go up to 3200. So this is a typical incandescent light bulbs, something that you might find indoors. You can see it's a little bit less blue, but it's still pretty blue. If you're indoors with incandescent light bulbs, this would look quite, but because we're outside under the daylight, it looks much bluer. So now let's go up to, let's say, 4200 which would be closer to a fluorescent light bulb. And if you are under fluorescent lights, this would be properly white, bounced and you can see that's getting much closer to looking proper properly. White pounds. Let's keep going up, though. And now we are at 5600 and this is daylight, so this is really, you know, for outdoors. We do have some clouds going right now, but it's still law Blue sky. So this is pretty good for a ah, typical white balance setting. And when you can look at our auto white balance setting, it looks pretty close to this. So let's keep going, though. Uh, if we go in here again and we go up to 6000 let's just go all the way up to 8000 now 8000 starts to look much orange er and you were outdoors. Eight thousands closer to what you would see under shade or if you were pointed at the sky . You know it might even make the blue sky look a little bit wider. This is kind of cool way you can adjust your Kelvin's and really fine tune what you want your wife pounds to be. Maybe you don't want your image to be fully, you know, perfectly natural looking. Maybe you wanted to be a little bluer or little orange er. You can adjust these Kelvin numbers to get that exact look that you're trying to get. This might seem like just a bunch of random numbers, but why understand? Kelvin's is important and so you can but better understand what you're doing when you or your camera sets the white balance, you'll be a better photographer if you can quickly see the lighting in your frame and you know what the white balance setting should be and how to play with it to Adam or Creative 10 or looked your image. Also, by knowing what your camera is registering as true white, you'll be able to better understand how the rest of the colors in the image will come out. This is very important when you start mixing light sources in an image. Now that you know more about light temperatures in the next lesson, you will learn exactly how to do this with your camera, using both auto and manual white balance modes to read that light. 44. White Balance: Auto White Balance Modes: Now that you understand what why pounds actually is, and the differences between light temperatures, How do you get your camera to read the light properly today, most cameras are incredibly accurate. With their automatic white balance modes, many cameras will have preset white balance modes. They're basically just setting it to read light in different Kelvin temperatures. By shifting through these settings, you can see how your camera reads the light differently. All right, so let's just set our white ballons. Initially, we're going to start with the auto white balance feature. So we go into our menu and just you know, for each camera it's gonna be different. But typically pretty easily there'll be a white balance or W B button on your camera. So you push that and up comes the white pounds features and will select auto white balance . And you can see that you know, William Shakespeare looks natural. The colors look right. So let's take a picture of this. So let's go over to the cloudy setting. You can see that it looks almost exact. Same know a whole lot of change there, and now let's just see the difference between cloudy and daylight so the daylight you can tell it's a little bit lower, but it still looks pretty good. Um, were common in between area right now, and now let's go to the last outdoor setting or preset four y pounds, which is shade. And with the shade you can see that's gone a bit warmer because this is really meant for less direct sunlight. It's meant for when you're in a very shaded area. All right, so now that we've done the outdoor presets, let's go into the indoor ones. Just It's just to see what happens when you're outside in daylight, but using an indoor preset. So first up, let's go to tungsten light. Now, immediately, you can see how blue it gets, and this again is because the white bound setting thinks that it's supposed to be orange ER , and because we're outside, the light is much bluer now, continuing down, let's go to the fluorescent setting, which you can see. It's a a little bit less blue. It's not quite as low in the Kelvin scale. This is closer to 4000 Kelvin, and lastly, on this camera, at least the next option would be for your flash so this would be this camera has a built in flash. Um, you can see that's gone a bit warmer now, so this is really meant for more of a daylight balance. Flash. Now is a great time to practice with your camera. Try adjusting the white balance settings to see what settings work best for you in different locations. Also play with mixed lighting, shooting in a room with lights on and some daylight spilling in through a window. Also, when shooting at sunrise or sunset, you will really notice a shift in color temperatures. All these things will help you become a bear photographer if you pay attention to what Kelvin works best for you. Presets and auto white balance are all great features, but understand what you're cameras doing is what is most important. 45. White Balance: Color Profiles: so a quick advance topic. We want to bring up our pictures, styles or picture profiles. Depending on the camera manufacturer you have. These might be called different things. What they are, though, are basically different ways that your camera reads. Contrast saturation and sharpness. Some cameras will also have color tone. So what you're effectively doing with these different picture profiles are just ing how saturated your picture looks, how contrast it is and how sharp it is. And this is all being processed with in the camera. So if you're shooting raw, this won't end up being in your end photo. But if you're shooting J. Peg, this will be part of the photo that is taken. So let's run through these different picture profiles just to see. So what? The general differences are, at least for these this canon camera. So first up we have auto and auto is just kind of going to be No, it's going best fit for the situation that the camera thinks will look best for you. So let's take a picture with that. And now let's go over and switch to standard. Now Standard is meant for sort of just the most general look, it's gonna look sort of similar to the canon. Typical color profile. Now let's go over to portrait mode, and this is ideal for people. This is ideal for making skin look a bit smoother. Nothing to contrast. Year two Sharp really should be a little bit more flattering for Phil. All right, so now let's switch over to landscape. Landscape is gonna be a little bit sharper. It's gonna be a little bit more saturated. It's really meant to make those landscapes of really good. Of course, we're just taking photos of Phil, so we'll see what this does to him. You can see it's a it's a little bit mawr more saturated, and then there's neutral. Neutral is meant for editing. It's taking down that saturation, making a little bit less contrast e maybe making the image look a little bit flatter in terms of color and sharpness and all this. Lastly, we have monochrome, so this basically takes out all the saturation and enables you to shoot in black and white . So doing on the camera you have, there might be other options in there, or maybe you don't have some of these, but typically portrait, landscape neutral or some sort of flat is gonna be part of these picture profiles. And really, they're just a way for you to customize the look of your camera within this camera and within many cameras, there's also gonna be typically around three different customizable scene settings and or picture styles. And within these, you can choose what saturation, what contrast, what sharpness you prefer for your images. So if you can go into your camera, play around with ease, find out what you like most to paying on, you know, maybe for portrait. So you like a little bit more contrast, E. Or maybe you like it Less contrast, it really comes down to what you prefer. 46. White Balance: Light Spectrum & Color Theory: everyone. In this lesson, you'll learn more about color and color theory. Colors are very small, part of a huge spectrum known as theological magnetic spectrum. You can see here that ranges from gamma rays, X rays, ultraviolet visible light to infrared microwaves, radar, radio broadcast waves. There's also two waves in there. There's a lot to that whole spectrum, but for us it's photographers. We will just be talking about that tiny little sliver in the middle of visible light. That's a light that we as humans are actually able to see. As you can see, the visible light spectrum goes from violet and cooler colors to warmer colors. Eventually up to read within this visible light spectrum are all the possible colors We, as humans, are able to see in all the colors that were photographing. Now, understanding this isn't going to change your ability to take great photos, but it will help you understand why some photographs seem to evoke certain emotions from you or might seem more dynamic. The more we pay attention to what colors are in our frame, the more dynamic images we can capture. Here are a few things to understand about colors that will make your photos better. First off is Hugh. The huge refers to the position of a color on the color wheel, as you can see here, each of which represent a certain spectrum of light. There are many kinds of blue. For example, light, dark, vibrant, pale blue refers to the hue, which can change in style. Value is the lightness or darkness of a color. It really just comes into that. How how bright is it or how dark is it? You can see that on this scale here, saturation is the relative strength or weakness of a color hue, really, just how much those colors stand out or how pulled back they are. In the next lesson, we'll show you ways to use this practically to get better photos. 47. White Balance: Creative Colors: now, As you saw before, there's a lot of science behind where colors come from and how we manipulate them as photographers. How we use colors in our own frame, however, is one of the ways that we make truly stunning images. This is an incredibly difficult thing to do well and takes a lot of time to learn. Well, you can adjust. Color is after the fact on your computer. I'm gonna talk mainly about actually setting up shots and getting the clothes right in camera opposed to just fixing them in post. So first off, let's talk about what colors work well together and what colors create dynamic contrast, as you've already seen here, is the color spectrum. First and foremost, let's talk about primary colors, their colors that, as you can see here, when added together, actually make the other colors in the color wheel. Most commonly, this is a combination of red, green, blue or RGB C M. Why is also in a more common color palette, which is cyan, magenta and yellow, blue and red make purple sign and yellow makes green. This can all get a bit complicated because technologies both new and old produce these colors in a number of ways. What's most important for us is to understand what colors complement each other and wish colors create dynamic contrast. Now, complementary colors are colors that are opposite one another on the color wheel and create a contrast similar to that of black and white. For example, red and green, you can see that image is using mostly Those two colors create some stunning results because of the contrast between the colors. When you have a blue background and one thing that is yellow, it really stands out. If you have a green subject in a sea of blue, it almost blends in its more so part of the scenery opposed to contrast Ian and standing out. Typically all cooler colors or all warmer colors will blend together. But by adding a little coolness to a lot of warm colors or vice, versa can cause an image to become more dynamic at the same time. Maybe you want to create more of a mood with your image and have all the colors kind of meshing together. Typically, cooler images will be more peaceful and calming. Where's warmer colors will be more energizing. Also most colors will really pop when surrounded by white, which is why it's fun taking photos out in the snow. Dark backgrounds will typically blend in better with cooler colors, while warmer colors will stand out from them. Well, some of this might seem like common knowledge. What is tricky is finding a location, knowing the color palette and then placing a subject in that frame and really coming up with the look of the image. Before you go and take the photo, however, you want to approach it. Playing with the colors in your frame is a huge part of being a photographer and can really set you apart from the rest. It can also, in a way, to find your style. Do you prefer warmer colors? Do you prefer cooler colors? Do you prefer only having two colors? Or do you like having the whole rainbow in there? There's no right answer, and that's the fun of it. Next, let's give rid of all the colors and talk about black and white 48. White Balance: Black and White Photography: Now that we have talked a lot about color photography and all that goes into it, I want talk to you a little bit about black and white photography. Black and white photography is now as easy as just dropping the saturation in post or popping on a filter. But to take great black and white photos. It's good to understand what colors and exposures make. Ah, great black and white photo in the first place. For a long time when film was the more common medium for taking photos, you had to choose between color or black and white film. The benefit of black and white film was that it was much easier to develop yourself in a dark room and overall less expensive due to the chemicals you needed and many other things . It was also a love style of shooting by many photographers to do portrait's and landscapes , the idea being that you are less distracted by the colors and really just look at the details of the faces or landscapes. Today, some camera manufacturers allow you to select a mode in which you can shoot in black and white. Some newer digital cameras, even Onley shoot in black and white. Now this might seem pointless to you, since you can simply import a photo and bring down the saturation and boom, you have a black might. Follow a photo. What you are missing here is that there's a lot more that goes into how that black and white image looks when it comes to editing black and white. The only difference is that there is no color contrasts highlights. Shadows white level, black level. All still apply in. What you'll find is that something like an overexposed sky or a color starting to look unnatural doesn't matter as much. You then begin looking more at the textures and contrasts much more closely, really paying attention to the lighting. You can also go much more extreme with some of your settings to really make the image dynamic and have lots of contrast to this day. Some of my favorite landscapes are those of Ansel Adams that were shot entirely in black and white. Now, of course, having colors might make an image popped more. Maybe Seymour exciting, but black and white has a special characteristic to it that makes you focus more on what's in the image then just enjoying the pretty colors. Here are some of our favorite black and white portrait, which I think show you how much can be done with black and white photography. How by not having to pay attention to color palettes and just on what you are seeing makes a big difference. I personally like both, but in this color image, your eyes immediately drawn to that red because the color just stands out. One. The black and white version you take in mawr, looking around the image and granted because of the composition. Your eyes still drawn to that singular point, but you're less focused immediately on it. It takes time that you can scan the image and Seymour so while actually taking photos in black and white, focus on the composition and the lighting, not just if everything is exposed or not, but what parts of your image are exposed. What is dark? What is bright? Pay attention to the fall off of light into the background. What are the textures in your image when you start editing it, you will be able to make those shadows much darker, and those highlights much brighter Then, if shooting color where they might start to look strange. I will say that noise is still an issue with black and white photography, but is much more forgivable and can look much nicer than grainy color photos. I highly recommend every now and then, switching your photos over to black and white and playing with the settings in there. You'll be surprised by how different black and white photos can look when you start adjusting things on your computer. 49. White Balance: Custom White Balance: Hey there. So a student asked us about custom white balance. Now we've gone over the preset white balances on your camera. Also, you can select the actual Kelvin number by using the K symbol on your camera. But there's another setting for white balance called custom white balance. And basically that means you'll take a situation you're in. Ah, and you can custom to that very specific photo or situation lighting set up your in. Now, this is gonna be very different on every camera. Some cameras use a reference photo that you're gonna take, which is what we're going to do on this camera. Other cameras, like my Fuji, you'll be able to do it live and point to a section, and it'll just balance to that square. But the main thing is that this will be so precise as faras custom balance goes, that you can really get in there. I think the type of situation you would normally do this in and be a studio setting or a setting that's gonna be consistent the entire time. I don't tend to like to use this custom white balance when I'm shooting events or weddings or I'm on the fly because things are changing constantly. But if you have a consistent lighting set up, this is a great way to be very precise about your white custom balance. So the way this works on this on this camera is we're in a setting right now that what the custom white balance has not been set, You're gonna want to basically remember what white balance is is. We're setting the camera to tell it what is true. White. If you don't have a professional great card or white card something that's just white, like a white paper towel, Um, we'll work. And basically what we're gonna do is we're gonna take our camera. We're going to take a picture of our white card or our white paper towel, and then in the menu, we're going to go to menu. We're gonna go down to custom white balance. We're gonna click that and basically the cameras asking, Is this what you want toe white balance to and we're showing it The photo we just took because we want to fill the frame with as much white as we can. We'll hit set. It's asking if we want to use the data from this image to be a custom. My balance. We're gonna hit, Okay, It balances. We're gonna take another photo and now you can see it's a little bit more true White. It's less blue. It's less daylight e its balance to the light around here and it's balance to the whiteness on here. So now every time I take a photo in our particular setting, it will stay balanced to that setting. As soon as we change the lights or move locations, it's going to change what it looks like because we're set for this situation. So keep in mind the custom white balance is for the situation you're in on, and it's very different on setting it on each camera, but that's the basics of it. 50. Lighting: Introduction: lighting is so incredibly important to photography, mostly because light is actually what we're capturing with our cameras. When we take a photo, we're exposing light sensitive material to light in the old days with non digital cameras. This was done by exposing film to light. Nowadays we're capturing that light with our cameras. Digital sensor. We are in essence recording the information of light at the particular moment, time and place. So if you work past all that technical jargon, it comes down to the practice of taking light and recording it so that we can reference it in the future. Ah, photograph light is a big deal in photography and there are many things about light that we have to consider the intensity, the quality and the how or where it falls. In this section of the photography masterclass, we're going to look at soft light versus hard light natural light vs artificial light and what onboard flash will do for you versus an off camera flash. Then we will look at what hot lights are and how to take some steps and creating some creative looks with all sorts of different types of lights. So before we get into it. Here are some examples of how light can really change the way a photo looks creatively in this photo. The couple iss silhouetted. It brings focus on their kiss and them as a couple together, rather than the details on their face and them as individuals. Here we see a well lit subject that's being backlit by the sun. Positioning the sunlight to highlight the person is a great way to make the person pop in the photo. Paying attention to the light in a landscape is a big deal is, well, you want a position and take your photo at the best time of day for what you're shooting. You may not be able to move the sun, but you get to decide when to shoot it, and you can always create your own light. Here are a couple of photos that we used flashes and strobes to create a specific look in both portrait's modeling and product shots. I will forever be learning how to light my images, but in this section we will cover the basics you need to send you on your way to using the light as another powerful tool in your creative photography toolbox. Let's get started 51. Lighting: Using Natural Light: shooting and natural light is the easiest, fastest and best thing you can do as a beginner. Shooting a natural light means you're basically using any light that is happening naturally in your scene. More often than not, that means light coming from the sun, and it's something that changes how you shoot during different times of the day. But just because you can't control the sun doesn't mean you can control how to use the light coming from the sun. Do you want to be soft, hard, minimal, blown out? The options are endless. With every photo you take, you have to think about what the lighting you want to achieve or what the goal of your lighting is. We can use lighting to properly expose a subject, or we can use it to highlight specific areas of your composition. The pros of using natural light include its ease and simplicity. It's free to use, and it's always available unless shooting at night. Some people even prefer the look in style of using natural light versus flash photography, too. Right away. Using natural light will keep you focused in the moment and what you're shooting. You don't have to purchase or carry any other lighting gear. You don't have to deal with lighting settings or charge batteries thes air things that take you away from composing a beautiful image. I have always felt the more gear you have and the more variables there are, the more problems or unexpected issues can occur. This photo was taken during a wedding where I was using a lot of natural light, the ease of not having to set up a flash or wait for some artificial. A light allowed me to capture some really great moments between the couple. Often, journalistic event photography will rely heavily on natural light by getting my settings correct. Using your light meter in the camera to expose for faces, you could make sure to capture those specific moments. Natural light will look different depending on the weather. With a lot of clouds, the light will be more soft and create fewer harsh shadows compared to standing outside in the middle of a sunny day directly under the sun. In these photos, I shot headshots and active photos for a Beachbody boot camp. More than anything, I got lucky that it was overcast that day. I exposed for their faces, and the soft daylight took care of the rest. Without the harsh sun that was exposed over everything, it looked really nice. You can see how their faces, the ocean, the sand are all generally the same exposure. Compare these photos to this maternity session. I shot where I was battling the sun as a backlight. It's a very different look. One is using the sun to highlight the subject, and the other is just even lighting. It works for these photos because in the maternity session I wanted to make it seem a little bit more magical, whereas in the beach exercise photo shoot, it was meant to be more professional and grounded for headshots, for websites, for booklets, things like that shooting in the early morning light or near sunset will allow results in softer light that has a beautiful, warm glow to it. The time of the day is often referred to as Golden Hour and is the perfect time to shoot. If you're trying to make your photos look magical, I tend to shoot a lot of head shots and or modeling shots. During this time, the sun is lower and creates a wonderful flare like this one in this shot. Still, you need to keep exposing for their faces and let the sun flare overexpose a little to create that look. Or you can set your camera to expose for the sun, allowing for a more silhouetted look. When shooting at person are letting a sunset photo create a Grady in over the clouds. Watch how we expose for the sun in this example verse exposing for the beach and the sky. You can tell that the photo is completely different when we expose for either the sky in the sunset or just the beach in the foreground. It's two completely different photos based on what lighting we're exposing for. And this lesson we're gonna talk about lighting outside. Basically, I'm gonna take you through three different ways to position a person based on the sun right now is you can tell the sun is right in our face. It's so bright, I'm having trouble keeping my eyes open. We're gonna go ahead and shoot. Phil over here is also trying to keep his eyes open, so let's see if we can take a shot. So basically in this shot were totally front Lee lit. We're gonna expose for Phil's face and see what that looks like. So let's check it out. No, you don't have to, you know, have to open your eyes. A look that way. So I'm getting pretty close because I have to avoid my shadow casting on Phil. Now I'm shooting at 200 I eso at an F 5 to 6 shooting aperture priority. So I'm letting my camera picked the shutter. So let's find it's a little washed out. Now let's walk into the shade and see what that looks like. So we're not in direct, bright daily, Phil. So now we're both in the shade. We can open our eyes, We can see. You can tell it's a little bit different. I've kept this on aperture priority, so I'm still going to shoot it to 56 and I'm gonna let my camera do the deciding on the shutter right film. So let's go ahead. Gonna get a little bit closer. So, Phil, if you could look at it that way, so it just looks like the last shot. Yeah, so now you can take a look at this photo and compare the two It's a nice, just even even soft light. I like to take my subjects into soft light when I'm lighting them because it's not as harsh and they could see their definitely two different types of looks. If you take a look back at the fill shot, where the light is really just blowing out right in front of his face, it's much more lit. There's harsh shadows, the background a little bit nicer. But in this shot, it's nice, even cool light. So now let's do something else. Let's take Phil back into the sun, but let's have the sun hit his back instead of his face. So now I've got the sun to their back, our eyes can open, and now we kind of have a rim around the back of our shoulders. You can see Phil has a nice room around his shoulder, so let's take the same shot. Same settings, aperture priority. Cool. So now check out this shot. So fills poses almost exactly the same. But now you can see that there's a rim light behind him, and you can really see that there's nice flare coming into our cameras. Well, the bummer part is that the background is a little bit blown out where the sun is, and he's a little bit shaded. So maybe let's talk about lighting as faras taking that son and controlling it. Now I'm gonna have Sam come and help us with a flex Phil, and this is something that will let us bounce in light and basically fill in the shade on Phil's face so that we get a more perfect exposure. So Sam's going to use the silver side of this flex Phil. He's gonna take the sun that's coming down, and it's gonna bounce from the silver side back into Phil's face. Let's see what that does. That same pose, if you can. Cool. So check out this shot. Now you can see all this light that's coming up on Phil, and it's really filling in. His fate was filling and fill because now this light is coming up. We see his face and we see the background. Now let's take a look at the gold side of this flex filmed See what that looks like? This gold sides doing a little bit more. It's bringing in some more light coming from below him, but it's also a little warmer. So if you want to get that warmer look, that's pretty cool. Now let's open up our flex bill, and we actually have a white, softer side that will be ableto bounce lighting and it's a little bit more natural. It's more subtle, and it's gonna be much better. Oh, yeah, great. So now you can see we're losing the sun behind some clouds, but we still have enough to bounce that nice, subtle soft light in. And that, to me, looks just fantastic. It looks the best. It looks better than the harsh, harsh silver or the harsh gold. Another thing we can do is we can diffuse light and get really close and still get that nice son direct on their face. So let's go back into the sun and do one more shot. So now I'm shading Phil. He's directly in the sun. Watch your eyes vilify. Take this away. See how he's directly in the sun. Now we're covering it with this. I'm gonna have Sam come over and hold this and I'm gonna take a picture. Phil. Cool. So now you can see Phyllis covered in the shade. But there's a nice, bright background. Now, this doesn't necessarily work unless you have a big enough shade and you're getting really tight on the subject. But it's another really good way to control sunlight, so you can see you're gonna have to position your subjects when you're outside in natural light to really take advantage of the sun. 52. Lighting: Using Light from a Window: All right, So we're here indoors, and I wanted to show you how to use some natural light when you're inside during the day. Now I want to take a nice portrait of Sam. Often you may want to take a portrait of a loved one or a family member or even a pet, and you don't have the lights that you need a really, really cool way to do this in a really soft artistic way. It's finding a window with a lot of soft light coming through it. Nothing were the sons breaking through, but just some bouncing off the street from outside in this living room. The sun right now is on the other side of the house. It's hitting the street. So we have this nice soft light. Once we open these curtains and then we're gonna expose to it and go ahead and take a nice portrait. So let's go ahead and see what that looks like. You can see it's probably a little blown out in the video camera, but we're gonna compensate for that in the photography camera, so I'm gonna have Sam looking right at me again. I'm back in our aperture priority. I'm shooting at a F 28 because that's where I like to shoot my portrait. I'm using just a standard 1600 I s O Our exposure compensation is set to zero. So it's good. And take a look at Sam Sam, if you could just look outside very good. I'm on a 23 millimeter lens on a crop sensor camera, so it's a little more similar to a 35 to take a look at this photo. You can see how the light is nice and soft, and it's coming in on Sam's face. There's a little bit of fall off in the back. You're getting some light coming from another window from the kitchen on his backside. It's a little bright for me, and I would rather expose to the actual light coming in. So because I'm an aperture priority, I'm going to go ahead and use exposure compensation in the opposite direction. We did in a demo earlier by bringing the stopped down by a stop and 1/2. So I'm gonna move my exposure compensation down to negative 1.1 basically and we'll see what that does. And if you go look outside. Great. So take a look at this photo. Now we're exposing a little bit more to the light, our shadows or a little deeper now because we've stopped down quite a bit. So you can see how the exposure conversation is letting us really get to the light that's coming in from the window. So let's talk a little bit about posing. You can see how I have Sam here, facing the window. His body's towards me and his face is facing out so that the light can see his face. So go ahead and face out again. Sam, that's beautiful. Now, Sam, look at me now, Sam, look into Ophelia. So look at these three different positions. As you can see, the light facing getting his face is great when he's looking right outside, the next shot is him facing us. It's a little bit more contrast. You can see there's no light on the left side of his face on the last one. He's not even facing the light at all, So it's really up to you how you want to design this kind of photo for yourself in composition and light. The main thing is it nice, beautiful soft source coming from a window. The really good use of natural daylight 53. Lighting: Using Artificial Light: If you don't want to use natural light and want more control of your lighting, you will want to use artificial lights. There are two types of artificial light that will be covering in this lesson. One is the artificial light that's created by lights around you, your house lights, street light or any other man made light bulb two is the light that you create from a flash , a strobe or a hot light. Using the artificial light around you can be very easy. The first step is to balance your cameras white balance setting to that specific type of light. Or, if you want a cool or warm tent than changing your white balance. This goes back to what Sam was talking about in white balance. A lot of cameras these days have excellent auto white balance. Is Sam discussed and we saw in the previous section. For now, you can let your camera do the heavy lifting. Here's a good way to use a desk lamp or room lamp to your advantage in making some creative decisions. Okay, so now we're inside. It's a little bit closer to nighttime, and I wanted to show you what you can use inside your house is just a household item toe light with something that I have Sam over here with a lamp right next to him. So let's frame up and let's just see what we got to start with. I'm shooting at an F two at 1600 my shutter is a 3/20 just looking right at him. So check out this photo. You can see how the light is coming around his face. It's a little too dark to see the front of his face, but really, what we wanted accomplishes. I want to be able to see his face and just do a nice kind of portrait photo of him. So I'm gonna use the light and I'm gonna manipulated by moving it around so that I can basically light him with a standard light. So let's do that. So we moved the light from behind him over to the right side of him. You can see in the last photo. It's really kind of cutting down his face and you can't see his face it all. I've moved it, so it's a little bit more frontal. And so we're trying to get a little bit more light on his face so we can see his face. So let's go ahead and see what that looks like. We're gonna open up just a little bit to get a little bit more in there. Judy at a 1 25th There we go. So you can see how the light spilling on his face just a little bit. Mauritz a little soft. We're lucky because we have a soft bald and it's bouncing off the soft sort of lamp shade right here. It's a really quick and easy way toe light, someone just using lights that you have around you. It's not the most professional way to light someone, but it really works in a pinch. I think if I was gonna change this, I would move him away from the background. So the background falls off a little bit and we're just lighting him from the front. So now we've shifted Sam to the other side of the room so that the background is further away, and so it's a little bit of light falling off, and now we're gonna shoot him. I'm gonna close down just a little to get a little bit more dark in the background, and it really is creating this cool art look. And we're shooting at a 2/100 of a second F to 1600. It's going to take a look. Sam, look at the light for me. Perfect. So see how this creates a really nice creative look to it. The light is not fully hitting his face, but just cutting down a little bit. It's kind of like we used the natural light from the window, but this is artificial light. Often, I found myself in office spaces with really gross looking fluorescent lights in the ceilings. The work great for lighting the whole room, but it gives people these heavy shadows that are just not very flattering because the lights coming from directly above other times I'll be in someone's house or room, and there are room lights or lamps around. Usually the best thing to do in these situations is to diffuse the light, and by that I mean breaking it up from being such a harsh hard light with something soft, like a curtain sheet, a lamp shade, or just turn them off or position them wherever you were shooting to take advantage of them . Let's take a look at this demo and see how we do it. So we talked about defusing light. Now let's talk about shooting with indoor light and defusing that, like the best thing you could do with defusing light is just using household tissue paper that you might pick up for wrapping paper or something like that, just using tissue paper and putting it over the light. I've taken off the lamp shade on this light and I'm lighting Sam's face with it, and we're gonna go ahead and take a picture of him looking at the light so we can show you what diffusion actually looks like. So there we go. That's F two at 160th at 1600. I s So now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take our tissue paper, and I'm basically just gonna lay it on top of that light. Now that light bulb itself is already a little soft, so I'm not going to see a huge difference, but you'll see enough to make a difference. Um, I don't recommend putting this on an Edison type bulb against an led light so it doesn't get hot enough to burn us, and we're going to go ahead and place it on top, and basically it's diffusing the light like we spoke about before. It's making it softer. It's creating less harsh shadows. So let's go ahead and take a picture. Right are same settings, and in this shot we can still see the light. But that's OK. We'll crop it later, and here we go. So now take a look at these two photos. You see the 1st 1 and the second. There's not a huge difference, but it's really shaped the light in the background, and it's really calm down on Sam's shoulders and his face. The shadows are a little less harsh, so it's still a little too harsh for me. So I'm gonna actually double up the diffusion and shape it a little bit more and you can see the background. It's going to change dramatically, and it's gonna change on Sam's face dramatically. So what I've done now is I've doubled it over, and I've placed it so that the thickest part of the diffusion is facing Sam and the wall. It's defusing it twice a much now, so let's go ahead and take a picture. Great. So check this photo out. It's even softer on Sam and softer in the background. You can see the difference between each photo. I do kind of like the second photo cause we created sort of radiant in the background because the light was sneaking through the diffusion paper. But you can see how we start with very harsh light, softer, softer. So that's a really quick and easy way to diffuse your indoor light using just tissue paper . Keep in mind you don't want to leave that tissue paper on your light bulb for very long. When you're done, take it off, and if you're not using it, don't leave it there. You can also create different types of diffusion by using different types of like sheet it's or using tissues or using tissue paper, and you can wrap around the light, Um, and every light ball. This sort of different. I would recommend doing this on led light bulbs, not those hot Edison bulbs. Now you've seen how you can still get beautiful photos using artificial lights around you. In the following lesson, we'll dive into using a flash. It's an important skill for any new photographer toe. Half 54. Lighting: Using the Camera's Flash: in this lesson, you'll learn how to use an onboard flash to improve your photos. Flashes can be a hard thing the master, but can really save you in some dark situations. Most cameras have a flash built into the camera that can be turned on or off, or set to auto mode, which I generally don't recommend. Personally, I would only use a flash if there is no other way to expose properly in that lighting situation. That means there's not enough natural or artificial light and increasing. My I s O on my camera just can't see into the dark enough without compromising the quality of the image. Each cameras different, but if you want to get up and running with your onboard flash right away, you can flip your camera toe auto mode and go into a darker room. The flash will pop up and be used when needed. If it doesn't pop up automatically or if you want to turn it on yourself, there may be a button on the body of the camera to do so or an option in the menu for turning it on. Shake your specific camera manual and you'll be able to find that pretty quickly. Let's see what using auto on a pop up flash looks like. Probably not very good. All right, so let's take a look at what our camera does with an on board internal flash in auto mode. Basically, I have it set up. So our cameras and auto mode and what we're gonna do is turn off the lights and the camera is going to pop the flash up because it's gonna think it's too dark and then we'll take the photo. So let's take a look at this photo. You can see how it's totally blown out by the flash. Now this is auto mode. Now. Shakespeare is just totally white and totally looks a little ugly. And, ah, that's basically what auto internal flashes dio. There's not much else you could do with an on board camera flash in adjusting it so you can turn it around or adjusted to flash in different directions. The only thing I would recommend doing depending on the look is diffusing it. Diffusing light means making it softer and less harsh. A naked flash is generally a very hard, harsh light, similar to the naked son. It creates a hard shadow and is really intense. By defusing a heart light, we're softening the light and dispersing the light race, thus creating less shadows, softening the light as it falls on our subject. Let's go back to the same situation we're in and applied to fusion in that last demo. Okay, So because that last photo was so harsh, let's talk about defusing your light that we already talked about what that is. We're gonna take a household item, this tissue, we're gonna double it up, and we're gonna put it over the flash like that, and then we're gonna try firing it and let's see what that does. So basically, you can use a rubber band or any other sort of tape to tape this on to your onboard flash. You can see how much softer this photo is. The light looks much more flattering and less harsh 55. Lighting: Using an External Flash: Let's first talk about the external flash. An external flash is a flash. It's not built into your camera and gives you more control in both positioning the flash and intensity or brightness. It will also allow you to change the direction of the flash. Remember how we recommended softening the light from your flash with a diffuser bouncing, the flash is light off the ceiling or in a wall near you to create softer light is great. I often point my external flash upwards to fill an entire room rather than the subject right in front of me. You can also use specific diffusers to bound to diffuse your flash, giving you more control of the quality of light. Here in the garage was Sam. We're going to go over how to use an external flash in the very basics of using it in taking a simple photo. So to start off, I have my camera and I have the external flash. It fits into the hot shoe just right on top. It just slides right on and locks in the position. So I'm shooting at 2 50 of a second, which is for this camera. It's flash Sync speed. You need to check with your camera and see what specific flash sync speed is for you. I'm shooting at 1600. I s so just because that's a good generalize. So for what we're doing and I'm shooting at an F four so that more things Aaron focus more than shooting at a 2.8. I got my flash on its in manual mode. It's at full power. We're gonna go ahead line Sam up, take a shot. It is totally white. See how white this showed up to? The shot is now, remember, fills exposure triangle. We can talk about that and we can bring the eso down. Or we can now go to our flash and on the back of your flash you'll be able to click the plus minus button and you'll be able to bring the power all the way down, and it's also infractions. So let's bring the power down to 1/16 power and let's see what that does. We're leaving all the settings on a camera the same. So let's line up Sam again. Now again, it's still a little blown out. We've probably blinded Sam because our flashes going right at his eyes. It's not really good for your subject. So we're gonna go all the way down toe 1 5/12 power and we're gonna take a picture of sand one more time. Great. Now it's a really nice exposure. Now the flash itself is really harsh, the lights really hard, and it's creating some hard shadows behind him. So how would we get rid of that? Well, for this flash, we can articulate the top. We can move it around. We can spin it around things like that. In an event I tend to shoot straight up into a ceiling because a lot of times ceilings air white or their beige and they'll apply a lot of bounce. Now let's go back to our full power. If the plus or minus button were sliding all the way over to the power one for one, we're gonna line up Sam again. Or settings haven't changed. Other than the flash power shooting, the photo get a little bit bright, so let's hit. The plus or minus will go back down to halfway, which is 12 56th and we're pointing up and let's look at this bounce lining up, Sam one more time. Great. Look how soft and nicely exposed that pictures of Sam. It's a little less harsh. The background falls off a little bit and the flash really isn't hurting our subject. I would go a little bit brighter hitting the plus or minus button going toe 1 28th lining it up. Very go. Really nice exposure. Really nice. Soft light on Sam is just bouncing off the ceiling. It looks great. Now there's another way to diffuse your light if you can't articulate around or there's no ceiling close by and that's using 1/3 party diffuser like this one I have right here. This one is a really soft plastic hard case and it will fit right on top of our flash. Let's go and put that on. So we still have. So now we have this on top of our flash. Now, some people like to shoot straight because there's still diffusion here, but I'm much more like to shoot straight up and all the light will get trapped in here and diffuse out all around me. So we're gonna leave the power at 1 28 This is what we took our last shot out when we were shooting into the ceiling. Let's see what it looks like now lines them up. There we go again. Really nicely. Diffused light. So now let's try pointing it at him and see what that looks like. Much harsher light because the lights going right at him, I think I would prefer pointing up. You can see the difference between these two photos. You can see the really soft light on Sam versus a really harsh light. It's much more flattering to have a nice, soft, diffuse light from your flash. The cool thing about this is that you can use this in any situation rather than just relying off walls to bounce your flash office. Also, another way to diffuse your life is a small little bounce card that comes with most flashes . It slides out like this, and your flash internally fires light into the bounce card and bounces out this way outdoors. This is great. It's a little hard to do in here because we're going to get some more bounce off the side here. But it's also another way to diffuse your light. There are certain modeling shots that we use harder flashes are, but usually from an external power source, powerful flash or strobe that can move away from your camera. Using an external flash off the top of your camera will allow for some really creative control. It will also allow your photo look more dynamic than just lighting from right above your lens. Check out the difference here between this onboard camera flash photo and when we moved the flash to the side and use the remote control to fire the flash at the same time as shooting the photo. Taking the flash off the camera opens up an entirely new world. You can use a wireless remote or a tethered cable to set up your flash somewhere else to create a more dynamic look. Check out this demo as I mess around with a remote flash off my camera. So now we're back in the garage with Sam and I've taken the flash off our camera and I've added a remote control to it. So basically, when I fire here, it's going to send a wireless signal over to my flash and fire my flash. Now, the reasons for doing this is just getting a little bit more creative with light and deciding how we want to kind of shape the light on our subject's face. So again, if we're right here and we're shooting and we face the flash, right it, Sam, you can see what it looks like. It's just a really harsh hard flash light, and it just doesn't look flattering whatsoever. Sorry, Sam. So let's move the flash somewhere else and see what it looks like when we can move it away from our unit. Weaken really, really kind of get into this really cool design. So we're gonna put this flash just to the side of Sam to create some separation on his face . This way, the flash just that's one side of his face, and this side will hopefully be dark. So move this over here. So let's go and look at Sam. Sam, I'm gonna have you looked down to your right. Yep. Like that will line it up right here and we'll fire away. Cool. Now you can see how the flash itself is really coming from one side. It's hitting the wall behind Sam on his left shoulder, and it's just lighting one face. Sam, if you could look straight down just straight down. Yeah, like that. So let's let him up again. Really, really cool. Just sidelight. Coming from the side, it really creates a different mood. It's still a little harsh for me, so I would kind of decide to defuse it by using our diffuser that's built into the flash itself. This diffuses little bits actually shooting it up into this white card. Let's see what that looks like again. Same sending Sam look straight down. So now take a look at this really soft, soft diffusion light on Sam's face. It's really much more natural. We're getting kind of a yin and yang sort of situation here, where it's dark on one side light on the other side, and the background is actually light on one side and dark on the other side. It's really kind of a cool, creative look. Let's move the flash behind Sam and see what that does. So I'm positioning the flash directly behind Sam's head. I'm gonna get a little bit lower so I don't see the physical flash, and we're gonna look right at Sam. Sam, go and look down again. So his head day perfect Check this out. Look how rim light he is. Now we see his face coming from our video lights, but we don't necessarily see the flash itself. We've created this rim around his head. We're gonna up the power of the flash, and we're gonna point a little bit more at Sam basically up the power toe 1 64th And I'm gonna point it right at the back of his head like that, and we're gonna see what that does. Great. See how it made the light even more powerful? And how the rim is just even more intense around. He's really standing out from the background. And if you have two flashes or two remotes now, weaken light from one side and we can create a backlight. Really? Cool. So now I'm gonna have them take the flash and pointed against the wall in the background and let's see what that does because we're in a garage and we don't really have a background. I've had the flash based, basically the wall itself. We're going to illuminate the wall in the background to create really rad white background . Sam is lit by just the lights that are already up and in the garage so we can sort of see his face and let's see what this does. Check this out. So this is a really easy way to create a perfect white background. He's against, like a white Sykora white piece of paper. But really, it's just a white garage with a flash shooting into a really easy way to do that. So now let's do let's get really creative and let's put the flash on the floor in front of Sam. So before I put it down, I'm gonna drop the power because I know it's gonna really powerful. We dropped all the way down to its lowest power, which is one 5 12 power. We're gonna lay it down right here. This might end up looking a little scary on Sam's. What I'm going for, we're gonna articulated a little bit. It's pointed right up at him. Sam, go ahead and look down yet. We're gonna fire it. Very Halloween E very camp story Camp Campfire Storiesq. This looks very scary. Sandwich should look right at me. Why don't you give me an evil face that's pretty evil. It's pretty scary looking, but you can see what you can do with the flash when you move it around your subject. There's tons of possibilities, especially when you start playing with more than one flash. As soon as you take it off your camera, you can really get creative with it. So check out the supplementary sources in this section for a really cool layout on where I'm placing the flash around the subject and some really cool ideas on how to create an awesome look. I'll put a supplemental resource together so you can see what the image looks like with what the lay out looks like. 56. Lighting: 3-Point Lighting with a Light Kit: When we talk about shooting with hot lights, we mean lights on stands that are always on. We call them hot lights. Well, because they get hot often hot lights, air used mostly in video because you need the consistent light. Right now I'm being lit by hot lights. So is this background. They can be great for photo shoots when photographing multiple subjects like a bunch of students. Or it could be great for fashion and portrait photography when you want to see how you are modelling the light in real time. Unlike the flash and the strobe, that could only be seen when taking the photo with hot lights. You can adjust the shape and light however you see fit as you move the light. Let's take a look at lighting a subject with a couple of light panels in the studio and what you can do to change the mood and adjust your settings with the light in hand. So here we have our three hot lights set up. Right now, I just have one in the back as a backlight. I'm gonna show you what the best practices for three point lighting, so basically I'm going to start with a key light, a fill light and a back like So let's turn off the backlight and I'll turn on the key light right now. So I've just turned on our key light. Your key light is your main light. It's the key toe light are subject. It's the only light that's on right now, and it's lighting Sam from one direction. It's a little bit higher right now, as you can see. So let's go and take a photo and see what? Just the key light looks like so you can see. Now Sam is lit just very from one side. There's a little bit of shadow on his right side of his face, the backgrounds a little dim, and we're using the same settings that we used in the flash exercise. So we're at 1600 eyes, so I'm still a 2/50 just so we stay consistently and I'm shooting at an F four. So now let's turn on the fill light to fill out some of the shadows on the left side of his face. So now you can see the left side of his face. Some of those shadows went away so Let's take a photo and compare the two Nice. So in looking at these two photos, you can see how the one with the key light. There's a lot of shadow on his right side. And then when we add the fill light to fill in the shadows, we lose a lot of those shadows. It's a much more flattering clear light on Sam himself. Now. It really depends on your style of photography. You can kind of use just the key light to create a little bit more contrasts a little more interesting. Or you can create a nice feel, like kind of better for headshots on actors and corporate headshots and stuff like that. So now let's add the third hot light, which is a backlight, so you can see how this light now is just on the back of Sam. It's not quite getting to his face, but it's lighting his shoulders and its head right here. You can see all my shadows directing it. Let's take a photo and see what that looks like. So now you can see is a little bit of separation on the back. It's a little bit hard to tell because of the white background. You can see between the fill light and the backlight. It makes it a little bit more dynamic. You can tell what the backlight as it lights up the back of his head. Let's get a little creative and let's turn off the key light and see what that does. So now our fill light has sort of turned into a key light itself, and we still have a backlight in the background. It's a little bit more dynamic. The shadows fall off his left side of his face and it creates a really cool look. Now let's get really crazy. And let's just use the backlight now. You can't really see Sam's face at all, but you can see what the backlight is doing. Precisely. It's just lighting the back of his right shoulder and the top of his head. This is a good way to create a silhouette. If you ever want to, you can really move the backlight around to get creative, like we did with the flash. But this is a really quick, easy way to use hot lights around a specific subject. So as you can see, using hot lights gives you a ton of control and you can adjust things in real time very quickly. 57. Lighting: Creative Lighting: All right, let's get creative. Up until now, we've just been using different lighting techniques to see our subjects to expose them properly. To become better photographer, you can use lighting to your advantage in creating some MAWR creative images. In this lesson, you'll learn about silhouettes, backlighting, flash positioning and nighttime long exposures. Let's talk about silhouettes. Using the background light to create a silhouette has always been one of my favorite things to Dio. To get a silhouette, you need to position your subject between you and the light source. Then you exposed to the light source. This makes your subject under exposed, and if the back latest bright enough, the subject will be silhouetted. You can make a silhouette more dramatic and post editing as well, by increasing the contrast and decreasing the exposure of your subject. Here are a few examples of just that. In this shot of Sam, we were testing a large led panel or a hot light. After testing the light falling on Sam's face, we move the light behind him to create a really cool look in post. I've crushed the shadows to create the darker look. You can see the light peeking around Sam's hat and his sweatshirt, but it really creates a fund silhouette and a creative look. At this wedding. I was able to find an archway in the old Santa Barbara library. We were shooting it. I had a couple kiss and focused on exposing the background in order to silhouette them. I feel like in this instance, we're seeing the couple as a couple rather than individuals. They really love this photo backlight. I tend to use import. It's mostly outdoors. This is very useful when having to deal with the sun. A backlight separates the subject from the background and as the nice glowing halo around your subject. In these portrait's I place Jenna with a hard, hard backlight behind her. It helps that she's blonde, but the backlight really highlights her and gives her a rim around her head, making her pop out from the background. All this was was just positioning her more than anything. If you were to take the backlight away, it would be a completely different looking photo. This shot has some extreme back light from the sun I noticed right away when we were walking the added backlight in this shot. Let me capitalize on the flare from the sun. Something you have to be cautious about when you're shooting a backlight is getting that light to hit your lens. This can look awesome sometimes, and other times take away from the photo. I tend to try and use this at weddings in the afternoon. If I can. I think it adds a bit of magic to each shot. When you have a remote off camera flash, you can put your flash almost anywhere. This opens you up to unlimited amount of creativity in building your light with your flash . Try positioning the flash to highlight certain areas of your scene or subject parts that you want to draw the attention of the viewer to. In this shot, I place remote flash in the bathroom behind our subject. There were not a ton of creative places issued in their little house, so the flash lit up the bathroom and I exposed for it, creating a sort of silhouette style photo with a bit of detail in it. You can't see me either in the mirror because I'm standing in the darkness. It was two under exposed to see my reflection this an example of taking a not so creative and interesting looking place and turning into something creative that really, really works. In this shot we used to flashes, we had a front flash to expose the front of the cake and then a remote flash that we set on the ground and pointed up at the cake to give it a backlight. In a somewhat, very dark place, we're able to design a look on the spot that looked a bit more fun and creative. For that cake, you can see the cake is being highlighted from the back to make it pop as a rim. Yet we're still gaining a decent exposure on the front from our front. Flash the's air good tools to keep in mind. When you're finding yourself in a position shooting something that just doesn't look the best, it can look without a flash. In a future lesson, we'll learn how to do long exposures at night as well. You can really get creative and create light streaks using flashlights or headlamps. What happens is the camera has a long exposure because it's so dark it doesn't capture anything except the light source itself. perhaps, um, ambient light from a moon or a distant city. If you move the light during the exposure, the camera will capture that exact movement. The's air, always Superfund to dio you will need a tripod and the ability to have a long exposure and a small flashlight. In these photos. We set up the shot with the camera in almost complete darkness, set the shutter to be around 20 to 30 seconds with an F stop about 5.6 and would run through with a flashlight. Hopefully, these ideas can help you take even more creative photos with light. 58. Mobile Photography: Introduction: One of my favorite sayings about cameras is that the best camera you can have is the one that you have with you. Smartphone photography has come a long way since they were invented. There's no faster way to take a photo and share it then from the same device you use to view social media. In today's smartphones, we see a wide range of really advanced sensors, lenses and, in some cases, portrait mode and settings that mimic the shallow depth of field of more expensive cameras . When you combine the advancement in some of these phone cameras, the post APS on them and the ability to share instantly the camera phone is a force to be reckoned with when comparing them toe other cameras. In my current iPhone, I have a pretty fast sensor that can see pretty well in low light. Check out this shot I took while riding my motorcycle at night. My current iPhone has two lenses, a wide and a telephoto wide opens up to a 1.8 aperture, and the telephoto opens up to a 2.4 aperture. Who would have thought that the camera on your mobile phone would have F stops. New to a lot of phones is the portrait mode. Your phone is able to distinguish between subject and background, creating that shallow depth of field. Look, it does that by using the wide lens and the telephoto lens and blurring the background in the processing, we'll talk more about that later. Smartphone photography is always changing in endless. Throughout the rest of this section. You'll learn more about how to take better photos with a smartphone. We'll be using an iPhone X one of the latest phones. At the time of filming, we know you might be using different types of phones. Try to use your phone's manual and help with Google. If you get stuck trying to do something on your phone that we can't really show you, we'll also include links to common smartphone. Resource is in the supplemental resource of this section. 59. Mobile Photography: Using a Smartphone Camera: Every smartphone is different, of course, and you can check your specific phone for its specs. The first thing you have to understand about your phone is that it's not a full blown DSLR . Chances are it will be under 16 megapixels. It's automatically a mere lis camera, and most phones are married to the lens that's built in as a default. Let's go over some capabilities and non capabilities of your smartphone camera size. It's small, and you will be able to carry it with you anywhere. And most places that don't allow you to bring in a large camera will allow you to bring in your phone. The lens. It's always going to be a fixed lens. By default. You can buy extra lens attachments, but usually what you have on your phone is what you got to work with. Don't try to think you'll be able to shoot wildlife from 600 yards away. While phones have advanced a lot, you are still limited to the technology in your phone. Some older phones will have smaller megapixels, while some of the new fancy phones will have upwards of 12 megapixels, which is plenty enough to print a decent size photo. Maybe not a billboard, but a 12 megapixel shot is a lot of resolution for something that slides into your back pocket. But remember that all pixels aren't created equally. A 12 megapixel photo from your smartphone might not be as good as a 12 megapixel photo from your DSLR, depending on the size and quality of the sensor. This is one of the most limiting factors that I have had with smartphones. To set your exposure on your camera phone, you simply tap where you want the exposure to be, and on some you can move the brightness up and down as you look at the screen. It's pretty much auto. You won't need to select an I S O and F Sapura Shutter. This is great for quick snapshots or someone who doesn't want to deal with all those manual controls. But you lose a bit of artistic control when you're married to what the phone decides as a correct way to expose. At the time of creating this class, most phones are not the best at shooting in low light. Don't get me wrong. They have come a long way, and you could do pretty well at night, but they cannot do a long exposure. A bump up the sensitivity like a DSLR or a mere list camera Can. You can take a photo with your smartphone, edit it in an app and post it all within two minutes. This is amazing. You can't do this on just your normal camera without sending it to your computer or to a phone to share. At least not yet. Editing in an APP has never been easier. It's one of the best things about a smartphone. By understanding these capabilities and limitations, you now know the pros and cons of using a smartphone, so get out there and shoot. 60. Mobile Photography: Exposing with a Smartphone: For the most part, smartphones are automatic. You just point it and you take the photo. This is one way of using your smartphone. There's another option, though. By tapping on the screen, you can tell your phone where to expose. You can also move a brightness bar up and down, changing the exposure on most phones. So I'm here with my smartphone, and I just wanted to go really quick on how to expose with your camera on your phone. It's pretty simple. So we have William Shakespeare here, so let's go ahead and take a look at him with our phone here. I've got him. I'm gonna get up a little bit closer right now. Really, it's just tapping. So let's tap right on him. You can see how that exposure is just perfect. It was kind of already there before we started. What if we tap on the sky in the upper left, see how much darker the shot gets? They could see it's much darker in the bottom, right, but it's still trying expose for his face. If it kept back on his face, you can see how the exposure went out. Now you can really control this. If you tap and you see a little icon on the right and you could move the exposure up and down as you go up and down, depending on the type of exposure that you want, I want to bring that sky back in. We might move down. It's a little more silhouetted, and then we can just take the photo. And now we've got a nicely dramatic photo. You can see how the phone is very automatic and it jumped right back to the main. Exposure is really good for auto mode, so I'm doing this with an iPhone. Most phones will give you those three options of just regular auto tapping or adjusting the exposure with your finger up and down. So now you can see how you control the exposure with your smartphone, and your smartphone really is a creative tool like any other camera. 61. Mobile Photography: Tips for Better Smartphone Photos: in this lesson will cover tips for getting better shots with your smartphone. Thes include positioned up the field exposure tips and even photographing at night. Look for good compositions because you're limited in how you manually adjust your settings to be creative in terms of exposure. Great smartphone photography is mostly about finding great subjects and composing them beautifully. You learn the basic rules of composition in the composition section. In this course, use those tips with your smartphone. One way to help you do this is with the grid mode. One of our favorite things about shooting with a smartphone is using grid mode. You can go into your settings on your camera toe. Activate this grid mode. It brings up a grid overlay on your screen that splits your camera into nine different squares. It basically gives you a symmetrical grid across your screen to help you composer shots in a pleasant manner. Check out this demo where we bring upgrade mode and start shooting with it. So I've got my phone here. I'm shooting Bill Shakespeare. Now I want to bring up grid boat because that's a really cool way to ship toe shoot stuff. I'm gonna show you how to do that. It's very different on everyone's phone, but for us, let's go ahead and go to our settings. We're gonna go down to the camera, pass it right here and now we're going to see where it says at the top of the second is the second option on our phone were in a turn grid on. Now we go back to our we go back to our phone. We now have a grid that we can see, and you can really use that to kind of use the rule of thirds put putting people in grid mode or using it to center up things you could see here. We could center him, make sure that his eyes are at the third of top. What's a negative space on him? Using the grid modes really fun, And it's helpful when you're starting out and trying to use the rule of thirds. Create depth of field as much as you can, using portrait mode or focusing on something in the foreground. This will help you through the background. Out of focus. This shallow depth of field look will often make your photo look more professional. and artistic. It's something you can do very quickly to make it look like you're shooting on a higher profile camera than just your phone. We have a complete demo of using the portrait mode of an iPhone X later in this section. Even if you don't have portrait mode, you can get shallow depth of field by moving closer to your subject and trying to put as much space between the subject and the background. Let's look at this in real time, so we still have a grid mode on. I want to show you how to make your camera phone look even better. Good way to do that is getting back to that depth of field conversation. So putting things in the foreground and making things in the background way out of focus. Now it really depends on the type of camera you have in your phone. But a really cool trick to use would be putting something in the foreground. You can see here I'm putting the ground in the foreground or putting the table the foreground. I'm tapping on it so that the focus goes to the front. You can see how everything's blown out in the background. It's kind of a cool auto focus thing. Now. If I get really close to Bill and we tap on his face, you'll see how this camera focuses on him and throws everything out in the background. It's not something all cameras will do, and this one doesn't even do it all that great. But the idea of having a foreground and having something way far back off in the background will really add to that depth of field look. And that aesthetic that looks really professional under exposed skies, something I have noticed in smartphone exposure when shooting the sky is that the phones tend to lose highlights much faster than the shadows, and that can make your picture look blown out or have less appealing. Aesthetic Try exposing the sky just a little darker than the phone would do automatically check out these two photos of the sunset. The one on the left is the phone's auto exposure for this particular situation. The one on the right is me sliding the exposure down just a bit toe under expose the sky a tad. Which one do you like better? There's some really awesome maps. You can use to expose at night. Try looking into these and getting a phone holder for your tripod. Take your time setting up this shot and playing around with these APS, and the production value of shot will go up for sure. This helps expose at night and you'll be able to get some really cool shots. I hope you've enjoyed these chips for taking better photos with your smartphone's camera. If you have any tips of your own, please post them to the course so other students can learn from your own experiences. 62. Mobile Photography: Low Light with a Smartphone: shooting and low light with a smartphone is not always easy. There are several ways to do it that utilize some of the same tips. Just use what you've got. The newest smartphones are pretty good at seeing into the dark. They do slow the shutter down a little and tend to hike up the sensitivity a bit. But it's worth the shot. If you do this, then you should try locking it off on a tripod or setting it up against something so it doesn't move as much. The less handheld you can do, the more still your phone will be number two. Using the flash on your phone. The flash on your phone can be very powerful and sometimes a little too harsh. It really only works for something that's less than 5 to 8 feet away from your phone, but it can be quick way toe light your subject. You may also experiment with defusing it like we did in our lighting segment, making a bit softer and a less hard on your subject or the background. Number three fine light may be easier said than done sometimes, but by finding artificial light, we can use it to our advantage. So hunt for a street lamp or a desk lamp or anything to help fill out the dark areas. Smartphones aren't always great in dark, so anything you can use will really be helpful. Number four, using a night long exposure app, is even better. APS, like night camera light and slow shutter cam will allow you to control the shutter a little bit better. Combine this with a tripod and you'll be getting as much light in your sensor as possible for a smartphone and come out with some really great stuff. In fact, check out this demo with us using some of these tips. So let's talk really quick about low light on your mobile phone. Now I have one of the newer models of phones and you can see just in the preview screen. We're seeing a lot already. Now let's turn our flash off because we know we don't like Flash and we're gonna go ahead and hit the photo button. Bam. Check out this shot. Now there's some decent amount of flair, but we're really capturing a lot of light on Sam and you can even see in the background here. You're seeing pretty well into the night. Now let's move away from these lights a little bit and let's see how we can capture and see how well it does now. You can see we're picking up a lot on my phone right now. Sam's pretty far away. If we take a picture, it'll focus there and again, just like we expose everything else. We can tap somewhere and we can bring down the darkness like this. And that's really a nice exposure for low light. If you wanna make it dark and now watch as we raise up the exposure, it's getting Granier and Graner's. You can see up in the upper left for the video preview mode and let's take a photo. Bam! All right, Now, check out these two photos is just this. This one is the very standard regular photo. And look at all the light that this phone is actually picking up again. This is a newer iPhone X o. The low light sensitivity is pretty good. Here's where I closed down the exposure quite a bit. To make it dark. You can see it's only picking up light from a house way back there and Then here's where I brought the exposure way up. Now, if we zoom in, you can start to see a little bit annoyed up here in the blacks and in the sky and where you where you're where you're really going to start to see noise and you're gonna see artifact ing from the sensor because it just cannot handle it. But as a general rule in your back, this wide can't really tell. So really, your phones great low light again. We have a decent amount of light coming in here. You need some light. It's not gonna be able perform in complete darkness or even just ambient light. You're gonna need some light for it. So real quick, we're gonna talk about using the flash on the back of your mobile phone. Now it's a little gross. It's a little aggressive, but let's let's take a look at your mobile phone. We're gonna go right to the screen on the phone and we're gonna shoot Sam and we're going to in the upper left. You can see the little flash, and that's where you put auto on or off that typically I turn my flash off when I'm taking photos because I think the flash is a little aggressive. So let's take a picture of Sam right here. Now let's take a look at this photo Now you could see it actually like it tests the waters a little bit and it doesn't overpower anything, really. It's kind of even. It's nice. It's matching these lights up here, and it's pretty good. Now, keep in mind, the further you move away, the less your flash is gonna have an effect. So let's separate a little bit now. There's a good amount of light out here, so we don't necessarily need the flash. But there we go. Now again. The flash read it a little bit, and it really lit up this whole scene. It doesn't look very natural. It's really blown out. So just to see really what the flash is capable of and what it can do in darkness, we're gonna go ahead and turn these lights off and use the flash in almost complete darkness, shall we? All right, you can't see me right now. I imagine so. Sam is in the same spot. I am in the same spot we have our flash on. Let's take a shot. Here we go. Hey, I'm over here now. So basically, this is a full blown flash, its maximum capacity in complete darkness. Again, it is a full blown flash. It's covering everything. It's very even now. One cool home remedy that I've seen people do is they'll cover their flash with a little piece of diffusion, like a tissue paper or a tissue when they're trying to use it. It's kind of hard because it's in between. On this camera is in between the two lenses, but it really depends on what camera You have every flash X differently on every single different camera, and it will be constantly changing. I'm not a big fan of the flash, so I try not to use it. So let's get really creative. I am going to light Sam of Sam. Do you have your phone on you? Let's turn your flashlight on so something really cool someone else can basically turn on the flashlight on their phone and we can hold it somewhere here I'm gonna use basically, this is an off camera flash, and you can sort of light the person in a way, and I see this is getting a little bit more contrast here on Sam Bam. So it's a little bit more creative. We can come up with something a little scarier like this, so check it out. That is a scary photo, Sam, But you can see how you can get creative by moving lights around. This is a little bit better exposed. It looks a little bit more Portrait E. It's really nice, actually. Get creative, use someone else's, like, use a flashlight. He's a headlamp. Whatever you got so real quick, I'm gonna go ahead. And I'm gonna use this tripod down here because we're gonna try and stabilize your phone on a tripod. Yep, You can do that. And that kind of helps with shooting motion at night because your camera is slowing down a bit. So let's go get the trip. And in my pocket here, I have a little adapter. Basically, this little adaptor will allow me to screw into the tripod with this little adapter right here. And then I congrats the phone with this thing right here. So if you want mind putting that on there, Sam So we're gonna go ahead and this just clicks in like so Oh, yeah. And then we put it in our plate, snap it in, and now have total control of my camera on a tripod, which is really, really cool, cause now, look, I can click over here and I can turn on a three second timer and I can pan just a little bit over here. I can click it three to what? And now I've got a really cool photo of me and my friend using a tripod. 63. Mobile Photography: Mobile Camera Accessories: the lens on your smartphone is great, but what if you're ready for more? There are a few options out there. You can buy 1/3 party device that allows you to attach an external lens to the front of the camera. This will allow your camera endless possibilities. As faras glass goes, you can attach a wide adapter to get those epic shots a macro lens to get some more close up shots, a telephoto to zoom and far away, or just some more glass. To help create that depth of field, look on your smartphone camera. You can also go big and get attachment that allow you use a zeiss lens and in fact, even at a sensor to that connects to your phone and just use your phone as its screen. Basically, you're buying a camera with a lens, and you can use your phone as the computer that attaches to that lens for low light and the occasional group shot that you need to be in. You can get a small tripod that can even fit in your pocket. Thes small tripods. Grab on your phone from all sides, keeping it stable in place. How about a printer ready to make prints yourself. There are so many different options when it comes to Bluetooth and WiFi. Many printers, thes small printers will instantly print photos. You shoot and edit from your phone. You can get a variety of different paper as well. From Polaroid style two stickers, Thes could be really fun while you're on the go or just at home. Shutter button Shutter buttons are small Bluetooth devices that let you activate your shutter from an external device thes air. Great when you're trying to take a picture of yourself or when you're attempting to do longer exposures and want to avoid moving the camera. Or maybe you just can't reach the shutter button on your camera kind of a one hit wonder sort of device. It can really come in handy when you really need it or you take it on a selfies. Speaking of Selfies, that selfie stick time lapse spinner, I used to use an egg timer and some tape to do what this little gadget does. Now it's simply grabs onto my phone and spends it very slowly. Allowing me to make these really cool time lapse is super fun and creative with this one. There's tons of accessories for mobile photography. Find what works best for the type of mobile photography that you want to dio. 64. Mobile Photography: Portrait Mode: My new phone is an iPhone X as a filming this class. It's the newest and greatest iPhone out there for photography. It has an updated sensor shooting at 12 megapixels, dual lenses and the ever popular portrait mode on the normal camera and the front facing camera. The normal camera works like any other iPhone model, and it's pretty easy to use. The new portrait mode takes a little bit getting used to, but works for not only Great Portrait's but normal photography as well. It takes the foreground that's in focus and isolates it against the background. It then throws the background out of focus, optically creating the shallow depth of field look that makes things look ever so professional. It does this by using its dual lenses a telephoto lens with a wide lens. They work together to isolate the foreground and background, send information to its computer and combine the photos to make one perfect image. You can still see some small imperfections if you zoom in on these photos, but for the most part it's pretty amazing. Let's see how it works in the real world. So let's take a look on how to take a photo in portrait mode on this iPhone X. So right now we're in photo mode. We're gonna look up a hill just for fun. Let's go and take a picture fil a normal photo mode. Cool now, to get into portrait mode, all you have to do a slide over at the bottom into poor treatment. Now you can see how automatically we've sort of zoomed in a little bit and step back. You can tell it's starting to do some face detection with that yellow, and we're gonna go ahead and, well, there's some player there. Take a picture. Boom. It's not that hard. You really The camera does everything for you. We'll tap again on Phil and let's bring down the exposure. Maybe just a little bit here, my finger. Take a picture. Let's move this way so we can see more. What's in the background will use the rule of thirds here. Tap on Phil's face. He's backlit down. Great. Now if we tap on here, we can go into our actual portrait, and you could see exactly how much fall off there is and how great that picture looks on. Just fill so we can go ahead. And if we edit it within here, we can use the bottom squirrel wheel to show studio lighting. And you can see how it fills in his light natural lighting stage lighting. And that's everything that the camera is actually blowing out in the background. All right, so how crazy is that? This is the photo. We take it in portrait mode. This is the photo we took in regular photo mode. You can see how wide and distorted it gets. We switch over and look at the portrait mode. Everything's a little bit more compressed. There's background out of focus. There's some Boca there now when you put the two photos side by side. What a difference. How great is portrait mode? And this is basically achieving the same aesthetic that a normal DSLR camera Mirrlees camera would with a longer lens. So at the time of recording, this is an iPhone X, and this is pretty revolutionary in portrait mobile phone photography now with your phone and may be called something different other than portrait mode. The cool thing is that this technology is advancing all the time, and it's only going to get better 65. Cameras: Introduction: welcome to this section of the photography masterclass. This section and the following ones are all about equipment at the end of the day, and we've said this before. A camera is just a box with a hole in it. It's just a tool, your the artist and you could take amazing photos with any camera. It starts to get a little complicated nowadays, since there are so many different types of boxes and all the bells and whistles that come on the outside of that box, every person is going to have their own way of interacting with their camera and their own definition of what a great camera is, along with what great photography is to them. This has a huge effect on what kind of camera is right for them. There is no perfect standard hero camera that will fit every person's needs and aesthetics . Every person is different in every photographer is different. I want to present different camera bodies and options to you so that you could make the right decision for what you need as an artist and a photographer. I said it before, and I'll say it again. The absolute best camera in the world is the one that you have chosen to have with you. So let's take a look at the cameras in the next few lectures to help you get on track for what you need or maybe already have. 66. Cameras: Camera Types: in this lesson, you'll learn about the common types of cameras on the market today. For this course, we have broken down the cameras into four different types. DSL, ours, mere lis cameras, pointing shoots and smartphones. So DSLR DSLR stands for digital single lens reflex. The DSLR cameras are named after their film predecessor, SL Ours, which were a single lens reflex camera that shot on non digital film. The single lens means they use only one lens to capture and see the image. The reflex is the moving mere inside the camera that allows light image to go through the lens, hit and bounce its way up to the viewfinder. When you press the shutter down the mere moves reflex and then allows the shutter to hit the digital sensor or the film DSL, ours are often bigger than other camera bodies. Because of all these components, they have more buttons and are heavier than other cameras. Mere lis cameras. Thes cameras tend to be a bit smaller, mostly because they don't have the mere system the DSL ours have. It's just a lens than the sensor, although the cameras are a bit smaller and way less. Some of them are still full frame sensors, meaning the quality of the image captured is very similar and sometimes better than a DSLR , often because they're so small, we see a lack of buttons on some of the newer ones, with fewer buttons and dials on the body. Most of the options will be selected and changed in the menu system. You also find a small electronic viewfinder in the replacement of the optical viewfinder from the DSLR point and shoot. These cameras are also mere lis but are even smaller. They usually lack the viewfinder and often have a fixed lens on them. This means you can't swap out lenses to change your angle, aperture or options or things like that. You just hold them up, look to the screen on the back point and shoot these air usually cheaper and have a lot of automatic functionality on them. Mobile cameras. This is that camera that's built into your phone or tablet device. Thes come in all different shapes and sizes. Every modern phone pretty much has a different camera from the other, with many having front facing cameras, great for selfies within each different type of camera. There are many options from the sensor sizing and types of lens mounts. There are endless different combinations and systems you can dive into. Something to keep in mind is that cameras tend to get updated every year or two. It's a fast moving technology that's always changing. You may not always be able to keep up with the latest and greatest, but the important thing is that you have a camera that allows you to take the photos that you want to take. Better to have a camera with you than be waiting for what's coming out next. Now that you know, the main types of cameras will move on to how to pick the right camera for your budget. 67. Cameras: What is Your Budget?: When talking about different camera types, the cost can greatly vary. You could have a smartphone for $100 or you can buy a medium format. Digital has a blood for over $10,000. So what are you paying for? Why air some cameras more expensive? And why would you want to pay more for a camera like that? In photography, price tends to go up for a more sensitive, bigger sensor. The speed of the camera. How fast taken, taken process photos. Pixel count also knows resolution ability to shoot video. And that video is quality and the lens system most full frame DSLR is are going to be the most expensive cameras you will see on the pro Sumer market. While smaller point shoes will be the cheapest in the mid range, you'll find smaller crops. Sensor deal solares and crop sensor mere lis cameras. But you'll also see some crop sensor mere list cameras for the same price as a full frame. DSLR. It really varies. You may see an advanced point shoot camera more expensive than a crop frame DSLR, so you have to look a bit deeper than the sticker price on that type of camera to see really, what's best for your budget and the type of photography that you're doing. This is why most camera sales persons will ask you for your budget before they tell you what kind of camera you're gonna get into. Once you have an idea of how much money you can spend on a camera body, you then have to start thinking about lenses. Ah, lot of cameras will come with a kit lens that is typically a zoom lens with a mediocre aperture. It will not be the best lens money can buy, but it will be great for basic lens to start with. And while you're learning, it's a really good lens will cover lenses more deeply in the next section. Aside from lenses, you'll start to think about accessories and other purchases and things. I can get a bit pricey again. Something will cover in a future section but basically include things like flashes. Stabilization is battery packs and more. If you have a very small budget, I would look into maybe getting a use camera. They will be cheaper and are a great option for just getting started. You can then spend that extra money you have on investing in a better lens that suits your type of photography that you're into if you have a larger budget test and handles many camera systems as you can. If you start spending lots of cash on a camera with some lenses, you're going to start committing to a system with specific lenses and accessories. You want to make sure it works for you as a photographer and what you're shooting before you start spending a ton of money on one system. You can always sell your camera body when you're ready to upgrade. But keep your lenses and accessories. Lenses will outlast the technology of the camera Body Award about brands. Up until now, we haven't mentioned or recommended different camera brands, and the truth is that there's no one perfect brand we've shot with all types of brands from Canon, Panasonic, Nikon, Fuji, Olympus and Sony and even more, and they're all really great. We can't tell you what camera brand to buy versus the other, because it's really up to you to decide which camera feels most natural and what works for you. That's why we highly highly recommend going to a camera shop, putting it in your hand and feeling it out. See what it feels like. Go through the menus and see if it's easy for you to understand. Even if you purchase the camera online, it's great to test it out before you buy it. So if after watching the videos in this section, you have a question on, if you should get the Canon Rebel T seven or whatever or the Nikon D 5000 plus or the Panasonic GH. Infinity know that the only advice will be able to give you is that you should go test out that camera yourself and see what you like and that with any of those camera choices, you'll be able to take amazing photos. 68. Cameras: Where to Buy a Camera: in this lesson, you'll learn how and where to buy a camera. There are two schools of thought when it comes to buying a camera, either online or in person. If you buy from a local camera shop, you can handle the camera and play with the lenses and accessories in person. When you buy online, you have endless options of finding a good deal, but might be going into your purchase blind without ever having felt the camera in your hands. Buying in person has always been my favorite way to buy a camera. Buying in person does not mean that you haven't done your research online. It's best to take time to read reviews online review all the features for the camera you're interested in and come up with some questions so that you can ask in person when you go into the store, you can then ask all your questions to the sales person. Often they love to answer questions and hope to sell you a camera. More questions and concerns may come up in conversation as well, and they may be able to show you features you didn't even know about. On top of all the one on one knowledge you can get from being in a store. You can also feel each camera and lens in your hand and the weight. The camera is a tool you use with your hands, so you want to make sure it fits right. Some camera stars will let you rent cameras so you can take him out for a test run before buying it. You can also rent cameras online from websites like borrowed lenses dot com to see what fits you best. Buying online can be a bit less time consuming, but you may not get the one on one support necessary to answer all your questions. Some of the websites we recommend for purchasing cameras and equipment include B, NH photo video dot com, adirama dot com. K h dot com. Amazon and eBay are also good places to look, but you want to look into the details of the exact model you're buying. Some cameras sold online are what we call Grey Market products. Thes cameras may be complete fakes that look similar to the real deal, often their actual cameras built by the camera company. But they may be import models that don't meet all the specifications of the camera dealer. They won't include warranties or be able to be repaired by the camera manufacturer if damaged. So be cautious. It's up to you to do your due diligence and make sure whatever camera you buy from whoever is in working condition. That's why you pay a premium when buying a camera direct from a company or one of its dealers, and often it might be worth it. 69. Cameras: What is the Best Beginner Camera?: One of the most popular questions we get from students in this course is what is the best beginner camera or what camera showed I buy. And as much as we want you to understand that any camera is great, we do want to give you some more specific ideas to help. There are many factors when thinking about the best beginner camera as a straight quick answer. A small crop sensor, DSLR or a small mere list camera are going to be the best places to start from most people's budgets. Things to consider our How much do you think you'll be spending on lenses and growing as a photographer? If you're set on using your camera as a professional, investing in a DSLR or large meal is camera will be important for the long run. You'll be able to grow with the camera as you learn, and you won't be stilted by any other shortcomings of the camera. But if you don't have that kind of budget, starting with a cheaper DSLR or mere lis and then upgrading the camera body later is probably your best bet. If you're not interested in professional photography, on are more of a hobbyist than a smaller, mere lis camera, or even a point and shoot would be fine for just learning when it comes to prices for the best entry level camera. Any camera between 300 $1000 will be very similar in terms of quality of photo. In Canon's entry line, you'll see the rebel Siri's, such as a T three i t four i t five I t six or T seven thes air. The North American names for the Siris of cameras outside of the US, these might be called the 5 50 D, the 6 50 d, the 7 50 d etcetera ni Cons. Entry level includes the D 3300 a. D. 3400 A. D. 3,553,555,600 and more. Sony's A Line is a good mere list. Beginner camera. This includes the A 5000 a 12,300 and a lot more. Fuji's X a three x t 10 x t 20 are also great. Mere lis beginning cameras. Panasonic Lou Mix makes the G seven, G 85 and the F S 1000 all great entry level, mere list cameras, and the list could go on and will go on next year or next week. For that matter, there could be additional models added to this list, so please take it to heart when we say that any camera between 300 $1000 is a great beginner camera. The higher the model number usually means the more options or increased quality. So if you can swing it, go ahead with the higher number. If you have a budget of higher than $1000 you can start to look any basic full frame DSLR and semi professional mere lis camera and each camera. Brandt will have a camera in the next tier. But if you're wondering if we're going to tell you which brand and which model camera you should buy, Unfortunately, we can't do that. We're each going to tell you what camera is the best camera for us at the time and why we use it. My first digital camera was a Nikon D 70. I remember at the time it was a big deal and I loved it. It was a wonderful beginning camera for me personally, because I knew that I wanted to get into photography. I was also shooting for my school newspaper, and it took the Nikon lenses that I had from my own film cameras from high school. So for me, a D 70 Nikon at the time, I think was around $1000 was perfect. Now I'm a professional photographer and I use a Fuji X T to its aim airless camera that has all the dials on the outside, which is great for a beginner. The smaller brother of the cameras, the Fuji X T 20 almost half the price contains the same sensor, although has a slower FPs and isn't water sealed. It's a great camera for beginners. The reasons I use the Fuji X T to now are because a lot of the accessories and the lenses are cheaper than the night cons. It's also smaller for traveling, which I do a lot, and it's lighter and wait for traveling. And for shooting events and weddings, I'm carrying around a camera for 10 hours a day. It feels much better to have one of these around my shoulder than to have a giant DSLR. My first digital camera was the Nikon D 80 which was actually a hand me down for my father . I was getting into photography and doing a lot of video stuff, and he wanted by new camera. So I was lucky enough to just take his camera, which also came with the 18 to 200 millimeter lens that I love learning how to use and shoot photos with. Today I shoot with a Sony A seven or three, which I just recently picked up. Actually, I'm still really putting it through its paces, but it's been a great camera for me so far. I really like the Sony line because I do a law photo and video work. They're just really the best thing for me. For a long time, though, I was shooting on the Nikon D 800. This camera was tried and true for a very long time, but I have since moved to the middle of system. My first digital camera was the Canon seven D, which was a great camera at the time because it had the video feature as well. And for me that was something that was really important. I wanted a camera that can shoot both photos and video. So even though this is a photography class, these are the types of things you have to keep in mind when purchasing your camera. Do you want to be able to shoot video as well? Different cameras will be able to do that at different qualities. So I really love that camera and used it a lot. And one of the things I'm excited to do in this class is actually have a real, live sort of round table discussion about what my next camera purchase is going to be. I don't have one of the latest and greatest cameras, like Will and Sam do. But I'm in the market for something that I can carry around more easily and that gets me excited to take photos every day. So later in the course, we're actually going to be having that kind of discussion, walking through my entire process for deciding what camera I'm going to buy. So you can see how between the three of us each camera is different for each person. We all have different needs and use it in a different way. So again, the cameras really specific to you and what you're gonna do with it 70. Cameras: How to Build a Camera Kit: Now that you know a bit about buying a camera, let's talk about the next things you may want to purchase. Building out your first basic camera kit is always so much fun. Let's talk about what order you should think about buying things so that you can grow at a steady pace. Start with the camera body. Obviously, you can't go anywhere without the camera first. Often when you buy a camera, the store or online store will throw in a kit lens memory cards, bags, cleaning tools. If you can take advantage of this stuff, it will always come in handy later. If your camera comes with kit lens often something like an 18 to 50 or mid range zoom that has an aperture that opens up to probably an F four. This kit will be fine to get started with. Then you just need to make sure you have enough memory, an appropriate size SD card for the camera, for the amount that you will be shooting next. His batteries. Most cameras often come with one battery. You want at least one extra, sometimes two extra if you're traveling or starting to use your camera on jobs this way. You keep one battery in the camera and one charging, or when you go out into the field, you'll have some backups for when your battery dies. If he didn't get a bag with your first purchase, it may be time to start thinking about that. Bags can be underrated, but it's a great way to keep all your stuff together. Once you start collecting all your accessories, we'll talk more about that in lessons ahead, depending on the type of photography will be doing, You may need some other things. If you're shooting landscape photography, night photography or long exposures, you want a tripod photo. Tripods are fairly inexpensive, so we recommend getting one just in case while we will cover lenses. Maurin Depth in the next section Here are a few ideas to keep in mind If you're shooting portrait's and photos of people, it might be time to look into getting a better lens than the kit lens. Ideally, you want something that can open up to a wider aperture, perfect for lower light situations and also getting that beautiful, shallow depth of field. Most brands have a standard zoom lens around 24 to 70 that opens up to around a F 2.8. That would be great. If you're interested in getting at prime Lens, I would look into a 23 millimeter of 35 millimeter or a 50 millimeter prime lens for your camera brand. The nifty 50 lens is one of the most recommended lenses, as there are inexpensive options for most camera brands, and these can open up to an aperture of even a 1.4. It's a great walk around lens for your camera. From here, it's really up to you start to accessorize, maybe find a strap you really like. Think about alternative lenses. Start looking into basic filters. Start looking into other photographers whose style you like and see what they used to shoot . And in the next few sections will be covering these options in more depth. Thanks for watching, and we hope that you enjoyed looking into how to buy a camera 71. Cameras: Intro to Photo Chats: Hey there. We hope you are enjoying the photography masterclass. We are so happy that again you decided to enroll. And most importantly, we hope you're learning a lot and having fun while you're doing so. This is a new set up that we're going to bring to you some more in depth discussions. We're going to call these, I don't know, roundtable chats or something where we dive deeper into some of the different topics and spend a little bit more time diving into our own experience as photographers, Hopefully to help you. So you'll see some lessons like this coming up in the rest of the class. You might see our dog pop in and say hi a few times, so Ashby is going to be a part of the class. We also might be doing some live Q and A sessions that you'll see on our YouTube channel or Facebook page, so make sure you check the course announcements to see when we're going to be doing those and follow us on social media to get notified. Thank you so much again for being a part of this class and continue learning and having fun 72. Cameras: A Chat About Buying a New Camera: One of the things that we mentioned in an earlier lesson is that I'm actually considering buying a new camera right while we're filming this course. So it's gonna be cool to kind of dive into what Will and Sam think I should by and kind of talk more about the process of what camera I should get. So I guess first, let me explain where I'm at, and then I'm gonna ask you just write often. About what camera? You think I should buy some good? All right. So actually, have my camera right here. This is my canon seven D d. It's sort of a mid range pro Sumer camera. It's a little bit more expensive than the Cannon t five I, which we've been using in this class. It's ah, step above that rebel Siri's, but it's also not the latest model in this series. They have a cannon. 80 d. As you guys know, I've stuck with Cannon for a while at the Cannon 70 and now the Kennedy Ken and 70 d. But I'm just not excited to go out and shoot with this camera. I was telling Sam before we were recording that even though I have this nice l series lens , it's the older model. And with this camera with the lens, the auto focus is just It just isn't as sharp as I want or as quick as I want. Yeah, so and it's huge. It's heavy, right? And by the time the class comes out, I'm gonna have a family. My wife is pregnant with twins right now. Well, over recording office, which is crazy, and I haven't told anybody yet, So by the time you're watching, this is old news. But I want to have a camera that I can, you know, take everywhere. That's easy and fun to use. That's smaller. Those kids will. Yeah, exactly. So like, I don't know, just right off the bat. What? What do you know about Like the current camera market and DSLR Brits? Marylise were just getting a new smartphone. What advice do you have for me? There's, I mean, there's a lot of things to consider because you obviously also do video stuff, and you also why, no have gone on some good trips, assume with kids. He might not be going as far, but you'll be doing, you know, some of those trips and whatnot. Um, so I think having I mean, you know, both of us have mere lis cameras, and the only point that I see DSLR still being competitive is really on the high end weather seal these robust cameras that will withstand Arctic wins. Otherwise, I think most mere lis cameras fully compete with any DSLR on the size of form factor. Everything is just really nice. Um, that being said, though, because you have canon stuff you don't want by a bunch of new lenses, necessarily. Yeah. So, switching systems, it's a big that zbig commitment. Yeah, And I think I think also like this. Canon lenses are not cheap. Like if you have several of them, it may be worthwhile looking into a system that will use those lenses or adapt to those ones. I think that's one of my biggest, uh, concerns right now is that I do have canon lenses. I think I might be at a point where, like a lot of the students watching this class, maybe I have a few extra lenses compared to them. Um, I have the 24 to 70 but that's old. Like I said, and it still shoots great photos and videos, but it's not as fast as I want it to be, but I actually don't have a lot of the other, like higher and lenses in the canon. Siri's. I have a lot of their cheaper lenses, so I wouldn't mind switching to another system. I think I think your specific in the sense that, like you do, do video and photo. Now, if you separate those things, if you say, like, you know we're shooting this on a canon C one C 100 right? So that uses canon lenses. Yeah. If you get another camera that uses Canyonlands, you can share them. Yeah. However, if you sever those two things and you let that be its own business and now it's fill the photographer. I want to go on vacation with my family. I just want to take great photos. Now that kind of opens you up to just you can start all of new. Yeah, you can be a whole new system. You can You can start with whatever system you want and start building it up. And then just kind of separate business and pleasure, I guess. Yeah, I guess it depends on what kind of photos were taken and even at that with, you know, having babies. Toddlers, You know, for the next few years, you're gonna wanna be, you know, it's gonna be personal. It's going to be more up close. You're not gonna be needing a bunch of lenses. You could probably get one camera and just have a nice prime lens. Or maybe, you know, nice zoom and that be it and just know it's fit for family photos and all that type of stuff. Um, you know, you work with your C 100 for video stuff and then when it's personal family time, you use your mork compact, whatever the new system is. Um, also know that your your dad has the cannon, right? So maybe you could gift him some of your old lenses or something just so he can, you know, keep it in the family type of thing. That's a good idea. Um, I mean, when I was considering purchasing a new video camera which were shooting on right now, I was thinking about should I just upgrade to a better DSLR Amir list? That is great for both video or photo, which I think a lot of people watching this might be considering like they want to do video and photo. So do I Do the Panasonic Panasonic jh five. Do I go with the Sony A seven s or a seven are, which have kind of gone crazy in the video market to, um so that was definitely a consideration. But I think I decided on the candidacy 100 for other reasons. It's bigger. It's better for video, but it obviously doesn't take photos. So so now I am kind of separating video from photo. So I am happy to kind of dive into a new system, I guess right now, knowing that you use Fuji, you use Sony. I've used Cannon. There's obviously other options out there. There's Nikon. We've got shot Nikon. For a long time I was on a DSLR Nikon, my entire like photo up and coming career. Like what? I've been shooting professional photos for 10 plus years now in the last year and 1/2 2 years. Yeah, I've completely switched over to Fuji because for the first time they can compete. Yet it's affirming where Amir list camera for me is held up to the standards of a DSLR. Is there any concerns I should have with Seo switched over to Fuji X D. I get X t two. Or maybe they're coming out with the next 23 sometime. And I wait til that comes out. What I guess are the biggest draw box to switching to Fuji. So that kind of form. So for me, like like, as far as this merely system goes is, they don't really have a full frame consumer mere lis camera yet. So if that's something that you're interested in as faras like resolution as faras light gathering, um, you know, you probably maybe want to shy away from it for me. The whole idea behind the Fuji was that it was small. It was lightweight. The lenses are not crazy. Expensive. The camera itself is not crazy. Expensive, And I can I can mod it from a professional camera shooting like this. Teoh, you know, and you could do this with Tony to, but it now becomes I have a nice little 23 millimeter nice little tiny travel camera that I could just kind of slip into wherever. Yeah, Umm ous faras concerns go. I think the full frame to me is really the only thing that like, well, sort of like change your opinion on it and it does good video, but it does not do is good video as the Sony's would you for like by our for sure, But again, if you're severing that, we're just talking about photography here because the photo masterclass, um, I think it's fun. And on top of that for me, Fuji just brought back the fun to taking photos because it's just it's all manual ITT's you know, it's It's like your old film cameras, and it's just it was just fun. And to me, that's a really important thing. If you're taking photos, you want to make sure you're still having fun with it. Another you can find with other cameras, obviously, and other cameras look great, too. I think for me personally, this systems is nice. Concern wise. Oh yeah, just the full frame is the only like I think Fuji lacks, but for good reason because of the size. Okay. And I mean the the quality of the food you glass. From what I've seen, just using your camera. It's for the price point and everything. It's pretty incredible. Yeah, I mean, you can get almost all the same prime lenses for, uh, I wouldn't say half the price of most DSLR lenses, but like pretty, pretty cheap, like 2/3 of price at least. I mean, it's definitely cheaper over. Oh, if you're investing in a new system, Fuji's like a really good way to go. And in the last four years they've really started ramping up there x Siri's stuff. And there's a bunch of different rooms like the They have a Range Finder version of this muralist camera that's even better for travel that uses the same glass. And then they have a smaller version of each camera. That's not weather sealed, but it's smaller but has the same sensor. So you know, there's a lot of options in that world, but you know, as far as ergonomics and using it in full frame, that would be the only thing that may get you and and this And I haven't actually help Sam Sony all that much. But this is a little bit more easier and more robust, I guess. Toehold in in the Fuji it's a little bigger eso switching gears to Sony because Sony has really come on the market the past few years with their cameras. I mean, I feel like 10 years ago you wouldn't have even thought about buying a Sony DSLR or mere Lis camera, Um, when thinking about getting a camera. So I've used the Sony's and I'll be completely honest. And you guys know this, that I've tested both your cameras out and I actually preferred the Fuji. But I feel like Sony has so much going for it. So what? What's your argument for hopping on the Sony train? Uh, well, so I definitely hope in the Sunny Train because of video. I do. A lot of I do both, I would say I do both equally even, um, Theseus Oniy Ace of nests hands down for video like Way to go. But we're talking photo, and that's why I love this camera. I just got it. It's the old Sony A seven or three, um, 42 megapixel, full frame e. I mean way massive. It's but you can choose to shoot in lower megapixels. So I just had a family trip to Peru as going around taking these photos. I can print those photos now, Liam. Printing one for my family. And it looks amazing when you blow it up and print it at a larger scale. Of course not everyone needs that. And a 24 megapixel image. You can still blow that up plenty big and look great. Yeah, um and I think so. The thing that I realized when I used it cause I took it on a trip to Australia. Um, and I was so not used to it that I didn't have fun using it. And I was also using an adapter with Canon Glass, which was slow and annoying to try to get focused. And so I feel like I didn't set myself up for success when testing it out. Probably. And I would like you to take it out again because I feel like it deserves a second chance, actually, that the sunny glass that comes with it, if you use native Sony glass on these on the A seven, it moves. So this is the fastest. The A nine is actually a bit faster, but these cameras are the fastest auto focus cameras. I mean, the systems Incl credibly, fast. Yeah, um, maybe built in lens range, find or, uh, 0.2 type things might have slightly faster. You know, there's Thea smaller. A 60. Yeah, which is crazy fast as well. Yeah, it's a really great camera. But this I mean, on a professional level, this is, you know, incredible camera. I will say the drawbacks. I love Fuji's layout. I love that you have shudder. You have s o. You have lenses that pretty much all have the f stops or iris control on the lens. It's a really nice It is that sort of classic style. And people might say you Oh, well, it's digital age. I want classic styles will. No, Like they didn't like that because it's simple. Yeah, is right there. It's easy to understand. Tapping said, I know my way around this camera that it's all really quick for me. Yeah, you know, I have my shelter here. I have my f stop here. I eso is a quick but in a way, once you know it, it's easy. But there is a learning curve, and it's also fully customizable You have. And while this stone is more expensive than to its This is much more expensive. Yes, but sensor Yeah, I mean, and then you compare these things. So, like you said the Sony a 63 100 over, like smaller, which is like the x t 10 or 20. And then you talk about the GH for which engage five, which Panasonic Olympus also makes. He's really good level cameras. I don't think we see them in much in our world because we've gravitated towards video food you, but well, jeez, fives also, Judge Fifi Felix video. Yeah, I feel like people really talk about that for video. I haven't I don't know any photographers that use that. I think it's kind of that if you get a judge five you're getting it for video and you can take photos as a backup. But I think where I'm at, I'm looking for a photo camera. So just to kind of clear out the air, too, is there a really reason for me to go for a really nice DSLR like a canon one DX or the new Nikon D 8 50? Which these air probably gonna be old when you're watching this. So there's gonna be there's gonna be new models. But those air kind of the biggest, most professional cameras right now in the canon and Nikon lines. Is there any? I mean, I don't think there's a reason for me to go that way. I really feel like unless you're going to be a true professional photographer and that is going to be full time every day job. I don't think you need that much power personally. I mean, I'm I'm a pretty. I shoot photos pretty regularly for clients and for jobs, and I've even scaled back from it because these fearless cameras are so good and the price point is so good. Like it takes a lot of money to invest in something, right? I mean, when I was touring, both major event photographers I worked with were on five D Mark fours or the and then even that got too slow for them. So they went to the one d X or one DC cannon, and but they're taking thousands of photos every single day, every day for 365 days a year. They're taking insane amount photos, and those will go on to print. Those will go into so many different platforms. You know, you need that That level of quality and taken. And then on the other end, you can go out often to the humid rainforest. You can go into the icebergs, whatever. And it'll hold up. Yeah. You know, I don't think need that. Uh, And the price point is ridiculous for this case, Especially if you're gonna enter into a new system. Like, Say, did find a Nikon that you like. You got to start all over at a camera. That's like, you know, three grand it up for that. You could get one of these mere lis and a lens, like so you know it, Zoe dependent on, I guess. Like what you're gonna do. My last question is, so if I decide to go with Sony or Food G and I just have a budget for one lens, which lens should I go for? Sam's grabbing his lens? You first. No, you could go eso, uh, for me again. It depends what we're gonna do. Knowing your specific situation. Family, kids, vacation, maybe some stuff for videos. Go online. Most of the Fuji's on my end will come with a kit lens. It's actually one of the best kit lens I've seen throughout my photo career. It's in 18 to 55. I think it's just like any other kid lens where it's like, you know, a 3.5 to 4 on the zoom in. That's a pretty solvents. That being said with what you're doing, you could get like this one's a 23 millimeter is only about $500. It feels like a 35 millimeter. It's a great walk around lens. This plus the kit lens that will come with your Fuji is like, Ah, fantastic starting point And then you just go on from them what you want. You want to do more landscapes, get a wide Do you want to do more? Uh, you know, Portrait's get the 56 millimeter 1.4. So, you know, out the door and x t two, which is the top of the line sort of mere lis for Fuji right now. I'm sure will change in the next week or two. Uh, this with the kit lens and this walking outdoor like, 3 to $4000. And so you've got, like, a whole system two lenses ready to go got our guy. And on the sunny side I mean, there's so many different seventies out there right now. Yeah, there's a 65 100 a seven. A seven are, um, all of which I think are good cameras. Each, you know, go up about $1000. And the benefits are alongside that. The a 65 100 my cousin has. I've played around with it. It's great. Autofocus is incredibly fast. I think it's, you know, it's not as nearly as May megapixels, obviously, um, and then in terms of lenses, tons of options out there, there's debate. Baddest the mill vis you know, all these different levels. And again, there's how fast they are the size of the manual focus for auto focus. Um, there's a lot of options out there. Uh, I personally have fall in love with just the 35 millimeter. I think picking a nice prime is always a good option. Um, I like having the zoom options, but to be honest, I feel like I'll get a zoom and all the using is like, Okay, it's so easy. Like I could just women out and then put this on and the quality and the look of it is just so much better. Um, I also I got these void lander lenses, which for the quality, are very cheap. All things considered, um, 1.2. So it's great in low light, but it is fully manual. So you have to be wanting to do Maybe if you want autofocus. Um, 70 does have a lot of options, and they've really built her line out. Um cool. Yeah. Can I lost eso? So we're at the level of, like, pretty professional, ah, lot of in depth photography and, like our systems are thousands of dollars and up. I feel like there are level. There's a level down. There's a tear down where, like on Fuji's and it's the X t 10 of the X t 20 on a 78 6300. Thanks a 6 500 and those with their kit will with something with food is kit lens. You can always invest in that, and you're going to be spending under $1000 on food. Decide and then, if you like it or you don't like it, you can have the kit lens Now sell that and then upgrade to the X camera when you're ready . So you know, it kind of depends on if you don't like it, you know, you can sell it and go back to their system. You may lose a little bit of money here, but, you know, at that level, when it's under $1000 if you're not really putting up a few grand and I think that's also a really good place to start as you start to become a photographer, like it don't hobby. All right. So basically, with similar to all the lessons of this class, there's no perfect camera for me, but I I think I'm definitely in The mindset of a miracle is camp. You don't know what I'm gonna get. I don't know what I'm gonna pick. I feel like I'm gonna have to, while to be honest, I'm I want to know if the next the x t three is coming out, they're actually coming out. Um, And again, this is going to change. This is so time sensitive. But a Zara's food, you rumor is that there is going to be a new X t to like s or extra something on it's gonna have optical stabilization inside it. Not in the lens, which will allow for, like, longer exposures, handheld, like a lot of cool stuff. But that being said, there will be a next T three, probably within the year. I mean, that's the other thing Is annual price Point aside, the form factor of the Fugees is really nice. Um, I think for anyone start with photography we're talking about, I s So we're talking about show you speeds all these things and to see the physical numbers right there. And as you turn the dial, you see, the difference is really nice. Um, the Sony I do think you have to be a little bit farther along because, you know they are, they are more expensive, and you can get older generations that are fine, but their technology is just advanced so rapidly. So, uh, yeah, I'm gonna have to make it. We're gonna have to do a follow up video when I actually get my camera, which I'll dio Um, I can't make a decision right now, but I'm definitely I am going to switch from Canon. I'm not going to go with a big DSLR. It is gonna be a Miral is camera, and it's gonna be I don't know. I think maybe I'm gonna look at the 6500. The Sony is 6500 or if there's a new model and then it's probably gonna be that or maybe the x t two. So I don't know, hopefully this Ah, this kind of brainstorm has helped you understand what? All of the things you should consider when buying a new camera. I'm gonna see the inside scoop. So if you have any questions about where I'm at, where you're at anything we talked about, let us know on the course, and we'd be happy to help. And, yeah, hopefully you enjoyed this video. 73. Cameras: Our 2022 Camera Chat: Alright, so here we are. Bill Sam. Well, you might be watching this video right after the previous camera chat in the photography masterclass course, you might be watching this on YouTube somewhere else. But basically it's been about five years since we talked. And we often get questions like fell, what camera did you end up getting? And we've all been on our own camera journey. We just wanted to come together to talk about what cameras we did end up purchasing and sort of that process making photography masterclass, which is five years. We're not going all the way back. No, I mean, weight target, we've talked about that before, so we've all changed camera brands since then. Lexical reminder for what are we shooting at that time? Start down there. I was shooting Sony. I had a Sony A7. Still a great camera today. Yeah. I was shooting with the Canon 70 d was it the 17707072, didn't you? Yeah, before the 70 and I was on the Fuji x t2. Yeah. I remember after all that long conversing. I was so excited a my brother and our Fuji world for years we were so tight we could talk about our camera. We could share equipment. I got the Fuji IX T2 right before my first kids were born, my twin boys, and that was that I ended up going through G. And it was the perfect setup. I loved it, it was small. I got a variety of lenses. My favorite for shooting photos of my kids was the 16 millimeter prime. Opens up to one for, I think a great lens. We're getting close getting full shots. And I loved the x t2 and then I eventually upgraded to the X t4 when that came out, the x t3, I believe we were talking about it in the previous video chat that was sort of in the Ryzen or had just come out is about to come. But I got a really good deal on the x t2 and the X t4. The sensor was, I believe it's the same as the z3, but the video capabilities were a little bit more advanced. I, I liked the flipping out screen. Instead. This one has ibis which they did not have that I remember that being like they're big, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Even now this is gosh, this is two years old now because I got this with one of my third baby was born Lucy. Yeah. And so this was sort of a good upgrade and this has become my everyday photo and video camera. I had been shooting a lot of my videos on the Canon C100, but I sold that just to be simple and have one setup. And I went Fuji, full-blown Fuji fan and we just started doing the advanced videography course and shooting on this. And it looks great still, even with those long lenses, I love it for video, really awesome video camera. It isn't present. And I know that Fuji came out has hasn't new camera out and they'll probably keep people out of them. But like for two-year-old camera, There's not necessarily been major leaps and bounds. I mean, unless you want to talk about AK and stuff like it's still for video, really great for photo of an amazing, a really great camera. Yeah, no. This guy left Fuji. So we're gonna start with, because that way as part of progression, as his fault. Go over there, Sam, you're shooting Sony. Sony fan boy. Like to Sony. Multiple Sony cameras. So you had the A7, R3. My, I want to say we got our company, we'll call got a Sony A7 us to first now, so the first Sunday, and that was like for video and it's really good for video. We also had cinema cameras, Sony's at that time. We were in that whole ecosystem. And then when I was really going the ASMR three was my main camera for years. I had that camera for probably the longest I've ever had a camera. A workhorse, amazing photo, amazing video, super-fast, I'll focus. It was a great camera. Then I think, I think I've told this story before, but I was on a camping trip on a peninsula and there's super heavy dense fog. And I woke up in my camera, which was inside a camera bag, was soaking wet and salt air completely corroded the sensor. As in this weird place where lot of my film work was being done on our video cameras or film camera, cinema cameras. And I wasn't doing all that much photo. And I had When did I get I got to like a queue at some point when I also have this Sony A7, R4. So I've kind of introduced myself to like, I loved it like a queue. It was the most amazing and is still to this day behind the scenes. Quick walk around the streets, travel camera. I love that camera. I think it's one of the best games ever made, like a QH2, being it's upgraded version, but still both are phenomenal cameras. So that eventually when Leica came out with the SL2, I hopped on it because they upgraded all their video features. They just were coming out with this really great new camera that I thought would work at the level I wanted to and could be my just single one. Use Camera. High megapixel, which I really like having a really large files, could do all the video things. And then I could also adapt like an M glass to it. I could get more land or glass. I could adapt various types of lenses to it, which I really liked as well. So got that. Had, that came up for a couple years now, which I really loved that camera and it's for video, working for photo. It's kind of became to love video stuff, but also incredible photo camera, really, really incredible. It's fully weather sealed, has most of the same things as a Sony A7 R4 are the same things as a Sony A7 R3. You had the Leica queue. And then when you're Sony got destroyed, did you think about jumping on Nikon or Canon who had these newer mirrorless lines that have been getting a lot of, you know, once you consider a Fuji for a split second, he totally did 2.5th and we would have all been Fuji together. But I still I still even with my like SL2 still debate going back to something. I still think that Sony for video in event photography, they're auto-focus. Nikon rival this now. But it's just far superior, like a slow, comparatively I think, to those cameras. But working in Cinema, working with $100 thousand lens sets that are these beautiful things that you make films on that or just gorgeous glass. I've never shot something close to that until I started shooting with Legos. And the quality and the just, everything about it just makes me smile. I get excited when I do this stuff and it's not for everyone. And I'm very well aware of that. And I know the price point is absurd and I totally get it. And for me though, it was just the next move and I'm there'll be it'll take a lot for me to move in a different direction. Ever again, hopefully not another in winter storm on a peninsula. I just think that's gonna be part of my life. Confessional time. Well, so you just decided to get rid of your Fuji kit and jumped? Well, let's see. Yeah. Okay. So you have a good reason at the time we were shooting Fuji, I was doing a decent amount of wings. I had a Fuji x t2, which I think was like such a great camera for me at the time. It was affordable. I can get all the lenses. It was good enough for my head shots and weddings and I was doing I didn't need necessarily any video aspect of it because I was say I'm gonna big cinema cameras that we use for video stuff. That being said, I upgraded to the x t3 when that came out, which as a Fuji is like main flagship camera. That camera has been like one of the end-all be-all mirrorless cameras of all time. Yeah, that's a great deal for that for that side sensory stuff. And so I upgraded to that. So then I had the z3, z2 and various mental lenses for weddings. Next, T3 was my main shooting camera for weddings. I continued to shoot weddings on that and all my other headshots and portrait sessions and everything that I did. Then Sam and I went to Guatemala, did this documentary where we took our cinema cinema, the camera down with some lenses that we use on that camera. And they were beautiful. They are amazing. Sam also add is like a q one with him. And I knew I had been avoiding messing with it and I mess with it. And I just found out in Guatemala just fell in love with the look of the glass and the speed of it, the size of it, all that stuff. And it just so happened that they are coming out with a Q12 right after we trip for some reason all the stars aligned. I was like, All right, well, I'll go ahead and go for it. And this has been my favorite camera I've ever purchased in my entire life. Like this is my daily I still to this day. This is what I carry around me everywhere I go, like snowboarding, horseback riding In the beach to concerts, wherever it's fixed lens, it's weather sealed. It's 47 megapixels. It's got crazy good artifact focus. It's got macro. It's like everything I needed, like an everyday camera. And I started using it as a backup secondary camera when I'm shooting weddings to the Fuji IX D3, I started using those two cameras together. And in my perspective, the glass on the Leica, this piece of glass itself, which is worth more than the Fuji Camera itself. Is just exquisitely more beautiful, like it's just, it just looks. I saw the sentence the other day. It's hard to describe how you feel, how I feel about what a Google Glass looks like. It looks like real life to me, like things that are in focus or sharp and they look beautiful and things that are out-of-focus look like they're out of focus when you're just in life? I don't know. It's hard description. So to me, like it has the best class in the world. The flu this year only camera right now? No. My other camera is also okay. So the x t3, I was like, This is not as good glass and and it was starting to slow me down. Yeah, there are times and during weddings were like, oh, I couldn't get enough light into it. Even with the one hundred four hundred eight. The shutter wasn't no fault to it. It just has a smaller sensor. Yeah, not a lot of light is coming in even with the fast lenses. And I needed to just slowing me down in relation to this full-frame camera. I was like, All right. That's it. Like I missed a ton of shots. I second shot for some weddings that just wasn't up to par. And I'm ready to switch to a new system. And I looked at, I actually looked at Fuji is GFS line. It's like they're medium format, but I had tested one and rented one wasn't fast enough for me, although broaden a lot of light and just just the way it function and stuff didn't work. Which I think for cameras is a lot to be said. How you feel about it, how it functions with you, how you shoot with it is like, I think far superior than the quality of what it's doing. Then I looked into canon, and I just couldn't get behind the cannon glass. Some reason an icon, which is why I left Nikon in the first place to go to Fuji was I was tired of the look. These are microcosms of my own. Not for everyone. Then. Yeah, I was like All right, well, what is like to have on that level of photography? And Sam had bought the SL and they again had come out with SL2 S, which was half the megapixels for him, but it still did great video, which are shooting on right now. You're looking through my main camera that I use for work and for video work and for for weddings like that right now is being shot there at 24 to 70. Like a lens that's beautiful to 0.8. The problem I was like, yeah, I sold all my Fuji stuff. I've sold like five lenses and two bodies are one body and was able to afford one like a body in one case. I mean, I think that is why the Fuji system is great for people who are kind of stepping a little bit further into photography, coming maybe from a Canon Rebel series or 16, five hundred and sixty seven hundred Sony or whatever. And they want, I mean, that's maybe more of a comparable camera, but the lens, you can get so many lenses, a nice full lens kit for such an affordable price. And it just depends on what you're doing. And this is Fuji, such a great entry system and to learn on a Fuji because everything is so tactile and right in front of you versus in digital menu systems or you're trying to find that out. It's rough. Yeah. Well, the thing is the point at which you sort of realize, okay, this game was not holding up, is that you were shooting alongside someone shooting on the new flagship candidate. Mirrorless. You're having this opportunity to side-by-side comparison. Shooting. How many? 6 thousand photos in a wedding? Yeah, we're shooting a time. It was a stupid amount of photos, low-light, crazy lane conditions. I mean, weddings are like Gogo go. It's putting it to the test, to the extreme. Yeah. We're basically keep up with the other photographer and she had, she was shooting at the same ISO for 80% of your other stuff, for chewing head shots, for sharing all these other things. It worked for a long time. Yeah. It's just a second. That's where why pros will pay that little bit extra, that a little bit more because there's those few times when you actually need that. Oh, yeah. I wouldn't be comfortable shooting wedding or event with this, especially weddings where it's like there's the moment and I said, I mean, it worked for a long time, but I think you could do that. Yeah. I don't want to say you can't shoot it with this. But if you're going to a 100% confident in knowing that your camera's not going to be buffering or anything when putting in a low light thing to honestly, yeah. With the crop sensor, there are times where I might get the shot, but it's a little noisy or whatever. Not as clean as I want. That's the hardest thing too, is when you when you're putting up two cameras systems in the same scenario, adds something like that and you just sing that. That one's not full frame. And one's not just delivering that aim at the same time, you have another point and shoot camera that's giving you amazing results. It's like law, law factors going into that. Yeah, that's where we're at right now. And I'm waiting to see what the next if it's the X.25 that comes out or they have, they're more video centric x H series. There might be one coming out or XHR coming out. I might pull the trigger on that to make my x t2, which I still have as my backup camera out, probably saw that one and then this would be maybe my B camera for video. I don't know. I'm assuming that the SHA-1 might have actually better photo features as well because I think if the sensor is gonna be better in this net and this new there next series. But I'm so curious to see where Fuji takes because the J5 or low Panasonics doing, you can do so much with smaller sensors in terms of what it can serve output, you lose lighting and you know certain things, but you can just do such high resolutions or you can do like ten or 12 bit. And now that Canaan is putting out aka cameras like it's just crazy what the options are. And also, I mean, especially doing we do that both video and the photo side because I've significantly cut down how much video work I'm doing with my mirrorless and stuff. And that's why I actually got this gamma, which is a range finder that doesn't shoot video at all. I mean, completely different world than what will shooting. But it's all like more street documentary, like slow down, really slow moving type of photography. And it's just been loved that I loved just being a photo camera. And then my video stuff is all with something completely different. Yeah, Everyone's different. Every photographer has different needs and that's really what matters more so than the actual brand. So this is our, I guess, five-year update. I think it was every five years. Every five years, unless there's something in-between that dramatically happened. I think that we'll see stuck with this camera for awhile. While I'm not going to hold you to it. We will see will update you in five years. And until then, if you need anything about cameras photography, head over to photography and friends.com. That's got all of our courses, our camera guides or Lightroom presets are coaching everything over there. So checkout photography and friends and we'll see you in five years. 74. Lenses: Introduction: All right, everyone, welcome to this new section of the photography masterclass. Now that we have a better understanding of what kinds of cameras are out there and a lot of the basic functions of your camera, let's talk about those big pieces of glass the attached to the front of them, and make all our photography possible. The lens lenses are crucial to photography because they control how light reaches the camera's sensor or film plane. They affect the look of your photos in a number of ways, and ultimately, I would consider them to be as important, if not more important, than the camera body you use in this section. We're going to cover all things related to lenses, why people pay so much money for certain lenses and why other lenses can be great quality but not crazy. Expensive. We will talk about F stops, which are also known as iris or aperture, what vocal ings are and how they affect your image. Why would ever want to buy his lens that can't zoom the best lenses to start off with? And how do you grow your lens? Set overtime filters for your lenses. Creative lenses like fisheye and tilt shifts. What lenses are best for different types of photography and more. There's so much that goes into lenses, and having a better understanding of them will greatly help you grow as a photographer and help you make better decisions when it comes to purchasing or renting them. So let's get started. 75. Lenses: Deeper Dive into Focal Length: to begin our discussion about lenses there two key ways that we, as photographers, use to describe what types of lenses were talking about, whether it be to describe what lenses are in our kit or what lens we used to get that shot . The first, which we will cover in this lesson, is focal length, something we've briefly mentioned in the composition section of the course. Focal length is one of the key elements of how we as photographers specify what lens we're talking about, especially when referring to our personal kits. When talking about my 50 millimeter prime lens, I'll just call it my 50 or my 24 to 70 millimeters zoom lens is my 24 to 70. These are all various focal wings of lenses, the latter being a zoom lens, which has a range of focal lengths. Now, what is the focal length? What exactly is 50 millimeters? These numbers represent the measurement of the distance between where the light rays entering the lens converge to make a clear, sharp image. From that point to the camera sensor, I know this is a fairly complex idea to understand at first and ultimately knowing the difference of how lenses affect our photography is more useful than understanding how these lenses work. But because we all want to become better photographers, let's try to understand was actually going on here, take your camera and point as subject. Everything you see through your viewfinder or on the screen is light entering your lens and hitting your camera's sensor. In this diagram, you can see the subject those light rays entering through the lens and converging. From there, the light continues to the film or digital sensor inside your camera. It's the same way your own I works. Actually, now this distance from where the light is converging to your sensor, that is the focal length. Additionally, I will mention the term field of view a few times. In this lesson, Field of view refers to how much you can see through your camera, depending on which lens you're using. The 50 millimeter is considered the middle focal length of lenses. This is because of 50 millimeter, has no distortion and is more or less equivalent to how the human eye sees the world. As the numbers of the focal length gets smaller, we get into wide angle lenses. What this means is that a wide angle lens field of you or what you are able to see with them becomes greater. So while a 50 millimeter lens is able to see this much, ah, 35 millimeter lens concede this much Initially, the effect is minimal. 35 millimeter doesn't look too different than that of 50 millimeter you can Seymour, but there is no change to the images overall. Look now, when we get down to 24 millimeter and blow, you can really start to see the difference in what wide angle lenses do. As you can see here, the 24 millimeter compared to the 50 millimeter allows you to see much, much more from the same location. The's lenses can start stretching the image, adding distortion sometimes because they're greatly expanding what you're able to see where wide angle lenses start to get kind of funky. And in some ways, pretty incredible is when you get wider than 24 millimeters here you can see what a 50 millimeters sees, and here you can see what 15 millimetre sees from the same spot from the 50 to the 24 millimeter. Most lenses remained relatively sharp. An image quality without getting crazy, expensive. But when you start to get wider than train for millimeter, you will start to see distortion in the corners and edges. Things become sharper and prices increased for pro level wide angle lenses. Why does this happen with wide angle lenses? This is because the glass of the lens itself is Ben or extremely curved. You can see clearly on this lens how calm cave it is compared to that of a 50 millimeter. It's pretty incredible what really expensive wide angle lenses are able to dio, but at the same time, it doesn't mean you need to go out and spend a bunch of money to get one of them. Some people use the distortion of cheaper wide angle lenses as a creative style, or take a step further by using a fish eye lens. But we'll talk about that in a later lesson. Let's now jump to the other end of the focal length spectrum, which are numbered greater than 50 millimeters, also known as telephoto lenses, where wide angle lens reveals more of the world increasing your field of view. Telephoto lenses narrow your field of view but allow you to see things farther, way in greater detail. For example, here's a 50 millimeters shot and here's a photo taken with an 85 millimeter. You can see how you can see more details with the 85 millimeter as you increase your focal length or go up in numbers. Not only can you see farther away objects closer up, but you will also notice that your photos start to have a shallower depth of field where the wide angle lenses enable you to capture many things in a single image. A telephoto lens will enable you to really focus in on a single subject to show mawr extreme example of this. Here is that 50 millimeters shot again, and here it is at 200 millimeters. Now similar to a wide angle lenses, the prices of ultra telephoto lenses can get crazy, especially when getting up to 400 millimeters and above. Typically, what you will start to notice when using more economical telephoto lenses is that they won't be quite a sharp or crisp looking. Now that we have an understanding of the difference between ah, wide angle and telephoto lens, let's talk more about depth of field again. This is something we covered earlier in this course, but let's have a bit deeper. Depth of field is ultimately, how much isn't focus or clear in your image. Here, you can see that only little slivers and focus meaning is very shallow depth of field. Here you can see everything is clearly in focus. The depth of field is huge. Can you tell the differences in the types of lenses? Typically, telephoto lenses achieve a shallow depth of field much easier, whereas wide angle lenses love more and focus or larger depth of field. This is a reason that people love 85 millimeter or above lenses for portrait's, because the backgrounds have these beautiful look to them thes air the basics of what focal inks are, how it relates to the lens and how it affects your images. Although there are recommended lenses for various types of photography, it is best to find a focal length or lens that you enjoy for the type of work that you are doing. There are no rules and photography that aren't meant to be tested or broken. Next, we're going to talk about the second most important thing when understanding what lenses are F stops 76. Lenses: Deeper Dive into Aperture: in this lesson will dive deeper into F stops and lens options. By now, you know that the two most important things that affect the overall look of your photo are the focal length and the depth of field, which relates to the aperture. First and foremost, let's review the mechanics of it all. Here you can see a lens wide open. This means that within the lens, the aperture of the lens is fully open, allowing in the maximum amount of light possible. Now, as we close down or make the aperture smaller, we're reducing the male flight allowed into it. This control of light is measured in F stops. These are numbers that you will use every time you pick up your camera and set your exposure. The lower the F stop number, the more light is being allowed in with each larger number. The mouth of light allowed into your camera is cut in half, so when you are set toe F four and Goto F 5.6, you effectively cut the light coming in by half. Now, if you move from F eight F 5.6, you've doubled the amount of light there's entering your camera. You will also see that someone's is our F 3.5, and this is considered 1/2 stop, meaning halfway between 2.8 and F four. Here's another term you might hear photographers saying when someone asked how fast a lenses they're referring to. The F stop when the lenses wide open, or the smallest F stop number so of fast lands would be one that opens up to something like F 1.4 or F two. A slow Olin's might be on Lee able to open up to F four, for example, by 24 to 70 F 2.8 is faster than my 7200 F four, but not as fast as my 50 millimeter F 1.4 now. Beyond the control of light, the F stop also makes a huge difference in the overall look of your image. Remember from earlier that the wider open you are the shower, the depth of field there is, the more closed down you are, the deeper the depth of field and the more that will be in focus due to this. Some people love shooting with a 24 millimeter F 1.4 because you get really great wide angle images, but still that shallow depth of field. Additionally, sometimes people taking photos that are on the telephoto lens prefer to close down to F A, because more will be in focus and will be easier to get a clear shot. If you're shooting on a 200 millimeter at F 2.8, it can be really tricky to get a really nice in focus image. If things are moving around here, you can see how depth of field changes from F 1.4 all the way to have 22. Another thing to remember with this is it all depends on how close your subject is. The closer they are, the shallower, the depth of field and the farther away they are, the more that will be in focus. Now. As you look around for lenses to purchase, you will notice that the ones that are F 1.4 are typically mawr expensive, and ones that are higher than F 1.4 like F two F four, for example, are typically much more economical. This is because the mechanics of building an F 1.4 lens is more difficult than one with a smaller aperture. You will also see on some zoom lenses, meaning lenses with multiple focal ings. The aperture will range from F 3.52 at 5.6. For example, this means that as you zoom your lens in moving from wider focal ings to more telephoto focal ings, the F stop will reduce from 3.5 to 5.6, effectively reducing the Malval I allowed to enter when your ATM or telephoto focal length . This is again because the mechanics of having a non variable aperture is more expensive to make. One thing to know is that as you get in tow ultra telephoto lenses meaning 200 millimeters and above you will barely see anything below an F four. This isn't because they're lacking in quality, but rather because there's so much glass in them that they require much more light to expose properly. Also, if you remember how shallow the depth of field was at F 2.8, there really isn't a need to go any lower because it be near impossible to focus on anything. Here, you can see an 85 millimeter F 1.4 that is wide open. Look how crazy shallot up to feel that ISS. Can you imagine trying to get Chris Photo at 200 millimeters f 1.4. Another important note is that outside of super high end lenses, the sharpest and best performance of lens will be around F four or F 5.6. And in terms of sharpness, we're not talking about being in focus but the quality of the focus. So shooting at F four will look sharper than shooting at F 1.4, even if the focus is perfect. This is by no means to say that you never want to shoot at F 1.4. It's just that the clearest image will come when shooting around F four. When you go out to purchase a lens, keep in mind that they will get more expensive as aperture becomes faster, and that doesn't necessarily mean you need to go and buy the fastest lens you confined. You just need to purchase the right lens for what you are trying to do 77. Lenses: Primes vs. Zooms: Now that you understand the key specs for lenses, focal lengths and F stops, it's time to talk about zooms in primes, zoom lenses or just zooms, as I'm sure you can guess our lenses that have a range of focal ings, allowing you to zoom in and out, going between various focal lengths. The's lenses air typically larger and heavier and at best, open up to around F 2.8. The more economical zooms will be F four or F 3.535 point six. Their quality can be very good, but typically not as good as primes. Mawr. Economical zooms will have worse quality than more economical primes. Typically, most common zoom links at a pro level at least are 16 35 millimeter, 24 to 70 millimeter, 24 to 1 of five millimeter and 7200. That being said, there are many combinations of zoom links, and you can't measure quality based off of the zoom range zooms air great because they give you plenty of options when it comes to composition. Standing from one spot. This is especially great for travel photographers and went out and about with your camera not knowing exactly what you'll be shooting primes or fixed focal length lenses are lenses there just one focal length? Ah, 50 millimeter prime or a 35 millimeter prime are just that a 50 millimeters lens or 35 millimeter lens. Thes lenses come in a wide range of sizes, and while they're typically more compact, lighter and faster than zooms, some are as heavy and big as other zoom lenses. And although it might seem like a zoom would be the better option since you get multiple focal ings. Prime lenses are preferred by many professional photographers, typically offering better image quality, Boca and overall performance. I've used both primes and zooms extensively, and while I love the ease of zoom lenses, especially when travelling, the quality of primes is my favorite, and often times I find that I would rather just walk closer or farther from my subject. Do you get the shot than just zooming in her out? Also, you can find relatively cheap prime lenses have amazing quality. Either way, though, finding the right lens for yourself is tricky and takes time. I started with my 18 to 200 millimeter Nikon lens practice. My photography in over the years figured out what lenses I enjoyed using most by 35 F 1.2 is my go to. But for a long time, my 24 to 70 was all that I used. Now, when it comes to building your own kit, money does play a big role in this because lenses aren't cheap. One thing I want to know is that while cameras are important, you can always upgrade your camera body later on. But ideally, you can keep using the same lenses regardless of what camera you get. This is why people typically become loyal toe Onley shooting with Canon or Nikon so near Fuji. It's because even as they upgrade their cameras, they're able to keep using the same lenses you can buy. Adaptors allow you to put a canon lens on a Sony camera, for example, but I find that extra piece of equipment is typically pretty cumbersome, and adapters greatly slow down your auto focus and take away from any weather ceiling you might have. So, assuming you have a camera in mind, what lens do you get? I would say a zoom with a big range is a good place to start, and typically the most economical will be the kit lends, which the manufacturer will offer at a good price with the camera. As you progress as a photographer, though, you will outgrow this lens and realize that there is much better quality out there. Getting a wide angle lens and something that is more telephoto is usually the next step. You want to be able to cover a range of focal links with your kit, so if your kit lens is an 18 to 55 millimeter, you might want to telephoto lens that is something like a 72 100. You might also want a wide angle that somewhere around 10 to 24. But just because you have a zoom that covers a particular focal length doesn't mean that you shouldn't think about getting a prime lands as well. For example, the 50 millimeter is a great prime lens to start out with for any photographer from there, it depends on what kind of photography you want to dio. If you're able to where the best things I can recommend is to rent lenses, tests amount, see if it's worth your money for the actual purchase. If you want a decent all around workhorse, you can't go wrong with the 24 70 F 2.8 or 24 to 105 I've used both these lenses and also two scenarios. If you are passionate about portrait, it's, I would highly recommend getting a prime lens somewhere between 50 millimeter to 135 millimeter. If you're traveling, a zoom lens might be the most practical because you can just bring that one lens. That being said, I have found that while traveling a discreet prime lens like my 35 millimeter, to be specific, get some of the best images because it is smaller and people don't seem to be as bothered by it. It's also F 1.2, which allows me to get great images in low light, which my zoom couldn't. Plus, it's easier to pack and carry around for landscapes. You'll definitely want a wide angle lens to capture large, wide open landscapes, but I personally love more telephoto lenses for landscape photography to get those details shots as well for street photography, undoubtedly, ah, compact prime lenses. A way to go, but focal length is dependent on your style. Do you want to get up close and personal? A. White England's is better for that. But if you want to say farther away, a telephoto lens is best for nature photography. You might realize you want in even more telephoto lens more than 300 or 400 millimeters to get that right shot of the birder animal Far, far off in the distance. As you can see, there are a lot of decisions to make when it comes to building. Your lens kit starts slowly. Experiment. See what types of photography you like and go from there. If you have specific questions about lenses, were here to help post questions to the course or drop us a message and we'll get back to you as soon as possible. 78. Lenses: Quality Comparison: all right. So really quick. I want to talk about zooms, verse, primes. And I think this is a really good example. Uh, here we have Sony's 16 to 35 2.8. This is definitely one of the higher end zoom lenses that they offer. And here I have Voight, Landers, 35 millimeter F 1.2. So right off the bat, you can see that. You know, there's obviously a huge size difference between these two lenses. Um, this does offer multiple focal links, but it is F 2.8, whereas this can, uh, see a F 1.2. So it's almost over to stop s'more light. Ah, in this smaller little lens, I think that when you're looking around for lenses, it's important to consider that while you might automatically think, well, this has a bigger range. Uh, the quality of this glass is really pretty incredible. So right here you can see two different photos. One photo was taken with thesixties to 35 at 35 millimeters f 2.8 so wide open. And here you can see the photo taken with the void Lander. 35 millimeter F 1.2. I've also take another photo here, f 2.8, just to compare them both at similar settings, and you can see that there's just serve a quality difference between the void lander and the Sony. Now both I think, are great. But when it comes to going around town, or if you're traveling, you know it might be a little bit nicer to have this smaller lens, or maybe two of these smaller lenses, which will still take up less room than this larger 16 35. 79. Lenses: Upgrading Your Lens: All right, everyone. So a little bit more about the kit lens vs the more pro level lens. Here we have the cannon 18 to 55 3.5 F 5.6 kit Lands and Cannons L Series mark 1 24 to 70 f 2.8. So right off the bat you can see. Obviously, there's a huge size difference. And why, that is, is that this lenses F 2.8, so it allows in much more light. Um, also the quality you could just serve tell from the build. This has a lot more metal behind it. This feels very plasticky. Now you can see here in these sample photos right off the bat, you can really tell that there's there is an image difference or serve a quality difference between the two lenses. The 24 70 just looks a little bit crisper. I think the fall off in the bocas much nicer, and you get that F 2.8, which allows a lot more lighten. Also, as you zoom in with this kit lens, it goes from a 3.5 to a 5.6, so you're losing almost two whole stops of light when you zoom into 55. So that's really the difference between these two lenses. You consider seeing the quality the F stop. Obviously, the man of light that's allowed in is a big difference. But I think it's important to note that Ah, there are There is a mark two version of this lens, so you're able to fire it. Find Mark one versions, which is still great pieces of glass for much cheaper. 80. Lenses: Stabilization: So one thing we want to talk about really quickly is image stabilization. And depending on UK manufacturer, this might have a different name with its V r. A. Y s. I ask. You know, there's all sorts of names for image stabilization out there, but what it is that the end of the day is for longer telephoto lenses is within the camera . It's helping keep the glass steady, and even some cameras nowadays have this built into their sensors. Really, all it's doing is helping you get a steadier shot and any little movements from your hands . It reduces that so you have a steadier shot throughout. Uh, this is something that can typically cost a little bit more for lenses, but it is of great benefit if you're using those longer telephoto zoom lenses specifically , if you're trying to get into sports or wildlife photography, I would highly recommend investing a little bit more money into a lens that offers image stabilization of some sort. If you do decide to get one of these lenses or you've already purchased one typically on the side of your lens, you'll find a on and off switch. Now what this enables is that when you turn it on, the image stabilization will be on and you'll be able to notice the difference. You turn it off and instantaneously. You should notice a big difference now. One thing to know is that if you do have it on, it will use up a lot more battery life from your camera. All right, so let's take a look at what image stabilization actually does. I'm going to start with it off, so I'm handheld Right now. I'm at 1 40 millimeter, which is equivalent to about 200 millimeter on a full frame sensor. And it's just frame up and you shot some hand held and you can see, especially at these long telephoto links. Just it's so shaky, every little movement of my hands you can see all the little jitters. Now let's turn on image stabilization. Get on this camera or in most lenses, will just be a little switch on the side, and I go up and you can really see just the difference it makes. I mean it is holding it steady. It looks like I'm almost on the tripod. No, As I move, you can start to see a little bit more jitter. But if I really hold my hand, still does a great job of holding it still. So you can really see the difference between being handheld without image stabilization and with image stabilization. I think if you're going by a long telephoto lens, it's definitely worth it to get it. You can see just the difference of how shaky it is without it and how still it is with it. 81. Lenses: Filters: Now let's talk filters. Filters are at the most basic level, a piece of glass or plastic that we typically place in front of our lens, either with an adapter or by screwing it onto the front. They do a variety of things from simply protection toe altering the image itself, often improving our images while shooting so we don't need to edit them in post. This enables us to make certain colors. Pop mawr reflections disappear, darkened only parts of our frame and much, much more. One thing to know about filters is that you need to make sure they will fit onto the front of your lens. The filters size in millimeters needs to match the size of your lens. It's important not to confuse this with the focal length of your lens, but rather the diameter of the lens, which can be found written on the end of most lenses with the oh, with a little slash through it, you can buy adapters if your filter is any larger than the front of your lens, but not if your lens is larger than the filter. The filter that most of us will use initially is the UV filter. The UV filter, or ultraviolet filters, are most commonly known as a way of protecting your lens from dust, smudges, scratches and whatever else could potentially damage your lens. The concept is, instead of risking something damaging the front piece of your expensive lens, it damages the $100 filter instead. Beyond that, UV filters shouldn't have any effect on your actual image. They do block ultraviolet light, which is harmful. And although I've never seen the effect, people say it could be damaging to your camera's sensor or to the film. In terms of filter brands, we recommend tiffen or being W. The second most common filter would be the polarizer. The's filters can be used a number of ways, but most commonly they used to reduce reflected light. Typically, you can use these to take out reflections in glass or on large bodies of water, but also, when consider all the light that bounces off the sky, you can help reduce is effectively making the sky seem bluer. This makes them great for landscape photography. They do reduce the light entering your lens to make sure there is plenty of light when you are using them neutral density filters are another fairly common filter. He's essentially reduced amount of light that enters your camera. These are great for long exposure photography. During the day, they move in a scale of 0.3 point 6.91 point 21.51 point eight all the way to 5.0, and with each increase of 0.3 equaling one stop of light with nd filters, you are able to shoot with a slow shutter, even if there's a lot of light out. This results in a cool motion blur effect. Great for photographing water, moving clouds and other motion during the day. You can also get variable, and D filters have a range of darkness all in one filter. You just spin them and the image gets darker. From there, we get into even more creative filters. These are great for preventing the need or desire to do a lot of post processing on your images. In the editing room, radiant filters are basically half normal glass and half filter. There are a number of types of ingredients, but their most commonly used for photos with sky in them. The top half would typically filter the sky, either darkening it or changing the color and the bottom would remain unaffected. With this, you can have more balanced exposure if the lower half of your image is in the shade and the top half is much brighter. Color correction filters actually changed colors in your image. Either tenting the entire image or making certain colors. Pop mawr The's air especially great with nature or landscape photos when you want blues or greens to pop more. Another fund filter would be the cross screen or star filter these air. Pretty straightforward. They transform any light soars into a star shape. There are varying types of these and can have various looks to them. Hopefully, by now you understand what filter is and what it does to start out. Definitely purchased UV filters to protect each of your lenses, then move on to purchasing other filters. If you want to get more creative 82. Lenses: Filter Demonstration: everyone. So just want to go over the filters really quick of a couple different ones with me. First up is the UV filter. So this is pretty much always on my lens. It's really just a clear piece of glass. It doesn't affect your image in anyway. Um, and it really just protects that front element of glass. So I'll take a picture here school and you can see it looks pretty natural. Looks very normal. Now I'm going to screw on a polarizer. And again, what the polarizer does is it helps with reflections. And one the main ways people use it is to help make the blue sky really pop. So gonna line this up and you actually spend the Pola or polarizer on here. And that's what's gonna just so you can see, when you put your eye through, you can see how it changes. Now you can really see between that first shot with just the UV filter and then the second shot with a polarizer, it really deepens that blue sky. And just looking at here, it's almost too much. So I'm gonna keep rotating it. I think that's a nicer balance between the two. Now you can also tell that this over Grady int with the blue sky happening. And that's because the sun is off to the right here and you know, so it's much brighter. They're going too much darker. So if you're taking a landscape or something, you might want to think of where the sun is in. Position it so you don't get that radiant in the sky Last up. We're going talk about neutral density filters, and these air filled the filters that just dark in your image overall. But they don't actually affect the colors or anything like that in any way. Okay, so I switch lenses just because I only have a variable indie filter for this one you can see here on the side there goes from minimum all the way to maximum. And so what that's doing is that it's basically making the image darker. So, really, this is, you know, if you're shooting in aperture, aperture priority or anything by using this, it's not going affect image because they'll just the shutter as need be. So let's go in tow manual mode, and I'm, uh, f four eyes. So 400 a 1 1/100 shutter speed. I take a photo with the pretty much fully open, not actually affecting the image, and it's super bright. I now spin the variable and defaulter down and right about their looks nicer. Take a photo of that and now we'll go all the way down and you can see how dark it gets. So very bowl nd filters are really great if you want. Maybe use a slow shutter speed during the day and you want to be able to long exposures or something like that. They're also nice. You know, if you I want to use really specific settings, you show a specific, so specific shudder and a specific F stop and not need to change. Even if the lights changing, you can use available indie filter to just change the MAV light that's actually able to come into your lens. 83. Lenses: Specialty Lenses: In this lesson, you'll learn about specialty lenses like macro tilt shift and fisheye lenses. Thes lenses each have a unique look to them and are great for photographers who have a specific project or style of photography. First, let's talk about macro lenses. What is a macro lens or macro photography? The word macro is used in number of ways, generally meaning large. Before our purpose is idea of making something very small seemed larger than life. A macro lens enables you to do this by allowing you to focus extremely close to an object, seeing every little detail. And then when printing or viewing on your screen, the object seems huge. This is just a blade of grass, but because the macro lens gets so close up to it, if you were to print this, the blade of grass could seem bigger than a person. Macro photography is really the art of detail, almost like looking at things under a microscope. The tricky part of macro photography is that because you are so close to your subject, the depth of field is incredibly small. What I love about this is how detailed every photo is and that most macro photography and lenses have the ability to focus up close and are also normal lenses. So really, they have dual purpose. Next, you have the tilt shift lenses. The's lenses are really something incredible. First off, let's take a look at one of these right off the bat. You can see that there is something different happening here on one side. Thes markings are the tilt and the shift of the lens. The shift allows you to move the lens side to side, helping reduce distortion in wide angle lenses. And the tilt allows you to actually angle lens in different ways. The change where your plane a focus is in plain English. This is creating a sliver of focus across your lens, which has been popularized on instagram with the tilt shift effect. Thes lenses also get that awesome miniature world look like this when shooting from far away and up above. Now, check this out The's lenses, our favorite of architecture photographers because you can eliminate any distortion that you'd get from a typical wide angle lens and also an awesome way to get very unique images off cityscapes or places with lots of people. Lastly, we have fisheye lenses, which have become slightly less popular in recent days but still serve a purpose and are definitely a favorite of some concert photographers. These are extreme wide angle lenses, typically around 10 millimeter or even wider, and have crazy distortion to them, curving on every edge to give a circular look to the image. I grew up using these a lot while doing skateboard videos because they allow you to get incredibly close up while still seeing a lot, and are way less expensive than some high end, ultra wide angle lens that doesn't have a distortion. As you can see in this image, the deejay is probably a foot or two away, and you can still see the entire room. A nice thing about these is that you can always crop in afterwards or use a software to sightly. Correct the distortion if you want to. They're great for crowded places where you want to be able to see as much as possible, or if you just want to creatively use that curve look. They are typically a bit slower, though you will rarely find them any faster than F 2.8, so that does it for a creative lens lesson. There's a lot that goes into using these lenses, and this is really just a taste of what you can do with them. I've added a few links in this section with the work of photographers that really go above and beyond with these lenses, and if you think you are interested in using them, I would recommend renting one and learning how to use them first before going out and buying one. 84. Lenses: How to Clean a Camera Lens: everyone. So I wanted to talk about cleaning your lens, and that's the glass on the front of the lens and the actually the back of the lens. So when I do this, I normally tend to do this before I have a big shoot. If I'm going out for a job, I'll sit down the night before and it's clean all of my lenses that I'm taking out, especially for weddings. I'll take the time just to double check or if you're in the field and something happens, like use. Put your finger on the glass or their specks of dust on the glass. Even the smallest little spot could mess up your photos, and you want to save time and post. You could fix it, but it's really good practice to get in the practice of really just cleaning your glasses. So I want to show you the very basics of how to do it. So let's start. So I got my camera here. I've got my bigger basically, this is a 85 millimeter land. It's a 56 on a crop sensor, but we've got a big piece of glass and I can actually see some fingerprints on there already. Um, I would start with this tool right here, and this is basically ah, blower. You can squeeze it and it'll blow air out. It's the best thing to start with. If you're just trying to get dust off, you want to minimize the amount. You're actually physically touching the glass if you can. I also prefer this for this type of cleaning instead of compressed air. Compressed air can sometimes be too harsh. It also get It's bigger to carry around, and you have to re by it all the time. Also, it creates a moisture. If you're angling incorrectly, so start by just. I just blow across the glass to see if I can knockoff any dust particles. And sure enough, I'm knocking off some. This is usually a plastic tip, so you won't really hurt your glass. But you know you want to be cautious about not getting it, so there's still there's still some stuff on there, obviously, So the next thing we have in our little kit here is I have a micro fiber cloth. Now this comes in a lot of cleaning kits, and it's a specialty cloth that's really great for glass or your phone or your laptop or any screens, really, but it really works well on lenses. The thing is that nothing will come off of it. You won't see any like fibres, necessarily. And so what I'll do is I'll basically do circles just a dry, a dry circles. After a blown dust offs, you're not scraping the dust against the glass. I'll just kind of lightly do some little spins here, and you can see that there's some grease from a fingerprint that's kind of getting spread around there a little bit. Um, and there's still some ST marks on my on my lens. So at this point, I want to use some lens cleaner solution now. I would not actually spray this directly onto the lens. You want to spray it onto, or sometimes air droplets. You could drop onto the cloth itself, and we'll step away from our camera a little bit here, and we just spray a little bit a few spots so it's moist, and then we're gonna go back and do the same thing with the moist part onto the lens, and we're just going to rotate. I usually go clockwise. You know, everyone could go their own direction and, you see, was starting to get a little bit cleaner and picking up up the dogs, picking up the grease, and then we'll take the dry part of it. Just dry it off, pick up any other loose change on there. And if for some reason stuff has gotten on their popped off, sometimes dust will collect on the wet. You could go back to this and blow off, and now our lenses, like, pretty clean. Um, there's tiny little speck that gets caught on this lens. I noticed between sort of the glass and the housing of it and in your kit. Sometimes they come with what's called a lens cleaning pen. Now this, you can basically push out on a share this morning, you twist it and you see these, like little tiny fiber, basically fiber fibers, and you can now, without hurting your lens, you can really get in there and pick up specific little dust parts on your lens, uh, and that you can just kind of Russia. We kind of like a broom. You're not going to scratch your lens with this as long as there's no sand or anything in there. So maybe double check and give it a wipe. Or to, uh And there you go. Now that lends to me looks pretty dang clean some of the edges air there. Probably to spend a bit more time on their Now. Now you've got the front of your lens clean. Don't forget that there's glass in the back of your lens. Now, to do that, I'm gonna take my lens off and to protect my sensor, I'm gonna make sure that I have my poor cat because I don't want to leave this open for any other dust to get in there. The sensor cleaning is something you should have a professional do unless you have a lot of practice or have done it before. But I wouldn't attempt to clean that yourself. Go to a camera store and talk to somebody that's very advanced. So you can see there's a whole another piece of glass here on this side. There's the lead contacts that talk to your camera, depending what kind of camera you have. I'm just gonna go through the same thing. I'm gonna blow for us. Get off any dust looks like they're still a little bit left. I'm gonna remember the dry side was here. Do a little bit of dry rotating here. There's still a little bit left. My cloth is still a little wet here from the lens cleaner so I can transfer some of that here. It's like we're doing all right. Take the dry side again, rotate a little bit and then with the lens pen, go ahead and just dust off anything else. Sometimes on the back of the lens, I'll try and clean the electric leads to make sure there's no dust in there. You don't have to do this if you take good care, your equipment as much. But obviously in the field sometimes if you know you're moving fast changing lenses, your fingerprints will end up on it. You're in a dusty area. Um, it's best to do this at home before you set out to shoot a zoo. Muchas you can, um and yet look at that. That's a pretty clean piece of glass right there, huh? 85. Accessories: Introduction: everyone. And welcome to this section of the photography masterclass. It's all about accessories for your camera kit. We'll go over everything from memory cards to batteries, chargers, tripods, flashes, camera bags and hard drives. It might sound like a lot of basic stuff, but after we go through all of this, you'll have a better understanding of what the differences between all the options and what's if you actually need love. This stuff will actually come with your camera, and some of it will be nice. Tohave might not be completely necessary when first starting off, though. And while we do have some specific accessories we use and will recommend, please understand that the photo gear changes constantly. So the models and tools we recommended this course might have been updated and changed by the time you're watching this. So we'll try and stay relatively general in our recommendations. So let's dive in 86. Accessories: Memory Cards: In this lesson, you'll learn all about memory cards. Memory cards are the digital storage device that your camera saves each photo to. They come in different shapes, sizes and speeds. Depending on your camera, you're probably shooting on SD cards, maybe CF cards and less likely but possibly micro SD cards. These are all names for types of memory cards, but as long as you know what works with your camera, that is all that really matters. You will also find different kinds of SD cards like SD HC, which stands for a secure digital high capacity or S T X C, or secure digital extended capacity. All of these will come in varying storage capacities from two gigabytes, all the way up to 256 gigabytes and beyond. Gigabytes, which is also abbreviated with G B, stands for a unit of measurement that each card is capable of storing. So the bigger the number, the more it can hold. STH see an SD XY, offer more storage and are most commonly recommended to photographer and videographers who will need much more space than someone using an SD card to store other smaller files like text documents. Now, before I get ahead of myself, you should check your cameras user manual and see what kind of memory card slot it has. And if there's a recommended speed, speeds of cards are typically by class. Class four Memory card will right at four megabytes per second, whereas a Class 10 card will right at 10 megabytes per second. There are also you HS one and you a chase to which are ultra high speed to being faster than one. And by now, who knows? Maybe there's something even faster. At the very least, I would recommend Class 10 but if you're going to be taking photos at raw and burst mode, I would recommend using U. H. S one or two. The other thing to consider is the amount of space that you need 32 6428 gigabytes for me. I like being able to go on trips and know that I will have enough memory space toe last entire trip and because I only shoot un compressed raw images, I bring a few 128 gigabyte cards. If you're a shooting J peg, 120 gigabyte is gonna go a very long way and might be overkill. But if you can afford it, why not have the extra space starting off 32 gigabytes or 64 gigabytes is probably fine. Ah, 32 gigabyte card can hold over 4022 megapixel Jay Peak photos, but only 410 22 megapixel un compressed raw photos. So that's really comes down to what your need is. I recommend getting something a bit bigger then you might think you need and then another smaller one just as a backup. If you Philip that larger memory card memory cards, hold all your photos, so it's a good idea to invest in better quality ones. Sands Disk is my preferred brand, but Kingston and Samsung both make excellent cards as well. They're fairly robust little cards and typically live in your camera. But having a case for them is a good idea. I love my Pelican SD card case because I know they're safe, even if I drop them from a moving car or into a puddle of water. So now that we know some war about memory cards, let's hop over to the other most essential piece of your kit. The batteries 87. Accessories: Batteries: There isn't much to say about batteries, but I want to share a bit about batteries and chargers. Most of the cameras you buy will come with at least one battery while working or traveling . I always like to have at least three batteries. Want to be charging one in my camera in one of the ready in my pocket? If you're just getting started to is probably fine. Also, if you're only shooting photos, one battery will last a very long time. Well, the batteries that are made from the actual camera manufacturer might be more expensive. I have found that they always last longer than the other third party brands. Personally, I've stopped purchasing third party brands altogether because although I saved some money initially, I end up having to buy more batteries later on and spending the same amount if not mawr eventually. That's not to say that I don't know plenty of people that use third party brands. I personally have just had an issue with, um, vertical grips are a great addition to any professional photographers kit. They plug into your camera's battery compartment and allow you to use multiple batteries at once. They also work as a separate grip for your hand more easily shoot vertical photos with many mere lis cameras today. No on Li air battery Life's getting shorter, but they are also so small they don't fit comfortably in my hand. A vertical grips solves both. These issues are riding a bit more, master the camera and also holding multiple batteries inside it. My vertical grip allows me issue all day and then some without ever having to switch out the batteries with some cameras. It also allows you to actually shoot more frames for a second in various burst modes. Lastly, when it comes to chargers, you'll probably only need that one charger that came with your camera. If you want an additional charger to help charge your batteries more quickly, I would recommend the Watson dual Charger, which has adapters for several different kinds of batteries. It also allows you to charge two batteries at once, and that's pretty much it about batteries 88. Accessories: Stabilization: In this lesson, you'll learn about different stabilization options you have for photography. Depending on the kind of photography that you are going to be doing, a tripod or mono pod might be a great addition to your kit, even essential for certain types of photography, Like long exposure, tripods come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, and finding the right one for you can be slightly overwhelming because there are so many different kinds and options for the most part, finding something that can support the weight of your camera, combined with your heaviest lenses, what matters most? That being said there typically two parts of a tripod, the base or the legs and then the tripod head on the most basic tripods, the head will come connected to the tripod like this one. The tripods with a removable head allows you just swap out or upgrade either the legs or head. Regardless, what the tripod provides is a stable base and the ability to leave your camera in one spot and really composed exact frame that you want without having to hold it there in place. Some things to consider as you look around at tripods is how talk and they get. How heavy are they? How small do they get when they fold up? Tripods will range from fairly reasonable prices between $25 to $100 to crazy, expensive carbon fiber versions that are over $300. Honestly, I've used very cheap tripods and very nice tripods, and at the end of the day, they all get the job done somewhere better for traveling, since they are lighter and more compact, while others are better for studio work because they can get a bit taller if you need it for taking photos of a model, I recommend getting something that can get up to at least six or seven feet high, so you have the option of looking somewhat downwards at your subject now. Besides the legs I mentioned, the tripod heads their two most common types. The ball head and the fluid head. Fluid heads are more common for videographers, where a ball head is more typical for photographers. Ball heads are typically lighter and really move the camera into any angle or position and then lock it into place. Flute heads cost more and are great for camera movement during video but not necessary for photography. The gorilla pod is another cool accessory. It's basically a tripod with legs that can move into any position. It's really compact in very versatile, great for attaching to specific places, like a chair or railing for backpacking or traveling. It works great because it's so compact, but it's also not necessary all the time. Sometimes a backpack or book is perfect for propping your camera up. Lastly, we have Monta pods, which are basically one leg tripods so they can't stand up by themselves. But they do provide support and stabilization. They're typically used when you need to be mobile, but have a really big telephoto lens that if you working around all day starts to get really heavy, or if your lens is just too large to shoot handheld, you'll see this with sports photographers and their huge lenses. They're good if you just want something to rest your camera on as you move around and are a bit more compact, since they only have one leg and are fairly light in terms of brands, Man photo is definitely one of the most common brands out there and highly rated, but there are plenty of other companies out there making quality products like Revelli, Zo, my and fancy air. I would advise doing some research first, sing what makes sense for your budget and going from there. A decent tripod should last you a very long time, but some of the cheaper plastic ones will start to fall apart if you're using them every day. So consider investing in something that will last maybe a bit longer if you plan on taking your photography to the next level. 89. Accessories: Flashes and Lights: another very useful but not 100% necessary tool for everyone is the flash you learned about their creative and practical uses. In the lighting section of this course, there are a few kinds of flashes out there in a number of ways to use them. At the most basic level is the onboard flash that come built into some cameras, then their external flashes that you can attach to the cameras. Hot shoe mount the male on top of your camera. We will also talk briefly about strobe systems that pro photographers use in the field or in the studio. External flashes are a step up from on board flashes thes typically fit injure cameras, hot shoe male and need to be sync with your camera. Each manufacturer makes their own external flash for their cameras. Typically, the more economical choices will have less features than the higher end ones. What the's air capable of are also dependent on what camera you are using. Some cameras are able to sink to multiple flashes and don't even need to be attached to your camera, so you're able to get really creative by placing these flashes all around you as well mentioned earlier. The more economical external flashes will be in a locked position, and once every bit more expensive will enable you to till and rotate them. If you're going to invest in external flash, I would recommend getting one that can rotate until and ideally one that has various flash intensities. You will also find that there are many different kinds of diffusion for external flashes. There isn't one best option. Everyone has their own preference, but in general, people don't want to blind their subjects and find a way of defusing the flash. So who really needs an external flash event? Photographers, for example, need to make sure that they always get the shot. And sometimes the lighting won't be ideal for them. This is great for wedding photographers or concert photographers. Lastly, there strobe lights. The concept is similar to an external flash, but instead of the flash being attached to your camera, you can place them wherever you want. Lighting is a huge part of photography, and learning to use flashes can really help you take your photography to the next level. External flashes are a great thing to learn, and please refer back to the lighting section of the course. If you want to learn how to use these tools 90. Accessories: Camera Bags: this lesson is all about camera bags. In cases, there are all sorts out there and really no. One best bag. It comes down to what your needs are and how you are going to use it. Also, how much gear you carrying with you or need to carry? Do you need to worry about heavy rain or snow, sand or dust? Are you walking around public places and maybe want something a little bit more low key that doesn't stand out? Are you going to be traveling long distances and needs something that will be comfortable after many miles? Do you want a backpack that can hold your clothes in other gear a day back for going out during the day, or just a satchel that is easy to throw of your shoulder? There are great bags for all of these occasions, and the technology is always improving. There are also hard cases, which are typically a bit more rugged but not quite as easy to carry around these air. Great for ultimate protection when traveling with or storing your camera equipment. Pelican cases are are preferred case their military grade waterproof dust proof everything proof cases that will guarantee the safety of your camera and your gear. There are a bit bulky in heavier than other cases, but your equipment will be safe. Storm cases is another brand worth checking out that are equally as durable in terms of backpacks. F Stop in Shamoto backpacks are two of my absolute favorite bands. They're made for adventures. People going on hikes with their camera gear and need something that has good support. They feature internal storage pouches of various sizes and can really hold a lot of gear very safely. I love these bags because they're a bit more heavy duty, and I can easily travel with him or just take them on the day. Hike thinking Donkey 10 Bow Low Pro are all great bag makers and make so many different kinds of bags from backpacks, toe little pouches to satchels. I would recommend going in tow any camera store and, if you can, trying them out yourself personally. I love my think tank Shapeshifter. 2.0, it can told a ton of gear safely and has many built in pouches, which are great for the ultimate organizer. Domke and Temba are great satchel makers, which are really accessible and great of shooting weddings or anything where you want to quickly and easily access a spare lens or other accessories. Another thing I've done is used little pouches that can carry my camera lens, maybe a few accessories, and then putting that inside a normal backpacker back. This has the benefit of people not knowing that I'm carrying a camera inside. It is a lot more low key. Lastly, there holsters like the high end leather ones made by hold fast or fabric ones that keep your cameras accessible at all times. Thes air. Great for event photographers who need to have multiple cameras or lenses at the ready. As you can see, there are many options out there. The most important thing is to have at least one bag that organizes all of your gear in one place, then, depending on your style of shooting, having another bag that makes going out on a photo adventure easier than ever. 91. Accessories: Hard Drives: organization is very important for photographers, so it's important toe have a good place to store all of your photos. We recommend using an external hard drive in creating a filing system that works for you. So in five years you can go back and easily find that one trip or that one photo. We also recommend having a spare backup drive to be extra careful. Cloud storage is also a great option for your edited photos, as hard drives can break and you don't want to lose your work. One issue we've dealt with with hard drives is that as technology changes, so do the plugs that connect your hard drives to the computer. So you may need to update your external hard drives every few years. Luckily, hard drives are getting more affordable. At one time, a one terabyte hard drive was extremely expensive, but today, getting a four terabyte drive won't break the bank. We recommend getting two drives of at least two terabytes space one to edit off of and use normally and another that just sits in a safe place and has everything on it backed up now , in terms of some of the more technical stuff. There are the older, more common discard drives in the newer, solid state hard drives. Solid state drives are amazing because there are no moving pieces, so they're more durable and typically much smaller but also way more expensive. Disk drives are more common and much cheaper, though they work just as well. But you need to be a bit more careful with them, since they do have a moving piece inside of them. If you damage that disk, it can be very expensive to repair, and sometimes you're unable to retrieve all the data from that disc. Additionally, you'll see some disk drives that are 5400 rpm's and others that are 7200 rpm's thes air. Basically, how fast the drives are able to operate the lasting to mention here is that various types of plugs that they use these air constantly and very frustratingly changing, and there isn't much we can do about it. And no use in really mentioning because by the time you watch this, there's probably a newer, faster, slimmer, better plug being used in all the computers and hard drives. At the end of the day, the more you spend on a hard drive, The faster in compact they will be. So when it comes to hard drives is really important to always have two of them, one to back up, all your photos and another toe work off of you. Take care of them and make sure that you don't bounce him around too much. Because at the end of the day, these air caring all of your photos So it comes to storage. Hard drives are definitely the best option because there there, you have them physically in your possession. A lot of people do use cloud storage, but if you're shooting raw photos or J pig, large photos over time will take a really long time to upload all those photos to the cloud . Or, if you want, retrieve them to download them again. It is nice, though, to use cloud storage to upload edited photos. Or maybe you're select photos that you know that you're gonna want to keep for a long time . This way, if your hard drives do get damaged, you'll have them in the cloud still 92. Accessories: Sam's Favorite Bags: so really quick. Let's just look at two bags that I own that I've used in various situations. One is Thebes Domke Satchel Bag here, and the other is the think tank Shapeshifter. Eso first, let's look at the satchel bag. You know, this is something that just those of your shoulder. It's very, you know, very quick to access. Just under these two flips open and then inside. Here you have camera lenses. You know, you could put your accessories here little zipper pocket side side pouches on either end for different things. And this is really more of a bag for an event or something, somewhere where you need to really quickly open up. Grab lens, switch it out. Keep going. Um, it doesn't necessarily look like a camera bag, but most people probably could figure it out. Uh, and it's definitely not super secure. You know, water can get in here. Hand skated can get in here really quickly. It's meant for quick access, Um, but it's, you know, it's a nice, compact, simple bag, and it's really if you prefer this style, there's a law different looks for satchels, but typically the concept being that's around your shoulder. You can spin it around, pull something out, and it's just quickly that the other one is the shapeshifter. This is a backpack that I feel like you could look at this and think it's just a school backpack or normal backpack. Um, foot inside. It has built in compartments for different camera things. So here this pocket conf it 7200. A big telephoto zoom camera can go in here, and it wraps around it really nicely. You know, makes it really secure. All these air patted so they keep them, you know, protected to some extent you convey it fit three lenses in here or different accessories. Two big pockets here and really, I mean, it's incredible. Incredible demand. Care if it in this you have all these front pockets as well. You have a laptop pocket so you can get lost up in this. It can get way too heavy to be harness. But it's nice. You know, I've traveled the world with this, and people don't necessarily know that I have all this camera here with me, which is what I really like about it. It also has this little strap in the back that for my roller case, I can put the handle up through here, and so it just fits on top of my suitcase so I can go go through the airports and it's actually attached to it. I don't to worry about falling over anything like that. So this is just, you know, two of the options out there. There are so many different kinds that comes down to what you're looking for. 93. Intro to Photo Scenarios: Welcome to this new series of lessons in the photography masterclass in this section and the following ones. We want to help you take better photos in a variety of different situations, using many of the skills you've learned in previous sections and some new ones. Thes demonstrations will help you become a more advanced photographer. Each section contains an intro lesson with our top tips for quickly improving the style of photography. Then we jump into the field to show you how to use those tips in real life. Feel free to jump around to the sections that interest you most. 94. Portrait Photography: Tips: this section is all about portrait photography. Let's dive right into our top tips. Tip one shoot at golden hour. Automatically shooting at this time will create a softer and warmer lighting for your photos. Also, with this tip, use the sunlight as a backlight instead of having your subject with the sun in their eyes, which may seem natural to beginner photographers to be able to expose them properly, Use the sun to create a nice glow from behind. Tip, too. Change up your compositions. Of course. You'll want to get a standard medium and close up, But while you're out shooting, make sure you get some wide shots, extreme close ups as well as some extreme wides with lots of negative space. Tip. Three. Clean up your background. First, pay attention to what's going on. Make sure there's nothing sticking out from your subjects head and next, get a shallower depth of field by moving your subject further away from the background and opening up your aperture tip for prepare some poses usar posing guide To have a number of poses up your photography sleeve, download this guide to your phone or even printed out to keep track of what shots you've got and what ones you'll need to get. Having this visual guide to show your subjects can help them understand what you're trying to capture. Tip five. Try some serious facial expressions. You don't always have to go for the smile. This can often result in some more interesting photos. With these tips, you'll be well on your way to improving your portrait photography. Now let's head out into the field and put them into practice. 95. Portrait Photography: Demo: welcome to the portrait scenario. I'm going to run through how to take a portrait in this specific setting, along with using the tips that Phil talked about earlier. We're going to run through those tips and apply them to taking a portrait to make your portrait's look better. So let's go ahead and get started. I have my ex t two here. I have everything on auto right now. It is totally auto up at zero exposure compensation, and I'm on my kit lens. It's an 18 to 55. I'm just gonna go ahead and just aim it, Phil, where he's standing and take a picture. All right, so there's our portrait, So let's take a look at this photo. I'm at a 23 millimeter on my 18 to 55 kit Zoom lens. It's on my crop sensor, X t. Two. This would just be your typical way to pick up a camera and take a portrait. Now it's not great. It's fine. It's a picture of Phil. It's not the best we can dio. There's an orange cone in the background. There is a bright white light on the right side fills just hanging out it's OK, but it's not great. So let's start with the basic settings that I would use to shoot a nice portrait. For starters, I'm going to get rid of this lens and I'm gonna use a prime lens. I'm going to use my 56 millimeter on the crop sensor, which is more like an 85 millimeters. So let's start with that. All right, I've got my 56 millimeter and I'm going to shoot at an F 1.4. That's mainly the reason I switched to this lens as well as its length. It's going to create some more depth of field now. We're still on auto other than the F stop, which I've changed to a 1.4. So we're going to step back a little bit. All right, so let's take a look at this picture Now. The fall off in the background is way more out of focus. It looks a little bit more professional. Still getting that cone in the background, though just pretty ridiculous. The camera itself has chosen 850th of a shutter and ISO of 200. I'm okay with, so go ahead and leave it like that. I do feel like it's a little bright. So I'm gonna go ahead and use my exposure compensation to come down to negative one to come down. Ah, stop. Basically. So let's take another shot job, Bill. All right, so take a look at this photo. It's a little bit darker. It's little bit getting more in line with what my style is again. We're dealing with that bright spot on the far right, and we're dealing with that cone and feels just kind of standing there. So let's apply our tips to start with. Choose a better background. Let's get rid of that cone. Look, we're in a really nice nature park. There's a really beautiful tree over here, so let's move over there. That's good. Cool. Come on over. All right, so now we're in a new position. The background looks good. I have the same settings. I'm at a 1.4 on my 56 millimeter on my crop sensor. I'm an auto, I s So it's giving me a 1600 right now. 0 200 I'm on auto shutter. So let's go ahead and take this look with our exposure at negative one. All right. So I put him. I put him with the sun in the background, and that's one of our tips. Try to get the son in the background. It gives a really nice, uh, light coming around a shoulder separating him from the background. Now this is now a little too dark because it's so much brightness in the background and that's shaded here. So our exposure compensation is overcompensating at this point, so we're gonna go ahead and shift that back down to zero. In fact, we might bring that all the way up to plus one now because we're in the shade. So let's take a look at that plus one and exposure compensation. It's selecting a seven and 50 shutter and 200 I. So there we go. It's a little bit better, a little bit brighter that the backgrounds had a focus on. The sun has a really nice backlight on Phil. You can see here we're in the shade so you can see the soft light coming from outside the shade in on Phil's face. Now let's talk about composition. So the fun thing about composition is you can really change things other than just dead. Centering your subject. Get closer, get further. Add negative space. You know, play around with your compositions once you have him in a nice setting and the backgrounds Good. Go ahead and try it out. So let's play around with some of our compositions. I'm just gonna have feel stand there for now. We'll adjust him later, hanging out and you know, all right, so now you can see that I've really messed around with changing the compositions. I went from horizontal to vertical. I also put him on a far left side of the screen. I put him on the far right side of the screen. I played with some negative space above his head. I played with some trees in the background here. It's really fun. You could really find the composition that works for you per your style once you get them in the right setting and you have the right exposure set in your camera. So now let's go ahead and start positioning him and different poses that we might like. This is gonna take you a lot of experience, and each person actually looks better in a different pose. So what I like to do is starting out. Is having Phil just squaring off to me. Go and score after he fell. Bring your left shoulder towards me. Yeah, but keep your eyes on me. Great. Now bring your face down. Tilt down. Perfect. Now, that's a really quick way of posing somebody very quickly. Another thing I like to do is having them sit down. Do you mind sitting down for me, Phil? So basically, I'm gonna be looking down on him. It's a much nicer, flattering shot. We still haven't backlit by the sun. Gonna have him bring his knees up so he can rest on his knees. This is really good for actors and headshots. All right, so we're back at our home camp here. Let's go and take a look at the photos that we shot of Phil Once we started messing around with composition and posing. You can see I had him sit down here on the ground and he's looking up again. Once you have the backlight set up the exposure set really play around compositions imposing It's much more flattering toe. Have someone look up at you. You can see it played with composition in this one as well. He's to the far right and this one. I had him looking right up at me. You can see that he's smiling and laughing a little bit. It's a pretty good shot, really, like classic headshot that may work for actors or, you know, corporate corporate corporate headshots. Now take a look at these. I put him in the trees here and you can see I got a little bit of flair on my lens. That's kind of some fun, magical things you could do with a portrait, especially when you're using toe back when you're using the sun to backlight them again. I had I had a ton of fun messing with the compositions. I moved his face all the way over to the right. Another times moved all the way over to the left. You can see the background is really out of focus, and that's because we're using that prime lens. And we were shooting at a 1.4, and that's a long prime lens, the sea as we cycle through a couple of these, I had him not smiling and then sort of smiling and then, like a full blown laugh, smile and was talking to him a little bit and trying to make him laugh. It really makes the photo look a little bit more dynamic. You can see in this one he's not smiling. And then we had a look in a different direction and he has a little bit of a smile. Changing your subject's face can really change the photo immensely. So let's compare this very last one with him just right here, looking off into the distance with the very first shot we took, The very first shot we took was just all on auto, just right up front, taking the camera shooting, not really thinking about it until we applied our tips and we applied the lessons that we've learned in this class. Basically, we've gone from zero to hero very quickly by just changing a few things like the lens, the F stop, the positioning, the sun and now keep in mind. You can still do a lot of these things about buying big, expensive lenses and stuff you can shoot at a longer lens. We talked about the depth of field changing when you shoot with a longer zoom lens opening up your F stop all the way and then just positioning a person in the right spot at the right time. That's a big deal that will improve your photography quite a bit. 96. Long Exposure Photography: Tips: this section is all about long exposure photography. Let's start out with our top tips. Tip number one. Use a tripod. You can't shoot long exposures properly by hand. Any little motion can ruin your photo tip number to purchase a remote shutter release. This allows you to do two things. It means you don't have to touch your camera body itself to snap the photo, which can lead to subtle motion. Blur because you're actually touching the camera, perhaps moving it. It also allows you to do custom, long exposures for any length of time, using the bull boat on your camera and we'll show you how to do this in our demo Tip. Three. Frame up first before you perfect your exposure. Crank up that I so and use a shorter shutter speed so you can get your framing just right. This is better than testing multiple minute or longer exposures, then needing to fix your framing. Tip number four. Look for motion when doing long exposures. Capturing motion is key to better photos. This could be anything from lights of a car driving by clouds flowing through the air or water flowing down a waterfall. Tip number five. Use nd filters neutral density filters because you can't decrease your shutter speed too much during a sunny day without completely overexposing your photo, you'll need nd filters to cut down the light entering your lens. Screw on filters or ones that drop in front of your lens can both work. They come in a variable style that comes in multiple nd settings or individual nd strengths that can be stacked. All right. With these tips, you'll be well on your way to improving your long exposure photography. So let's head out into the field and put them into practice. 97. Long Exposure Photography: Daytime Demo: All right, So we're here out of the creek, and we're gonna talk about long exposures during the daytime. Now we're out here, and I wanted a demo and kind of show you this type of scenario. We're at a creek. We're gonna do a long exposure, which means we're going to leave the shutter open for a long time. We're gonna expose the sensor for a long time. The cool thing about doing that with motion is that you get to really get to see this really cool flow of water. And the light gets to kind of move around, and it gets really cool. And we're going to stick on a try public. We did the night session so that the things that are not moving are locked off the sharp. They look cool, but the water that's moving love this cool, airy feel to it. So let's go ahead and start with what we got right here. So right now I have the camera on, uh, aperture priority. Um, I'm shooting right now at an F four. I found a nice little creek. Nice little seen here. Gonna auto focus and go ahead and take the shot and you can see the camera in this shot decided to pick a shutter of 1 20 because I'm shooting and ah, I s 0 200 shooting at f four. It's cool. It's got some motion to it, but it's not like a ton emotion, so I'm gonna go ahead and put it at one second. I'm gonna put the aperture over to shutter priority, so that means when it's on shutter priority, it will pick the F stop. It needs to be to achieve exposure at the shutter that I've picked. I'm leaving in a 200 eso because it's daytime. It's really bright out here, and I'm trying to get a lot of light in without overexposing the sensor. So the lowest sensitivity I can make the center the sensor, the better. Hence I'm at 200 eyes, so it should look really clear. Haven't set up here on a tripod because we're leaving it at one second. We want to get this stuff. It's not moving in sharpness, and any time I hold handhold that I won't be able to hold it for a second without moving it . So we're raising and try. But here we go. So I clicked. It moved away. So let's take a look at this photo. Cool. Now we see really sharp rocks. We see really sharp, mossy green grass in front of us and got some really cool motion coming from the water. That's a really fun way to make a really cool, creative looking water thing. I would actually maybe try and refrain just a little bit. Let's zoom out a little bit and see if we can get it a little bit more area. We're using the same settings and trying to, like, be cautious when I click the button, because any motion you give this will affect the image. So again, we got a really cool like silky looking water and stuff like that. Now my camera only goes down to Ah, the Diallo on a second. Now I do have a mode on my camera and go to A T. And I can actually select longer than one second. I'm going to select five seconds now again, since right shutter priority. My camera is already telling me that five seconds is gonna be too long. It's gonna make my photo too bright, and so it stopped down to F 22. Now let's see how how long I could go before it makes me not use a 22. It looks like one second is all I can dio. So let's go back up to five seconds and let's see what that does. Check out this photo. It is so bright, the water looks pretty cool in silky, but it is so bright, there's no way for me to make that darker at all. With this rig that I have set up, there's just too much light coming in for that long of a shutter time. The Izzo's too low. The F stop isn't high enough, toe let less lighted. So we have to do something to make it look better if we want to expose for longer time. So what are we gonna do if we want to expose longer? We want to have more motion creating more eerie cool feeling, but we still want to get everything sharp and in focus and exposed. We need to put in a filter so we use neutral density filters to basically block down the amount of light in but not change any color or contrast or anything like that. All this does is bring down the levels of light. So for my camera, my lands, I actually have a big stopper. It's a lee filter, and they make an ND filter that is an nd 10. That means we're going taking down the light by 10 stops. That means, you know, we're exposing at a to eight. We're gonna count up 10 f stops. That's 284568 11 and so on. That's only four. So imagine how much light were really cutting down. So let's go ahead and throw that on the front of my lens and let's see what happens. So this is actually my kit lens for my camera, which is my white ist lens that I have and because I don't care about f. Stop. I know that it doesn't matter that this is not fast enough for this, but because I can go to in 18 to 55 I have a ton of range. So I bought this adapter. This adaptor will circle onto this specific lens. It's got the correct diameter, and it just screws on like that. The reason I have an adapter because the filter that were using Onley sits in this specific Lee holder, so this will hold two filters. But because it's so large, I can't get it on my lens. Hence the small adapter. So again I'll be able to just kind of snap it in like so okay, and then I'll put my filter right in there. You want to be careful with voters. They're very touch sensitive. It's very be very easy for you to get fingerprints on it. So that's why I keep it wrapped in this nice tissue paper. And when you grab it, I grab on the edges. So even if a little bit comes off, it comes off, uh, on the sides. They're gonna slide it in here. I like to slide my filters in the closest slot, too. The lens I can so that you don't see any other space in between there, and that's a good practices. Get it as close to the lens as humanly possible. So I've got the filter in there and you can see even when I look through it, it is so dark, I can't see anything, So we're gonna put it right here, got my filter on it Zbig Stoppard's 10 stops a light now because I know we're stopping down that much. I'm gonna go ahead and plug in my food. You remote for that? My specific camera, Basically this Allow me to push the button for the shutter without having to touch the camera, thus minimising the movement of the camera and so we could make sure that we get things that really in sharp. The reason I do that is because exposure is going to be so long. The shutter is gonna be open for so long that any movement it gets is gonna affect the sharpness of the picture. It's just plugs in over him. We're gonna go and frame up the shot. Now. I'm really lucky because I'm using a mere lis camera now in the Mehlis camera. If your camera is sensitive enough, it will actually be able to see the image through the filter, Which is pretty crazy because my older camera, you wouldn't be able to do this. And you have to calculate the exact exposure because you just wouldn't be able to see anything, because I can frame it up without doing calculations. We'll go ahead and moving that method and then we'll show you how to calculate it in a second. Now, right now, my camera is left on five seconds of a shutter. Now it's now telling me that that's too dark, even at the F 36 that it's picking because one shutter priority. So I'm gonna go ahead and move the shutter up with my wheel that I can use. So I've moved my shutter now to 30 seconds. And because one shutter priority, it's picked an F stop oven F four, which is fine. That's great. I want a lot of things and focus and actually appreciate more things and focus. So I want to get a higher F stop now. 30 seconds. The max I can go on my camera for actually dialing and shutter, but I am at an I s 0 200 So if you think back to our exposure compensation talk, we can up the sensitivity of our sensor so that I can stop down a little bit more and get more things and focus. So I'm gonna go ahead and lift my eyes so up to, let's say, 100 because I feel like a nice round number, and I know my camera can handle 800. Really well. So now my camera has picked an F eight for my shudder at 30 seconds, and it picked the FAA because I'm shooting and shutter priority still, because I want to pick the exact shutter that I want. F It's great. More things will be in focus more so than the 35 that it was giving us before 100 esos wonderful, because I know that my camera operates while in 100 now, 30 seconds kind of a long time. It doesn't seem like it's a long time, but if you take a shot for 30 seconds, you're gonna be sitting here for the 30 seconds that you take the shot plus depending on your camera and then has to process that image and buffer it and create it. So that will be another probably half of 30 seconds. So 15 seconds. So maybe just for sake of time, let's get it down to 10 seconds. Remember, we're at five earlier now, 10 seconds. It's only giving me enough stop of 4.5. Not as not as high as I wanted to be a really would like to hit a 56 or above. So let's bump the I s so up again. 12. 50. Now that's getting us an F stop of a 56 with shutter priority 12th Cheddar. Let's take that shot. Use the remote to push the button. Camera is counting opening the shutter for 10 seconds at all our settings. The water is moving the airfields knife. We just gotta wait now. So take a look at this shot. We've got a lot of things and focus, but the water looks really dreamy and movie really cool. Way to kind of get this really creative spot. And I want I kind of wanted toe to be even more like I don't know, mystical. So I think we need mawr time in the water. So let's go back and let's see if we can push it to 30 seconds now at 30 seconds, it's giving me an F stop of 10 because I'm at 12 50. Now that we're changing the shutter, I feel like we can drop our eyes so back down to 800 and the camera is giving us an FAA, which is great. Let's do this 32nd exposure. So it looks like All right, so take a look at her shot. Now, this is a 32nd exposure at 100 eyes, so and f eight. So, yeah, this looks great that we could see the waters a little bit more dreamy. We're getting the movement ish in the water. This River creek is not moving that fast. So I would suggest the faster moving water stream. The more, uh, movement you'll see and you'll get. I think I might actually pan over a little bit, and you can see in the right side of this image there's a little bit more movement on that side. So let's go ahead and zoom in on that and we'll see what that looks like. So if hand over a little bit, I zoomed in and I'm noticing now that my camera is actually having trouble auto focusing, that's something to think about when you have a big giant filter in front of the lens and you can't see anything, your camera can see anything either. So I'm kind of focusing on a little bit of sun in the upper left corner that it's able to focus on it looks like, which is great if you're not in that situation, most lenses will have the feet and centimeters on the lens and on the back of the screen, we're gonna have to do your best to use that to focus. The cool thing is that we're shooting at a higher ups stop, so that means we have a bigger range of nailing that focus. Let's go and look with see with the shot looks like and 36 0 yeah, see, Like a little bit of a bummer, because that rock that was trying to focus on a number that's sons hitting is like super bright. But look how dream and silky the water looks because it's moving so much. The rock on the right is in focus, and it's sharp and you get this really cool movement in the water. So this is a really cool way to shoot sort of water. Daytime stuff like a notion with tide pools, waves under appear. Ah, waterfall. So if 30 seconds doesn't seem like enough to you like, say, you want to maybe exposed us more or you're not in the shade like you can see, our rock is in the sun. I think having a higher F stop would be better. More things were in focus. You can stop down a bunch adversely, though that's gonna have an effect on your shutter. Now most cameras will hit. Will Max out at 30 seconds. Some of you consent for longer. But I'd say generally most for Mac. About 30 seconds. So the next step after that is bold mode. What ball bone means is you can push the button to have the shutter move up. And then you there, leko, or push it again toe, have it come down depending on your camera. That means you can time out any time you need for your shutter link. So let's go ahead and take it off, shutter priority because we max out at 30 so we can get our f stop down to F 22. Not an F 20 to 30 seconds. I s 0 800 I can't see a thing I can't see through the image. The camera can't see anything until we're open for a long time, I'm gonna go and shift my camera into bold mode. Here we go. Now it's recommended. This point you're gonna have to keep time yourself now, whether that's counting in your head, which is always gonna be not the same or using a timer on something like your phone or some stock watch. If you've got that, that might actually work better is gonna be the best way to keep track of your exposure link. So we're gonna go ahead and I'm gonna hit my timer. And I have my boat at the same time because we're at 30 seconds. You can do a little bit of the math and use a calculator here, but before we're at 30 seconds and F eight and we just closed down to a 22. So for an F eight, that's 11 16 22. We just went up three stops. So without doing math, just kind of judging 30 seconds not long enough. Let's just double that so we can see what effect that has, and that will be 60 seconds or a full minute. So I'm gonna go ahead and time that out. Here we go. I guess what? We're waiting something to understand about your remote. Every remote is different on the Fuji. If you push it and slide it up. It holds the bulb up, and as soon as I let go the global undo on other cameras, it's You have to hold it down with your hand. Maybe there's a little lock on other remote to push it once and you can let go and it's open and they push it again. I'll close. It really depends on the type of remote and camera system you have for the food you want is just this very tiny little USB style remote. Pretty easy to use minimizes all the movement on your camera, especially when you're open for a minute. I'm kind of scared to move. Hopefully, the wind doesn't blow my camera. Earlier, there were 50 seconds, 3 to 1 family. So I'm taking a look at the photo now, and it's just too dark. So a minute wasn't enough. Next, if you want to keep the F 22 we need to go even higher. I'm just kind of shooting off into the random space here. Is there a way to get around that? Yes, you can download on your phone or a mobile device, a calculator that will help you calculate the exact exposure you need. So basically it starts with a base shutter exposure. You let it know what f stop you're gonna shoot and then how many stops of light you're cutting down? Once you put that into your calculator, it will then tell you what the corresponding time or shutter value need to achieve that same exposure. So in order to get back to that and try and get to our F 22 f stop, let's go ahead and see what a normal exposure would look like without stopping down the light. So I got to take the filter off. So I've taken the filter off. I've framed up our shot. I can see it now because I have no filter in front. I put it on aperture priority because we want to prioritize our F 22. I'm at an F 22 the cameras giving me 1/5 of a second to basically yet this shot at the right exposure now, Phil Scott a calculator over there on the side and he's gonna go ahead and calculate that and let me know what number I need to shoot and shutter wise. After putting 10 stops of light in front of our lens bill. All right, so Phyllis telling me off camera that this is going to take three minutes and 24 seconds. I don't really feel like waiting around for three minutes and 24 seconds and then waiting for two minutes for it's a process. So maybe F 22 is getting a little crazy for this situation. Could do that if you like, and you have all the time in the world. We're gonna stop down to an F 11 then and that's telling me that my base to get exposure here is 20th of a second. So let's calculate that and see what that looks like when we put again 10 stops of light in front of So that calculates to 51 seconds with our 10 stops of light. So let's put this guy back in. Our calculation was 51 seconds. So we're gonna go back until bold mode and read enough 11. We could kind of see stuff, but not really. We're gonna get our stopwatch, and we're gonna and 51 seconds ready. Here we go. I heard the shutter start a little bit after I clicked the remote. So keep an eye on that. I might go 52 seconds just to be safe. So we're using an app called long exposure Calculator for IOS. And basically every phone has its own app. You can search for long exposure calculator in your APP store for whatever system you have , and a bunch of different will come up. So I'm looking at this photo now with our long 51 2nd exposure with our big stopper at F 11 100. I S O. That's another way to calculate exactly how much time you need based on your other settings . It looks at exposure like our other shots, where you definitely don't need to shoot at F 11 or high rise. So just depends on what situation you're doing. I like to shoot a higher F stops in these types of situations because one I'm not always sure with the focus because it's hard to see through the filter and two, it just looks really nice with, like, everything in focus and sharp. All right, so we moved over here from our last location in quotes in my camera bag back there, it left, but ah, just creatively like this is a much cooler shot has got more depth to it. There's a little bit more movement in the water and I just like it a lot more. The rocks or contrast You were all in the shade, so the exposure will be clear the whole way versus having some sunspots. Let's go and take a normal photo. I met completely on auto on everything but cameras giving me 1/60 of a shutter F four at 200 s. Oh, here we go. Click Water looks frozen. Very cool, Cool Reflections. Let's go ahead and put the big stopper on and we'll go to shutter priority and so I can stay under 30 seconds. So I went and put my eyes So 800. So I get a little bit more information. I put it at 30 seconds to get a lot of movement. It's a long shudder that's open. And the camera itself is picking an F 20 for me, which means lots of things will be in focus. I've plugged in my remote so I don't shake the camera. We're gonna push it. We go. So check out this photo. This looks awesome. I really love it. I got a lot of contrast going on which I personally like a lot. You can see the movement in the water. The reflections aren't very good because the water is moving and we're leaving that long exposure open. I just I really love the shot looks really dark and cool, but you can see how big of a difference compared This shot with the one we took without the long exposure. There's two completely different moods. They're two completely different photos. The movement in the water just adds a whole ethereal feel to it. Um, this is really fun thing to go on play with. So now you have this wonderful new skill to do with long exposure during the day. A Z can tell, Really, you don't necessarily need a filter. Although it does help, they're not super expensive. You can find them online for your specific lens and camera. This is another tool in your photographic arsenal of tools to be able to get out there and make some really cool creative shots 98. Long Exposure Photography: Night Demo: So we've come up here into the foothills of the San Gabriel to do some long exposure photography. Behind you is this amazing view of the city. But for now, we're focusing looking this way because there's actually this great s spend just going to take a photo right now as I'm talking to you more or less as cars come by, we are in this big U turn. So as the car comes by, we're doing a long exposure and we actually see the car. The streak of light come across the screen. It's a really cool look here. You conceive of our first tests photos. It's a little bit too much ground in there for us, but it's a really cool effect. We're currently shooting on a 16 to 35 at 16 millimeters, and I almost won't be wider than this, but we're working with what we have. Um, currently, my settings are at 15 seconds, which is about the mouth time it takes for these cars to go buy. Some people are driving pretty fast, so sometimes it's even too long. My eyes. So is that 1000 which for this camera is definitely within range I might go even a little bit higher. And I'm f 2.8. So I might go toe at four or 5.6 just to make sure that everything's really in focus and then boost my eyes. So ah, just toe you bring up the brightness a little bit also, Uh, typically, I wouldn't wear a headlamp like this in a video, but I just want to mention that when doing long exposure photography when you're out here in the dark. Um, you know, we have this white light just so you guys can see us or see me talking the red light, though it doesn't affect your night vision, enables you to still see in the darkness where's of white light will make it much harder to see. Once you turn off that light a red light, your eyes still adjust to the lighting around you, and it makes it a lot easier to see. I can also still see the feet, you know, functions on my camera and adjust all those without, you know, turning on a bright white light and then having my eyes to have to be a just, um, one thing to be careful, though. If you have a lights on and you're taking long exposures, that light will bleed into your photos. So you don't want that to happen cause ill? Well, maybe you do want that to happen, but for this sake, we don't want that to happen. So we're just waiting for another car to come by now. I've tilted up, so we have less ground in the frame. I've gone to an ISO of 4000 F 5.6 15 2nd shutter. Really, this is all guesswork. And you just have to try, try, try again until you find the right settings for you and the photo you're trying to trying to take. We got a car coming, so I just took the shutter. There goes the car and just waiting for the 15 seconds to be up. And there goes, so you'll notice. Sometimes after taking these photos that you can't preview the photo right away. It's because your camera is actually processing all that light and turning it into one image. So let's check this out. Oh, man. Yeah, this is awesome. So because the cars coming around a U bend, we have both red light from the brakes and white light from the headlights, and it's almost surreal. You can see where the headlamps have lit up the surrounding area on. Then, as the car comes around and that red light becomes revealed, the red lights of comes into play as it, um, makes its way around that bend. Now, looking up in the sky, we do not see any stars. That's because we have Los Angeles blow us, and we have tons of light pollution. It also is a little bit hazy out tonight, so there's just enough stuff in the atmosphere that we're not seeing any stars. There's a chance that when I bring this into post, they'll be able to use the D. Hayes filter all night room and maybe bring out with Started to, But it's not looking too likely. So right here in the middle of the U turn, I kind of want to see I want to see the entire thing is cropping just on the edges. So we're gonna move down the street a little bit, get more of one side unless of the other, but will be able to get the entire thing in the single frame so No. With long exposures you got Be patient. Each time you take a photo, it's going take 15 seconds or 30 seconds. And in this case, we're actually waiting for cars. So we have to be patient with us and take the time to get the shot. So let's move over there and see what we can get. Now it's nighttime. You got be really careful that you move slowly and you don't fall off a cliff or damage any of your photo equipment you want. Just take the time and, you know, make sure you set up right. This could be I don't know if I'm way off. Here comes another car, though. Okay, so I'm not set up. Adul the legs and I've been on the ground. I've probably been moving it around. Let's see what this looks like, though that's vehicle Still another holding. Yes, Phil has the right idea. This is another reason to go out and do these types of things with friends. Because different people have different ideas. You just get Teoh, try different things. Another sort of pro tip is if you do have a headlamp or any flashlight concerns, shine the light out there to actually see what's in your frame so I can see that everything I want to be in this frame is actually in there. There is, um, stuff in the way like this is tree here and because it's a little windy, I think it's gonna be kind of blurry. But we'll just have to wait for the next car and see how this looks. You know, maybe having the tree and there will be cool and maybe I won't like it, but we'll give it a shot. So we just had this car go by moving up here. We're actually able to see the car come from a lot farther away and make the whole band. And in the 15 seconds time I counted it out is exactly 15 seconds from down there all the way around. So we got the full streak. It is a little over exposed or probably could stop down, but again, this is a seven R three shooting uncompressed raw. There's tons of data in there will be able probably bring some things down. Um, but overall, you know, I'm even think some stars in here now. It's a pretty cool shot. Phil. Do you wanna You wanna take a look or that's dope? Yo, Yeah, It could be a little less, but you want to get the wall, you want to get the streets, but you could stop down, but yeah, like I could stop down 5.6. All right, so I just hit the shutter. Maybe a little prematurely, but there goes the truck, and he's going in the opposite direction. So we're gonna have a lot more red light this time around, and we're actually going a second car. So maybe right when this car comes, I'm going to stop down even till 11. Now is just at f eight nama half 11 just to try something different. You know, we got lucky we had two cars going in the same direction, so we'll be able to compare these two. Now, this guy is driving much slower, so I'm not sure they'll make it the entire distance, but they do almost almost made the entire distance. So by stopping down instead of just having these big blobs of white light, we now have much cleaner streaks and wears before it almost looks like the entire car was going now? It's really focused in on those headlights and those tail lights. It's really cool because we started the exposure when the cars were actually behind these trees and they get these low glimpses of like, Oh, we got another car. This car is coming the other direction. So again, we'll see the difference of when headlights are coming at you versus tail lights leading. Wait. Okay. How does this one look? So getting its processing patient. Ah, that looks amazing. And it's kind of nice having these trees, and they're actually add some foreground elements. Um, I do think I'll probably crop this a little bit again. Is there are three. I'm shooting probably close to 100 megapixel images right now. I mean, there's so much information in these things. Um, I'll be able to play around with him a lot. I am. I have the entire road in there, though, have this cool star effect from the headlights. So that's long exposure photography. You know, this is very clearly, um, you know, having lights moving in your image. There's also astro photography, all these other things. But the key things to remember are having a tripod testing, testing, testing you doing different F stops that you have more unfocused lesson Focus. How high? Vinai. So can you go without making it look too noisy and then, you know, really just being patient, taking the time to practice composer shots, finding the right angle to get the right location and the right, you know, scenery around you. It's all about patients, so go out there and have fun. 99. Landscape Photography: Tips: this section is all about landscape photography. Let's start out with our top tips. Tip. One. Increase your depth of field with landscape photos. You'll typically want more to be in focus. Crank up that F stop to make sure you get a much and focus as possible. Tip, too. Look for a subject or a focal point. While landscape photography might mean just capturing him wide open view, the best landscape photos have some sort of subject. It doesn't even have to be something natural. It could be a cityscape or a particular building, or even just a tree while out shooting. Look for something specific to capture rather than just capturing everything in sight. Tip. Three. Choose the right lens. If you don't have a wide lens like something between 11 to 35 millimeters, you'll want one. For landscape photography, A wide lands is crucial for capturing the entire view in front of you. At the same time. Bring a telephoto lens that allows you to capture closer up shots of specific landscapes. Tip for go at the right time of day, shooting at Golden Hour will create more contrast and interesting shadows going across the landscape it's worth getting up super early to catch the sunrise to capture this beautiful lighting. Tip five straight in out that horizon. Of course, you can fix this in posts, but the less work you have and editing the better. So make sure your horizons air straight across and also pay attention to where they are in your frame. Do you want to at the very bottom of the frame with the sky creating a shot with lots of negative space? Or is there enough interesting landscape to put the horizon up higher? All right. With these tips, you'll be well on your way to improving your landscape photography. Now let's head out into the field and put them into practice. 100. Landscape Photography: Demo: everyone so out here shooting landscapes, and we just won't put some of those tips into practice. So we're in full auto mode. I'm just going go over here. Nothing about too much TECO shot. I'm on the widest focal length for my lens, so really just taking big, wide shot out there. You can see that it's focused on the sky to get that in good exposure. But the lower areas you know, the trees and everything are completely dark because we are outdoors. There is a good amount light. All those settings make sense more or less, but I want to get a little bit deeper into this. So first thing when doing landscapes, I'm going upon a polarizer. This polarize ER's like you know, will help sort of bring out more of the blues and the colors. Also give of reflections. It's something I like to use when shooting landscapes. Next, I'm going go into manual mode. Um, you know, like we talked about having a bigger F stop is going. Just have more and focus. I have a pretty wide lens here. It's a 16 to 35 so, really, already most things are gonna be in focus. But just to really make sure I'm going to go to a F eight, and this will also be the service sweet spot of the lens. It's really gonna be sharp and clear in all the corners. Now, when shooting with the polarizer, you have to actually spend the Pola to see the difference it's making. So let's line this up and I'll take one. So here you can see the polarizer more or less off, um, the skies, pretty white looking. You know, there's no a lot of color in there. Now rotate it and really deep in that sky, you can see just how much more rich and colorful the sky is now. Next is something about composition. The main focus of the photo is the skyline. But because I'm so wide, I'm also thinking about you know, we have the school clouds coming in there, illuminated from the sunrise. We also have this foliage in the foreground, and so the concept here was where nature meets the city. So we wanted to get both of those in frame, so I'm going to punch into 35 disc in a little bit closer. Another nice thing is I know I'm shooting in raw, so I will be able crop in after the fact if there is anything that I'm not necessarily enjoying, So I set up in that shot the city to be serve low and frame off to the right. So you had a lot of sky and also some of that tree foliage off to the left shows a contrast there. I'm just going to take a few different photos. I will say that with my auto focus, it was having trouble focusing because I was doing negative space of the middle point Where is trying to focus was the sky so it couldn't focus. So I moved my autofocus, uh, spot to the lower right corner over the city so it would focus on that. I'm just playing around this this path here. So I'm doing some with the skyline, you know, higher up in frame and having mawr foliage in the foreground. I'm going get lower, get higher, really just going to have a bunch of different things to see what works. And once I've got my sayings and I'm feeling pretty comfortable. But, you know, as I get more of this foreground in frame. It is a bit darker, so I'm going. Just my shudder. Just make it a little bit slower, maybe 1 25th just to get more light there again, shooting raw. So I know that will be able to bring some out of the shadows. I don't want the sky toe ever be to blown out because I won't be able to bring back that information. Clouds are always going to be the biggest thing to give you an issue because they're white and they're reflecting the sun, the sky, not so much, but the clouds will blow out very quickly. All right, so now they have taken a few wide angle shots. I just want hop on to a longer telephoto lens just so you can see the difference. This is still considered a landscape. It's just gonna be more zoomed in on a specific subject, all right, so I don't actually have that long of lens that is Sony made yet. I just don't have it in my kit. So here we have a Sigma 50 to 100 with a cannon adapter to the Sony email, so it's a little bit large, but it's still fully works. You know, I will lose most of that auto focus features with this, but that's really okay with me. Typically, when shooting more telephoto, it's easier to find that focal plane if the subjects not moving. So I'm going go all the way to 100 and at 100 I'm actually to zoomed in. I'm really focusing on that skyline, so I'm just gonna pull back out to They're so mad about a 60 which from the 35 or 16 is you much more telephoto. Great. So I just took a couple shots. There's actually a plane flying in between the two buildings, so it's kind of a subject behind the buildings it looked really cool on. You can see that this is just really zoomed in on the buildings. It's more focused on that and still considered a city escape, a landscape of sorts because it's wide shot. It's just a more telephoto wide shot, which I really like Now we also have some of the Hollywood hills. We have the Hollywood sign, a couple things around us. I'm going, go around, take a couple photos, but really, this is all about finding a subject for your landscape. You know something that your audience is. I will focus on when they're looking at your photo. Uh, using that higher f stop just guaranteeing that everything's in focus. If you want some foreground elements out of focus, you can still go to the lower F stop. It's really sort of preference at that point. I've tried a few different focal links here, so going from the telephoto to the more wide angle, you know, just trying different things that works for you. Sing what you like most and also wear out here in the early morning. We have this great soft lighting. It's not hard shadows. It's just a little bit more interesting looking. We're still in the same park, but we just drove around looking for another view, and we found this great view of the San Gabriel Mountains. Now, one of my favorite things with landscapes like this is when you have one mountain, another mountain behind it. I think it adds great depth to it again, though I dropped on that F stop so that everything still in focus all play with both F stops. Just a show when you have a showered up the field versus, uh, larger depth of field. But it's just good to, you know, try. Different things were also still in your The sun's coming up a little bit more. But we have this directional son. So do I. Won't be looking towards the sun getting more contrast in that way. Or do I won't be looking this way with the son's pretty much hitting everything. It's a little bit more even. There's no right answer here, obviously, but I'm just going go around, take a couple different shots, get both the city and the landscape. You know another thing you'll see in my shots. I really love negative space. I think having a lot of sky and there is a really cool effect. We don't have quite as many clouds over here, but earlier there were some great shots with a lot of clouds. It adds a texture to the sky. So again, all things to consider when you're out shooting your landscape photos 101. Product Photography: Tips: All right, Welcome to this new scenario on product photography. We're gonna talk about shooting an actual product. Now there's two different really types of ways of shooting product photography. There's the product photography, where it's on a backdrop and you're shooting the actual product itself. Our product today is gonna be this little Hold a camera, and there's also lifestyle product photography, and that's out in the field seeing actually being used in work. Now you can use all your other photography skills to kind of shoot outdoors and go shoot in action and seeing this out in the world. So we're gonna concentrate on sort of a d i Y way to shoot the product itself on a nice, clean backdrop. Um, this is great for using an e commerce on websites. If you're shooting, you know, even food or any type of product that you need to showcase to either sell or sort of showed a magazine or anything like that. It's also a really cool way to start making money with your photography. So we're gonna do some really basic shots using a kit lens on my fuji X T to a tripod, some butcher paper some natural light and some really cool tips to show you how to do this . So let's get into it. The first tip is using a cheap paper roll or posterboard to create a really nice looking professional backdrop. Tip number two is using a tripod. This will help with a lot of different things. For one, it will let you shoot with a higher F stop. That means stopping down to, like, 11 or even eight or 16 getting mawr in focus so your product looks great and that way to let you have a longer shutter exposure on your tripod. You get that handshake. It will also let you compose your shot effortlessly, and it will be consistent if you're shooting multiple products over one. Really, the tripod is fantastic and a must have for product photography. So tip number three is controlling your light with bounce cards or negative Phil. So we'll use posterboard. We have white posterboard or black posterboard that I'll help you control contrast. Control. The look on your product itself tip for is really paying attention to your product. Make sure it's far enough away from the background. It's in the center where all your light is and it's clean and it looks pristine. You can fix up some stuff on photo shop, but the more time you spend on set making sure product looks good, the easier time you'll have later. Tip number five is making your product look even more professional in a higher production value. By creating a reflection under the product, you're going to use some plexi glass glass or a mere to create this really cool reflection from below that are really add a lot of production value to your D. I. Y. Project on our last tip is to edit your photos to make them look as professional as possible. Clean up the background, clean up any spots, make your product look clean. Bring up the whites, crushed the blacks, little bit. Add contrast. Just make it look as professional as you can. 102. Product Photography: Natural Light Demo: All right, So we're here with our products set up. What we've done is I've got a big piece of white paper on a butcher roll. You can get this at an arts and crafts store, photo store, really anywhere in any type of background. Were using white because it's very basic. We also have a backdrop set up for it. Now, we have this because we shoot like this all the time. But if you don't have something like this, you could just attach it to ah, Rod or a chair or a ladder or really anything a wall. So you can really do this at home. We have a garage door opens. We're letting all this natural light coming in on our whole go right here. I have a tripod Which eyes gonna help us because I'm shooting at an F 11? The reason is I want to get as much in focuses. I can. I want to see the whole product. Let's just say we're putting this on. Let's hear a website were trying to sell it, um, in some shooting at an F 11 which means I need to have my shudder at 1/15 of a second at 400. I s O so I can't really handhold this, and I want to be able to get that high f stop. So right now I'm at an 18 millimeter on my kit lens. It looks great. I'm going to go and take a shot. Boom! There's our first product shot. It's pretty good. I'm actually gonna zoom in a little bit to get a little bit more in there, and I'm going to drop it down to an eighth of a second. And that's gonna make the background even brighter because it's white and it's soaking up all that natural light. We're gonna make the white just look really clean, really professional, and I'm gonna take it again. Autofocus, Bam! Take a look at this shot. This looks like a really nice product shot. I think, actually, I am a little bit high angled on it, so I'm gonna come down a little bit. I want to see more of the camera itself. We'll get will adjust. Our tripod were getting a little shorter here. Aim it perfectly and I can level everything here being on the tripod. I could go ahead and shoot this If I had a remote, I would just use the remote. Um, I don't have to touch it and you can see that's looks like a really nice product shot. Very easy, very simple to set up. I'm not even using any lights. It's all coming from outdoors sons hitting the houses in the background and it's reflecting back in again. I'm kind of married by the daytime, but let's let's add a little bit more dynamic. Mr What if we want to control the light around this, So I want to design this shot a little bit better now because we're shooting with outside light. I really have one big source coming in and you can see in this photo there's a little bit of shadow coming on. The our rights, the right the this part of the camera over here, a little bit of shadow, and I kind of want to, like, Kill that. I want to make the whole image look really clean. Really lit. I don't have any lights on me. So what? I'm gonna uses bounce. I'm gonna take that light coming in. I'm gonna bounce it off another white source and have fill in they may remember in a three point lighting set up, we have the key light and then have a fill light to kind of get rid of those shadows and make it look really nice and even lighting. So I have a white board over here now. It's probably hard to tell from the video camera itself. You can see this light is just bouncing a ton more. It's a bright white card that's bouncing more light enough now. Basically, I could get it as close as I can to our our image right here and you can't really see. Maybe you can see a little bit. You can see how it's filling in the shadows on the video camera. Phil, can you see that? So you could see shadows. It's causing out of air, but no shadows. So if I just set this year, normally you have a friend. Hold it where you can walk it down with a clamp or lean it up against a stack of books or a chair or something, and I'm gonna take the shot. Now if we look at these two images, compare this shot to that shot. Look how much cleaner it is now. It's just nice. Evenly. Let it really looks like we have a professionally lit subject. It's a little bright to me, so I'm actually gonna come down and stop it. You're gonna go down to 1/15 of a second. Bring this back up. I'm gonna get it as close as I can before it's in my frame right there. So we get maximum amount of bounce, take a picture boom, take it with, take it without and you can really see the difference in what having a bounce like that is compared that it's subtle. It's really subtle, but you can really see the difference in making it look going from just kind of a standard photo with shadows to what looks like a very professionally lit program shot and in editing , you can even Brighton that stuff up. You can take out the shadows a little bit more, but there's a really cool way to like add a lot of nice lighting so adversely to the bounce light, adding light. Sometimes you get products where you want to add more contrast Now, there might be too much light coming in, and you want to see that contrast. You want to see those shadows? You wanna have a negative? Phil is what we call it. Instead of adding positive light, we're going to try and take light away. So to do that, we use another bounce card. But this time it's black because black soaks up light. So I've got this black card here, and this is the same size card. It's black is a little big, but I got big ones just in case. Um, and we're gonna do the same thing. We're gonna bring it right in as close as we can next to our light. Here are camera here and you can see how this is adding Aitana contrast and really taking away a lot of light from the subject as a whole. Take the picture. Still a little dark. We're gonna bring it up to eighth again. Take a shop. Now let's take it away and we'll take a shot. Now let's compare these two shots. You can see how there's our normal contrast that we had a beginning and this is even added contrast. You can see it just adds a deeper, deeper contrast to the left of that lens on the right of the camera. Switching back and forth really adds a deeper contrast and allows shadows to wrap around the camera itself. Depending on what you're shooting, you may want that you may not want that. It also depends on your style. Thing kind of looks cool in this camera cause it adds some death to it. But I also like the full. The full light source to kind of depends on the style of what you're shooting. What your backdrop is, what your subject is. But it's another way to control the light and create contrast on your image. It's up to you on how you want to do it. So this is a very quick and easy cheap set up. Now. You were using a garage door, and I think the bigger the window, the better. You can do this near a big window, a big garage open door. It's just free light that you can use. This whole set up costs under 20 to $30. You can get paper and you can get a poster board any color that you want, Um, really at a craft store. If you can't get a big roll of paper get a big giant poster board, and you can just kind of roll it up like that, and I'll still have the same effect. This is the best and easiest set up you can do to start doing your product photography and really work anywhere now to push ourselves. We're gonna do another thing by adding actual lights. When you can control the light, you'll be able to design it a little bit more easily on, and also you can shoot anytime of the day. 103. Product Photography: Lighting Demo: So we showed you how to use natural light. Let's talk about studio lights. Now, if you have the investment and you're gonna be doing product photography a lot, I would highly recommend this set up more than any other set up. You can shoot any size. Ah, and you're able to control the light at any time of the day anywhere. Really. What we have is two lights with soft boxes on their daylight balanced, and then we have a backlight and won't necessarily use the backlight. But what we're gonna do is we're gonna set up these studio lights in the same way the natural light was coming in with the bounce. So basically, they're soft boxes. I'm aiming them directly at our subject. And these lights are dimmable. So we can really control exactly what kind of light looks on a product, and you can see how right away we're starting to brighten up the background quite a bit. It's creating a little bit of harsh shadows. They're canceling each other's shadows out. The really cool thing about these is you can kind of move them around and really design and create the light you want. So now look at our camera. It's pretty bright. We got bright lights. I'm gonna leave it right so that the white becomes a very, very weight. There we go. There's our picture. Our product looks nice and clean and pretty professional. Um, I would actually move the lights up a little bit, so they're pointed down so the soft boxes really help with softening the light. So the light is not as harsh. So you don't see those shadows necessarily as much. You can kind of see the shadows right now, but if you overexpose a little bit, the shadows will start to blow out a little bit. And also, the closer you move a light, the more intense it will be in the more you can get out of it versus the farther away it is . So keep that in mind if you're bright. If your lights are not necessary bright enough, get them as close as you possibly can and will. You'll be adding, like as you get closer. So we moved their lights, go and take a shot that looks pretty good. I still see some of the shadows in the background a bit, but we can fix that up in post. If we had a longer arm, I would move the lights in a little bit closer. These are a little bit hard to tilt down. I would even maybe move the table up a little bit. Um, it's very easy to control. And you can tell that, uh, you can have control with these types of lights, just like we did with the negative. Phil, if we kill this light on the backdrop here now, we've created a moodier look. It's kind of like a really cool, harsh light. Actually, if we stop down a little bit, I'm going to 1/15 of a second. I'm a still at f 11. Take a picture. Look how cool that moody look looks Now, if I was doing a product shot where I was kind of like focusing on shadows and had a really contrast the website, this would be a great shot for that. Compare that to this a little bit bright. This has a little bit more character, a little bit more interesting, which is pretty cool 104. Product Photography: Reflection: So another tip to really add production value to your shots is adding a cool, reflective bottom part to your shot. We're gonna do this by putting in either plexi glass or glass and putting, making sure that white is underneath and then taking a shots. Let's see how that looks. So get a clean piece of plexi glass here and what it will do once on the white is going to add a reflection on the bottom. I'm trying not to touch it, to keep my fingerprints off it. And I'm going to move this. Put this down. I'm gonna keep a little bit of plastic on. And I just got this at your local hardware store. It's pretty easy to pick up. It was like six bucks. I put this here. The white doesn't show it as much, and we'll change it out with black eventually. But you can see how, with the light we have right now, we have a really cool, reflective shotguns. Good, and take it. So check that out. So that's kind of a really cool way to kind of up the product of your shot. I would impose end up taking out those lines in the back room where you can see in the background here this this line that breaks out. Um and actually, I think if we pulled the paper back a little bit, we might be able to get rid of that. Ah, and you wouldn't see that as much, depending on what you're shooting. It's kind of cool to see that reflection added. It makes it look a little bit more dynamic ads sort of a look to it. So this looks really cool. This actually works better with, maybe like a darker bottom. So let's go ahead and put the black cardboard underneath and see how that reflection changes in more. So what we've done here is I've taken the same plexi that we had on the way I took our black cardboard that we had her black posterboard that we had before using negative. Phil put it under the plexi glass, and it creates a really cool black mirror effect and check it out. I'm still using to start one light from this side, and I'm taking a picture and adds this really, really cool conceptual mere. Look to our product. Look super cool. I think I may use, like a black paper in the background next time to really, like have it lost in the sea of blackness. But it's a very quick, like $10 way of making your product looked really professional and really cool. 105. Product Photography: DIY Light Box: All right, So here's another way to shoot some product photography. This is very D I Y. If you don't want to use outdoor natural lights and you don't own your own studio lights, this is a very quick and easy set up for that's under $30. Very cheap. Basically, we've taken its plastic tub. You can see right here. I've taken some poster board and some butcher paper and actually cut it to size and scooped it inside our plastic box here. And then we found a white sheet that we covered it with to diffuse the light. And we got these kind of Home Depot hardware stores sort of big lights. There really just floodlights you can pick up at any hardware store. And I put him right here on the side, basically pretty close and lit into our little soft box. Basically, this is our products. Soft box. Now you can go on Amazon or by already built soft boxes with nice big areas. But if you're shooting something small and you want to create something on your own, it's very easy to Dio I did this and I built this in under about 10 minutes and it's ready to go now. The cool thing is that we still have lots of available light from our little sources spilling all over the place. The white is still soaking up the light and bouncing it back, and then were able to can't control our light with these little tiny Home Depot lights. So again, let's take a picture because the lights are so low and I'm using a tripod. I can still use a low shutter shooting at an F eight again just to make sure everything's in focus and were shooting at 400 eyes. So I may 15th of a second bam. Look at that. I think that looks fantastic. That looks like a really nice professional shot product shot of this little bowl here. It's really cool. It's got these nice little reflections you would never be able to tell. Like if you zoomed out and shot that this is being just kind of mashed together by a bunch of different random things. Now you can control your life a little bit more by turning off, turning off a light and taking a shot. Now you can see that we've added some more negative filling this side, adding some contrast. Look at the difference here between this one and this one again. That's per your style. Yes, we turn off this one and we added some back in. You can see now we're doing it from the other direction. Uhm, the cool thing about having a soft box like this is you can use any type of lights on the side and you can actually move them wherever you want. We could actually even clamp to the side here and shoot into the ceiling and add a different look to it. And now we have a totally different light. Look, you could really start to play around with your type of style or your type of sort of product that you're shooting. I like doing this. I like using harsh light. Sometimes you can see how this has a really cool son. Harsh light effect. Um, or if your lights are already too bright, you can put a softening filter on here or just leave a blank and have dual dueling harsh lights, which is really cool, because now we've created this really bright, bright sort of product shot, Uh, and you could diffuse light if you want right here or Adam to the side. Um, it's really versatile. That's the cool thing about having this soft box that you can do so many things with it. Here's another cool thing they like to dio. This one is a little bit toppy and you creates a shadow from the top. So get it Depends on what you're shooting. Um, it's kind of cool to shoot a bowl like this. We can see how it just has this nice soft light coming in right here through the diffused light through the plastic. Let's switch it out for it's really brilliant. Beautiful ring. I really like this kind of top down light. Um, it's kind of a cool look. Look at that. What a great product. That looks more professional than a lot of things that I've shot with professional sets. And this is all we've really needed. I'm gonna do a really cool lighting trick here. Not cool, but I think this will look better. But this year put this here to fill in a little bit from the back mover. Quick able. There we go. Now check out this. You can see how on the front side here. We've got some really nice shadow, and then it's coming in with a backlight, just lighting this side right here. But then now we also have this top light, and you can see how I take my hand over and over it. You can see the difference that the lights doing so real quick. Let's add in one of our other tips. Let's try and add that reflection in there and see what that looks like. Inside are soft box. So I've So I've added in our plexi glass. I've basically zoomed out a little bit so we could get some of that reflection in the bottom. Take a picture and there you go. Now, I don't like that line in the background, so Phil's gonna probably end up showing you how to edit that out. But I think it looks really cool with the reflection, adds a lot of production value to it. If you add a black piece of paper in or use a black piece of butcher paper in that, I'll add an even better element, and it will actually probably help you lose that line in the background. Now that we shot everything. It's in. Camera fills going to take these photos, and he's going to run through how to edit them and add some contrast, take out that line, really beef it up and make it look really nice. A very cool production value shot. 106. Product Photography: Editing Your Product Photos: all right, Phil here. And I hope you enjoyed those lessons with will about product photography. I found them very fascinating myself. Now, there are some things that we could do to make our photos look even better by editing them . So I'm going to be editing these photos in Adobe Light Room Classic CC. We have a complete section on using this program later on in the course. So if you don't know how toe used light room and you want to learn, you might want to go ahead and skip ahead to that section and learn before watching this lesson. If you're using another program, I will try to sort of keep the things I'm doing general enough. And I'm really only going to be making adjustments that you can do in pretty much any photo editing software out there. So let's dive in and make these photos look better. I'm gonna be just making a general photo like this look better, and then I'm going to be showing you how to make this one look better by also removing these lines in the background from the plexi glass used to create this reflection. So the first thing that I always do with my photography when editing is crop them. So I'm going to use the crop tool in light room here and crop it in, so I don't know exactly what size I want. I don't know if I want a square or a rectangle, but for now I'm just going to do a nice for the rectangular shot that would probably look good on online. I will also rotate depending on what the background is, just a straight in and out. When I click and rotate on the corners, you can see that there's a grid that helps you sort of align everything and then press return on my keyboard to finish it up. All right, so there's a few things just with our basic exposure adjustments that we can do to make this better. And those are down here. You'll find these in most editors, but basically what you want to do is make the whites even whiter and then also building a little more contrast with our colors. Actually, first thing first, though, I want to set the white balance. Thankfully, since we have this big white backdrop in light room, it's really, really easy with this white balanced color picker or eye dropper. I can just select on the background, and it creates a perfect white balance. If you need to make another adjustment, you can tweak it with these temperature sliders. But with that color picker, it should work fine. Are you? So the next thing I'm gonna do is play with the exposure. I'm going to boost the whites. And when I do that, you can see that the background starts to be pure white, basically. So I'm gonna boost that white at the same time. I'm going to drop the highlights down a little bit. I'm gonna drop the shadows down just a little bit and also made the black just a little bit to bring back some of that contrast in our image in terms of vibrance and saturation might boost the saturation just a little bit to get a little bit more color in our product. We can see the before after in light room by pressing the backslash button before, after before after, So it's already looking a lot better. I want to do a little bit of touch up. This camera was actually a little bit ter t. So I'm gonna zoom in here by clicking there and then using our healing brush tool. We've got the healing brush tool. I can kind of remove these what I would call blemishes, which would be the kind of the same thing that you would dio if you were removing something like pimples or something on a person that looks good over there. So I'm just painting over these blotches, then using cloned brush to move things around. Now, remember, if you don't, if you're not following along, please go ahead and watch the entire light room section because we cover how to do all of these things in that section of this course. So that looks pretty good. There might be a little bit more that we can do up at the top, but for now, I'm gonna leave it at that again before after before, After it's already looking pretty darn good. I'm gonna go into the tone curve, and this is something that you can really do with product photography with a white background is adjust the white point. So at the bottom left and the bottom right, you have the black and the white point. So I clicking the white point in the top right and dragging it to the left. The whites become even whiter, so this is sort of a more dialed and way to adjust the whites up here. So by doing that, I might bring back the whites up here that might just bring down the saturate, the exposure of the mids by dragging down this curve here like so, let's see the before after before, after, I might just go in and add a little bit of sharpening. Let's go down to the detail panel. We'll add a little bit of sharpening. I already had a little bit more because we're we're using raw photos, and so that looks pretty good. And then the last thing I'll do is under effects. I'll add Ah, highlight or a white vignette. So dragging the vignette to the right, it basically creates a vignette around the edges so that it's definitely pure white. And the reason why I want to do this is if I put this on a website with a white background . I think it looks really nice when the product images just basically blend into the background and so you want to make sure that the edges are basically pure white, and you can do that with this sort of post crop vignette ing. If I drag to the left, you can see that it's a dark vignette drying into the white right creates a white vignette , and that's pretty much all I would do with this photo. Let's compare the before and after right here. So we got the before and after. It's just a little bit more punch here and a little bit more clean, and I like it a lot. All right, so let's get a little creative with our other edits. So we have these two images right here with the reflection. I'm gonna go ahead and use this image. I think we're gonna use this image right here. I like this one a little bit more. First, I'm going to crop it, so use my crop tool. I'm going to use my level tool here to level this line, so that's perfectly straight, and that's looking a lot better and then crop in. But I don't want to crop out the reflection necessarily. So I'm just gonna crop in something like that. Cool. So Now I'm going to play with my basic adjustments. Let's make sure white balance is good by using our white balance color picker for the background and then we'll play with our exposure. So I'm going to definitely boost my white. We want that white background up at the top to be pure white and shadows my boost. The shot is a little bit to get its a little to contrast it for me. Our highlights. It really depends on what you want, but gonna move it down. One thing I see down here at the top are at the bottom corner. I see the edge of the plexi glass, so I'm gonna try to crop in just a little bit, so we don't see that. That's pretty good. Wondering what it would look like if I did just crop out part of the reflection that might look even better and not worry about what said the bottom of the frame. I think I liked it before. Maybe we can do a square aspect ratio for this one, just like so. Yeah, that'll be good. That gets rid of that front of the plexi glass over there. Cool. So that's looking good. I'm going to play with the white point on the tone curve, Move it to the left a little bit. Let's grab it. There we go. So that the background is pure white. Then add a little bit of contrast creating a little s curve like so now on a remove some of those blemishes. So I'm gonna take my spot healing brush tool. Zoom in here. P over. I'm just gonna go one go paint over all of that. And that worked really well. Now I got to do the reflection as well. And thats eyes Amazing how awesome that works so quickly. Cool. So that's looking a lot better. Let's click. Done. Now I want to show you how you can remove this line in light room. There's different ways you can do it, but the one that I like best is with the graduated filter tool. So click on this little rectangle and then what we're going to do is click and drag right around here in this middle line. We want to go below this line in our image. If I turn on show selected mask overlay, that's O on our keyboard. You can see what is actually selected this pink part, and that's what's going to be affected by our adjustment. Remember, if you don't know anything I'm talking about, then please washing the entire light room section of this class in this aspect of editing, your photos might not be available in all other editing applications, so you might need a more professional tool like light room. So this is our selected area, the pink, and we can adjust this by color, basically with our range mass set to color. And now let's use this eyedropper to pick the white. And so now it's selecting all the white in this image, and we can use this amount to select less or more. Basically, I'm going to select a little bit more so we get a little bit more of the gray down here, and then I'm also going to use our brush to erase the part of the image that is on or camera. I really don't want any of our camera to be selected and adjusted with the adjustments I'm going to be making right now, so I'm brushing out all of that right now everywhere. So the only thing that selected is really the background. Okay, so that's going to be pretty good. Let me turn off my show selected mask overlay, and there's a couple things you can do. First, you can bring up the exposure. What starts? If you can see if I continue to bring it up, it helps to get rid of that line. Eventually and then I can also decrease the clarity and D haze or decrease the D. A's increasing. The D. A's brings a lot of information back decreasing. It makes a little softer for the background. So if I move this down a little bit, you can see that it kind of adjust where the fade is. Now let me click done so we can see better how it looks So we see the before after before, after it's completely different shot. Now, with this image, I don't want to necessarily add a white vignette because the bottom I'm fine with it being a little bit darker. This bottom right corner is a little dark, so I might see what a vignette looks like. Okay, actually, it looks pretty good, so I might add a bit of a vignette. Make sure I feather it out so it definitely blends it in, play around with where the midpoint is. I think feathering and out actually makes it look even better. So you do have a little bit of a darkness here in the middle, on the sides. Ah, you could use the adjustment brush or something like that to bring that up. But for now, that was a quick edit of this photo with the reflection and getting rid of that line. And now with this photo, you would basically do the same process. It's just that the reflection won't be a strong, which actually might look a little bit better. I kind of like how this reflection is a little softer than the use of the blackboard below . But both of them, I'm pretty good. So I'm gonna go through and edit the rest of these photos that we shot while we had our light box set up. And I'm sure that you've seen these in the videos earlier in this section. But these are just some of the basic practices for editing your product photos to make them look better. Basically, just bringing up the whites to make the white pure white, making sure the white balances on adding a little bit of contrast and saturation if you want, so that your product really stands out. Now, I do want to show you one really cool tool in light room. If you haven't hs l adjustment, we can change the hue of a particular color by clicking Hugh choosing this color picker. I'm gonna choose that sort of teal of the whole god and drag up or down and see how we can adjust the color of the whole good that we're using. That's pretty cool, huh? So if you want a different color, hold a product. You can use those Hugh adjustments to quickly change the color of your product. Cool, huh? Awesome. So I hope you've enjoyed this section of the class and we can't wait to see the product photos that you take in the activity coming up 107. Low Light Photography: Tips: this section is all about low light photography. Let's start with our top tips. Number one Know how high your eyes Oaken, Go test your camera to see how much grain and digital noise your photos have with a higher I s o This way you'll know what I so you can go up to when you're in a low light situation . Tip number two Know how low you can take your shutter speed without getting any motion blur ? Is it 1/60 1 30th or maybe even 1/15? Can you hold your camera? That study if you can, Great, That allows you to expose properly in low light. If you can't, you'll need to compensate with a higher I S O tip three. Shoot wide open. Drop your F stop to let more light in and invest in a fast lens one that opens up to something like an F 1.4 or F two tip for use manual Focus often in low light. Your camera won't be able to automatically focus properly. Plus, it might be shining a distracting red light on the subject To try to read the focus. Practice your manual focus to be able to do so quickly when auto doesn't work well. Tip five Used stabilization, especially if you aren't shooting a scene that has motion Using a tripod, a mono pod or just setting your camera down allows you to decrease your shutter speed to expose properly. With these tips, you'll be well on your way to improving your low light. Photography is and al its head out into the field and put them into practice. 108. Low Light Photography: Demo: everyone. So now let's take those tips that fills is talking about and put them into practice. Now we are gonna work with two separate cameras in the scenario. Starting off, we're going to start with the Eos Rebel T five I, which is more of a entry level camera. You know, it's not going perform as well in these low light situations, but we'll see what we can do with it. And then we're going jump up to my Sony a seven or three, which is really incredible in low light situations, and we'll show you the difference of the two cameras. So starting off I have the kit lens 18 to 55. I'm in auto mode. I've turned off the flash, though I don't want deal with any flash for this scenario. And let's just take a photo right off the bat. I'm at go to 24 millimeters and just go and take a shot of Phil here. All we have are these Christmas lights you might even notice in our video camera. We've had to boost up the eso. Um, just because it's pretty minimal lighting right now s Oh, here we go. Let's take this shot, Phil, if you want, turn your shoulders towards me. Cool. Get the lights in there. All right, and awesome. So under the auto settings, it went to 3.5, which is the most white up in this lens can go. It was a 1/13 shutter, which it looks like they might have been a little bit of motion blur in there. I held my hands pretty study, and I so 6400. And it's plenty bright. You know, there's lots of light there on the back of the screen. Actually, you know it looks doable, but, you know, Phil's definitely a little out of focuses on autofocus. Still, I do know that at 6400 this camera looks a little grainy. It doesn't look great. So let's hop over into manual mode. Um, just so we can start playing with the actual settings. I'm also gonna throw on a 50 millimeter 1.8 just so we can open up the aperture a little bit more. Alright, so I've thrown on the 50 millimeter 1.8, going from a 3.5 to 1.8. We've almost tripled the amount of light that is ableto enter through the lens now with this F stop. So I'm actually let's go back to the auto mode and see what it does with auto settings. Now there has that much more light with the aperture. We're also on a 50 millimeter now, whereas before that last photo was taken at 18 millimeters, so I'm much closer to fill. I'll take one close up and then I might have you step around. Nice. So it's actually not a horrible photo. It's at 1/60 shutter speed, which is, you know, for hand Holding is a pretty good speed, actually said to F 2.2 and the ISO still 6400 which is higher than I would like this camera to be shot out. So I've dropped the is so down to 1600 which I think is a little bit more manageable. I'm gonna change f stop to being wide open. So all the way down to F 1.8 and the shutter speed all set to 1/30. Let's see what the light meter says now, the light meter saying I'm a a little bit less in a full stop under exposed But let's see what we can do here. All right. So as you can see, this photo, I think, looks about the same exposure as Theo. Auto settings was able to bring down the isso. And I think with the digital noise, it'll be a lot cleaner. Now that's 1600 over. Although you know the 50 millimeter, it's not the most flattering shot. Maybe Phil, if I could have you step over there just next to that part of plan with the lights right above you. So it's a little bit more interesting. You know, Something I'm noticing is that well, the autofocus is pretty good. It's having similar of a difficult time actually focusing in these low light situations. So I'm going up to manual focus and really just dial in that focus myself. Cool. So just here in the backyard, taking some photos of various things took a lot headshots of Phil. And the main thing was getting the exposure right. And so really, I think the biggest thing at night time, you know, the first is the is. So how high can you push at eso without too much digital noise? And this is something that you really have to test. You should go out in low light and take photos at each Aiso. Import them and see what they look like. How high are you willing to go? And what is too much digital noise for you from there? Your shutter speed. Do you know? Are you gonna have any movement? Are you going to people who might be moving a little bit? All those things are gonna add motion. Blur. So seeing what you're capable of hand holding, and we can keep it steady. Typically, 1/60 1 1/100 of a second is gonna be best for shutter speed. But in low lights, you might have to go lower than that. So, you know, sometimes these tripods good, but again, if your subjects moving even if your camera study, it doesn't matter. So just some things to think about and also having a prime lens that can open up to f one point. It really helps you know, on that kid lenses F 3.5. We never could have gone toe is so 1600. So these are all things to think about. You know, it's exposure triangle, but you're dealing with minimal amounts of light. So now we're gonna take my Sony a seven r three and just compare the difference of what the Eos rebel t fit t five eyes capable of and what this game is capable of. This is obviously a much more professional level camera. It's known for its high Aiso capabilities, and we just want to share with you when paying for these more expensive cameras what they're actually capable of doing. So the full frame that alone will allow more light. And it's a major reason that people like purchasing full frame cameras. Cool. I'm not going bump up to the maximum, which is 32,000. See what that looks like. Good. Bring my shutter speed down 21 1/20. Cool. Just for kicks. There's a couples of extended Izzo's, which goes all the way to 102,000 eyes. So let's so let's just check this out. It's crazy. So it's nighttime. My shoulders now at 1 4/100 of a second F 2.8 and I s 0 102,400 It's get Ashby in there. Awesome. I'm gonna bring bring my eyes so back down just to actually make this look nice. I've dropped down to 12,800 and I've now brought my shutter to 1/40 which will see how still ash beacon stay. Awesome. Now, just because we're out here, we're having some fun. We brought this latter out. We're going to see what looks like just to get different perspective, I think, especially when you have limited lighting, it's good to move around the light. See, you know how different lighting looks and just try to fit angles. So going climb up here into the tree. Now, one thing I was trying to right there is that you have these lines of defense in these concrete squares down below. And because I'm kind of off angle, I can't get perfectly straight. So instead, I'm going to try and line up with this Torii Gate thing. No, I'm taking all these and I'm still in auto focus. This camera has a great autofocus system, but I'm gonna hop over to manual focus just to really make sure that I get a nice, crisp focus. It's always interesting getting up high. I mean, just the whole world looks so much different when taking these photos you and knows there's some cabling off to the side, and just it didn't look quite right. So we move those off to the side. It's really important to check your entire frame. All right, So all those photos were taken above 6400 which is Max is. So I would push the Eos rebel and you can see just how well this camera performs and why people are willing to spend so much money on these cameras. Uh, really. It's because you're able to use very little light and still get great looking photos. 109. Sports & Action Photography: Tips: this section is all about sports and action photography, so let's start out with our top tips. Tip number one used a long lens. You'll probably want a telephoto lens that extends past 100 millimeters, something like 200 or even 300 so you can get close up shots and medium shots from across the field or across the court. Keeping it tight and seeing the details of the action will result in better shots than your typical wide tip to increase your shutter speed. To capture sharp details, you'll need to boost your shutter speed, depending on what the action is. Your photographing It might require a faster shutter, so make sure you do some test shots. Tip. Three. Take lots of photos. Use burst or continuous mode to rapidly capture multiple photos at once. This gives you options in case the subject looks awkward or isn't in the perfect position. Tip for position yourself properly. Scope out the location when you get there. If you won't be able to move around during the event, try to get a spot close to the action. Also, shooting from near eye level of the athlete usually results in better photos instead of just looking down at them. Tip five show their face most times. Capturing the athletes face will result in a better photo than one from their back. So this might mean working your way around the field or wherever you're shooting so you can capture their faces in action. With these tips, you'll be well on your way to improving your sports and action photography. So now let's head out into the field and put them into practice. 110. Sports & Action Photography: Demo: All right, guys. Welcome to the sports action scenario. We're out here live at a field. I've got Sam with a soccer ball over here, and we're gonna have him running up and down the field little bit with a soccer ball. And I'm gonna show you guys the best practices for actually getting a really awesome sports action shot. Now, to start off, many of you will have a kit Land. That's what I've got right now. I've got my food. Txt two with Kit Lens. Everything's on auto right now, So we're gonna go ahead, have Sam run left to right. And often, you know, you'll be at a sporting event, you be out the park, you know, things will be happening quickly. So we're gonna go over how to get really good shots of that right now. Sorry, My auto. I'm at my 18 55 and he's really small in frame. Even if I zoom in on my 55 as he's coming. Okay, so we're looking at the 18 to 55 here. You could see we got some, like, decent shots here. It's really not anything to write home about its fine. The auto worked great. You can see that the I s o drop down to 200 because it's really bright out here. I'm not an F 6.4 and I'm at 7/50 of a shutter, so it's pretty fast enough to sink stuff, but the shot just doesn't seem like that in your face. That action in that like, exciting, you know, that's what we were trying Teoh accomplish here. So the first thing I'm gonna dio and you know, this is kind of a budgetary thing or renting a lens, But I'm gonna find a longer leads a telephoto lens so that I can sit on the sideline and I can get right up and see the face, see the expression, See the action. I'm right in there. You really want to do that with a telephoto lens? So it's the first thing we're gonna do is I'm gonna jump over to that right now. All right? I'm now on my telephoto lens and on my camera it's a 50 to 1 42.8 It's a beefy lens, and it's pretty big for such a tiny little camera again, these aren't that sheep, so it's not likely that you'll be purchasing something so big and so easy right away. Unless you're really trying to get into sports photography in action. I highly recommend this type of lens. So I'm gonna go ahead and zoom in at 1 40 Everything's that auto, and we're gonna have Sam run back towards us and let's see what that looks like. You ready? All right, cool. So let's take a look at some of these shots now. It's a little blurry. Everything's really in focus. You know, the closeness works out a lot, but we got a lot closer. That looks really awesome. Now, what's the next thing that we could do to make this look better? Since we're on auto, the camera is evaluating Lee, exposing everything, and it's giving me an ISO of 200 F stop of 5.6 and a shutter value of 8/100 of a second. Now I know that when we should on a long lens, we get some more shallow depth of field. But I want to get as shallow as I can. That means I want less in focus and more stuff out of focus, so I want to open up all the way to a 2.8. I'm ditching the auto. I'm now going to put the shutter to compensate for that instead of having it pick, I'm gonna compensate and go to a 4000 shudder. Now, that's because the F stop is wide open because I'm trying to get that showed up the field and I'm not a 4000 to compensate for all that light coming in. So have a faster shutter. This is great for sports because adversely, when you have a faster shutter, that means we'll capture the light faster and for action. That means we're freezing stuff, which is awesome. I'm gonna leave the is so it 200 because it's really bright. Let's go and have some come towards us now and see how that works. All right, So, sure enough, we have less in focus, and it looks a little bit more Action it now this place is not the most picturesque grasp in the back. It's a little brown and dirt. We're in the middle of winter shooting this, but that really helped a lot. You can see how much action that really is happening there. Now, another thing that I want to do is because I feel like I'm sort of missing the actual kick . I'm missing the actual point where he actually kicks the ball. I'm gonna switch over to burst Note now for my camera. Right now I'm in single moment. I'm just quickly shooting the shutter like down as fast as I can. And it's auto focusing the best you could do. But you can see there's a couple shots where I kind of miss the action s o. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna have sunrun to this point and we're gonna move my camera into continuous high. And you all have the camera pretty close to the microphones. We'll hear how many pictures it's taking on this camera is gonna be taking about 6 to 8 frames per second. Uh, and your camera could be different. Every camera having different frames per second. Now, if you're gonna be shooting sports are shooting any other action, you're probably gonna want to look into getting a camera that has a higher frames per second rate and often times some cameras have vertical grips, addicts or batteries that will let you boost up the amount of frames per second. I think. What? This camera If I put a vertical grip on, I can up my frames per second cause it adds more power to distributed evenly. So first, let's have Sam run towards us. Well, hold down the button for a little bit and then we'll have him post up. It will have a kick. A ball. Great. All right, so one of the crazy things about this burst mode is sometimes it'll miss focus. It'll be faster than the auto focuses on this lens. You can see here how we got this sequence of Sam running, and then, for some reason, his foot kicks the dirt and you see all that dirt flying up. That's a product of a fast shutter, the backgrounds blown out of focus. That's the product of the 2.8 and the burst mode. We can really see the sequence from when he begins starting right here. Here he comes. You see the ball, you seem, kick the dirt. He almost falls. Would have been great if you fell right. Let's try the burst mode in another situation where were just static and we're waiting for action. Actually, happen. We're counting it down. So what I'm doing now is to test burst mode out and having Sam set the ball down. Now, what I'm gonna do with auto focus is I'm gonna auto focus on the ball. I'm using my joystick to move my square over to where the ball is. So it stays there. I'm setting up the shot. And now I'm gonna on three. Have Sam going kick it, and I'm gonna hold down the burst mode. You could see the sequence that we get. It's gonna be awesome. I'm also gonna zoom in at 146 I want to see the foot kicking the ball, and I think I'll be really cool. Shot ready, Sam. Okay. On three. Ready? One to three. So check out this weekend sequence. Let's rewind resumed in quite a bit. Uh, and as you can see, we're looking at the ball focused on the ball. Hickam. Sam, we get one to bam o. C. We we weren't even fast enough to see the actual impact. We just see ball. No ball. So now let's move into shuttering and making something really creative. Now, I said we're going to use a high shutter because I want to freeze everything now something really cool. And we talk about this and lower shutters and low light. But if you try and move with their subject and use a slower shutter, we can try and time it out. So that were timed with Sam. But the background is a little blurry now. Basically, we're trying to match the light or match the movement with my camera and him running to make a really creative shot. So let's go ahead and see if we could do that. So basically, I'm to shut her down about 60 because I know that that's kind of a slow shutter. And to compensate for that, I'm gonna have to move my f stop up about 18 which will be better for auto focus when he's running by me. And I'm going to keep it at the burst mode so we can see we can get, um we're gonna try and move the shutter with Sam as steady as I can to make a really cool shot. Oh, let's go ahead and take a look at both e sequences. Now. I'm not gonna lie. This is actually something that's really hard to do, and I usually do with cars more often than people. But you can see how we start with Sam, and I'm trying to keep the pace up as he's going at our slow shutter. You'd see this shot. There's a good timing. I froze. I was. I was moving at the same speed that he was, but the background was moving faster than he and I are moving. So the slow shutter caused him to be in focus and sharp and the background to be moving blurry. Now it's not the best shot, and you can see this one's a little bit better right here. You can see his face struggling a little bit, but we caught him in the action and then we had him go the other way. There's a couple like this one. This one's really cool movement now. If he was playing in a game that the people around him, you'd see his jersey clearly. So this is a kind of a really hard thing to nail, but if you practice at it and get more consistent at it, you'll get some really cool shots like these 111. Sports & Action Photography: Demo II: Philip inner with a dark few masterclass, and today I'm going to help you take better sports and action photos, following up on wheels demonstration and the tips we gave you at the start Over this section, I'm in downtown Sandy, Miss. And each year they have a bike race. It's a circuit race that does about a one mile loop through the downtown streets. Each race is about 30 to 45 minutes. So they're going through these loops many times each race every couple of minutes they're going by, which is the perfect opportunity to practice your action photography. The type of photo that I'm really trying to achieve here is the one with the nice, blurry background where you are panning your camera with the motion of the subject and you're getting the subject sharp. You're going to see them flying by in just a second. You get the subject sharp, these cyclists behind me, but the background is really blurry, So the gear that I'm using is so the gear I'm using is my canon 70 D, with a few lenses. One is the cannon 10 to 18 millimeter, which is a great wide lens perfect for posting up on a corner and getting the full seem, getting the whole bike and the cyclist from really close up. I'm also going to try to take some telephoto shots and some mid range shots just toe have them. But I think my wide lenses really what I'm going to be using most. So I've gone out and done a few shots and the first thing I noticed was that it isn't as easy as you would think to get sharp motion. I mean, I am using my burst mode, which helps to take rapid fire shots, but still the focus is a little off, so auto focus isn't working that great. So what I did was changed a manual focus and so I knew that from like 3 to 4 feet in front of me. Everything was going to be in focus and that's kind of I took a couple rounds for the cyclist to go by me to get that right. The other thing is that I've been practicing with different shutter speeds. Some work better than others. Some are just a little bit too long to get sharp motion, though you're really I'm having to use like a 1 5/100 or higher shutter speed. But to get that nice background motion blur, I want to use something closer to 1 100 or 1/60. With the cyclist moving as fast as they are, it's really hard to get that sharp sort of focus and get them sharpen the image with that sort of shutter speed. So what I did next was I started using my flash. The cool thing that you can do when using your flash is that even with a longer shutter speed or quote unquote long 1/60 the 1 100 what happens is during your shutter while it's open, your capturing that motion blur. But when the flash goes off, it freezes the motion of your subject in your frame because it gives you more light. So what's awesome about that is part of the cyclist might be a little blurry, but when the flash goes off their sharpened focus, it's still not perfect. You still have to do it a few times and practice. But when I was using my flash, I was able to get some even better shots than without the flash. One thing I did notice with my camera and probably with most cameras is that when you do have the flash on, you won't be able to use burst mode because your camera has to process. The flash has to get ready kind of charge up. And so you're only able to take one photo for me anyways every few seconds rather than burst mode, which is 8 to 10 frames per second. So that meant being patient, staying here for over an hour or two just to practice my shot. Practice my composition. The other thing that I was trying to do was get good composition. I was staying on the corner trying to get an upward angle, which I thought gave the cyclist a little bit more power, made it a little bit more dynamic than coming from a downward angle or shooting downward at them or even eye level. I found that shooting up gave me the best angle that I liked anyways, so I hope you enjoy the photos that I took today really are just using the techniques that we learned in the last demonstration with Will and earlier in the class about shooting action. It's basically just following and panning with the the moving objects or the subjects while you take your photos. With the cyclist coming by one more time, I'm gonna sign off. That's the rest of the race, and I hope you have a great day. See in another lesson. 112. Macro Photography: Tips: this section is all about macro photography. First, what is macro photography? Basically, it means photographing small items to make them look larger than life size. Technically, macro photography has to do with the size of the subject being captured compared to the actual size of your sensor on your camera. This means the object, such as a flower petal, is actually larger on the sensor when it's captured than in real life. The closer you can get to your subject larger, it will be compared to your sensor. So macro photography does require specific lenses that can focus up close. This brings us to our top tips. Tip number one is to use a Mac Rowland's. It should say macro on the side of the lens, and you'll need to rotate the focus ring to that micro setting. If you don't have a macro lens, you can use extension tube adapters. Toe add glass onto your lens, which basically allows you to focus closer to the subject. A 50 to 60 millimeter lenses fine for general macro photography, but a 100 millimeter lens will give you more options when photographing macro photos from a further distance, perhaps necessary when shooting things like insects. Tip To choose a point of focus, manually adjust your focus to make sure your focus is exactly where you want it. When photographing such small objects, even focusing a millimeter forwards or backwards can make a huge difference. Tip number three. Use a flash because your focal plane is so narrow, you'll want to increase your F stop and deep in that plane as much as possible. To compensate for exposure you may need or want to use a flash toe, add more light tip number four. Use a tripod to make sure you can perfect your composition when photographing something that is static or still life. For some things, you might need to be handheld like photographing a butterfly or something that's moving when shooting moving objects. Handheld. Make sure you use a faster shutter speed like 1 2/50 or faster. All right. With these tips, you'll be well on your way to improving your macro photography. So now let's head out into the field and put them into practice. 113. Macro Photography: Demo: Hey, welcome to shooting some macro photography. Now, I've got a DSLR here with a macro lens. It's actually 105 millimeter lens that has the ability to shoot macro. And I've got some pretty flowers right here. Now, the really cool thing about macro photography is that the surrounding area looks kind of dead, right? But there's this really beautiful yellow flower right here. And macro basically lets us get macro focus. We're gonna get really tight on it and take a picture. So let's check out and see what it looks like to begin with. So I'm getting really close to you can probably see in the video camera how close I have to get to it, and you see what kind of image it produces. So check these out. It's a little blown out. I'm a little over exposed right now, but you can see how we can see the little tiny details inside that flower Now with the macro lens. Typically, that macro site is all the way to the other side, and you have to switch it over to macro and every lenses different. So keep in mind and look at the manual for your specific macro lens on how to activate that macro mode. So right now I'm in auto focus and you can hear the lens as it's trying to find its focus now shooting macro. The planes are so minute and little, and you can sort of see how the autofocus is having trouble catching exactly what you want . Check it out so the lenses is trying to find as of flowers moving in the wind, it's jumping from the follicles to the inside of the flower to the outside, and I can sort of position where I want the focus to be a name for that. Now, that's a little hard with you. Shooting a little flower Moving in the wind, even though it's moving just a little bit, were so tight that those little movements are so big. So I'm gonna switch over to manual focus and now really be able to dial in exactly what I want to get in focus and you can see every little movement that you do is gonna just the picture immensely. So I'm gonna get in there, and I really am trying to get as much as I can on one plane to make this photo pop. Let's get down there and check it out. So now I've got complete control. I can kind of decide where I want to put the focus much easier than the auto. Focus well, and I'll take a couple of shots while I'm down here. So let's check out these. We could see I'm really close up. You can see how bright the yellows are, how great the blue is and how close we could see the detail in the little tiny follicles in side the plant. It really looks awesome. Another tip that I've noticed when you're shooting macro is not only we be able to focus like this, but if you make small movements forward or backward, it'll make a huge difference. So if you can't really dial in here dialing between your movement like that and here it's very little movement, though very subtle. Even that much will change the focus ton. So also something that mentioned is I'm shooting at an F 22 right now to get as much in focus as I can't. Even though there's so many glass elements going on here, there is still a lot out of focus if I was to shoot. I can't do this right now because it's so bright outside the roses shooted a to eight and try this. They would be so little in focus that it would be kind of hard to distinguish what you're shooting. That's your style. If that's what you're going for, you can go and try it. I think it would be really helpful. Toe have a tripod. That's another tip that I'm not actually practicing right now, But I'm getting frustrated trying to get this ant, this moving flower, everything in focus while trying to keep my hands steady. You're just so close and so tight and so small that every little movement makes a huge difference. So using a tripod would really help a lot. And it probably saved your back and your patients. All right, so I got a little tiny dime here, and I'm shooting that with our macro 105 lens, and it's looking pretty cool. Check out these shots. It looks huge and frame. You can see how much macro photography really changes perspective and what you can do with it. Um, here's some with a little drop off and focus. You can see just, uh, FDR's faces and focus, and it drops off to the back of his head. And then we go over to the just centered where the whole entire plane, the focus of the dime, is in focus. And then you see the shadow drop off and you see how dramatic the shadow is coming from. The dime looks when we're shooting macro, when in reality it's ho, tiny like compare this little tiny thing against my face to this photo. It looks giant, so that's a little bit about macro photography. And keep in mind, it's just another style of photography that you can really have fun with, get creative with and really show off this tiny, tiny world and make it look big and enormous. Another really cool thing about macro lenses, as they tend to be, too, and one. So not only is this lens a macro lens, but it's also a 105 millimeter lens, which is actually a pretty good portrait lens. In and of itself. It's a prime, but it's also a mackerel ins 114. Street Photography: Tips: this section is all about street and architecture. Photography. Let's start with our top tips. Tip number one. Be aware of your surroundings. Make sure you are always aware of your gear and the people around you use a camera strap to discourage thieves from grabbing your gear and running away with it. Take two stick toe, one focal length. Street photography is all about creativity. Sometimes limiting your options, such as using a prime lens or sticking toe. One focal length on your zoom can push you to get even more creative as a photographer. Tip. Three. Choose your own street portrait style. There are two basic styles of getting street Portrait's. One is just to be quick and perhaps sneaky. Photographing subjects without asking them the other is to get their permission first. Both ways take practice and you'll need to get used to either being obtrusive to people or going up and asking for permission. Tip for Look at the lines for architecture photos. Lines are everything. Look for interesting lines. Anything from curvy or straight balanced or cricket Tip. Five. Tell a story with your photos while it's fun to go out and capture the textures and still life scenes of the world. As a photographer, you are a storyteller. Try to tell a story with what you're capturing, even if it takes a series of photos With these tips, you'll be well on your way to improving your street and architecture photography. So now let's head out into the field and put them into practice. 115. Street Photography: Demo: everyone. So we are now here in downtown Los Angeles. We're going to going around the streets, just taking photos of both architecture and just some general sort of street scenes throughout the day. We're still kind of early morning, so we're just using the light that we have right now behind me. We have the Walt Disney Concert Hall, which is obviously in terms of architecture, a very well known building. Eso We're going take a couple south of that and then just make our way around downtown taking different shots. I'm shooting on my Sony a seven r three. I love this camera. It's great for street photography because you can actually turn off the shutter, so it makes no sound when you take a photo. I also have my 16 to 35 millimeter lens on here. It's great for white angle architecture stuff to get entire building, but I can also go into 35 a little bit closer to get some of those details shots. On top of that, I have my polarizer on here, great for taking on reflections, sometimes all the windows on a building. You'll get this reflection of other buildings or different things by spending it. I'll take away those reflections and make the building just look a little bit cleaner. Be very aware of our surroundings when we have these cameras out here. So we don't want to cause too much attention or get anyone upset s. Oh, yeah, let's go around and take some shots. - So we continued around the Walt Disney Concert Hall, went and found a couple different areas, and it is actually really cool after being in the front. You know, the so the iconic Walt Disney Concert Hall. We found our way to the back and found this whole other community garden with this really cool walkway. Got some really nice shots there. I tried taking a couple portrait shots of Phil, but again at the 16 35. So I tried using the space. You know, for some people, they really like the style for other people. They prefer that much more close up look, but it's just funded to walk around and try some different things. We really took our time enjoying the nice, a soft light behind the building rise and from the building at a much harsher direct sunlight and then from there we went and just sort of walked around. We got some breakfast at the Pantry Cafe, and so it took a couple shots outside there and just know So saw what would come up, see what we're able to capture. I got this one shot of this guy on a bike who, because a seven or three is silent, you know, he didn't know I had taken photos, but is just down by my hip. I kind of wish I go on his face. It is great face to him, but I end up catching him just just as he passed me, but still some cool shots there. So next time you're out taking street photos, just remember, you know, be mindful of your surroundings, try to explore space is you know, you might have something in mind. We knew we want to go Walt Disney Concert Hall. But then we walked around. We found other things, and that's really the joy of it. And as you see other people in the streets, you know you might want take their photos. Either do it sneakily or go up in Assam. It really depends on your style and your you know what type of photography you want to be doing. So use these tips next time you're out in the streets and have fun. 116. Event Photography: Tips: this section is all about event photography's such as weddings. Let's start out with our top tips. Tip number one. Be prepared, especially for events like weddings. You will have one chance to capture the moment. You can't have them. Pause and redo the vows, so do everything you can to be prepared. Visit the site forehand. Get there early, talk to the coordinator or event organizer and also talk to your client to know what they're expecting. Tip. To have the tools you need, you don't need to over complicate your shoot with too much equipment, though. Just make sure you have the simple things covered, like fresh memory cards, extra batteries and 1 to 2 lenses that you'll need for the entire day. Tip Number three. Be aware and courteous of your surroundings. No one likes a photographer that draws attention to themselves, and people typically will be curious and move out of your way to let you get your shot. So go ahead and take your photos and then calmly and quietly move out of the way so everyone can enjoy the event tip for Be quick. No one at the party wants to wait for you to take multiple photos and adjust your settings to get the right shot. Make sure to take some quick test shots whenever you get into a new lighting situation, like going from outside to an indoor reception. That way, when you do ask to take someone's photo, you'll only have to do so once. Tip. Five captured the details. Capture what the setting looks like. Get wide shots of the venue as well as close ups of any details, such as table centerpieces tips. Six. Bring your external flash and know how to use it. Event photography is one of the only times we recommend bringing a flash, especially for corporate events where you'll be photographing people. You'll want to get them exposed properly. Just make sure you know how to use the flash properly and balance it often nearby wall or the ceiling so it's not flashing harshly in their face. If you're doing event photography, you'll know that most events there's not enough light to expose properly. With these tips, you'll be well on your way to improving your event photography. So now let's head out into the field and put them into practice 117. Event Photography: Chat: this video, Will and I are going to be chatting Maura about shooting events and weddings in the previous scenarios. I know that we have gone out and actually shot different actual live demonstrations. But because events and weddings are a little bit different, we haven't been able to get behind the scenes of a wedding yet. Hopefully, maybe someday we can actually do that. But we thought the next best thing would be to kind of sit down, actually go through my wedding photo album, which will shot my wedding and just talk through the tips and how to put those into practice. So you ready? Yeah. Let's do it. All right. So the first tip that we talked about was about being prepared. So for any event or wedding, what? What does that actually mean and look like? So I think the first thing to do when you're shooting a wedding is getting to know the couple a little bit. I mean, obviously I knew you pretty pretty well as a friend beforehand and Isabel, but with the other couples that I don't know, I'll grab coffee with them. I'll get to understand who they are, because that will give you a sense of style in a sense of like how the actual wedding they will go. Um, from there I decide how big the event where the wedding is. So if it's like, you know, only 20 people, which I've had, you know, gone to courthouses and Don, I'll just bring one camera on. So I know that I don't need to be running around all that much. I can handle just a regular strap like things like that. If the wedding is more than that, if it tends to be like 50 6200 I think the biggest wedding of shot was about 350. I'm know that I'm gonna be moving a lot and there will be a lot of opportunity for a lot of things, and things are gonna move much faster. And I won't be able to get to everything, in which case we'll probably need a second shooter or all need an assistant. And I'll definitely need to carry two cameras with me, which is what my typical rig is, which would get more into that later. But I think it's being prepared and knowing exactly how big or what you're gonna need to wise to shoot. Really? And I think a lot of that comes with experience. And sometimes I know you have gone maybe to the location beforehand. I know for our wedding, though, that was probably your first time at any of those locations, right? It was definitely the the church I didn't get to go to. But since you shot really close to my house, I knew the layout already. So that's a good point to bring up is I didn't get a chance to go to your church because I think it happened so quickly. But I would highly recommend going somewhere before And actually, I did do another wedding for another LMU couple at the church at Loyola Marymount. And I went and checked, remember? Because close by, I went and checked it out like walked around because at that specific location to I couldn't go past a certain point. And that's something you need to know about your location as well. If you know that you're not gonna be able to move into a certain area to get the shot that you think you have in your head, you have to compensate for that. So I remember I rented a very long lens for that particular reason because I knew I was gonna be tied down to that that place and there's been other places. There's another church that I shot down South and we couldn't even go past the pews and that when I was prepared to bring a tripod with a longer lends so that I could sit back, have, like, a 300 millimeter lens and still get that two shot of the first kiss and like, cause that's that's important. Yeah, I think being prepared in knowing like your shot list, knowing what you want to get, knowing what the couple wants. Like all these things are like there's a lot of pre production should go into the wedding and then also the night before weddings. I get down and I lay out all my gear and I clean everything. I make sure it's all working. I set both cameras that I'm using to like the specific date and time, so that when you import them in the light room, they're all in order. Uh, I just charge everything I like. Just make sure everything is there and then I pack it all and I, like, let it sit right there, said in the morning. I grab it and go, Yeah, that's super good advice, I think, especially with if it is a wedding or any sort of event. I think I mentioned it in the previous videos. But talk to the coordinator, talk to the person at the location and see if there are any strict rules beforehand. I mean, usually as a photographer or videographer, I kind of play it like if they tell me to move, I will. But I'm just gonna go. You take a photo. I'm gonna go wherever I need to go unless they tell me not to. But it is good to talk to them beforehand so you don't get in trouble or or break any rules like that. So that's great advice. Were being prepared. Laying all your equipment, getting charging your batteries, making sure your memory cards air clear all great advice. So that's tip number one 118. Event Photography: Bring the Right Tools: tip number two was have the tools you need, but not necessarily to overcomplicate it. So we talked about getting read your equipment ready? But do you have any other advice or thoughts about what equipment you really need tohave for wedding specifically or GIs? General event photography. I think the big thing again is taking what you know about being prepared in our first tip and applying it to that, um, typically an event in a wedding. You're kind of moving around. You just kind of photo journalistic shooting. I guess it depends on your style. But the three big things that I think you need our fast enough camera that you need Teoh that you feel comfortable with and that you can shoot with on. And if that means to, uh, that's ah, that's making sure that they match. And there close enough incapability. The second thing is glass. So, you know, like I said earlier being far away, we need a zoom lens if you're just shooting a wedding of 20 at a courthouse than maybe you a lens that's just a mid range zoom like a 24 to 70 or 16 to 55. Uh, because that we will give you coverage of wides and close is on dso knowing you know, your situation. That and then, um and then three would be just cards and just general accessories that you may need, like, flashes. Are you shooting at night? Is it indoors? We're gonna lose light. Do you need extra batteries? Like, you know, it's It's all those little Kuchar Montes. I get my typical set up, I think, for your wedding actually is back when I was shooting DSLR still on and I shot him on to Nikon d eight hundreds and my go to set up is having I use a strap with two cameras. It's actually really nice. It's like leather. I wish I had it with us, but it's nice and love and helps you blend in with a lot of the guests. I look like I'm just wearing really nice suspenders, and when people bring when I bring my camera, people don't notice so that two cameras on my right side, I have always usually a long lens like a 72 200 that is actually probably what I shoot 75% of the wedding on because I can step back and I can zoom in and I can get those candid shots get really fun shots that hangs on my right side. And then on my left side, I usually have a mid range zoom 24 to 70 or in 18 to 55 which is this amount goes here because things are happening so fast. I need to be able to switch and grab that lens quicker than a faster that it takes me to switch it on my camera. So that's a huge. I think that brings up two things. Well, one, I do remember it after after our kiss walking down the aisle, going outside of the alter, the ceremony venue my wife and I walk outside and will is like swapping cameras to get that wide shot as we come outside of the the church or the chapel. And you couldn't do that with there's a telephoto lens. The other important thing is you just never know what's gonna happen to your camera if something doesn't work. For some some reason, if it breaks, you know, you never know what's gonna happen. I know when I was shooting a wedding actually my first wedding. It was doing video, but it was one of the scariest moments of my life because I was my first wedding, so I was nervous already. But for some reason, the only camera I had it just wasn't turning on him. And it's just like one of these things, like it had never happened before. But it just wasn't turning on, and I was. It was like right before the ceremony was about to start, their about to walk down the aisle. Did anyone else know? No one else knew, except that I went to the photographer and the photographer had an assistant, and I was literally this close to like, begging them to letting me use their camera to shoot the ceremony until I could get my camera, their work. And luckily for some reason it turned on me, and I think it was just like I opened up the battery and took out the battery. Put it back in. But you just never know. And now, after that experience, it's like having a backup camera for that kind of event is so important for weddings when there's no second chances for any type of event. It's if you can have a backup camera, it doesn't have to be as expensive, but just having something just in case. I I even like because now we shoot on. You know those D 800 with this. Now it's mere lis. I rent the same exact camera for my second camera because I can afford it within the budget . And then the older model that I have XY one is in my bag, ready to go if it needs to. It takes the same lens to take the same cards. It's not as fast as resolution, but, like just knowing that it's there is, like is like super huge and then going back to like the speed of the having two cameras and lenses. The moment of the first kiss to you guys walking out is like my gosh, like you just walking. And so to get the close up shot with the long lens and then drop it and grab the other one is like you. That's all I had time for, and even even that, like I'm shooting aperture priority. I don't have time to set my manual settings. I just have to know that I'm good to go. So getting used to that is good to cool. All great tips for being prepared and having the right equipment. 119. Event Photography: Be Aware of Your Surroundings: Arthur Tip was about being aware of your surroundings, being courteous with the people around you, and also all throw in their dealing with people who are the family photographer with their iPhone or the iPad. I mean, if you have been to a wedding lately as a guest, you probably know you see people in front of you with their their tablets tryingto filmed the entire event. How do you kind of deal with all of this? And still, it's security. It's so funny because I started shooting weddings in probably about 2000 and seven hasn't eight. And since then, you know, over 10 years it has completely changed and people are out there with their cell phones. I'd say first and foremost, Um, ask the people, ask the efficient or the couple to kind of put a notice out. And I've seen that a lot lately is when people are coming down, will make an announcement. Hey, we have a photographer here that we paid for please, you know, enjoy the wedding. Don't worry about taking photos will make it available for everyone, and that actually really does wonders. And like, it really keeps people back from actually getting in the aisle, getting in places, holding things up in the air where I'm trying to shoot over their heads. If that's not the case, having a long lens is probably the best thing you can do to kind of shoot around people. But again, you know, this tip involves, like, you have to still notice that it's an event and you have to, like, not necessarily being people's way be courteous of people. I try to work with other videographers that I know that we know we kind of like, make a plan and we tell each other what we're doing. Um, and then if there's someone in the way or someone in a spot that I know I'm gonna need to be, I'll just go up to be like a sir, Uh, I'm gonna be running around here just so you know, when the when the ceremony start, it's like I just don't want to be in your way. So just keep an eye out will be like, usually like, oh, very cool vehicle like No, no problem. I think just being nice and letting people know it's a big thing because you never know what's gonna happen and you want to get that shot on. You want to keep an eye out, that you're not in someone's way during like a real important moment. I think with wedding specifically, you have a lot of license to be moving around pretty quickly. Um, long as you're not in one place in front of someone for a long time, I think getting in there shooting getting out is like, very important and knowing kind of where to go, where to be and that you'll gain experience with weddings. As you do that you just get really good. And then it's kind of a cookie cutter thing. You know where to be for every wedding, and it's the exact same cool, awesome that brings up something that I know, at least for me was it took a little get getting used to. But photographing this could be for weddings or really anything getting ready and getting dressed, the bride or the groom, whether you're a male or female photographer, what is sort of the protocol for when they are getting dressed and you might want to capture those moments but, you know, making sure they feel comfortable with you being there, I think having a conversation way before the wedding and asking first like do you want a za male like, Do you want photos of you getting ready? You know, put a dress on and typically there, So yes. And so the protocol for that is on the wedding day the morning of I always tell them like, Hey, I'm here. Shooting is a cool that I come in and they usually give a warning to all their female people and and and then I'll come in and tell her, Look, I'm here to shoot when you're ready to put the dress on, put it on to a point where you feel decent and I'll step are, you know, and then let me know when I'll come in. So I'll leave when you're about to put it on, get to a point, re feeling decent uncomfortable because it's still like a sensitive day. And then let me just come in as you're putting on the final touches and stuff like that. And at that point, um, usually people are okay with and a few nice with them like that, they'll be they'll be okay with you and on the mail, and I've heard female to the same things like, Hey, start getting ready. When you guys feel like you're in a decent mode, let me come in. And oftentimes both sides will have an undergarment that they're okay with you shooting on and you'll come up with some stuff, too. But I think it's worth hanging conversation way beforehand and just being curious and having a good bedside manner and understanding that you are in their private space so much . And between the couple and the photographer, you spend the most time together throughout that day. Like no matter like those moms, dads like like parents like, I think I spent more time with you that day than anyone else in the world, which is cool cause we're friends. But you know, when you're shooting a stranger like just that's important relationship and you're in their face the whole time. So it's important to be increased. Cool. Well, I know that was kind of more of a specific tip, but that's something that I know as a wedding photographer. Videographer myself came up in the beginning so cool. Great advice for being curious to people you're shooting at events 120. Event Photography: Be Quick with Your Settings: our fourth tip was about being quick and Maurin the sense of if you are taking photos of people at a reception or just groups of people, What advice do you have so that when you do go up and ask people to take their photo, you know your settings are going to be right and everything's gonna go according to plan. Sure, I think I think there's three different settings at which three different situations that you'd be in, that you need to be pretty quick. So, like one is the event, right? So you get in there, take a shot, get your head and get up to was going up to people and, uh, and seeing them, I think before I'm at a reception and I'm shooting people like, Hey, you mind taking a picture? I'll test it on someone that I've already like, sort of talked to or built a relationship with. So usually that's my second shooter or my assistant. So all throughout my settings, But hey, can you go stand out there, take a couple shots, make sure it's working mostly, The lighting is not gonna change. If not that I'll go to the D J or some other vendor and be like, Hey, man, I'm just trying to, like, test my settings give. I can send you a couple of these shots. Do you mind if I just take a picture of you or two? And usually they're, like, super okay with that and you get the information, and then that kind of helps them out. And then if they need help, offer help. It's just kind of a trade. Workers were both there working and your colleagues, even though you're doing different things. So once you nail that, now you can go approach people has going Click your out, let them enjoy their time. You've got the shot move onto the next couple, and then the 3rd 1 is posing shots. So there's a certain amount of time, you know, in when we're shooting, we were imposing. The two of you are imposing for your wedding. We pose the entire wedding party and the entire wedding guest. Everyone that was at your wedding, right? Yeah. Um, I think having a plan and again going and going to that spot shooting pictures and knowing your settings before you get there is so crucial Because You can only hold attention span for people for so long, especially the bigger the group gets. And for you guys, you don't want to be taking photos all day and you've been standing there. Your It's a long day. It's nervous, you know? We're in the sun. Um, you know, you're in this tight suit with a tie like she's in a dress that she has to, like, fumble around with, like, you just want to get in there. No, your shots take, um, having a shot list, knowing your settings, making sure that your couple has water, like, you know, whatever I think one thing to that. Maybe my my wedding party and our guest list was rather small, so we didn't have a coordinator. But oh yeah, having a coordinator who's there who can help you get all the right photos of the specific groupings of people. You I mean, you can help be in charge of making sure that oh, the bride's parents were there and then the groom's parents, and then you got them with the siblings. But it's a lot better if the coordinator is there helping with that kind of stuff, and then I think I don't know if you were shooting with burst mode when you were taking group photos. You were. I think that was another thing that came to mind is when you're taking group photos, you never know if people's eyes, they're gonna be open or one person's will be closed and shooting in burst mode can help. Yeah, I think I shoot. Um, this camera and the Nikon had a continuous high in a continuous low. My continuous low. You can custom set I set to three photos. So if I'm taking lots of portrait or portrait, So I'm taking lots of group photos with everyone. The last one was that I shot in Barcelona. Actually, they wanted to go around to every single person at every single table and take a picture with them, which was fine. Like, I'm okay doing that. So I go on everything on three post and sure enough, like one out of three is not good. So, uh, someone's looking away panna pocket, hand hands, you know, so yeah, continuous continues. So also keep in mind with the coordinator when we're talking about the coordinator. Um, often, if there isn't a coordinator even if there's one, then they're not doing necessary. The best job. It will fall on the photographer to lead the charge in what's happening next, Who needs to be where all this stuff And so you have to be prepared because people will be asking you questions constantly. Like where we supposed to do this? Is this next, like what's next? Including the couple, and like, they've already set everything aside. So it's kind of charged on you to sort of have a general idea of how the day's gonna go, have a print out, have notes, and I've been on. I've been on ones where there's coordinators and they're great and they let me know their assistance. Let me know, and I don't have to do anything. Yeah, but I've been on other weddings where the coordinator is actually terrible and I have to keep moving things along, ask questions. People are coming to me because I have everything together, and then there's ones without any coordinator, and it really falls on you to kind of help move things along. So just be prepared for that. I think that's just a natural thing that's happened with weddings because the photographer is usually the one that's really on top of everything. Yeah, it's the first time for the couple getting married. You all things like as a photographer you start to learn, and I've been to so many thanks like And I know I know typically what comes after next, what traditions are like, what side the bouquets are going on with. Side is what? Because you just get used to it on by the time you get to the reception with the deejays there. That D J hasn't necessarily been there the rest of the day, so they know what's going on with to get to that point. But up until that point, it's just, you know, be prepared to know what's going on, and I feel a lot of questions. Cool. Well, those are great tips for being quick and also specifically for taking more group photos at events 121. Event Photography: Capture the Details: All right. So the last tip that I want to talk about with will Here is just Theo idea of getting capturing the details of the event, especially for weddings. We put so much time, effort and money into decorating our wedding for the flowers for just all of the details. So what? When do people when you capture these details, any advice for setting them up? Getting a nice shot? I mean, obviously we'll show pictures of this, but you have, you know, our rings a ring box, flowers. I mean, I know how you do it, but, like, how do you go about getting this shot when the rings are sitting there? Sure. And we can throw the shot up, maybe on the thing, But I tend to go and I start with the very little details while they're preparing. What? People are getting ready. So the rings is like a classic shot, right? So I think having a shot list and knowing what you're gonna dio is super helpful. Um, one of them is the ring shot. So go get the rings from people, go find a window and just set him aside. And you can look up how people shoot them. Take a look at this shot. Um, I was shooting. I did not shoot the macro lens, although I wish I had it on this one. But I zoomed in through Ah, really big open f stop it like a to so that there is some fall off and then, you know, just shot them near window. And then often with different weddings, there are little trinkets that you should kind of find out like you guys had a box specifically for the rings. There's been other places where there's other rings. There's specialty. Uh, you know, like Chris AJ is their specialty napkins or specialty, Everything for that wedding. So trying to capture that is a really good idea. The dress, the details of the dress. I hang it up. You could take a look at Isabel's dress here. You know, I tried to get specific details and ah, and it looks great. And I think having a macro lens is super helpful. Also, um, in addition to the dress addition, Teoh, I think for you I also shot like your bowtie here. You know, getting that specific little detail of the what the group is wearing is also something you should do that I think people forget about by like, um call flings. I had another couple who actually put lyrics on the cufflinks, and she gave it to him before the wedding. So, like a shot of that, um, you know, little details like that are really great. And then once they're done getting ready, you got all that going to the reception. If you have time after the ceremony and just getting little things there because there's place settings, there's name settings there signs all those little things in your down time to test. Also your settings is super crucial in great I mean, and that's tough if you're shooting the wedding by yourself and you're going from the ceremony to maybe taking photos of the couple right after the ceremony before the reception . But ideally, you're able to get into the reception before all the people to shoot that stuff, because the reception can get super messy really quick with all the people, and it's nice to jump in there before people are their I mean, even before the wedding. If you have time before the event started, yeah, it's in the same location. You can pop in there, get your detail shots as well. And also the bouquets of flowers, all that stuff. And you don't need to just be macron close up. I think I went to some I don't know if I did it yours, but there are some places were just shoot a wide of the place before anyone can get in there. And, like, just for record keeping like it doesn't need to be the most beautiful photo of all time. But I think you know, it's nice that you can see that right towards the end. Yeah, I love it. You know, as the person that got married, that taste is being able to see all the details and remember where we were and what the restaurant looked like for the reception. So, yeah, we'll show we'll be sharing a lot of these photos, but, um, cool details. I mean, one of the best things to do is just toe look at other photographers, see, a lot of wedding photographers will put up literally all their photos or all their best voters from the day. And so look and see what other wedding photographers air doing and make sure that you're trying to capture all those photos. I mean, you mentioned kind of out list the rings, the bouquet, something for the men, the dress on that might be worth. While writing those things down and having a list on the day of to help you get all those shots social, you can reference back, put it on your phone, make a little note. Put in your camera bag. Just a reference. Well, awesome. Well, these were some great tips and hopefully diving in a little deeper helped you watching this to understand a little bit more about how will goes about shooting weddings. If you have any questions, let us know and we'll be happy to help out. 122. Event Photography: Overview of Wedding Photography: So I have here Fillon Isabel's wedding book that they made off the photos that I took. I was their photographer at their wedding, and basically I just for anyone that specifically interested in shooting weddings, I thought it would be a great idea to kind of go through their book and kind of give you some tips and tricks and show you what I was thinking during specific shots. What tools I was using and basically everything that goes into shooting was wedding. All right, so let's take a look. Um, I just to start off with, like, I feel really framed this in making this book. But this is one of my favorite shots that I took. You can see it's backlit Green Party 2.8 with my long lens. I love it. So again we're talking about details in honor lier lesson. But here are some lesson shots. I shot this with the long lens near window. You got to get those little details that they had a lot. We'll skip around a little bit. Nice dress detail. It looks like you got here. Um, I like putting the dress up against the window and blowing it out because it just adds that nice, bright feel to it, you know, supposed to be a happy, bright day. So I thought that was cool. Then you can see him just shooting candid photos As people are getting ready. You could see Phil's brother here brought, uh, something to Isabel and I captured that moment. So just kind of being aware of what's going on, and then you jump over to fill side, and he's there with his guys. Look there, Sam, There's Sam, uh, over here in the bottom. Right corner, hoping Phil, get ready. Couplings. Um, it looks like this one. We turned black and white. This is like a really good example of moving your subject near a white ah, lighting source inside. And look how nice the though light just kind of softly falls on him as he was putting his couplings on. Um, I really love this shot. Actually, I've used this in my portfolio before, and I tried to mimic that with Isabel, which maybe you'll see right here so you can see again. Nice soft light coming in. She was talking to someone off camera, so it's good to just kind of snap in between poses. But yeah, also is important. Her mother was their family was there trying to get the bride and her mom. The grooms and their parents is always good. Especially while they're getting ready and then getting the wedding party, having them step us having the ah, the bridegroom step aside and getting photos with Herb. Okay. Hizb okay. Always looks really nice. These are mostly candid, just basic photos of the place. I have to admit it was a little tough and you can see in this shot. This is a really good example of a wedding. Uh, that has kind of gross toppy. Fluorescent lights on also has some tinted windows where a lot of daylight was coming through, but it was also tinted by the blue. So now I'm mixed in this in this setting, with daylight coming from from the from the door, I'm mixed with a different color, uh, different color tent coming in. And then also just these weird warm lights coming from up top. So turning stuff black and white is always nice. But finding a good balance is always good. You can see I was trying to level out with the daylight here, and we had another shooter shooting from in front as people came down. Um, so good mix is always good daylight here. Just getting ceremony. This is a nice wide shot. This example of having two cameras being able to shoot to here and then also be able to run up and get that two shot getting like a nice to shot from behind. Always looking for angles that aren't necessarily typical, um is always Superfund running around the front, shooting your subject, but also shooting guests. I mean, I guess this is Sam here, so I'm a little biased here, but shooting your guests and shooting the parents as they're getting married is always something to keep an eye out for. Um, this again. I was complaining about these windows earlier, but look how great it looks in the shot. It has a lot of color to the background. I think it makes Isabel pop. There's a nice little flare coming through. I really love this stock shot because you can see how she's looking at Phil, like, how wonderful is that? That's true love right there. You can see it so again at the end of the ceremony. Here's their first kiss. Really good example of shooting with a long lens really quickly getting some negative space here. You can tell how excited Phil was there moving too fast for my shutter. Clearly. So you get some shutter roll, and then as soon as they do that, they start walking down the aisle and you can see him starting to shift from a long lens to a wide lens. They come out the window and we're here now with a wide lens and we're outside. This is absolutely one of my favorite shots of this wedding, and I have used it for my portfolio shot. Um, Sam's cheesy smile always is in there, but I got a wide lens and I ran over to it so that I flipped it up so we can use and get that shot right after seeing them come out getting more details. Obviously, we're gonna skip ahead. Here's Here's an example of everyone that was at Phil's wedding. Now it was a small wedding, so there wasn't a ton of people, but I got up high, I think, from a second floor window and had everyone position I usually try to get some energy in there, and I shot everyone just kind of hanging out. And then I was like, All right, everyone, put your hands up and celebrate And so everyone did. And that actually turned out to be the better shot than three shot where people were just kind of standing there smiling. So it's always something to dio, um, did lots of formal shots. It's great that Phil has these in here. I put them in shade for the most part. As time went on, the sun started a creep you can start to see. It's it's behind them. Um, positioning people so that the sun is hitting their back instead of their face is always better. It's a real quick and noticing this, like shooting on a DSLR. This is a beautiful book, and if you look in the back here, we use peekaboo. Phil designed it out of all the photos, and really, it's a wonderful, wonderful book. It's printed out nicely. The papers nice. It's not Teoh glossy, and it's like in between between Matt and glossy, and it looks really great. The colors are holding up also, Fillon Isabel did a thing where they had all their guests come and take a picture with an understanding of small wedding. So they're able to do that. But how wonderful is this? This is a really great layout. Here we go. Here's a real Here's a real meat of this again. This is really great layout. Phil took this photo, and I tend to shoot a lot of couples with some negative space. But this is a really good layout on way to kind of show emphasis and creating emotion with Fillon. Isabelle There again. You see, I'm doing this constantly. Look at those sunlight on the back here and look where it's coming from. I always try to put the sun behind them if I can. Here's more couple shoots. This one turned out really great. The sun just looks really great on the background. This is like the perfect situation, because I was able to shoot with shade in the background with a little bit of light Grady int, while still getting some light on the back of them to make them stand out from this darker background. Look for that, if you can. It's a little tough to necessarily do I really like doing the shot? This has become sort of a staple of things I do is I sort of cut off their faces and focus on their bodies next to each other because you get the OK, you get some of the jeweler in the ring that she may be wearing. You get the suit that he's rented in his custom tie. Um, it's really a cool kind of Americana, sort of framing. And then I just have fun with them, uh, have them play around, have them looking at each other, having kiss. They're gonna be kissing so much that day. They're just gonna have to get used to it. Um, always having a kiss on the forehead is nice. This is the same photo that is on the cover of this book. Turned out great. You can see there's extra room over here, but the cover framed it like that. So over here we were shooting in Manhattan Beach, Calif. And I hadn't even known this existed. And I grew up about 20 minutes away from there, and we found this sign that had street signs to happily ever after. Once upon a time, Um and they found it. And, you know, you kind of go with it. They really want to go take a photo over there. We went over, we took a shot. Um, and it really turned out great. Actually. Have this printed out in their house as well. Um, and then here's what was talking about in a previous lesson. When you get to the reception early, I did all these little inserts of everything that was going on that they had set up. So here's the name of the restaurant. Here's things that fill in Isabel made. They had signs on the back of their chairs, signs for the guests. They had a little screenplay that he had written out. It's really getting those details because, honestly, those things are gonna end up getting lost or, you know, sometimes taking a ruined the cake and the cupcakes obviously will be gone. But getting shots of those is always really good. You can see they made a little I M P would display in front. Getting inserts of that is really good for your book. Here they are arriving here they are at the actual reception. They didn't necessarily have a giant reception hall. So it was kind of nice just to get little inserts and coverage of that so you can see the pictures air sort of winding down. Getting little inserts of glasses, speeches is always fun to get. One of my favorite things to do is don't get lost in taking too many photos of the speech you can see here. I got Sam, I got Caleb and I got his friend over here taking a speech. But after the speech, there's always gonna be a hug like they're just always will be a hug. So keeping that in mind, be ready for that hug at the end of the speech and the cheers. It's a really good opportunity to get something really candid like that, and I really like that photo also during speeches, looking for reactions you can see here. We got some reactions here looking to Isabel when her dad is giving a speech, looking to her mom listening to the dad give the speech. It's a really good opportunity to get those kind of reactions, but also in the layout that Phil did here. Look how great this is. Isabel's dad's giving a speech and you see the mom reacting. You see her reacting. It really creates a portrait story in the layout. And that's really what you're trying to do is you're trying to capture the story of the day . This is one of my heart is honestly like the hardest thing for me to shoot is usually the cake, because you never know which side they're going to go on. You never know how many people are going to get up there and start taking photos or video. So you having a wide lens and kind of scoping out what is gonna go on in the cake situation is good to know. Also, um, I never know if the couple is gonna shove cake into each other's faces or not. So being prepared to switch to either lens in a quick, fast way is good, because otherwise you'll miss it. A good rule of thumb for me is I always just live on my mid range zoom when the cake time comes because that's the only way you're gonna be able to capture it faster. What a wonderful way to end a book 123. Drone Photography: Tips: Hey, Phil here. And welcome to this brand new section in the photography masterclass all about Ariel and drone photography. This is an exciting section that I know a lot of students have asked for in the past, and we wanted to make sure we covered it in this photography masterclass. So what this section is all about is how you take better photos with a drone or doing aerial photography. So if you have the chance to get up in a helicopter or you're flying in an airplane or something like that, or maybe a hot air balloon, however you're up in the sky, we want to help you take better photos. Whether section is not is a complete walk through of a specific drone and how to use a specific drone. We want to like the rest of this class. Make sure that no matter what equipment you're using, you're going to get tips and be able to take better photos with this section. So we're gonna be going over our favorite and recommended equipment. We will be going over some basic camera settings that you might have in your drone. Or, of course, you'll be using your own photos. If you're up in the sky yourself and then we're going to be putting into practice with a demonstration, so it's gonna be an exciting section. We hope that you enjoy it and let's dive right in. 124. Drone Photography: Equipment: in this video, we want to go over our recommended equipment for aerial or drone photography. In terms of drones. There are several companies making drones from all price ranges that have cameras built into them. It's amazing compared to 10 even five years ago. The accessibility to take aerial photos is way cheaper and way more accessible now, so we're really living in a great time where we can go get a drone and easily fly it. And that's one of the cool things about drones now, even just five years after the first drones really came on, the market for consumers is that they're easier to fly than ever. So specifically, we recommend the deejay. I brand there, the main brand of professional drones out there, and they've continued to revolutionize this market. They have several models at different price tiers that will hopefully allow you to get a drone in the future. So they have this spark. They have the maverick, they have the phantom, and then they have the inspire, and then they also have some other systems where you can put a full DSLR or professional camera on it. But most of us are going to be using one of their drones that have the camera that's built in, like the Spark, the Maverick or the Phantom they inspire is a tear up. And that's right now between two and $3000. And one of the cool things about that drone is that you can actually operate the camera via a second remote so one person could be flying and the other person can be manning the remote. The camera and the drone that we are going to be using in this class is the Phantom for Pro , So they have all kinds of different models. They're still selling the Phantom three on their website. They've got the Phantom four, and then they also got The Phantom for pro. And then, depending on what package you get, you might get a remote that has a screen on it built in. Or you may have to use a tablet or your own mobile device as the remote control viewer. Here's the Phantom Pro for Plus Remote, which has the screen built in, which is one of the best things that has come to drones. We've used the inspires. We've used the Mavericks, and it was almost a little annoying to have to connect your phone every time and waste your phone's battery. Now this is all built in, and the screen is super high resolution. It's very bright. So when you're out in the field, it's super easy to see this, even on a bright, sunny day. In terms of the differences between a model like the Phantom Four and one of the lower to your models like The Maverick and the Spark, there are a few main differences. One is the camera itself with the Phantom four Pro. You're getting a 20 megapixel camera to remember back in our camera anatomy section, with Will You covered camera sensor sizes and resolution. That's what we're talking about. 20 megapixels with the Spark and the Maverick. The current models have a 12 megapixel camera, still an amazing camera that will allow you to take amazing photos. But it doesn't have the quality of the Phantom, and it won't have that dynamic range the ability to capture the darks in the highlights as well as something like The Phantom. The Phantom Pro also has a longer flight time, so per battery has about 30 minutes of flight time. The other models have between 15 and 20 minutes, typically of flight time. It's not a big deal if you purchase multiple batteries, but it's nice to have that extra bit of flight time, so you don't have to be constantly swapping out batters and paying for extra batteries as well. You also have obstacle avoidance with The Phantom for Pro, which is an awesome future that makes it easier than ever to fly. If you get too close to something, it's going to warn you, and eventually it's going to stop. So it's more difficult. I won't say impossible, but it's more difficult to fly this thing into a tree like I've seen many people do. Search YouTube for Drone Fails It's pretty hilarious. Kind of sad, actually. The other thing you get with the Phantom four or the deejay I inspire, which is the bigger drones, is you get more stability. Your shots are going to be a little bit more study, which makes more sense and is more important for video, which all of these cameras have the capability of doing. But with something like the spark and the maverick, if it's a really windy day, you're gonna be a little bit more wobbly and shaking, and you might not even want toe test the waters or test the air anyways and fly in a windier day. But with The Phantom Pro, I was comfortable going out to the beach on a windy day, and it was still very study. And then, just speaking of video itself, all of these cameras do come with the video option. We don't really cover too much of the video in this class because it is a photography class , but you can't shoot amazing video in the air. With these drones, you can shoot high quality four K video in slow motion, and it's a smooth as butter in terms of other brands that you can check out. GoPro is really the only other brand that we would recommend. Right now. They make the karma, which is a cool sort of really compact drone that fits in a small bag. And with any of these drones, you can buy backpacks that sort of Utkan fit them in and haul them around. Definitely with The Phantom Pro. It's not as compact as something like the Maverick, the Spark or the Karma So check it out at D j i dot com, or go to go pro dot com to check out the karma. And, of course, if you have a friend or if you rent one of them, that might be the best option, because you can play around and see what settings are and see how you like it before actually making that investment. Anyways, if you have any question about the equipment itself, let us know in the question section or the common section of this class, and we'd be happy to help you out, and we'll see in the next lesson. 125. Drone Photography: Tips: Here are your tips for shooting Better drone and aerial photos. Tip number one. Remember your basic photography settings and rules. This is still photography at its core. It's just shooting photos at a different angle and from a different perspective. So remember, you want to expose properly. You want to compose a nice image. Use your rules like the rule of thirds level horizon and leading lines and shapes, which is really big with aerial photography, because you're so far up in the sky that you'll see lots of cool new shapes and lines that you can capture. But most importantly, tell a story. I know that when I first got the drone and started getting into drone photography, it was just fun to get up in the sky and take photos of really whatever direction I was looking at. And it actually looked pretty cool. But the best photos are the ones that tell a story that you pick a subject. You compose it properly, and you do try to tell that story with your photography tip. Number two Following up on having a good subject and a good story with your photo is to choose the right location. You want to make sure that it's safe. Make sure that you're allowed legally and technically, to fly your drones in that area. Make sure you aren't harassing anyone. You gotta follow with laws, and we'll talk more about that in just a second. But mainly just finding a location that is safe so that you don't have to worry about any of those things, and you can focus on your photography. You can focus on composing that subject in a way that looks great, also finding a location without too many distractions. This can be hard when you're flying up in the sky because you're looking down at the earth and there's lots of stuff going on, especially in busy places like cities. So it might be good to go to a location that is a little bit more simple and finding a subject that doesn't have as many distractions so that in those photos the viewer is really drawn to whatever your subject is. Tip number three is to be prepared. This means having your batteries charged, making sure your equipment all works, having an extra batteries having extra propellers in case you do have a minor accident or if one of your propellers isn't working. It's always good to have backups of both the batteries and the propellers. You want to make sure that you know how to fly the drone, practice it, go practice it in a big open field before you go out and shoot in a busy street. You don't want to get into any trouble or her anyone. I mean, that's really all. Legalities aside, you definitely don't want to hurt anyone or any property with your drone, so make sure that you're practicing and then have a plan. Estimate the flight times estimate how long it's going to take for you to get ups into the sky and take your photo. I know it's a little hard to know exactly what your composition might be from down on the ground, but it's a good idea to have your photo in mind. So you as soon as you get up in the air, you can take that photo and not waste any time because thes drone batteries don't last that long. Tip Number four is to look for symmetry and patterns, especially with drone photography. This is one of the compositional rules or techniques that I like to use, especially from up in the sky. You can see some cool patterns made by the landscape of our beautiful earth and also with symmetry, both with the landscape with buildings, any man made objects. Look for those two things to take some great interesting photos. Tip five is to look for some interesting shadows if you're shooting at Golden Hour, which we always recommend trying to shoot at golden hour if you can, because the lighting tends to look better, at least in our opinion. If you do shoot at golden hour, the shadows are going to be longer and a little bit more dramatic, and especially if you're landscape has some sort of difference in height. If you're shooting buildings, or if you're shooting mountains or hillsides or cliffs or anything, really, you'll get some cool shadows, and that will result in really neat photos. And then our last tip, which is really the most important tip and should probably be our number. One tip is to follow the rules and regulations of wherever you live. The rules are different in every country, in every city and every state, and so you are required. You are responsible for making sure that you are being a lot abiding citizen drones. While they're fun, they're a toy. They are a tool. They are also dangerous. And they can seriously hurt people or property if you don't know how to use them or if you just have a freak accident. So make sure that if you need a commercial license, you get that. If you don't need one, make sure that whatever you're doing doesn't require any sort of license. Make sure that you practice some of the common rules right now, which might change in the future. So it's up to you to make sure that you follow the rules. You can't fly above 400 feet. You have to fly in your sight line. So you have to be able to see the drone at all times. You can't fly within five miles of an airport without their permission. You can't take photographs of people or their property, any private property without their permission. So these are just a few things to keep in mind. Of course, these things change and like I keep saying, this might be different where you live so it's up to you to make sure that you follow the rules. In this section, we will include links to two websites that are very helpful, especially in the United States. No, before you fly and also the federal government's website with information on drone regulations and rules. If you are from out of this country and you have Web sites that you think would be helpful for anyone in this class, please send them to us and we will add them to the resource is too. Anyways, I hope you enjoy these tips and next we're going to go out and actually start flying our drones. 126. Drone Photography: Demo: Let's go take some aerial photos. So the first thing that I want to do is do some research and preparation, just like we talked about in the tips for this section. We want to find a place that is both legal and safe to fly and also something that has potential for some sort of cool photo. So I'm actually on Google Maps right now, and I'm searching around my home. I also have two other tabs up. The D. J I website has a map that shows where you're allowed to fly and also know before you fly dot or which is the United States Governments Partnership Website, where you actually have a little bit more detail of where there's warning zones and places where you should not really fly. So let's dive in there and I'll walk you through my process. Google Maps is awesome because you can see parks, which is generally where I like to go because there's more greenery. There's less buildings. Unless you're trying to take some architectural staff photography or cityscapes, you can also go to satellite mode, which is cool because you can then really see where the greenery is now. I know as soon as I go over to the No before you fly website. There are a lot of airports in Los Angeles. I mean, you see all this information, those orange circles, those are airports. You have the red, these air national parks where you can't fly. So you don't have a lot of options in Los Angeles area unless you go down to the coast down here in Palace for days down here in Orange County and also in the same Gabriel Mountains National Monument, which is not technically a national park. So what I was doing was just doing a little bit of Google map reconnaissance to go up to this area in Azusa, California And I was looking at this water reservoir, and I was thinking this would be a very cool place to shoot. Water is generally cool to shoot with a drone. It gives a nice texture and contrast from the landscape. Now, another cool thing that Google Maps has is this three d mode. If you click the button in the bottom right, you can get sort of a three D aerial look, and this is basically like flying a drone around and you can kind of see some cool stuff. And then I saw this damn here and using the three d view rotating around. I'm thinking that some sort of view looking over the dam like this might look pretty darn cool. It looks like there's places to park over here. This is another cool thing you can do with Google Maps is do the street view so that you can check and see where might be a good place to actually go fly the drone. So you gotta be in sight of the drone sitting right here. I think I'll be perfectly inside of the drone flying over that damn right there. So I'm excited. So let's go out, get to this location and then we'll walk you through what? My thoughts are in my processes for getting some cool shots. All right, so we made it here to the canyon, Azusa Canyon, and I'm just going to set up my drone now and kind of walk through some of my thoughts before we actually get up and start flying. So the first thing that I did was I drove past the dam to see what it actually looked like it's hard to know exactly what it's gonna look like from Google maps. Those maps can sometimes be a few years old, so I didn't even know if there was gonna be water in there right now. Likely there is, because it's going to make this much interest more interesting photo. I also drove a little bit further down the road and found another spot, which I thought would be a cool takeoff spot. There was also another little damn there, and it looked pretty interesting. As soon as I pulled over, though, a ranger stopped me and said that there was a local ah, family of eagles and so that it wasn't allowed there to fly the drones. Even though I checked the maps and everything, there was a specific reason for that location that we weren't able to fly over there. I'm glad you told me that, because I really wouldn't want to disturb, uh, any any sort of wildlife. So we've got the Phantom for pro. Plus, here we've got some cars driving by, and now it's a little bit noisy. We're pretty much ready to go. I'm gonna turn these on. I've already checked to make sure that my batteries are full on both my remote and my drone . One thing I noticed here before we take off. It's good to check out your location. Kind of plan your shot beforehand. I know the shot that I want to get is looking down at the dam, so I'm gonna fly right over there at the beginning. Then I'm gonna just fly around and see if there's any other shots that I might like. I noticed there are some power lines a little bit close by, so I'm gonna shoot up, go up, really go up really high to make sure that I don't hit any of those and then fly out towards the damn. All right, so let's get set up, and then we're going to take off. So your drone might be a little bit different, but pretty much all we have to do is wait for the satellites to connect to our drone to make sure we are ready to fly connecting my remote too. The drone takes a few moments for it. Teoh get connected to the satellites so it knows where it's flying. Okay, so what I'm gonna actually do is shoot some video while I'm flying so you can see what my processes, And I'm gonna walk you through it and we're going to take off. All right, so we're going up high to make sure that we don't hit any of those power lines. You can see the mountain in the distance now, so there's the damn. We're just gonna fly over there quickly. All right, so we're almost over the dam, so I'm going to turn off the video so I can go ahead and take some photos, okay? And take one looking off into the distance while I'm at it. Now I'm turning around and looking down to see if I could get another, more interesting shot. We got the water. The water is really green, so maybe I might be ableto kind of boost those colors. Now I am at 400 feet with these photos, and that's the maximum that I'm allowed to fly. And so I'm not going to risk it and fly over that. That would not be legal. So let's just take this one. It would be nice to be able to go a little bit a little bit higher. All right? So now I'm turning back video. Now you can see kind of where I am. I'm gonna fly out here over the reservoir, and this is gonna be a nice photo as well. So I want to get this photo looking outwards at the reservoir. Something like this is actually gonna look pretty neat. So paying attention to my battery as well let's turn off our video, take a couple of shots. It's nice to get those lines. Those leading lines of the road looking out into the distance go a little bit further. This is a nice video show actually revealing the background in the water. It's got this, like, green sort of look to it. I'm not sure exactly why. And when I'm here, it's great to see what this looks like. It looks supercool to see this ravages Alvar going almost like a river. So I'm gonna take a couple shots here as well. Silting up, tilting down. I like to take more photos that necessary just because you never know what's gonna work in posts. This screen is very nice, but isn't as good as looking at the photo on your computer. So I'm just moving forward a little bit now, taking a few more shots while I g o revealing more of the reservoir. So now I'm gonna turn around again. Look at the damn Not too interesting. But you get the lines of the reservoir, the water, the street looks pretty cool, Case, Let's turn our video again, Paying attention to our battery. We're still at 68%. Someone go out over to this sort of peninsula in the middle of the reservoir, see if there's anything interesting over there while we're at it. And that's a nice little use of leading lines as well. Let's take some photos turning around, getting in sort of that horseshoe bend of the reservoir. And I'm just flying back a little bit closer to me so that I can kind of see the front of the reservoir again. I'm just gonna give this nice wide shot of the reservoir. So now I'm gonna go over to the side of the mountain just a little bit more to see if I could get more of that leading line of the road. Nice little landscape shots. Now what I want to do while I'm up here is just get some shots looking straight down at the reservoir itself. I think I'll be able to do a really cool edit with a photo like this. Now, the last thing I'm going to do before I get my camera back, hopefully one pieces go as low as possible to get sort of a better shot of the water with a little bit more detail. So I'm going down closer to the water, as close as I am going to risk it. So see how this is a completely different perspective than the one from a top. It gives the dam at the end a little bit more prominence because you can see actually, how tall it is. This will actually be a very cool video to while fly this way. So I'm just gonna fly over the reservoir this way. All right, so we're gonna fly back here, land this guy, Then we're gonna take our photos into the editing room and see what we can do with them. So it's good to be paying attention to where your drone is in the sky as well as looking at the monitor from time to time, probably while you're not moving down as quickly to make sure you're not going to fly on top of anybody or any possession, any car, anything. Let's hope for a smooth landing and there we are. So we're back. We're going to go into the car now and take a closer look at some of these photos that we've shot. All right, so we're back in the car and I just wanted to check out some of these photos. We can see them. It's awesome. You can just swap the SD card from the drone itself to the remote control. And now I can kind of scan through these. It's just easier to see these voters when I'm in the car when I'm not trained to fly, talk on the camera and review some photos. Now, the photo that I thought I was gonna like most, or the one that I came out to get was the one where I was looking down at the dam itself. I got two shots or two versions of that one from behind the dam, which actually looks pretty neat and then one from in front of the dam, which I like the one looking straight down at it. because you see all of these different textures of the water of the dam itself, and I'm pretty happy with that. But I'm also very happy that I was able to get some more shots around the reservoir looking at the leading lines. And overall, I'm super happy with these photos. I'm gonna be taking these photos into the editing room to see what I can do with them, to really make them pop a little bit more. The colors, I think, will be interesting once I start to play around with them in post. Right now, it's all a little bit planned. Lots of green, turquoise Brown's, which is could be a nice sort of natural looking photo, but I'm ready to have some fun with them. 127. Night Photography: Tips: this section is all about night photography, so let's start out with our top tips. Tip number one. Shoot in raw. Make sure you're capturing as much information as possible by shooting and raw, and not just JPEG tip number to use a tripod. Stabilization is a great piece of equipment to bring on your night photography shoots, allowing you to shoot at longer shutter speeds instead of having to try. Do so with your hands. Tip. Three. Increase your depth of field. Increase that f stop. This might seem counterintuitive as you want to let more light in, but when you're photographing buildings and cityscapes at night, you'll want a deeper depth of field tip for bring a flashlight. Changing your settings on the back of your camera can be really hard. When you don't see what you're doing, bring your phone or a flashlight so you can see what you're trying to change. Tip. Five. Be careful of high I ISOS with night photography. You'll have lots of darker areas in your frame. Thes dark spots are where digital noise or grain will be most visible. As we've said before, no your camera and how hard you can push it with these tips. You'll be well on your way to improving your night photography. So now let's head out into the field and put them into practice. 128. Night Photography: Demo: All right. So we're now out here. It's nighttime. You know, we've gone through with our low lights of lesson of learning how to get the most out of the low light situations when shooting at night. So we're out here at the doughnut man, which you know, oddly enough, you know, Elvis used to come by here on his way between L. A and Palm Springs. So we figured it is kind of fun thing out here and seeing demons to take a photo of, um, I've set up my camera. I s 0 6400 1 1/100 of a second shudder and 2.8 so wide open for this lens. I I am on a 16 to 35 though, and so I won't get a little bit closer. We don't want bring the camera out there, so I'm just gonna hop out into the middle divider, take a quick shot, and then come back toe talk about you know what type of results I'm getting. All right. So no traffic and I'm just gonna walk across the street and there's no cars coming for a long time. Just go kneel down right here. Really? what it comes to this type of photography, you know, being nice and, uh, lo, I feel like, really makes it just seem a little bit bigger. Cool. No. One thing I'm running into is that the lighting from the actual restaurant is pretty bright , and so I'm having to stop down. It's really nice, so young. You have these people walking across the screen. I was on 35 was fairly wide. I'm shooting raw, so I didn't want to be standing in the street, which is where I would like to have been. But because I'm shooting raw, I know I can kind of go in and crop in later, so I'll make sure to do that once I'm doing post on these photos is really nice, though, because it's still well lit for the restaurant that often off to the sides, is falling off. And it really made it seem like the donut man was this loan building in the middle of a dark void at a really cool look to it, and you have these people walking in front of it. I think the Post came out really nicely. Um, as I said, I got a little bit lower just to make the building seemed a little bit bigger and waited for cars to pass. So I didn't have anything distracting in front of my frame. One thing I did realize upon looking at my photos is that at the shutter speed I was at once I serve sped it up. I started to see a ruling, the sort of you know, dark lines and then brighter line, dark line Brighton Line. You can see that in this image here. And what that is is from the type of lights they are the refresh rate or the flicker of the light, which the human eye doesn't see. But your camera can see when you're at a higher shutter speed. So why Release have done and what I'm going go back and do right now is bring my show, you speed down, bring my f stop up. So that's I'm going by having a lower share speed. I'm more light stop down. So I've less light and hopefully with that I won't have this ruling flickering effect from the lights. So once this car leaves, I'm going to do that and I should be able to get some some pretty cool shots at that point . All right, So we switch sides of the road, actually ended up coming and standing come in the street to get the shot. Just because I wasn't really happy with how far away I was. So end up being very low to the ground. Went to 16 millimeters, you super wide. And it just gives the building this like, bigger, larger than life presence. It also helped me crop out the side. So it was just nursing, then this black boy, and I think it came out to look pretty cool again. Just remembering what I saw. Were you comfortable shooting out? I knew I could do 6400. So I said at that and forgot about my eyes. So from there was figure out what the shutter speed was gonna be right for the SEPTA lights . I end up going to 1 100 and then I just adjusted my f stop accordingly. I ended up shooting on F four, which was just right for getting the exposure there. So again, just remembering these things. If I had to go to a lower shutter speed, I would have gone the tripod, but because I was still there's enough light. It's a bright enough building. I didn't need that tripod, so keep these tips in mind for the next time you're out shooting at night. Always make sure to be aware of your surroundings. Check your settings. Make sure you're comfortable not going too much digital noise. And if you need a tripod, use a tripod. But if you're at a fast enough shutter speed, you don't need one. 129. Wildlife Photography: Tips: this section is all about wildlife photography. Let's start out with our top tips. Tip one researcher location ahead of time. Do a bit of research to find out what animals and plants you might see. Know what time of day, and even what time of year is best to capture that specifically, wildlife tip, too. Be patient as much as you can plan ahead of time. Be prepared to be patient. The filmmakers of Disney Nature's Born in China took months before they captured their first shots of the reclusive snow leopard. While you might not have that much time to sit in the wild, it might take hours or multiple trips to get the shot you want. Tip. Three. Use your automatic modes. Aperture. Priority is a good mode for wildlife attire for you because you'll need enough depth of field to capture an animal in the distance and make sure it's in focus at the same time. If the subject is moving quickly, you'll need a faster shutter speed to reduce any motion blur. So do some test shots to make sure using aperture priority mode won't decrease your shutter too much. If it does increase your eyes, so to compensate and get proper exposure. Tip for. Use your burst mode to snap multiple shots in a short amount of time. Great for photographing moving animals. Tip. Five. Get down low crouching down and getting eye level with the animal will create a more dynamic shot. Also, you can capture more of the details of the landscape, including lots of foreground elements that can creatively frame your subject. Tip. Six. Be safe and respectful when out in the wild. Being safe is more important than getting the right shot. This means being prepared with food, water, a first aid kit and any gear you need to be safe. It also means not pushing the limit, going too far near the cliff's edge, dealing with harsh weather and things like that. And, of course, be respectful to the environment and the animals you are trying to photograph. Never try to feed them and always keep your distance not to scare them. And, of course, leave it cleaner than you found it. With these tips, you'll be well on your way to improving your wildlife photography. So now let's head out into the field and put them into practice 130. Wildlife Photography: Demo: in this video, I'm going to be going over the photos that I just took this morning on my very own back yard wildlife photography session. Depending on where you live, you might not have to go too far to capture some amazing wildlife. In fact, in my own backyard, I have a number of birds that come. They nest in the trees in the backyard. They even do ness in the front yard, sometimes in the spring as well. But I've never taken the time to actually photograph them. So I thought this was the perfect opportunity. Now, while we were out there trying to capture them, it was a little bit too intimidating for the birds for me to be talking and moving around and for Salmon will to be filming. So I went out there, I shot some photos and I'm gonna show you those now. But I was using my canon 70 d with a Tamron 75 to 300 millimeter lens. This set up is a fairly mid range beginner option for wildlife photography, but I wanted to use it to show you that you can get some great shots without paying 34 $5000 for the expensive camera body and a great lens. This lens is one of the first lenses that came with an old Canon 70 that I got probably, like seven years now ago now, and it's more of a kit level lens. But it does go to that 300 millimeter focal length, which is great on this crop since her body, because that also gives you a little bit of extra distance. And that's one thing about shooting wildlife photos is that if you're using a crop center body, that's it. Okay, it actually gives you a little bit of distance and some photographers for to use a crop sensor camera when they're shooting wildlife photography. Some full frame cameras actually have a crop sensor mode. Eso Utkan see if your full frame body has that option as well. But anyways, what did I learn from shooting outside while I tried to put into practice all of the techniques? I was patient. I did my research. I knew that there were gonna be birds out there in the morning. I can hear them. You might be able to hear them in the background right now, and so I knew they were gonna be there. We also have a bird feeder out there, which is a little bit of a cheap, but that helps toe get birds in there. And that also helped me later on when I was trying Teoh get the burst to come even closer. What a noticed originally was that there were a lot of birds up high in the tree. And if I got too close, which I wanted to get close. Even though this is a 300 millimeter lens, it wasn't close enough to get that really close up shot of the bird with all the detail. And so what I did was I sprinkled some bird seed on the ground, and then some of the birds hop down. And then, in that moment I captured from some shots and then they would fly up to the lower branches . I would capture a couple more. One thing I noticed was that I was shooting on manual mode, and I was having a difficult time quickly addressed in my settings so that I could expose it properly, but also have a shutter speed that was fast enough to not get any motion blur. And so what I ended up doing was switching over to an automatic mode. I was on shutter priority. So I set my shutter speed. It adjusted the aperture. I also has had to boost my I s so a little bit, because before the sun came up over my house, there wasn't enough light. And so I had to boost my I s 02 500. So I was able to expose properly with that faster shutter speed. Remember, faster shutter speed. Less light means it's darker. And this lens it only opens up to an F 5.6 aperture when you're zoomed in. This is one of those variable aperture lens is It's common for a cheaper telephoto or zoom lens. To be like that, if you zoom out all the way, it opens up to a four point. Oh, but when you zoom in, it can only open up to a 5.6, letting in less light than if I was zoomed out. The other thing that I was having trouble with was the focus itself. At first I was on auto focus because I thought that was going to work best but I was shooting into the tree a lot, and in the tree in our backyard. It's a pine tree, and it has a lot of pine needles, branches that were sort of in the foreground or just in front of the bird where I was shooting up at the birds and the bird was on the branch. But the branch was at their feet, and so the lens was having, or the camera and lens was having a little bit of a hard time focusing on the bird itself. And so what I ended up doing was switching over to manual mode and just lightly adjusting the focus. Even just moving in and out a little bit helped to get perfect. Sharp focus. Of course, though, it took a lot of practice and I was patient. I sat out there for a good 30 45 minutes, even though that the birds were just flying around all the time. I was shooting a lot of photos trying to be patient with them as well. I also did a couple burst shots, Teoh. When the bird was in a great position. I shot as fast as possible to see if I could get some great shots. And one actual happy accident from that was that there was a bird that had a worm in its mouth. And so I got the sequence of shots with the bird eating the worm. So has its in its mouth and hand. It's like halfway in the mouth, and then the worm is gone. So that was kind of a cool thing that I got with burst mode that I wouldn't have gotten if I wasn't on that burst or continuous mode, which it might be called on your camera. All in all, it was a fun little shoot, and I got some great shots of the wildlife that literally lives in my backyard. So hopefully you can get out there, you some of these tips to take your own wildlife photos, and we can't wait to see when you post your own. In the activity of this section, Sam is also going to be posting a video on the course, giving a lot another recap of his recent trip to Mexico, where he got some great wildlife shots with some more interesting animals as well. So enjoy that video and good luck with your wildlife photography 131. Wildlife Photography: Sam's Mexico Trip: So I recently had the opportunity to go out to this small archipelago off the coast of Mexico and take some wildlife photos. I was working on another project as well a documentary, but I got some really nice photos of the trip and want to share them with you. And I have talked about my approach to taking these wildlife photos. Now, first thing to consider when being out there was that, uh, I didn't want to disrupt any of the animals that were living there, and we did find a small colony. Only about three see lines. And while we were out on a boat and so we went around and I just asked a boat driver to do two laps and they kind of, you know, barked at us. Our gave out their little call initially, but then they just went back to sleeping in conflict. Nor does but as they will get some shots there, I didn't have at the time of Long lens, I only had a 24 70. So a lot of these photos war the bow, getting just as close as we could without getting too close to disrupt animals and then taking a lot of photos in raw, so I was able to punch in after the fact and still have good detail. One thing I did run into is that they're on the shady's have the rock and, you know, ideally, I guess I would have been there in the morning when the sun we've actually been hitting there's out of rock and eliminating the movement more so they weren't quite so much in the shade from there. We went on to the actual island itself where there were these birds. They're called blue footed boobies and a lot of iguanas and other animals as well different types of birds and whatnot. So we went for this walk and the blue footed boobies were actually laying eggs and had some chicks. And so it's really exciting to get to see, you know, the parents with these younger chicks. And they were fairly protective, though, So one of the things that I thought those new most important was I don't want the parents to fly away from their chicks and leave them abandoned or leave their eggs. You leave their nests because I'm approaching them as a photographer. So what? I would do is I would get fairly low. I would never make eye contact with the animals. One the researchers actually told me that you know that I I contact can. That's what can really spooked them or think lead them to thinking that you are wanting to attack them or something like that. So I mean, no eye contact with the birds and really just pop my screen out and look down on my screen . And so my lenses look at them, but I'm never making eye contact. I also got low to the ground as to not be this, you know, taller figure coming at them. So I crouched down and slowly made my approach towards them being, you know, out on this island being you island birds. They didn't seem too concerned with me after so much time. But it did take a little bit of time to just sit there. Be still let them get used to the fact I'm there, but I'm not moving fast or anything like that. I moved very slowly, low to the ground, and then we're able to snap some really great photos. I think of, you know, both the birds flying overhead. This colony of birds right on the beach is beautiful. Location got a couple of chicks and even some of the eggs, which eyes so hot on. The researchers were saying that if these animals get spooked, they're leaving. Because of the heat of the sun. The eggs can actually be cooked and kill the animals. So it's really important when you're out taking wildlife photos to not disrupt the animals that are there. You never know, especially if they have chicks of lover, um, or younger babies. They can get aggressive, they can run away, and that leads you. The baby's to be exposed, possibly killed by another animal. You don't want to be the cause of anything like that. So make sure you approach these animals in the right way. This is also a big reason that having really long telephoto lens is important because you don't need to get right up there and have them, you know, have an interaction with them. You can stay far away, allow them to keep living their lives, you know, keep doing their thing and not be too impacted by you. Uh, as we could hear a walk, we found a couple of Guan is which was really cool because they really aren't that afraid of us as humans. And I was able to get very close to them, gets really nice shots of them, saw one actually climbing up into a tree which was really cool to see it, you know, eating these flowers. But it's just a different look. So the end of the day, the main tips that I took away from this experience of taking photos of these animals was first off a long telephoto, you know, 100 to 400 millimeter ranges. Kind of essential you to really get that up close. Beautiful shot the animal. You need those longer lenses. The second tip that I found to be most useful is to you know how you approach the animals. You need to move slowly, low to the ground, not making eye contact with, um, you know, these are all things that can kind of scare them if you're moving to faster. If you are standing tall, that can be more intimidating to them. So getting lower to their level, moving slowly, really taking the time and being patient, you need Teoh to allow them to go back to their living and not just looking at you. You can get great shot during that time, but I think you'll get really amazing shots when they start interacting with one other again and stopping attention to you. So I hope these tips are useful for you. I can't wait to get back to these islands or going another trip and really honing my skills as a wildlife photographer. It's something that takes a lot of practice and knowing where you are, the area you're in, where you're going to see the animals, how you how you gonna find them? It takes a law research and so best of luck, and be sure to share photos you take of wildlife on our course page. 132. Intro to Editing: All right, Phil here. And welcome to the editing sections of the photography masterclass In the following sections, we're going to dive into specific editing applications to teach you how to edit your photos with the following sections. Feel free to jump around to specific applications that you're going to use. There's no need for you to watch through all of these lessons because you probably won't be editing using all of these APS. 133. Photoshop CC: Intro: Welcome to this brand new photo editing section of the photography masterclass. In this section, we're going to be learning how to edit your photos with Adobe Photo Shop. Photo Shop is the world's leading platform for photo editing and graphic design. And in this video, I'm gonna talk about who should really use Photoshopped, why we're starting with photo shop and how to get it and how to get a free trial of it, because it can be a little pricey if you are paying for it first. I want to explain that this is going to be used for Photo Shop CC, which is the latest creative cloud version of photo Shop. There is a version of photo shop called Photoshop Elements, which is more of a beginner, sort of dumbed down version of photo shop CC. We might add a section of using Photoshopped elements to this course as well. And why are we starting with photo shop? Well, it's great for Mac or PC users. Some of the tools we use in this class are just for Mac or just for PC, and so it's great for anybody that wants to get started. Plus, when I sent out before creating this course. A survey asking people what photo editing applications they would most like to use. Photo shop was the overwhelming majority of the highest ranking platform that people were using, So that's why we're starting it now. If you're not using photo shop, feel free to skip this section and go to a section of this course that is more optical bull to you. So how do you get photo shop? Well, you would want to go to the Adobe website adobe dot com, and to go straight to the photo shop page. It's adobe dot com slash products slash photoshopped dot html. Here you can purchase it, or you can get a free trial, which is a seven day free trial, and if you want to buy it, you can buy it with a creative cloud subscription. So the way that Adobe works now is that you have to purchase a subscription, a monthly subscription to get their applications. They have different plans. They have a photography plan, which gets you Photoshopped light room and Light room classic. Or, if you want all of their APS that include other things, like illustrator and premiere pro and after effects and all kinds of other ones. It's this one for $50 a month. If you're a student out of high school or a university, you should be able to get it for the student and teacher price for students online. I don't think you're going to be able to get that student price, but if you do go to school, you can get that price so really quickly. We also have sections of this course on light room, classic CC and Light Room C. C. Those are great photo editors to, and I do actually recommend light room Classic CC if you're going to be a professional photo editor or photographer. It's what I prefer for editing a lot of photos at once, and I'll talk about that more in that section of the course. But it's also good to know Photoshopped because photo shop is better at some things compared to the light room, so I don't want to talk too long, So go ahead and skip to the next lesson where we get started with actually using photo shop . But make sure that you download the practice photos. I've included downloadable folders of photos for each of the sections. And so you'll find a photo shop folder at the beginning of this section, which should be actually in this videos supplemental materials that include raw photo files and JPEG photo files. The thing with That's a scary photo of Sam. The thing with photo Shop is that you can edit both raw or J peg images, but you edit them in a really different way, and I'm gonna walk you through all of that. So go ahead and download the sample files and then install photo Shop CC. The version of Photoshopped that I'm using and will be using in this class is the Let's Go Ahead and see which version of photo shop is the 19.1 point two version. This came out in 2018 when we recorded this class. You might be using an older version. You might be using a newer version. Don't worry about that. Most of what you do, and most of the process of editing photos in photo shop will be the same, especially in all versions of the creative cloud version of photo shop. If you're using a CS six or a CS five version or something from the past, it might look a little bit different. You might not not have all the effects and styles and tools that we have in the newer version and in the future. If you're using version 2025 if this class is still available, then then you might have a couple new at new options for yourself. But the basic process should be the same. If there's any major updates, I'll make sure to update these lessons with those updates to them. Cool. So go ahead and do all that and we'll see in the next lesson. 134. Photoshop CC: Opening Photos: this lesson is all about how you import and open photos in Adobe Photo Shop. The way that these sections for the photo editing work is we're going to go through a basic process for each type of application, starting with importing than doing basic edits, knowing how to save and export our photos to share them with world. Then we're gonna go over any sort of advanced features of the application I think are applicable for this class. And then we're gonna work through some full entire edits to show you the entire workflow photo shop is a little bit different than some of the other applications because you really are editing one photo at a time. It's not a way that you can easily organize photos such as you would in Adobe Light Room or the photos app on Mac the's air applications that are great not only for editing but also keeping a library and organizing a library of photos. Also, the way that we work with Raw and J. Peg or other compressed photos in photo shop is slightly different in like everything, there's usually multiple ways to do the same thing. So for importing an opening photos in Photoshopped, There's lots of different ways to do it. Here's our folder of practice images. You'll find this in your documents and usually on Windows. You'll be ableto right Click and then open your photo with a specific program like here on my Mac. If I right click and choose open with, I can open with photo shop CC. All right, so when this happens, photo shop will open up in this raw viewer. This is camera raw, which is different than your traditional photo shop sort of desktop and workspace, and that's different than when you open a J Peg image in photo shop. So I have these two JPEG images to show you. If I open this say open and photo shop, it brings up the photo in the more traditional workspace of photo shop here, not the camera raw editor. I'm gonna close this out by clicking this X button down here, and this might be the view you see if you're opening up photo shop for the first time. Although you won't see these previous projects that I've been working on, you'll just see a button that says create new or maybe some templates. So if you want to open a photo once you've open photo shop, go to the file menu, then she's open. And then if you choose the raw photo again and click open, it will again open camera raw. No, I'm not gonna make any edits. And I'm gonna show you how to make edits in the next lessons. But if I'm done editing this image and I choose open image, that's when it will actually open up the image in the normal Photoshopped workspace and not in the raw workspace. Okay, I'm gonna close this down by clicking that X Don't save. I'm gonna do the same thing open. And now I'm gonna open the J Peg image. But I want to open this as a camera raw file. Even though this isn't a raw photo and it's not going to have the capabilities of a raw photo, we can still open it using that camera raw editor so that we have more editing options. So on a Mac, you'll see down here this options button, click that and shoes format and choose camera raw, then click open. And that opens up this J peg image in the camera raw viewer on a windows computer. You should see something, and I'm going to cancel this. You should see something that says open. As and then in the format options of the open menu, you should see something that says camera raw. Okay, there's one other way that you could get to the camera. Raw editor say you open your photos, your JPEG image and photo shop, and you want to open up this image in camera, go up to filter camera raw filter, and that will open up this camera raw setting. Okay, so those are a lot of different ways that you could hope enough photos in photo shop or import them. We're gonna work through a raw image, though, so let me exit out of this photo and then, like we've done before, we can go to our finder and let's just pick this photo right here. The scary looking photo of Sam choose will be Photoshopped CC. Now we are in the raw editor, and in the next few lessons, I'm gonna show you how you can do basic edits within the raw editor of photo shop. And following that, we're gonna also learn how to do edits within the main version of photo shop. Before I go any further, I will say this is not a complete Photoshopped course. There's lots of other things you can do with photo shop, and we actually have a photo shop CC course if you're interested in more of the graphic capabilities of it. But this class is all about just the photo editing aspects of it. So we're going to dive into actually editing in the next lesson, coming right up. 135. Photoshop CC: Cropping: in this lesson, we're going to learn how you cropped photos using camera raw in Photoshopped. Now I'm sorry that I've been a little bit rambling or waffling the past couple lessons, but there's a lot of sort of preamble to understanding how Photoshopped works and how to properly how you have a proper workflow as a photo editor. So let's get straight to it, though. Toe Crop an editor in the camera Raw settings. You're gonna click this crop tool, and then you can literally just click and drag over your image to crop. Right now, I'm locked at a specific aspect ratio, and I think it's like 16 by nine or something. But if you click and hold down on this crop feature, you have different presets for your aspect ratio, you could have normal, which just means I can create any sort of shape, a square or a rectangle anyways, and so now I can edit it freely. But typically I want to stick to a perfect aspect ratio, and this depends on what my uses. If I'm doing something for Instagram, for example, and I want a square, I would do a 1 to 1 ratio and then I could move this crop around. I can make it bigger or smaller, and then when you're done with the crop, you can just press the return key on your keyboard. I'm gonna go back into my crop and you'll see that you have more options, like five by seven. And if you want a specific aspect ratio, for example, for a print like 8.5 by 11 or eight by 10 then you can create your own custom crop. So say I want a eight by 10 photo. Then I would create that eight by 10. Now I can rotate this around as well, and I can rotate it anyway. If I hold the shift key down, it kind of locks it to sort of like I don't know how many degrees that is, like 15 degrees or something. And so this makes it easier for me to get it perfectly straight up and down. If I want sort of a portrait style crop. If I click and hold again, you consent to the original crop. You can clear the crop. If you saw that menu right there, clear crop. If you did do a crop, and then you want to undo that exit can say clear crop. So for me, for this photo, I'm going to actually do the eight by 10 and crop like that. Click and drag. I'm going to have a portrait just like that scary portrait of Sam and then press the return key or go to any of these other tools to get out of the crop mode. This magnifying glasses kind of the typical tool that you have in camera raw. If you click, you zoom in. If you hold the option key all turkey on a PC and click, you zoom out. Okay, so that's how you crop in the next lesson will look at fixing white balance. 136. Photoshop CC: White Balance: in this lesson, you'll learn how to adjust white balance in camera raw. I've opened up this image, which is the practice image. Three. Practice photos Photoshopped three and I. I'll let you go ahead and open this one up. Go ahead and close the old one that you were working on last. If you're following along, the white balance settings are over here in our adjustment panel, and just so that you understand how this sort of panel works is there's a number of tabs up at the top that show different kind of styles of editing, different things you can do and then most of them. You adjust with sliders sliding to the left or right. You can adjust these settings. Double clicking will adjust it back to the original that it had, or you can type in a specific temperature over here or number for these settings. So I'm going to go back and for white balance, you have this drop down menu and you have different presets, so you have as shot. And this will depend on if you're editing a raw photo or a J peg photo. If you have a raw photo, you'll have a lot of these options. If you have a J Peg photo, you might not see all of these options. So if you say Oh, my lighting was tungsten, then I would adjust to this preset, and that looks pretty good. If I said this was daylight, it would look really, really off because the light that was actually in my scene was not daylight. It was very much warmer than daylight. And that's why the image now looks a lot warmer than daylight. You can use sort of an auto setting where Photoshopped will try to adjust it to look proper , or you can do custom, and that's usually what I do. I start from as shot, and then I'll adjust this slider up and down. Now the thing is, I know sort of. The temperature of these lights was somewhere between 2700 and 323,200 is your traditional sort of tungsten light, but I think these lights were even warmer than that sort of traditional light bulb. So if I go down to like 20 700 or eight type in 2700 that's going to look pretty darn good , pretty spot on. You also have under white balance tint, which goes from green to magenta. Depending on if you are under sort of fluorescent lights or different types of light sources, you might need to adjust the tent slightly to make it look a little bit more natural. So here it was originally at two, which I think works pretty good. If you want to give it a certain tent you can by just dragging to the left or right. Okay, so that's basically how you adjust white balance and you try to get the most perfect white balance possible. The easiest way is if you know the light temperature of the light source, you can just plug it in right there. I'm gonna cancel this and then I'm going to open up another image. Let's open up this raw image in photo shop, photo file open. We're gonna actually do this J peg choose options so that we can open it the format as camera raw, think like open, and you'll see that the white balance settings are only as Shaw auto or custom. And that's because it doesn't have all that raw data that allows us to choose one of those presets because this is a J peg image in this example, Photoshopped doesn't really know the starting point. So you might be saying, Well, we know the temperature of our light source is the sun. And so we know daylight is around 5600 Kelvin. But if we type that in, Wow, this is not the proper white balance that is way too warm. And when you are editing a JPEG image, photo shop will only allow you to adjust the temperature from negative 100 to positive 100 which is a very different scale than sort of the Kelvin scale that was used for the raw photo. So I just wanted to show you the difference. So you understand that there are some limitations when shooting JPEG, and that's why we recommend that you shoot in raw. Okay, that's white balance in the next lesson will be looking at exposure 137. Photoshop CC: Editing Workflow: before we get to exposure, I want to teach you how you can reopened photos into camera raw. This is a workflow issue, but if you've been following along switching from one photo to the next, you might be having trouble and getting frustrated about how can I get back into this camera raw menu. So I'm going to start from scratch so that we can kind of see what the proper workflow is. So let me just exit out of this photo. I'm not going to save. So if it's with a raw photo, it's a little bit easier. Open up your raw photo and photo shop, just like we've done before and say you make all your adjustments. We've changed the exposure. We've changed our white balance. Super crazy, Cool. What you want to do then would be potentially opening up this image in photo shop to do other edits. Maybe you are adding titles or graphics. The easy thing is to click open image, but let me show you what happens when we say open image. If we want to go back and make changes to the settings that we did in camera raw, we can't do that because now those think of those settings as being burned into this image and Photoshopped. That's typically how Photoshopped works. It's a raster based application where once you make edits, those edits are sort of burned into that image. So we can't go back and open this image in camera raw. There is a way to go back and open this up in camera raw by going to filter camera raw filter. But this is basically starting from scratch and see how our white balance is back to zero. And now we don't have all the raw capabilities of editing White balance. This is basically like editing a J peg version of this, and if we do this again, we're basically just layering on new effects, which is not the proper way. We want to be able to go back and edit the raw photo in the original state. So I'm gonna cancel this close this out again. I know this is a little bit hit repetitive, but I just want you to be clear. We're gonna open up this photo and photo shop and I'll show you something crazy. So notice right now that there's this practice photos photo shot. One dot ex MP file This is what's called a sidecar file that has been created by the computer that is basically attached to this practice photo. One photo. If I right click and choose to open this up in photo shop, it's going to open up the original image in photo shop with those adjustments that we made crazy, right? So that's one way that you can actually go back and adjust the settings. But we don't wanna have to be doing that over and over closing the photo, reopening it. There's an easier way. Hold the shift button down. Notice what happens to this button in the bottom, right? It changes from open image, toe open object. And so if I do this and click this, it opens this image as a smart object, which means that you can go back and edit things and edit the original photo by just double clicking this image over in this layer panel. Now we haven't talked much about the workspace of photo shop. Yours might look a little different if you go up to a window workspace, Click essentials, which is the default setting, and you should see a workspace that looks something like this. This is your layer panel. And this is this photo layer that we've added Double click that and it will open back up in Photoshopped camera raw. And so now we can make our adjustments. We could change our, you know, white balance or whatever. Make it crazy green. Now, if we click OK, it's a smart object still, so we can always go back and edit this later. That's the process with raw photos. So if I cancel this and let me just close this don't save if I delete this file the sidecar file and then I tried toe open up the original photo and photo shop. It's going to open up the original photo, so if you've made at it and you see that sort of sidecar file in your file structure, leave it there unless you want to delete it and start from scratch. The workflow with JPEG images is a little bit different if we go this route of going file open and we open the J peg image with the option of the format camera raw and open it and then say we adjust things which I actually have the adjustments that I was playing around with before. And then again hold, shift, toe open the object. There we have this image that weaken, double, click and go back into our camera Raw settings, just like we did with Rye Image. But what if from finder you had opened the image, open it with photo shop and now we have our image and we went this route of opening camera raw of going to filter camera raw. If we make changes here, you can go toe. OK, Those changes are burnt into that image. So that's not proper work flow when you're editing a J peg layer of your photoshopped file , so I'm gonna close that out. Let me do show you the proper way. Right? Click or open up your photo in photo shop. What we want to do is convert this image to a smart object. So if we right, click it and choose convert to smart object and then we go to filter camera raw, make our changes Click OK, Now that camera raw edit is applied as a filter to this photo that weaken DoubleClick and get back to and then change and edit the original photo, Then we can continue to make changes and go back and forth again. I know this is a lot of sort of workflow, but these are a lot of the questions that I used to get from students who were confused about working with raw or JPEG images. So now that you know the workflow, if you have any questions, let me know. Otherwise, we're going to continue back with that photo of Sam the scary photo, not this one. We're gonna open the scary photo of Sam, this one right here and we're going to adjust the exposure. 138. Photoshop CC: Exposure: After all that, let's get back to editing exposure and actually editing our photos. So below the white balance options. You have exposure. You have multiple sliders. One is for overall exposure, which is the brightness of the entire image. All parts of the image will become brighter or all parts will become darker. And that's a good way if your entire images too bright or too dark to sort of adjust the exposure. You'll notice with this image. And this happens with most images if you bring down the exposure. While parts of the image might look good, say we want the background to look darker or Sam's jacket to look darker. The other parts that we want to be exposed properly, it gets too dark. That's why we have sliders below that allow us to adjust the exposure of all of the individual exposures, have the image, so this latter highlights will adjust just the highlights, just the bright part. So if we want to bring up the highlights weaken, bring up here, say we want to bring up the shadows to get a little bit more detail in Sam's hair or in the jacket weaken, adjust the shadows slider. The whites thes air the part of the image that are even brighter than the highlights. Maybe we want to bring that down. And this is usually where if something slightly over exposed by bringing down the whites, you could bring back some of that exposure in detail. Blacks. If you want to add contrast, you might want to bring down the blacks just slightly. You'll also notice this contrast slider. By increasing this, you add contrast by decreasing this, you decrease contrast. Contrast is the ratio of dark too bright. And so by increasing the contrast, the darks get darker and the brights get brighter. By decreasing contrast, the brights get darker and the darks get brighter. You can see on this hissed a gram up here the top, which is a good thing to look at when you're adjusting exposure, you've got the darks on the left, the brights on the right. And if I take the overall exposure to the left, everything moves to the left. If I take it to the right, everything moves to the right double click that toe. Reset that exposure level. Now with contrast if I drag to the left everything squeezes into the middle and becomes sort of all that mid range exposure. If I go all the way to the right, everything sort of spreads out. The darks become darker, the brights become brighter. What we were doing down below with the highlights, shadows, blacks and whites was also sort of adding contrast to this image by bringing down the brights. By bringing up the highlights, you are creating contrast itself. The contrast slider is just one other way to do so. Cool. So that's how you adjust exposure. Play around with these sliders with your own images or with some of the other sample images to practice. Getting proper exposure with all those photos and also to get creative with it in the next lesson will be looking at thes color options. 139. Photoshop CC: Color and Saturation: to practice color. I'm gonna open up this practice Photoshopped to file. But before I do that, I'm going to open up this practice file as a smart layer that we can go back and edit by hitting shift and choosing open object. Now, if I go to this photo, practice Photoshopped to open it up, you can right click it or you can easily just drag it into the voter shop icon on a Mac and that opens up camera. This photo is cool for color because it has a little bit more interesting colors in it. With these succulents for color, you have saturation and vibrance. Saturation is the overall color of the entire image, whereas vibrance is a smarter way to increase colors. So you can see if I drag saturation all the way to the left, it becomes black and white. If I drag all the way to the right, get super colorful. All the colors get more vibrant. Vibrance will increase the saturation of mostly greens and blues and it won't increase. Is much the saturation of yellows and oranges. Why is that? This is good. If you are editing portrait, let me actually go ahead and open this image is an object. Now, when you have multiple projects open and Photoshopped, they appear as tabs up here in this big window that you can tab between. I actually don't want to open this photo because there's not much color in it. So I'm gonna open up this photo with Sam with some more color in it to show you So in Photoshopped File Open. Choose that photo open as camera. This photo actually has the same settings. We applied to it before that images saved or that information that saved. So let's click this little line button over here and choose camera raw defaults so that it's resets everything. So with saturation, if we increase this, you can notice that while Sam shirt starts to look really nice and blue, Sam's face starts to look really orange. And that's why saturation isn't good to use Vibrance. On the other hand, if I bring up vibrance, his shirt gets really colorful, but his face doesn't get as orange as when using this saturation slider. So that's just one thing that I would know is if you're adding saturation to an image with people in it, used vibrance. Sometimes what I'll do is even increase the vibrance and decrease the saturation a little bit, so that we do lose a little bit of saturation in the face to combat the increase in vibrance. So that's just one note. If you're editing photos of people and want to increase the saturation of those images, use the vibrant slider instead. While we're here, I'll mention the Clarity slider. This will increase the detail of an image. So, see, if I increase this, it's becoming mawr. Quote unquote clear now with Portrait's. It gives a very sort of grungy style, and you can see Sam. You can see all the details, which might be a style you like. Going the opposite way will make everything soft and sort of dreamy. Increasing clarity is usually something that I do with landscape or nature photos, because you can really tell if it is a portrait and you're increasing too much. So I would be careful of increasing clarity too much unless you really like that style. All right, so those are the basic color adjustments in the next lesson will be looking at noise reduction and sharpening 140. Photoshop CC: Sharpening and Noise Reduction: in this lesson, we'll learn about detail, which is your noise reduction and sharpening. So I've opened up this image. It's the Photoshopped three file because it's a good example of a photo with digital noise . In it, you can see the settings of the camera here. If you shot in raw and depending on your camera, you should be able to see all these this metadata. It was shot at 32,000 I s O which is really high. So if I zoom in here, you can see that this photo has a lot of digital noise. All these little speckles that basically make this photo not so clean looking. If you're zoomed in and you want to move around, the photo clicking and dragging won't let you do that. That will just zoom you in or out. Press the space bar and you see this little hand tool pop up. And now you can click and drag and move around so you can get to the proper spot of your photo. Okay, so click this little tab over here for detail with the two triangles, skip sharpening for now and will move to noise reduction if you slide this Luminant slider up. What happens is it starts to get rid of some of that noise. As it does that, though, as you increase this, you can tell that everything gets a little bit softer, and that's what's happening. It's kind of blending everything together, and so it will become a little less sharp noise reduction and Scharping kind of combat with each other, so you almost have to pick what you want. You want to be sharp or to remove noise, because if you actually sharpen your going to be increasing the noise, which is the digital way of sharpening. But anyways, with noise reduction, it's a good idea to play around with this and see if there's a balance you like down below . Luminous. You have luminous detail and luminous contrast, So if you drag this to the left or to the right, it will try to increase the detail of your image where it will say, OK, we'll give up some of the detail and decrease the noise more so if I want my eyes to be a little sharper, I'll probably drive this to the right and then luminous contrast. It will look at the edges of things, and it will make it more contrast. E. So it looks at exposure and colors, and it will decipher if there's like an edge. See where there's this edge with my hat and my forehead, and it will ADM or sort of detail make it more contrast. E. But in essence, it's adding more noise. So dragging this to the left, actually dragging both of these to the left will beat will have the least amount of noise possible and then dragging them. Overall, Luminant slider is sort of your master adjustment. You'll see here, color color is a type of noise. If I drag this all the way to the left, you'll start to see all this color noise. Now, almost every photo automatically will have some color noise, but your camera, the way that it processes it, or the raw sort of standard adjustments. It already add some color noise reduction. So if you want to get rid of more or you see more, you can continue to drag this to the right. But as you do that, you start to lose some color. Actually, if I go all the way to the right you can see some of this becomes like de saturated, so you got to be careful with this. I usually just leave this at the Standard 25 again like the luminous detail. In contrast, you have color, detail and smoothness, which affect sort of the size and the definition of the the grain or the digital noise. So typically you leave that at 25 for some reason it's not on know that if you get have these all these colors sliding this up will get rid of it. So that's with noise reduction. But say we want to make an image sharper. So this image, when I'm zoomed out, it looks kind of washed out, and I might want a little bit more detail I consumed to fit in this window by clicking this drop down over here and shoes fit in view so it fills this whole window with raw images. Photoshopped will automatically add some sharpening to it, and that is totally natural. And you wanted to add some sharpening because even in your photo when you're shooting in raw, it's going to actually be a little sharp, and you'll need to add some sharpening If you want to add more sharpening, though, just drag the slider to the right, and now this is were zoomed out. So far, it's really hard to see. So I'm gonna go ahead and zoom back in, and if I drive us to the left all the way to the right, you can see that it starts to become sharper. But what's happening? It's adding back digital noise. And that's what I'm saying is that you have to kind of be careful about reducing noise and sharpening because they kind of combat each other but say you don't have any noise to reduce. Say you have a nice, brightly lit, sunny day shot, but it's not as sharp as you want. You can increase the sharpening and add a little bit of grain, but you can live with it. Radius and detail are similar to these detail, in contrast, in the sense that radius will increase the size of the the digital noise that is being added and detail will try to look at the edges of things and make it finer or thicker, basically, so that the edges of things are more contrast. E. If I zoom in here all the way. You can really see what detail is doing. It's adding a lot more sort of grain and making things more contrast. E with radius. If I drag to the left, it makes the green smaller to the right. Bigger with masking. It tries to blend these things to gather, tries to make things that are supposed to be more detailed, more detail, the things in colors that are kind of blending together. It loses that noise as much as possible. So this is a lot of sharpening that has been added. It's kind of to the extreme. But if you zoom out all the way, I mean, we're really zoomed in. You might be able to live with this, but if I'm doing this, I don't want to decrease my noise reduction a little bit. Something like that. And we're looking pretty darn good. So that the detail panel for sharpening and noise reduction If you have any questions, let me know otherwise, we'll see you in the next lesson. 141. Photoshop CC: Tone Curve: in this lesson, I'm going to show you the tone curve. So I have this photo of Sam brought back up one that I want to make a little bit more contrast. E So if you open this curve, you can see that we have sliders down below. But you have this sort of hissed a gram square with this line in the middle on the left hand. Bottom side, you have your blacks on the top, right? You have your whites were in the parametric view, which means you have to use these sliders down below toe. Adjust this line. So if I do bring down the dark's bring up the lights, you can see that it creates this s looking curve. You'll hear a lot about the S curve with contrast and foot photography and s curve creates more contrast. I can do this manually. Let me undo those and go toe point. And here I can go in and just click the curve. It creates a point where I click and drag when I let go. It will lock that point there. Then I can click up here and drag up. So dragging up is increasing exposure dragging down is decreasing exposure. So if you want to add crazy contrast, you can create an S curve that looks like that Right now I am adjusting the entire color spectrum. RGB If you remember our color lesson, you know that one way to view photos is through RGB, which encompasses all the colors. We also have this drop down where we can edit specific channels of colors. So say we want to go into the blue setting and increase the blues. We can click and drag this curve or click and drag it down. You can create an ask her of with the blues to make more contrast with the blues if it's to read you Kenbrell down the reds and when you bring down the reds, what's left green and blue. So you kind of can play around and get some really cool shots with these curves, and you don't just have to do an s curve you can do sort of, Ah, it's not really a Z curve, but it backwards s curve or an upside down, as see how cool that looks. I mean, this is very stylistic, but it's one way that you can address the curve. If you want to undo this, just go up to the curve menu. Click Lanier, and it will set everything back. I like using the point curve because I can really dive in there and make things more. Contrast it. You can also take the white and black points, which are these points in the corner, and drag them. So if I take this black point and drag to the right or up, I can make the black point blacker so everything gets darker or I can make it brighter so all the blacks actually become more gray, more light. If I go all the way up, the blacks become white. Same with the top right with the whites. If I dragged down, the whites became come whiter. If I drag toe left, the whites become darker, cool. So that's the tone curve. And the next lesson. We're going to be looking at vignette and grain to stylistic things, and then we'll be saving our images before going through more of these other advanced features. 142. Photoshop CC: Effects: to Adam. And yet, in photo shop, it's pretty easy, or at least in camera raw. Go to this effects tab. So we're skipping a couple that will get back to in a second. Here you have a few different effects. The one we're looking at right now is post crop vignette ing. So if I slide this slider to the left, it becomes a dark vignette to the right becomes a white vignette, and this is post crop. What does that mean? It's applying the vignette to whatever you crop. So say we go back and we crop this as eight by 10. We have this nice sort of frame. It's going to apply the vignette to this frame or this crop and not the original image. So this is the amount. Midpoint is these size, so you can make it smaller or bigger. Roundness makes it more circular or more oval or actually, more rectangular and feathering will blend it in more or make it more of a hard edge. So usually, if you want a more subtle, natural looking vignette, you'll feather it out more and you won't even have that much of been yet, unless you want to. Extreme highlights will actually allow highlights in your image to shine through the vignette. This image doesn't have many highlights in the background, but if you were shooting a bright landscape or there were bright lights in the background up here, those would shine through the vignette mawr. If this highlights option is up while we're here, I'll just talk about grain. So grain is just another stylistic approach usually looks better for me anyways for black and white images. Let me just make this a black and white image really quick by dropping the saturation when we used to shoot on black and white film. A lot of the that those photos have natural grain in them. Just because of the process and the type of film with different ISOS, and you can change the size of the green to be bigger or smaller. You make it rougher or more unique or blended in, so this is more of a stylistic thing. But if you're going for that sort of old time ease sort of classic feel, adding green is one option. The last effect up here is de hes. So let me click OK, and let's go to one of our photos that will look better for D. Hayes. Let's open up photo shop, five file and photo shop, and I'll show you what D. Hayes does. There's not a lot of haze in this image, but if you were shooting out on the landscape and there's a lot of clouds or a lot of smog or haze increasing, the haze will basically do what a polarizing filter does by decreasing reflections in the sky and decreasing that sort of fuzziness. And it will bring out more saturation and color. Driving to the left will actually add haze, which I don't really know why you would want to do that unless it's a stylistic approach. But by dragging to the right, you can see that the sky there's a little bit of haze. It makes things more detailed and more colorful. Be careful about using this on things like portrait's and things, because adding this filter can make faces and people more contrast e and looking basically unnatural. But this is a cool, quick effect. If you are doing landscape and you want things to pop out a little bit more, just slide up that D Hayes slider just a bit cool. So these air the effects. I wanted to show you in camera raw. In the next lesson, I'll show you how to save photos from camera raw, and then we'll move on to some more advanced features. 143. Photoshop CC: Exporting: How do you save a photo from photo shop again? There's lots of different ways, but we're going to show you first how to save it from camera raw. So once you've made all of your edits in camera raw, you can save right from within by clicking the save image button. This brings up all of your settings, so starting from the top, you have different presets. If you've saved them in the past, I don't have any presets right now. Destination is where you are going to save it so you can save it in the same location as the photo that you're working on. Or you can choose a new one and you just clicks select folder, and then you can choose all at a photo shop, creating new folder at it and I'll saved in there. Then you have your naming options. So right now it's just going to save as the document name, and it's going to save it as a J peg. You can also just type in a word so say we have photo shop practice. Then it's just going to save it as Photoshopped practice. And then you could add sort of these other drop downs for a series of things. So, for example, if we want to have a Siri's of one digit numbers, then it's going to save it as Photoshopped practice one. If you want to start it as a different number than you would just change the beginning. Number two. Something like 10 This way. If you're saving multiple images, it will save it as a Siri's Photoshopped Proctor's one Photoshopped practiced to etcetera. You could add multiple things so we can do have a number and then the date, for example, so well to the date in numeric format. Okay, so let's just delete. Those were just going to say photo shop practice and that's it. File extension is going to follow the format so you could choose the different format from a photo shop file to a tiff File. J Peg Digital Negative. We're going to be saving as J. Peg because that's the high quality, compressed format that's great for sharing online or even printing below format. You can choose to include data, the metadata or not, or specific metadata, so if you only want copyright if you want the contact information, the raw information and this is going to depend on what metadata is on the photo itself. How your camera is set up. Most cameras will save a lot of that information like the I S o the f stop the lens used some cameras even saved the location. If you have GPS on your on your camera, if you want to remove specifically that location info, you can check this box next. You have quality. Right now, I have it checked toe limit file size, but you probably will see just this, and you have this drop down low, medium high or maximum. So if you type in 12 it's going to be the max quality possible. If you want to save file space and decrease the space of the actual file itself, then you can choose one of these other options medium high. For most online applications, high is going to look perfectly fine for printing out. I would go Max and go with 12. If you are posting online and or if there's some specific reason you want to limit the file size to a specific kilobyte, you would check this box and then type and amount. So say you needed to be under one megabyte, which is 1000 kilobytes. Then you would put 1000 because for some cases, some places you upload they might have a limit. Or if you're posting on your own portfolio or website, and you want to limit the amount of space it takes up so that your website loads faster, you might want to make it under 500 kilobytes. So you wanna sort of balance the size of the file if you're posting online. But for most cases, if you're just saving for sort of your archive, we're putting out. Just leave that off and choose maximum for color space. You're going to leave it as RGB. There's all kinds of other color spaces, but for 99.9% of everything you're going to need to do, just choose RGB unless you know that you need to use something else depending on a specific printer you're using or something like that. But that will come up if someone tells you you need another color space for us. Just use RGB next. You have image sizing, so this is not the file size but the image size itself. So if you have this unchecked, which will probably be what you have. It's just going to say that as the default image, the same size as your image that you shot or that you cropped it, too. The resolution down here is the quality of that size or quality of the print. If you're publishing to like Instagram or social media, you probably don't need to adjust these things because those sites are going to sort of resize your photos anyways, if you do need to adjust the size of the image. For example, if you are posting to your website and you know it needs to be 500 pixels wide, then you would choose resized to fit. The one that I like using is this long side. So if you do that and you set your long side to 500 pixels, then it will automatically adjust the other side, whether it's the height or the with to fit that with the same aspect ratio. So what it's saying right now is that the long side is the height of this image that we're practicing with, and that's going to be 500 pixels to keep this same aspect ratio. The with will be 400 pixels. If I change the height to 1000 then that means the with is going to be 800. Okay, next we have resolution. Keep it at 1 50 You can go down to 72 which will actually save a little bit of space because the foul size will be smaller. Or you could go up to 300 if you want sort of higher resolution. This is great for printing, but for really any online use or even printing 1 50 is kind of standard. Lastly, you have what's called output sharpening. I don't add this because all typically add some sharpening while I'm editing. But if you are printing out, they have these glossy paper and matt paper presets, which add a little bit of sharpening, because when you print photos, sometimes they can lose a little bit of that sharpness. So they add a bit of sharpness to combat that they have a low standard and high amount. This you probably won't be able to tell, especially if you're just printing out, um, at your local printer or Costco or something like that. You really will only see this if you're doing a super duper high quality print, But usually, like I said, I leave that off and they do have an option for screen. That's like if you're posting online, But again, I just choose to leave that off. Then you click save, and it's going to save it. Let's go to the finder. We have our edits folder now and now we have this photo, which we can see is 800 by 1000 pixels. The size is 3 92 kilobytes, and if we open this up just in the space bar, we have this image that we can now share for our next Halloween party. So that's how you save photos from camera raw. If you have any questions, let us know in the next lessons were going to be diving into more of the advanced options within camera bra, and then later on, we're going to be looking at other ways. You can edit photos in photo shop back in sort of our main photo shop window, which you might be working with, especially if you're adding things like text and graphics, and we'll also show you how to do things in Photoshopped specific to editing, like removing blemishes, removing backgrounds and cool stuff like that, which is all coming up. It's a huge program, and like I said before, we have a full class on it. If you want to learn the ins and outs and you're a complete beginner, but we also want to include as much as possible specific to photographers in this one, and I hope you're enjoying it. 144. Photoshop CC: HSL and Grayscale: welcome to this new lesson in the photo shop Sesay editing section in this section. We're going to learn about this Tab H s L and Gray scale HS l stands for hue, saturation and luminous. It's if you want to follow long, go ahead and open up the photoshopped five dot drw file. Hugh, as we've learned earlier in the class about color, is basically the color itself, so changing the hue of a red will change it from red to a different red or to a different color. Completely saturation is the vibrance of that color, and luminous is the brightness of a color. And so with this actual tab, you can edit individual parts of your image. For example, in this image, if we want to make the blues change color, we could take the blue slider and drag it to the left or right. And all the blues in this photo become a different hue. There might even be some aqua or purples in the sky that will change if we adjust the purple slider or the aqua slider very slightly. But actually, there's some aqua in this green sign over here. So if we want to adjust this green sign. We could adjust the greens very slightly. It's a lot of that aqua, actually, and maybe some of that yellow. Mostly that awkward, though, and it had some blues in there. So this allows us to adjust specific parts specific colors. Let's set developed by clicking that. So if I just adjust awkward, you can start to see this becomes a little bit more yellow or a little bit more blue. Double clicking reverts. That saturation, on the other hand, is how we can make the sky. Maybe de saturated mean we we don't want as much blue so that this the sign over here stands out, and in this way we could leave all of the colors except for one. See this red up here? If we increase that, it becomes more read that might even have some magenta in it. If we decrease it, decrease the purples as well. Everything thing becomes black and white, except for the oranges, yellows, greens and talk words. So let's actually make the ark was More greens are good yellows. Let's take out oranges. Let's take out. So now we have a photo with just greens and aqua so you can get some pretty cool photos this way. Reset to default. Last we have luminous and like I mentioned, this is the exposure. So if we want to make the sky brighter, we can increase the luminous of the blues or darker to decrease, which actually gives it more color. If we want that signed to stand out, we can increase the aqua as and the blue or the greens. Rather, it's very subtle for this sign and doesn't have that much color in it already. Maybe we want to make it darker to stand out. And that sense we would make the blues brighter so you can see that again. Using these different tabs, you can really make your photo more creative. Go ahead and set default. The other option in this tab is gray scale. So if you check this box right here, it converts the image to gray scale. But you can still adjust the individual colors of your photo. So if we take this blue slider, for example, we can adjust the exposure with luminess of the blues, which affects how the black and white image looks same with the greens and the awkward. We can adjust how it looks. So if we want to make this sign more contrast, e we drop the greens and the aqua is, and then bringing up those blues makes it stand out a little bit more. The reds. If we want to make that tall scraper over here a little bit brighter, weaken. Bring that up. Same with our magenta is and purples. So this is the way that you can really adjust how your black and white photos look rather than just your overall exposure, but by adjusting specific colors in a photo. And this is how you can take your black and white photos to the next level by playing with these individual colors. So by default it's going to actually auto. Create the settings. So when you turn that on, it's going to set to auto. You can also set it there, or setting to Z fought lets you create it from scratch. All right, so this is just an individual way that you can adjust colors in photo shop. Let me know if you have any other questions otherwise will soon. In the next lesson, 145. Photoshop CC: Split Toning: in this lesson of the photo shop section, we're going to learn about this tab right here called Split Tony. I'm using the photo shop one file that we edited before with some exposure and basic adjustments, which I still have applied. What split Tony does, which is sort of similar to H. S. L is allowing you to edit a specific part of your photo using highlights or shadows and adjusting the hue and the saturation of that part of the photo. So, for example, for the highlights, if I take this First Huse letter and drag it around, nothing happens. But if I put it to, say blue, or like Aqua and then I increase the saturation, what happens is all of the highlights of the image become more saturated with this you that I've selected. So now, with the saturation all the way up, I can adjust the hue and you can really see what's happening so I can get this really cool . Interesting effect. Now the saturation doesn't necessarily de saturate and make it black and white. It's just adding how much saturation for this hue to the highlights skipping down to shadows. This allows us to add the same sort of color to to just the shadows. So first, let's move this saturation all the way up to 100 to start out. Now let's adjust the hue so you can kind of come up with these kind of dual tone effects like this, where the dark's or the shadows of your image are blue. But the highlights get the sort of pink magenta you can adjust how this is balanced with this balance ladder. Going to the left will sort of wait it to the shadows, going to the right. We'll wait your adjustments to what you've chosen in your highlights up here. So this is again just a creative way to make your photos more interesting. You don't have to go so crazy with the saturation, though, which gives you a more subtle maybe realistic or maybe not so unrealistic effect that still looks pretty good. You know, if we want this image, Teoh have that sort of menacing stare make it a little scarier. Maybe we want the shadows to be a little bit darker blue and, like we have it. The highlights, which is most of Sam Space to be sort of that orange or red? Pretty scary, right? Awesome. So this is the split toning tab. If you have any questions, let me know otherwise. Play around with it. And I'd love to see any image. You come up with it, so feel free to post them to the class or tag us on social media with your photo post and we'll check them out. 146. Photoshop CC: Lens Corrections: in this lesson, I'm going to show you how to use this lens corrections tab I'm using photoshopped five dot air W The practice file If you want to follow along, so if you go to this tab, you'll have two options down here. Profile or manual under profile. You get sort of an automated way to fix a lens quote unquote fix, because what it's doing is it's going to try to remove any warp in vignette ing that might come naturally from the lens you use typically, if you're using a wider lens than you have more of a warp around the edges, which we were using for this photo right here. The Sony 16 to 35 all the way on 16 millimeters. So it was very wide on the full frame camera. So first, if we check enable profile corrections, look what happens. This is the before, and then the after it becomes a little bit brighter around the edges, and then it feels a little bit like it might be warped. But what's happening is actually unrewarding it. To make everything look a little bit more natural, as if you were actually there, you'll notice that Photoshopped already knows what camera, what model lens and what profile we were using. And this is all automated, and it's built into the metadata of this camera. If you don't have a smart camera, if you're using a manual camera or an old camera or a lens, that doesn't match with the camera itself. In terms of manual camera, I'm and like an old lens or something. You might not have this information, so you can go in and actually find the specific lens and model that you are using, and it will adjust it accordingly. You can also manually adjust a little bit more or less with this distortion in vignette ing option. So dragging the vignette ing left to write will increase or decrease the sort of vignette fixed that it has applied. Say you want to get rid of the door store shin, but you still like the vignette. We can add back the vignette that the lens naturally has. The distortion, on the other hand, will again bring you back to how it was shot to how it was a fixed in the middle. Or if you drag to the right, it will sort of flat in and out as even more so you can adjust this to your liking Now. These corrections are only if you don't like the look of your lens. If you like the look of your lens, then there's no real reason to adjust these things now. What about chromatic aberration? I don't know if we'll be able to see in this image, but sometimes, depending on the setting and situation, you can kind of see it right here. You'll get these sort of purple and green lines on the edges of things. Checking on remove chromatic aberration will get rid of those lines and make it more of the natural color, which you can see here. If I turn it on off, it makes this line more blue, which is probably what it more nationally look like. This photo has a lot of blue. I'm not seeing really much green or purple. Let's see if we turn this off. So this is a good example of lens in a camera that doesn't shoot with a lot of chromatic aberration. But I just wanted to point that out. If you are in a setting where you are looking at your camera and you see, like some weird purple hazy lines on the edges of things or green. That's what chromatic aberration is. And by checking this honor off, you can sort of remove that. Now, the manual tab right here basically allows us to do what is done here on our own. So let me go down here, say fit to view so we can see our whole image, which is important when doing these types of corrections. And so here we can basically do whatever we want. We can make it bulge, which actually gives it you know, an interesting effect if you want that or stretch it the opposite way. If you do the stretch it like this, you'll want to go in and crop so that you don't see these edges. And if you see this sort of grid behind your photo, that means the background is going to be transparent. So you don't want to see that when you're saving your file so you would want a crop in if you do that sort of distortion and then same with D fringe if you have a specific color. So let's zoom in here really quick So this has that sort of purple fringe fringe on this line. This is the chromatic aberration that if we increase the purple amount and then adjusts or the hue angle, you can choose more or less. It will get rid of that. So see if I goto before after see how it got rid of that sort of purple line. This allows you to pinpoint either a specific green or purple to get rid of in terms of the fringing, which is what that chromatic aberration is. Let's zoom out one more time, and lastly, you have been getting so this is sort of a weighted decreased the vignette and also choose a midpoint, which is happening for the entire image itself. It's not like this effects that we added before, which is a post crop vignette ing. This is just fixing the entire image when you're zoomed out and uncrossed doing what is happening here in the profile. But in a manual way, cool. So this is the lens corrections tab, another sort of advanced feature, not one. I necessarily play around with too much, because typically, I like the way my lenses look. Sometimes when I shoot on a very wide lens, though you do get some of that distortion around the edges that I don't like and using this enable profile corrections but and tends to help with that. If you have any questions, let me know. Otherwise, we'll see you in another lesson. 147. Photoshop CC: Spot Removal: in this lesson and the following lessons of this photo shop section, I'm going to go over some of these tools up here that we haven't covered before. We've seen the crop tool, but in the hand tool, but pretty much that's it. I want to start out with removing blemishes, which is something you might be interested in. So say you have a portrait or any sort of image where someone has a pimple or there's a blemish that they want to get rid of. Now I will say that usually I like to be very natural in my editing, and I don't remove a lot of blemishes or, you know, if there's a mole or a beauty Mark, I like to leave those things in. But that being said, I know a lot of you want to learn how to remove blemishes. So say, here this photo of Sam, he has this. I think it was a pimple that day. If we want to remove something like that, click on this brush right here, which is the spot removal brush or press be on your keyboard. What happens over here on the right are the settings for this brush so we can adjust the size by clicking and dragging the left. You can adjust the feathering, which is sort of the edge, how it blends in and you see two circles. The outside circle is that fathering and the opacity. Usually, I would recommend us leaving this at 100 for now, so I got the brush about the size of that pimple. Let's make the feathering a little bit smaller and actually make the whole brush a little bit smaller now. And what you do is just click once or click and drag around the sort of blemish and then latte Photoshopped do the magic work. Right now it is set to hell and you'll see that the red sort of pinpoint is where we clicked. The green pinpoint is what photo shop is using to blend in to where we picked. So to show you what's actually happening, you can click and drag this green sort of spot to wherever you want to sort of use to blend . So if I put this in Sam's hair, this isn't going to look good because Photo shop is trying to blend his hair. The image of his hair into that sort of blemish, which doesn't work. So what you want to do is find a part of the skin that looks similar to this area of the skin, but without a blemish. So if I put it there that looks a lot better. You'll notice over here that you have a hell brush and a clone brush, so a clone brush is similar. It just doesn't complete copy and paste basically into that spot instead of trying to sort of hell it or blend with it. So if I put this around, his eye, for example, is going to copy and paste his eye right there, which is a cool way to clone one part of your image to another. But it's not a good way to remove any blemishes, so I would use the heel brush. All right, so if you are happy with that, you can click off to another tool or you can move around. I'm pressing the space, sparred to move around, and let's just say, OK, Sam doesn't really like this. This Ah, Frankel up here, So we want to get rid of that. Let's just make our size smaller. Click and drag around it and it's disappeared. Pretty cool, right? The other tool just mentioned while we're here is the red eye removal tool. What you would do is just click and drag over the I, and it's going to process it and remove now. Since we don't have right, Iet's not going to work. But if you need to make any adjustments, you can increase or decrease the pupil size here and also make it darker or brighter based off of you still see the red eye, and so that's a quick tool that you don't really see much meeting. But I just wanted to mention it here. So those are two spot and healing removal tools that I wanted to show you will continue going through these tools in the next few lessons. 148. Photoshop CC: Targeted Adjustments: in this lesson will use a few of these tools up at the top, including white balance, color sample and targeted adjustments. So starting with white balance tool, you know that we learned how to adjust the white balance over here on the right hand side. With this menu, there's actually an easier way to do it with this white balance color picker. If there is something white or neutral in your color, you can just click on this. It looks like a little eye dropper and then click on that part of the image. So right here we have this gray sort of concrete block, which should be completely gray. There should not be any sort of warm, too warm or cool tone to it. So if I click here, what happens? Is it just this gray so that the rest of the image is balanced to that gray? Now I think it took it a little too far, and so we can come back here and, you know, reverse the adjustment just lightly. But this is often a good place to start. Now let's go back to as shot and then try this white logo on my hat that works a little bit better, listens to use the gray. It really depends on what you're lighting. Situation is if you have, like a white card, actually, the look of this white pot right there, that's probably the best option here. This is sort of a cream colored pot that gives me the best overall white balance to start out with. Now, I might want it to be a little warm, because when I was taking this photo, these lights are warm, so you want that to look a little bit natural, But that's a quick way to get an auto white balance. This next eyedropper is the color sample sampler tool. By clicking this and clicking anywhere on my image, I get an RGB sample color. And this is just good to know if you are looking for a specific color and you want to use it for some sort of graphic later on, you have these RGB levels later on. This gets a little advanced with graphic design, So if you're not understanding what this is, that's OK. But basically you can use these RGB values right here to select a color to add a text that is a specific color or a box s sort of like a shape that's a specific color, and that's what you would use that tool for. Lastly, we have this targeted adjustment tool. So if you click and hold, you see that you have multiple options. Parametric curve, hue, saturation and luminous, starting with the Parametric curve. I don't know if you remember where this was, but it was under art tone curve and on the Parametric tab. If I click and drag up or down any part of the image, it will select that part of the tone curve and move it up and down. So if I want to bring up the shadows, I would click in the shadows and drag up and see how the curve on the right hand side gets brought up. Maybe I want to make it a little contrast year, so drag that down. But at the same time, I want to bring up the mid so I'll pick somewhere that is somewhat in the mids like my jacket and bring that up or the highlights again. Click the whites and bring those up or down if I want. So this is a way to sort of pinpoint a part of your image so that you can make those more precise adjustments. Similarly, we have hue, saturation and luminous, which is similar to H. S. L. Here we can go in and pick in our image. Say this like green an increase or decrease this green. To adjust this specific color in my frame, you'll notice that on the right, it's also picking some yellows to increase your decrease the hue because there's more than just green in here. Same with If I pick this sort of wooden fence on the right, it will adjust the oranges and the yellows, and then you can do it with not just you but also saturation and luminant. Maybe, well, we want to de saturate this orange. We can click and drag down. Of course, that makes my skin look a little weird, so we might want to click in a skin, bring back a little bit, which gives us a little bit more of that fence color. But it's just a way for you to pinpoint colors in your image itself, to make adjustments to, rather than relying on the sliders themselves, over here and you can do the same with luminous and then gray scale is the same. You can use the grayscale mix option and increase your decrease specific colors in your image. A really cool way to get specific to come up with a nice looking image. Cool. Thank you so much for watching this lesson on some or pinpoint adjustments we'll see in the next one. 149. Photoshop CC: Straighten and Transform: in this lesson, I'm going to show you two tools that help you quickly straight and out and sort of adjust your horizons and things in your image to make them look straight. The first is this level tool right here. So instead of cropping and rotating manually, you can use this straight and tool by clicking it, then dragging across the horizon or whatever lying is in your image to straight in and out . So here we have this horizon behind Sam. It might be a hill, but if we want that to be a straight across level in our image, click and dragon when you let go, it creates a crop in a rotation that matches that line pressing return. We can really see now that that crop and rotation made this line in the background more level, which creates more of a balanced image. Cool. So that's this. The level tool. It's very quick and easy when you have horizons. The other one I want to show you is with the Photoshopped three file, and this is this transform tool right here. So click this. This works best when you are shooting an image of a building or or something that you want to have perfectly up and down and sort of horizontal lines. So this isn't the best example, because it's going to warp myself. But when you're shooting architecture photos, this tends to work well. But this is a good example because it has a lot of lines in it. So say we want this per Gola right here, this little structure to have perfectly up and down in straight lines. If we click and drag once for this structure along the top line, and then we go from the top or down of this line right here, what will happen is it will adjust the photo and you'll notice. See how this top line is now perfectly horizontal. And this oven online is perfectly vertical. You can make adjustments over here if you want. By rotating actually vertically, horizontally. You could change the aspect. You can change the scale moving around, but as you can now, this doesn't look good for an image of a person because it warps the person and it stretched. It actually stretches the photo out, but a photo of a building or something where you wouldn't be able to tell so much might be better, and it also depends on the angle that you're taking the photo at. At an extreme angle like this one, it really does sort of warp. But if there's just slight minor adjustments and a look, better cool. So those air, the straightening and the transform tools to help make lines straight and level in your photo. 150. Photoshop CC: Graduated, Radial, Brush Filters: in this lesson, I'm going to show you what the adjustment brush the graduated filter in the radio filter do . This is another way that you can adjust just parts of your image. I've added this file to your folder, which you probably already have. Now it's the photo Shop nine file, which will be good example, especially for the graduated filter. So let me just quickly make an adjustment to the exposure. If you want to follow long, go ahead. I'm just boosting the exposure by 2.4 or so. So let's first start with this graduated filter by clicking that nothing happens. But we get a bunch of new sort of adjustments over here now. They should probably not be changed. Right now. I have the exposure adjusted, so I'm going to double click that so everything is set to zero. What I want to do is click and drag in the image and just click and drag, and then I'll show you kind of what's happening. Nothing has changed when I clicked in drag. If I check on the mask option and it might help to change this mass to sign light pink, we can actually see the selected part of this image that is going to be adjusted, so I haven't actually added a pink sort of overlay to this. This is just telling me what's in pink is what is going to be changed now. I can use all of these adjustments here to make changes. So let me turn off the mask and let me now make an exposure adjustment. So say I bring down the exposure or up the exposure. It's just affecting that top part of the image. I can adjust the white balance if I want to make the sky more orange or more blue. I can do that. Clarity or D. Hayes. This would be the perfect example of using D. Hayes to just get rid of some of the haze that's in the sky. You have all your other options here that you can play around with that you've seen before you. Do you have one new option called more a reduction? I don't know if you've ever seen before, but when you're taking photos of a really detailed pattern, like a striped shirt or a checkered shirt, sometimes you get a little bit of sort of fuzziness in that shirt. And so what you could do is apply that sort of more a reduction to just the shirt, which might be better done with the adjustment brush or the radio filter, which will show you in just a second. So that's basically what the adjustment brush does. And there are some more advanced features that will go over with all these tools in the next lesson. But let's go move on to the radio filter so clicking that it basically does the same thing . We can click and drag, and right now we have all of the same sort of presets that we use for that last adjustment . So let's delete that and reset all of these. So now if we click and drag, you see sort of it oval, and we can make it tall, wide. So say, I just want to make some sort of adjustment to this part of the image. Well, let's turn on the mass to see what's happening. Well, it's actually selecting everything outside of the circle, so we want to go down here to this effect option and choose insight. You also have a feathering with short sort of blends adjustment in with some feathering. So now if we turn off the overlay, you can also turn off this overlay. But and down here to not see this circle of that helps, we can now adjust this. Say we want to make this part of the hills really warm. Maybe we want to boost the contrast and the sharpness of this part of the image, Maybe boost the saturation. Now, I'm just going through this a little bit quick, but let's go ahead and make boost the clarity as well. So now that works pretty good. So say you want to do two of these adjustments, so either using the graduated filter or the radio filter Now I'm like, Okay, I'm ready to add another one. What you do is just click the new button up here and then you start from scratch, OK? To delete or to move. You can just select it and move that point in the middle of the others that green dot You could also select the edges toe change the size and then to delete just when it selected pressed the delete key on your keyboard, saying with the graduated filter, If we want to go back and adjust it. We can go ahead and click the point or one of the points and make adjustments, or select the new button to create and new adjustment. And you can see that what happens is that it selects the part of the image from where you started clicking. So let me delete this and I'll show you again. So if I click of the bottom and drag up its selecting that bar bottom part of the image if I click from the left and drag right, it's selecting the left side and so on and so forth. Let's go on to the adjustment brush, which is basically the same idea. But instead of using sort of a graduated a radio filter were brushing onto our image. Let's reset all of our settings. Turn on our mask. You can change the size of your brush here, the feathering, the flow and the density. This is sort of like the opacity, and if your flow and if you're density is off anyways, it will sort of only apply it at a more gradual level. You'll have to brush over multiple times to get the full effect. I usually just leave it on full. So say we want to just adjust those things down there. I paint over it, turn off our mass so we can see what's happening. Maybe we want to decrease the saturation, make this black and white make a super creative. Or maybe we adjust here, increased the clarity, so everything's a little bit clear, but we're not doing as much of a warm adjustment. Me. We were making a little bit cooler, actually making a little less saturated, increasing the contrast or decreasing the contrast. You're making adjustment based off of where you brush Now. If I continue to brush, it will continue to make adjustments wherever I brush, unless I click the new button so that I have a completely brand new brush that I can make new adjustments to. So let me delete that. Let me delete this brush as well. Let me just show you what happens if the density is down below. So now let's turn on the masses on see how it's sort of a lighter pink, so whatever adjustments we make aren't going to be as strong. So let's turn off the mask so you can see that I've brought my exposure down really far, but it's not really affecting it that much. But I can continue to sort of paint over it, and it will continue to make it darker and darker and darker until the density of what I'm brushing is basically up at 100%. Or you can increase and brush again and it does it right away. So think of sort of the density as how opaque your brush is. Flo works in a similar way. I've increased flow all the way to 100%. We've got our mass down down here on so we can see what I'm doing. See, it's sort of like a complete big paintbrush. Now, if I decrease the flow all the way P on, you barely get it. So this is great for making really subtle minor adjustments. Sometimes I'll use this brush adjustment to increase the exposure of just faces on a portrait or in a group photo that seems to work really well. So that's basically how you use this brush. I'm going to show you some advanced features for how you edit these selections with the range mask and also with the brushes option for your graduated and radial filters coming up in the next lesson. 151. Photoshop CC: Range Masks: So I still have my photo that I was working on last time. And if I go back to my radio adjustment and click this, we can see that part of what was edited is the sky above this hill. So it might be easier if I turn this officer. You can see that. See this part of the sea, This guy let me zoom in just a little bit so you can really see Go back to my radio filter . Turn this on, make sure I have it selected. So part of this hill in the background that I had added the graduated filter to to make it blue is becoming warm and I don't want that. So what I can actually do is use a brush clicking this brush tool to add or subtract part of this selection. So I want to subtract. So it has the minus or erase option to make the brush size a little bit smaller. Fathering a little smaller flow will increase something like that. Now, if I brush over here, you can see that I can get rid of some of that selection now. I might have to go in to make my size really small. So I'm not selecting some of these houses up above, but say I go through here looking pretty good, and then I go, Whoops. I got some of that tree. We can just click that plus sign. And now this is sort of an ad brush that allows us to add that make it really small, back some area so you can get pretty precise. You can also just use the option key to switch from the plus to the minus. So holding them the option key gets me my option breast, so I can just quickly move around. Now, this is just sort of a workflow thing. I'm just using this brush. But now I've gone through this whole area, but I want to move the photo to the left or right. Just switch over to the hand by pressing the space bar. Click and drag. Now I can go back here option to get my race brush race all this. So now the background isn't being adjusted by this radio adjustment. Cool. Right now let's zoom out all the way. See what it actually looks like. Turn off our mask. And now that probably looks a little bit more natural, All right, so there is one other option, and that's this range mask. And you have that both for your graduated and your radio filters. Let's go turn on our overlay, go back to edit, and then let's delete this for now because I just wanna have my graduated filter. So, seo, we have this graduated. Filter it, selecting everything. What if we only want to pick a specific color or luminous to adjust what we can dio Travis Mask? What we can do is turn on the range mask for color or Lew Minutes. So if I do buy color, then what I can do is pick a specific color in this image to edit. So click this eyedropper, then click in my image to these mountains, for example. Now if I let me reset these settings, so we're not having any adjustments done yet, So what it's done is selected the original color of these mountains, the gray. If I turn on my mass, you can see that it's more or less selected the mountains without the sky, which is what I want. If I just want the sky, then I would click the color the eyedropper and click in the sky and see how just just the sky now So now I can go in here. I can make the sky really warm. Let's turn off my mass So we can see say, we want this guy to have that D. Hayes, but we don't want the mountains in front of it to have the D. Hayes could make it brighter. Make it darker or whatever. And now that adjustment is just being made to the sky. If I want to go in and sort of adjust how much is selected or not, I can choose this color range decreasing. It gets very precise with the colors that are selected, increasing it. Select s'more. It did a pretty good job when it was at 50 there. Now, if I want to go in and adjust just the mountains now, what will I have to do? I would actually have to go and create a new graduated filter, so let's go ahead and do that. Reset our settings, click and drag over our mountains. Thanks. So let's make this green down here. Turn on the mass so you can see what selected now with the range mass turned onto color. Let's go ahead and pick the blue of the mountains. So now this is cool because it select some of the blue in these foreground mountains in front that we're selecting before. If we want to get more specific weaken, drop down the color range, turn off our mask and now we can adjust the mountains. Say we want the mountains to be more blue or more purple, Purple Mountains. Majesty. That's a American song. If you don't know, turn on some D. Hayes and adjust the mountains separate from the background. Now this is getting a little bit wacky, a little bit unrealistic, but hopefully you can kind of see by now that using the range mass options you can select specific colors and or brightness is so if we take the radio filter three settler settings and then just click and drag around, move this around here, turn on the mass so we can see that we're selecting the inside if we turn on our range. Master Lu Eminence, what if we just want to select the bright part of this image or the selection we can take this left side of the luminous range and drag it to the right. So it's just picking the highlight. If we keep this to the left and dragged the right side down, we're just selecting the shadows of the selection, and the smoothness will sort of blend it in or make it more harsh if you really want to be particular about what you're selecting. And now what we're doing is adjusting just that selection within this radial filter. So if we want to bring up the shadows of just this selection, weaken, bring up shadows with blacks, shadows right there, There it was exposure. You know that doesn't like good. We can create sort of a Halloween effect like so. But you can see that is just affecting that part of the image. Now again, this might be good if you're shooting a photo portrait, a group shot and some people are in the shade. Some aren't. You got splotches of light in the shade, some fully in the sun. You can make a selection of just the bright parts of people's faces and bring those highlights down. Or you could select just the shadows of people's faces and bring them up. It's a great way to be very specific with your selections and adjustments. Thank you so much for watching this tutorial and we'll see in the next one. 152. Photoshop CC: Landscape Demo: welcome to this new lesson in the photo shop section. This lesson is a full demonstration of how I would edit a photo using all of the skills and techniques we've learned so far. Again, this is with the camera row raw option within photo shop CC. We are going to be including lessons coming up shortly about how you can edit photos directly within Photoshopped, not using camera raw. But by now, I think you've learned a lot, and it's time to put your skills to practice. So I'm gonna edit this photo shop four practice file if you want to follow along. I haven't edited this photo, so this is sort of a real world demonstration. You're gonna follow my entire process and so it might be a little bit longer. Feel free to skip this if this is not something you're interested in. So the first thing that I do with all my photos is generally I crop it. This photo is a little bit hard because it's very dark. So what I'm going to quickly do is boost exposure. Now, this isn't going to be my final exposure adjustment. It's just for me to see the photo better. So when I go to my crop tool, I can edit it better. If I want to edit this photo for, say, I want this to be my computer backdrop my desktop background. I would need a crop for vice of 16 by nine. So I'm gonna choose that aspect ratio and then just click and drag out to get an initial first sort of size. So now I'm gonna make it as Why's the photo and drag up or down? I kind of like dragging down because actually, I kind of like seeing that church in the distance. So I need a bounce of wanting to see some of these houses up front, the main part of this images through this river going through. And either I need to decide to just cut off that sort of chap on the background completely or have it completely because I don't Maybe something like that might be good. Sometimes it's a little hard for me to see with the overlay, so I'll just press return on the keyboard, and if you see this photo for the first time, you might not think anything of it. But I think I need to move it up or down. So let's go back to the crop. Move down. Press return. That's not terrible. But let's try up. It's getting more of the background in the distance. I think I like that better. There's more layering to this photo. Cool. So now the next things I would do would be starting with my basic adjustments for white balance and exposure. White balance looks good. The only thing that I would do differently is if I want to give sort of a warmer tint or a cooler tint to it, I would adjust. It may be making it a little bit warmer. Okay, this is for everyone that doesn't know the Los Angeles River folks. It's currently one of the I would say ugliest rivers in the world. Hopefully, they do something about it. I know there's lots of groups that are trying to revitalize the areas around the L. A river, which I would love to see. But yes, this is the great Los Angeles River sitting right next to all of these industrial buildings . It's definitely that sort of gritty Los Angeles vibe. If you've ever been here, all right, so next I would play with my exposure, so I want to actually drop my overall exposure to get it to sort of starting from scratch. Usually, I don't do much with the overall exposure except with this photo. I need to make everything brighter, I think. But before I go too far with that slider, I am going to pick ups, things like the highlights and then the shadows bring up the shadows. Wow, the shadows doesn't do much, so it's a lot of the blacks down here now. I don't want to do that. So what I actually am going to do is bring up the exposure quite a bit. So now it's a little bit brighter than we had before. But make it a little bit more. Contrast it by bringing down the blacks. Yeah, that looks pretty good. I think it looks pretty good and then with the whites, maybe bring down the whites just to get a little bit more information back in some of the highlights of those buildings. Next. I'll look at these three adjustments down here. Since this is more of a landscape, it's very wide. There's lots of detail to it. I didn't Do you want to increase the clarity? Just a bit Going too far. Not my style, Definitely not going to the left, but going with right, just like plus 10 or so helps a little bit. You can always see the before and after by clicking this button down here, the one that looks like the why or pressing que on your keyboard to shuffle through these sort of before and after settings with saturation and vibrance, I might just boost the saturation a little bit to give this image a little bit more color. Sometimes boosting things too much might sort of make it look unnatural. But since it's a landscape I like to boost a little bit, I'm also going to boost colors individually, using HS cell in just a minute. So these I'm pretty happy with these sort of basic adjustments. I am going to skip tone curve for now. I usually like to leave the tone curve for the very end when I just add a little bit more contrast if I want with noise reduction, let me zoom in here really quick. We were using a I s so that's really low, so you don't get too much noise but zoomed in here. There's a little bit of noise, but it's also that balance of Do I actually want to sharpen things? I mean, everything is pretty much in focus. I also add a little little bit of clarity. Zoom out and see what adding some sharpness does, actually adding, adding some sharpening to me. Anyways, I know it's very subtle and hard for you to see if you're watching just the video. It does pretty good. So I'm gonna boost this toe like 50 or so and noise reduction. I'm just gonna leave it because I can live with that little bit of noise that was added. All right, so now let's get to H s L. What I want to do is see if I can play with the colors of these trees that do line the river. So what I will do is use my pinpoint adjustment tool, the targeted adjustment tool for saturation by clicking in the image to increase the saturation or decrease the saturation of these trees. And so when I do that, if I go too far, it looks unnatural because it brings some of the saturation of the buildings up. But what we can do later on is used some of our adjustment brushes or are graduated a radial filter to decrease the saturation up there, which I'm going to do, so I kind of have to live with that unknowing seeing that. Oh, I don't like the saturation up there now, but later on, I might. I also want to get as much green as possible. So I'm gonna bring up the greens as much as possible. Well, not as much as possible, but pretty far up. So right now, it's starting to look a little unnatural to me, and I don't really like it, but we're gonna fix that in a second in terms of luminous and Hugh, I'm not really gonna change anything unless I want to change these trees to be green. Ah, nah, I'm not gonna fake anyone out. I'm gonna leave it as is. All right. So that is the hse l split toning. I'm not going to do lens corrections. I will see what happens, but pretty much nothing, because it's not reading the lens. I think I was using This was Sam's camera, and he was probably using a Nikon lens with an adapter. I don't remember exactly what lens So I'm not even gonna worry about lens corrections because it looks fine to me. Terms of effects. I also add a vignette, usually at the end. Right now, I don't think I'm going to include any sort of in yet, so I'm going to skip that. We're also going to skip these last options there. So let's go in and make our local adjustments. So I'm trying to decide for the top and the bottom or where the buildings are. Should I use a graduated radial or adjustment brush? I honestly think the adjustment brush might be the easiest for this, so I've got my mask turned on its pink. This will make it easier to see everything. All my settings air reset. Let's actually turn our flow all the way up, though. And I'm just gonna paint up here pain all these buildings because I want the river really to be the main focus. Some pain down here. I am paying over some of the trees, but that's OK cause I can erase them just by pressing the option key. Which takes me to the race and Now I'm just gonna erase over these trees that were selected on the river. Sort of Papa, as much as possible might go into the race and decrease the size just a little bit. Get some of these. I don't want to Just to be like a dramatic line. So I just kind of going here, make sure it's a little more organic along the edge. And then let's make it really small Go over here just just following the river all the way up there. What I might dio I'm gonna leave it at that for now. I'll show you what I'm gonna do in a second if I want, so I'm gonna turn off my mask so I don't necessarily see any changes until I had make adjustments here, which I'm going to drop my saturation just a little bit. If I drop completely, you can see that everything starts to decrease in saturation and the river really starts to pop. So let's do the before and after with Q on a keyboard here, you can really see before and after how much that river pops than before. I might also just see what the exposure does, making a drop. Dropping it just a little bit might make that river pop out. Even increasing exposure might. It might be better to do that with the shadows or highlights, which I find actually looks more natural often than just adjusting the overall exposure. I almost liked it when it was dark like that. It really does kind of pop that way. When I increase the exposure, it starts to look a little wonky. Let's bring down the shadows that spring down the blacks. Mm, don't look too unnatural, but I actually think I like it when the overall exposure was just brought back down just a little bit. If you want to get like, super creative with this, this is how you could create some sort of interesting, sort of depth of field perspective. So if I drop down my sharpness, see how that creates sort of that tilt shift? Look, I'm not going to do that for this photo, but that's how you could apply sort of a tilt shell shift. Look to a photo using either any of these local adjustments. My question is, do I want this full sort of field over here to be have the same edits as the river here. Or do I want to also include this within this adjustment brush? Let me just tested out by taking my ad brush, just painting over here really quick to see what would happen if it kind of looks like that we undo. Let's make it a little smaller so I can get a little bit more precise. Something like that. Thin? I don't know. You tell me. Pressing undue control Z on a Mac Manzi or command Ziana Mac Control Z on a PC. You kind of go back and forth. I think I like it on there. Maybe if I decrease the flow just to drop the exposure just a little bit, actually, not the flow of the flow and the density just to drop a little bit. So it's not competing as much. That kind of works pretty good. Okay, so now let's look at our mask. See how it's a little bit lighter here on the right hand side. I think that looks pretty good. Cool. So I'm happy with those local adjustments. Um, there's I didn't show you this before, but is how you can quickly rotate an image If you're interested in the hat, let me just think if I want to add any sort of contrast, it's pretty contrast. He already so I'll just play with this curve. But I don't I don't think so. It's It's crazy contrast he right now, So I'm gonna undo that. I'm actually pretty happy with this image compared to the before and after. I think it looks way better. The colors are a lot better. Maybe going through my low, my overall sort of exposure. Bringing up the black point just a little bit is a little bit better. I feel like it was almost to contrast Ian these buildings down below. Hey, but I'm happy with that. So this is my process of editing. I'm gonna go in and save it just to show you the entire process of clicking Save. I'm going to save this in my photo shop at its folder that I created before I'll just save it as Photoshopped. Practice number one J peg. I'm not I don't need to remove location, information quality all the way to 10. No limits resize to fit in, up. Gonna turn that off. Resolution fit. One fifties sharpening Nope. Click save. Now. Let's go to our folder. Should be in here and there you have it. Here is our practice number one. Hey, this looks pretty good to me. I'm happy with it. It definitely popped a lot more than the original image. Let's look at you Have it Original image before and after. I'm happy with it. Thank you so much for watching this full demonstration. I'm going to do another one with a portrait at it, and then we're going to jump into photo shop to show you how you can edit photos right within photo shop itself, not using camera raw. 153. Photoshop CC: Portrait Demo: welcome to this new lesson in the photography master class. This is a full editing demonstration of editing a portrait. This is more of a creative portrait, but I want to show you some cool effects to get some neat sort of shallot up the field. Some techniques that I typically do when doing a creative portrait at it. So the first thing that I like to do is crop, So I'm going to take my crop and let's see what if I wanted this to be a portrait or a profile pic, it's probably going to be a square, so I'm going to take a 1 to 1 aspect ratio and crop right in there. Actually, let's go back and let's go into our crop. Let's slightly rotate so that the eyes are going to be level. All right. Next we go through our basic adjustments. White balance looks good for now. I think we're using daylight bulbs, so adjusting to daylight actually makes it a perfect white balance. 555,600. Something like that looks pretty good. Next, let's go through our exposure. So with this one, I do want to be a little creative with it, so add some more contrast to it. Make the blocks a little bit darker. The whites a little bit whiter shadows. We'll bring up the shower just to get a little bit of detail back in the hair. The highlights we'll bring down. I can either bring the highlights up and the whites down or the highlights down on the whites up. I think with whites up on the highlights down, it looks a little bit more contrast in the way that I'm wanting it with clarity, vibrance and saturation. I'm not going to do much. There's not anything I want to increase the saturation of in this photo. I'm gonna leave the tone curve for last to see if I want to add any sort of contrast at the end. There's also nothing I want to do with HS cell or split toning here. I showed you how to get creative with split toning, but I don't really want to do that. The only thing I might do is see what this looks like as a grayscale image. Actually, that could be pretty cool if I want to make it a sort of gray scale so stylistic photo. But let me turn that off for now because I'm gonna leave it like that, make my other sort of adjustments and get back to it. One thing I want to do is play with the depth of field. The eyes are the most important part of the image, but sometimes I like to have a little bit more fall off. And this is a way you can create sort of fake shallot up the field, especially with his neck, his shirt. So what I'm going to do is take a radial filter, make sure I reset everything. Let me just creates oval, and I'll put it around his eyes. So for this one, I actually do want to. It's like everything outside of his eyes. So I'm gonna choose the outside option and I'm going to drop the sharpness all the way. Turn off mass so I can see what's happening. So I'm dropping the sharpness just around the eyes and maybe the clarity all dropped just a little bit to something like that. But what I want to do is brush back some parts where I want the focus to be, so I'm gonna choose my brush gonna take the minus. Turn back on the mask. Let's turn down our flow like 25. Increase The brush size increased the fathering 2 100 Something like that. And I'm just gonna brush over his nose, his mouth. Those are things that I I want to be in focus. The front part of his ear, his hair, something like that. Me more around his eyebrows, too. Maybe his chin. But let's decrease the size just a little bit. Something like that. Let's turn off the mass to see what that does so we can see the before and after turn off overly so we can see. See how it creates Sort of a shout, more shallot up the field. Pretty cool, huh? A creative way to do that through editing. Okay, so let's get back to our edit now. I think I want to add a little bit mawr shallot up the field around his whole head, so I'm going to click the new radio filter brush. We can leave the sharpness and clarity, as is. I'm just going to create a circle. It's actually best to go from the middle, create a circle around his face like So let's turn on the mass so we can see feathering. Let's decrease a little bit. Make it a little whiter, little taller, something like that. So now we're getting even a shallower depth of field for his neck and even his ears, which looks pretty cool. One thing that can look good for skin is toe actually decrease the clarity of skin just a little bit. Eso that it softens it up and it gets rid of some of those details. So I'm gonna take the adjustment brush to make sure that all my settings are reset. Except for I mean clarity's find about. Let me just reset that and turn on mask. When we just brush over his skin, we'll send said the flow a little higher. Same with density. So we're just going to soften up the skin just a little bit. Were not making out of focus. It's just making it softer. If we go too much, we can always erase. So let's decrease the size erased by holding the option key. Don't need to get his hair over. There were there looks pretty good. Eyebrows don't necessarily need as well. Okay, so that's like I'm pretty good. So now with that selection made, let's take our clarity and bring it down, saying like, negative 80 or so if we go undo before and after, see how it kind of softens the skin just a little bit. They want to brush in a little bit. Hey, there looks pretty good. All right, so let's make his eyes pop a little bit more. We're gonna use the brush again. Click new, reset our clarity. We're gonna zoom in here a lot, so let's zoom into the eyes so we can really brush and where we want Take our brush, decrease their size. And I'm really just trying to get in his the whites of his eye. Depending on how big your photo is, you might not go down to a brush size to when you're editing a photo of someone's eyes. It might be done 20. And it's the perfect size. Let me just around here. I think so. Looks pretty good. All right, turn off the mask. We'll just bring up the whites just a little bit. You don't want to go too far, especially you don't want to exposure because that starts to look scary. evil Sam, but just the whites a little bit. Now click new. I'm gonna pay over his pupil and his iris. So let's paint over. Let's turn on Mass so I can see what I'm painting looks pretty good being over here. And we're just gonna bring out some that color and clarity in his eyes. Gonna get rid of holding option to paint off that part down there. Okay, let's turn off our mask here. Let's increase the clarity. Let's increase the saturation and maybe bring up the shadows. Yeah, bring of the shadows. It's good if you want to change the color of the I slightly, you can do so with the temperature. Make it more red green. We're not going to do that. So let's reset that white balance back. But I think that looks pretty good. His eyes pop just a little bit more from before, so let's go ahead and see the before and after. See how his eyes pop just a little bit more. I think they do. Anyways. You can go a little bit further, maybe with that exposure adjustment as well. So now I'm done with those adjustments, so let's go back to our tone curve and see if we want to add a little bit more contrast, using the point method, creating just like a little s curve. When you do that, you start to get a little bit more saturation. Then I want because when you increase contrast, the colors become a little bit more saturated. I actually kind of like the image before without that contrast, so I'm just going to select these two points and delete them. And then let's go to the gray scale tab. Convert to grayscale, seen before and after, before and after you lose all those sort of details and color adjustments we made with the eyes and everything is a little bit less detailed and the ADA's we made with Grey Scale So I'm gonna leave. It is colored. The last thing I want to do is add a vignette, actually with this image, so let's decrease the vignette. Slider amount to create a black or dark vignette increased the fathering just the midpoint to go in slightly, which I like Awesome. So that starting look good when I'm looking at now, though, I'm thinking that Sam doesn't pop out from the background enough. So what I want to do is adjust the background. Let's use a graduated filter so you have that selected. Just reset everything by clicking the minus button on one and then resetting that selection if you want or going one at a time and then just click and drag. Now I'm going to use my range mask for color. I believe will work best. Use my eye dropper to select the background and look at that. It did a pretty good job. Let's change the color range. Actually, that looks pretty good. What we can do is just brush out his eyes because I don't want his eyes selected. So with our brush on minus, just brush out the selections on his face, which works perfectly. So now let's turn off our mask and let's increase the exposure of the background. Maybe make it darker. Yeah, I actually like a darker. I thought I was gonna make it brighter to make him pop out a little bit more, but I think making it darker looks pretty good. There's other ways that you could make selections that will learn in a future lesson about removing backgrounds, but this is an easy way toe edit a background, a blank background white right within the camera. Raw. All right. This is the before and after. I hope you liked my edit. Let me know if you have any questions about what I did. What I didn't do. If you have edits of your own, we would love to see them go ahead, to post them to social media. Tag us so we can check him out or post them to the course page so that we can see them there. We love to check him out. Thanks for watching. And we'll see you in another lesson. 154. Photoshop CC: Cropping II: welcome to this new lesson in the photography masterclass. In this lesson and the following ones, we're going to learn how to edit your photos in photo shop itself, not using camera raw. So first, we're going to get a quick refresher of how you can open an image in photo shop. If it's a J peg or compressed image and you right, click it and choose open with photo shop or literally just drag or drop it into the photo shop icon on a Mac. Or if you're in photo shopping, choose file open and then choose that J. Peg. It's going to open it in photo shop itself. If you open up a raw image in a photo shop by right clicking and opening and photo shop, let's go ahead and try this one. Then it's going to open it up in camera raw, and then you can either choose open image or remember, if you hold shift down, you open it as a smart object, which allows us to easily go back to camera raw in the future. Well, for this lesson, we're not really worried about going back to camera raw, even though that's the best practice. So those are the two ways you can open up or the multiple ways you're gonna open up in photo shop. In this lesson, we are going back to the basics. And I want to show you how toe do basic things like cropping affecting white balance, exposure and things like that. So to crop, we have a crop tool on the left hand sidebar clicking that brings up the crop tool. You probably won't see this overlay look like this when you start out. I It looks like that for me because I already have an aspect ratio plugged in here at the top. You have, ah, variety of aspect ratio presets up here, or you can type in a specific one over here in these two numbers down here, if you choose one like five by seven, for example, but you want it to be seven by five. Just click this swap button in the middle, which swaps the height versus the with. So say I want this to be a profile image one by one. I can choose that and then just click and drag around the edges to resize it. I can click in the middle to move the photo around. It can hover over the corners to rotate as well. Once I'm done cropping happy with it and you notice that it has the grid overlay, which is great, you can press the return key on your keyboard to sort of save that crop. Now you might be a little worried because if you click the crop tool again from the move tool, which is kind of like the main tool that we're using in Photoshop, it looks like we can't adjust it back to the original setting. Just go ahead and click outside the square itself or the inside of the image, and then you get the full image back. I really quickly want to show you this straight in tool that we learned in camera. It's a cool way that you can level out horizons or any lines in your image. So if I click on that when I click and drag across the horizon, it's going to straighten it out. Now, the one thing that the crop tool doesn't do automatically is see how in this bottom right hand corner we're selecting outside the outside the image you want to make sure that you're careful of that and you're only choosing the image itself. So this might be a balance of rotating leveling your horizons, making sure everything's good. You can also check the check mark up here to commit current crop operation. It's the same as pressing the return key, So that's how you crop an image in photo shop just in the main view. Remember, if you're a photo shop, doesn't look quite like this, just go upto window workspace and then choose essentials. While I'm there. I'm going to show you how toe quickly rearrange the workspace a little bit by clicking and dragging these panels up or down to get more space. I'm not going to work too much with the color of the swatches in this lesson, or in this course. Ah, but I do want to make sure that I work with this paint layers panel quite a bit, and that's pretty much it for now. 155. Photoshop CC: Layer Panel: before I move on to editing the photo itself, I want to add a quick lesson about how you work around the photo shop workspace. So we notice here that we have this layer panel over here on the bottom, right with the photo that we've opened. The cool thing about photo shop is you can add lots and lots of layers and edit them together. And that's one of the cool things about it. I can also turn an often on individual layers with the eyeball right here. So what if I want to add another photo to this? We'll call it a project. There's a couple ways to do it. One is to go toe up to file and then go down to place linked and then select the photo that you want to place in this project. So now it actually places this image as a new layer, and from here, I can resize it by clicking the corners and driving to the left or right or around to make it bigger or smaller. Now notice that when I do that, the aspect gets all funky. If you press the shift key down, it locks it to the aspect ratio. So it stays and it looks normal. We can click and move it around, and then once we're done moving it around, initially press the return key to sort of lock it in place. You can still move it around. It's just now a part of the image, and so we can just resize it again. Press return to sort of lock it in place. So now we have two layers over here on the right hand side to delete a layer. You can just press the delete key with one selected. I'm gonna undo that. If I want to reorder the layers to put a different one on top, I can just click and drag and reorder them. So now I have this photo of Sam playing soccer on top. You don't see the one below unless I turn this one off, but still there. Now that's just a little bit about working with image. There's other ways that you can place images in your project for most Mac users and PC users. If you just select the image in your finder or documents and drag it into the project on top of that sort of window that your have your photo on your canvas, as it's called it just places it in there like that again. Pressing return will lock it in place, but I'm gonna delete it. So that's a little bit about the workflow and understanding layers. I'm sure there will be more sort of tips moving on. But now, in the next lessons, I'm gonna move on to how you properly edit your photos in photo shop. 156. Photoshop CC: Photo Adjustments: There are many ways to add a photo in photo shop, and there's the smart way and the not so smart way. The not so smart way is where your edits are actually burned into the image and you really can't undo those edits. I want to show you what that would look like really quickly. I'm gonna open up this photo shop eight filed by dragging it and dropping it into photo shop or right clicking and opening it into photo shop notice. Right now, this is the background layer. Remember how earlier in this section I showed you how you can convert this to a smart object by right clicking, converting to a smart object and then we could apply the camera raw filter to it, which allows us to go back and edit this photo more easily. I'm gonna undo that and say, You didn't do that. This is not a smart object anymore. If I go up to image and goto adjustments, there are all sorts of adjustments up here from brightness and contrast to hue and saturation. By clicking any one of these, a window will pop up and I can make adjustments with the sliders. So if I want to make this more contrast E and brighter, crazy, bright like that, I can do that and click. OK, but what happens is now that edit is burned into this image. So next let me go in there and adjust the white balance. They don't have a traditional white balance editor, but they do have a color balance of photo filter effect. Let me show you that one photo filter. This way you can warm up your photo with different filters by choosing the filter and then adjusting the density. So if you want to make it warmer or cooler, you just choose the right filter and then adjust the density. You can even choose a specific color that you want to add as a filter here, like so and then you click. OK, and you're happy with that? But now you're like, actually I made it a little too bright. How do I go back? Well, you can't really go back and go to image adjustments, brightness and contrast anymore, because now this is a brand new brightness and contrast effect, which is not the right way, because if we had just in now and try to bring down the brightness. It starts to get a little funky because it's applying multiple brightness and contrast filters or effects over and over and over, and that starts to distort the image. The only way you can go backwards in photo shop is going to your history, which is this little button here which, if you click it brings up the history window. If you don't see that goto window click history. And this has all of the different things we've done so far to this photo, we opened it. We added brightness and contrast. We added the photo filter, and then we added another brightness and contrast filter. What you can do is click on one of these steps, and when you do that, you go all the way back to that step. But by doing that, you delete the later steps. If I want to just delete that brightness and contrast effect, I can't do that. There's a little trash can hear that might look like I can do that. But if I click the the brightness and contrast and choose delete currents state, then it's going to delete that step, plus everything after it, so the history option is a good way to go all the way back to the beginning. But it's just not the right workflow for editing photos. So the best way is to convert your object to a smart object. So this one over here are soccer. Image is already a smart object because we open it up previously in camera raw, and Photoshopped remembers that. So the next time you open it in Photoshop, it's a smart object. You'll notice that's a smart object because it has this little icon down here where it's the photo itself in the layer panel. And then there's this little icon in the bottom, right? See how this photo of this the water doesn't. If I right click and convert to smart object, it has that little icon. Now, Now, look what happens if you goto image and then adjustments say we add brightness and contrast . We changed the brightness. We increase the contrast and click OK. What happens is a new smart filter is applied. Now we can't go back and edit this brightness and contrast filter by double clicking it, making change, mints, clicking okay, if we go to image and adjustments again, and at our instead, photo filter. Choose color balance. We can add more red, make it more yellow. Actually, this is a good example of where you have your sort of standard white balance going from yellow to blue. It's not exactly like white balance, but it's close, so we want to make it warmer. We can do that a little bit more red click. OK, now we have the color balance and the brightness and contrast filters. We can always go back to brightness and contrast by double clicking it. It's going to warn you that says that these smart filters are stacked on top in the same way that you add them, are applied them. And so if we click OK, it's going to get rid of all those effects so we don't see it. We can adjust the normal brightness and contrast without seeing the color balance. You can reorganize the effects by clicking and dragging them around. So now if I adjust the brightness and contrast with it on top, I do see the color balance as well so you could make the adjustment. Knowing what it looks like with the color balance applied. You can quickly see what it looks like, with or without one of these effects by clicking on the I little icon to the left of each of these filters, or turn them all on and off with the big smart filter I right there. So that's how you have apply image filters or smart filters using the images and adjustment window. There's another way to add adjustments to an image, and that's with an adjustment layer. And there's multiple ways that you can apply those adjustment layers. One is by going to this adjustments tab up here if you don't see that goto window and choose adjustments. And now you have these icons and these air similar many of the same sort of effects as what was up here in the image menu. So if we choose hue and saturation, for example, notice what happened was we have this layer that appears above the photo and then in the Properties panel, we have the the sort of edits or the sliders for this effect. So if we drop the saturation, for example, we make it lighter, darker and make any changes. This is just a layer that is being applied to the layer in underneath it. Now I want to show you something. What if I want to put this soccer photo? Let's take this soccer photo and place it into this project, clicking and dragging it. It opens it up in camera raw first, but I'm just going to click. OK, so that it creates the smart object on this project. I'm gonna resize that. Make it bigger. If you can't see your entire canvas, you'll use the zoom tool down here. First, we have to place this file so press return on your keyboard or plus press place. Now, with the zoom tool, you could zoom in or out. You can choose to zoom in with this button up here, Zoom out with this button down here with the minus, or you can with the plus sign to click and zoom in. You can just hold the option key down to zoom out, so now it's a little bit easier to see the image and place it where we want it. Pressing the space bar to get our hand tool allows us to move the canvas around itself, not the image itself. So now this practice photo 86 is on top of our other layers. If I put this underneath the hue saturation layer, the hue and saturation is applying to that layer as well. And so that's the difference between these adjustment layers, and the photo smart filter is here. It's that these smart filters that we applied to this photo down here are only being applied to this photo. The hue and saturation layer applies to all the photos or any sort of layer that's underneath it. Say we add another adjustment, which we can do with these buttons up here. Or there's another way by clicking this button down here. It's like the little circle half dark, hack half light choose. Let's go ahead and add a black and white that's going to add the black and white filter. And it's a new layer, and we have the same sort of adjustments that we have seen in the other lessons where you can adjust the brightness of individual colors in terms of your black and white image. But again, if I take this soccer image and put it above all these layers, and even if we make it smaller, you can see that it's not having the these same filters being applied to it. If I drop it underneath now, it's black and white. And just to clarify one more time. If I have this selected to go up to image adjustments and now I go to hue and saturation. Now this window is for the smart filter that's going to be applied to this image. So let's make it crazy saturated. Click OK, and now that smart filter is is just on that image itself. So that's how you apply adjustments to your photos, right within photo shop. There's multiple ways to do it. You can still use these layers. There's nothing wrong with using these adjustment layers. Just know that applies to all of the layers beneath it, and not just that individual photo. You can turn them on and off. You can go back to them because when you click them and opens up the settings in this properties tab, so it's still not burned into it, you can still go back and edit them. It just depends on how you want to edit your photos. So my advice is to go through them and play around with the different effects. You'll find a lot of them similar to what we've seen in the past. You see the curves, which allows you to adjust the contrast and the exposure. There's levels and exposure, which also allow you to adjust the exposure. You've got hue and saturation for colors and saturation, and I don't want toe bore you, so I'm not going to go through each of those one at a time in this class. But if you have any questions on a specific one, or if you're looking on how to do a specific thing, let us know and I'll get back to you and show you how to do it, either with a new tutorial or through the questions and answers in the course. Thank you so much for watching this lesson on how you make adjustments to photos and the next lessons. I'm going to show you some cool techniques you can do in photo shop that you might be wondering, like removing backgrounds 157. Photoshop CC: Removing a Background: in this lesson, I'm going to show you how to remove the background from your image or basically, how to make a cut out of an image. So I'm gonna open up this photo photo shop one in Photoshopped by just opening it up and photo shop. And then I'm going to reset everything by clicking this drop down menu and choosing reset camera raw defaults. So everything is back to normal. No edits. Then with the shift button, choose open objects. So it's a smart object. If I ever want to go back to camera. The tool I want to show you is this selection tool. If you hold it down, you have the magic wand tool. But what I want to show you is the quick selection tool. When you do that, you see your tool meant options up here which if you choose any of these tools, you usually get options up. Here you have a plus, a minus. If you have dropped, click this arrow down. You have the settings. You have the size, the hardness, which is basically like the feathering. If you have it at zero hardness, there's sort of a feathering effect on the side. If harnesses all the way up, there's not much feathering. There's other options here, but just leave spacing at 10% and you should be good to go Sample. All layers should be off unless you have multiple layers that you're trying to make a selection of. But usually it's just one, so that's fine. Off an auto enhance on is great. Now what we do is basically click on the objects that we want to cut out. So if I click over Sam's face, you see what happened. As I clicked in drags, Photoshopped recognized that all of this is probably what I want, and it recognizes that based off of color and exposure and seeing the edges of things. So now it doesn't know I want the sweater, but if I just click and drag over here, it grabs a bunch, keep clicking and dragging, and eventually it's going to grab everything. Now say I clicked and dragged and selected too much like it did there with the background. All I need to do is go to the minus selection or press the option key to get the minus brush, and now I can subtract all of the selection that was made. You'll notice that now I have this selection and it's a pretty rough selection to make a cut out. What you need to do is copy and paste it so you can press command, See, and in command V and what happens is it created this new layer and notice if I turn off the bottom layer. Now we have a cut out of Sam. Let me add a white background so we can really see what this cut out looks like. If I click this button down here the one we saw for the new adjustment layers there is a solid color layer and I'm just going to choose white when the color picker pops up, click OK, And now put that color layer down at the bottom so you'll notice that we have this cut out now. But the edges don't look that good. So I want to show you how to improve those. So let me actually just turn off that layer by checking on and off the eyeball turned back on my photo layer, and I want to use thes selection tool. But make sure that I'm selecting the layer that I want to select. So clicking the practice photo one. So now I'm going to click and drag over like I did before. Click Over is a year, Alex. Pretty good. Then I'm going to choose, select and mask. So now it brings up this other menu with properties on the side, which we can use to sort of make it better. Skipping these two top two options you have Radius, which sort of looks at the edge and tries to intelligently choose the right selection so you can see here with it off and then with on and it's by pixels. So it's actually selecting 37 pixels and trying to read what you want to select. Part of Sam's hair starts to look pretty good. If we turn on Smart Radius, it does a little bit more work in the back end toe look even better. You also have these global refinements like smoothing feather contrast, shift edge feathering, see what happens. It kind of feathers The edge makes it soft. Contrast does a little bit more on looking at different colors and contrast of exposures. To make the selection shifting edge will shrink or increase the selection and smooth will make the selection sort of sharper or a little bit more smooth. I do quickly want to show you what this opacity is. This is just a preview of what the background would look like. So with the opacity at zero, you're actually seeing the background with that 100. You're not in between your convincing a combination of the background with no background. I can change the color if I want to see it against Red. If that makes it easier to see my selection, you could change that color there, so that's just helping for a preview. There are some tools over here that help you refine things especially like hair, So if you have hair that's especially longer or a little bit more detailed, this will help you click that tool. You can adjust the size of the tool here and then by clicking and dragging over the edge, you can see as I do that it starts to pick up more of Sam's hair. Pretty neat, huh? So it's a good idea to go over the edge of things with that tool, especially with hair, and once you unclip, it does a pretty good job of selecting his ear over here also isn't perfect. So let me brush over that. That's starting to look a little bit better anyways. Ledge of his jacket. You're getting some of that fuzz. That looks pretty fine. If you do want to make a complete new selection, you go back to this selection brush, and this is just like the selection brush. When we made our initial selection, you can add things clicking and driving, and it might take a lot of process or subtract things. And now it's doing a lot of processing because it's like, Phil, what are you doing? You're telling me you want this background now you're telling me you don't want this background? We don't really know what to dio, so I'm going to step backwards or undo which, if you go upto edit menu Goto, step backwards. You can actually go back in your steps, basically like the history to go backwards. So let me just make sure that we have the selection of his ear a little bit better. It's pretty good, and it might help in this instance to drop the opacity so you can really see what you're working with. So once you've made all of your adjustments, click. OK, but nothing has changed yet. Remember, you have to copy and paste to create a new layer. So if you press command, see on a Mac control CNPC than command V. Now we have this new layer. So let me go ahead and turn. Take both of these layers. I can select both by selecting one and then shift clicking the other, pressing the V key on my keyboard to get my move tool or just going to the move tool. And now I can resize them again, holding down the shift key to keep the aspect ratio. I just want to show you kind of the before and after. So now when I'm done moving them, press return on my keyboard to place it, and now it's separate them so you can see the one on the right is the one we did initially , and the one on the left is the one we use the refined edge tool. You can see how good that does at removing the background while still getting the small details of Sam's hair. So I'm gonna go and delete that top one. Take this good one right here. And there we go. We have Sam's new passport photo. I'm sure he's going to love this one in all seriousness. That is how you remove the background from a layer in photo shop. You still have this background layer or the full photo down here if you ever want to use it for something. But we have this new layer with just the selection. If you have any questions, let me know. Otherwise, we'll see you in another lesson. 158. Photoshop CC: Favorite Tools: in this lesson. I want to show you some of my favorite tools for editing and manipulating photos that we have in photo shop. So I'm gonna delete this layer. The selection that we have so we're not using that I can also delete are background white layer because we don't need it. So the first tool that I'm going to show you is the healing brush tool. This is a way for you to remove blemishes. Pimples. It's whatever you want to remove from a photo. So with the layers selected, you'll notice that if I hover over the image, I get this sort of error warning mouse. It's like a circle with a line through it. If I try to click anywhere, it's going to say this smart object must be rast arise before proceeding. So what roster ization basically means is it's turning your smart object into a non smart object, making every edit you make to the photo burned into that image or into that layer so you can't undo it. So one way that I like to do things to make sure it's easy to go back or to see the before and after is I'm gonna hit, Cancel, and I'm just going to make a duplicate of this layer by dragging it and dropping it into this button next to the trash can. That looks like a little sticky note. That's the new item button. So now we have two layers there, the same exact layer. Let me rename this top one by clicking in the title twice. I'll call this edits. So now if I ever make any changes and want to quickly go back to the other one to see what it looks like, I can do that. So now, with the edits one selected with my healing brush selected Click on the layer and I'm gonna choose Rast. Arise it. Okay, so now we have a brush, which we can adjust the size and the shape of the brush up here. Another keyboard shortcut that I want to show you is on a Mac. It's control option, and if you click and drag to the left or right, it increases or decreases the size of your brush or whatever tool your using and then dragging up or down makes it harder or softer with more of a feathered edge or just a hard edge, so that's control an option on a Mac. I believe that would be Command and Ault on a PC and clicking and dragging at the same time so I can adjust the size of this brush until it's about the size of this blemish that I want to get rid of on Sam's face. But I do wanna zoom in a little bit more so I press Z on my keyboard to zoom in. Go back to my healing brush and there's several ones down here you can see if you hold down this tool, you see all the options. But I'm just going to use the spot healing brush right now. And if I click on this little zit and then let go, Photoshopped does its magic and removes it. So if I turn on and off this edits, you can see what it does, so this automatically tries to make changes. If you want to do it yourself, I just under that So we have this layer back original. You can go to the healing brush tool, so now you'll see that wherever I put my mouth, it's kind of taking an air. Another area of my photo, and it's going to try to blend it in with that blemish. So I want to make my selection first of the area. I want to basically copy and blend in with that blemish. To do that, you press the option key click, and now that area is selected. So if I do it to his eye, for example, then come over here, see how it's basically copying that I. And if I click, it's going to kind of take the and try to blend it in. So what I want to do is make a selection right about here and then go up and then click. And that's a cool way because you can kind of preview what it's going to look like. So that's the healing brush and the spot healing brush tool for removing blemishes. The clone tool is very similar, so when I select the clone tool, I still have that sort of selection that I made on his cheek earlier. What if I want to make Sam have three eyes while I can change the size of my brush by increasing it again? Control option dragging left or right on a Mac command. Holt. I believe on a PC. Now let me press the option key to make my selection of the eye and click. And now, if I go over to the center of his forehead, click. I've now copied that eyeball. If I continue to sort of click and drag around, it continues to sort of paste around the copied spot. So if I continue completely, it's kind of like painting on the face from where I started clicking. So if you just want the eyeball, I'm just going to click and drag just a little bit like so there's a couple other tools I want to show you. One is the blur tool and the sharpening and this smudge tool. So let me zoom out like So Sam is looking really awesome right now. So holding down this tool going to the blur tool, changing the size. Something like this, we can just kind of literally drag around, and it's gonna blur. Parts out takes a little wild of process because this image is so big, you can adjust the strength up here. Let's just go out and so you can see a little bit more clearly if I keep clicking and dragging over this, I see how it's starting to get a little bit blurry. All you have to do is just keep clicking and dragging to increase the strength of that blur . So let me go back on the history and you can see all the blurring that I did. And let's go all the way back to the clone stamp tool to get back to where we're not blurred anymore. The sharpening tool does the same thing. Clicking over an area will sharpen it. The smudge tool. This is cool. This is a way to reshape bodies. So if I take this much tool, let's make it a little bit bigger. You have the strength up here, which is that 50. So you might want to play around with different strengths, and this image is really big, so it takes a little while to process. But say I let's make a little smaller, which is click here on his cheek and just drag to the right a little bit. See how it starts to smudge Sam's face a little bit. Let's under that. Let's go out to the outside and drag in just a little bit and that's making Sam a little bit skinnier. So this is how you can actually manipulate people to be bigger or smaller on this image. It doesn't look too bad because the background is pretty simple. But if I go to this image, for example, let's go this image to use this smudge tool. It's not going to let me do it until I rast arise it right. So I'm gonna create a copy. I'm gonna rast arise it you can rast aerated by right click in choosing Rast, Arise Layer and now it's just smudge him in. That was probably a little bit too much, but you can see as its source Wow, Yeah, that was really, really too much. But as it starts to smudge, the background starts to get a little bit weird. So let's just do a little bit. Actually, you know, the background starts to get sort of warped, and things start to look unnatural. So you do have to be careful of the background when you are using this smudge option back to our three. I'd Sam, let's just look at one more tool that I like. It's the Dodge and Burn burn tool so that's underneath this much. So let's take the Dodge Tool. This is a quickly, quick way to basically increase or decrease exposure using a brush. Right now we have our options. The range is set to shadows. This will affect just shadows, just mid tones or just highlights depending on what you have selected up here. So if I click and drag in his hair, for example, it's really bringing up the details of his hair. But it also affects the background a little bit. So let me undo that. Let's do the highlights and show you what happens. So when I do this up here to the highlights, not really much has affected except the top of his forehead. So when would this be practical? Let's choose shadows, make it a little bit smaller, just go underneath Sam's eyes. The strength might be a little bit too much, so exposure at 100. Let's set this down to like for 39 or so. Now let's just slowly paint a little bit, gets rid of sort of those sleepy eyes for Sam with this tool that might have gone a little bit too far. But you can play around with that, too, you know, get rid of those shadows or the bags. Under people's eyes, the burn tool does the opposite. It basically makes things darker. So if exposures set to 100 we paint over this, it makes everything darker at least the shadows, the highlights that will really mostly effect just the highlights. Mid tones will mostly just affect the mid tones. So it's a cool way to just kind of pinpoint specific areas, sort of like the adjustment brush using camera. But right here in Photoshop. But remember, these edits are being burned literally burned onto this rasta rise image. So to undo it, you have to go through the history panel and go all the way back to the edit you made. And then you lose everything you've done after the fact. All right, those are just several of my favorite tools to play around with and manipulate photos in photo shop. If you have any questions about those tools, let me know. Now. We know we didn't cover every single tool in photo shop, but that's what other photo shop courses are. Four. This is not a complete Photoshopped course, even though I have had it. What is this like three hours worth of push of content so far? Ah, I do have a full photo shop cc for beginners course which covers like the other things, like adding text and making graphics and a lot of the things we didn't cover in this section of the course if you are interested. But for now, I hope you've enjoyed this section. I have one more lesson for now, and that's going to be how to save and export photos from photo shop, and that's coming up next. 159. Photoshop CC: Exporting II: So you're done editing your photo and photo shop and you want to save it and share it with the world. Well, first you can save it as a Photoshopped file. Or you can save it Oz a J pic file or something that's better for sharing to save it as a Photoshopped project. Go up to file Save. It's going to have the format as photo shop. So let's just call this three. I'd Sam Sam and our edits folder and choose Safe Click. OK, and now this file is safe. So I closed this down. Then I want to go back and open it. I have this three it Sam Photoshopped file. I can just open double click to open in Photoshopped if I want to save it as a J Peg image or a variety of other formats really easily, I can go to file save as and just changed the format from something like Photoshopped to P and G or J Peg. If I choose J Peg and then choose save, it's going to pop up with options for that Jay Peg in terms of quality, so you have maximum high, medium or low, which is the slider down here when she can just go from left to right. So this is going to be the exact size of the crop and the image that we've done. So if I click OK and then look at my photo, you'll see that is is 3745 pixels by 3745 pixels, which is the size of the crop that we did. The size of the image itself was 6000 by 4000 pixels, so it does take into account if you've cropped the photo using the crop tool in Photoshopped. The way that you can export or save a photo at a specific size is to go up to file export and shoes export as this brings up a another module that allows us to choose the right settings that we want. So let's see that pop open. So in the top, right, you choose the format you have P and G J Peg gift or S V G quality. You can change from 0 to 100% so 100% would be full quality. This will affect the size of your image, which you can see sort of a preview over in the left. So say we decrease the quality. 2 46 is going to change it to less than one megabyte. So if you're looking for a specific size, you can decrease the quality. That way you can also change the image size. So say you wanted to be 1000 by 1000 pixels. Just type in 1000 and it will match the height and to the with based off of your aspect ratio. And then I just pressed Tab to sort of lock that height in, and we are zoomed out to 16% here. But we can zoom in by clicking the plus button down here to see sort of the full image quality and also by t decreasing the image size. We decrease the file size over here metadata. If you want to include the copyright in contact in vote, that's fine or none. And for color space, just leave it as RGB or convert toe s RGB, which is better for a J peg. Then choose export. All choose the name and location, called his V two for Virgin to click Save and is going to save it to that location. So now we have this version. In this version, the V two version is only 531 kilobytes. The original version that is a lot bigger is 7.4 megabytes. And that is how you export an image from Photoshopped. 160. Photoshop CC: HDR Editing: in this lesson, I'm going to show you how you can merge together photos as an HDR photo. Remember from earlier in the class that HDR or bracketing, which is basically the same concept, is taking photos, the same photo at different exposures and then combining them to get a properly balanced photo. So I've included in the Examples and HDR folder with the two HDR sort of photos that I took . So we have one that's a little under exposed, one that is over exposed to get the details in the rocks. So in photo shop, if you go up to the file menu, then go down to automate, then choose Merge to HDR Pro. A window pops up where you choose the photos you want to merge. Click, browse, find the photos you want to merge, select all of them. It could be two or even more click open. It's going to appear there and then choose OK, it's going to process those photos and open up this sort of HDR menu. So it's already gone ahead and process both of these images together and you have several options for adjusting how it looks here. You also have presets up here that you can choose. There's custom. There's surreal. There is just different ones, depending on the style you're looking for and also depending on sort of what photos you took. So if you start with the default ah, which is that makes really no adjustments, you can go in. And now in this menu, you can actually make adjustments to things like the exposure with the highlights and the shadows adjusting the vibrance in the saturation, you also have more adjustments. Appear like edge glow tone in detail, which will make changes depending on what your photo is. Of the radius basically in the edge, glow effects, the edge of things and how things are blended together for this image. It doesn't do that much for tone and detail. You can affect the overall exposure with exposure. You could increase the detail this detail slider to give you more of that sort of typical HDR. Look. Gamma is similar to contrast. In a sense, where is making things a little bit more contrast or flat so you can play around with that ? And so go. I didn't play around with your settings. Make it look how you want and then click. OK, and it's going to open it up as a Photoshopped file. This has been a little bit wonky for me in the past where it actually crashed. Photo shop. So hopefully with updates to Photoshopped, this will work properly for you. If it does crash or if it doesn't open, try saving the file as a Photoshopped project and then reopening it. I'm going to show you how to save the project in a couple lessons, so you might have to go skip ahead to that lesson if you don't know how to save a Photoshopped file. But basically now you have your your HDR photo that you can continue to make edits to as you wish. It's not a raw image. It's a rast arise image, but you can go ahead and right click. Choose to convert it to a smart object and open it up in camera raw using the filter camera filter. If you're interested in making adjustments using camera raw, so that's how you combine images into an HDR photo. Let me know if you have any questions, otherwise we'll see in the next lesson 161. Lightroom Classic CC: Intro: Welcome to this new section of the photography masterclass course. This section is all about editing your photos in adobe Light Room Classic CC. So I know you might be confused if you're brand new to photo editing and the Adobe suite of software. You have Photoshopped. You have Photoshopped elements. You have light room. You have light room. Classic C C. You have the new version of Light Room CC. This section is about light room classic CC, which is what the older version of Light Room CC morphed into when Adobe came out with their new cloud based editing application, Light Room CC, which we cover in a different section of this course. So who is Adobe Light Room? Classic CC four. And how do you install it? Well, you can go to the Adobe website. It's just at adobe dot com, and then let's go to the home page. So Aiken walk you through exactly how you get to the Light room. Classic click on created creativity and design Click Photographers. And then, if you scroll down, you see all the ops that they have for photography, and you see that there is light room CC in light room classic CC, which is their desktop focused photo editing app. It's great if you shoot a lot of photos. It's what I would recommend. And I know that Sam and will like for professional photography if you're a wedding photographer. If you're doing portrait's and you're editing a lot of photos at once, there really isn't anything that can be the efficiency and the power of light room. Classic CC photo shop is great, and it's probably the most popular professional photo editing and manipulation tool, but it's more for one off very intensive edits. Whereas Light room is great for editing lots, you can copy and paste edit styles from one foot to the next. So if you shoot an entire wedding and you have AH, 100 photos of the bride and the groom and one location when you're doing the couple photography or the bride and bride, or the groom and groom, or whoever you shoot the wedding for, you can quickly paced editing styles, contrast saturation, all the adjustments from one photo to the next, and I'm gonna show you and walk you through and you'll see why it's so good. So to get this application, though you can get a free trial. If you click the free trial button up here, you get a seven day free trial, or you can purchase it by clicking the buying out button. Adobe has different plans. They have a photography plan where you get all of their photo APS for just $10 a month if you pay annually or pay the monthly price for an annual plan, or if you want to get all of the adobe products, just go up to creativity. View all plans and pricing, and then you can see that for $50 a month they have an annual plan that gets all of their APs. You even have a students and teachers option. This doesn't work necessarily for online courses, but if you are part of a university or a high school and you have a student email address, you should be able to get this price 1999 a month for all of their APS. You can see here if you are part of a school, you might feel to get your school accesses well or a business. You can purchase individual apse as well. For me, I use not only their photo editing APS, but I use their video editing APS. I use their motion graphic APS, and so that's why I have this full plan. But if you just want the photo APS, you can do this $10 month plan. Once you perches your plan, it will probably prompt you to install what's called the Adobe Creative Cloud desktop app, and this is where you can actually install and make all of your updates. You can see that I have to update some of my APS four things like photo shop after effects , Light room, Classic CC. Let Room CC and they have all the adobe ops here that are a part of your plan. And that is through the adobe creative cloud app that you download once you purchase your plan. So once you have light room installed and up and running, we're going to continue with the next lesson and will start importing our photos and then editing them 162. Lightroom Classic CC: Import and Organize: go ahead and open up light room, Classic CC And now we're going to learn how to import your photos. First, I want to give you a quick overview of the program if you're completely brand new to it. I know that this is not a complete light room course from, you know, every single but into the end. We want to do a quick dive of how to use the tools to do basic and some advance edits. And as we go through time, we will continue to add lessons, brand new lessons or content from my other full light room class to this photography masterclass so that you have access to our best content so that you don't have to go out and purchase another class unless you want to. And unless you want that full sort of class, you have your top menu up here, which we'll get to a lot of things like importing and making quick edits and organization. You have your main window where you have different sort of modules. Your library is where you organize photos. Your development is where you edit your photos and then you have these other ones for creating things like books, slide shows, printing Web, APS and even putting your photos on a map over on the right and left hand side. You usually have menus for the different options, depending on what sort of module you're in. So if you're in the develop module, you'll have your editing options on the right. You'll have other presets, and options on the left will go over in the future lessons back to the library tab or really, either these. You have your photo tray at the bottom, which is the photos that are in the current sort of folder that you're going through and these you can go through. And it's an easy way to get from one photo to the next, especially when you're in the developed tab. You can go from one photo to the next. Okay, so that's kind of your crash course of the workspace. How do you actually import photos? The easiest way is when you're in the library module, click this big import button in the bottom left from their you pick a source on this left hand side and the sources either some folder on your computer or in some sort of media card or external hard drive that you have plugged in. So I have my photos that I want to import, and you should have downloaded these already. If you haven't done so there in the light room Classic CC folder. Make sure you download that and unzip the the photos from There are that folder, and so that's gonna be on my desktop. So I'm on a Mac. This might look a little different if you're on a PC, but that's the great thing about light. Room is good for Mac or PC users, so let's go. There's selecting all my photos for editing and go into a light room classic CC. So when you select the folder folder that you want to import, photos from your photo should appear here in this big window in the middle. Here, you can select the individual photos that you want to import. You can click this button up at the top left to select all photos or toe un select all photos for us. We're going to import all of these photos, but if you are importing photos from an entire shoot, you might want to go through them one at a time and choose which ones you want to import before actually importing them. So you're not dealing with all the photos you don't even want to edit. You can click this button in the bottom left of this window toe, go through them one at a time. And then I just used the left and right arrow keys to view them one at a time. And Teoh, see which ones that I want to include in my in my import, Over on the right, You have your options for how you want to import. And so the main thing I want you to look at is odd to collection here, and this is sort of a folder that you create to help organize. And you can add your photos to existing folders or create a new folder So you can see here that I have a photography Masha Class 2.0, folder that has all the photos that we took in this class. We have a selects folder which has the best photos. I'm going to click the plus button to create a new folder and all called this practice at its and then select create. And now when we import this, it will put it into that folder. You also will notice that here I have unchecked don't import suspected duplicates. Usually I have that checked on because the way that light room works is that it's not actually moving the files or anything. Once you import them on your computer, there's just it's just reading from the file that's on your computer, and you don't want toe have to end up importing the photo twice. You don't want to have a duplicate just because it gets a little messy. And so once you've imported it, light room knows if you've imported it. And so if you're going back to that folder and trying to import new photos the next time, it will tell you that those photos have already been imported. Awesome. So this is pretty much all we're going to do and then click import down here in the bottom rate once it's imported and you'll see that it goes through this sort of progress bar on the top left. Whenever you're exporting your saving or importing, that progress bar will go, and now they are imported and they are imported into a specific folder and catalog. So here on the left hand side, you have a few different options for organizing and adjusting or just finding the photos. So first you have your catalog, which is sort of your general full library of photos. If you want to see all the photos you've imported, click all photos. If you want to see your previous import, you click previous import, and there's a couple other options here. But don't worry about those right now. Another way to find your photos is if you want to find photos from a specific folder structure on your computer, and that's under folders. So here I have two hard drives. My Mac HD, that's my home computer and then my hard drive that's plugged in. So here are all the folders that I've imported in the past from this hard drive. This is the only one that's imported from my computer because I kind of re started everything from scratch. And that's why there's only one so I can click that and that shows up all these photos. If I click one of these other ones, then this shows all the photos. Other photos from Day one of shooting the photography masterclass. And so that's the way of finding folder photos based off of where they live on your computer. The last option is through this collections, and this is what I was we did when we imported. We created a new collection, Practice edits, so I can show you that I have the photographer masterclass, which is all the photos, the select. And now these photos are the same as that are in our folders. It's just organized in a different way, and so from here we can create new collections. We can also add photos from one collection to another or completely new photos into a collection. If you're in the library and you want to do that, just select the photo or multiple photos, then you're going to go down to Where is it Teoh Collection? Actually, all you have to do his dragon drop easier than that, So just drag and drop into the folder that you want. All right, so a couple more things with organization, and that's with these different filters down here. So we're still in the library module, and let's do like a full screen view by clicking this button down here. So here's sort of the grid view his full screen. We can do different things like rating are images flagging them or unflagging them. And that's usually what I do when I import all my photos, I give them a rating, and they have these star ratings down here, and you can either click the star rating that you want to give it here. Or you can press the keyboard shortcut, which I love keyboard shortcuts, which is just the number on the top of your keyboard. So one for one star 234 all the way up to five for five stars. So what I do is I'll go through all my photos one at a time. So this one I set to five, go to the next one and say, OK, this is a four star three star, this one that's a two star. This one's a five star. This is a three star. This is a five star. This is one star. And then, if you want to filter your photos because say you shot a wedding in your shot 200 photos or 1000 photos, or however many, and you only want to see the five star photos. You can turn on these filters down here, and so it's kind of hard to see right now. But if we click over here to one of these star ratings, you can see that it's showing one star on higher to star in higher three star in higher four star in higher, five star and higher. So that will show you all are five star photos. We can also change the option for maybe the rating is equal to If we want to see just three star photos or just two star photos, I usually leave it. At rating is greater than or equal to, because I generally just mark my top photos of five and those are the ones I'm going to edit. Click it again to get rid of that. The other option is to flag. So here is this button here or this little flag option here, and you can click that on toe flag this photo. But in the next one, flag it, flag it and say, OK, this one I don't want to edit, so I'm not gonna flag it. This one all flag, this one all flag, this one No, I'm not gonna flag. So if you want a flag filter by flag now you can filter by things that are flagged, things that have not been flagged and there are with no filter. And then the rejected photos, which is the ones that have been unflagging or d flagged her. I guess it's a rejection flag, which is kind of sad. The last option is to filter and mark by color. So if you wanna say that all my good photos are green, for example, you can right click set color label to green, for example. And then, if you go filter to the green photos on Lee, you're labeled green. Photos will appear and you can combine these. You can say green photos that have a filter rating higher than five. So you see that you can get really intense with how you labour label and filter and organizer photos this way. And that's one of the reasons why I think Light Room classic Sisi is one of the best options for professional video editor or photo at it. Here's rather because you can at a lot of photos at once and stay really organized. All right, so that's enough with the organization and importing. Next, we're gonna move on to doing our basic edits 163. Lightroom Classic CC: Crop and Rotate: in this lesson, we're going to learn how to crop and rotate in adobe light room Classic CC. So select the photo that you want to edit, then click the develop module tab of at the top. Now you have your adjustment options over on the right, with lots of different menus that some are open because I've used those recently. But you can just open these different windows by clicking the arrow or the triangle on the right hand side of the title. And there's also some presets over here on the left hand side to adjust the size of your windows. Sometimes I'm just not using this stuff over here right now, something that click this little arrow on the left hand side and then say, I want even more room at the top and I don't need this menu up here. I can click this arrow. Then if I just hover over it, I can click on it up there, which allows me to have a bigger canvas for editing. Same here. I can click down to get rid of that tap, that sort of tray at the bottom with all our photos. Okay, so to crop you want to click this little box that has, like, the dotted line around the edge, Click that, and that brings up our crop options. You'll also notice that sort of an overlay with corners that look like you might be able to do something with them by hovering over them. Ah, and also this grid, which allows us to use things like the rule of thirds and to strain and horizons and things like that in an easier way. So this photo it's a nice photo. It's a lovely background. Whoever that guy is looks kind of funny, but it's kind of centered and awkward lease to the left of the frame. So I want to use more of the rule of thirds with this photo. So the easiest way to crop of the quickest is just to click and drag one of the size or the corner and sort of drag in her out. You'll notice that right now the aspect ratio is locked to the original. So here's this little lock icon. If I unlock that, I can drag this anywhere I could make a super skinny photo. I could make it super lot wide. And if I finish that? All right, So say I drag it, That kind of ends the cropping, and then I could move my photo around in that crop. This way, when you're done, you just click the done button at the bottom or press the return key on your keyboard. But I'm not done, because that's a really awkward photo and crop. You see now that this aspect is custom, because that's what I create just by clicking and dragging. But if I click this custom menu, you can see that there are different preset options for aspect ratio as shot, which is usually what I leave. And then I just zoom in her out. Or it's kind of like zooming in by dragging in and out and moving around. Or I use one of these other presets like 1 to 1, which is a good aspect ratio for instagram or 8.5 by 11 which is good for prints or five by seven, which is another common print size. You could even enter custom ones like I've done here with 1920 by 10 80 which is perfect for TV screens or mobile device screens so you can create your own custom ones. I'm gonna leave it as shot. But it was gonna drag in slightly and try to put my face sort of mawr on that last line. Or maybe because I'm actually facing I'm turned the other way. I might move myself over here just a little bit. Something like that. Try to get my eyes close to that intersection of these lines so that I'm following the rule of thirds. You can also rotate by hovering over the corner and dragging to the left or right if you want. Try to make my eyes mawr aligned or more parallel along the lines. You also have this angle, which is cool, Cool, quick way to adjust the rotation of an image as well. So say we're happy with that. Gonna press return on my keyboard and now we have cropped it. Let me go find another image and I'll show you. You really quote trick. Let's say this one of Sam in the background. Okay, so in general, you want to make sure that your horizons are are flat. This one's kind of tricky cause there's mountains, so I'm going to stick with this one. Even though there's not a horizon, this is a good example. If we go into our crop, click this sort of ruler tool, this level next to angle. What we can do now is drag along any straight line, which typically would be your horizon. And then light room will automatically rotate the image, so that's perfectly straight across your image. So that's a quick way to actually level any photos that have a horizon in it. Good trick to now. Okay, so let's go back to this photo and we are looking good with our crop. And then the next lessons were going, Teoh, start editing it, fixing things like exposure, white balance and that kind of stuff, too. 164. Lightroom Classic CC: White Balance: after I crop a photo. The first thing that I tend to do is fix the white balance of an image in first. Really, the reason why I cropped first is so that I don't have to worry about anything that ends up being outside of my crop in terms of editing and making look better. For example, maybe there was a big red ball over on the side that I cropped out, and I would have had to play around with to make look good while editing. But since I cropped it out first, I don't have to worry about it. Okay, so in terms of white balance, the easiest way to do that is under our basic options. And so there you have in this first sort of block right here are white balance options, depending on if you shoot in raw or J. Peg and you're editing a rock or J peg, you'll have different options sort of presets up here in the top, right? I believe that Sam mentioned something about how if you are shooting and raw things like editing color or applying color filters or styles or presets while shooting in camera doesn't matter as much because you can adjust everything later, and that's true. And this is an example of where we can use the as shot white balance or we can choose one. This was kind of in the shade, so let's see what that looks like. It makes everything a little bit too warm, so that's not right. Daylight might look a little bit more natural compared to what was as shot as shot looks a little bit cool. So maybe daylight or you can use an auto selection. That light room has that tries to make it look proper. Sometimes these don't look good, and there are a couple more keyboard shortcuts that I want to teach you right now that will help you out. One is the back slash button. It's the backslash, not the forward slash. A lot of people get confused in the email me and say, Fill, This doesn't work. It's the backslash where you see the before and after before after before. While I'm pressing it down, the other is L, which allows you to get sort of a simple view of your photo without any distraction. So if I do that then before and after with the by slash. That's an easy way to see more clearly. You can also use these buttons at the bottom of this window to do comparisons of actually this one. Let's Dio before and after and then you can kind of just click through and you can change the view split screen or side to side going back here to see the full screen. Okay, so those are the presets now, None of those were really working that well for me. So I conduce a custom white balance with these sliders. The way that sliders work in light room is you can either click and drag to the left or right to adjust them. You double click to set it to what it originally was. Or you can hover your mouse over the slider and use your arrow keys going up or down to jump the slider up or down. And this is a good way to make kind of fine tune your adjustments. So that's how the sliders work. Or you can actually click within the number and type in a specific numbers. Say you know that. Okay, we want this to be at 3200 or whatever. Then that's going to give you put the white balance temperature, the light saying that this light was 3200. Obviously it wasn't because that looks to blue is probably more around 5600 or something like that, and that looks better. So this first lighter is with the temperature. And so what does that make you think of? Well, you're lighting scale, your warmth, your coolness, your kellan temperature. And so if you go to the left, it's gonna make it more cool. Go to the right. It's gonna make it more orange and warm. So let me undo that. You also have this tent which goes from green to magenta. So sometimes depending on the light source that you're using or even in this example, where we were surrounded by green trees and green leaves, it gave sort of a green tent, which you might like, but it might not look so natural, so you might have to combat that by adding some magenta. Or maybe you're under some sort of weird fluorescent light gives that green tint know that the tint slider is where you can fix that. Okay, so if I was doing this myself on this photo. I would probably slide to the right just a little bit to get back some of that warmth and then maybe play with the tent just a little bit going from right to left. Sometimes I like going extreme and then dialing it back so that I can really see what I'm doing and then say, Oh, that's way too much. Let's go back. I don't even know where it started. It started at 19 so just a little bit might help. And again, we can go do the backslash before after it. That looks more natural to me. The other option for selecting your white balance is with the white balance eye dropper right here. If you click this, what you're supposed to do is then find something that is white or neutral, without colors in your image, something that is like a gray that has no color. Because then you're telling light room that what I'm clicking on is supposed to be white, and then all of the other colors around it adjust to that white balance or that white point that you set. Now, this isn't going to work in this image because there's nothing really white. If I click on the green trees, for example, what's gonna happen is everything gets really pink and magenta ish. Because what we've told light room was that this green trees should be white. It should be neutral. It should be de saturated, and so it makes everything else pink. Accordingly, it drags it up that tint slider. I'm gonna under that with Command Z. If I click, say, I think my teeth are perfectly white. It z close, but everything gets a little bit too cool. So this is not a good example for this photo. Let's see if there's another photo with something that is more white. This one, I mean the color. The problem is that the white balance auto setting was really good for all of these photos . So you don't really need. I mean, this might be the best option if I click the eyedropper, click somewhere on the street right here. And that looks better. So if I do before, after and the reason why I clicked down here on the street rather than somewhere in the light right here, which is pure white, and you can see when I click that it says cannot set the white balance here. Please click on a darker, neutral area because if your images over exposed that's not necessarily white. That's just overexposed. And there's not really any information in that part of the image. Four. Light room to see and to use similar to down here on this photo if I click up here. Nope. It's too bright. It's over exposed. So you need something that is well exposed, white or gray to use this color picker if you are, you know, holding up a white piece of paper even here. Actually, this is a good example. This wall is white behind us, and because of the vignette and the lighting, it looks great. But if I click here, it'll make everything look better a little. Make the background look quite actually neutral gray and then all the other colors kind of fall in line, and that's a perfect example of where this looks a little bit too green and a little bit too blue. But using the white bounds picker and picking the blank neutral wall behind will looks a lot better. So that's how you adjust and fix your white balance. In the next lesson will be looking more at adjusting and fixing exposure 165. Lightroom Classic CC: White Balance: I'm going to stay on this portrait image of me for the next setting, which is light mostly when it closed down my filmstrip. So let's open up the light options. These are your exposure options, and you have a number of ways to adjust exposure. You have sliders that increase or decrease the exposure of every part of your image. You also have sliders down below that a just specific parts of your image, which is usually how I like to edit my photos. Sometimes doing an overall exposure adjustment can help. If something is completely under exposed with this image, though it's relatively well exposed. There's just parts that we can adjust to make it a little bit more contrast e and pop a little bit more with all these settings or with a lot of them. You also have this auto button just by clicking the auto button. It will try to automatically make your photo a well balanced, well exposed image, and that can be a good starting point. But often it's not going to make it perfect. So let me undo that by pressing Command Z on my keyboard on a Mac that be control Z on a PC , and then you also have this contrast. Lighter dragging to the right makes things more contrast to the left. Less contrast E. What that means is that increasing contrast. The darks become darker, the life become lighter, going less contrast. E that darks become brighter and the highlights or the lights become darker. So you have more of a mid range tone across your image. Let's get into the other options down here, where you can pinpoint a part of your image to adjust. You have your highlights, shadows, whites and blacks. The highlights are those brighter parts of your image, which allow you to adjust just the bright parts, and you can kind of see in my hair some of leaves up above decreasing. The highlights brings back some of that information the shadows. By increasing the shadows, Aiken bring up that exposure on my face, which was kind of dark, in my opinion, so I would bring that up. The whites will be the even brighter parts of the image, so if I drag that down, I can get a little bit more information back from the background and some of these leaves in the background. See before. After drying into the right, I would increase the contrast. If you wanna have a very blown out background, which might be a nice Die Elice stick approach, Teoh a photo like this, the blacks will be the darkest parts of the image, making the blacks blacker the very dark parts of my eyes here, my shirt a little bit darker. Dragging to the right sort of washes everything out again, a style that you might like. But for me, I like bringing down my blacks in this image to increase the contrast. You can see the before and after quickly by hitting the back slash button on your image, and that will show the before after before after, so you can see a more contrast E dynamic photo that I've adjusted. If you need to make an overall adjustment here, you can so say it's still too dark. I can bring up the exposure here, and then maybe parts of it are two white like my whites, so I bring my whites back a little bit. But now my face is a little bit brighter, so I'll usually make those sort of overall adjustments and then go back to my contrast lighter toe. Add a bit of contrast if I want or you also have the curve tool the tone curve here by clicking that button. And this brings up this line and this graph which allows us to adjust exposure by clicking and editing parts of this line on the bottom left, you have your shadows going up the line, you of your darks than lights and then your highlights. So clicking in the middle of this graph and dragging down it will decrease the darks, and it also starts to affect the blacks and the lights. Depending on how far you go. If I click on the top part, for example, I can increase the lights. And the more I edit like this to create this s looking shapes. Look how this curve that I'm editing becomes more s like we're adding contrast. So you might hear that a lot with photo editing, An S curve adds contrast. You should also see the hissed a gram appear here, sort of in the background of this tone curve graph. This is the hissed a gram of my image so you can see a lot of mids, and they also have some pure whites over here on the right hand side, you can also use these sliders in the bottom to adjust taking the darks, making them a little bit brighter or darker. Taking the mids dragon to the right will make him a darker to the left will make him brighter and saying with the highlights, you can drag to the left to make everything brighter. You can turn on and off this individual tone curve here with this button right here to see what you're working on. So let's reset this by double clicking in the middle to get back to our original at it. In this tone curve window, you also have the point curve. The point curve is similar where you can create points and add contrast or adjust the exposure. But what I like about this are the black points and the white points that you see. The black point is this bottom left point. And if I click that and drag to the right, what you're telling light room CC to do with this photo is to make more of this image black . If I drag to up along the left hand side of this square. We are actually increasing the black point. So nothing is really black, what is actually black and the image becomes more gray. So if we want mawr of the image to become black, we just drag this to the right and you can see as I do that more becomes black similarly with the whites. If I take this top right point drag to the left mawr, parts of the image become white. If I drag it down, the right hand side less becomes white and white actually starts to become more gray to create that sort of ask her if I can just click in the middle and drag up and down to create. That s the cool thing to is you can go in and specifically add more points. As many as you want to get really specific with what parts you want to increase or decrease the exposure of. You also have presets down here for the linear curve, which is your standard. You can add some medium contrast or some strong contrast quickly with those presets. Lastly, you have these individual color point curves. You have red, blue and green. So if you take any of these, you can increase or decrease the color or the reds in your image. So if I decrease the Reds, what's left are blues and greens. So if I decrease the reds and then I go to my green curve and I decrease greens, you're gonna get more magenta and the blue that's left over with the blue, you can increase the blue, you can decrease the blue to get yellow. And so this is a way that you can get really creative with the colors of your photo. You can also create sort of an S curve with these colors to create contrast in the blues or in the Reds or whatever colors you want, Adam or contrast to. So obviously, this is a creative edit. This is not how I would personally like to edit my photos. So I'm gonna save the set these all back two Lanier for the point curve. I might go ahead and add that strong contrast back in there. And now we have this image that if we see the before and after, at least where my face is a lot better exposed. It's definitely a style with that nice, highlighted background. But it's something that I like for this image. So that's your light and exposure adjustments and how you can fix a and improperly exposed image in light room. Next, we're gonna go back into our color and see these color mixer H S L adjustments. 166. Lightroom Classic CC: Sharpening and Noise Reduction: in this lesson, we're going to learn about detail and sharpening and noise reduction. So in light room, I'm opening up this image at night, which is a good option so that we can see the low light performance of this camera. And that's usually when you would have to do a little bit of noise reduction. So I closed the color tab and bring open our detail panel. Okay, so let's scroll down now. It gives you sort of a preview area. If you want to move that, you can kind of move that around my clicking that little box in the top left and choosing a spot that you want to look at. I think somewhere like in the Sky is pretty good. Or you can just hover over the image in Click to zoom in and then dragged around by moving . You can also press the space bar to zoom in or out, and you can see. I don't know if you can see that well, but on my screen I can see lots of digital noise in the sky. It's made up of all these little pixels, and you can almost kind of see them here it looks like little bits of sand. Light room automatically applies, some sharpening to an image when you're are editing a raw image. And that's good because when you're shooting a raw image, it actually needs to be processed a little bit to have the right amount of sharpening. And that's why this is set to 25 1 25 These numbers right here under sharpening. If you want to make it sharper, you can increase the amount. But let's go. Actually, skip that and look at noise reduction first for this image. So if we want to get rid of some of that digital noise, drag up luminant noise reduction and you can see as I do that everything gets a little bit softer and you start to not see as much of that grain. If I go crazy with it, it gets rid of most of it. But things start to become not so sharp. It almost looks like when you're zoomed in some things painted with like water color. It's not sharp at all, so you don't want to go too crazy, and then you could make adjustments to the style of noise reduction. With this detail, in contrast, and basically this is light room, looking at the edges of things, trying to preserve some of the detail, or if it's okay to get rid of some of the detail toe increase the noise reduction and then the contrast. It's looking at the edges of things. It's really hard to see in this image, but if we drag up here, you might be able to see if I decrease the contrast all the way, then increase the contrast. It brings back some of that detail. It makes the contrast between two colors between the edges of things a little bit more sharp, which actually increases sort of the noise in the image. That's with the luminous noise. And that's the black and white, non saturated noise you get from an under exposed image. You also might have color noise, and if I drag us all the way to the left, you might be able to see a little bit. You see all this little splotches of reds and blues and greens, and so automatically it's getting rid of some of that because this is set to 25. If we want to get rid of even more of that, you could increase it. But in this image, I don't see too much of that color noise at all with the luminous up like this. So I don't have to worry about that. But if you do see a lot of that sort of splotchy nous the reds and yellows and blues, this is the slider that would help you get rid of it. All right, so that's noise reduction. And depending on the image, you might want to add a little bit of that. It also just depends on your settings if you shot at a high rise, So you're gonna get more digital noise that you might need to apply more noise reduction to , And that brings up a cool trick is that you can actually see the different information either by going to your library and going to the metadata. And here you can see if we scroll down, you can see the exposure time you can see the I S o the camera model. But you can also have a little overlay by going up to view view options, which is command J on a Mac control J on a PC click show in front overlay and you can adjust what you see. Click this top one and I'm going to use just common photo settings. And this is going to show your shutter Speed your eyes so and your f stop. For some reason, the Sony wasn't giving me that information. It might have been the lens that he Sam was using. Let's see if we go to this next photo. Yeah, there we go. We have the shutter speed, the F stop, the I s o. And then the lens, which is cool information to have. So here you can see that we did have somewhat of a higher I s So you get a little bit of noise and green and so doing a little bit of noise reduction can be good for Portrait's. And it's okay to get a little bit softer on some portraitists as well. Losing some of that detail is is perfectly fine with me. What about sharpening? Sharpening basically does what it sounds like. It makes photos sharper. Let's go back to this photo. Let's reset it by clicking the reset button down here, which gets rid of all of our adjustments from before and Let's zoom in. If we increase our sharpening, I actually odds digital noise to make things appear sharper by adding grain, it makes the edges of things look a little bit more contrast e and sharp. You can adjust the amount of Scharping Ning and how it's applied with the radius and detail increasing the radius increases sort of the size that is affected. And then the detail also adjusted as well, making it more contrast, e or less contrast e making you see more detail or less detail. OK for landscapes. I would recommend increasing the sharpening just a little bit. Gonna drop that down again. And for nature shots and things like that, you might want to apply a little bit of sharpening as well. Sharpening is not going to make an out of focus photo in focus, but if something slightly out of focus very slightly, it might make it look a little bit better, especially for group photos of people of their farther away. And the focus is just slightly off and can help quite a bit cool. So that's the detail panel. That's your sharpening in your noise reduction and the next lessons we're gonna look at some of the more advanced features. In terms of these basic ad, it's like your effects, which include been yet ing adding grain and D hazing. 167. Lightroom Classic CC: Vignettes, Grain and Dehaze: in this lesson, we're going to look at these effects and talk about adding style. Tear image. The first is with a vignette, which you are probably familiar with. And at the top of this vignette, you can choose to add a white vignette or a dark vignette by sliding the slider to the right or left so that kind of darkens the edges or makes them sort of white. And what a vignette does is it focuses the attention of the viewer more towards the center of the image, which is great. When you're subject appears in the middle of your frame. You can adjust how the vignette looks. Let me go all the way to the left to show you how crazy this is. And then by addressing the midpoint, it makes it a smaller circle in the middle or a bigger one. So a bigger vignette or a smaller one, let's go all the way to the left and then adjust the roundness more circular or more like a rectangle to make it a circle and then fathering, so fathering Smoothes it out or makes it more of a hard circle. So that's a very stylistic approach I'll I like more of smoothing it out. Highlights will let some of the highlight colors appear to come through the vignette, which makes it look a little bit more natural. Now this vignette looks crappy. To be honest, those looks terrible. This is too much of a vignette, so I would not do that. Let me actually reset. All right, so I've reset my vignette settings. Usually I try to be a little bit more subtle about it, going somewhere around negative 50 increasing the feathering quite a bit and depending on if I wanted smaller, bigger all adjust the midpoint and usually with the roundness. I just leave it as is, which is more of a natural look for the image so we can see the before and after. With our backslash button, you can see how that vignette does look quite natural and nice. Vignettes are natural, depending on the lens that you're using. Some lenses actually have more of a vignette than others, so you can use them. But I would be just careful about using them all the time. Some people like to add vignettes, toe every single photo that they edit. I used to do it when I was starting out, and now I look back at those photos and I face Paul myself because I don't know why I added vignettes to everything it looks to stylistic. So be careful when you're adding a vignette and be subtle about it. So that's been yet. What about grain? Why would you want to add grain to your image? Well, it's purely sort of a stylistic approach back when we shot on film, especially with black and white images, adding grain or green was just naturally part of the film. And so if we want to make this a black and white image, for example, just by clicking black and white, that's a quick way to do it and then increasing the grain that gives it sort of that old time you feel you can adjust. The size of the grain may get bigger or smaller, and the round is making it more round, sort of more choppy, more blocking, more square like. And that's just more of a stylistic approach. If you want to make it sort of that old timey feel. What if you want to add some sort of sea Peotone tow it a quick way to do that? Just go back to our color to make it in color. What we're gonna do is drop the saturation up under our basic just around, like negative 50 or so and then drag up the warmth. This is just a very quick way to do it. There's other ways to do it, but that creates sort of a cool stylistic choice. Let's make the then yet amount more. We're gonna decrease the roundness, decrease the feathering bring in, you know, giving it more of a stylistic look. Now, I don't personally like this, but it's a style. What about D. Hayes De Hayes is good for if you're shooting the sky and if you're shooting on us Hazy day , let me reset this and show you what D. Hayes will dio if I increase this. It actually brings out more of the color and detail in the sky. Now, this isn't the best example. Let me try to find a quick photo that will be more easy to see what d Hayes does. Now You you have this photo under your I believe this is in the Mac photos folder. So if you want to play around with this one. You can. This is of Dodger Stadium. If I increase D. Hayes all the way, look out. Much information is in the clouds. It becomes a little bit more contrast. E a little bit more saturated, and that looks too much. But just doing a little bit helps quite a bit for this photo if we go to the left and makes things more hazy again, a stylistic approach that you might like. I don't personally like it. Usually, though, for landscapes. I do add a little bit of D. Hayes to the image to bring that information back when shooting wide open landscapes, especially in Los Angeles, where we get a lot of smog. And when you're looking out at a big open city or landscape, things are just they just tend to be a little hazy. So those are the effects here in light room. In the next lesson, we're going to learn how to export and save photos, and then following that, we're gonna look at some of these other tools and options that we didn't go over to show you more of the features and capabilities of light room and following that, we're gonna be doing full light room at its to show you the complete process thought a pro editor would use when editing a photo. 168. Lightroom Classic CC: Exporting: this lesson is about how you save and export your photos from Adobe Light Room Classic CC. So once you have done you're editing either in the developed tab or in the library, you can select the photos you want to export. You can control or command click, depending on if you're a Mac or PC to select multiple photos at random. Or you can select one and then shift click to select a series of photos. You can also go into your library. Might be easier to select photos this way in this view, and you can increase your decrease. The size of the thumbnail is to be able to see them, so I have a few photos selected. Then we're going to go up to file export. Or you can click the keyboard shortcut shift Command E, or you can click this export button down here, right? So let's go through all of these options. Starting at the top first is where you are going to export. Typically, you're just going to do hard drive unless you want to email it or burn it to a CD or DVD. Nowadays, hard drive is really where you're going to export it, and then you do whatever you want, like posting it online or burning it or whatever. Next, you choose your location. So if you want to export to us specific folder, they have some sort of quick hit options like your desktop, your home folder, your pictures folder, the same fuller as the original photo. What I'm going to do is a specific folder and then down below. You choose the folder by clicking Choose, It's going to open up your finder or, if you're on a PC, your documents. Now let's go into light room Classic CC. I'm going to create a new folder by clicking the new folder button and calling edits Click , Create, Click Choose. All right, so the next thing you can do is you could put it into a sub folder in that folder. So you might be like this is round one or whatever, but I'm just gonna leave it as that. And then let's just skip to find naming. It gives you all kinds of custom options for naming Could name as the file name, which is saves it as whatever the name of the foul was, except in the format that you're saving it to, which could be like J Peg or as a raw photo will get that down here. Or you can do some sort of sequencing. And that's what I love about light room. It makes it easy to create a sequence of images, so I'm going to choose custom name sequins and I'll call this light room classic Sisi at it , and then you start the sequence at a number you can do a one you can do. It started at 10. You can do it at really whatever, and it will export them and do it. Name it this and then one than this than to all right, so video we're going to skip because we're not exporting video for file settings right now . It's on original, which is it would save it as the raw file format that it came in. We're going to choose JPEG. They also have PSD, which is a Photoshopped filed tiff and DMG. Those air more advanced files, but you really don't have to worry about those options unless there's a case for someone. Ask you, Do you have a tiff image? Usually, J Peg is perfectly fine for exporting and saving online or using an any sort of graphic or printing. Even once you select J. Peggy of the quality, leave it at 100 unless you want to decrease the quality to save space. To make the file size a little bit smaller, you can either do that by decreasing the slider here. Or if you have a specific file size, check this limit foul sized to and then put in the number of I believe that's kilobytes, that you save it, too. So 1000 kilobytes or one megabyte might be the limit that you have for uploading a video online or if you're posting your photos to your own website or portfolio to make sure that you're your Web page loads fast enough, you might want to limit to a specific size like 1000 K for space or color space. Just leave it as S RGB down below. You can resize the image, so notice that there's two different things. File settings and limit. Foul size is about the size of the file. The image size is the dimensions and the pixels of your image. So if you have a specific pixel length or sought with or height that you wanted at. You can check resize to fit, and then you would pick either or both with and height that you have a max of so say for your website. You only want to upload images that are 500 pixels wide, and you can change from pixels two inches or centimeters. Usually, we're working with pixels on a computer, so the with will be a max at 500. And then, if you leave the height blink, it will end up being whatever it is, depending on the aspect ratio. So if it's a portrait, the with the height will probably be taller than or greater than the with. If it's a landscape or a horizontal photo, the height will be shorter than 500. So let me just put this at 1000 to show you as an example, or I always recommend choosing this. Don't enlarge so that it doesn't actually enlarge your image. If you're working with an image that is too small or something, which generally doesn't happen in terms of resolution, this is pixels per inch. That's usually what I would use, um, here in the States of you works in another country, you might be more used to pixels per centimeter. 1 50 is a general good rule for images that you're posting online. You could go up to 300. If you are printing 75 is generally pretty good as well. And changing this will make the file size bigger or smaller, so I generally just leave it at 1 50 They have this option for output sharpening, which is sort of an automatic sharpening that they add, which might be good for printing. So if you are printing, I would test it out to see if you like it or not. If you've already added sharpening in the development and editing, you don't need this necessarily. But if you haven't added any sharpening, you might want to just add a little bit of sharpening for Matt paper or glossy paper, depending on how you're printing, we talk about printing later on in this course. If you're interested in more of that, I generally don't add sharpening for the screen, though if you want to make your foul size a little bit smaller, you can decrease the metadata that is included. This is off the camera information that copyright information. And so you could just choose copyright only if you want or contact information. We're almost done, everyone. So hopefully your was still with me. We have a watermark. It's super easy to create a watermark. Just check on that box. Goto edit watermarks that's going to open up a new window here at the bottom left, you can add your name and then over on the right. You have all your options for the font size, the opacity. You can have effects, making it less opaque or more opaque. You can also adjust the size over here. You can put it to a specific position if you want to centered. If you want it completely over, you know the middle. You can do that so you want are just sending a test. You could make it like that. You can also increase the size by clicking and dragging right here on the images. Well, okay, so usually you'll just put something down in the bottom left corner. Something like that. You can also add an image by going up to image options and clicking shoes. Say you have a logo or something like that, you can add a logo overlay as a watermark, then you can save it. If you go up to here, click save current setting as a new preset, and then that will be a preset that you can use. So let's go ahead and cancel. Let me just show you. If I add the VSO logo, let's go toe edit watermark, it adds. This is my old videos con logo to the bottom left. So that's something that I've saved in the past. I don't generally add watermarks, but it's a good way if you're posting online and you want to make sure that no one is stealing your images, or if they do, at least they have a watermark of your image or of your information on it to do that. Lastly, post processing This is just what happens after you're done exporting. Do you want it to show in your finder or your documents? Do you want to continue editing and photo shop, or do you want to do no? Nothing. Usually I just say show and finder so that I'm I know it will pop up when it's done. Click export. Once you're happy with all your settings, and after it goes, you'll see a window pop up. And now we have have all my edits. I can see here the size so all of them are 1000 wide. This one's 3000. And because the aspect ratio for all of these images was the same, the with is this. The height is the same to 6 67 j peg. The size of each image is a little bit different. That just has to do with some of the editing, the colors and things that adjust that change. How much information is in an image? Now we can take these photos, share them with world, post them on instagram, post them online sharing with your family printed out, and that's how you export with Adobe Light Room. If you have any questions, let me know otherwise will seem another lesson 169. Lightroom Classic CC: Lens Corrections: Now you know the basic way to edit a photo to save it, to export it. So you should be able to take a lot of your photos that you're taking, make them look better, fix things like exposure and white balance and save them and share them with the world. But I want to continue to teach you some of the awesome features that Adobe Light Room C. C has to offer. So I'm gonna go through some of these other editing options now that we haven't gone through. In this lesson, I'm talking about lens corrections. It's really quick technique or trick that will quote unquote correct the way that your lens sees. So there's two options, and if you select a photo, you'll see that you none of these air are checked initially, so you have two options. Remove chromatic aberration and enable profile corrections. Chromatic aberration is a color sort of distortion. That may happen, and you may see along the edges of things in your photo, like purple lines or red or green lines or some just sort of color distortion. So if you see that in an image, you can check that on and it will try to remove it. There's not really any showing up in my photos right now, but I just wanted to make that note enable profile corrections. Though this will definitely change something watch wouldn't what happens when I check this . See how this image this wide shot gets a little bit. Well, to me, it looked warped. UNB ends, and then the vignette around the edge becomes a lot lighter. And that's basically what this profile corrections does. If there's a vignette ing that naturally comes from your lens, it will try to remove that so that there's no actual vignette and it looks more natural, as if you were just there in the moment. Looking at this scene, you'll notice that it has the lens profile from the camera and lens we were using. This was Sam with his Sony, his 16 to 35. If this doesn't show up, if you're using an older camera that doesn't include the metadata that's for the lens being used. You can go through and choose specific lens. It has pretty much any lens that you're using, and depending on which lens you choose, it will try to fix it but you want to make sure that you're using the same lens that you're actually using. You can also go forward and do some manual adjustments down here. Teoh fix the distortion or the vignette ing even more so. If I do this distortion, you can kind of see what's happening. It's kind of stretching it. It's flattening it out. It looks like it's treading, stretching it, but it's actually flattening out the image. And then same with the vignette ing. It's gonna keep the vignette, the natural vignette or it's going to remove it, so that could be kind of a stylistic thing. I'll just show you one more image. This is the macro photo. So here, if we check on enable profile corrections, you can see it's very subtle, but it basically flat in South image. No one's really gonna notice. Unless you're using a very wide lens like a fish islands. It will be more pronounced if you just click the manual buttoned up at the top. You can adjust things like the distortion, and this is kind of extreme. You can get kind of cool effects if you want. If you check on the constraint crop When you do that, it will increase the size of your photos so it doesn't have those white edges on the sides . When you are doing a distortion adjustment, then you have the D fringe, which is what the what is happening with the chromatic aberration. You have this fringing on the edges of things, and you can kind of see in this image. There's this green sort of edge to this pedal right here. So if we take our eye dropper and we go to the edge, pick a fringe color, which is this green, and then we do the before and after. It's so subtle. It's so hard for you to see. But I can actually see it with it before you see the green after without the green, so that can help slightly and you can adjust the Hughes and the amount that you're selecting. It has the purple or the magenta amount and then the green amount. That's basically the colors you get from chromatic aberration, and you could increase sort of the amount of colors you're trying to de fringe. If I do that, you can see the edges become sort of like highlighted like glowing, so I don't want that necessarily. So I'm gonna undo that. Go back to where it was, so that can help fix the colors on edge. And, yeah, that's pretty much all you have to know about the lens Corrections profile. If you have any questions, let me know. But play around with it, these air again, things that are a more advanced level. But it's something that you might be interested in if you're getting very particular with your photos. Thanks a lot for watching and we'll see you in another lesson. 170. Lightroom Classic CC: Split Tone: in this lesson, I'm going to show you the split toning option. So I've reset this photo if you want to follow along. And basically what split toning is is it's allowing you to play with the saturation and hue of the highlights in one way, and then the shadows in another way. Remember when we did the huge saturation and luminous adjustments, how you can adjust those different aspects by color? This is a similar way of doing it by exposure, but just splitting the highlights and the shadows. So let me just quickly show you what you can do. You can if you drag the hue slider. Nothing's going to happen until you drag the saturation up. So now if I drag the saturation up, let's just put it at 50. And then I dragged the hue around. What's happening is it's adding this color tint to all the highlights. So for this portrait, it's pretty wacky. But you can get some really creative looks. You know, something a little bit more natural would be maybe adding some yellows that kind of see Peotone to there and then if you want, you can address the shadows. So again If we just adjust the hue, nothing's going to happen. But if we first adjust the saturation, then you can see what's actually happening. So if we want sort of a yellow and a blue sort of look, we could do something like that. And that gets you that more sort of creative look, creating your own sort of unique filters with this now, when would this actually be practical? Well, in terms of landscapes, when you're not shooting people, I find that this can look a little bit more natural. So let's go to this photo of the night sky. And this includes the edits that I made before for the basic adjustments when we're learning about exposure but say we want to play with the night sky and the highlights down below the night skies, more of the shadows. The highlights are more of the or the street is more of the highlights, so we could go by slider. Or you also have these two boxes here that are quick sort of ways to add a specific color or be very particular about the color. So they have some commonly used colors up here that you can just click, and you can see that when I do that, all the highlights get that sort of tent. So here we have a yellow tent, which looks pretty nice for the ground down below, and then it puts this box in this little highlights color bar. At the bottom are the unsaturated or de saturated colors. At the top. It's more saturated, so taking this box and drying up or down will make it more or less saturated. That's basically what we were doing back here on this saturation slider. It's just another way of doing it and being more precise. So you can see as I drag this through all of these, you can get some fairly cool looks for something a little bit more natural. I'll put this around the yellow around, saturation 60 now for the shadows. If I click that box again, if I want to make the sky a little bit bluer, let's start with this blue and see how that is. Then maybe pick it from there and you don't want to go too crazy with it, unless you like that style. But something like that looks pretty darn cool. I think you also have this balance slider, which kind of goes from Mawr, making the strength of the highlights stronger to the shadows. Actually, this is more of the highlights. This is more of the shadow, so initially it's right in the middle. But if you want to like, adjust the balance from one to the other, you can do that. So let's show you the before and after. Now. This does apply the exposure adjustments as well, but you can hopefully see the split toning adjustments as well. This one looks fairly natural. Ah, inmate. The saturation might be a little much for both the highlights and the shadows, but something like that looks pretty cool. Now we can go super creative and basically do the opposite. Making the sky some sort of, Let's see, yeah, maybe some sort of pink. And then the highlights, some sort of blue or something like that. You can get super creative that way, but I like the more sort of natural, simplistic approach of making something look somewhat natural but still looking pretty cool . So use this play around with it. It's definitely a more stylistic approach, but it's a really cool tool and doing some subtle adjustments is probably the best thing to start out with, especially if you're taking fortress of people. It will be more apparent and work better if you have a high contrast image. If all the parts of your image are sort of in that mid range exposure, this isn't both. The highlights and shadows will affect the whole image in terms of the split toning adjustments. So you want to make sure that the image you're working with is more contrast, e. So you can really pinpoint adjusting just the shadows and the highlights. Anyways, thanks so much for watching, and we'll see in the next lesson. 171. Lightroom Classic CC: Graduated, Radial and Brush Adjustments: in this lesson of the light room classic C C section. We're going to be teaching you how to use the graduated filter the radio filter in the brush adjustment. Filter these air really cool advanced features that allow you to just edit parts of an image. So let's start with the graduated filter. And to do that, we're gonna open up this image of the Walt Disney Hall. Click this one right here. It's the rectangle next to this I, which is the red eye removal. We haven't gone over this, but it's basically you. Just click that, and then you click on the eye of the person or whatever that you want to remove the red eye . So click this little rectangle over here, which is the graduated filter. Think of this as a filter that allows you to edit 1/2 of the image or one part of the image I have of the top, the bottom, the left or the right. When you hover over your image. With this tool, you have this little plus sign. Clicking and dragging will create these three lines that will create this filter. So if I do this, it's better if I just show you what's happening and I let go, nothing has happened yet. I can check this box down here. Show selected mask overlay to show me the selection that I will be editing. So basically, when you click and drag, it's going to start, and it's going to apply any effects to the part where where you clicked from. So let me delete this by clicking this dot in the middle and then deleting it on my keyboard. So if I click and drag, it's going to affect everything on the left because that's where I started. If I click and drag this way from right to left, then it's going to slight everything on the right hand side. So let's go do this to the sky, though, because I think that's really what we want to dio and again, this is just to show the selection. This is not actually editing anything. This guy is not pink now, so let me turn that off because now we have all of these adjustments over here, which are basically similar adjustments to what we've done before. But we can adjust just this top part of the image now So if we want to change the the white balance of the sky, we can adjust the white bonds with this slider, making it more blue. For example, If we want to adjust the exposure, we can make it brighter or we could make it darker. With exposure, you can adjust things like the contrast this highlight shadows, whites and blacks, which you learn how to do with the basic adjustment. You can do things like clarity or D hazing specifically for the sky, which is a good option when you're doing landscape photos. Instead of applying the D haze that appears in this effects option, which have would basically apply the D. A's to the entire image. This allows you to d. Hes just a part of the image. You can add sharpness. You can do the D fringing. You can increase or decrease the noise, so these are all specific adjustments that are happening to just part of the image. So let me just make a crazy effect so you can kind of see what's happening. Let's make the exposure darker. So how does this sort of lot these lines work? Well, we can now rotate. This graduated filter by clicking the middle of the lines one of the middle lines on the left or right of the die and rotating, clicking and dragging. Or you can click one of the outer lines and increase or decrease basically the feathering. So if you want sort of a hard edge, you can do like that. To move this middle point, you can click it and drag it up or down and again. If we click, the bottom line is going to increase or decrease the feathering. So this looks pretty intense. I mean, this is kind of unnatural, but if you want sort of that dark sky at the top, maybe something like that might look a little bit better. And this is a way that you can basically do what a polarizer filter does after the fact in post. Okay, so this actually doesn't look that great, but it's a good example of what you can dio to delete a graduated filter. Just select the middle button and press the delete key on your keyboard. These other two adjustments the radial and the brush adjustments work similarly, but I do just want to show you quickly how that would work. So let's select this photo of me. Let's reset it so we don't have those split tones we did before. If we select the radio brush and then click and drag, it creates a circle or no lips. You could make it more oval or more round. If you want it to be a perfect circle, just hold the shift key down on your keyboard, and it will create a perfect circle. But I just wanted to be sort of oval around my face. Now, if we click the show selected mask overlay, you'll see that it has selected everything outside of the circle. If you wanted to select everything in the circle, you can click this invert button down here. So say, we want to just use this sort of oval toe brightened up my face or to apply something like softness to make my skin a little softer. Weaken do that. So let's turn off this selected mask overlay. Let's actually do that a little bit. We can decrease this sharpness just a little bit. We can increase the exposure. Maybe bring down the blacks could make it a little warmer. So this way we're adjusting the white balance of just my face because maybe we like everything being a little bit more green. We can adjust the size of this again by just clicking on the edges, dragging them in her out. We can click the middle to move it around. I say we check the inverted, we can do this, and now everything except for my face has thes settings applied to it. You can increase your decrease the feathering for the oval, which will make the edge of this adjustment harder or softer. I usually leave it around 50 just the standard, so that's how you use the radio filter. Now you'll see these other options, like brush, and there's this range. Mass option will be going over that in the next lesson, when we do a little bit more advanced lessons with these things. But I just want to show you now the brush tool so similar to the other adjustments. The brush adjustment works where wherever you brush on your going to make those address mons. So I have show selected mask overlays on so you can see where I'm brushing, and then there's a couple settings that you want to be aware of down here. So you have the size of the brush. You have the feathering, which is what you've seen before. You also have the flow, which is sort of similar to opacity in the sense that the higher the flow, the more opaque the brush will be lower. The flow is going to be less opaque, um, and kind of blend in with the original, same with the density. Then you also have this auto mask button on watch. What happens when I brush on up here without auto mask on? It just creates a nice brushstroke that we can now adjust the exposure. And if I turned off shows like it mascot, really, you can see what's happening. Aiken, just adjust the exposure of just that part of the brush. Now, let me go back. Turn the mask overlay on. Delete this by selecting them. Start point pressing delete on my keyboard. Now, if I collect click auto mask and brush over here, you can kind of see that it tries to select everything the edges of things except for the sky. So I'm paying over and it just kind of selecting the hills because light rooms pretty smart . And it's saying, Okay, well, I know you might be trying to select just those hills. It did get this guy right here. And if you want to erase a part of a brush that you've brushed on, just click the erase button and then just kind of go up here and erase it. It still has. The autumn actually doesn't have the auto mask on. We'll include that. So it knows that I'm trying to get those hills and let's go back to the brush by clicking the aid on there. All right, so now it has sort of intelligently selected the hills, turn off selected mask, overlay and now free increase the exposure. It's kind of done it in an intelligent way. For us. This doesn't always work, so you might want to try just doing it manually with the auto mask selected off. And so say we want to adjust just these light streaks or the road. It's decreased the brush size and brush over like this. And if you I'm just clicking and dragging. If you stop clicking but you want to add more, just start clicking and dragging again, just like so you can change the size of the brush while you are sort of painting. If you need to get somewhere, that's a little bit smaller. Just getting the road back there. Okay, so this isn't the best job, but it's kind of quick. So now if we want to make any adjustments to that selection, we can just adjust our settings here, decreasing things like that saturation de hazing, which will increase sort of the detail. If if it was a little hazy, which kind of works to with the lights changed the exposure, why bounce all the sort of same things? So all three of these tools kind of work in the same way where you are just making selections and editing that specific part of the image play around with it. That's sort of the best way to learn just to play around with the settings. In the next lesson, we're gonna be showing you some more advanced ways to adjust these settings and also some preset brushes that you can use to make your photos look even better. 172. Lightroom Classic CC: Brush Presets: welcome to this new adobe light room classic CC lesson. We're continuing to learn all the advanced features of our brushes and filters up here, and I mentioned in the last lesson that there are some preset effects. So I have this photo of will up and I have my brush selected. And so if I drop down this effect, you can see that there's a different sort of adjustments. And they have these presets, like softening skin whitening teeth, making the iris of your eyes look better or things like adjusting the day haze, which would be good for it, like the sky or things like that. So if I click softened skin, you'll see that preset adjustments have been made. The clarity has been dropped, the sharpness has been increased. And so now I can just take my brush over brush along will skin, and this quote unquote makes the skin look better. So if I turn this on and off by pressing the backslash button before after you can see that will skin has become a little softer. Another way to turn these effects on and off is with this button down here, and that just turns off the adjustments from this brush or from this panel. You can see all of these adjustments down here have this sort of on off switch on the left hand side. So that's an easy way to see the softening of skin, which, Ah, lot of people like doing some basic adjustments like that. If you don't want it to be so strong, you can just increase the clarity just so it's not as soft for the iris adjustments. Let's go ahead and click new to create a new brush, get our IRS enhancement, make our size of the brash. Let's zoom in with Easy on our keyword, increased the size of our brush just a little bit and click there and you can see what it's doing, its increasing the saturation, the exposure a little bit and the clarity as well to make a little sharper. If you want to change sort of the color of an eye, you can click this color button down here. This is kind of similar to our tone. Adjustment are split tones, and so now we can choose these different colors and give our I sort of a different shade. It's not completely changing the color of the eyes, just giving it sort of a shade. You can increase the saturation and change the temperature of the I to give it even more of a color change. If you want to leave that, though, So those are how those precept effects work and you confined those in any of these the radio filter, the graduated filter or the brush Awesome. In the next lesson, I'm gonna be showing you how to use the range mask, which is a newer feature of light room that is really cool for pinpointing a specific color or exposure within one of these brushes to make your adjustments to. 173. Lightroom Classic CC: Range Masks: this lesson is all about range masks, which you confined in any of these adjustments that we've been working with. I'm going to use this image to show you what you can do. Let me quickly apply what we did before. Say you want to make the sky even bluer. We're going to create this graduated mask or filter clicking and dragging pretty much over the whole thing. And let's just adjust the temperature, make it super blue. Now I want to show you what we can do to improve this with the range mask. But first, I want to show you another cool trick. If you want to make sort of a copy of your photos so you contest out multiple edits, you can create what's called a virtual copy. Right. Click the photo down here in your photo Trey and choose. Create virtual copy. This is not creating a copy on your computer. It just creating a different version within light room that you can play around with and adjust. So now if I delete this graduated filter, for example, we have these two photos that we could go between and see the edits we like and that might be something you do with your photos. You might, you know, edit it one way and want to try a different edit, but not want to delete your first edits. And that's what a virtual copies for. I'm gonna undo Control Z to get back that graduated filter on both images. So now I have two images that are exactly the same. Same graduated filter. But now, with the 2nd 1 I'm going to turn on drain range mask. You have two options. Color and luminous. You've learned similarly how this works before color allows us to adjust justice specific color Luminant swill. Allow us to adjust just a specific exposure, so I'm gonna choose color. Then I'm going to use my eye dropper up here to click the color in the sky. You can click just once, and it's going to select a specific color. Or you can click and drag Teoh sort of choose a range of colors because of sky goes from sort of dark blue light blue. I am going to pick sort of a range up here, and so it is more intelligent in the colors that it's picking. You might not have noticed exactly what happened. But if I go between these two photos, let me know if you can see the difference. Well, I know you can't tell me, but let's just go back and forth is the 1st 1 Here's the 2nd 1 What changed? Well, a lot of the Walt Disney Hall that is the silver is now not being affected by this graduated filter, which is cool because adding this filter to make the sky look bluer. If it applies it to the buildings in the foreground, it just looks fake. It doesn't look riel, but this one itself looks a lot more real. And I like that is just being applied to the sky now and not as much to the silver below. You can add just sort of that amount of how this is being applied. If I drag to the right, it select s'more of sort of the previous image to the building actually gets more of that adjustment. If I drag all the way to the left than less of sort of. That filter is being applied, we can still see what's happening by train. This on and off was being applied mostly to just the sky. Now let's go to this photo and show you how the luminous range mask works. So with this one, let me turn off the split toning that we've done before. And I don't believe we have any other effect on here right now. So that's good. So let's use our graduated filter and just create graduate waited filter like this. So if I want to select just the sky using Luminess, what I would do is turn on the Luminant range mask. Let's turn ons show selected mask overlay. Now, this is selecting just everything up here. But we have these sliders that is selecting everything in the range of 0 to 100 exposure. So dragging these up or down, it can make a selection of a specific range of exposures. So if we just want to select the darks, we would drag this right part down and it would select see marches, selecting the darker parts down here. So that way, if we want to just bring up the exposure of those dark parts, we can do so by just dragging up the exposure up here, or the shadows which might look a little bit more natural, or if you want to just select the sky this way, you could also use the color for this. But if we want to just select this guy and not the ground below, which is a little bit darker, can drag up this range. Something like that that looks a little bit better. And now we can use this to make the sky even bluer. It looks a little bit more natural. Then, if the range mask was off similar to what we had in the Walt Disney Hall, the range mask prevents this adjustment from completely adjusting the ground below, which might not look too natural. Cool. So now you know how range mask work with both the luminous and color adjustments. Remember, you can use these for both or any of the graduated radio or brush filters. 174. Lightroom Classic CC: Full Portrait Edit: welcome to this full portrait editing session. I'm going to be taking everything we've learned in this section of the course so far from all the skills with adobe light room CC and walk through how we could make a photo look better. Now, this photo that you're seeing right here was shot with so Sam's Sony, a beautiful sigma lens. It's got that nice, shallow depth of field. It's already practically you don't need to do much. This photo, on the other hand, was shot with the cannon t five I, which is more of a basic camera, um, or the kit lens, which isn't, you know, amazing in a location without great lighting. And so I'm gonna make it hard on myself. I want to make, even though this photo is unedited, I want to make this photo look good, have a similar style with that, shallow it up the field and just look better. So I'm gonna walk through this entire edit and so you can fall along if you want. All right. So first I'm going to crop. That's the first thing I like to do. This photo is composed relatively well. The only thing I don't like is see this little part over here? That's part of the wall that he was living next to. So let's go into our crop and just crop and slightly to get rid of that. You can also use the clone filter if you want to get rid of that. But I also want to just crop in just a little bit because the right side of Will's face, um, it's He's kind of sitting to the left, so on to make sure his face and his eyes are as centered as possible. So something like that looks pretty good. This it will be great for, like, a head shot for a linked in profile, or if Will decides to start acting or something like that. All right, so next we want to do our basic adjustments, including our white balance. White balance is pretty good. Let me just warm up everything a bit. Decreased the green just a little bit by increasing the tint that seems to look pretty good . Then the exposure. This is the photo we practice exposure with earlier. And you can see that the highlights back here are just crazy. This wasn't the perfect location, but we're dealing with it. So let's bring down our whites. Let's also bring down our highlights a bit, so we have at least some sort of information back there. While we're at it, we're going to play with their blacks at a little bit of contrast. By bringing down our black point than our shadow, May will bring up just a little bit. Just to get a little bit of that. Detail back from Will's hair with the virus will increase the virus just slightly. That looks good Sometimes. What I like to do is increase the virus and then decrease the saturation just a little bit so that it is increasing the colors like these reds. But then it decreases sort of the it does the reverse of decreasing the reds and the oranges in the skin tone, so it still looks a little natural. So that looks pretty good for portrait. I'm not going to play with clarity here. I'm going to use some of my more detailed adjustments with my brushes and my other adjustments up there in just a second. One other cool trick to see if you have a good range of exposures in your image is to see where your pure blacks and your pure whites are. You can kind of see this up here in our history Graham up here, and we can see that we have a good range of exposures. But say I take my black slider and I'm adjusting and I want the black to be pure black and that's generally what you want. If something's black, he wanted to be black. In this image, there's not much black, maybe some of will's hair, maybe parts of his eye. If I hold the option key down, Look what happens. We are seeing sort of a white image and the detail that we're starting to see as I drive to the left. That's what's going to be pure black. And you can also see in the history Graham in the top right that there's now pure black. It's touching that left edge. Now, if I go all the way like this, this is too much. All the information in that hair is lost in his eyes is lost, so I don't want to go that far. I just want to touch it. So it's something like that were just the beginning of his hair gets to be lost in that pure black. Now, for the pure white, we can do the same if we hold the option key down and click the whites weaken, See as we drag to the right when things become pure white. Now, I don't want there to be pure white in this image because there's nothing that I want to be completely overexposed. But I just wanted to show you that. And you can see that in the history Ram as I drag the whites to the right. You see that pure white? Okay, so I'm not holding the option key anymore, and I'm bringing down the whites. So we have that information in the background. What I like about this first image of Well, let's go back to that one. Is that these softness? I mean, even his eyes air sharply and focus his mouth is, but even just like his cheek and his years, you start to get that shallow depth of field. And I just didn't use the land. They didn't have a lens, and a lot of you won't have a lens that can get that shallot up the field see his ear and his eyes were generally in the same focus. But we can use our adjustment brushes and filters to get that sort of fake how to focus. Look. So to give that sort of shallot up the fueled for everything except his eyes were going to use the radial filter. So check that on. Make sure you have show selected Basque overlay on and then just create a sort of oval shape. You probably want to start in the middle of his eyes, and then just you can rotate it by hovering over the edge and rotating something like that . Okay, so now turn off show selected mask overlay, which is the keyboard shortcut O on your keyboard, which you can use now to make it easier. And let's drop the sharpness, and we'll also drop the clarity just a little bit. I don't drop the clarity too much, because then it starts to get a little bit like blurry and watercolor e kind of style. The sharpness is more of a better way to create that sort of shallot up the field. Look Okay, so this looks good because the eyes are now on focused, but I also want his lips and his nose to be in focus, too. So what I can do is with this radio filter selected, click the brush tool and now click erase. And it might be helpful to press O on your keyboard. So you see the mask overlay, and I'm gonna put the flow at around like 77 so I might have to brush over things a couple times. The opacity of this brush is a little bit lower now. And if I just paint over his nose, I mean, his nose should be in focus. Same with his mouth. It was a little distracting with his mouth not being in focus. And that looks pretty good. And now maybe I'll increase my brush size and drop the flow and just paint over his face once I'm just clicking, driving once and maybe clicking Dragon one more time. So parts of his face are still in focus. But his eyes are really what's unfocused. And if I turn this off on and off now, you can see that it created this sort of nice out of focus. Look, we could do this again to make it a little bit more extreme by clicking new and then creating an oval sort of around his whole face, just like so rotated so that it matches up with the way that his face is turned. Oh, to see the mask overlay, make sure that we are selecting the outside and not inside, and we will drop the sharpness again. This time I'm not going to drop the clarity at all, and that might be a little too much. So let's go down to, like, negative 50 for this. Okay? So again we can turn those off and on Alex Pretty darn gay. Let's turn back on. Click Done. So that gives us a nice sort of shallot up the field. Look on his eyes that I like Now we want to make his eyes look a little bit better. So let's zoom in Z on the keyboard. Let's take our adjustment brush here. We're gonna make it pretty small, and we're just going to adjust the whites of his eyes. It's actually just paint over his eyes, like so. Oh, on my keyboard so I can see what I'm painting over his eyes like that. Let's actually use a range mask for this with color. And let's choose the color the white. Okay, so now that's selecting more. Just the white. You can adjust the range amount down here to select mawr or less so let's do a little less So we're really just selecting the whites of his eyes. Oh, on my keyboard to turn off that mask overlay. Let's bring up the whites a little bit. You don't want to go too crazy because that starts to look a little weird. But just bringing up like the whites just a little bit can make his eyes pop just a little bit more before after before. After, on off on. See how that looks looks a little bit better. Let's do a new brush by clicking new and brushing just over his the iris of his eyes. We're going to do that irisin hands by clicking iris and hands there automatically. That gives a little bit more pop. All right, so let's do a little bit of blemish removal. I noticed that Will has a little cut on his lip here. So what we're going to do is take this healing brush over here, make the size pretty small. This pain over his lip and we're gonna take another part of his lip Teoh replace it with. And that looks good. We had that one sort of pimple that looks like it was sort of it got rid of with the shall it up the field. I was going to remove it like that as well. That looks pretty good. I am going to do one sort of brush overlay over his skin to soften it up a bit. So going back to our brush clicking new, changing our settings to the skin, softening. Let's just paint over his skin, just like so peeking over it all. I think it's starting to look a little bit too fake. Let me zoom in. Just get up here between his eyebrows painting, and you can kind of see if I press. Oh, you can see where I am painting. Let's make the brush a little bit bigger. I don't want to get his eyes or anything like this, because that would get rid of any of the sharpness that we added or applied going through getting his skin. And the more effects you apply in the faster or slower your computer is it will actually make you know, editing a little bit slower. So let's press Oh, to turn this off and we're going to increase the clarity and decrease the sharpness just a little bit. So it's not too crazy and click done. Okay, so let's see that before. After before. After, er not starting. Look good. One thing I don't like and I didn't like from before was this green background. It's a little bit distracting. If the whole thing was green, I might like it a little bit more, but just because it's got this overexposed background here, I'm gonna go to my HS cell adjustments. I'm going to go to saturation, click on my color picker, Go back here to the green and decrease the saturation back there, Okay? And I wanna go too much because that looks fake. I just want to go a little bit, so it looks a little bit better and not as distracting. When I do that, though, the background starts to look a little bit dreary. So what I want to do is make the background warmer without affecting will's face. So one way we can do that is with our graduated filter. Lets reset by just resetting all these settings and then just click and drag over his face actually, something like this and then dragging down to the start of his shoulders pressing. Oh, you can see what selected. I'm going to choose my brush to brush out his face. So I'm gonna erase his face from this selection, going to turn the flow up all the way. So I'm actually erasing his face and I'm actually going to turn auto mask off. So it's not tryingto auto mask. Anything you could do this, like another way is if you just use the fresh adjustment brush, it might have been quicker to just use that to brush around the background. This was kind of a multiple step process that might not have been the quickest. Okay, so now we have the selection of the background pressing. Oh, so we can see what we're doing. Let's warm it up just a little bit going too far. My what kind of cool for you, But I'm just gonna do it just a little bit. Okay? So if I delete this brush selecting at pressing delete, you can see what it's doing is just adding a little bit of warmth. Along with this, I want to add a little bit of style with a vignette. So let's close down our adjustments at the top go down to effects. Let's add a little bit of a post crop than yet. I don't want to do a highlight or a white one. I want to do a dark one. Going about their pretty subtle increased the feathering to make it even more subtle. Something like that, you can let the highlights go through if you want. I'm not going to, though, So now let's see the before and after by clicking this button down here. You have the before and after I feel like the softening of the skin is maybe a little too intense. Maybe it's just cause I know will. But I feel like it looks like he's got like, a porcelain face or something. So let's go back to our adjustment brushes. Let's see the one that actually I was the brush it on the radio filter thing. Is this one up here? Yeah, that one. So let's, um, increased the clarity. Let's just delete that, See what that does? Yeah, I think, um, with a clarity around 14 or so 15 that works good and the sharpness around 15 that looks a little bit better, a little bit more natural. I'm actually really liking this. You can tell from the before and after. Look how much more out of focus wills sure is. The background is more out of focus. That focus on the eyes is definitely more poignant. His hair is a little bit out of focus, maybe a little bit too much. So what we can do is go back to one of the brushes for Let's see. What was that? The eyes? No, it was one of our radio brushes for the focus. This is our selection and weaken. Brush out a little bit more. So let's go to our brush a race and just make it smaller. Turn down the flow. Well, just erase a little bit in his hair so the front of his hair is in focus. Something like that. A lot of this is just kind of playing around to see what you like, and that's looking pretty good. It might be a little bit to worm. I must decrease that white balance just a little bit, even though that's combating everything, that's an overall adjustment. It's making the background even less warm. Even though we added that sort of warmth to the background. I think that looks a little bit more natural and lastly, we're just gonna add a little bit of contrast. So I'm gonna go to my tone curve, and I kind of like having this before and after up right now so I can see what's happening . Let's just add a little s curve to add some more contrast. You know you can go crazy with it, but you want to be a little careful. I accidentally created too many points. Yeah, I think adding a little bit of contrast definitely helps a little bit more in terms of noise reduction. We don't really have much noise. That shot was shot during the day, so we don't have to worry too much about the noise. Overall saturation might be a little bit too saturated right now, so let's actually bring the saturation down just a little bit. When you increase contrast, you actually make the colors more saturated, so you gotta pay attention to that. If you are increasing the contrast, I could play around with this stuff forever. I feel like the contrast is a little bit too much, actually. Go there. There we go. Okay, so I am going to be done at anything this photo. But I hope that you kind of enjoyed seeing my entire process. Let's go ahead and look at sort of this photo. Let's turn off the before and after. And of course, it's not the same background, so it's a different style. The lighting's different, but I find that this photo, in terms of quality and style, looks a lot more closely to this photo compared to it before. So using all the techniques that you've learned, you can do a lot of amazing things with your portrait's to make them look even better. Definitely come up with your own style. Don't just follow and copy all the step that I did for every single portrait. There's a lot of cool things that I did that you might want to do, like sharpening the eyes, making the iris and the eyes more enhanced. If my teeth will's teeth were showing like in this photo, I think my teeth are showing. I might go in and do a little teeth whitening to make that look a little bit better. Removing a few blemishes, softening the skin just slightly, using those cool radial filters to create sort of warmth in the background or two. Sort of create that fake, shallow depth of field, all cool stuff that you know how to do now that you can create cool photo with All right, thank you so much for watching this and we'll see you in another lesson. 175. Lightroom Classic CC: Full Black and White Edit: Let's do another full editing demonstration. So I'm gonna edit this photo of Sam here. I think it will be a cool one to use. And the first thing that I'm going to do is crop it. I think this one would look very good with Sam, Sort of centered with motion. I I don't like having him on the left hand side of the frame. If he was more in the right hands, out of the frame, it might look better. So if I crop in, put him or on that right hand side, like so that to me, looks a lot more natural than having him on the left hand side of the frame like this. With motion, Typically, you wanna have the person or the thing that's moving. You wanna have them moving towards the more open side of the frame like so it just looks a little bit more natural and balance. If you're going for that sort of unbalanced look, by all means, that's totally fine to do it that way and just a quick no, I am going to go through this at it a little faster if I am going to fast. If you're watching this on you. To me, you can use the video player options, and you can actually speed down the playback of any of these lessons or even speed it up if we're going to slow so that things might be a little bit more at your own pace. So the first thing I'm going to do to make this black and white is click this black and white button Oregon present V on your keyboard as the keyboard shortcut. Teoh enable this black and white. And now that's a better way of doing it. Because then I can go in and adjust the black and white mix of specific colors. Say, I didn't do that. And then I went down to saturation, and I made all my adjustments for, like, the tone and the exposure. And then I was like, Actually, I want to go into the black and white settings. When you do that, it changes sort of the look of some colors. So the proper way to add a black and white photo is to first enable this black and white setting, and then we can go back into our exposure adjustments up here to make some adjustments. So with a black and white photo, I typically like it to be a really contrast e. So here I'm going to bring down the blacks. And if I hold the option key, I can see when things are becoming too black, completely pure black with no information. And sometimes I'm okay with that. I'm okay. With parts of the image being completely black, I do want to increase the contrast. So I'm gonna bring up the highlights and the whites just a little bit. I don't want to lose too much information holding the option key down. I can see that I'm losing some information of those whites. So I'm not gonna go too crazy. And then with the shadows, we will just see. I think I want to bring up the shadows to actually have more information on his shirt, kind of in the shot other than his face. Cool. So this is starting to look pretty good. I will boost the clarity just overall, but I also there's parts of this image that aren't as sharp as I want them now. We talked about how, with the sharpness filters in light room, you can make things that are slightly out of focus appear a little bit more sharp. This isn't going to make something blurry appear in focus. But let's test it out. So I'm gonna actually take my adjustment brush filter right here, change the size press. Oh, so that are selected mask overlays on. Make sure my flow is all the way up. And I'm just gonna paint over Sam and his shirt. I'm gonna probably due another adjustment to his shirt because that's really what I wish was a little bit more in focus. But I think his face could also be a little bit more and focus too. Okay, so that looks pretty good press Oh, to turn off the mask overlay. And it looks like I actually had some settings already set. So let me undo these by double clicking each setting, and I'm going to just increase the sharpness and the clarity just a little bit, Actually, no, I'm not gonna do the clarity because that's messing up with his face. But the sharpness that Mm. Yeah. Let's go around like 50. Now I'm gonna click to create a new brush and just paint over the logo here on a shirt. And again I have those settings from before. Let me get rid of those and I press oh, to see where I painted just to make sure. Yep, covering both logos. And now let's increase the clarity of this. So turning this on and off Off on, you can see that has a little bit more detail, especially where it says Los Angeles. But this is the logo for the L A football club, LFC the new football team here in l. A. But it's not going to make this down here in focus where it says football club, but that helps just a little bit cool. So I kind of want to make Sam stand out from the background a little bit more. Yes, the background is fairly blurry, but I feel like because it's sort of, I guess, like maybe neutral graze. It's Sam just doesn't stand out as much as I want. If it was more blurry, it might help. So I'm gonna take the radio filter, and it still has these old the facts that I applied to it to reset all these just double click effect right there, and it sets everything to zero there. So now I'm going to create a circle sort of radius around Sam. Then I'm going to use my brush toe, add or subtract. So let's press Oh, to have our selection and I'll use my brush. Then click. Erase on like sure, my flow is up. Pretty high. Auto mask is off. The auto mask might work kind of well for this. So let's just paid off. We'll do auto mask. Where and we get to his head is paying off. All this is fine. If you want to get pretty specific, we could pink into his paint this part in between his arms and the background back on, Let's turn auto mask on, make the brush a little, it smaller paint over his head, and that works a little bit better. It kind of knows that I'm trying to select erase off of his hair, but not off of the background. See how that's doing that? That's pretty cool. Way to just sort of paint off someone's hair. Let's make sure his whole face is painted off of now. Let's go back to brush a on leads. Drop the size turn on auto mask. This is paying in here now it will know that I'm not really trying to select his shirt. Okay, so it's a little bit of fine tuning. It's make sure up here selected. That's looking pretty good. Let's just erase a little bit more along his sunglasses. There we go. OK, Cool. Okay. See, you could spend hours doing this kind of stuff. At least I could Okay, then let me press. Oh, so now I'm going to adjust the exposure, so I'm just gonna take the overall exposure, an increase it see how, when I do that, Sam starts to sort of pop out from the background a bit more. I'm gonna under that. And then just see what bringing up the shadows does. Sometimes bringing up the overall exposure starts to look a little unnatural and so then moved to just affecting the shadows. Both kind of work. Well, I think bringing up the overall exposure just a little bit works. And then let's bring up the shadows as well. Let's also, just while we're at it, decrease the sharpness, make it a little bit blurrier. Something like that looks even better. I would say Maybe not so extreme. You can play with the clarity that looks a little bit too ridiculous, Phil, but maybe a little bit like that, and that's that's looking pretty good. We can turn this on and off to show you that before and after CEO Sam starts to pop a little bit more. That's what my goal was with using that sort of adjustment. Lastly, let's go into these black and white filters and see what happens when we're adjusting specific colors. So there are some auto settings, but we can go in here and find Tune it. So, like with yellow, bring up the exposure. That might be pretty good to get some of that background exposure. So Sam stands out even more. Then the oranges that's gonna get some of Sam skin. So bring it up. I don't like so much may be bring it down just a little bit more from where it was at. So get the green. It was a little bit of green in the background again. Bringing up that exposure just a little bit looks pretty cool. And so that's a way you can find tune specific colors. We can see the before and after just to show you what the work we've done there. We have the before, and after looking pretty good, we can also swap the side. So if you want to do like this split screen and swap it, you can press this button right here. It's swaps. Which side you're seeing the before and after, which is kind of cool to All right, That's my full edit for this photo. I hope you enjoyed it and we'll see you in another lesson. 176. Lightroom CC: Intro: welcome to a new section of the photography masterclass. This section is all about editing photos in light room CC, so this video is just about how you get light room CC and what it is and who it really is. Four. And you can also download these practice files that are in the late room CC folder that you can download from this section so you can follow along. So what is light room? CC Light room is a applicator and application from Adobe, and they have a Siris of applications for editing photos. You might have been aware and use light room CC in the past, but what happened was when they came out with the CC 2018 version of all of their applications. Light room Sisi became light room classic CC, which is the desktop app, and we have a section about that in this course, and then they introduced a brand new light room C. C. I believe it's a way for them toe. Ultimately try to move everyone to using light room CC, which is more of a cloud based, simplified version of light room. But I will be honest. It was completely confusing and it is still confusing why they kept them. They made the old software a different name, and they have a brand new software taking over the name of light room. See see. The full name is Adobe Photoshopped Light Room CC, which can add to the confusion altogether Lighter. MCC is powerful, though, and it's a really great way to quickly edit photos. And the beautiful thing about it is that you can edit photos from wherever you want. You could add it on your desktop. You could add it on your phone. Your tablet. You can use a browser based editor toe Edit online on any computer that you have the use cloud storage so that you can upload all of your raw files or JPEG files and edit straight from there. And it's all cloud based. So to download Goto, the Dhobi website, go to creativity and design and choose light room CC under the featured products menu and then to download, just click the download button in the top, right. You do get a seven day free trial if you want to practice with it, or you can just click the buy now for the light room CC plan or choose one of these other plans from here. And you can see that you get one terabyte of cloud storage with lighter MCC. With the photography plan that includes light room, classic and photo shop. You get 20 gigabytes of cloud storage, so it's less but you you get all those other applications, which is awesome. Awesome Zagat and download that get it installed on your computer. It's great for both Mac and PC, and then we'll dive into importing and organizing your photos in the next lesson. 177. Lightroom CC: Import and Organize: when you open up light room C C for the first time, there are going to be a few windows and a little tutorial if you want to watch it or go through it, and it kind of walks you through the interface. So I recommend doing that as well as watching this video too quickly. Just jump right in and tow. Start importing. All you have to do is click this plus button in the top left for add photos. Now you want to do that and browse through your computer because you probably downloaded the practice files to your computer. Or you can choose photos from any sort of connected device, like an iPhone or a smartphone or other device. So click browse or use the keyboard shortcut Shift I to import. Now I have my photos in my light room CC folder. I'm going to select all of them and choose review for import. Here is the import window, and you can see that all of these photos have been checked. So if you, for some reason don't want to import specific ones, say you go on a shoot. This is a good idea to go through all your photos and you might have a lot that you don't necessarily want to import, and you can turn them on and off here. There's other ways to organize your photos later. If you do just want to go through and import everything and then sort of filter them later . You also have this option for adding to an album up here. I'm gonna go ahead and not do that, and I'll show you how to create an album in just a second. And then you have this check all or select all. Or it's like none but in here, which would make it easy to select all or still select none. If you have a bunch of photos, then choose. Add seven photos and you saw here that we did have some photos from my wedding that had been imported in the past. So when you open a new set of photos, they'll appear down here in this sort of film. Strip at the bottom, and you can go through by clicking on them or using the arrow buttons on your keyboard to go left or right. So I want to teach a little bit about organizing in this lesson. If you come from light room classic CC, you can see how simplified this sort of interfaces on the left below the adding photos. But in you have the my photos button. This is how you can organize photos, and you can choose to see all photos. You can choose to see the recently added photos. If you have multiple imports, you will have them by date. Or you have this album option here, and this is where I want to go ahead and create an album. So click the plus button to add an album will call this light room practice. Edits. I have include the selected photo options selected, which will include this one photo of the Doan um hand, which is good to show you that you can select photos from your film strip down here to add to this folder or this album, that is, and then just click create. Now this album only has one photo in it. So if I click on that now you see in this film strip at the bottom that only one photo is in this album. Soto add photos to this album. I can go back to my recently added photos to see all the other ones select the ones I want to add by shift clicking or command clicking on a Mac control clicking on a PC than just drag and drop into this album here. If you click This Plus annual also knows you have a folder. A folder is a way to group albums, so say you want to have a folder of all of your vacations. You can have a Vacations folder and that will appear here. And if you want, you can drag and drop your albums into the folder. So say Create another folder will call this photo masterclass. So this is going to be another folder, and we can put this full this album into that folder now and so it's just a easy way to organize your different albums, so that's a little bit more about the organization. Let's just talk quickly about viewing and rating. So here you can click these buttons and the bottom to view your photos in a different way, from grid mode to square grid so that all the photos are the same size. You have your standard detail option, which is best for when you are wanting to preview more full screen, then you have an ordering option this button down here, which you can order these photos by captured a import date modified day if you sort of added them before or star rating. So that brings me to my flagging and rating system. You can flag photos that you like and sort of unflagging them or reject them with these two buttons down here. So what I would typically do is import all my photos and then go through them one at a time and give them a flag or a rejection. So, yes, I like this one. Yes, I like this one. Yes, I like this one. No, I don't like this one. And the keyboard shortcuts for those two options are Z and X, So Z will flag as a pick. X will reject it. And you also have these star ratings. So this is another way that you can filter your best photos and this helps you choose which ones you will at it or not. So this one say I want to rate it as one star. This one, I'll do two star, which you can use the keyboard shortcuts. 1234 or five This one I love. So we're gonna set that as five. This one is a two. This one is a three. This one is a four. This one is a five. Now, how do you filter these? Click this filter button at the top and I'm gonna go ahead and close this down over here on the left hand side. So we're more full screen, and you can choose this filter option to show your filtered photos You can filter by rating . So this is filtering photos and only showing one's greater than three stars greater than two stars greater than four stars greater than five stars, greater or equal to you can click this equals but in to change how it is rated. So if you just want to see one star photos said it, two equals in turn there to click one star to turn off the filter. Just click the filter button up here. You can also filter by your rejections or picks, so clicking one of these that will show all the pics clicking off of it and then choosing your rejections will show the rejections and then, if you haven't flagged any, you can click that middle one, and now you can flag them. Choosing multiple of these. You can show once that have been rejected and not picked yet. For example, you also have filtering options here, like showing photos, videos, keywords if you add any keyword data to your photos, which I'll show you in the SEC cameras. So it imports all the metadata from these cameras. So if we just want to see Fujifilm x t two photos, then we can choose that camera. You can also have locations. If you do have locations in your metadata, let's turn off our fill options down here in the bottom. Right moving here. We have different view options. We can fit the entire image to this window. We can fill the screens of this whole editing sort of window with the image you could do 1 to 1, which is zooming into the photo. So you're seeing the full quality based off of your screen and your screens resolution and the photos resolution. So this is seeing at 100%. Um, according to this screen in this photo, let's go back to fit and Then you can turn on and off the film strip down below. And then you can also show the original. If you've made edits or not, which we'll see in just a second you have these tagging and information buttons down in the bottom. So if you click the information but in any of the metadata that is imported or seen through the file is here. So you can see the camera, the lens, the information, the settings. I s O the lens. You use the aperture, the shutter speed, which is really awesome. And then here is where you can add things like a title. You can add the location saying Dimas in California and you see a map actually pops up where we took this photo. If you're more precise that IHS, you'll notice that down below that is sinking has the sink status menu because it is sinking in the cloud that adobe cloud so that if you want to, you can go to the desktop editor or to your mobile device. If you have the light room CC, app downloaded and open this photo and everything is sink and this button down here, you can choose to store it locally or not. If you don't want to have it stored locally, it will just be in the cloud. So that's the info button. And then, lastly, we have these keywords, so weaken tag it with keywords such as Portrait. We can tag it with Phil. And so now if we go to our filter options, we can look for keywords such as Phil or Portrait, and it will bring up all the photos that have those keywords added to the photo. Awesome! So that is how you import an organized photos and light room C. C. I know it's a lot, but go ahead and play around with that. And then in the next lessons, we're going to go through editing our photos in light room CC and learning the prakit proper workflow for doing so. 178. Lightroom CC: Crop and Rotate: let's start actually editing our photos. So I'm gonna go ahead and take this photo first to show you how to crop, which is usually the first step in my editing. So I'm also going to go ahead and turn off our filmstrip so we can see more of a full screen view of this photo. You have all of your editing options over on the right hand side. I'm actually going to jump down to crop right here, which is also C on your keyboard. I love using keyboard shortcuts. When you do that, you have this grid that appears over your image. You also have these little looks like kind of buttons on the corner that are a little thicker. And those symbolized that you can click on those parts and then if you drag around, you are actually reach sizing this crop. So right now, when I do that, everything is completely custom, so I can have a completely skinny image. It could be a square ish image, but it's completely free hand. If you want to lock the aspect ratio to the original sort of photo, so you're not changing it, you can hold the shift button down and then click and drag, and it will keep that aspect ratio let go and then click in the middle to dry your photo around. You can also rotate by hovering over one of the corners and clicking and dragging to the left or right or up or down to rotate. You also have these options in the menu over here. Now the aspect ratio is the original aspect ratio of the photo. If we click down this drop down, you have multiple options for presets like 1 to 1, which would be a square. You also have widescreen like 16 by nine, which is perfect for televisions or computer screens or mobile devices, and also these presets that are great for popular print sizes. And then you also have custom, which allows you just create freeform. You also have the option to rotate or straighten with this slider. Here, dragging to the left or right allows you to rotate this way or you can click in this number area and type in a specific number. If you have a specific number or amount of rotation, you also have these rotate and flip options here. If you want to completely rotate or flip your image. You can choose these options or, if you want to flip, let me get back to original kind of rotates, so it's easier to see. And then you can flip your images vertically or horizontally. This way, once you are done and happy with your crop and rotation, which I'm just for this image, I am going to use the square, which is great for Instagram. And then I want to line it up with ease tables on the bottom in terms of the rotation. Also the lines. When you rotate, you see that there's an extra grid that appears to help. You sort of flattened out horizons and things like that, trying to get as symmetrical as possible with these lines, all the lines in the image. And then when you're done, just press the return key on your keyboard to sort of lock that at it and then get into your other options. We can always go back and edit things later, and that's the beauty of editing in a program like Light Room CC. It's not burning in these edits to your image. It's not Raster based. You can always go back and make changes cool. So that is crop and rotate. In the next lesson, we'll learn more about white balance and then pop into exposure. 179. Lightroom CC: White Balance and Saturation: the next step in photo editing workflow that I use is to fix any white balance issues, and that is under this option. Up here is the top button. It's those three little lines that look like sliders and then, under the color drop down, you can click the arrow to see all of these options. So with color, this is fixing your white balance, making adjustments to saturation and things like that. So you have multiple options for fixing white bounce. You have a preset option up here with this. Drop down, depending. If you're editing a raw photo or a J peg photo, you will Seymour options. Since this is a raw photo, we have all of these options or presets. So if we say to light room that this light here was tungsten light than it's going to adjust it to that, The reason why this looks so bad is because this wasn't tungsten light. This was mawr of like cloudy or shade shade a little bit too much underneath the shades shelter. That looks decent, but I would say more like daylight looks like proper white balance. You also have what's called this white balance color picker or selector. So if you click that I drop her and then you go in your image to something that is white or neutral and then click it, it will balance everything else to that color. So there really isn't something that's white in this image. If I click this green, it's going to not work because we're telling light room that this green should be white or neutral, and then it tries to balance all of the other colors to it. If I click in the sky again, this guy was a little blue, so that doesn't work. So for this image, I don't think the white bounce selector will work. Let's just go back to daylight, and they also have an auto setting that would try to adjust it automatically. But I don't really like that. So I'm going to keep it at daylight. Let me just go to another photo really quick. Let's hear images. Let's go to something that does have white in it. So this image has white. We still have our white balance color selector up, so if we click something that is white than it should work now, the tricky thing is it can't be completely overexposed because if there's a white part like this area right here that's completely over exposed, it's going to ask you to pick something that's darker that has actual information in the image. This sidewalk down here is gray, so that might work. Yeah, that looks pretty good. If I click over here on this wall right here, which is grey, it makes everything a bit warm because thes lights are fluorescent and it just warms those up based off of the cool lights that were shining on these this brick wall. Now this brick wall or Ismet Waugh looks more neutral, but the rest of it looks warm. So I think this sidewalk down here at the bottom is mostly the best neutral gray to use for this image. Okay, so let's go back to this photo down here. Turn off our filmstrip. So that's how you use the white balance selector up here. If you want, you can also use these sliders. So if I take the temperature slider to the left or to the right, this is a manual way of adding warmth or making it more cooler to reset. Just click the title of the effect right there to reset it. You also have tint, which goes from green to magenta, depending on what lighting you're under. If you're under some sort of fluorescent lighting, sometimes you get sort of a green tint. So you might want to combat that by adding some magenta to it that will really show up in different photos, and we'll actually see that, not necessarily under fluorescent lighting. But under this photo, we might want to add a bit of magenta because we're getting so much green from all the greenery that is bouncing light around me. So with this photo, though, you could also type in a specific temperature here. So I know that sunlight is around 56 to 5700 kelvin. So if I tell light room that hey, we want our white Mouse to be 5600 then that works pretty good at getting a proper white balance so you can type in numbers there as well. You can also just click this black and white button. If you want to make your photo completely black and white or without that selected, you can drop the saturation here to the left to get rid of any color and then increase it to increase the saturation of of all the colors in your image, which can make things very colorful. Vibrance. The last slider that we kind of just skipped in this panel is a way of adding colors in amore intelligent way. Let's go to this photo of me and show you what happens when I increase the saturation. All the colors, like really good. The greens look and papa really nicely now, but what happens to my skin is you see a lot of reds, the oranges and yellows and my face get a lot more saturated, and that looks pretty unnatural and unflattering. Let me reset this. And so vibrance is an intelligent way where if you drag this up to the right, all of the colors, except for the skin tone colors are more saturated. So the greens blues, all those things will get mawr saturated, but the skin tones will look better drying into the left. You can see that it's decreasing the saturation of all the colors, but the last things that it's really affecting our my skin tone's so here. If I increase the vibrance and then use the before and after right here, you can see the before and after. It's a subtle change right now to reset any of these sliders. You can also just double click on the slider that you've made changes to and that will reset it, which is similar to light room classic CC. So that's the color tab. We will dive into this color adjustment are color mixer in a future lesson. But basically I wanted to show you how you fix white balance. And since we're in this tab, I showed you vibrance and saturation as well. Next, we're gonna go back up to the light options here, which would be the next step of editing your photos. 180. Lightroom CC: Exposure and Tone: I'm going to stay on this portrait image of me for the next setting, which is light mostly when it closed down my filmstrip. So let's open up the light options. These are your exposure options, and you have a number of ways to adjust exposure. You have sliders that increase or decrease the exposure of every part of your image. You also have sliders down below that a just specific parts of your image, which is usually how I like to edit my photos. Sometimes doing an overall exposure adjustment can help. If something is completely under exposed with this image, though it's relatively well exposed. There's just parts that we can adjust to make it a little bit more contrast e and pop a little bit more with all these settings or with a lot of them. You also have this auto button just by clicking the auto button. It will try to automatically make your photo a well balanced, well exposed image, and that can be a good starting point. But often it's not going to make it perfect. So let me undo that by pressing Command Z on my keyboard on a Mac that be control Z on a PC , and then you also have this contrast. Lighter dragging to the right makes things more contrast to the left. Less contrast E. What that means is that increasing contrast. The darks become darker, the life become lighter, going less contrast. E that darks become brighter and the highlights or the lights become darker. So you have more of a mid range tone across your image. Let's get into the other options down here, where you can pinpoint a part of your image to adjust. You have your highlights, shadows, whites and blacks. The highlights are those brighter parts of your image, which allow you to adjust just the bright parts, and you can kind of see in my hair some of leaves up above decreasing. The highlights brings back some of that information the shadows. By increasing the shadows, Aiken bring up that exposure on my face, which was kind of dark, in my opinion, so I would bring that up. The whites will be the even brighter parts of the image, so if I drag that down, I can get a little bit more information back from the background and some of these leaves in the background. See before. After drying into the right, I would increase the contrast. If you wanna have a very blown out background, which might be a nice Die Elice stick approach, Teoh a photo like this, the blacks will be the darkest parts of the image, making the blacks blacker the very dark parts of my eyes here, my shirt a little bit darker. Dragging to the right sort of washes everything out again, a style that you might like. But for me, I like bringing down my blacks in this image to increase the contrast. You can see the before and after quickly by hitting the back slash button on your image, and that will show the before after before after, so you can see a more contrast E dynamic photo that I've adjusted. If you need to make an overall adjustment here, you can so say it's still too dark. I can bring up the exposure here, and then maybe parts of it are two white like my whites, so I bring my whites back a little bit. But now my face is a little bit brighter, so I'll usually make those sort of overall adjustments and then go back to my contrast lighter toe. Add a bit of contrast if I want or you also have the curve tool the tone curve here by clicking that button. And this brings up this line and this graph which allows us to adjust exposure by clicking and editing parts of this line on the bottom left, you have your shadows going up the line, you of your darks than lights and then your highlights. So clicking in the middle of this graph and dragging down it will decrease the darks, and it also starts to affect the blacks and the lights. Depending on how far you go. If I click on the top part, for example, I can increase the lights. And the more I edit like this to create this s looking shapes. Look how this curve that I'm editing becomes more s like we're adding contrast. So you might hear that a lot with photo editing, An S curve adds contrast. You should also see the hissed a gram appear here, sort of in the background of this tone curve graph. This is the hissed a gram of my image so you can see a lot of mids, and they also have some pure whites over here on the right hand side, you can also use these sliders in the bottom to adjust taking the darks, making them a little bit brighter or darker. Taking the mids dragon to the right will make him a darker to the left will make him brighter and saying with the highlights, you can drag to the left to make everything brighter. You can turn on and off this individual tone curve here with this button right here to see what you're working on. So let's reset this by double clicking in the middle to get back to our original at it. In this tone curve window, you also have the point curve. The point curve is similar where you can create points and add contrast or adjust the exposure. But what I like about this are the black points and the white points that you see. The black point is this bottom left point. And if I click that and drag to the right, what you're telling light room CC to do with this photo is to make more of this image black . If I drag to up along the left hand side of this square. We are actually increasing the black point. So nothing is really black, what is actually black and the image becomes more gray. So if we want mawr of the image to become black, we just drag this to the right and you can see as I do that more becomes black similarly with the whites. If I take this top right point drag to the left mawr, parts of the image become white. If I drag it down, the right hand side less becomes white and white actually starts to become more gray to create that sort of ask her if I can just click in the middle and drag up and down to create. That s the cool thing to is you can go in and specifically add more points. As many as you want to get really specific with what parts you want to increase or decrease the exposure of. You also have presets down here for the linear curve, which is your standard. You can add some medium contrast or some strong contrast quickly with those presets. Lastly, you have these individual color point curves. You have red, blue and green. So if you take any of these, you can increase or decrease the color or the reds in your image. So if I decrease the Reds, what's left are blues and greens. So if I decrease the reds and then I go to my green curve and I decrease greens, you're gonna get more magenta and the blue that's left over with the blue, you can increase the blue, you can decrease the blue to get yellow. And so this is a way that you can get really creative with the colors of your photo. You can also create sort of an S curve with these colors to create contrast in the blues or in the Reds or whatever colors you want, Adam or contrast to. So obviously, this is a creative edit. This is not how I would personally like to edit my photos. So I'm gonna save the set these all back two Lanier for the point curve. I might go ahead and add that strong contrast back in there. And now we have this image that if we see the before and after, at least where my face is a lot better exposed. It's definitely a style with that nice, highlighted background. But it's something that I like for this image. So that's your light and exposure adjustments and how you can fix a and improperly exposed image in light room. Next, we're gonna go back into our color and see these color mixer H S L adjustments. 181. Lightroom CC: Color Mixer: Let's continue with our color mixer, which is a great way that you can actually pinpoint specific colors to adjust. So if you open up that option, let's go ahead and close our light adjustments up at the top. At the top of this mixer, you can see that you can choose specific colors here, and this allows us to adjust the hue, saturation and luminant of those specific colors. So, for example, in this photo we have a lot of blues. So if we select the blues here and then we take our hue adjustments and dragged to the left or right, you are literally changing the hue of the blues in this image. If you want, you can make them more saturated or less saturated. And this is a cool way. You can have decrease the saturation of specific colors just so you can have serving colors more vibrant. Fluminense's the brightness of a color, So if we go, let's bring back our saturation and we can make the blues brighter or darker. You can also change how you adjust from color to like you. You're basically doing the same thing, but now we're just seeing the hue for any color. We can adjust the hue this way. So if we want to make those reds of the street lights or the car lights change color, we can do that, going from more of a yellow to more of a purple. And so now we can address all of the colors Hughes at once. Similarly, if you got a saturation, you can say you wanna decrease all of the colors in this photo except for the reds, which we want a boost. So let's get rid of those greens. We'll get rid of the yellows, even the oranges. So all we have is this one red light going through our photo. That's an easy way to get rid of all the color, except for one. Using this color mixer and then luminous works the same so you can go through and edit the luminous of a specific color. Using these options. It's just a different way to do it than by going through color up here, so that's the color mixer. Next, let's look at our effects 182. Lightroom CC: Effects: the next set of adjustments are in this effects tab. Here you have clarity, which increases the sort of contrast and the sharpness of your image. So for this image, if I drag all the way to the right, you see all the details and the leaves in the sky. You get more stars in the sky that you didn't see when this was off. Drag into the left softens everything, which can help a little bit with skin for portrait's to make things a little softer. If I go to the photo of me, let's go. Just going to the right. There we go. If we increased clarity, you start to see all of those details of my face, and it gets really grungy, which I don't like necessarily. So softening it up can give you a nice sort of portrait dreamy style. It's under that. Let's go to this photo again and show you what D. Hayes does So D. Hayes's away that if you're shooting a photo of a hazy sky, you can pull out more of that detail. It also works here with this image similar not technically, but sort of how a polarizing filter works it adds a little bit of contrast. It adds a little bit of saturation to things like skies dragging the left will make things a little bit cloudy and foggy. Let's go to this image. Let's go to this last image here or this one here dragging up the D. Hayes. Now this is a J peg image, so we don't have as much information toe edit with. But as you can see here, dragging up the D. Hayes brings out a lot of more details in the sky. All right, so let's go Here we have our vignette options, which is another effect. Dragging to the right will create a white vignette to the left. A dark vignette. If we click this era to drop down our options, we can see that there is a feathering option that increases or decreases the feathering, making the edge of this then yet harder or softer. The midpoint makes it basically bigger or smaller. Dragging to the right increases the size of the vignette, or the circle dragon to the left will make it smaller, and then the roundness. You could make it more of a square or a circular vignette if you want sort of a more stylistic sort of like framing like that. You can drive the feathering midpoint, roundness to the left in the vignette all the way to the left. Me, We don't want feathering. You've got this nice hard border now or a white one dragged all the way to the right. So now what highlights does increase our roundness something like this increase our feathering. So what highlights does is it allows highlights to come through the vignette toe, look a little bit more natural. So seeing the top left how those highlights start to come through. If we increase this highlight slider, that's just allowing the brighter parts of your image to come through the vignette. So let's reset. What I typically like to do is add a little bit of a vignette. Definitely feather. We sent our roundness, and I like to have something very settled. The reason you would add of and yet is to increase the attention on what's in the middle of your frame. Now, with this image, we I usually don't like adding a white vignette, but for this one kind of works, I don't always like to add vignettes though I feel like it's a it's definitely a stylistic choice. That's great for Portrait's. But for things like landscapes, it generally doesn't work as well. At least in my opinion. Lastly, we have the grain slider increasing the grain gives it sort of that green. It just adds grain to it, so it gives it that style. This can work better when you're doing a black and white photo. So if I drop my saturation all the way down, maybe I drop the exposure down a little bit, too. You can see that Grain adds that sort of effect. There are more options under this grain menu, increasing the size of the grain and the roughness, making a little bit smoother or less move. So going to the left makes it a little smoother to the right, a little bit more blocking and contrast E. But as I do this, you can see that it starts to make my photo a little blurred out. So dragging the roughness to the left and increasing the size might not be the best option . It's definitely a stylistic choice. I usually don't add grain unless it's going for that specific style, so that's the effects. Here we have one more effect, which is split toning, which will look at in the next lesson. 183. Lightroom CC: Split Toning: All right, let's go back to this photo. I'm going to Reese. Turn off our color Makes your effects to show you what split toning does. Split toning allows you to adjust the highlights and the shadows differently, basically adjusting the saturation and the hue of the highlights in the shadows. So if we take this point in the bottom left and drag it up, you'll see that the numbers start bouncing around in the bottom of that window. The more we drag up, the more saturated it will be with these colors. So if we want to make the shadows of this image more blue, we would go over to the blue and add some saturation by increasing that, say, we want to make the highlights a little bit warmer. We can take this point on the right and drag up and make him super red. So now the highlights have this sort of reddish tint, and the shadows have a blue tint. You can adjust the balance of how this works with this slider at the top, leaning more heavily toe the shadows or, more heavily to the highlights. So this can be a way to sort of fine tune. The adjustment. That's pretty much how it works is definitely a stylistic thing that can work pretty good for images like this to bring out some more color and just make it a little bit more dynamic. So play around with it, have fun with it, and that's split toning. 184. Lightroom CC: Details: in this lesson will go over the detail panel, which allows you to sharpen your image, reduce any noise that digital grain you might see in your images both the luminous, the black and white or the unsaturated noise and color noise. First, let's start with sharpening. So if we go to this picture right here, we can see if we zoom in that my eyes were just a little bit soft. Sharpening won't make an out of focus photo in focus, but it can make the details and the edges of things a little bit sharper. So by increasing sharpening, you add a little bit of noise, but it sharpens the image. Let me zoom out, and you might be able to see if I go all the way to the top at 1 50 and then go down. It gets a little bit sharper, and it's a great way, especially for landscape photos to bring back some of that detail. You'll also notice that initially light room adds a little bit of sharpening to this raw photo, which it will do for all raw photos because raw photos need a bit of sharpening coming out of the camera they are a little soft in general, and so it applies this automatic sharpening to them. Depending on your camera, you might have to play around with adding even more now with noise reduction. Let's go to this image right here and zoom in. You can probably see that in this big open sky. There's all this little these little dots. That's what that digital noise is because of the higher I s O. If we increase noise reduction, you can get rid of all that noise. Now, when you do that, though, it starts toe make the color the edges of things a little bit more washed out. And so depending on what the photo is of, it can start to look a little unnatural. And basically, when you're increasing noise reduction, getting rid of noise, things are becoming less sharp, so it might look a little bit blurrier, so you have to balance out getting rid of the noise with how sharp you want the image to be . Color noises also automatically applied. If we drive this to left, you can see that there was a lot of color noise, these green and red dots in there, so initially light room adds this to get rid of some of that noise from the raw photos, which you might see. So if you want to add more, you can increase this. All of these sliders have fine tuning adjustments, so if we are open these up, you'll see that there's sort of similar. You'll see a detail slider, so the detail slider is a way to preserve more detail or to apply Maurer of the reduction or the sharpening. Basically, what it does is it looks at the edges, and it will apply more or less sharpening or more or less noise reduction in sharpening. You have the radius, which looks at the edges of things, so let's go into this photo again. And if you increase the radius, what you're telling light room to do is to look at the edges of things and expand by 2.4 pixels or so. So every edge it's looking at and it's applying sharpening to a whiter area basically under sharpening, you have masking, which is a good option. If you have a subject in front of a large area. That's kind of like plain, because what will happen is it will mask out your subject from the background. The noise reduction or the sharpening will apply to your subject. But in the background it won't apply as much sharpening i e. It won't increase the noise in the background. So if we take this photo, for example and we increase the sharpening all the way so we can really see what's happening and we zoom in, pay attention to the hills and then the sky. So if we increase the masking and these trees to you can pricey by increasing the masking, the background, the night sky that has less details, less Edgett, fewer edges, it doesn't get as much sharpening and you don't get that increase in noise. But the things with lots of details will still be sharpened. Then you also have the contrast and smoothness sliders under noise reduction in color noise reduction, which also fine tunes the size of the noise reduction or the type of noise reduction that is being applied. So I would recommend that you go through these photos, play around with these sliders, see what they do for you, and also test all your camera, see what type of noise reduction you need, especially when you're using Ah Hirai. So thanks so much for watching 185. Lightroom CC: Optics: in this lesson, we'll learn about the optics options. So first we have removed chromatic aberration. Chromatic aberration is a distortion that you get along the edges of things when using a specific camera or lens you might be able to see very subtly. That along the edges of these pillars is a little sort of pinkish magenta line. It will appear as sort of magenta or green, and if you ever see that line, you can turn on the remove chromatic aberration to get rid of that. I know it's hard for you to see here. I can see it on my computer, so I hope you're following along. Can see these little magenta lines moving, turning on and off. So basically, if you see those lines, turn that on. Next. We have enable lens corrections. Let's go to this image here. So if I turn this on, look what happens. It looks like it's a little bit distorted. The edges become a little bit brighter, so what's happening is with every lens, there's some sort of natural distortion and also natural vignette ing around the edges. Well, with most lenses anyways, the wider the lens, the mawr sort of distortion. You'll get around the edges. So by clicking this honor off, it removes that distortion, and it also removes the vignette ing around that edge. Click on this drop down menu and you'll notice that with this camera and this lens, it knows exactly what lens we are using. So it's already applied the specific effects for this lens because it knows that with this lens you get X amount of distortion X amount of distant vignette ing and will basically reverse that. You can also go in and adjust it manually with these sliders. So if you drag to the left or right, you can get back. The distortion from the natural distortion from the lens drag to the right will actually increase the distortion. And then same with the vignette ing say you want to get rid of the distortion but want to leave the vignette ing. We'll just enable it, but then drag your lens vignette ing back. So you still get that natural vignette in which I actually like and you're seeing your photos through your lens So you're actually seeing that with your own I So a lot of the times I like leaving it as so. If you're editing a photo that is a compressed J peg or it doesn't have the metadata for the lens you're using and you try to apply enable ons corrections, it will not be able to pick that profile for you. You can do it manually if you know the lens by clicking this camera icon and then choosing the lens. But you want to make sure that it matches with the actual lens. Say we pick something like cannon. We'd say it's a 15 millimetre. It's creating this crazy distortion because this is not the lens we used. Well, maybe that's a sort of interesting effect you want to add, but generally you just want to pick the lens that actually matches it or just use the manual features. So that's what optics is. Next. We're even go over geometry 186. Lightroom CC: Geometry: The next tool I want to show you is this geometry tool. This is a way where you can easily make horizontal lines, horizontal and vertical lines perfectly vertical, especially when you're shooting things like architecture. You might be looking upwards at an upward angle at the building, and when you do that, the perspective can be a little warped and straight lines don't become straight anymore. You can see in this image it's very subtle, but these pillars, while they are vertical in real life there sort of bowed out words, and we can use this tool to help us. They have some presets down here that you can try, but generally they don't work. So I'm going to use this guided method by choosing the guided method or turning on this guided tool. What you have to do is put in two lines in your image. They can both be vertical. They could both be horizontal. One can be vertical, one can be horizontal. So if I click and drag along this pillar perfectly up and down as possible, nothing happens. If I then click along this bench and let go light room is going to look at those two lines and say we're going to adjust it and crop it and warp it so that that first line is perfectly up and down in that bottom line is perfectly flat horizontal. I can add another one for this pillar over here trying to make it up and down. And so now it's going to make both of those pillars perfectly up and down. You can add up to four lines. Now, if I said okay, I want to make this line right here. Horizontal. Okay, it's going to start. Teoh get really weird while it makes that lying horizontal. It stretches everything else out. And that doesn't look too good. But maybe to add my fourth line to make AZM any verdict perfectly vertical and horizontal lines as possible. I might just go along one of these brick lines that seem that didn't really do that. Well, maybe one of these ones in the background on this play set and when I do, that starts to get a little bit wonky, so I'm just gonna leave those first ones. So if you want, you can choose this constrained to crop option. So if you did do one of these weird lines like this, it will actually crop in. So you don't see any of that white space in the background. So I'm gonna delete that, though. Alright, So I've gone back and deleted that line and turned off. Constrained to crop already. This is actually basically constraining to crop. We don't have any white edges. You can also go in and fine tune this by clicking this drop down. And here you have all your options for distortion. Vertical horizontal flipping basically. So here we convention it in or out. We can rotate and stretch vertically, horizontally, doing the same. Rotate, changing the aspect a little bit. And so you can play around with all of these to fine tune it. You might want to go in here with this photo. And now let's crop in. Go into something like this. How we had it before. And now this photo is a lot more balanced. These lines are a little bit better, and the lines of the pillars are more up and down. And I will say if you have people or other objects in your image that get distorted, it can start to look a little bit wonky. This image looks OK because there's no people that give us sort of a perspective. What should look good, what shouldn't should be worth. What shouldn't be warped. Ah, and also more subtle adjustments are generally better, so it's great for architecture photography, but not really great for things like portraiture. All right, so that's the geometry tool. Before we move on to some of these other advanced features, we're going to show you how you can export and save your photos so you can share them with the world, and that's coming right up next. 187. Lightroom CC: Exporting: in this lesson, we'll learn how to save and export and share your photos from light room CC. They've made everything a lot more simple in this program, and that includes saving. If you click this button up here when you have a photo selected, this sort of share save button you can press save to toe export it as a file. It brings up this window that gives you your file type options. You could choose either J Peg or the original photo sort of the raw file or whatever format it is that you are using. Then you could choose where you want to save it. So I'm going to create a new folder in my light Room CC folder here that we've been working from at its Choose that one and then you choose your size so you have a small file size. You have a full file size, which won't which won't compress it at all, or a custom if you choose custom. What you're telling light room is that you want the long side to be X amount of pixels, So if you want alongside to be 2000 pixels, it means that for a horizontal photo like this one, it will be 2000 pixels wide and then, depending on your aspect ratio, it will. It will change the height so that it's a perfect the perfect aspect ratio based off of this long side. So then, if I click, save Goto our fuller goto our edits. And now we have this J peg image exported, ready for us to share, print or do whatever under that menu. You also have the scent of Facebook option. All you'll have to do is click the go to Facebook, authorize your Facebook account, and you could automatically share to your Facebook profile that way. So they've really simplified saving your photos here. You don't get that many options, but that's what light room Sisi is all about. Simplifying the editing process. If you want more options, you can actually send this to photo shop. Right Clicking an image choosing edit and photo shop will open it up in photo shop so you can then do all of your edits there if you want, or save it as another file type, which we taught you in the photo shop section of this class. How to say from there. That's how you save an export from light room CC. Next, we're going to be looking at these other adjustments and more advanced techniques over here . 188. Lightroom CC: Healing and Clone Brushes: in this lesson, I'm going to show you the healing brush, which is a great way to remove any blemishes in your photo or also to clone one part of your photo and add it to another part. So if you click on this healing brush tool right here, it looks like a little Band Aid. What you'll see is a little circular mouse. Now it's your little brush. Let's zoom in. What I'm actually going to do is press the space bar to get my zoom tool click into my face . And now I can also click and move around. Say, I had a pimple. Or if I want to get rid of one of these, these freckles, you can adjust the size of your brush here. You could also just the feathering, which is the edge to make the edge a little bit softer and also the opacity. I would leave that at 100%. If you are trying to remove something completely, then literally just click and drag around. Cover up that pimple or that freckle, and what light room does is it takes another part of the skin that is a similar sort of color and exposure and texture, and it blends it with that part that you want to get rid of. So you can see here. This little circle is the one that we wanted to remove its taking from this area. If I move this area to my eye, for example, it's not going to look so good because it's saying that I want to blend my eye into the skin that doesn't work. So you want to make sure that this second point sort of matches that the color and the texture and exposure of the skin. Even if I put it down here, it might not look as good because it's a little bit brighter. It's a little bit more yellow there compared to read up here. So that's the hell brush. You also have the clone brush right here. So in a similar way, the clone brush can be used to remove blemishes. But here's what happened. So let me move over. Let's see this freckle right here. Say I click that right there. What happens is it creates the second part that is pulling from, but it doesn't try to blend it in like it did with the healing brush is literally just like a copy and paste. If I drag this over to my lips here, for example, it's literally taking my lips and copying it there. If I drop the opacity here, you can kind of see what's happening with the opacity, where it makes the part you're copying, a little less opaque of the part you're cloning. So this isn't good for necessarily removing blemishes in that sense. But what you can do is clone something. What if I want to put 1/3 eye on my forehead? I can increase the size of my brush. I click where I want to cloned the thing, then drag this selection part to my eye. Pretty crazy, right? So now we have this cloned I on my forehead, so that's not very practical. To delete this, just select it and click the delete key. Maybe it's something that would be a little bit more practical is if we wanted toe go into this photo, zoom out and we want it. Increase the number of stars in the sky so we would take the clone brush paint over here where there's no stars. Then take this selection point toe where there is a star and now we have a star there, maybe drop the opacity just a little bit, so it blends in a little bit more. So that's the clone and the healing brush. It's a great way to quickly remove any blemishes or make duplications on your photos. 189. Lightroom CC: Brush Adjustments: these next three lessons are going to be about the brush, the Grady int and the radial filters. These all work in a similar way where you are editing a specific part of your image. So let's go to this photo right here. It is a J peg image, so you don't have as much control with things like the exposure. But it will be a good example of how we use the brush tool, so just adjust the size of your brush. You can also adjust the feathering, the flow and the density. The density and flow are similar to like opacity, so it will apply thicker. We're not as thick. You also have an auto mask, but in which might work pretty well for this one. So let's paint over our cowboy here and say we want to bring up the exposure of him and the horse just a little bit. So we're painting over. It's kind of hard to see what we're doing right now, but when we let go and then hover over this point right here, the point that we started at this blue dot you can see what was painted on. And that's our selection that is going to be edited. Now you can see that it tried toe auto mask by selecting parts, the darkest parts of our image. It does try to look at where edges are with this auto mask. If you don't have auto mask on, you can kind of brush and let me show you. So now it just kind of select everything and doesn't use that auto mask technique. If you've painted on too much, you can use the erase tool here to erase your selection that you don't want to adjust. Now let's show you what you would actually use this four, and you have all these adjustments down here. So in that selection you can bring up the exposure. You can adjust the exposure values for highlights. Shadows, whites and blacks. Individually, you can increase the clarity. De Hayes ad saturation, Increased sharpness, Noise. Moray If you've ever shot a photo of someone with a very spine detailed tee shirt with like a checkerboard pattern or a stripe pattern, you might see a little bit of distortion in the shirt. That's what more are a is, and you can brush that in. Add more a reduction basically to fix that, you can adjust the temperature to make this part of image a little bit warmer or the tent as well. So that's just a cool way to adjust a specific part of your image. If you want to add a completely different brush, click this plus button and then create a new sort of mask. Because if I start to brush now, it will apply all these effects that I've already made to the rest of this image where I'm painting so you can see that if I have over this this is my selection. So now I'm addressing all of this. If I want to make a different adjustment to, say the sky, then I would click the plus button, increased the size and then reset everything. Then I get paint over the sky. Maybe we want to make this guy a little warmer. Maybe add magenta de hes a little bit, and now we have this second brush. If we want to delete it, we can click that and delete it. If we want to really paint it on thick, let's increase the flow Now. If we painted on, you can really see that's happening. So now we're making the sky really warm. And of course you got to go in there, find too in it, we can then go in, make our brush smaller. We can erase the parts that we don't want. Apply this effect too. Obviously, this doesn't like like a great picture, but I just want to show you how you use it. And so that's the brush filter. Next, we're going to go over the graduated and radio filters which work in a similar way, but you would use them for different scenarios. 190. Lightroom CC: Radial and Linear Gradients: and this lesson, we're going to go over the golden near Grady Int. So we click that and we're opening this image of Hollywood. I made a slight exposure adjustment to thes shadows. Just toe bring up the exposures in here. We might make it a little bit brighter overall so we can see what we're working with. So the linear Grady, it works in a similar sense in that you can affect just a part of an image. So let's reset all of these here, and what you want to do is just click and drag to create, and lanier fade from one side to the other of your image. So if I hover over this dot you can see that the top part of this image is going to be selected. So wherever you click from, that's the half of the image or the part that will be affected. So if I go from left to right like this now, the left side is affected. So this is a great way to effect just the sky, for example, like this where we can click and drag, and the bigger you have this gap, the more of a fade it will be weaken. Go in here afterwards and make it smaller. And if you make it really small like this, it's just like a sharp sort of adjustment, and you can click and drag around. You can click the middle line, rotate it like so. So now we can make our adjustments. So if we want to make the sky more orange, for example, you could make the sky more orange and warm. We could add de Hayes to just the sky, which is a good option for wanting to add De Hayes. But just for part of the image right, you do all these same sort of adjustments similar to what we saw with the brush filter. There's also this inver options so that you select the bottom half rather than the top half . And you also have a brush and a race option, which allows you to add or subtract parts of this. For example, in this graduated filter, I don't want this Hollywood sign in this mountain to have these adjustments, so I'll click the erase tool. You have the size, flow, feather and everything like we saw before. Now I can go in here in a race. The hills here so the hills aren't selected, but everything else is. So now. If we see our selection, want to get this down here as well. Decrease airflow and density and just paint over the top of these hills. See what we're looking at? That looks pretty good. So use the brush in the eraser tools to add or subtract parts that you want to be affected . So that's the linear ingredient. I'm just going to go to another picture. Let's go to the portrait of me and we'll show you the radio filter of the radio Grady Int. It basically does the same thing. Let's reset these, though with that selected, just click and drag out and you see that it creates this circle or oval. And so now what's being selected is the outside. If you want to invert it and select what's in the inside, you can choose invert and so say you want to make an adjustment just to my face. Weaken quickly, create a radial, Grady it like that and now make any adjustments over here on the right hand side. So for my face, maybe we want to increase the sharpness of my face. This is a cool way to actually create sort of a fake, shallow depth of field effect. Let's create a new radio filter just by clicking and dragging will also move this one around my face. But this time I don't want to invert it because I want to select everything outside of my face and let's drop the sharpness. So now it's making everything a little bit blurry. We could even drop the clarity you can see that gets really blurry. But maybe something like negative 32. It really draws your attention to my face. We can create a sort of custom than yet, so if we decreased exposure everything around, that's pretty extreme. So that's the linear and the radio Grady In similar to the linear ingredient. You have a brush and in the race tool so that you can add or subtract parts that you want to be affected in this image with this filter. So these air three amazing tools to really take your photo editing to the next level. Now, in the next lessons, I'm going to be doing some full edits to show you my entire workflow with editing a couple of these images rather than just showing you the tools so you can see from start to finish how I would add it. Photos in light room CC. Awesome. Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you in the next lesson. 191. Lightroom CC: Advanced Options and Presets: before we do the full demonstrations. I just want to mention this Mawr options menu, which is a great way for you to revert an image to the original. And you also have the keyboard shortcuts next to it. So you we know that if you pressed backslash, you can see the original. But to actually revert it, you conduce shift our or just click that button undoing that too. Get back here at its by doing control Z on a PC or command Z on a Mac. You can also see the hissed a gram of this photo, which is awesome for any photo. You know how his Graham works. If you've watched this entire class, you've got your blacks on the left, the highlights and the whites on the right. So this image has a lot of darks. This image, on the other hand, has more highlights. This one definitely has a lot more highlights. This one's a little bit darker. This one's definitely very dark and this is a good idea. Toe have this up while you are actually editing, especially the overall exposure. So just turn that on with command zero or just by clicking this button. You also can copy edit settings. So this is one reason I loved light room classic Sisi. Because if you're editing a lot of photos from the same location say you did in an event you did a bunch of group photos or portrait's for someone, Sometimes the set the overall settings like the exposure white balance, all of those things will be the same. So what you can do is just go there, copy with command, see? So if we'd select this photo, for example this one of the night Sky Command, see and then go to another photo like this one and then command V to paste it, it will apply all of those same edits to this photo specifically for this one. It was the split toning. Cool, right? The other thing you see here that we didn't go over yet are the presets. So you can get to presets here with this button shift p or by clicking this button down here, these air preset effects that you can do a little cool sort of filters and apply them to your photos. If you hover over them, you see what they look like. You can see that they are adjusting our settings over here, and then you confined to them to them, so you can actually apply a filter, for example, and then go into here and make the rest of your adjustments. So these air just quick ways to add a cool style or look to your photo similar to if you use instagram or a lot of the mobile APS how you can quickly apply filters that way. Another thing you can do is create your own preset. Say you love this kind of split toning that you created. If you want Teoh, save all of these settings as a preset click this dot menu. For more options, choose, create preset name. It split, toning one or whatever you want to save it as whatever you'll remember it with. And now you have under presets user presets, including this one. So now if we go to this image, for example, we can add are split Tony, and it resets everything and applies the same effects that we saved in that preset. If you ever download someone else's presets, you can install them. Just go to this button. Choose open presets folder user presets and then you should download the file. It's a dot light room template file and just paste it into this folder. So that's something you may purchase online. Or you see a lot of YouTubers and other people giving away presets, and you put them right there in that folder and they should appear under your user presets . Using presets is a great way to speed up your workflow, especially if you're becoming a professional photographer and doing things like events and portrait photography. All right, so those are just some more advanced features I wanted to let you know about before we get to our full editing demonstrations. I hope this has helped you become a better editor in light room, and I can't wait to see some of your work. So if you're editing your photos, please feel free to post them online to the chorus or just on social media. Antagonize tag. Will Sam myself video school online? We'd love to check him out, give you some likes and some subscribers. All right, see you in the next lesson. 192. Lightroom CC: Full Night Edit: in this lesson. I'm going to do a full editing demonstration to put together everything you've learned so far in this class. So I want to reset this photo to scratch so I can choose shift our or click this button to revert to Original. So starting with my work flow, the first thing I always do is crop my photos. So, using the crop tool, I'm going to adjust the aspect ratio to 16 by nine. It's my favorite aspect ratio specifically because I come from a video background and I just love having that 16 by nine widescreen format perfect for using as a desktop screensaver or putting on my phone. Then I'm going to rotate just slightly because it feels a little bit off something like that. I don't want to make it flat because I know that this part of the road is higher than that , that part. But just trying to get it balance on this front side of the road in this front side, too, and also maybe cropping in just a little bit so that the road just barely touches the edge of each frame. Okay, President, the return key were locked in and loaded and ready to go. So the first thing I like to do is make sure my white balance is good. So under white balance or under color, we have white balance weaken, go through these presets, maybe choose auto. I definitely sensed that it's a little bit warmer than I want. I can use other things to cool down the sky, but I am just going to go ahead and let's try our color picker. Pick something like this gray right here, which is the street, which should be a pretty much neutral color unsaturated. And that actually looks pretty good. Cool. So I'm happy with that. I'm gonna leave the color mixer for now, maybe actually, all go into the blue and see what happens if I boost the blue saturation. Yeah, that's pretty good. Usually I like to do this after I do my exposure adjustments, but that looks pretty good. Awesome. So now I'm going to go into my exposure adjustments. This has a wide contrast of exposures in this image you can see from the History Ram. It goes from basically pure black to pure white. I do like the contrast, but I also want to bring back some of that information, especially in the highlights here in the road. So the first thing I'm going to do is try to bring down the highlights and maybe play around with whites to see what that does. Actually, I think that bring down the highlights and bring up the whites. The whites are really this bright part of the headlights right here, which I don't mind being overexposed at all. I think it's fine if those are over exposed and I can't really bring back any information from them anyways because they are so great. So I'm happy with that. I do just like playing with the shadows just to see do I want to have more information in the shadows, not make it a little bit more contrast? E. I actually think I am happy with how it was before I might go into my point curve, so I'm going to choose my point curve and just see about adding a little bit of contrast this way. I could use the slider up here, but I like using the point curve to get super precise, so that's looking pretty good. I'm happy with that. next. Let's go under our effects. So my choice right now is Do I want this to have, like, a grungy look, everything sharp, or do I want to have it clean and do some noise reduction? And the reason I'm thinking about that right now is because I'm using this clarity slider. If I increase the clarity, I get this very sort of grand G look, which I think is actually pretty cool. If I want to decrease that, I can get sort of a washed out. Look, I don't get as much detail, but this would be good if I do want to decrease some of that noise reduction later. I think for this at it, I am going to be grungy. I'm gonna get this clarity, boost the clarity up. But you know what? After doing this, I don't like the clarity in the sky. I like it on the road. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to use a Lanier filter in a second to add that clarity to the bottom. For now, I'm not going to add any clarity to the whole picture. I'm not going to d hes it. No, not at all of and yet maybe adding a little bit of a vignette. Want to boost the feathering of it? We already have such a vignette from this lens and just the darkness around this curve. So that's fine Like that? Yeah, Looks pretty good. I don't want to adding any grain to it. Now with the split toning, I did kind of like what I did before, where I made the highlights a little bit warmer. Right now, it's a little too cool. So I'm gonna take my not my shadows. My highlights. Warm them up just a bit. I could make him super red to kind of add to that red tail light, more yellow, something like that. And I can turn it on and off just this effect with that button right there to see how that looks. And I like it. Don't want to go too crazy. Something like that. Okay, Yeah, I'm happy with that. All right, so that's our effects tab. Let's go on to detail. I might apply a little bit of noise reduction to the overall image just to get rid of some that luminous noise in the sky. Even though we're adding some of that greediness with the clarity slider. I still want to get rid of some of that noise in the sky for optics and geometry. I'm gonna leave those. I like how my lens looks. I'm not going to try to quote unquote fix it. All right, So next what I want to do is apply that clarity to the street with a linear Grady in. So if I check that, lets reset all these now let's create ingredient for the bottom half of the image. Something like that. Remember, if we hover over the center, we can see what we're selecting. Something like That's pretty good. Now let's increase the clarity. So now we are making that street super grungy, which I like. When I do that, it gets a little bit too dark, boosting that contrast of the street. So let's see what happens if I boost exposure. Ooh, that's looking pretty cool. Let me see if I just boost this the shadows because I don't want to boost the highlights that much more. And I don't necessarily want to boot the blacks because that looks a little faded out and I don't like that. Yeah, that's looking cool. Awesome. So that's cool for the bottom half. But what about this guy? I feel like this guy is not playing as important of a role in the story of this photo as it could. So I'm going to just click and create another greeting filter going from top to bottom. Lets reset these settings. Let's think about this. What would make this guy a little punch here, maybe increasing the exposure, Maybe if it was a little bit more blue. Even so, if we take this temperature and dragged to the left even more, we can get this night sky toe look really, really blue, which might be kind of cool, maybe boosting the shadows just a little bit so that the skies a little bit more pronounced when I do that have been yet around the edge starts to look a little bit two of and yet he to me. So I don't know if that's a word, but I might go back and decreased that vignette ing injustice. Second, let me try D. Hayes, which will actually increase the saturation and also a little bit of the clarity of the stars. I don't want necessarily the clarity, but the hazing helps a little bit saturation. Um, I don't think I'm going dio for this image, Sharpness, na, but that's looking pretty good. If I delete this and then undo, you can see the before and after, which I think looks pretty good. Now let me just look at this. I do want to get rid of parts of this radiant filter where these hills are so that these effects are applying as much to the hills. So let's go to our eraser. I got my flow and density all the way up to 100 so that it really erases same within these trees over here. So I hover over this. We can see our selection. It's drop our density and flow and just go over the edge. Little bit of these hills blended in just a little bit more. Just keep painting over until it looks a little bit better. Yeah, I like a little bit better to me now. Let's see the before and after before, after before. After I think it's looking pretty good. Let's go back to our overall adjustments, go back to the effects living yet, which I think I'm going to decrease just a little bit. And overall, I might just boost the exposure a little bit. Just all feels a little bit too dark. So there we have the before after before, after everything's looking pretty good. And I'm happy with this photo. I am ready to share this, So I'm gonna go ahead and click my share button save too. We're gonna not resize it will do full size. We're gonna save it there. Let's go to our finder In our editing light room, CC edits. And there we have our photo looking pretty good. There are a couple tweaks me those brushes I could have fixed a little bit better, but overall, I like this sort of grungy feel. It looks cool. The colors are very vibrant compared to the original. And I'd be happy sharing this online. Thanks so much for watching If you took a chance and edited this photo, we'd love to see how you came up with the specific style of your own posted online posted to the course and we can't wait to see it 193. Lightroom CC: Full Portrait Edit: Welcome to this new full editing session in light room Sisi. I'm taking this portrait image of myself. Who knows? Maybe I want to use this for the cover of my break out singer songwriter album coming out next fall. Not really. Because I don't sing. Let's get into photo editing, which is something that I do try to dio. So first things first, I always crop. My image is this one is actually a really good crop already. The only thing that is bothering me is on this right hand side. You see these brown branches? I'm not a huge fan of those, and also, I'm a little bit too far on the left hand side of the image. So let me crop in just a little bit. I don't want to crop in too much because I don't like images where my face like goes from top to bottom of frame. So I'm going to make it as wide as possible, but also get getting rid of those branches. Something like that, making my eye on that intersection of the third looking good to me. Cool. So then we're going to adjust our white balance. So for this image. We got a lot of green coming from the light bouncing through this tree. You might like that style. That might look kind of cool, but I do want to see what it would look like if I add a little bit more of magenta. Maybe warm it up a little bit. Yeah, I think warming it up a little bit, having just light tent magenta that's looking pretty good. It's a tough image because the lighting is so weird because you get all of that sort of green light coming from these trees in these branches. I will increase the vibrant quite a bit. I do want to increase the color and saturation of the green, but not so much of my face. So I'm gonna increase this quite a bit, maybe even decreased this overall saturation so that my face looks a little bit more natural. That's looking pretty good. Now let's play with the light settings because I really feel like this is where I can make this photo pop. I definitely want to bring up the exposure of my face. I can use a radial filter for that, but in general I do want to bring my blacks down, make it more contrast. E You can see with this hissed a gram that we have all these highlights, but nothing is really touching the left hand side where the blacks are, where pure black would be. So let's do that. Let's bring up the shadows. Highlights. Let's bring up similar to how I added to this before in the exposure section or lesson. I do want to make the background. I don't mind if it's over exposed something like that. So right now I'm kind of looking at everything except my face because I do like the contrast and the exposure of the plant. I'm still not 100% about my face, though, but I think I can edit that better with some radial filters later on, I'm going to leave the point curve, as is something I like to do is leave that. So at the very end, if I want to add a little bit of contrast to make it a little bit more dynamic, I can use that sort of as a crutch at the end. In terms of effects, I'm not gonna had any right now. Detail. Let's zoom in really quick. There is a little bit of noise, but I also my eyes aren't that sharp. So what I will do is do a little bit of noise reduction. There is some chromatic aberration going on. So let's go toe optics and see if that Oh, I guess I already have it on getting a lot of weird colors on the edges of things, So I helped a little bit. Not amazing, though. So the noise reduction looks good for in the plants again. I'm gonna be using a lot of brushes and radio filters toe edit my face to make it look better. So I'm not worried about the sharpness of my face right now, which got a little bit softer with the added noise reduction geometry. We're going to leave, as is cool. So now we get to the fun stuff. I'm not gonna remove any blemishes. Not that I didn't have any, but I'm just gonna leave my face as is. Let's go ahead and add a radio. Grady in lets reset all these settings, click and drag around my face, and I want to make sure I'm selecting my face. So let's do invert and Now I'm going to really boost the exposure of my face like that. So it pops a little bit more but also bring back down the blacks to increase the contrast. Yeah, that's starting. Look better. At first, it was kind of blending in with the background, which I didn't like. Spring down the shadows a little bit. That's looking a little bit better. When you add contrast like this, though, it increases the saturation. So what I am going to do is decrease the saturation here so that we're not adding too much red in my face. Actually, speaking of CEO, my ears are really red. That's from the sun, shining and behind. Let's see what we can do with the color adjustments. So if we go into color, it's going to read and see if we get decrease. See, that's pretty cool. Actually, I want to get rid of some that it might even be some of this pink. It's more of the red, actually purple, etc. Enough all right? Yes. So if I don't want to get rid of all the red cause, then I look like a zombie. But just a little bit, I think helps with getting rid of some that read in my ears, which looks a little bit better so they don't stand out like that. Okay, so back to our radio, Let's go here because I did that. I lost a little bit too much saturation overall. So I'm gonna go back, increase the saturation here, starting to look a little bit better. One thing that I noticed, though, is my lips starting to look a little dead there. So what I'm going to do is use a brush press space bar. Go to my lips, click over here. Let's resize the brush, reset our settings. Here. It's good. Now I'm gonna p over my lips. Looks like I'm a zombie. And now those selected soon back out. Keep pressing Z because I'm so used to a light room classic Sisi, where Z would zoom in or out. Now let's increase the saturation, and I don't want to add lipstick to me. Maybe add warmth, just subtle, just staying saddle. Phil and I want to go too crazy. That's looking a little bit better. Is turning off back on is very subtle, but it brings back a little bit of that color my lips that we lost from decreasing the red in the whole image. While I am using a brush, I'm going to create a new brush. We're gonna go into my eyes. We're gonna try to make my eyes pop a little bit more. So we have auto mask off. We're gonna go here for my iris, my pupil. So there we have those selected and now we want to boost clarity and saturation. That's how you can make your eyes pop a little bit more. You can also change the color a bit with the temperature intent. If you want saturation, We're also going to sharpen up those eyes quite a bit. Maybe boost the exposure JAA slightly, just slightly. So now if we see the before after now, you get a lot more color in my eyes, which I like. I also wanna improved the whites of my eyes make it pop even more so let's create a new brush, make it super small Gonna paint in the whites now to help me see where I am painting. I could do something like increase my exposure so I can really see where I am painting. Okay, So cool so that's good. Now lets reset all these. We don't want to increase clarity or saturation. What we actually want to do is kind of decrease the saturation so you can get rid of that red eye. That's something. If you need to get rid of some red, I paint over the whites of your eye and decrease the saturation. You don't want to go all the way, but just a little bit. And then let's boost the exposure just a tiny bit. Another thing you can do is instead of clicking and dragging. If you hover over these sliders and press up or down, you can actually adjust them with your arrows, which gives you sort of easier, an easier way to fine tune them. All right, so let's look at the before and after of just the eyes. Look how that pops way, way more than the original photo. Cool. All right, so let's zoom out again. So everything's starting to look pretty good. We got this nice sort of green tone going. Let's go back to our radio radiant. Let's try to get a little bit more creative, so I'm going to create another great aunt around my face. This time, though, we're going to invert, not inverted. So we're selecting everything. What we're going to do is adjust the sharpness, decrease the sharpness, decrease the clarity, getting our attention on my face. If you want a really shallow depth of field, what you can do is make this really small, so literally just my eyes, my mouth and the Maybe I'll go in here with my eraser. We'll decrease my density just a little bit and paint the front of my hair. Maybe I want a couple of these plants and focus like these ones up here being around my chin, my nose. Make sure none of that is out of focus. But now you get this sort of baked up the field because everything here has the clarity and the sharpness, sliders all the way down. One thing that you can do back with our brush tool to soften skin is to decrease the clarity of the skin, which helps make it look a little bit better. So let's actually decrease clarity the like, negative 25 or let's actually go toe. Negative. 30 in contrast, were going to increase sharpness. And this is a good sort of preset for smoothing skin. Let's decreased this increase. Our flow and our density just paint over like my nose forehead. So we're kind of combating what I've done in the past with a little bit of sharpening. But I'll show you the before and after. I don't want to get my eyes at all. So with this on off, very subtle on no, if you could see that, but without it a little bit more detail, let's actually decrease clarity even more so you can see it an extreme What would happen? My skin starts to look very, very soft. Now I don't want to go too far because I don't want to look like a porcelain doll. But something like that for some people, they might think their skin looks nicer. Okay, let's close this. Let's look at the before and after now. See what we want to dio before after before, after definitely a little bit more of a stylistic portrait at it. What I like most is that my eyes pop a little bit more of the colors are more vibrant. Definitely got those warm and green tones coming from the trees and the soft golden lighting from shooting this with backlit son at golden hour. Lastly, like I said, at the beginning, I'm going to go into my point curve and just see if adding a little bit of contrast can help make this even more dramatic. Dropping my contrast at the bottom or the exposure of the bottom. Really settle, though. And now I can see that before after I like a little bit more contrast, but not so much. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I like having that little bit more to cool. So I hope you enjoy this full edit. I'm gonna go ahead and save this to my files. Go here in there. Click Save. And there we have my photo ready to be printed for my new album cover. Awesome. Thank you so much for watching this tutorial. This is one photo I don't necessarily need you to edit and show me what you did to it. But if you want to feel free to post to the course, we'd love to see how you came up with your own style for portrait editing. Thank you so much for watching this lesson and we'll see you in another one. 194. Lightroom CC: Editing via the Cloud: in this lesson. I want to show you the browser version of Light Room CC. So if you go to a light room dot adobe dot com and then sign in with your adobe creative cloud account, the one that you used to sign up for light room CC, you can see all of your photos and even edit them in the browser. So when you log in, you'll see all of the photos that you've uploaded in the past. So you see these ones. It's organized by date. You also have your albums here, just like we created in light room. If you go to your dashboard, you'll see your stats. Like how many photos you've uploaded some news or anything like that. You also have this galleries on the left, so if you click that Globe click gallery, you can create a gallery with albums or specific photos of yours and share them online. This is great if you are a professional photographer and you want to use light room Sisi as your way of sharing photos with clients, you can do things like allow downloads, comments and likes. It's a great way to get comments and notes on specific edits as well. So click Add albums. You can choose an album from your edits. Add as a gallery. You can add an image of yourself. Here you can change your name description, and then this is the link to your gallery. So if you share this with people, they can access your profile basically your portfolio and with organized at its that our public for people to see. But the good stuff is really where you can add it, and I'm not going to go through and show you how to edit photos here. You can play around with it, but look it. If you click on any of the photos, this is the photo that we just edited. You can click this edit photo, but in the top left, and you get pretty much all of the same editing tools that we got in the doubt desktop version of Light Room CC. Things are a little bit laid out differently, so you've got your main adjustments. You've got presets up here. You got your crop over here. What you don't have are all the adjustment. Brush is radial filters and graduated filters in the browser version of light room CC similar to the desktop version you can rate flag. Then here is where you would see any comments. If you do share this photo in a gallery, people can post comments there, and this is where you would see them hopes. Let's go back into the image you get, download and share images as well. This is the thing that sets lighter MCC apart from many of the other photo editing applications out there. Google photos is great because you can access your photos from anywhere, but you don't have that ability toe. Edit raw photos online like you can with the cloud version of Light Room CC. As always, Thank you so much for watching this video for the watching this section of the course, and we hope you have a beautiful day. 195. Sharing: Intro: So now that you've learned how to take great photos and edit them, let's talk about putting them out there and sharing them with the world. This can be a bit daunting, and there is really no one best way to do this. It all comes down to sharing your style and your voice with the world, and there are a few ways to do that. Some of you might prefer toe on Lee be sharing with friends and people you know personally , so it can be a bit more personal with your posts and on social media, while others might want to share all your amazing photos and tell stories with them to raise awareness about certain things, whatever it is, we want to talk about where you share your work and how to build a portfolio that will best represent you from social media to your own website, we're going to dive deep into creating an online presence as a photographer. One thing to keep in mind is that being active on social media can be a full time job in while platforms like Instagram have helped to get a lot of people notice, there are other ways to of becoming a professional photographer at the end of the day, having your photos out there publicly for people to see and find is what matters. A place where you can send people to see your work from a specific project, but then start clicking through all the other work. Also choosing a stylistic approach to how you want to present your photos and work is very important. We will also routinely share great portfolios we find online and encourage you to see what else is out there. What people are creating and how they're approaching their work. Being inspired by other people's work is one of the best ways to motivate you to take more photos or try new things with your photography. First up, though, let's talk about social media. 196. Sharing: Online Platforms for Photographers: now, when it comes toe online platforms for photographers, there are a lot of options, and there's a slight difference between having a place to show your entire portfolio and building a social media presence. Well. Some people use their social media platform as their portfolio. I think it's best to also have a place where you have your entire photography portfolio, a place where you don't just post one of your favorite photos from the weekend, but all the best ones to really show off your work. To start, though, let's talk about social media and the one that stands above the rest. Instagram Instagram has completely changed how photographers share their work and get recognized. One thing I do want mention right off the bat, though, is that you don't necessarily need a big Instagram following to be working as a professional photographer. But it is becoming a more popular way of companies and brands, finding photographers toe work with. They like the idea that if you have an online presence that while you are taking photos or when you eventually post them that not only are they getting good photos but also have a huge new audience Also, a great thing about Instagram is that you can share to multiple other social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook instantly when posting to your instagram. One downside that I hope in Syrian fixes is that because you compress your photo to fit their platform, when you share on these other sites, you can lose a bit of quality. And most of time it's Berto upload to those sides separately. Another limitation with Instagram is that you're really only posting one, maybe a few photos from a single photo shoot. And while it gives people a taste of your style, typically they will ask to see your portfolio or more of your work in the following lesson , we will dive a bit deeper into using instagram. But let's not talk about those other online photography communities people used to share their work and get inspired by other people's work. 500 picks is by far one of my favorites. It's super easy to use and offers a lot if you are willing to pay for the membership at a basic level, 500 picks allows you to upload photos directly from your computer or connect to it with your Instagram, Dropbox Flicker and several other online platforms where you might have noticed. Or you can select multiple and then upload them instantly. Once you do that, you can add descriptions, technical information about the photo, tag it so other people can find it, and then you can share it. It's super easy, and that's really just the beginning. From there, you can also make either public or private galleries that can either be your own photos or also include other people's photos that you find while looking around other pages. Once you start looking around, you will see how many other creatives incredibly talented people are on there. Being an active member is key commenting on people's work, liking their photos. Sharing your own work, of course, is huge. There are various groups you conjoined based on what camera you use or types of photography that you are into and again, actively commenting and liking people's photos will help get more people to seeing your work. Another great thing you can do through 500 picks is actually allow people to purchase your photos, which I think is a great feature because if you find something you really enjoy, you can support that photographer, or if someone really enjoys one of your photos, they can purchase it and support you from their 500 picks. Goes even a bit further. They lie. You toe automatically take the photos you've uploaded to your profile and create an online portfolio. Ah, professional looking website that you can share with clients. They have quite a few really nice looking layouts, and you can customize your portfolio quite a bit now. LA. This does require a subscription, and they do offer discounts from time to time but is worth looking into if you are starting to get more work as a photographer overall, I would highly recommend checking out 500 pics, but know that this isn't the only one out there. Flickering Behaves are two other online communities that are fairly popular. Flicker, which is run through Yahoo, has been around for quite some time and gone through a few upgrades. It offers a lot of the same things as 500 picks when it comes to sharing your work and discovering other people's work. Flicker boasts that it is almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world. I'm not sure which is the best. But Flicker is definitely a popular choice in a great way to share multiple photos with friends and family and allow them to make comments on all of them. You can also really easily search the massive database of all the photos on their by keywords colors find people associated with certain keywords and also find various groups that matched your search. One thing I found surprising while looking around was the community on there, all the various groups and how active people were. I personally never got that into flicker, but have a lot of friends that use it every day. Not only just a share photos, but to talk with other photographers here, how they achieved a certain look or promote their own work to get feedback on it. Ba Haines is similar to 500 picks, and that is a great and easy way to make an all my portfolio and connect with other creatives. It is connected to Adobe Creative Cloud suite, so if you don't use that not sure makes sense to use. There are also love other types of creatives on there, like graphic designers and animators, since it's connected to the entire creative cloud suite. It's pretty incredible to see what kind of stuff people are creating with Adobe Sweet. But if you are looking for purely photography, Behan's might not be the right choice for you. That being said, if you use Adobe Creative Cloud Suite, you can make really professional quality portfolios and easily share them with clients. Another site that is great for sharing your work, but maybe you wouldn't initially relate with photography is Pinterest. While people use pinches for a number of reasons, when you log in, you will see that you are basically schooling through thousands and thousands of photos. Now this isn't going to give the same sort of community engagement, but is a great place to find inspiring images and share your own creativity that might inspire someone else. So these are just some of our favorite sites that we thought were worth sharing their law out there, and honestly, it's hard to be the reach that Instagram has. What I personally have set up is my instagram in a personal website that has my portfolio one there. Beyond that, I will use 500 pigs or Pinterest or instagram for inspiration and seeing what other people are doing. Either way, we will get to building your portfolio in a later lesson, but next we're gonna talk more about Instagram. 197. Sharing: Instagram Success: So let's talk Instagram, Assuming you've used it or at least heard of it, I will just briefly talk about what it's all about. From there we will get into using your photography to build a following and how to create a really nice looking account. This could be helpful not only and sharing your creativity, but also be a useful way for brands and companies to find you and maybe even hire you for work. One thing to understand is that people who have a serious instagram following work hard for it, connecting with her followers, sharing things that their audience wants to hear and see. Let's start simple and build from there. At the most basic level, Instagram is all about sharing what you're up to through actual posts and the insist story in which your videos and photos will only last for 24 hour window. We will go deeper into the post shortly, but first I just want to mention that the inside story is a powerful tool that enables you to share quick thoughts or funny moments with your audience. Well, taking great photos is important putting yourself out there and sharing things that matched your style and online presence will really help viewers connect with you. On a more personal level, it's a great way to share things that maybe aren't quite at the caliber that you would post , but still something you think is worth sharing. It's also a great way to bring your viewer along for the ride and see what you go through to get the shot. Some people like doing selfies in talking to the camera, and others prefer to keep the video pointed outward, and others prefer to share images with text over them. Regardless of how you want to share these, The main thing is that you build a story and really progress in what you are sharing, so your viewers want to click to see what happens next. Also, when people respond to these stories, it's always good to interact with those that show interest or complement your work. Now it comes to your actual post. There are a few things to keep in mind. You want to build a style that you are going to stick with, at least for some period of time. Staying consistent is difficult, but over time it will really pay off and people will come to your page because they like your style is not to say that you shouldn't try new things with your photography, but people will start following you because they like what you've been posting. And if you radically switch this up, they might not enjoy it as much, or they will love it. There really is no one answer here. Consistency does help, though. Also, if you really want to be a travel photographer, for example, or animal photographer, maybe a sports or portrait photographer, focus on that one area. Try to mainly share photos in that area. Push yourself to consistently have new photos of that one type of photography. This way. When someone is looking for a great portrait or sports photographer, they will think about you first. Outside of what you post. What you write is equally as important. This is your voice. What do you want to say? And how do you want your presence to be all mine? Do you want to be funny and witty and have captions for each of your posts? Maybe you want to get really deep and share in depth, lengthy captions that provoke conversations. Maybe you just want to keep it short and simple, so people focus on your image and not the text underneath. Whatever it is, try to make your caption feel like they are really coming from you and have your style behind them again. You can always switch this up, and if you really want, you can always write that lengthy heart felt post every now and then that puts it all out there and then get back to your normal types of captions. Hash shagging, geo tagging and tagging People or companies that are either in your photo or their associated with your photos are all very important tools for getting more eyes on your photos. Hash tagging is essentially tagging your photo with various keywords. So if you hashtag sunset when someone searches sunsets, they're more likely to find your photo. Hashtags, like hashtag TBT, have become synonymous with instagram posts you see on Thursdays because it's throwback Thursday and that enables you to post older photos and show people obey of your past, even if only a week old, I highly recommend looking up trending or popular hashtags that might fit your posts because these more popular Hashtags will have a lot more eyes on them and more people are likely to see your post this way. Something I do which again everyone has their own style is to write my caption in post a photo. I then comment on the post with all the hashtags I want. This way, people won't necessarily see all the hashtags right and focus on the caption itself, which even in that caption might include one hashtag that you wanted to highlight. Geo tagging is also important and can be used in a few ways. Some people like to share where they're posting from. And Ali People like to share the location of where the photo was taken. There really isn't a correct way of doing this. Just depends on you. Some people will ji attack things like Earth when posting a more heart felt post or the White House when getting political a tent of the day. This is just another way for people to find your photos. When they searched that location, they will see all the photos air tagged there in this same way, tagging people that are in the photo or people that might be associated with the Post is a good way to get people to see your photos. For example, all tag at Sony l Foe when I posted a photo that I took with my Sony or I will take my friends if they are in the photo that I took this way, When people are on their profile and look at images that that person is tagged in, they will see my photo. Some people prefer not to tag anyone in their photos, but again, this is personal preference beyond all this. When first getting started, try posting at least a few times a week. It's good to be posting consistently so that people can see your work, but I would highly recommend not posting more than once a day. If you game plan out what photos you want to post in advance. That could make it all a bit easier during the week and help you get more creative with your posts. At the same time, you want to make it seem as if each photo each post that's what you're currently doing. You can try and take photos and write captions that match upcoming holidays or major events so they match the current popular themes. Overall, social media is a tricky thing, and finding your voice can take some time. Some people get it right away, and other people struggle just to write one caption. Try not to overthink it too much in just post things that match who you Are and what you find entertaining. Also following people that inspire you and have an online presence that you admire is a really helpful way to see how they approach posting in caption writing. Best of luck out there and be sure to follow us. 198. Sharing: Create a Portfolio with Wix: Phil here, and in this lesson, I'm going to walk through building out an actual portfolio using Will's wedding photography . As an example, we're going to be building a portfolio that looks something like this based off of Wickes dot com, and you can sign up for weeks for free and get a free account and follow along. Now. The first step in building out a portfolio is to choose the photos that you're going to upload. You might have to make some changes here and there later on, but I think it's better to go through your photos first before you start building it out online. So you have everything ready to go. You might also want toe right out some information like a little about me paragraph or a few paragraphs, and we're going to be using what will has on his other website. Ah, as our example. So Step one is to choose your photos and to write out an about me section. So let's go to the finer here. You don't have all these photos, and this is a lesson where you'll have to have follow along with your own photos. But what I'm going to do is pick the very best photos that we're going to upload for will. So here are a few weddings that will shot, and my goal is to have as much variety as possible, especially if you're a wedding photographer or an event photographer. You want to show as many weddings as you've captured to show that you can do a variety of styles that you have been to a variety of weddings and it looks like you're not just starting out now, this might be hard if you actually harsh starting out. But as soon as you do multiple weddings, make sure you spread out sort of the photos that you put on your portfolio. You don't want them all just coming from one wedding. So just looking at these top photos, I'm gonna mark them in my finder by just right clicking and marking labeling them so that I know which ones I want to use. So starting from the top, I'm definitely going to include one of these ring shots. I don't see any other ring shots, and that's what I'm looking for is a variety of types of shots. So I see this one as I scrolled down. That one looks pretty good. We've got sort of these dark silhouettes. Here's one silhouette. I like this one better. So I'm gonna slick this one down here in the bottom left. Then we've got a bunch of kissy shots. See how these ones are all kind of similar. Lots of negative space. They're all great, but I wanna use one. That kind of shows this style and this one might be the one that I like best. It's good to show group shots, so showing a group shot like this is probably a good idea. I'm going to scroll down and see if there's any other group shots that will send me. Nope, there's not. But this one is pretty good. This is an action shot showing wills ability to get that part of the wedding the bouquet tossed. This is a shot that I know will love these sort of detail. Close up, shot. And then the emotional shots are definitely good for wedding photographers capturing this kind of emotion. Nice, creative, shallow depth of field there like that. I want to make sure we get a shot of this guy right here, which shows a little bit more variety. So it's like, Do we pick this one? This one, I think this one from them. Motion. I like this detail. Shots of the bride putting on her shoes. This one's pretty good, too little detail portrait. And this is a good, just kind of standard couple shot. I like this one, too. I know Will really likes that one. So that should be a good place to start with. Those one selected this one. Actually, I'm gonna also include walking away along this street. That's a pretty cool shot. And because it's a little bit different than this photo, you can't necessarily tell if it was the same exact wedding or not. Well, you should be able to guess, but it's good toe kind of show that variety awesome. So that's my process we're going through and picking the top photos. Now let's get into Wickes and start building out our portfolio. Now you can use any other sort of portfolio platform. You could self host your site. With WordPress. You can use squarespace or whatever it is that you want, but this is a great free option to get started, and that's why I wanted to walk through this option for you. So what you want to do is click the sign in button right there or the get started. If you don't have an account already, click the sign up. But in here to create a new count, you're gonna have to use your email and password and click. Sign up. The cool thing about Wix is that you can have multiple sites under one account. So I have signed and I have a previous site that I started building. You won't probably see this, but you will probably see a button that says create new site or something like that. So go ahead and click the create new site button. Then it gives you the types of websites that you're going to be creating. We are going to be creating a photography websites of click photography. Then it has a number of templates, and you can view these templates just hover over them. Click view and it's going to open that up and you can see a demo of what that website looks like. And they have a lot of amazing ones. I'm gonna go ahead and pick this wedding. One click edit. So the cool thing about the template is that it build it all out for you, and all you have to do is kind of swap everything out so you can literally just click in the text. We could just type in our new text. William Kernaghan Wedding Photography If you want to change the background of this top images, just click in the background. Choose change, strip background, click image and now you're going to want toe upload the photos that you're going to be using on your website. So click upload images. And then now I'm going into my wedding photos album or folder, and I can select all of the ones with the red label, which makes it super easy for me to find the ones that I have selected. This is also good that they're labelled so that if I ever do want to go back and upload new ones, all know which ones I have uploaded previously. And whenever I upload new photos, I'll just mark them as labelled red. Or I could even do a different color to show that this was like my round two up loads so that I know which ones have been uploaded in the past. Once it's uploaded all your photos, just click done and then you want to choose the photo that you want to use as the background, and this might take a couple tries to see which one actually looks best. I think this one is going to look pretty cool for that kind of top banner, these this couple walking away. So I'm going to select that one and choose change background. It's gonna take a second to upload, and now we have that photo in our background, which I think looks really good up there. Next, let's edit this about me sections, so I'm going to go toe wills website really quickly. Just copy his bio. Of course, you'd probably want to write a unique bio for your wedding photography. Double clicking in this text box, pasting it, making sure there's the proper spaces, and that looks good. Now I'm gonna edit this photo, but the first thing you'll notice is that when I add more text, it kind of move this part of the website down. The cool thing about Wix is everything sort of modular, so you can just literally click on a box, an image and click and drag the edges to make it bigger or smaller. So I just clicked and dragged that to make sure that it meets up with these photos down here. So I'm just going to choose change image. And I actually didn't upload the image of will that I wanted to just this one. And I have that photo selected and shoes image. It's gonna edit it. So now we have this photo here, but I don't really like how Will is on the left hand side of this box so we can adjust the crop clicking that crop button you could zoom in or out. So maybe zooming out might look good. And then I'm also going to crop this block or this box for the photo to the right. Actually So attained the left side and dragging to the right. Something like that. Now, going back into my crop setting zooming out just a little bit more. So I think that looks a lot better. A lot more balance. So next you have all of these photos in this sort of gallery. So this is a gallery, so I'm just going to click manage media to choose the photos that I want to include in this gallery. So I'm gonna select all of these. I'm gonna choose delete, and then I'm going to hit this ad media button up here images. And now I'm just gonna go through and select all of the photos, except for that top one that we used at the top of the website to include in this gallery. And then she was add to page. You can adjust the order by clicking and dragging them, which might be a good idea to make sure it's a well balanced that perhaps there's not two photos from the same wedding in a row. If you don't like that, anyways, Or maybe you do want that putting your best images at the top so that those are the ones that people see. You could also arrange by title or file name. If you've given them a title or have a file name. Here's the title over here on the right side so you can go through and in Wicks, give them a different title so you just type it. Name 12345 etcetera. So now let's click done and see what this looks like. Awesome. So now we have all of these photos in this gallery. The one issue, though, is that the crop is a little weird on some of these images, and you can adjust that in back in our manage media options. So say, for example, this photo of her putting on her shoe. You can't really see what's going on, so I want to adjust that by clicking. Manage Media is going to open up these photos. Click on the photo You want to adjust? Click this button here for Put the focus where you want the most attention, and now you can click and drag or just click actually on the foot, which has the most attention. And you might want to do that, make sure everything is on the right. Focus. Here. Everything is looking pretty good. That's good Here. We might want to go over to the right a little bit here, over to the right, a little bit. These rings down this one. Definitely go to the left. So when that one's pretty good me down a little bit, this one definitely go down a little bit. Click done and now you can see that this photo of her putting on her shoe is a much better cropped are composed image. Now, I have sort of this extra row here, and there's also this sort of background layer down here. So I might actually delete this photo from this gallery and put it down here so that we don't have this awkwardly blink. Rose. Let's actually delete that done. And now we have this perfect grid with all these photos. Now, the same thing for this block right here. Let's choose change trip, background, choose image. We're going to choose this one right here that we used before that we just took out, not cropped properly. So you want to go to settings? And then where it says, Where's the position? Change this position to move it up or down, So I'm gonna move it up, are down. Actually, some moving the crop down like so. So we see them, and then this might be an example where we move this quote up, you can change the quote if you want. That's looking pretty good. Now we might need one more image here, so let's go ahead and change the strip background, just the image. Or for now, I'm just going to show you that there's lots of these cool textures that you can play around with two or stock images that they have. So say you want this nice Boca over here or so, just like this color that might be cool to you, then want to adjust all of your contact information, his copyright image at information at the bottom of the page. And then, if you want to preview this, to see how it would actually look as a Web site in a browser click preview and now it's going to show you what it looks like. The issue, the thing with, um and this has a cool sort of parallax effect right here. I love that photo at the bottom like that. The issue and same with the top one. The issue with what wicks dot com is that they will put ads for Wix or maybe other things in their partners on your Web site if you don't have a plan, and that's sort of just the default, if you are going with their free plan, which, if you're starting out, is totally fine um, I think it's fine with ads, but you may want to pay if you want to remove those. So another thing I noticed with this template is, if you hover over it, it shows the title of the photo, which right now is just the file name. So you'd want to go through there and give it a new title because people can actually click through and do like a full screen look of these photos. So you might want to show Give them a better title there. So this is cool for the browser. The menu, the way it works is it's just a one page sort of parallax effect. So if you just click on one of these buttons, it scrolls down to that part of the website. If you want to see what it looks like on mobile, just click the switch to mobile button up here. Choose at it mobile view, and now you can see what the mobile view looks like. You want to make sure that this looks good and probably edit it. Make sure that the crop of these photos looks better. You know the point of focus and everything for the mobile version looks good. Let's go back to the editor. We'll go back to the desktop view and a desktop view, and that's pretty much it. If you want, you can edit this menu, so if you click manage menu, you can give these a new name. For example, if you want to change the name of portfolio toe photos or something like that, you can do that. If you don't have a client's album section, which, if you click head, it looks like it adds that sort of clients album section. Then you can get rid of that. That's also another part where you can, um, ad specific albums for clients so that they can see their photos. I'm gonna go ahead and delete that, though, and you see that I kind of ran through this step by step, showing you all the options just for quickly editing this template. But there is so much you can do. You could adjust the background of your website. You could add text with this text gallery over here. You could add new APS forms instagram feed, which is kind of cool. So if we want to add wills, instagram feed, we can do that. So it's populating right here. Choose setting, and then you would want to connect your INSTAGRAM account. That would be a cool thing to do next to the about me section or at the bottom. Gonna delete that just by hitting the delete key on my keyboard, you can add a blogged. You could manage your booking section over here in all sorts of cool stuff. That about wraps up this tutorial. I want to let you kind of go through, play around with everything, make sure everything looks good on your end. If you need help, just click this help button in the top of the Wicks website, and there's lots of FAA cues and support that you can get here. Once you are done and ready to publish, just click the publish button right here, and that's going to make your website live to the world. And here is the U. R L for your site, which is basically your Web address in the name of your website that you created. If you want to upgrade this, you can. There might be a little upgrade button down here or if you go to site and then site manager . You'll have lots of options about the plan that you're on. You could upgrade your plan. You can connect your own domain name. You can purchase your own domain name. So it actually says, Will Carnahan, wedding photography or whatever your website, you might want to be cool. So anyways, I hope you enjoy this sort of walk through tutorial, and it kind of helps you out, gets you an idea for how you can quickly create a professional looking portfolio in really less than 20 minutes or so. Thanks so much for watching and we'll see you in another lesson. 199. Sharing: A Chat about Online Presence: welcome to another chat. And as always, if you're interested in this topic of growing your online presence, continue watching, if not feel free to skip this. It's really for people who are just totally into this class and want don't want to learn more. So this question is just for new photographers, online presence for photography or for really anything any kind of business or brand is so important now. I mean, I don't think you could really start a business without having an online presence nowadays . It would be really hard anyways. So for people just starting out, what's like the most important things toe do to build your online presence? I mean, I think if you're working as a photographer and even if you're knocking jobs to, like, be routinely taking photos and just, you know, putting yourself out there sharing your work, it doesn't necessarily need to be every single day. But you know, at least once a week or a few times a week, um, I think with your online portfolio or your website keeping that up to date with your work eyes huge and then through suit, social media sharing what you're up to um, you know, I found that even going out and just wanting to test something or try something new, all going like, so share going out and doing that and that it engages people in a way. Um, and it really whatever the platform is that you use, it's just being consistent people, you know, through social media, people will think like, Oh, like I need a portrait photographer over. I saw this one person, and they're always posting photos of great portrait like we should use that. It's just a good way to remind people like this is what I'm doing Here is my style. Here's what my look is or whatever it is, and they'll reach out to you then and it's It's a great way to find clients or connect with other creatives that maybe you won't collaborate with you or something. Uh, yeah, well, kind of following up on that. Is there any other thing besides social media online? I don't know, Yelp or other platforms that you've had success getting clients building your brand on. I would say between, um uh well, I'm coming more from, like, sort of a wedding world because that was my main business. But websites like the not or wedding wire or those free those free ones the not pretty expensive, depending on your area but getting yourself onto a site or onto blog's or in other relationships with other vendors of the same event type s so that they could do stories on you. Or you can shoot for them or they can mention you in, you know, on their blog's or their websites is good, I think. Yelp, I think you you had your old wedding videography company on yelp And like even still, I'm were not functioning as a wedding photography company. Where, but we're still getting enquiries like all the time. Yeah, and And all that was was like 10 good reviews, a website link and some great photos and some information. And because people often go to yelp immediately to search for something. Yeah, and you know, if they type in wedding photographer, portrait photographer in your area, it's gonna pop up. Yeah, whatever the Whether it's forum social media, whatever is having your website like that, you have to be able tohave it click to something and you yeah, so, like having your own website that I think is really essential and that combined with the social media, is important. And I think now, on Instagram I just started doing the business. Instagram. Have you done that? Yeah, I don't know. You don't yet, but you can see analytics and it'll tell you how many people are clicking on your website in your link so you can see the transition of when I post photos. How many people are actually leading my way into my website? And then that's looking at my contact with us looking at my portfolio? Yeah. So having that website set up before your social media's Yeah, and I'll just say, just from starting my own business, not just for photography but for video school online to keep things. One which Sam mentioned is consistency is really the key to success, I think, in starting a business and growing a brand, and it's gonna take a while. I mean, I was blogging once a week, at least for five or six years, up until this point, and it was because I was doing that and posting videos basically weekly on YouTube that I've built track enough traffic to sustain a business online, and I get a lot of questions not just in this class but in my other classes. You know, asking like, how can I get more followers? How come people aren't watching my videos? How come I'm not getting people to buy website? And the truth is, no one's just going to find your website out of the blue. You have tow, you have to create interesting content. You have to post it regularly. We live in a world where search engines are really the main way that someone finds you. So whether it's Google or whether it's yelp just being on there and being on there, a lot is the best way to get people to actually come to your website and also reaching out to those other things you know, interacting on other people's pages. You click, you know, commenting on things or whatever it is. And just so you're in that form, your in those things, you being a part of those different communities, whatever you know, type of photography. It might be be a part of those communities, be active in it, and that then will Oh, this person says great things all click on the you know, it's about being engaged alongside show sharing your own work. Yeah, totally. Yeah, totally. Just you can't just be in a silo by yourself, posting stuff. You have to connect with other people. And that means people will more likely find you. Yeah, you got to be social online on then. The other thing I was gonna just quickly mention is this balance between picking one or two platforms and really going deep in those platforms and then also being everywhere. And this sort of approach of being everywhere, having a profile on Pinterest, instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, your website. It's a lot to handle. So my advice is, while I do think you should have profiles on all of those platforms of that if someone is searching for your brand or your business on those platforms, you pop up, I think focus on a couple like Instagram. I think for photography is really important. So focus, perhaps on Instagram and then on those other platforms. Maybe just put out some of your best content and then make sure that it's linking back to your website so that if people do find it on those platforms they can. They know you're there because when I search for brands and they're not on Facebook or they're not on Instagram, it's like, What are you doing? Like, yeah, like in the modern world, you need to have those accounts so that people, you know, know that your president, But I think it's hard to do that unless you have a full team on all those platforms, so you really have to pick one or two toe to do well. Otherwise, you're spreading yourself too thin. Cool. Those were some ideas for growing your online presence. Hope you enjoy this chat and we'll be chatting about some more coming right up. 200. Sharing: A Chat about Getting More Followers: We've talked a lot about Instagram in this course and with this shot, we just want to talk about how you conspire civically, get more followers, and this could probably be used. This advice could be used on other platforms as well, but we're going to use Instagram Mazar example. So just putting out photos isn't going to be enough. What tactics have you guys used successfully to get people to actually follow you? On Instagram? My biggest, most successful tactic has been hash tagging. I just throw a bunch of hash tags on every photo that ideo um and then not only do I do that, but I find ones that are popular. I think Sam talks about this in this lesson, but finding ones that are popular that people go to because on Set and I'm shooting a lot, I tend to do actor's life, and that's a really popular one, even though nothing to do with acting. It still drives people to my photos, and then they start to look and get in the deeper but not only hash tagging and finding a popular ones is clicking on those hashtags and then going and commenting on other people's photos. This is such a snipe e sniping thing to do, but I look for photos that have very little comments or very little likes, because I know that person will be like who's liking and who's following your interesting. And then they'll end up, you know, coming and checking myself out. And often I find some really cool pages doing that at the same time. And I treat Instagram kind of like Pinterest in that there's like, a lot of inspiration out there, and people want to be inspired by your stuff as well. So if you confined that interaction, uh, it'll, I think, lead to more followers, and it's been successful for me. I only have like 1700 followers, which is like more than maybe the average beginner photographer. But, um, you know, I think the more you do that in, the more you post photos in a specific world, the better it will go. Great, Sam, Any other ideas? Yeah. I mean, I do think, you know, posting your work, hash tagging, geo tagging, tagging people involved UK manufacturer. You know a lot of things I talked about in the lesson, but engaging that community and going out. And yeah, liking rain and people's photos if you actually like it. And if it's the type of photography you're interested in following those people, you know a lot people want it to be where they don't follow more people than are following them. Type of thing just cause the numbers game. But you do have to fall in, but going and liking their photos, they'll see like, oh, who is this person like in my stuff and they'll lead them back to your page so you can't just be posting. You also have to be engaging people on Instagram. What about collaborating with people who might have a bigger following? I know you've had experience with that. Can you kind of talk about that idea of using someone else's audience to grow your own audience? Yeah, I mean, I toured with the band major Lazer Diplo, so obviously they both have huge followings. I was actually with Major Lazer when they had 400,000 followers and by you know, by now I think they're close to three million. So I was alongside that right into this guy alongside the right of them growing now. Yeah, I was part of all that was also traveling with really talented photographers who every now and then I'd get their way. So they have to take a photo of me. And that really helped to to get some cool shots of myself. No. Typically, I don't post myself on social media, but typically people want to see photos of yourself. I mean, that really did help grow my following a lot more. Not just my work, but here's me. Yeah, that made a big difference. And then also, of course, to instant story. Um, the fact that I was showing people like behind the scenes or I'm with these people and, you know, people want to see famous people. Not everyone is going to be in those the same situations. But I think that's a great piece of advice, though. Is just this idea of sharing your life sharing yourself. And like you said, not everyone will want to do that. But that's the That's one of the main reasons people will follow you. They love seeing pretty photos and stuff, but a lot of that might be photographers, and they're gonna be interested. Maurin, you know, seeing you seeing, you know, the behind the scenes. That's why video school online has grown so well because it's not just about teaching you photography skills, but on the YouTube channel and Facebook page. You know, I share behind the scenes looks at you know what we're doing and people love that kind of thing. Well, it's because they appreciate how you talk or what you talk about or you know what you're into and it's it. It is supposed to be personal. On the certain level. It's also, I would say, You know, I think a lot of our things, you know, we tell people go out and take photos and a great thing of photography's, you know, going out there, um, going around with other photographers. I mean, you know, I've gone some of my best shots because I was working with other people and they saw me in the in my element. They snapped a quick shot of me, and it's just a nice way to, you know, and then also doing the same for them. Make shots of them. So I think it's a fun way, and I've seen a lot of photographers grow like that. Where they get five of them and they go around a city doing street photography, and they all get these amazing portrait's of themselves. And then they tagged their friends who took the photo. And it's like it is this weapon that has grown. Yeah, yeah, Cool. Well, a few good ideas for growing your instagram following that you can use for other platforms as well. Let us know if you have any ideas to that have worked for well for you posted in the class . I'm sure that other students would really enjoy hearing your experience to. 201. Sharing: A Chat about Best Web Platforms: welcome to another chat. This one is about continuing to build your online presence, talking about website builders, creating a website portfolio as a photographer. So really quickly. What Web builders are you guys using for your portfolios and websites? Squarespace But saying skirts fights that we do have we do have, actually, we do have another one that, um, we use called Zen Folio, which actually has the capability of building out a website. We just happen to use squarespace for our company together. But those Empoli one also holds photos for your clients and as a client database for photography that I use today for our corporate clients, where they can log in with a password I think is used for my wedding. Did you? Yeah. So you units book could log in and see every folder that I've created? Yeah, it's a great, great platform. I mean, I've also I was on WordPress for a while. I played with Ba Haynes's, um, system of using your building portfolio through there. I've played with a lot of them, and just because our businesses website is also on squarespace and made it easier for my personal toe beyond there as well. So you kind of said that hesitatingly, though. What's the problem, or what issues have you found with? I think we have are separate issues with it, but I actually don't mind squarespace. I just think it's like, um, basic against basic, from the sense there's a kind of a learning curve to it. Maybe it's cause I update my website so little that every time I sit down to change it like the entire interface has changed. Yeah, I mean, that's one of the things they pitches that you never have to do any updates, yourself and it. But then they end up doing all these days, all these updates. You're like, Oh, there's all these new templates that I can use of these new like things like these. I think it's great for a very basic landing page, like for my cinematography stuff on photo stuff. Really, It's got a great landing page. It's got contact page about me, and it's got my portfolio like it's just very like simple, easy to build. It's quick, it's cheap, it's not that expensive. And I mean between Wickes Squarespace, like there's so many different website builders out there And if you really you know, he's a gallery of my photos. He's about Page. Yeah, he's landing page. Uh, most of them will be able to do this, and maybe there's a deal going on or something. So it makes more sense to do one of the other. Yeah, uh, I will say My roommate works in website development, and he talks trash on all of them. He's just like you should be on WordPress. There's so much more customization that can happen. And it's incredible what you can dio. Yeah, but you have to get pretty deep into it. I think that's that's been my issue is like we're photographers you want taking photos. I don't want to sit at my computer and make a websites, honestly, one of my least favorite things. Yeah, but it is so necessary and it needs to happen. And so I think things like Squarespace and Wicks are great because you could just do it, get it over with, uploaded playing a couple days. But I think wordpress like it comes from a world where you can just do anything and everything. It's like you have the whole and I'm on WordPress with video school online and my personal website Philip veneer dot com. And what I do love about it is that customization. But like you said for a photo photographer site, it doesn't have to be that intricate. You need a portfolio on about page. But if you're interested in WordPress and learning, I do have a full course on WordPress for beginners to check that out because that will get you up and running. And it does. I mean, there's something about going to a website like I know this template. Yeah, like I've seen this before. Yeah, versus going to another one. We How did yo I'm scrolling down, but the things moving sideways, they are like, you can do these really cool things that I think helps you stand apart from the rest. Yeah, I do think your work at the end of the day is what's most important. But, you know, if you want spend the time to get really fancy with it. Great. Uh, at the same time zin Folio or and figuring out this other way of interacting with clients. Yeah, I think. Then folios amazing. Sinfully is It's it's It's really great to because as a photographer, if you are, if you want to build a system to share photos with clients, it's just built in. Yeah, I like I think you might be able to do with Squarespace. You could definitely build it out with WordPress, but Zen Folio hosts your photos and, like I can upload 400 photos at once. Make a password you can. You can do kind of a square space, but not on the same level. It's more so of a gallery than it is somewhere for them to go and check Neo. Here's 400 photos. Tell me your favorite ones. Yeah, it's just that I think maybe that's the difference is like Wicks and Squarespace and WordPress or just website builders. Send Folio of the Citizen Folio commercial, but sent Folio is like meant for photography. Yeah, I think it is a photographer site map. So you know there's that, and on the other side with your website, you can use dropbox or box or one these cloud sharing programs Google photos to share photos with your clients through that so you don't need something that's fully integrated. It's just a nice a nice pot formula. Cool. So, yeah, I mean, we're all using different platforms. Sounds like Sin Folio is a great option specifically for photography. Especially if you're doing client work. I would say WordPress is the most customizable, but also going to be the hardest to get up and running on. Then the other kind of plug and play options like squarespace wix dot com Those air great for just getting going. But you might see the exact same website like yours down the road on another photographer's website. So you have to deal with that, too. All right, so that was websites. Let us know if you have any other questions, and we'll get back to you. Thanks a lot. 202. Business: Intro: welcome to this new section of the photography masterclass all about starting a photography business. One of the coolest things about knowing how to take great pictures is that people will pay you for it. Photos have never been more popular in today's culture. With the advent of social media, photography is everywhere. Profile, pictures, events and sharing your life visually has really blown up. In college, I worked as a staff photographer for my school newspaper and then started a wedding photography business just to get through the rest of college and grad school and into my professional career, I kept shooting. You can get paid to shoot anywhere in the world and by all different types of people, on a personal level, or even for a corporation. In this section, I want to touch briefly on the beginning steps to be getting paid with your photo skills. Keep in mind that sometimes this can be a very long road. It took at least a year for most professionals that I know as photographers to be making a decent living. It combines all the hardships of a freelancer, a business odor and an artist all in one, but it also has its perks. It's well worth it. If you're willing to put in the hard work and learn as you go, so let's get started. 203. Business: Starting a Photo Business: in this lesson, you'll learn about starting your own photography business. Specifically will start with the two most important things toe have before you get started . Other than a camera, of course. Ah, business name and a website Before we go, too. In depth about starting in business, you need to talk to your tax person and or find out about the tax laws that apply to you and find out what the best option for you in starting a business is. Every person is different, and every city, state and country is different. You need to look into setting up a corporation like an S Corp or an LLC, which removes the liability from your personal assets. You'll typically need a DB A under your name so you can do a business and accept payments under your business name. Or you may just want to use your name as a self proprietor. If that's the best option for your life situation, then go with that one. Because of all the recent tax changes in the states and because many students taking this class live in countries around the world are best advice is to find a tax accountant and legal adviser with experience creating small business to help you out in your specific area and what you need specifically, everyone is different in every situation is different. Once you decide to start a photography business, you want to choose your name. You basically have two options. Using your own name or coming up with something completely different. Using your name is always an option for most business types like William Carnahan photography. This is great if you imagine being the main photographer in your business and running for a long time. If you imagine hiring other photographers or building out your brand in the future, you might consider choosing a name that's not specific to you. When you do think of a name, it's important to see if the website your ill is available. Use a site like name cheap dot com, or go daddy dot com to see if the domain name is available. If your ideal business name isn't available, you can add words like photography or photo to the end of the URL to see if it's free. We recommend trying to purchase a dot com website because those are the most memorable and most popular It also has the best S E O search engine optimization for Web searches. When people are looking to hire a photographer, depending on what kind of photography you're doing, you want to set up your website accordingly. Sam talked about building a portfolio in the last section. You'll want to showcase the best photos you have for your type of photography you're doing . If it's portrait's, you want to show the best ones. If it's events and weddings, chances are you want to show your best, but also show some collections from one or two of those events. The key things to put on your website, aside from your portfolio, include contact information and an about page with more information about you, the business locations and what type of service you provide. That is what's have a photography. You do perhaps maybe a little bit of pricing packages, but it's not totally necessary. Including prices can sometimes scare potential clients away, and it's always nice to start a conversation via your contact form or email before jumping into prices. You'll also want to link to any social media accounts that you've been actively using. Speaking of social media, you may want to check out and see if social media accounts are available for your business name before locking down your website. It is better if all your accounts use the same name so people can easily find you. Social media is very important to the modern world of business photographers, especially photos specific platforms like Instagram. It's basically free advertising, so we highly recommend using it, especially when starting a business. Let's recap all of the steps to starting your own business, choosing a name, setting up an official business in your city or state and then building out your Web presence, including social media. Now you're often running, and the next lessons we will go over how to get your first few clients and how to run your business, including setting prices. 204. Business: Finding Your First Client: in this lesson, we're going to teach you the best ways to find clients as a freelance photographer or someone starting a photography business. Let's get started to have a successful business. You need clients you need people to shoot for. This can seem like a daunting task when first starting out, I'm not gonna lie. It will take a while to really get going. So when thinking about getting clients, you will always be hunting for them. Even in a year or two, when you're really successful, you'll always be looking for new clients. Over time it will get easier as word of mouth spreads. But in the beginning you may feel like you're spending half of your time doing photography work and the other half the time just trying to find work. So this is the best way of starting out. Ah, huge source of clients comes from word of mouth. That means friends of friends, of friends, things like that. Where should you start your friends, your family start taking photos for your friends and family for free or minimal pay if you can. Maybe you already doing this, use these photos to start building your website and your social media, assuming you're shoots went well and you got your friends, your new clients, what they wanted. Ask them to recommend you to anyone else that may need a photographer. This is how we start out. You will be surprised how many people, just your friends and your family can reach your network will start building, have them post one of their photos on social media, and you've got free instant advertising toe a vast fast network. This is a great way to build your portfolio as well. If you don't have one, your friends and family will love having you take photos for them. So how do we continue on from there? Referrals. Word of mouth is always going to be the fastest and easiest way to get new clients. It will continue to build on itself year after year, month after month. To keep building your clients list, you'll have to take the same plan of word of mouth to new clients and social media as well . Every time you get a new client from a friend of a friend and deliver photos to them, ask them to tell their coworkers, tell their friends, tell their family asked them to post your photos and tag you on their social media, even if it's a business social media account. The MAWR exposure you get from the friends of the friends of the clients and the networks, the better social media. Take your own social media to the next level. Start developing your social media presence. Tag your current clients in every instagram post you have the men. Also look for photographer Instagram accounts and tag them. If you're photo is good enough, they will pick up your photo and repost it, getting you even mawr exposure again. Tagging is free advertising on Social Media Company. You can also start tagging companies like Sam had talked about before with styles that you want to be shooting. The key is to get noticed. If there's a company out there that you could see yourself shooting for, like an outdoor company, go shoot photos that that company would like and tag them. You never know who is hunting around for your Instagram and looking for their next photographer Business groups. For a while I belong to a business group near my house. It was made up of local professionals lawyers, Realtors, CPS wedding vendors, event vendors. We would meet once a week and help refer clients to each other. It was a really nice way of feeling accountable as a group and helping each other out in a community. I would say for two years I belong to the group. I would get a referral for a client about once a week, and then I would close on them maybe twice a month. These groups are sometimes put on by local communities or organizations or city clubs, and there's tons of private ones you can look into online for your specific area there really made up of local vendors and local business owners to create a nice cool community review sites and business pages. Make sure you set up a business profile on Google and Yelp the's air. Great ways for local people to find your business. If you're in a specific industry like wedding photography, set up an account on sites like wedding wired dot com or the knot dot com on sites like thes, brides and grooms are constantly looking for different vendors, and you'll be surprised at how many people might find you just by having an account set up with a few reviews. Make sure that after any shoot, you ask for a review. Don't expect your clients to go out of their way to find your business on all these sites and leave a review, Follow up with them or even give a discount if they leave a review. Phil still gets requests for Wedding videographer you from his old Yelp profile, even though he doesn't run that business anymore. But because many companies don't take the time to set it up properly, you'll have a leg up on the competition. If you dio online job boards, searching on sites like Craigslist or indeed, can actually be a great way to start out. While you won't find the highest paying clients and maybe a way to get your foot in the door and build your portfolio, you'll find individuals as well as businesses wanting to hire freelancers for professional work on both of these sites. Online freelance Web sites like up work dot com can be another great resource, so those are some ways to start building your client list. The best way to think about it is that it's going to take time and my best piece of advice is that a year is a good projection for meeting someone to turning them into a client, so keep that in mind and keep working at it. 205. Business: Payments and Accounting: in this lesson will cover many topics related to money, payments and expenses for your business. As your photography business grows, you need to be set up to track everything. Monetarily. Every city, state and county is different. So again, make sure you consult a tax person or lawyer before setting up or taking any legal steps to creating your own business. You want them to advise you on the best way for you to handle your money in the area that you're in and your specific life situation. That being said, there are some basic practices on setting prices, presenting them and tracking money and expenses for photography. Business here is a basic process for how a business transaction will work in your photography business. Client asks for a photo and a price. The photographer gives a quote contract and asks for deposit client signs. Contract hands over deposit photographer photographs and it's delivers photo client hands over rest of payment on final delivery. Every business handles things differently. You have to decide how you want to receive your money and when, for example, wedding photography. I would take a deposit and then the rest of the money would need to be paid on the wedding day before the photo delivery for corporate jobs. I would invoiced a client when the final photos were delivered. It's really up to you on how you wanna handle it. The important thing is that you consider deposits, contracts and start to keep track of every single thing. There are free and paid accounting applications that can help. Like QuickBooks zero or wave. They have templates and automated processes for sending and receiving invoices, tracking payments and more. While using an excel, she can be a great way to start out time. It's worth it to spend a little bit of money to properly track everything as you grow your business. I can't stress this enough. I love QuickBooks. 206. Business: How Much Should You Charge?: one of the first questions you might have a new photographer is How much should you charge ? There's really no correct rate to start at. This is a ton to do with your experience, what you're shooting and what people are charging in your area, along with your cost of running a business. For instance, if you're just starting out $100 for a head shot is a good place to start. As you grow over the years, you can start to increase that as you go along. If you're living in Los Angeles, most photographers will charge between 150 to $200 for a head shot. So in order to be competitive, you'll need to either charge less or the same amount. But if you're living in a more rural area or someone with a lower cost of living, you might charge less. Do some competitive research to see what other photographers air charging in your specific area and then set your prices. According to that, you can even do some stealth research if other photographers don't have their prices publicly displayed and pretend to be a client to get more information, Another good way to set your prices is to understand what your hourly rate is. How much will you charge an hour to shoot? How much will you charge an hour to edit what you shoot? This will depend on where you live and your expenses and lifestyle also understand that if you're a full time freelancer, you're paying your own health insurance, your own equipment and other non tangible items that will probably make your hourly rate a bit higher than that of a typical full time salaried position here in Los Angeles, starting at $50 an hour to shoot and $25 an hour to edit is a good standard rate to start with. As you feel like your clients can afford mawr and the quality of what you're shooting is coming along. You can start to charge more today. I've been shooting for about 10 plus years. I now charge $200 an hour to shoot and $100 an hour to edit. This convey very for a lot of different photographers, depending on what they're doing, How many hours are spending shooting? Keep in mind, though, that many clients won't want to pay an hourly rate. They'd rather have one payment for an entire project. But by knowing your hourly rate and estimating how long the project will take you, you can better set your prices per project. For example, if your hourly rate is $50 an hour and you know that a head shot shoot and edit will take you three hours, you might start by charging $150 for a head shot. At some point, you may want to jump into your freelance business full time. Understanding your monthly expenses can help you predict the viability of your business and your ability to do that. Sit down and figure out what your overhead costs are and adjust your prices to the amount of gigs to that. If it costs about $500 a month to run your photography business, say website, hosting the site for your photos insurance monthly payment for that new laptop, then you need to clear $500 a month just to keep things running smoothly. Now, if you set your prices to $100 an hour for shooting, that means you just need to spend five hours a month shooting now Hopefully, you're spending more than five hours a month shooting, so you're paying yourself and putting some money back into your business. A general rule that I've started with with all my businesses was always putting 25% of each paycheck I make back into the photography company itself. This allows you to invest better and equipment things like advertising and having a rainy day fund in case business slows down for a little bit. By understanding these numbers, you can also estimate your annual salary your take home pay. For example, if you're charging $100 an hour and work 20 hours in a month, you would be making $2000. 25% goes back into the business. A certain percentage of that goes to taxes, leaving you with about $1000 in take home pay. Now that's only $12,000 in a year, which for many isn't a full time income that matches your standard of living. But that's also on Lee working 20 hours per month. Hopefully, you're working at least 20 hours per week, meaning you're taking home almost $50,000. And if you were working full time hours this would be a take home pay of almost six figures . It's not common for freelance photographers to be working 40 hours a week. But as you grow your business, you can charge more for projects. Or you can do specific photography work that pays Mawr. It's not uncommon to charge between three and $4000 for a wedding shoot, which might average out one day of shooting one day of editing and one day of miscellaneous prep work. You might be able to have a thriving business by shooting two weddings per month or 24 weddings per year. This will take time to build up to those numbers. For example, Phil shot his first wedding for only $200. By his seventh wedding, he was charging over $3000 so it doesn't have to take too long again. You're not going to be hitting this groundbreaking. Get rich quick numbers right away. It's going to take a lot of time patients and work to reach a very successful salary. It's going to test your personal life spending and a balance of creative, freelance and business ownership. As a photographer, you're the owner boss, marketing, accounting advertising assistant HR and artists, all rolled into one. The next topics we want to cover are more of a business logistics, like giving quotes, asking for deposits and creating a contract. 207. Business: Contracts: Whenever you do a project, it is essential to have a contract signed by you and the client. I can't tell you how many times I've been burned without a contract. When I was starting out to prevent cancellations, ask for a non refundable deposit for 1/3 of the full price toe, hold the date of shooting you then work that into the contract and on Lee hold the date if they're able to pay and sign a contract. Yes, you are conducting a service, a business, and you need, even if small a contract to protect your investments of time and effort. We definitely recommend consulting a lawyer to help you write an official contract in our supplemental resource is for this section. Check out some of these websites that can help you lock down someone to help you with or get advice on contracts. Here are some things to include on a contract that I always try to include. Deposit and date of shooting. Full agreed cost of everything when the final payment is due. The penalty for a late payment, if any, How much extra over shooting will cost names and contact info. Location of shoot what you will be delivering. Example how many photos and in what format when you will be delivering? Who owns the raw images? What happens in case there's an emergency or someone cancels signatures by both client and the photographer? It is a lot of business to think about, but at the end of the day you're doing it because you love to take photos for yourself and for other people. Try to put as much business as you can away so that you can focus on being a great photographer, but also try to keep in mind what your value is as a photographer. One thing to be a prayed for is being in a situation where the client changes the scope of the project while you're shooting, perhaps you were booked to shoot a wedding for eight hours, and someone asked you to do a little bit extra shooting or they ask you to a little bit more editing. It is a good idea to explain before the shoot date what the cost of any added time is whether it's an extra 10 minutes or an extra hour, so that on the day of the project you can remind them if it comes up. It's funny that you have to think about this, but it always comes Hub being prepared on what to say and being strong and saying it is crucial. When I started out, I would always just say OK, whatever for free and then regret it later. You have invested a lot of time into your business and education. Your skills and time are worth it. Don't to more than you need to for free. It will suck time away from your business and your personal well being. 208. Business: Income and Expense Tracking: Finally, let's talk about how you're going to track all the payments and expenses. You'll have to keep records of everything for tax purposes anyway, including both income and expenses. You want to keep receipts from equipment purchases and anything you spend money on related to your business. You'll also want to devise a way to track invoices and client contacts. It's also a good idea to track hours spent working on each project and how much money you're making to determine if projects are sustainable for your business. All of this will help you figure out how your business is doing after a year and allow you to make financial decisions in the future. You can start out by doing this for free. Using spreadsheets on Google Drive, you can use Google sheets, and that's a great way to start for something small. So an app like Evernote is great for taking photos of receipts and being able to access them online again. No detail is too much. If you ever need to go back and find things, you'll be happier. You did it at the time of each transaction. Take his many details down as you can for invoicing. You can use word processors like Google docks or even the one that comes with your computer . Check out some of the cool templates we've attached here in the supplemental resource is. The main thing about invoicing is to make sure they're numbered and accurate. You can use those numbers to attach to your income spreadsheets, so you have a master reference. It may come to a point where you need something a little more robust. For all this financial tracking, I think the absolute best way to do this is using a program like QuickBooks or zero Wave is a free alternative with many of the same options as well. I pay for a freelance version of QuickBooks online. It's about $10 a month, and I couldn't be happier with it. I also created a bank account specifically for my photography business so that my QuickBooks is hooked up to it. I can create invoices. It tracks expenses for me straight for my bank account and holds all my client contact information. It also comes with an app for my smartphone, so I contract monthly expenses and see my income versus expenses in a variety of different ways on the go. It really takes a lot of stress out of the accounting. Although it requires a bit of time to get set up, it's well worth it at the end of every year. Wow. So this is a lot of information, and at the same time it feels like we're just glancing over the important aspects of starting your photography business. Please check out all of the supplemental resource is for this section as we've added a ton of stuff, including templates and examples of all the things like contracts and invoices. This is going to be a really great thing for you to use to start your photo business. So good luck. Get out there. 209. Business: A Chat about Getting Our First Clients: welcome to this new chat about starting a business. We think it would be good to dive a little bit deeper into our own experiences as photographers and just people starting our own business being a freelancer in the creative world. So this first video, the question is, how did you get your first client? And do you remember what your first, who your first client was? And Ah, yeah, because a lot of people are probably watching this, wondering what their first client should be, how to get there first client. So, Sam, you got, uh, So my first client was my colleges newspaper, actually. And it wasn't necessarily a one time thing, but I went in and I had all the photos I had taken from the past. And as in a photography class, Aziz. Well, so I showed them my work. They said, Yeah, you can be more of our staff photographers when we have events will bring you out. And, uh so, Yeah, that was my first time having, you know, someone asking me this events happening. We want photos of these things, go on, make up. And so where you were you were in the photo class. Did you reach out to them, or did they find you because you were in the photo class? I was in the photo class with one of the assistant editors of the newspaper Nice. And she saw my work and liked it and said I should join Nice. So I think that's one way to get your first client is to just be in the community of photographers and me, other photographers who might, you know, I need you to come on a job or something like that. Yeah. And also this was before social media. So this is before, you know, she I wasn't talking about her and she checked on my instagram and was like, Oh, you take good photos. You know, this was all before that. So I think it is slightly different today. I think that meeting people and really is putting yourself out there and showing people your work. That's what's important is that people have to see your work and be say that they like your photos. Can you take photos for me? Cool. Well, who was your first line? Oh, man, this is a complicated question for me, but my very first paid photo client was actually in high school. The development office at my school needed photos and they saw that it was a photography class, the same thing. And they were just like, Hey, do you want to take photos of the assembly or whatever? And I was like, OK, and then, like, we'll pay you 50 bucks there. Like something to me in high school that was like it was like a 16 year old. You're like, Yeah, this is amazing. I mean, that was with film back then. So that was a whole another level of nerve wracking this. And so they went on to college. Same thing I actually went to the newspaper and was like, I want be a photographer because at my school, UC Riverside, they would publish a newspaper every two weeks on, and they were filled with photography's. There's staff photographers, and that's why I made the transition from film to digital. But then I guess so. In college, my very first wedding was a, uh, a friend of my uncles, and they just didn't have the budget to pay for a full blown wedding photographer. My uncle just pitched me to this guy and I was like, Okay, sure, like all shoot a wedding for a couple 100 bucks like that. You know, that's how I just, you know, you just went for and took it. And I was so nervous I did it and it felt fine. And then that person recommended me to another person, and I just sort of upped the price a little bit and did that for, like, five years until I got, like, three or $4000 had an assistant and just it just built built on itself. But yeah, a friend of a friend of a family of a recommended And I think that's pretty much how most people will start is those family recommendations and then ultimately, just word of mouth will get you more jobs. And I did my first actual paid to photo gig. It was a friend who just want Christmas photos. But they knew that I had a DSLR camera, and that's part of it is just having the equipment and knowing how to use it, I guess, to yeah, the base to the base capacity that you can make something. Look which everyone in this class by the end of the class, you should know how to take a photo that someone would pay for. Basically, and you're gonna be way better than 95% of your friends. Uh, and so if you have people wanting holiday photos, graduation portrait, it's anything like that. You'll be able to do that once you're done with this class and we'll say that. So through my time with the newspaper ended up shooting a ski and snowboard event, that Red Bull sponsor. So through that I met people in the Red Bull world. Another time I shot Peace Jam, and that doesn't to to. The archbishop was there. And so I got a photo of him, and it's also my portfolio. I'm doing events that maybe I wasn't Snowboarding was awesome. That was my world. But then, like piece Jim, I was interested in. But didn't I think of it? Also have this photo of this Neil, this man that's done incredible things for the world, and that's part my portfolio and so really taking on these jobs and do sporting events and different things, and it pushed me, too. Try and get new types of shots. It wasn't necessarily. Why wanted. But it made me a better photographer, and through that I then figured out what things I was most interested in. Why, like doing the most and started to focus on those things. But I think early on just taking every job, trying to make the best work you can like That's what helped me become a better photographer. Awesome. While hopefully you enjoyed this video, and if you have any other questions about how to get your first client, let us know. And if you do have your first client share your experience with the rest of the students in the class, I'm sure they would be inspired to know and hear your story, too. 210. Business: Gear You Need to Start a Business: in this video, we're gonna talk about the year you need to start as a professional photographer. It's something that I know. When I was starting, I felt a little bit, um, not confident that I had the right equipment, so you might be sitting there with whatever. Can you? You have wondering? Is this good enough? Especially when you see other people in there crazy, expensive camera gear. So in your opinion, what what's the best sort of base kit or gear that someone would need for a professional shoot? I think if you're going to start shooting like, um, e mean the I feel like there's two tiers. There's the very base level of event portrait, you know, Christmas card shooting. You need a camera that you're comfortable with, and you feel it's fast enough to function at your speed. And I think the base, ah kit lens is great. But like it's something like a mid range. Do like a 24 to 70 you know, 16 to 55 2.8 that is like that in the camera. I think you can get away with a lot, and that is a very base that I think that you need to basically start from there. If you go to an event and it starts to get dark at night, I think you need then a faster lens. Even if it's a prime, you get like a 1.41 point eight on, then from there and the next level would be shooting events. You can step back and get like, a longer zoom 70 of 200 something in that range. But like it's, I think, mid range zoom and a camera that you're comfortable with with two extra batteries and maybe an extra card. That's like the base I think you need cool. Yeah, undoubtedly a camera that you're comfortable with that you know that. You know, you don't get situations where you're fumbling with your camera and then you miss the shot because of that. Um, enough memory space. Enough batteries like those air essentials. You have to have those. There's no reason to have a bunch of lenses if you can't use your camera. Um, from there, yeah, the mid written zoom. Absolutely. If you're doing events where you can't get close up having that 727,300 on then you depend on light conditions. I mean, there's a lot of things to be considered to be considered, Uh, but if you're doing Portrait's, mainly if you're going to doing things where it's not event and you know you could get closer up in different things a prime once I think a lot of people the second they buy their first prime like Oh my gosh, this is photography. This actually looks like the the level I want. Where's your shooting with? You know, maybe you're showing at 24 16 35 and everything's in focus. It doesn't have that cinematics or beautiful quality. It's because it's a wide angle zoom. So really would recommend that 50 Primor that 35 prime. Maybe if you're all about port risking like 85. Um, but that prime lenses really a great first purchase on. Then you can always rent, you know, for love jobs. Starting off, I would rent stuff because I couldn't afford to have all the lenses I wanted in. Each event was different. Each job was different. So I love that idea. Renting and investing over time to build out your kit. Cool. Thanks, guys. I hope you guys enjoyed that answer 211. Business: A Chat about How to Charge: welcome to another chat about starting your own photography business. One question. We get a lot. Is people struggling to know how much they should charge as a freelancer or as a photographer? Are you charging for the hour? Are you charging per project? And how much should you charge for each of those things? So when starting out, um, you know, I don't know. Things might be different because of inflation and stuff, but, like right now, how much do you think is? How would you even go about figuring out how much to charge? I think what your time is worth, because I think there's a lot of different photo projects like a wedding would be hourly. Sit down head shot would be just a one single pop. How much that is you need to figure out, I guess what your time is worth from from a day to day basis in our leader hourly basis. And then also where you live, what's competitive for that area because, you know, in Los Angeles or New York and a big city in London, it's gonna b'more than it would be, you know, in the middle of the country or somewhere that's like not as populated the price of probably down. So it's it's really depends on where you are, what, what you're worth, how you're starting. I think when I very, very first started in college, I put myself a $25 an hour for editing or shooting, and and then I would just adjust according to that. So I was gonna go do a head shot. I knew that would take two hours. And then I knew editing would take me. Probably like two hours. That's $100. Yeah, but now it's a little bit different because I've I'm faster. I have better equipment. I have more education. And now I charge around $150 an hour for photography. So you know it. It depends. Okay, Any other thoughts toe add, Sam. Yeah, I mean, I think Well, the biggest things to consider is I mean, I always think hourly charging because it's really easy for people like, Oh, can we just do a couple more? Okay, It's well, sure, but that's going to cost you more money. Um, and making sure that you and your client on the same page in terms of what you're delivering because that all equates to how much time you're going to spend on it. You know, if you're just seeing them one photo that shouldn't take very long. But if you're taking thousands of photos and you have to go through and pick the best 100 photos and then edit them, you have to calculate the amount time you spend on that. Um, but also, you know, I remember there's some job selling off where I would drive 45 minutes to the place and used X melon gas and then have bought this camera. They spent X amount on and went to school. And you know all these things that add up and costs and I wasn't making. I was breaking even, basically how much I was charging, which is fine starting off. But there's a certain point where if you won't do this professionally, and you need to know, like for yourself how much money Migra spend to go here to use equipment that I've invested money into the time I've spent learning this and researching how to do this well, like your time is valuable. So but also knowing the market whenever I meet other photographers working out different things. You know, sometimes they share sometimes they don't sometimes personal. But it's interesting to know what the market issue and I think that is so important. I mean, we'll mention, and you kind of added that you need to know the market where you're at. It's going to be different. You can't just go. I think I did this, but you go on Google and say, How much should I charge is a photographer per hour, but you're getting answers from L. A. When you're living somewhere that it's not that expensive. So you do have to kind of compete with the other photographers in your market, and you can do that kind of stealth research by talking to people or going online and seeing what some people post their pricing on their own websites. And that's something you can look at our Yeah, that's actually a good question because I see people posting their pricing on their website and some people not what's kind of like the pros and cons I know as a client, like looking for wedding videography or photography will shot my wedding that when we were researching that it was nice to see on the website How much was it going to cost? It's great. Yeah, it's great for the client because people who didn't have their pricing sometimes I wouldn't even bother asking. I've seen there's a happy medium if we're talking about wedding photography. When we first started our wedding photography company, we decided not to put prices on their. We just put our wedding start at $2000. Please contact us for more information for a quote because everyone that it's a base price . So you know what you're getting into. And then and then at that point, we'll send them something or sort of tell them like, you know, these are packages, but, you know, let's talk about it. Let's work something out. Let's see where your budgets at. Maybe we can find a happy medium because you're providing a service, not a product, and so you have to be able to negotiate. You have to be able to, you know, be personal, talk to your clients and say, you know, So I charge $150 an hour, but it's a great cause, or your family or your friend, you know What is your budget like? Let's be honest about this. You have to be able talk business. Yeah, and be comfortable with that. And it's not that you're trying with the Muffy like, Yeah, this is how much I want to be charging as a photographer. And even if it seems absurd to you, like, set that price and then say But I'm flexible. Let's figure this out and, yeah, maybe you end up doing $75 they feel like they've, you know, one something, because they got 50% discount. But really, for you, like sweet. I just know I'm going make $75 an hour and, you know, it works both ways. It's such a It's such a balance to you. I mean, you're a business owner, you're a sales person. You're a technician because you have to know what you're gonna use and you're an artist. And so there may be some weddings that you really want to take, because it's gonna help your portfolio, and you're gonna help get photos later, where there's photography, things that you want to do so that it will help your business later. So you're really balancing all four of those things in pricing in negotiating in the personal pool. Yeah, And at the end of the day, you have to consider that you're paying taxes on this money. So, you know, you say you're charging $50 an hour starting out, which sounds awesome, But as a freelancer, you're paying extra taxes on that, At least in the States. This is gonna be different other places. But you pay the extra self employment tax. You are in charge of everything else except marketing communications. Your camera's gonna be out of date in three years. You got another one. So you have to, like, really sit down and calculate How much do you need to make her month basically as a freelancer? And you got to get those jobs. Yeah, You got to get those jobs and you need to not feel guilty when asking people for money. That might seem like a lot of the hardest. It's really hard. Yeah, it's like you feel guilty in a way, But at the same time, you know, at this point, I've invested 10 years of my life for however long doing this. And I know my cameras well, I know, I'll get great shots. So, like, you know, time is money, and you're you're good at what you do, so you should charge x amount. I think that's what they're paying for the right. I I always struggled with it, and I had some comparison. Someone told me a story of like, You know what? Can I just get my nephew Billy over here? Pay him 50 bucks and you can shoot the wedding? I'm like, Yeah, well, your little nephew hasn't spent 10 years of his life shooting weddings, practicing investing time into looking at practices, having equipment, education. You have gone to school for it. You've taken online classes like you've really invested this time. And that's what your client is putting money into you for. You have to make sure that your valuable But then also, if you go and do that, you know, work your butt off when you're taking photos, like, do a good job, get great photos. Every job is gonna lead to potentially 10 more jobs or however many. And all those photos you take are part of your portfolio now. So if you're going, do this like do it right, do it well. And if you're going to start charging more, you'll make sure that you know you're delivering a great product. You know, the law times, people I know it goes back, back and forth with, you know, what is the cost of five photos? Know how do you put that into Ah, number? Yeah. Is it about this number of photos, or is it just capturing that moment or that event like now You have it captured in a beautiful way. And it doesn't matter how long you were working on it, because at the end of the day, they just have a few photos, and it's hopefully worth it to them. So I think one more thing, I'll just kind of recap. I think the idea about putting the base price on the website is a great idea for you because it does kind of weed out potential customers that you have to spend time saying okay, sending your prices. And if you're way too expensive for them from your base price, there is Yeah, you don't have to spend that time. So I love that idea about doing that. As you can see, we go down these rabbit holes with these topics, but we hope you enjoy this video. And if you have other questions about how much to charge or anything like that, please let us know and have a great day. 212. Stock Photography: Intro: Welcome to this brand new section of the photography masterclass. This section is all about selling stock photography. Stock photography is a way for you to make money with the skills that you have learned with this course, and it's easier than ever to sell your photos with hundreds of stock photo sites that take care of all of the payment processing for you. In this section, you'll learn which sites we recommend trying out. First, you'll also learn how to sell photos on your own without a stock photography site and you'll learn how licensing works. We can't guarantee that you'll make money this way, but it's something you can try for fun. And if it starts to take off, focus more attention on it to build up a nice passive income stream. So let's dive right in. 213. Stock Photography: Best Websites: in this lesson will share our favorite sites for selling your own stock photos. The way it works is you'll need to sign up for an account on their website. Sometimes you have to fill out a form with your information about you or your business, including payment options for how you can get paid. Then it's a simple as up loading and submitting your photos. Your photos typically go through an approval process, and it isn't surprising if most of your photos won't be approved as there are is just so many online nowadays. So it's a good idea to pick a specific niche to specialize in or try to find an area where there is a lack of photos out there. Think like a marketer. The people who will most likely be buying your images and take photos that fulfill that type of need. Think about photographing specific ideas like events, sporting activities or seasonal trends. Thes things tend to be in higher demand than general photos like of flowers or abstract photos. The royalty percentage, or how much you make from each photo on each site is different, so you'll want to definitely check out the terms for each site will include links to all of these sites and their contributor information in the next lesson, according to our experience and personal experience by other photographers here. The top sites to contribute to Alami Shutter stock, Adobe Stock, Getty Photo yet 123 R F dreams time and pawn five. There are others out there, but these air great ones to start with. The great thing is, for most of these sites, you can upload the same image across all of them. And like I said earlier, we can't guarantee whether your photos are going to sell or not. But play around with it and have fun. Keep your expectations low. And if you do start to make money than think of it as a bonus, and you can start working at it even more in the following lessons, you'll learn about how to sell photos on your own and how licensing works 214. Stock Photography: Selling Your Own Photos: in the last video we gave you are recommended stock photo sites. Great if you don't want to deal with promoting transactions and any customer service. But because the stock photo industry is super competitive at this point, selling photos on your own might be a better option. In this video, we'll go over our recommended options for how to sell photos using many modern tools. First, you'll need a website to be able to sell photos online, and there are few options for doing this. You can use a tool like smugmug dot com or visual society dot com to create a photography website and sell directly from there. These platforms are built for photographers and include all of the tools you would need to share your work. Shopify is another e commerce platform not specific to photographers, though they do have specific themes and options that makes selling photos online. Super easy. Or you could use a custom website built with a popular Web building tool like WordPress Foursquare space, and then add plug ins or themes or tools to sell photos through that site. For WordPress, you can use a plug in like sell media or woo commerce to sell from your own website. Lastly, you don't necessarily need your own website to sell photos. Use a tool like gum road dot com to upload and sell any type of digital products, such as photos. You can start for free, and gum road takes a percentage of every sale. Gun Road also has a plug in that you can use on a WordPress website to sell directly from your own website. I've used Gum Road in the past to sell photos and other digital products and find it a cost effective way to get started. Some of these other tools you'll have to pay for it to get started hosting and having a tool to sell photos is just part of the equation and even bigger. And perhaps more important thing to do is drive traffic to your website. Using the tips from previous lectures about sharing your photos online and starting a photography business can help you get that initial traffic. One of the biggest complaints we've received from previous students of the photography masterclass is them saying, I'm not making money from my photos. They have a website and they're trying to sell photos. But The biggest issue is driving the trap to your site yourself. And just like starting your own business, this could take years to really get up to speed, so be patient and consistent if you have a passion for photography. Just tried doing this for fun before really focusing on making money from it. So these are all the tools we recommend for easily selling photos on your own website. Let us know if you have any questions, otherwise will move on to more information about licensing. 215. Stock Photography: Licensing: whether you sell photos through a stock photo site or through your own website. What you're basically doing is giving someone the rights to use your photos. This is called a license, and the license explains how the photos can be used first. Here are a few key terms that you should understand royalty free. Often people thinks this means that anyone can use the photo for anything they want without paying for it. That's actually not true. Royalty free means that once it's purchased, and once you've purchased that license, you can use it multiple times without paying again for continued use of the image Fair use . This is tricky. Basically, If you're using the photo for something that is non profit and usually educational or research based, it's fair to use the photo without paying for it. Every situation is different, though, so it's always best to ask the photographer for permission first and with any type of legality. We recommend talking to a lawyer before using any photos without getting that permission. Creative Commons. There are a few different types of creative Commons licenses, but basically you're giving the rights to someone to use the photo without giving them the actual copy right. Some Creative Commons licenses require attribution, meaning the user has to credit you wherever they use it. Public domain or Creative commons. Zero cco. This may be what people think of as royalty free. This means the image is completely free to use, and you don't need to ask permission for it. However you use it when selling your own photos, it will typically be a royalty free or creative Commons license that you give. There are also options when selling these licenses. Different stock sites work differently. Here are a couple examples of different types of licenses you might find on a site. The ability to use a photo for a non commercial project, meaning any project that you aren't selling or making money from, or the ability to use a photo for a commercial product that is only digitally available, or the ability to use a photo and something that is printed but only up to 250,000 items, for example in a magazine, but only if it's printed fewer than 250,000 times, you can see that it can get quite confusing for you as the photographer and for the purchaser. Here are a few things that might change how you license a photo. One. Is that commercial or noncommercial work? Charging more for a commercial license is standard to digital First print. Will there be a limit in the print for a limit on the number of digital downloads? Three. Merchandising use Will the photo itself be the primary value of the item for sale? For example, are they using your photo on a T shirt that they're selling for use in stock templates? Well, your photo be a part of any sort of template available for sale or download, such as a power point template or a motion graphics project. Okay, so now you understand different types of licenses. But how do you actually give someone a license when they purchase a photo? Well, it's as simple as explaining what the license is and how a user can use your photo on your website and when they purchase a stock photo sending that license to them once they've purchased it, it's important to create a license that works for you and your business and to have it written out in detail so that you don't get into any legal issues in the future again, with all the legal stuff, I'm obliged to tell you that you should talk to a lawyer before setting up your own licenses and selling your photos to make sure everything is good to go. And this is also one reason why selling photos on a stock photography site is easier because they take care of all of this for you. But of course, you're balancing being in a market with thousands of other photographers and competing with them. We're selling on your own site, which might be a little bit easier. If you have any more questions about licenses or selling photos, let us know and we'll be happy to help out. 216. Printing: Intro: pretty. Your photos is pretty easy. Once you're done editing, you want a crop, your photo to the appropriate size and export the biggest, best quality J peg you can. Each printer, either online or in stores, has different sizes they can print, but here are some typical sizes you might see in at least the most common areas. Four by 65 by 78 by 10 8.5 by 11 11 by 14 16 by 2018 by 24 20 by 24 24 by 36 4 by six and five by seven are usually the most typical size you might see on your desk or from a one hour photo lab back in the day. My favorite large print sizes are 11 by 14 and 16 by 20 and I would say eight by tens and 8.5 by Elevens. Make great gifts for people when framed and are usually a good price point for size and cost. Once you've decided you're signs and exported your J pig, you are ready to take it to a print shop or uploaded online. If you upload your photo online, they will walk you through choices and cropping on their website. They will also have recommended color space and settings to export your photo. There are two processes to printing. Your print will either go through a dry process similar to your household printer, but through a printer made for photos using ink or through a wet process, which uses light sensitive paper to print and runs the print through a chemical process. I have normally always thought the wet process is always going to have a much better quality, but today there have been some real advancements in ink processing printers that look just fantastic. The biggest choice you have to make is going to be the type of paper. The two most common types of paper are glossy, and Matt Glossy has a little bit more of a shine to it and is a bit cheaper. It's what most mass printing places are going to be using. Places like Costco or a one hour photo lab will use this type of paper as their default paper. Matt is a little bit higher quality, and lads lessons shine to it. I think it's best if you can use it when you put it under glass as well, and it holds its quality longer. Other places can even print on metal. Metal is usually more contrast. E and has this metal shimmer and shine to it. It looks great with certain photos, but not everything. They can also print on canvas, which increases the artistic aesthetic. Ah, lot of places online and stores will also mount it for you in a wood frame. So remember the two things to keep in mind from this lesson. Art. Deciding how big you want to print your photo and what kind of paper you're going to use. And keep in mind, every photo will look better or worse, depending on what size of paper use. You have to decide what you think will look good for your specific photo and what size you want. Print it. What kind of paper you want to use 217. Printing: How Big Can You Print?: Let's make a billboard. Just kidding. The ability to print a large photo depends on a lot of things coming out of your cameras. Pixel count. You also have to consider the distance of viewing of the photo, along with a few other factors. Let's go down the list of things to consider when thinking about how large you can print your photo, P P, I. D, P I and pixels. A lot of printing houses will consider 300 dp I The standard for high quality print DP I stands for dots per inch. You can also call it P P I, which means pixels per inch. When you exported J peg from your computer. The highest level J Peg will usually land around 300 d. P. I. The most common formula to figure out the best quality in size versus megapixels is dividing your pixel count in one direction by the DP I. So if your camera takes a photo that 6000 by 4200 and pixel size, it's 24 megapixels ish. Divide each number by 300 DP I. Then you can print a photo up to 20 by 14 inches without losing any quality you can actually print even larger, depending on some other factors. Remember, in the last lecture we talked about paper. Those paper types affect the quality as well. The smoother the quality of paper, the more detail you need to make the image look clear. Adversely, the rougher the material with less detail from pixels, you need to make it look clear. Glossy and metallic paper would be on the end of a smoother material. Matt is in the middle, and then campus would be on the rough friend distance of viewing. When you get really close to your TV, you can start to see all the little pixels, and you lose detail and perspective. The concept is the same when it comes to Prince and sizes. If you print a very large print and stand very close to it, you'll be able to see the imperfections. It's basically how billboards are able to be so big and hold lots of quality. You're viewing it from very far away. The most common viewing distance for an eight by 10 is about two feet to be the best looking quality. So taking this calculation, you can infer that the bigger the print, the farther you can step away and hold quality. You also have to think about where and how your photo will be displayed. Is it in a hallway where people will be close to it? You may need mawr quality and pixels or make a smaller print. Or is it being displayed in the lobby of a hotel where people won't be able to get that close to it? All things to keep in mind. 218. Printing: Framing: another cost of printing, but so very worth it is framing your photo. There are two things that you have to decide when framing your photo. What kind of frame and toe Adam at are not Adam at? There are many different types of frames in all shapes and colors and sizes. Walking into a store like Aaron Brothers, you'll see what I mean. Decide what kind of frame style you want and what kind of color suits your photo and where it will hang. I'm always partial toe a solid black frame. You can never go wrong with black colors. They always make your photo pop against him, and it won't distract from your photo, either. You can also go white, or you can use a fun crazy color to maybe match the neutral walls You're gonna hang it on. The possibilities are endless. You want to see if you can pick a color and style that will complement your photograph and its surroundings. When you hang it, you want to avoid any color or design that takes away from the art inside the frame. Often professional photos have a map around the photo. This creates a more fine art look and can raise the photo away from the glass and or the background. You have the same options as you do with the frame, colors and style you also have to take in account the size. If you have a five by seven photo, you'll have to look for a mat that can hold a five by seven photo. And that is the correct size for the frame you want on the outside. Typically, you find a map that has a five by seven hole for the photo, but it fits an eight by 10 frame. This frame is a custom frame around a print that we got from Anthony Carbajal. You can see that the mat is cut a little bit custom for the exact print. Because he signed the very bottom of it. The framer decided to leave some room so we can still see his signature. But it's still matted against a black frame, so it looks really nice. And we chose the black frame to go around this black and white photo to make it stand out and have contrast so you can see that we decided this frame and this Matt specifically for this photo. So that's printing and framing. Please try to take advantage of printing your photos and displaying them on the wall. It's so great to actually physical eyes, your art. 219. Thank You Video: all right. It is the end of the road. This is the conclusion of the photography masterclass hand. We really, really, really, really hope that you enjoyed this class and you had fun. And ultimately that. Now you're taking better photos than ever. So I just want to say thank you. And also let Will and Sam se uh, their own thanks or whatever you to you guys to everyone watching this because it does mean a lot for us. Toe be able to teach you on online, so Well, Sam, Any thoughts? Yeah. No, thank you so much. This is Ah, really, even for me, as a photographer going back through some of these things, going to collaborate with both these guys on, you know, how do we best present this information? How do you help people grow? And through the first photography masterclass and now doing this one? I mean, it's helped me grow a lot as educated and also as a photographer. So thank you for being a part of all this and helping us continue to do this type of work and can't wait to see what you will come up with. Yeah. Thank you, guys. so much. I think for me, it's just been inspiring being around these two guys and bringing me on to this new class. It's not only inspiring being around these guys and getting to work with them, but just seeing the feedback that you guys have gotten from your last class and from this class has just been awesome. I think inspires me more to be a photographer, just knowing you guys are all watching this and, uh, I've really enjoyed it, and it makes me a better photographer just teaching and doing this. So I love to keep doing it and thank you guys for seriously sticking with it and shooting. Yeah, for it. For everyone who's actually watched all the videos up till this point, you're a select few. So congratulations, just a couple housekeeping items. If you haven't left a review for the class yet, we would really appreciate that. That's really how we can determine whether you're enjoying this class, and it also helps the class of grow. Your reviews are really the most important factor for helping other students find this class, so if you think this is a great class, we would love that review. If there are things that we covered too quickly or didn't talk about enough or just skipped completely that you were expecting in this class, just let us know. We are happy to add to this class to make it better. I mean, our goal is to make this the best online photography class in the world, and we want it to last forever. And eso we can only do that with your help. So just send us a message or post a question to the course page and we'll be happy toe update this class. And lastly, I said this was the end of the road, but really, we're going to be continuing to bring you new content. We've mentioned it before, but we're planning to do live Q and A sessions and also just bringing more content through video school online's website, the YouTube channel and the social media pages. And of course, you can follow us on on online as well. So we'll make sure the link to all of our profiles and websites that you can continue toe, learn more about photography and follow our journey as well. All right. Thank you so much and have a beautiful day. Thank you. Thanks 220. Bonus: Free Lightroom Presets: Welcome to this new section on Lightroom presets. This is a bonus section that we've added to the course since the launch of it. Because we love giving things to our students and making these courses and your photography better, more fun, easier, and more affordable. So what better way than to give you some amazing Lightroom presets? If you've never used presets before, perfect, We have a lesson coming up on how to install and use them. And then I'll walk through the different packs that we add to the course over time and share ideas for when and why you would use those certain types of presets. Will be adding one new pack of presets to the course every month until we have 12 full packs, ranging from black and white style to bold colors and contrast, HDR nature, soft pastels, vintage vibe, street grunge, all kinds of fun packs that you'll be able to use for your own photos. I just wanted to explain what this section is. It might not be applicable to you if you don't use Lightroom or if you don't want to use presets. But regardless, we hope that these bonuses are a nice gift for you and a special thank you for taking our courses. Thanks so much. 221. How to Install Lightroom Presets: In this tutorial, I'll show you how to install Lightroom presets into the Lightroom Desktop app, both classic and the regular CC version, as well as the Lightroom mobile app. If you don't have a desktop computer, just skip ahead to the timestamps which I've included below to the app you're looking to install. Thanks a lot. Enjoy. From the library page or module, go to the develop module. On the left you'll see your presets panel. You might have to drop it down to see if you have any presets installed already or if there are the ones that are already installed when you load Lightroom, click the drop-down and click Import Presets. Then if you're downloading any of ours from Video School, click the desktop folder. It will have all of the XMP files. Select all of those files and click Import. They will import into a folder, which we will see here. And now we have all of these presets. To use them, you just open up a photo in the developed module and then hover over to get a preview of what it looks like. And then when you find one that you like, click on it and you will see that the preset has automatically applied different settings. Sometimes depending on the photo, you'll need to make some adjustments like exposure or contrast adjustments, things like that to make it look good for your photo. And the beauty of these presets is that it's a non-destructive way to edit. So you could always go back, reset things. You can adjust any specific setting. You'll notice that some of these presets in this pack are italicized and that's when there's an option. Usually it's a color profile that we might have selected when creating the preset that will work for a RAW photo, but it's not a setting that works for a JPEG compressed photo. That's totally fine though these presets will still work and they will still look fairly similar to what it would look like on a raw photo. But that's why some of these are italicized. And for any other presets that you download, you can rename these groups or renamed the individual presets if you want, just by right-clicking the group or the preset itself and choosing Rename. All right, That's how you download, install, and use presets in Lightroom classic. Cheers. Here's how to install and use presets in Adobe Lightroom. This is the Cloud-based apps on my desktop. From here you go to the Edit tab, click on Presets, click on the drop-down menu right here, the three dots and choose Import Presets. Now if you've downloaded one of our video school preset packs, you should unzip that pack. You'll see two folders in it, one for desktop and one for mobile. Still use the desktop option if you're using Adobe Lightroom, select all of the files. These are XMP files and click Import. Once they've imported, you will now have this new pack. You can click this drop-down to see all of them. Then you can hover over the presets to see what they look like. Click on one of them and you can see that they've adjusted some of the settings as we've created these presets. Now, depending on your photo, you might need to make some adjustments. Typically things like exposure. Your overall exposure might be the one that you want to adjust. But we've tried to make these work for fairly any photo that is well exposed. That being said, this is a non-destructive way of editing, which is great because you can always undo this. You can always adjust individual settings until you get your light it to your liking. You can also right-click the group or any of the presets to rename them in case there's ones that you really like and you want to give a special name too, or things like that. The other cool thing about importing presets via the Lightroom app on your desktop is if you use the mobile version and it's tied to your same Adobe account, these presets are automatically going to load in your Adobe Lightroom app on your mobile device once it sinks. This is the quickest and easiest way to do that. We'll have another video if you don't use the Adobe Lightroom Desktop app and you want to download and install presets on your phone. But it is quite a bit more work than just this. Here's how you install presets on the Lightroom mobile app. Here I have a photo open on the Lightroom mobile app under presets, I have this video school flatMap pack automatically applied. So I can just click on any of these presets and it will automatically apply. Okay, so now let's go ahead and I'm going to actually delete this pack from Lightroom Mobile. And then I'm going to show you how to manually create presets. If you don't use the desktop app. Now you can see I've deleted the folder. The way it works in Lightroom. The mobile app is a little bit different. You can't just this time install XML files as presets. The process is actually creating a preset from another photo. What we've done is created photos that have all the settings applied that will copy them from and create the presets. The first thing you'll need to do is download the folder. You can do this on your phone. If you have a desktop, you can download the folder, unzip it, and then send the files to your phone. However you do it, You need this mobile folder of files on your phone. If you download the zip file, typically it's just clicking that zip file and your phone will be able to unzip it. You'll see these two folders. And then just know that you'll be using the mobile photo. Back in Lightroom. The best way to do this is to stay organized. The first thing we're going to do is actually create a new album. Create new album. We'll call this. For now. We'll just call it VS flat matte. Click. Okay. Now click on that folder. We're going to add photos to it now. So click this bottom button in the bottom right to add photos. We're going to choose from files. And then on your files you're going to find that mobile folder. Open that up, and to select all of these files, click the three dots in the top. Click the Select button, and then go ahead and select all of the files. Each of our packs contains about ten presets. Then click Open. These will populate into your album that we just created. And you can see a preview of what these photos are. Presets will look like. Now one thing I noticed is that the order of these photos is not always correct in terms of the order that we've named our presets. To view them in order, it's very helpful to click the top three buttons in the top right. Click sort by filename. And then the view options. If you don't have photo info on already and show overlays, click Show overlays and make sure the photo info is highlighted. Now they are in the order of the filename. The way that we've created them, which we try to order them in a more logical sense like all the black and white presets for this pack, for example, are at the end. So the next step is to go individually. Open the photo, select the first photo, for example. What we're going to do is basically create a preset from this photo. Click the three buttons in the top again. Click Create preset. Under User Presets, we're going to create a new preset group. Click, Create New Preset group. We'll call this VS flat matte or whatever you want to call it. Click the check mark. That's going to be, we're going to put these under a group now and then just create a name for it. You can name it whatever you want. You can follow our naming conventions, flatMap one, and then click the check mark. Alright, so now let's go back and find a different photo from our library to practice this on. You would have to repeat this for all of the photos in that folder. But now let's just open up another photo. Here's a photo of my kids. We can go to the presets button down here. And now we have this VS flatMap album or folder of presets that we've created. Click on that, and we have flatMap one. Here's an example of where we would have to adjust the exposure of this preset. So click the check mark. Now because this is non-destructive editing, we can go in here and we can edit any of these other settings. That's how you install and use presets using the Lightroom mobile app. Like I said in the beginning, it's much easier to do this using the Lightroom app on a desktop. But at least there is an option. So just a reminder, you'd have to go through each photo again. Go back to our albums. We're gonna go to VS flat mat, open up the second one, and from there, do the same thing. Three dots. Choose Create Preset. And then from there you'll see under Preset group, now we have the BS flatMap group that we could add this under. Alright, that's it. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and I hope you enjoyed the presets that we share with you. Cheers. 222. Preset Pack 1: Flat Matte Style: In this video, I'll show you the flat matte pack of presets and I'll walk through how I would use these on a number of photos. So if you haven't gone through and install them yet, go ahead and do that all the editing in Adobe Lightroom Classic. But the same techniques apply if you're using the cloud or mobile versions. Here you can see that I have this package installed and I can go through and hover over each individual preset. In this pack there are 11, there's four black and white and seven color versions. And what is flatMap? What were we trying to do in creating these presets? That flat matte look is where you bring up the shadows, the blacks. And so you don't really have a ton of contrast in the photo. It is exactly what we call a flat profile of flat look. But all of these presets are very different. So let me just highlight, hover over and you can see this is a big bold bright photo. This was from wide key, key from several years ago when I was there. You can see that as I hover through, it, adds that little flat matte look. But the colors change. And not all of these presets are going to look great on all of your photos. I find when I'm using presets that when I download a pack from someone, I might find one or two that I really like. And that's the beauty of using presets so that you can kind of come up with your own style or while take a style from someone else. But that being said, you can always edit all of the settings. So for example, this first FlatMap does not look good for this particular photo, and we'll try to find a photo where it looks better. But I'm really digging some of these other ones, like 2345, that gives us kind of like a vintage vibe. Now when I apply this, if I click on it, you'll see that all of our settings over here have changed. We've gone through and changed a lot of different things for all of these different presets. Not just your basic exposure and white balance and that kind of stuff, but down into our color, especially in our HSL panel, you'll see that we've adjusted things like hue saturation and luminance of different colors for all of these different presets. And depending on the preset, some of these other settings as well, including color grading. It might be something that we chew use for creating that preset. So you can always go in here and change it. For example, if we like the basic look of this, but maybe we want to warm it back up just a little bit. Go ahead, change the temperature slider. This photo is relatively exposed well for the situation, but there are times when you slap on a preset, for example, this one which I don't think looks great for this photo at all. It's desaturating a lot of colors except for this bright pink floating right there. But that being said, it's just dark. That's the problem with this preset for this particular photo. Maybe increasing the overall exposure makes it look a little bit better. That's actually a pretty cool look right there, I would say, when you're going through using these presets, make sure that you know, you can make adjustments. Of course, that's going to change the look of the preset. So if you're trying to come up with one specific style, you want to stick relatively to the colors and the saturation and the HSL adjustments. But basic exposure and things like that, those are sliders that you might need to adjust. All right, so let's go to another photo. Let's just go to a completely random photo. Here's a photo. This is not a photo I took, this is just a free photo I found online. So here's an example of where flatMap one actually looks pretty good for this particular photo. As a lot of drama, I might brighten it up still just a bit. But it looks pretty good. Now if I hover over these other ones, you can see again just the style that this is going for. I'm betting that some of these flat matte black and white presets Looks pretty cool for this photo. So if I click on this one, notice how our exposure was the same as our previous edit. Just in case that doesn't look good for you. You might want to just go through and reset your edit down here before you add another preset. Depending on how they're created, sometimes they are layered on top of each other. And if there's not a setting that's been adjusted for the new preset that you're trying to apply, your previous adjustments might still stay here. I like these black and white ones for this lion. Let's go to another photo. Let's go to this one. This is my lovely newborn LWCF when she was born. Flatmap. Here's a great example of flat mat one looking really cool. I love the style of this for this photo. Some of these other ones, maybe like four or 56, the one that looked better for that Hawaii photo. Not so great. Here's just a typical standard photo downtown San Diego where I live. And it's got sort of a quaint little downtown. This photo itself, not terribly great photo, but it kind of shows what the downtown looks like. But I think these flatMap styles might look pretty good for this photo. Some of them have a vintage sort of film type film vibe, especially with the colors. And this might be example where some of these are just a little bit bright. So we might need to bring it back down our overall exposure to get it to a decent exposure. That's pretty much what this pack is. I hope you enjoy it. You can download it in the lessons are on the course page here and install it if you haven't done so already. And make sure you refer to the video on installing it so that you know which files too use because we have both the mobile and the desktop version files. Thanks so much. I hope you enjoy this flatmap pack. And if you use these presets in any of your photos and you post them anywhere like on Instagram. Please tag us in your photos. I'm at Phil Webinar and find us at video school online as well. Thanks so much and I can't wait to see what you do with them. Cheers. 223. Preset Pack 2: Street Grunge Style: Hey there, this is a new video school preset pack for Lightroom called Street grunge style. Let me just walk through a couple of these presets, talk a little bit about them, applying them to some sample photos. And you can of course, find all the files in the downloads of the course to play along with. Here you can see we just made some fun grungy style photos playing a lot with color. Gardeners, dot presets, that is playing a lot with colors to make your street style photography pop. Now of course, with all of these packs, you can mix and match some of them. We call it street grunge, but maybe it's gonna look good for a portrait that you're looking for. This one is a kind of cool, vintage retro vibe going on. And as you can see with all of our presets, there might be some that worked for our particular photo and some that don't. For example, some of these street grunge ten is a crazy Edit. Click it to apply and you can see that the colors completely desaturated except for some of those yellows, a little bit of the greens that might work for some photos, but it doesn't really work for this one. Now, maybe for this one we bring up some of the shadows, we bring up some of the whites. So it's not completely crazy with that backdrop. There's some other edits that we can make as well to make this look potentially better. But that being said, play around with them. Here's a cool shot that I'm playing around with. Another example might be, let's go find another street photo. So basic street photo. Apply one of these presets and it gives it a nice five. This one brightens things up, highlights the reds, lots of sort of desaturated tones and then some reds. This one a little bit of a greenish tint to it. This one was that retro vibe brings back some of that, those blues. Another one that's sort of a bit contrast year, but again brings out those reds. This one brings out some blues as well. And here's that crazy one, this one, total crazy style. Maybe what you're looking for. I think for this one, when we're not looking at the skies, it looks a little bit better. Sort of looks like a POC, apocalyptic scene. Perhaps. That's one more example. And then let's just look at one last example. Let's just apply this to a portrait. So here's the standard portrait, basic edit. Even the street grunge portrait presets can have some nice looks like for this one I love five, I love three, warms it up. Some of them D saturate the skin tones a little bit too much for my liking. But it might be something you, yeah, ten does not work for a portrait, but it's something that you could play around with. I hope you enjoy the street grunge Style presets. And as always, if you're using them or any of our presets tag us on Instagram, let us know and we would love to share your work. Thanks so much. 224. Preset Pack 3: Bold Contrasty Colors: Here is the bold contrast and colors preset pack. I'm so excited about this one. We've got ten presets that are going to make your colors pop, make that contrast, contrast ear. And really make a lot of your photos just pop with a little bit of extra. Here. I'm just going through some of these presets on this great photo of Yosemite Valley. And you can see the different styles we play around with the colors. So some bringing out more of the green, some bringing out more than read, some bringing out the blues, some giving the different colors a little bit of a tint or a change of hue to play around with it and give it a little bit of style. I love just the number one. This is sort of the go-to. If you're just have a great nature wildlife shot, just want to make it pop. These are also going to work for other types of photos as well. So say we have this standard portrait right here. I think the flat matte look, looks pretty cool and we have that preset pack for the flat mat. But some bold contrast is also a cool look. And sometimes if you think, okay, this looks pretty cool. It's sort of a grungy, looks sort of too contrasty, but maybe we want to dial it down a little bit. And of course, some of these aren't going to work for certain portraits. Skin tones are very difficult to work with, and you don't want to play around with the colors too much. So that's where you can dial back and adjust the sliders. This is a great starting point, but it's a little bit too bright. The highlights are too bright. Maybe we're going to just bring down the saturation just overall, you can play with all the individuals sliders. It's a starting point. It's not a one-click fixed for every single photo. I would say these pack definitely is more for the nature shots. Here is a sunset shot, raw, unedited. I shot this down in insipidus, California, Carlsbad, actually. You can see that it just makes the sunset pop. That one gives it a little bit of a pink hue. So very cool preset pack. And again, a starting point, say here, a little bit like the colors, maybe it's still a little bit too dark. So let's just bring everything up. Let's bring up our shadows. Maybe bring up our black point so we can see a little bit more information. Still, if you're using this preset and you're trying to get a cohesive vibe across multiple photos, use that preset as a starting point. If you're making just manual adjustments to the exposure, your photos are still going to have a very similar vibe. And that's looking pretty darn good. So this is the bold contrast colors preset pack. If you're in the class, you can download it from the resources of the class or of this lesson wherever you find those resources on where you're taking this class, enjoy if you're using them and you like them. Let us know togas on Instagram, we'd love to check out your photos and share your work. Thank you so much and we will see you in another video. 225. Preset Pack 4: Light & Airy: Here is another video School Lightroom preset pack. This is called light and airy. And I'm just going to sort of shuffle through some examples of what these presets look like. Give you some advice on how to apply them to different photos. Light and airy. This is meant to make your photos bright, bright and light. Have that area vibe. Sort of like a bohemian style that you see a lot starting out with a photo similar to this one that I shot up in carpentry area, california. It's already a bright photo and you can see there's just a variety of different ways that we created warmth, coolness. Some of them we brought up the highlights, some of them we made it a little bit flatter, brought up the blacks and the darks. Here's another example. So here's a photo of, let's see, here's another photo of me and my daughter with her little tiger hoodie. This one already died, bright light. And it just sort of adds to that vibe. Newborn photography, some food photography, maybe like baking. This is a great example of where this type of style might help. With that. Let's go to the newborn shot that I have as an example. Here you can see it. A lot of those sort of like oranges, red tones. Really great for skin tones, softening some of those skin tones with some of these give them a little bit of a warmer tone, but some warm. A little bit of greenish, a little bit of magenta ish, some yellow. Lots of different styles for you. Here's another example. Let's take this portrait right here, this family portrait, already a bright photo and it's just going to enhancer it, enhance it and saturate some colors desaturated, others sometimes for portraits depending on the skin tone, it's not gonna work. Air set every seven. This looks great for this sort of gray enhances that yellow warmth of the sun. It's just going to depend. Now for darker photos, let's take just one of these darker photos, for example. Let's go with one like Here's a landscape photo. Let's see how it applies. It's not going to necessarily make it that bright, airy, Bohemian style, but it might work for you for these photos. I don't think that this is the best pack for nature and landscape Though. I think it's better for portrait, newborn. Interior, perhaps like real estate. But I'll leave it up to you to play around with it. So this is the light and airy pack. You'll see it in the resources of the lesson or the course wherever you download those resources. And I hope you enjoy it. If you do, please use them, please tag me at Phil Webinar and our video school profile on Instagram or wherever you're sharing these photos so we can check it out. Share your work as well. Thank you so much and enjoy. 226. Preset Pack 5: Vintage Vibes: Welcome to another free Lightroom preset pack that we're giving out with this course. I'm so excited to announce the vintage vibes pack. The vintage vibes pack is one that sort of emulates different old film stocks and gives that sort of retro feel for portraits and for pictures of people. It's a super fun and exciting pack that I'm excited to share. As you can see, I'm just running through some different examples of what this looks like. It has ten presets. You can use it with any version of Lightroom. Of course, all of the information for how to install them has been given previously in the course and you can download them in the lesson resources or in the course resources. Wherever you download resources for this class. It's a great pack if you're doing like sort of classic vintage stuff. If you find a cool street shot like this, of this old train depot that we have in our hometown of Sandy, Ms. California. It gives a very cool vintage vibe and all of these presets are completely customizable. So you liked the colors in this one, but maybe those highlights are a little bit too bright. Let's bring down the overall saturation a bit. And you bring down those whites, bring up those shadows. Everything completely customizable after the fact, that's what makes these presets so awesome. Here's a cool picture of this clock tower and little clock, not related towers. Big clock. As you can see, some look a little bit teal and orange. Some have a little bit more magenta, some, some deep blues, all kinds of styles here. This is a fun one. I hope you enjoy this pack. If you do, let us know. Let us know if you're using these presets for your photos wherever you're posting them. And if you haven't done so, take a chance to leave a review for the class. No matter what the rating is, good, bad. We love hearing from you. And we just enjoy making these presets for you, giving out more bonuses to try to make this course even better. Much love and joy the pack. And we'll see you in another one. Cheers. 227. Preset Pack 6: Desaturated Colors: Phil here with Video School. Thank you so much for watching this lesson of the class where we are announcing in launching the desaturated colors preset pack. This is a pact that might not be for everyone, but I think it's a pretty cool style. So desaturated colors. What are we doing with each of these different presets? We're basically dropping the saturation sometimes a little bit in just one area. Like for example, this one desaturated for it D saturates the blues. Then in some were just going crazy with it. Like some of these 78910 are pretty intense. Nine d saturates everything but the blues. And so it's not always going to look good for all of your photos. You just got to play around with it and find the one that's right for you. If you are in the class, you can download these from the resources of the lesson or of the course wherever you find those, those downloads, let me find another one. So here's an example. Even with people, it's kind of a cool style. Drops the saturation. Some are more contrast than others. Some have a little bit of warmth, some are a little bit cooler. Lots of Brown's desaturation going on. And so for this example, desaturated ten works in that other of the Eiffel Tower. It didn't work so much. For this photo, for example, this is a bright neon, lots of colors here. And you might be like Phil, why would I want to desaturate it? Well, maybe you want a D saturate some of the colors. Maybe it's just a style you're going for. For number four, this one looks pretty good for this one. I like that one a lot. Let's see what some of these more intense ones look like for this pack gives completely different hues. You can see, look at that blue sign. Maybe you don't want to see that. Maybe you're going for this style. So this is a very fun pack, not going to be for everyone. I completely understand night photography. This is a pact that might work really well for night photography because there's not a lot of colors that you're seeing perhaps. And so it's really just playing with the tones and things. The overall exposure to the different parts of exposure that is going to give your photo a good or bad style, whatever you think about this pack. So if you have downloaded this, if you are using it, let us know what you think. Tag us on Instagram at fill up near App Video School. And also if you haven't done so, hit that Review button on the course. We love hearing reviews from our students no matter what you think, good, bad, beautiful, ugly, whatever it is, We appreciate it. Thank you so much and enjoy this preset pack. 228. PhotoDash Los Angeles - Episode 1: Here in downtown LA for the first episode of Photo Dash together. Will, you are gonna pull the Stout Sule those up. I'm gonna pull the subject card. Are we ready for Round one? Right. I'm so excited. Oh, what is it? Shadow. Oh, that's good. Got wiki stock style. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Color shadow. One, two, three dash. Alright, a 30 minutes. 30 minutes. Where's Will gonna go? Where is he going? Is going up or down? Are you following me? He's going up. Welcome to Photo Dash. The rules are simple. We run around attempting to capture the best photo that fits a combination of randomly chosen subject and style cards. We must lock in one photo by the end of each 30 minute round, and you get to participate by voting for your favorite photos. And with your votes, at the end of our three episode season, we will crown the winner of this season of PhotoDash. Details later, but let's get back to Will and me dashing around downtown Los Angeles. I don't I honestly don't know where I'm going right now. Colorful shadows. I'm just gonna get my camera out, so in case I see anything. Looking for colorful shadows. Well, the sun is right there. I don't see any colorful shadows there, but I am gonna get my camera. I've got my k at SL twos, which is probably a little overkill for this gig. And I got a 24 to 70 full frame. Extra batteries. Using your extra cards. I got a water bottle because we have three challenges at 30 minutes. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Alright, I got a couple ideas for where I'm gonna go. Get some iconic downtown LA street photography. Colorful shadows. That's a pretty good poll. I think we'll find some good shadows right now because the sun is just coming up. So for starters, I'm gonna make sure that my camera is in a color mode, 'cause normally I shoot black and white. You know what's really cool about these new shirts that are Poncho shirts. They have little lens wipes. They're meant for sunglasses on the bottom of the shirt. They work great for photographers? Let's go figure this out. That's the this new concert hall. Now, I wanted to walk by here because I wasn't sure if there was gonna be any really cool reflections or something. It's just not too much colors man. I want to take some photos right now of that colorful shadows. I'm just gonna get kind of a safety shot here. You and I need, like, a color skate, something really bright and colorful. And then there happened to be, like, a shadow going across it. That's not very colorful. But there is shadows. I don't like it. I'm gonna see how close I am to Alva Street. Oh, my God and they didn't make it to UTT Station. So I could walk over there. And just wasting time. Sure. Alright, I'm switching my lenses really quickly because I have my 35 millimeter and my 16 millimeter. I'm shooting on the Fuji film XT four, which is a crop sensor lens or camera. I see it kind of a cool shot here. Let's get on auto focus. And these trees are kind of creating this cool little shadow effect. So Okay, let's drop that or that aperture. It's kind of cool. Wonder if there's anything from over here with the concert hall in the background. Oh, that is cool. Oh, except by seeing my freaking camera. Let me move my camera. I get closer up. Of course, the first challenge is, like, something super gnarly. These are colorful. But there isn't any shadows. There's no shadows. I'm gonna lie Phil. This one's hard for me. I wonder how Phil is doing. I want to get behind this tree 'cause I don't want to see my shadows in here. Oh, that is cool. I would say that's colorful with the sky. Alright. That's good. I was not thinking I was gonna be getting a photo of the Walt Disney Concert Hall right at the beginning. But I think that was the place to do it. Like, in my mind, every time we're taking photos of shadow, it's always been black and white or contrasty or something like that. Union Station directions. Walk. Oh, 16 minute walk. I can't make that date. This is hard, D. Oh, here we go. Succulents create a lot of shadow, and sometimes they're colorful. Lots of shadows coming up here on the grod as well. Yeah, here we go. So let's work on this. Okay, well, right now I have ApaturiiFour. I'm gonna actually jump it all the way up to, like, an F 16 because it's pretty bright outside. So more things are in focus. That's got shadow and color. Ooh, I'm happy. I'm liking this. And I notice will come out better. I posts. I don't know. Let's go back down to a 28. I also dropped down to 100. There's some nice, pretty colour in the background. Alright. I'm into that. We can submit that it we absolutely have to, but it's we can do better. We can do better. In these super colorful food trucks, so let me get that shot. It's kind of cool. All photos you're seeing are raw and unedited. You'll see an edited version once that player locks in their choice. I don't know. It's kind of a weird photo. Nature thing. That's cool. Alright, I'm into this. Hold on. Let's try a different rendition of this. So I'm trying to shoot these colored things right here with a little bit of that green and then the background with the back. I don't mind that. But that's at 24. I'm using 24 70. I wonder if I scoop back and then I'll be back here where you are. And we'll use a 70, and we'll compress everything, right? 'Cause when you zoom in at a 70 from 24 images. Like, the background starts to compress, so it looks like closer together, versus using a win so I mean, you see colorful. But you don't see shadows. So on the 16, as I was mentioning, this is my whitest lens on the Fuji film XT four. Oh, that's such a better composition. That's cool. Okay, right now, l10 012, it's probably my favorite for now. 17 minutes. Okay. We're walk. Let me see if I find a better location. Okay, I'm heading over to Angels flight. It's a ernicularRil, way that's, like, 1 minute long, and it just goes up this hill over here. But I'm not exactly sure where it is. Where's this, like, bright building architecturally here with the blue sky. Can't really tell if there's shadows. It's colorful. And there's kind of some shadows. I wonder if we get closer. Thankfully, I have a pretty good sense of direction because we were headed in the perfect direction. Lots of reflections, now reflections, that would be another fun subject or style to be capturing here. I'm liking this a lot because there's color. There's, like, a hard shadow in the building, it's creating these really cool textures and lines. And then the shadows in the back building. So, okay, so let's start at 24. 24, I don't think. Like, does it justice. So 70? No. 50. I'm trying to center the lines in the center of the photo. Think that'll work. Alright. For now, that's gonna be my submission, I think. 10022. Alright, let see what I'm trying to shoot. Colorful shadows. Colorful shadows M. Not only am I trying to take great photos, but ultimately, I'm trying to beat Will in these challenges and win the first season of Photo Dash with the two of us. So I wonder where he's at. Alright, I don't want to go too far from this area, 'cause I feel like it was a really solid area for the second challenge. But if I get behind these buildings, I'm gonna lose light, and I need the shadows. I need the hard shadows. Oh, these shadows are super cool right here, though. And then with that Angels flight there, I like the leading lines of the benches and the path kind of going that way towards the top the Angels flight railway station. I want the Angels flight railway to be at the end of those leading lines. Burning. That's cool. What if it's colorful and there's just shadows in the background? No, I hate it. I hate it. Let me show you what I'm looking at right here. It's cool. I got to get some colorful shadows, though. Stupid shadows. Why couldn't have been black and white shadows? Why couldn't it have been color flowers? Catal Shadows. That's funny. That was the name of my ska band back in 1999. Parados. How much time you got there? Okay. I got, like, 11 minutes. It's really cool is that you get to look at everything so differently. Like, I'm looking I've walked through here my whole life. And now, right now, I'm looking at it very specifically for something very different. And you don't get to do that normally. I think, especially in a place that you've lived your whole life. So you get to do that. But also, you're worried about time. I wondered if I got down on these stairs and you could see it. And how do I get down to those stairs? That's the question. And I'm at the second street tunnel on hill. Which I actually have shot a commercial for here before a long time ago. So visually cool. Zepto. While we're heading down to the stairs, I'm just looking at some of my photos. I like something like 5964, where you can see the guy walking or 5962 in this really cool pathway. I think that's a cool photo. 595 one's kind of cool just for a cleaner shot. I like the sunlight coming in over on the left hand side. Oh, colorful. Colorful. Huh. Alright, running down here really quick, 'cause there's another car coming up. Shadows are kind of cool. This bulling's cool. This could be colorful, especially if we saturated it. Uh, sorry. Ah, that's kind of neat. I wish that tree wasn't there. Not really an award winning photo, though. I guess my question now is, like, am I happy with these photos or do I feel like I need to go to one more spot? Also, I have to take into account, like, for the next round, do I want to be closer to another location? I might try to get on this thing and see, maybe there's a cool thing. So cool shadows coming through the car. I think it's only $1. Probably my second choice for submission. That first one with the Blue building and the other building. He's probably gonna be the best. Are you guys running right now? No. No. No. Okay. Day. Ran up the steps for no reason. Aah. Still looking for something better. I think I maybe sacrificed. Distance for my second and third challenge. Like, I want to be, you know, the Disney Concert Hall. I want to be near Second Street Tunnel. I want to be under the Hope Bridge. Come have breath. Feels like I don't know. Maybe Phil's gonna be me on my first challenge. I mean, we're both winners. Everyone's a winner, right? I got 5 minutes left. Oh, my God. Like, my only chance is to go down, maybe get a better shot of Angels flight from. There's Angels knoll. It's a little hill that's outside, and it might have a little bit more color over there. Got to go around the block. Stairs to live Street, yeah. That's where I need to go. That's kind of cool. Holy. Hm. That's a lot of stairs. Downtown LA can be so random and beautiful. Especially when there's no one around, it's a Saturday morning. You know what else is not here? Colorful shadows. Oh, my gosh, maybe as soon as I said that. What do we have here? Man, if only the sun was hitting these, this would be more, like, colorful reflections, am I right? 3 minutes left, 3 minutes left. I think I'm gonna have to climb back up something to get to that park thing. Nah, it's just not giving what I needed to give. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Is this park even open? Don't tell me it closed. It is tough. 3 minutes. I guess we're gonna have to lock in that one, and that's just it is what it is. Oh, I think my best bet now is to walk down towards a location that might be better for the next pole, not completely sure. But while I do that, you got to lock in. So 5971. 5963 is cool because it has kind of a cool shadow of the guy or 5964, but cropped in a little bit. I like having, like, a subject or something in it, and he was super colorful. The Broad Museum ones just aren't that good. I think it's between 5934 or 64 cropped. The Disney Hall one's cool, and I'm worried that people who are not so familiar with the Disney Hall photo are gonna think, Man, that's a really cool photo of this cool building and think I should have picked that one. But I am going to lock it in with 5964. The photo of the guy walking towards Angels flight. It's more colorful than the other one, and it has the shadows. It's got the subject in there that I think makes it a little bit more interesting. 5964, locked in, baby. So our winner is l101 0021. Locking that in for challenge with 1 minute and 29 seconds left. This is such a nice little area. Surprised I haven't run into Phil, actually. That's it. Tim's done. Alright. Got to call Will. Yeah. What's up? To so fast for one, and for To was so hard. I think I got something that's decent. Yeah, it goes fast. It goes fast, and then I was like, covering ground 'cause I was like, I can't find anything. Alright, well. Alright. So you locked in. You locked in a photo? Yeah, I locked one in. It's not my favorite, but I locked it in. Wow. The people will decide. We each do our own twist. Yeah. Okay. Twist, you ask? Before dashing off to snap our photos, we randomly split up a deck of twist cards that add a fun or perhaps difficult twist to each challenge. These will come into play. Don't look at them. This one. Okay. Keep us safe. These are added to the second and third rounds. Round two subjects. Okay, Silhouette. Oh. High contra silhouette. Hey, that works. I'm gonna pull my twist. Coffee break. You are required to make a pit stop for a coffee or alternative drink. Drinks must be I serve you. I need water. That's fine. Don't I don't mind that. Mobile camera. Only use a mobile phone camera for your next challenge. Oh, okay. Come on. Use only a mobile phone camera for your next challenge. Shh. Alright. Three, two, two, one dash. Man. Okay, well, I guess I better put my freaking camera away. Okay, coffee shop, coffee shop, coffee shop. Let's see. Where's the closest coffee right here to me? I don't want to walk back up those stairs, those freaking stairs. Oh, you know what? I'm going exactly where I want to go. Grand Central Market. That's where I'm going. I'm right by it. No, I'm not going the right way. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I am going the wrong way. I got to use my mobile phone. It's got to be a silhouette, and it's got to be a high contrast. In order to get a silhouette, I need to be exposing for basically the sun, and I need to see the shadow of something, right? The silhouette or something. Luckily, for the phone, it's easy, right, because you can just stop all the way down, and, like, the phones, like, high contrast, anyway. Alright, so the plan is to head over to the Grand Central Market. Order some a drink from somewhere. I'm hoping there there's, like, a lot of sunlight that goes through there. I'm gonna switch over to the 35 millimeter. But really, it's mostly about just posting up and finding people walking by interesting things that will create a silhouette. Alright, let's go here. Let's hope this doesn't take a long time. Why are gonna get a coffee and use a phone. Silhouette is already by nature, high contrast, right? 'Cause high contrast is, like, really dark darks and really bright bright. Right? Bright bright, dark darks. This building over here there's a lot of contrasts in the white to the dark. This camera's trying to expose for both because it's a solid camera. I like this game. This is fun. I'm just trying to get to the Capitol. The Capital. Stop saying that. City Hall. Disney Concert Hall. Which hopefully we're gonna come back to for the third challenge, 'cause it's gonna look cool. Hey. Um, what are those are those cold drinks right there? I'll do the small one of those. Yeah. Okay. Yep. I've been running around to eat butter, so I don't need some hot. That's here. Also, I got the timer on my watch going now, which is much better. Um, City Hall there. But we got to walk over there to get to that shot. Thank you. Cheers, my friends. Alright, ordered a beverage. Coffee break. Let me swap lens really quick and do a time check. I think the 35 will be cool. I almost wish I had a tighter lens. I always say that because looking down the hallways of this market is pretty cool with all the vendors and colors on each side. Super contrasty options to do it that way. Now, I'm on an aperture priority, so I set my aperture, and then I can use my exposure compensation dial to drop down. Alright, God that 22 minutes. Alright, that took a while. Okay, I'm kind of back where Phil and I started in the first place. How the sun is so high. But in order to get the silhouette, I think I need to be closer to City Hall. Uh Oh, hoh. Just need enough light coming from that way to create a cool little silhouette. I kind of want like a subject walking by. Silhouette. Ya. Maybe we do one of these palm trees. Let's try with this palm tree first and see what it looks like, and I'll show you what I want to do. You got a little bit time. So that's a nice frame. And then if we expose to here, Whoa, not doom. Exposure. We'll bring it down. Maybe widen out. Silhouette, silhouette. Get a deeper silhouette if we're background high contrast. I'm into that. This could be first place, right? We'd crop it like that. Okay. Like I always say, you know? It's not the camera, man. It's the camera man. Ooh, Do, man. This has got to be it, right here. Hmm. I'm kind of waiting for one person there, right there. Ah, yeah, there we go. Oh, yeah, that's cool. People ordering doughnuts? That's kind of cool. Oh, yeah, baby. Okay, there are a lot more people here, so I don't think I'm I don't know if I even gonna get another shot, but this is such a cool spot. I love the sign of the doughnut Man. Perfect for a lot of contrast. And the reflection of the sign is cool, too. Like, if I center him, that's kind of cool. What you saw me do there was get right up under the shadow of the tree to create that silhouette, which then created the contrast, right? Now, if I want to do that with freaking City Hall, I have to get under the shadow that is being casted by the sun. And I'm great if I had this challenge earlier. 17 minutes. I think we should be able to do it. But that's gonna be it. We're gonna have to, like, commit to that. Alright, I'm going the other way, and I'm noticing that even this other way, you can see people silhouetted up there. Oh, yes, and this is where that colorful wall is. I where I'm just gonna post up and try to see if someone walks by. This Billy is huge, so I'm going to put it in a place where I get the sun further down behind it. And see what it looks like on the phone. I'd like to keep moving forward, though. I'd like it to fill the frame. This is great. I've always wanted to take a really pretty photo of the Capital. Mac, why do you call it capital? The City Hall. City Hall, City, Cit yhall It's a city. It's not a state. Yeah, I always want someone to walk on by. You know, people are waiting for me, but I want you to walk by. No, walk by to the right. No, no, no. Wout the camera? This way? We're gonna be raw Mac. And let's get up. Let's drive. I hate it bat. Maybe we just zoom it. Yeah. Okay. So in order to get it silhouetted, we need to bring down the exposure. Feel like I want that framing? Okay, focus? No. See, like, focus or exposure. This is with a lock. I don't know. I'm not happy with that. Let's go closer. L have some time to chill 'cause that doughnut man shot is the one that I want. This is just gonna be a little extra credit right here if I get the shot. Oh, yeah, that's cool, photo. I want the composition to be good, as well as the exposure and stuff. Right? 'Cause I do feel like you can get away with a lot if your composition is, like, solid, right? If you have crappy lighting, crappy color and stuff, if you have a good, interesting composition, you'll still evoke feeling. If you have a terrible composition and okay lighting, you know, Oh, yeah, this is way better. It'll It'll not be as good. So, I always say, like, focus on being better at composing shots before you're worrying about everything else, right? Six oh 29. I think if I, like, edit it and I, like, overexposed that background a little bit, Oh, maybe if they were silhouetted in front of that sign, that would be kind of cool, too. Look, S, look at that composition. You got me? And you got the subject. Ramax. Yeah, that's a much better shot. It's a little phallic. Not gonna lie, which I'm not crazy about. Let's add some shadows. It can still be silhouetted with. Uh, I think that's gonna be it. Got the plane in the background. We can crop it like this. It's silhouetted enough. Image 118. On my phone. This is such a cool photo. But I don't know if there's gonna be a silhouette. I bet Phil and was gonna do this. I like the idea of a palm tree. Oh, here we go. Yeah. Silhouette, high contrast, right? IPhone wants to make sure everything looks exposed. I don't I don't like it. Now, can I be in the photo? I don't have a tripod for my scenery. That was cool. And now I'm gonna do I'm gonna do a timer shot and see where I'm at. Wait. Yeah, that was kind of cool, though. I think I need to be closer. I guess I can just start walking back up towards the concert hall, so I save some time. The twist thing is fine. Just not as excited about this. We sure are uncovering LA. I think that's been my favorite part about this so far is, like, Again, you get to see somewhere in a different light. And normally, like, my whole life on vacation, I go out for walks and I take photos. But Havi's challenge is, like, fun. 30 minutes, you think is a lot, but it goes by quick if you're not happy with what you're shooting. Like, Illy only took like three photos here in this one. And like we said, in the photomask class? The best cameras the one you got with you. 6062 of me is pretty cool, but it's really hard to see the silhouette. 6057 is also cool, but, again, I feel like this location, the lights are just so cool and iconic, but really, it's just not working for the silhouette. Favorite is still going to be He juice one. What number is this six oh 11. That one's kind of cool. The Donut Man. Something like I built a little tiny in you to relax. Like, we got 4 minutes. So you just chill. Is it hiking when you're walking to the CV up and down hills. I wonder if he's rushing around. I might want to head back towards the Walt, Disney Concert Hall a bit because we have to end our last round there. See, this is the shot that it was if I was more telephoto, it would be super cool. So I have this 5 minutes to recalibrate so that Round three I can crush 'cause I feel like I'm not doing well. It's not fair. Phil's done this once already. Ooh, six oh 84, 34 seconds. Six oh 84. Now, 608 oh nine. That's the one I'm going for. Locking in six oh oh nine. Sure. Round number two. Three, two, one. I'm calling him. He's not gonna get any free time. Got you. Hey, W. Running out of time over there? I had a nice little round number two. Me too. I'm sitting at this nice table. I like, took my jacket off, had some water. Hey, remember all that money I spent on this really fancy nice camera, and I was using my phone. Yeah, but can't you get great photos on your phone? Got we teach. Yeah, for trick. I guess we'll find out. I was trying to take that into consideration of, like, where I wanted to end my time, but then I was like, taking photos with 30 seconds left. So subject number three. Whoa. Nice. Are you doing that on purpose? No, I swear to God. Alright, here's the style. Here's the style card. Ready? W K. Oh, I instantly had that idea. I mean, it changed everything. The twist, man, the twist is what's gonna mess me up. I know. Like, I got the picture of my head. I know what I want to do. You go first this time. Alright. Grounded, your camera can be no higher than 6 " from the ground for the next challenge. Oh, no higher than 6 " right in the negative space of architecture. My ground. Phone jail. You can't use your phone for the duration of your next challenge. Phone jail. That's a big one for you. Do you know where you are? I think so. I can't look at the phone for the timer, so I just o. Make sure that I lock in before that. One, two, three dash. I want to go shoot the concert hall because that's what we're here for. Alright, this is just gonna be me running around looking for buildings. And you know what's awesome is the Bradbury buildings right across the street. You know what's not awesome? It's closed. I'm gonna stay at an FA to get a lot in focus. It's still a cool building, though, so let me see what I can do. And it's kind of cool getting the building with the Metro. Yeah, Al Poo Loco over there? Is that cool? Ooh. Okay, negative space. I'm gonna get right crain on. We're going back up to Disney concert hall. Sky's cool. Lot of colors. Let me switch back to the 35 Aequal with the birds. Hi. I'm gonna try and go back to the car to get the other battery for this camera, 'cause it says it's at 3%. We got 26 minutes. I'm not super worried about timing. Kind of being in front of them, you know, corner of the building is kind of cool. This building is kind of cool, too. It's cool. I think it'll be cooler if I was across the street. Oh, see, I love this building. I wonder if I can shoot through the water. Can't be more than 6 ". Off the ground. I'd be helpful if I had a silty screen on this camera, huh? I mean, that's cool. I need negative space, too. Mm. Man, I'm gonna have to get on the ground here. I don't know. I don't know about that. Ah. Not really. There's a couple really cool buildings that we go for. There's the Walt Disney Concert Hall. There is the City Hall building. I think I prefer the Disney concert hall. A right, that's the classic thing, we'll go to the backside, though, 'cause I feel like Phil might have gone West. But now I'm, like, not exactly sure where I am. From where I'm at. You haven't run into him yet. Man. Look how far we've walked. I'm walking towards City Hall, and there's also this really cool building right here with all these reflective windows. That will be kind of a cool photo, too. I only a slight audible. If these cops aren't still there. I'm gonna go down under Hope Street. It's a solid walk, though, so we'll see if we can pull it out. God. I thought I was gonna be on the 16 for this whole challenge, but I think I'm gonna be on the 35. Alright, so far, I like 6105. 6096 is cool, but it's kind of not negative spicy enough. 6093 is also cool, except, again, not negative spacy enough. Now, here's the City Hall, which is a cool building. Now, where we started from? It's like, that straight look down towards City Hall. And I think it'll look pretty cool. I'm having second thoughts about the bridge now because I forgot the challenge is negative space, right? And architecture. Like, the architecture would be rad, but there's not really a lot of negative space, right? And that means, like, there's more negative than positive space. And positive space would be the subject. Negative space would not be the subject, right? So, more negative space. Which I love doing, but I just don't now that I'm thinking about the bridge might not be good. So I'm just gonna go into the bowels of the freaking Disney concert hall. Can I see if I can connect my camera to my phone, so I can still see what I'm taking photos of, which I guess this is why you'd want a flippy screen on your phone when you're doing silly Saturday morning challenges, and your camera can't be more than 6 " off the ground. I mean, look at how cool this is. I'm getting a little bit of a safety shot right here. Ooh, that sun is so bright. Oh, that sounds right. Kind of the wrong spot to be straight on. I think I want to be up higher. Does this count as being the ground? 'Cause I could stand here. I will. Ah, we could probably do better. So leave floor here. Architecture, but you can't be 6 " off the ground. Hey. Well, not really what I'm going for. And I know the further I get away from this, the worse it's gonna be in terms of my lens not being able to do what I'm wanting to do. This place is so cool. Ah, this is what I was looking for. You got a little amphitheater here? But I wanted to shoot up at this. This is architecture. Right? Something everyone's like, used to see. I could imagine the shot where we were up here. Telephoto straight straight on, not really looking up at it. I think that would look really cool. This is kind of cool shot. It's got these little grassy things. That's kind of cool. Wondering if it's not perfectly centered on over here is kind of better. Oh, 6118. Maybe as a contender. There we go. Connection successful. Alright, so we're connected, but I want to be able to take both. There we go. Let's go. Okay. I got my phone. I got my camera. I got the Osmo. Yeah, that's what I want. Right there. D. Yeah, exactly. It's about 6 ", right? Yeah. Get those lines going. I think a lot of people take modeling photos in there and stuff. I don't know how much time is left, but I do know where I am, which is good. I'm about a block away from the Walt Disney Hall. The negative. Well, that's nice. The negative space I was thinking. There's one other shot I was thinking would be the front of the building, and we're just gonna, like, skim the top of it. Uh, how much time we get? 10 minutes. Yeah. Wish that fountain was on. Have a good one. Probably gonna run into fill here soon. No, other dudes with cameras. Look, that's cool. But I think I need to be across the street. That's part of the problem. It's a cool building close to where we parked? I just don't know if I'm gonna have enough time to get the shot that I want. So, I got to book it. Remember. I just feel like, Alright, I'll do this shot at this building. It's like, typical. Like, I want it to be something more, like, different. Like, everyone takes the same photos of the freaking Disney concert hall. I don't know. We'll try. See what we get. This cool? Walt Disney concert hall over there with foreground elements negative spacey. Got it? I mean, that's nice. That's like, that's the negative space that I want. Actually, the shutter and the focus. I don't think that's the shot. I couldn't even see what I was taking p. I'm gonna have to lock in a photo. Let's go like a 16. Let's just go for it, huh? 'Cause there's no depth anyway. That would make a really nice black and white photo. There's so many opportunities here. I just need more time. Something like 6119 or 6117. Kind of cool two, 6105. I think that's got to be it. I don't think I have any more time. What is that? Is that a Here's a problem? Because my sensor is dirty as all heck. When I shoot at F 16, you can see every little spot on it. Oh, I really need to clean my sensor. It's been a while. I'm gonna get on the ground myself. And just do the best I can. 61 oh five. That's it. Locked in. And now I got to get to the concierge Hall. The trees in the way. Man, I wouldn't have to freaking lay on the ground and see a much better photo. I would be cool if it was architecture. Where is Philip? Friends with a Frames got? I don't know what time it is. 40 minutes. Am I late? Men not late? Did I make the time? Oh, Mavill. I see him. Oh, there's Philip. I see him. He's way over there. Trying to do his challenge. And a great way to end our challenge. He's gonna be in my photo. Do you still have time? I have no clue what time. Yeah. You got 1 minute and 53 seconds. Are you still trying to get your shot? Sorry. Sorry, 6 " on the ground. There we go. You haven't locked in the shot yet? I can't decide. Can't decide. B. I can't decide, Bill. Does that count as negative space? I feel like it does. Can I go away R T in this one? We're going with RT. I'm locking in one, zero, zero, 38. 30 seconds left. Nice. Hey, go off. Ooh. Wow. That's a wrap on Episode one of Photo Dash. Thank you so much for being here. I hope you had as much fun watching that as we had planning, prepping for it, and going out running around downtown LA, taking photos. Thank you so much for watching, and we will see you next week for the next episode of Photo Dash. See you then. 229. PhotoDash Los Angeles - Episode 3: Welcome to Venice Beach for our last episode of Season one. Will ready to go. That's my photo Dash move. I don't know if you know. Fix up the subject. Bam, what is it? Transportation. That's a good spot for that God, yeah, yeah. That can be creative. Okay, Kyle. Frame within a frame. Okay. Okay. That's a solid pole. I already see one. Three, two, one. Dash. Let's go. Transportation and frame within a frame. Where does he go? By W. Welcome back to the finale of season one of Photo Dash. Votes are in from Episode two at the Los Angeles Arboretum. Will's incredible last second submission in Round one, along with a win in Round two, helped him overtake Phil for the season lead. After two episodes, Will now has a lead of 306 points to Phil's 294. As a reminder, each episode contains 330 minute rounds. In each round, subject and style cards are paired to create a unique photography challenge. In the second and third rounds, a twist is added to spice things up. Let's head back to Venice Beach for the third episode and finale of season one. Clearly it's foggy here at Venice Beach, California. I think I have the home advantage when I was a kid, 'cause we used to skate up here, hang out. And so I've been actually photographing here at Venice since I was like, 14 or 15. Dude, transportation frame within a frame. That is a pretty good poll. We have got a lot of opportunities here for that. People on bikes, transporting surfboards, skateboarders over here. Man, I'm just kind of doing graffiti. Look at. Here's the thing, though, I need transportation, so a bike is transportation. A frame with a frame, maybe palm trees. Why don't we go post up by those trees and see if I can get a bike going by with Trees. As in the frame. Since we are at Venice Beach and we are right next to the skate park, I feel like we've got to get this shot. Alright, I'm on my Fuji film XT four with these 16 to 55 zoom lens. I'm gonna go walk around to the other site. There's some trees over there. So I think I found the perfect frame, but there's people in the spot that I want to shoot, so I'm gonna find a different spot for now, and then we'll come back to that spot. But basically, it's like a fence opening to the bike path. And I feel like if I get low enough, I'll be able to shoot. But then there's also these dot palm trees, right? And I feel like I can probably shoot through these palm trees. It can be really Californian, you know? Oh, no, clearly, I miss that. Changing to continuous I so that I can I'm trying to shoot through these trees onto the bike path. The focus has to be at the bike path, but I hate that there's a pom fron there. I wonder if I could get rid of it. You see that palm fron right? Right here? It's in my shot. Co. People are in front of me. Alright, so I'm standing here waiting for these skaters to go. They're trying to jump over this kind of sign that's on the ground. It's just trying to figure out the framing between a couple objects that will work. This one's kind of cool because I've got the palm tree in the background. I'm gonna stay here for just a minute and see. And we've got M. Like a thir quarter? O quarter, not ir quarter. Because I'm nimble and I' quick, I'm gonna put your priority. And we got auto focus, and now we just got to wait for transportation to go by. 'Cause I like this frame a lot. Pug? Okay, here comes some bikes. Few horizontal or vertical. Horizontal or vertical. Horizontal vertical. I'm gonna go vertical? Vertical? I think the other spot will be good horizontal. Alright, here we go. Here they come in here. Oh, oh, there are too. That's like I mean, that's cool. Ah, that first one. I kind of wish I saw more of the palm trees, though, huh? Do we need to get further back? Get some alts. I was pretty cool. One more try right here. This one's got the palm tree in the background, the girl with the beanie. I might have to crop in just a little bit to get the exact kind of framing that I'm thinking for this shot. Okay, this guy's about to go. That was better. This surfing count as transportation. Lanna see if I can get the surfer over there as he's going through. Oh. Frame. Ah. What a California photo. Yeah, I don't know. That one's pretty good. Okay. So we could roll with one of these. Kind of like the surfer one. I don't know if that counts as transportation, no. There's one other spot we can go. I think there's people leaving. Let's go over there. Gonna do the same thing, but different frame. Hm. We like people playing basketball. In the thog. I am honest to God, Southern California vlogger at this point, right? Everyone's kind of looking at me like, Hey, bro, you got a blog? Sure do, bro. It's a photo competition. Check it out. Photo dash. Ready to beat Phil. I'm gonna have to sit on the floor for this one, I think. Looking for my frame. Oh, there it is. So I feel like we could shoot through this. And it's sort of a frame on a frame. We'll catch a biker. But again, I got to get on the ground. Yeah. Okay. That shot's cool. I just don't want that backpack in front of my shot, so I'm gonna try one more time. Now, we just got to wait. Oh, misty. That's pretty cool. That's cool. Let's make it a little darker. I really wish something cool would go by, you know? Better. Literally, nothing is going by now. Alright. We're gonna go try something else. Well, here comes one. He's on the phone. I think we got the exposure nail down. He come two bikers. That's transportation. I'm gonna move it to manual focus because this is hard. We're just waiting for something to come by. Oh, here comes a golf cart. Let's go. Yeah? I don't know. It's not that compelling. Alright, I'll give this five more minutes. And then we're moving on. How are you doing? Phil. Right, 10 minutes into the challenge. I think I've got an option. This is the last episode, meaning I've got to beat Will. So I need a really epic photo here, honestly. Now, it is foggy, which I was a little bummed out because we're here in the afternoon and I thought we were going to get some sunsety vibes for the end of the season. But we are looking like it's gonna be cloudy for the rest of the day, which is okay. Alright, there's this lady who is rollerblading right here. We've got all these palm trees. So I think sort of a wide photo might look kind of cool here. Last one. Someone rollersk. Not compelling. Not compelling. We're out. We're out. I mean, the foggy vibe is kind of cool with the palm trees. I need to get closer. Nah. That's that's hard. I'm gonna walk towards the street. Down where the Venice sign is, there's those arches. And maybe we can get, like, a bus or a car under one of the arches in a frame, right? I don't feel like I'm in such a rush in this challenge. You think it's 'cause I grew up like 10 miles down the road here? Or maybe the cards were pulling or better, or it's just cooler looking. Everywhere you look, I don't have to go very far to get something cool looking. I'm pretty close to the Venice sign itself, this kind of famous sign over the main street over here, so I might run over there since I have a little bit of time. There's these arches. There's a skateboarder. There's a motorcycle. Oh, my God. So I went through my photos that I got right now, and there's a couple that could work. 491 is the one that I'm leaning towards because it gives off the Venice vibe. So a couple of the other ones look cool, but the frame within the frame wasn't exactly what I'm going for. And there's a lot of, like, cars. There's bikes parked on the street, but I want to find something like moving. Use a frame. Within a frame. This is crazy. Oh, wait, transportation. Transportation without a frain. I don't have a wide nu lans. I should be on the other corner. I'm gonna get one shot of this sign. I don't know. It's just like cars that interesting? Oh, this seems like such a risk to just be standing here rather than on the boardwalk. I bet Will's over there. Okay, I got 11 minutes. I think I'm gonna go towards the skate park. And the only other transportation I can think of is skateboarding. Bet that's where Phil went, too. Yeah, frame want a frame here could work. I guess skateboarding is transportation, but, like, I don't know. It's trying to be sneaky, and I completely missed the shot. I wonder work Bill is. Alright. This is not working out. I want you. Let's move on Oh wait how much time I got? You got 8 minutes, crap. Alright. Well, I'm kind of stuck here. I found sort of a cool composition, but now I'm just waiting for something more interesting than a car to drive by. Maybe this will be a better spot. Frame within a frame. That kind of looks like a movie. I think I would just crop this 'cause it looks like a movie, right? It looks like the Asper R show with 24 oh, especially with, like, everything's going on in the background. I was just kind of waiting for something to happen. Come on, something cool with a bike or something go by? No. It's cool, but it's not great. Let's go. Let's figure out what we need to lock down. Mm. Alright. Well, it is what it is. Walking across the sand in my tore up vans. Alright, Philip, I've exhausted the photos that I'm gonna take. Pretty excited about that surfing one, but is that considered transportation 'cause you wouldn't use a surfboard to, like, go anywhere, right? I'm looking at 582, and this one was kind of like an accidental rush shot, but it's kind of cool of this guy on a skateboard being pulled by a couple dogs. But the frame within a frame is not really frame within the frame at all. 594 works. There's a one wheel, but he's not moving. If I were a more extroverted human, I would go talk to him, put him somewhere. I like 595 because it has a story of, you know, Venice Beach, the cars, the bike rack with missing bike. 813 is actually a cool shot of the skateboarder up in the air. It's a good moment. That's probably the best action shot that's actually with framing within a frame. I mean, at the last second, I'm getting this one wheel guy in between these trees with his trash can socks. Oh, I could probably take that trash can on Photoshop. But now I wish he was all alone. Like is another surfboard guy. Should I follow this one wheel guy? Let's sit here and figure out what photos were gonna do. I mean, that one wheel show would have been cool if he was, like, doing something. I have gotten rid of the thing. We go to the skate park. 39 is kind of cool 'cause it's like this weird. I just don't think it's, like, frame within a frame worthy. And again, like, I feel weird about skateboarding for an activity being transportation, but I guess it is transportation. Five bucks says Phil got a skateboarding thing, right? Oh, but 491, that's so cool, too. 49 one's got, like, the whole Venice vibe of palm tree, the girl watching the Beanie, and the guy on the skateboard. That's like, totally transportation. I don't know, what do you think? Is that, like, more interesting than just the Venice sign? It's o, okay, a, a, yay. Cars didn't work out. Motorcycle didn't work out. Lady roller skating, 822 didn't work out. That one's kind of cool. But the buggy. Bike 819 through the gate. No, 818 through the gate. No, 817. Ah, this surfing count as transportation. I don't know. Wait, 1 minute and 35 seconds. I wish surfing. If surfing would count as transportation, I feel like I would lock in 814. But I don't feel like it does. So I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna push. I'm gonna go with 817. I feel like it's the sharpest one. He's got some character, right? As a person. We got the palm trees, we got the fogs it's gonna be good black and white. Locking it in 817 with 1 minute to go. Which one do I think is just a more engaging photo to look at 492. You know, I always talk about things that I like about photography is a photo that keeps you looking, a photo that's compositionally interesting, and then one that tells a story. And I think that hits on a lot of those points. That's what I'm locking in 492. You got 40 seconds to go. We will see where Will is. Oh, I see Phil right now. He's in the spot that I was taking the gate photo at. Alright, let's call Will. I can see you. You can see me? I could have done way better if I had more time. Yeah, dude, the transportation thing messed me up. And right when I sat down here to pick my photo in the last minute, a one wheel guy came right by these two I saw that one wheel guy. Alright, so you're gonna pull subject. Alright, here we go. Oh. The streak. Oh, that's good. I mean, that just like, whatever. I have a great idea for that one. Okay, our styles gonna be You better hurry. I'm thinking. Soft focus. Okay. How does it even mean? Is just got to be out of focus? Say, more like Like a lot of out of focus. Shallow depth of field, kind of, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I got Twist cards, Phil. Let's go first. Okay. Give me the bad news. Ready? Okay. One shot. During your next challenge, you can only take one single photo for the entire challenge. One shot. During your next challenge, you can only take one single photo for the entire challenge. I wanted this one so badly. I like this one. Don't think. Just do. That's fun. Alright, here we go. Here's mine. Time out. You can't take any photos for the next 15 minutes. You can move and do research. I'll just take a nap. If you better find a good shot. Actually, the one shot would have been harder in the last challenge, so Alright, 30 minute timer. Okay, three, two, one. Dash. Alright. See. Day. That sucks. I think I have, like, 28 minutes to set up a shot. It's not the end of the world. A street, soft focus. And I got to wait 15 minutes. Hey, Siri, can you set another timer for 15 minutes? First off, I am gonna put on my 56 millimeter. So this is the street. Which is a cool challenge for being down here. But soft focus makes it a little bit challenging. So we're gonna try to get a lot of stuff out of focus, Shallowed up the field or something. Let me do a little bit of research. I can't take any photos for 15, so we'll just sling this puppy around. Buddy? Go find a street. I think I'm gonna walk all the way down the boardwalk, go towards the pia. Although I don't want to be too far for the third challenge. I'm gonna do it anyway. I'm gonna go down there, 'cause I think the street that leads to the pier is really cool. Okay. Check in sand. Let's think about what this street is. And street basketball is, like, one of the things that goes on down here in Venice. So I think that could be a cool subject. It's just figuring out how to get it out of focus. So I think I'd have to be, like, focusing on something in the foreground with the ability to see the basketball players or the basketball game in the background. It's really funny because I have 15 minutes I'm gonna find Phil, and I'm gonna stock him. I found him already. Alright, we'll get up behind him. I mean, otherwise, I feel like I'm gonna be running around trying to find some interesting shot of, like, something on the street. He doesn't even notice when. I'm gonna sneak up a lot. Yeah, like, street ball. It's like that's really good. But I have one. Oh, my God. Hey. That's pretty funny. Oh, okay. We out. Got to go find a street. I'm gonna go just walk around this court and see if there's anything anyway cool that I could take a photo. Maybe we should play some basketball, huh? Shot a commercial here on time over there. Where'd that guy go? He's way over there. He's walking. So, the other thing about the lens that I'm using is it does open up to a 1.2 aperture. So that's that's gonna be a lot of stuff out of focus. It's been 5 minutes. And I'm already getting frustrated that I can't take a photo. But I was hoping to find, like, a really dim street. Oh, yeah. Like, this is like an alleyway. Do you feel like it's pretty cool? Oh, this shop's cool. Again, I'm trying to capture the essence of, you know, Venice Beach. That's why I'm here. I have not been down here. I was telling Will for, like, 15 years or something like that. I don't really know exactly where everything is outside of this area, so I feel like I got to stay right here. That right there? Could be a composition. Iconic. Yeah, not that wide. We'll walk down the ways and then come back and shoot it since I got 15 minutes. Really, what I want is, like, a basketball in the foreground, and then them playing in the background. I wonder if I could borrow someone's basketball. So right now I'm just kind of lining up a shot where we've got basketball players in the background, something in the foreground. It's got to be something more interesting in the foreground. Street bike? Street ball. So let me frame that up and see if there's anything I can get. That looks good. I don't know. This feels like a cool street, too. It's the fog that's making it look cool. Unfortunately, bike is too close to them to really get them out of focus. I took up a lot of time. Mm. I should get a coffee or a snack or something. What have he'll do for 15 minutes last time? Sit around, research, walk? Maybe? Is basketball. It's right there. Maybe I'll grab a basketball. Now, this is an example of taking my time to make that photo. So much going on. I'll love it. How much is your basketball? Oh, you rent it. How much? Five. Oh, yeah. Actually, I just I honestly wanted to take a photo. So yeah, I'll rent it. Can I rent it for five bucks? I'm not gonna be long. Probably 15, 20 minutes. Thank you. John Paul. Be honest, honest, I think it's much better here when it's brighter. The fog's cool and it's interesting. But, like, the whole point of Venice is, like, bright and vibrant and beach in California, right? Here comes a one wheel guy again. God, the sky is like following me around. There he goes. Mt. Yeah, yeah, yeah, get it, get it, get it. Alright, let's go. I mean, there's so many iconic spots and locations areas. Rick, thank you so much for your time. Yeah. Good luck with your project. Thank you. Wouldn't have done that if I didn't have extra time. But I'm looking at this shot right here, and I think it'll be a good one. I think this court is better than the other one because there's fewer people. It's just a cleaner shot. Man, I think I'm too close. Let me get a little bit farther away. Okay. Alright, I'm here. It's been 15 minutes. I can take my photo now. Thank God. I just don't want to take the photo. Okay, I can't even be at a 1.2 cause too much is out of focus. It's a one way street, so that's good. Alright, we're gonna have to wait. And then I'm gonna change the F stop to F 16. And we're gonna shoot Arnold here and we're gonna sure everything's in focus, and we're gonna blow up the saturation and dim down the exposure to make it like look even cooler. Got to wait for these people to move. Oh this is pretty good. Okay, maybe this is it right here. Oh, yeah. This is it. I just need them to be in the right spot going up for more like a layup or something. Is this better? Yeah, this is better. Take out that cone. I dig it. I dig it. I don't know, but I want to be down there for the next challenge, potentially. Nah. What's comment. We're gonna go down to the pier. Can street be just street? Like what This is street. What was the other part of the Oh, soft focus. That was not soft focus. We need to fix that. I put it all in focus. Go for a layup. Maybe this guy over here is better. But we don't want it to be so soft focus that it's gnarly, so let's put it out of F 16. Let's try this. Ominous. Still sort of in focus. I don't like it still. It's good to those dumpsters. Let's try it. Oh, yeah, This is good. This'll work. Take a shot. I think the soft focus thing is what getting me this time. It's like I can nail one and not the other. I think this will look cool soft focus wise. Looks like it's an out of focus photo. I'm much I feel about that. Go to the next spot. Ding his challenge. Let's go right here. Run up and take the shot, and this is gonna be it. Alright. We're into this. End sign. And graffiti. I think this might be the spot. We'll do a little soft focus, and it's like, at the end of the street right behind me. Ooh. I'm really into this, actually. It's like some art. Yeah, I'm into that. I'm gonna put a little bit of focus in there. Maybe like 1.7, and then we'll try and focus on the wall. It's a tough call, actually. Nope. Oh, my God. Why is this so hard? Okay. This is it. Here. Okay. So two is all in focus. But oh, I kind of like that. So think about it just being soft, but, like, you know what it is. Soft, cool. We'll do a vignette on it, and pose. Make it a little ethereal. Maybe we'll get rid of that red, like the sign. Just gonna lock it in and get weird. I don't know I'm gonna beat Phil in this season, but, like, I'm trying, right? I'm pushing boundaries here. Which, again, is, like, the whole point of this, like, I don't know, this competition, like pushing boundaries, pushing yourself. So let's lock it in. Eight, six, nine. Alright. Well, I'm just gonna walk towards the pier 'cause I know we're gonna finish that. How is it? Mm. Six oh five. Okay. That was hard. And we have to end up at the Venice Pier, so I can walk a little bit that way. Muscle beach. Yeah. Thanks a lot. Alright, well, a lot of that was me just fumbling around with the basketball trying to make sure that it wasn't rolling. Ultimately, I think that the photo came out pretty cool. Is it the best photo in the world? No, but it's kind of like a good storytelling photo, and it fit the street. I fit soft focus. Hopefully I get a little extra credit for getting a photo with one shot for that challenge, which I think is the hardest twist card that we have, and we hadn't holed it until today. One more challenge, 30 minutes to go and one photo for this first season photo dash. 2 minutes and 40, it's like, Co. That was a drop of water. I'm walking down here towards the pier, and it's starting to get a little bit quiet down this way. A little worried that walking this far is a mistake because there's so much action back that way. 1 minute and 20 seconds. Should I move? I'm getting wet. This camera's water resistant. It's fine. It's a tank. Oh, is that wheel right in there? I think it is. It's rolling 20 seconds left. It's kind of raining on me under here. I felt someone behind me. Cool. Well, we're together again. For the end. Last chance for a good photo. I gonna win? I'm gonna win. Subject. Last subject of Season one. What's getting wet. Abstract shapes. Abstract shapes. Okay. I'm into that. I'm into that. I'm down with that. Okay. Alright. Style is going to be symmetry. I think we're gonna go take the same photo. We can walk over there together. It's fine. Give me my twist. Okay. You twist first? Grounded. Your camera can be no higher than 6 " from the ground for the next challenge. Man, I hate that one. I'm not mad about that one. But we'll see what yours is. Mobile camera. Only use a mobile phone camera for your next challenge. You've got that again. So let me go ahead and put my $5,000 camera back into my backpack. I am proud to take really good photos with my phone. I promise. I am. The three, two, two, one. Dash. If I just start running 30 minutes left. One photo. It's also the last photo of the season. We got to end at the piers, so let's just walk towards that together. Yeah, I feel like abstract shapes, the skate park would have been cool. Yeah. But I do feel like I was trying to do a frame in the frame there by shooting through the, like, Oh, were you doing the same thing that I was? And then I couldn't find anything that was worth Yeah, anything. The fog. Where are you going? I don't know what abstract shapes are, Phil. You're an abstract. Okay. See. Bye. I know exactly where I'm going. I am worried that Will is gonna be going here, too. He's probably doing something, but I don't want to do. And I'm gonna use my phone. These are abstract shapes, but then it's like, you have to be symmetrical. I don't like it. Dug it. It's underneath the pier. I bet he's going under the pier. So the shot I want to see if I can get is one of these these columns down here. I'm not sure if it's abstractly enough. Hey, Siri, what is an abstract shape? It's cold here. Abstract shapes are stylized or simplified versions of real world objects. What does that even mean? Oh, I like the abstract shape of these. So I've got to be 6 " from the ground. I'm on wet sand. Like this. Would you guys consider this an abstract shape? I think so. That's more like a pattern. Ooh. Let's look. Let's try. Let's open up the camera, since we can only use our mobile phone. Okay, zoom in. We'll turn on raw. Ooh, that's cool. The sand and the I'm into that. Then we edit it, like, black and white style. Kind of like a sunset, right? All the rays are coming out. Ooh, yeah. I don't know. Maybe there's a better one. Sunset. Alright, let's just do the normal lens, and then we'll get in close. We'll sharpen the heck out of it. And that is our sunset. I'm happy with that for now. Maybe we keep hunting. For something better? Like the pier. Five more dollars says the fill went under the pier. There's kind of these abstract these shapes in the ground right here. Like, if I focus a little bit closer to the lens, Ah. Ugh. Oh, yeah, yeah, that's water. I look at my lens, my camera 6 " from the ground. You can kind of see the pier in the distance. There's, like, a lot of shapes going on. Wait for the water to come. Oh. Oh. Man, it's just not the shot that I want. I want a longer lens looking that way through these five more dimes Piers, whatever you call them. This is just not it. Down there and shoot as well. I'm gonna shoot up. I've shot piers millions of times. Just fine. Grew up around him. Got one for sale, my website, William carnahan.com. You go to get a picture of the Manhattan Beach Pier. Symmetry, too. Oh, shoot. I totally forgot that. It's got to be symmetrical. I got to do this again. Looking through these, I think, is the symmetry that I'm going for. Didn't see me. Shooting this way. Not abstract enough. And there's no symmetry. That's what I forgot. Symmetry. Go on, let's focus on the pier down there. I don't know. Let's go hang out with him. Let's go see what he thinks. That's okay that we can be near each other. It's the only thing I've got symmetry around here. Look who it is. What do you want from me? Take the better photo. There's nothing to say we can't be photo friends. Sticking together, like good photo friends. What'd you give? I forgot we had to do symmetry. I did too. Oh, this is symmetry that's killing me. Alright? That's a cool photo, but not what the No what the Oh, there you go. I got to get in the water, I think. What is happening down here? If I'm quick, it'll be okay. If I'm quick? If I'm quick. Abstract. Enough? Oh, the water's coming. Oh. I don't think that's abstract enough. Maybe this will be easier for me to get some symmetry over here without water rushing up on me. Here's the thing. Abstract doesn't necessarily mean like symmetry, right? Symmetry is like uniform and, like, and like, reflections. Ah. Yeah. That's what we'll do. Okay, so I really do have to wait for the water to move. 'Cause if I do reflections, that has symmetry in it. Yeah, I think this is better. Okay, so I am on a 28. I'm gonna drop down to, like, a 56. So more is in focus in the background. I want to focus on that pier in the background. The abstract of this, like, weird, there we go. I figured it out. That's abstract shapes. There's symmetry right there, right? I think we're gonna go horizontal though. I'm gonna use my exposure compensation to drop down just a little bit. It's kind of cool with Ooh, this is the better shot. This is the shot, 'cause we've got the foggy light post. This feels like it's working. Look at that reflection and the symmetry and the abstractness. And you know what? We're gonna take it horizontally, but we're gonna present it vertically. Or we'll take it vertically. And we'll present it horizontally. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. This is gonna be dope. Symmetry and abstraction. I am locking that in. This guy, we'll straighten it out and post. What is this one? We don't have a number. Do you have a number 1375 Image. And I think we're gonna lock in with that, and, like, it knows where we are. There's symmetry here. Wait till you see me edit this photo. It's gonna win. 12 minutes, 34 seconds. I'm happy. I can call this. Maybe I get a little wider. Okay, we'll get a little wider. So we'll walk out here. And we'll zoom in. That's cool. We're supposed to be in California. There we go. Abstract symmetry. Oh. What if we Yeah. I'm gonna lock this one in. This is 1380. And what we're gonna do crop, we're gonna flip it, and we're gonna present it just like that. Wait till I edit that. That's gonna look. Dope. This is so fogged up right now. I want this one. It's hanging out here for 10 minutes? You got your photo. I think I got a good photo. Locked it in. 10 minutes. It's gonna crush yours. I'm just gonna hang out and watch you. Oh, yeah. Se little cemetry there. Go some abstract East that's a proper shape. I'm gonna show you mine as soon as a buzzer hits, but I don't want you to steal my idea. That's a pretty cool shot, though, Phil. Oh, this is kind of cool, too. Oh, there's people on the pier right there. That's cool. I better shot. Now, I want to be back. Let it be frame. Just right in the middle of his frame. I'm so happy with mine. I could edit it right now. I was wondering if it was gonna get dark enough to make sense to be down here taking photos till the very end. Episode three season one was supposed to be at a very vibrant place here in Venice. And we're gonna end at the beer, and it's gonna be sunset, but as you can see, sunset is in actually 45 minutes. And we're not gonna see it. So let's take a look at the photo that I picked. We straighten it out a little bit, maybe bring up the highlights, crush the black point, make the blacks even blacker. With Alright. Is it just gonna be that last shot? They're all looking the same to me right now, so And then I want to sharpen the ever living crap out of it. Wow. Before or after? I'm going to sprit two top. Climb through here. Ooh. Did I miss him? Did he go up the Pie? It's probably some abstract shapes up here, too. That would be cool, but Oh, I sure did. You didn't see me. Now was gonna think I'm white. Alright, final photo. Photo Dash. Season one. 689. Locked in baby. Wow. He's close. I'm not walking all the way down there. This is an abstract and has set is. Is that your photo? No. Did you lock your photo in? I locked it in 32 seconds. We're call on it. And a photo Dash. Season number one. Good job, well. We did it. Photo, dance, photo, dad. A. You have all been so supportive throughout the past few weeks as we launched these videos. And even before that, if you're a member of the photography and friends community, just being there to hear our thoughts and feedback, giving us some feedback on the initial ideas, you have inspired us to get out there and go do this. And we are excited about a potential next season of Photo Dash. And because this was the first season, there are things that we loved about it. There are things we might change. And if you have any ideas, or how we can make it better. If you have ideas for subjects, styles, twists that we can apply to the next season, let us know. Submit those in the comments below. We love seeing everyone. We read all the comments, and if you have ideas, we'd love to hear them. And that's a wrap on season one of Photo Dash.