Transcripts
1. Course Introduction: I've always felt that still life photography is one of the most creative and fulfilling types of photography out there. Being able to take a seemingly normal, boring everyday object and depict it in a way that's beautiful, and in a way that tells a story, is an incredibly rewarding experience. It's also a really accessible form of photography and you can start taking some really awesome still life photos at home, with just a little bit of knowledge. My name is Sean Dalton, I am a traveler and lifestyle photographer based out of Bali, Indonesia. Today I want to show you guys exactly how you can capture some really cool still life photos at home. Today we're going to start things off talking about subjects. What subjects might you want to choose when you're shooting still life, and why you might want to choose certain subjects over other subjects. After that, we're going to start talking about gear, and what gear you might want to use to capture these types of photos. Whether you have a professional level DSLR or maybe you're shooting on an iPhone. Either of those are okay for this course, but we're going to get into the details of that in this section. After a few more short lessons, we're going to dive into a real life shoot and I'm going to show you guys exactly how I plan, set up and organize a coffee still life photo shoot. I've always loved to shooting coffee, it's something that not only do I find beautiful, but something that I just love in general. I think it's a great example subject to help teach these core concepts of still life photography. If you are interested in photographing coffee, that's totally fine. The principles you are going to learn in this course can be translated to pretty much any still life subject that you have at home, or any still life subject that you're interested in general. By the end of this course, you can expect to have a thorough understanding of the factors that constitute a beautiful still life image, as well as the steps that you need to take to planning, shooting, and editing beautiful still life images at home. More importantly, though, while I do think the technical stuff is important, I also want this course to serve as inspiration for you, so you can actually have the motivation to get up and shoot and capture something at home. We're so often surrounded by these beautiful scenes that we don't recognize at first, but when we sit down, slow down, and we look at things, there're some really beautiful things that you can find in your own backyard. So this course is for anybody that just wants to capture beautiful still life images or anybody that just wants to get creative at home and create something beautiful. Maybe you just need a boost in inspiration right now, or maybe you've been a still life photographer for a while and you just want to pick up on a few tips. But no matter who you are, there's definitely something in this course for everybody. With that said guys, the introduction of this course is over. It's time to dive into the content. I really hope you take the time to enroll in this course, and if you do, I'll see you in the very first lesson.
2. Class Project: Shooting at Home!: This is an interactive course, and I want you guys to shoot along with me. For the class project, I want you guys to capture 1-3 photos of something in your house, and then explain the creative process behind capturing those photos. What were you thinking when you captured those photos and why did you capture those photos in the way that you did? If you're not sure what to shoot, well, you can pretty much shoot anything. You could shoot a cup of coffee, like me. You could shoot a pile of books. You could shoot a pair of shoes. You could shoot a trinket of some type. Honestly, it doesn't matter what you shoot. I always recommend just shooting something that you're interested in. One thing to note that the less interesting the object is, the more difficult it will be to shoot, but the more you will gain from this project.
3. Selecting an Object to Photograph: In this lesson, I want to talk about finding an object to shoot. This is an interactive course, and I want you guys to shoot with me. After you finish watching this course, I want you to capture something at home. But you might be thinking to yourself, "What am I supposed to shoot?" Well, if you don't want to shoot coffee like me, you can pretty much shoot anything at all. Still life photography is defined as the act of photographing a seemingly normal and everyday inanimate object. That can be an apple, it can be a pair of shoes, it could be a laptop, it could be a vase of flowers. It could be really anything that is inanimate. Oftentimes, you can find some really cool things at home. Maybe you've seen those really classic paintings of a bowl of fruit or a vase of flowers. That is essentially what still life is. It's photographing these normal, boring everyday objects, but photographing them in a way that's beautiful, and often in a way that tells a story. When deciding what you want to shoot for this class project, honestly, you can shoot anything at all. I always recommend shooting something that you're interested in. Every object that we have in our lives, we have some preconceived notion about that object. When I see a cup of coffee, I feel cozy, I feel warm, I feel comforted. So those emotions help me craft an image that expresses those emotions. If I feel comforted and content when I view a cup of coffee, that's the emotions that I want to depict in my scene. Another example of this could be tequila. Maybe you see a bottle of tequila and you think crazy, wild, bright colors, loud. Well, then you might want to shoot that in a much different way than you would shoot a cup of coffee. You might shoot the bottle of tequila in some sand or with a lot of bright light. I want you to essentially find an object that you're interested in and then think about the emotions that you're feeling when you think about that object. Another tip I have for you is smaller is better, and the reason why smaller is better is because it will allow us to create a scene around that object. If you have a big object, well, it requires a lot more space, and oftentimes, we don't have a lot of space in our homes. So I'm going to be shooting coffee because it's small, compact, and I can really create a mini-scene around that coffee to create a beautiful image. If you're not sure you're going to shoot yet, that's fine. Maybe by the end of this course, you'll have a better idea. I just wanted to touch on this because this is an important piece of the process. With that said, let's move on to the next section.
4. Gear and Camera Settings: In this lesson, I want to take a short second to talk about gear and some of the gear that you might want to use to capture beautiful still life images at home. Now if you're a smartphone user, that's totally fine. You don't need a DSLR to capture awesome still life photos at home. In fact, a smartphone is totally fine. The newer smartphones that have portrait mode, they have a 50 millimeter lens. Those are amazing for capturing these types of photos. In this course I'm going to show you guys how to do that very quickly. Just how to capture some really cool images with the 50 millimeter lens. If you have a newer iPhone or Samsung phone, Those are really awesome. If you do have a camera, a DSLR, or a mirrorless camera, I always recommend shooting with one of three lenses. I recommend a 35 millimeter, a 55 millimeter, which this camera has the 55 millimeter. I can't show you guys that lens, and an 85 millimeter, these are known as the trifecta of lenses because you have a good range of focal lengths and they're all really nice lenses. I really like 35 millimeters because it's a little bit wide and I can see more of the scene. It's also really good for top-down shots, for flat lays. I really like 50 millimeters or 55 millimeters. It's essentially the same thing depending on the brand. I really like that focal length because it's a little bit more zoomed in. Because of that has less lens distortion, which means that it will make your object look more natural. But the king of all lenses for still life photography is the 85 millimeter. The 85 millimeter is amazing because at 85 millimeters, we no longer have lens distortion. Typically, the wider your lens, the more lens distortion you will have. Because 85 millimeters is really zoomed in, you no longer have lens distortion, so your object looks really nice and natural. If you don't have any of these lenses, that's totally fine. You don't need to overthink this. Any lens is going to work here. In fact, the lens is only just a piece of the puzzle. We're going to discuss the most important things later on in this course. But I just wanted to touch on some of my favorite lenses and the lenses that I'm going to be using to shoot today. I'm going to be using a mix during the photo shoot today, and I'm going to tell you guys, which lens I'm using and why I'm using that lens. Now if you're thinking about purchasing a lens for this project, I recommend buying a 50 millimeter, 1.8. A 50 millimeter 1.8 is very affordable. You can find them online for a very cheap price and they're such awesome lenses. They look really good. They're small, compact, and they create some really beautiful images. You can get a 50 millimeter 1.8 for a really good price online. But with that aside, I also want to quickly touch on camera settings here. If you're shooting with a DSLR or a mirrorless camera, you don't need to shoot in manual mode for this project. In fact, I'm going to be shooting in aperture priority. You guys have seen my photography essentials course. You will know that I love aperture priority and I think it's sometimes a mistake for us to always be shooting in manual mode, aperture priority, oftentimes does everything we need it to do, and I'm going to prove that to you guys today by shooting in aperture priority. If you're wondering what aperture priority is, it's essentially you set the aperture of the camera and the camera selects the ISO and the shutter speed. Why that's important is because, aperture allows us to dictate the depth of field in an image. If we want to make sure everything is nice and in-focus, we'll use a really small aperture, which is a larger number like f/8 or f/10 or f/11. If you want to get a really shallow depth the fields, we want to have our main subject in focus and everything behind it be nice and blurry. What we like to call bokeh, we would use a much wider aperture, which is a smaller number. Something like f/2.0, f/1.8, or even f/1.4, those apertures create some really cool looks in our image. If that makes no sense to you, that's totally fine. Just know that I'm going to be shooting in aperture priority today. I'm going to be telling you guys what aperture I'm shooting at and why. But now that we've got gear out of the way, let's move on and start talking about what actually constitutes a good still life photo and how you can ensure that you're nailing all three during your photo shoot.
5. Anatomy of a Good Still Life Photo: In this lesson, I want to talk about what constitutes a good still life image. If you've seen any of my other courses, you already know these three topics because I'll talk about them in every course, and I really think they're super, super important. Those three things are lighting, styling, and composition. Let's start at the top with lighting and why it's important for still life photography. Lighting refers to essentially the light in your scene. Lighting is very important for photography because cameras capture light. That's how the image is recorded. The light enters the camera and is recorded onto the sensor. Having good light might be the most important thing with still life photography, and it's also one of the most overlooked by most beginner photographers. Now when talking about light, I always recommend natural light across the board. Natural light is light from the Sun. In fact, I always say for shooting inside or at home, turn off the lights inside. They're not going to look good, they often have different colored tints, and it's just not going to look good in your photo. Turn off the indoor lights and only shoot with natural light. But when it comes to shooting with natural light, there's a few considerations that you should make. The first one is the strength of the light source, and the second one is the direction of the light source. When talking about the strength of the light source, that essentially means how strong or how soft that light source is. With the Sun, the Sun can be both incredibly harsh, incredibly strong. If you're shooting, say under the midday Sun, you have a lot of crazy shadows, really high contrast. Or on the other side of that, if you have that natural light diffused, say you're sitting inside and you have a white curtain in front of the window, that light is going to appear much softer. The same goes where if it's a cloudy day, the light from the Sun is going to hit the clouds, and it's going to be diffused, and it's going to get nice and soft. Actually, shooting on cloudy days is often the best time to take photos, because you have nice, soft, natural light. Now if we want to diffuse light at home, well, there's a few different ways to do that. I always like to recommend shooting by windows, if you're shooting inside. Turn off the lights, shoot next to the window, and you can put a translucent white curtain in front of the window, so when the light from the Sun hits it, it'll get nice and soft. If you don't have a white curtain, you can use a white bed sheet. In fact, I'm going to be using a white bedsheet today to help soften the light later on while we're shooting. Now the second consideration of lighting is the direction of the light source. The direction of the light source essentially refers to where the light source is in accordance to our subject, and where the light source is in accordance to us the photographer. I always recommend shooting either into the light, or with the light to the side of the subject. The reason for that is, if you shoot with a light behind you, or what I say the light with you, you're not going to have any shadows in your scene and it's going to make your scene look very two-dimensional. It's just not going to look great, it's going to look flat, it's going to look boring. If your light source is coming from the side of your subject, or from behind your subject, it's going to create a lot of depth. It creates that depth by adding shadows in certain areas of the image, and it just looks really, really nice. You're going to see while I'm shooting today where the light source is in accordance to my scene and why I'm choosing to put that light source there. Those are the two considerations with lighting, the strength of the light source, so making sure that the light is nice and soft and diffused. I'm going to show you guys how to do that, as well as the direction of the light source. So where's that light entering our scene, is it from the sides? Is it from the front? Is it from the top, and what that looks like in our photograph. But really, the most important part of lighting is finding the best location. In our houses, we have dark areas, we have bright areas, we have areas that might be both bright and dark. It's really important that we find a good space to shoot in. In the next lesson, I'm actually going to walk you guys through the process of how to select an area in your house that's good for still life photography. But lighting aside, let's talk about the second important aspect of a still life photograph, and that is styling. Styling refers to essentially all of the objects in your scene. Not only your main subject, in my case, coffee, but also the table that it's sitting on. Maybe there's a napkin, maybe there's a fork and a knife. Maybe there's a plant in there. All of those things are considered part of the styling. We could enhance our still life images by styling them with props. For example, today while I'm shooting coffee, you're going to see me using certain props that I think add to the scene. I have a little wooden board I'm going to be using. I have a newspaper, I'm going to be using. I have a napkin and a book, and a few other things that I think just really enhance the scene, the story that I'm trying to tell. Another example is if you're shooting whiskey, you might want to include whiskey glasses, maybe a cigar. If you're shooting a scarf, maybe you want to include some knitting needles and you might want to shoot it on a couch or something like that. I just really want you to think about what is the object that you're shooting, and what objects are related to that object, and what objects can enhance that story that you're trying to tell in your image. Now one of the most common mistakes I see with prop utilization is, number 1, it looks unnatural. Number 2, it's just thrown in because they think there needs to be more props. In fact, you should be incredibly deliberate with the props that you use. Be very mindful of everything that you're putting into the scene, and really think about, is this adding to my scene? Does it make sense for this to be here? Or is it just out of place? Does it not make sense? Really be mindful of everything that's in your frame, because that is going to lead to a much better styled image. Last but certainly not least, is composition. Composition is basically just tying everything together. Composition essentially refers to how you orient all of the objects within your frame, and how you capture those objects with your camera. When it comes to learning composition, I think the biggest mistake people make is they try to focus on these traditional composition terms that maybe they've read online, or maybe they've learned in the photography course. You might have heard things like rule of thirds, rule of tenths, things like that. Those are valuable lessons, but I also think that they can detract from your creativity when you're first starting out as a photographer. In fact, I don't want to even touch on those in this course because I think it's going to be more detrimental than it is beneficial. But there are two compositional topics that I want to discuss because these are going to make a big difference in the outcome of your photos. The first one is perspective, and perspective essentially refers to how you orient yourself in your camera in accordance to the scene. Altering your perspective is really going to alter the way the image looks. If you shoot it from the top, it's going to make your objects looks small. If you shoot it from the bottom, the objects are going to look much bigger, much grander. If you shoot it from the side, it might be a more realistic representation, or 45-degree angles. There's a lot of different perspectives in photography, and I urge you to experiment with as many perspectives as you can. When I'm shooting still life, I like to really move around and capture my subjects from a ton of different angles. I shoot from the top, from the side, from the bottom, I get close, I back up. I really like to alter my perspective because it changes the image so much and you won't know what you're going to get until you look at it later. I highly recommend just letting your creative side flow. Just take as many photos, and capture a ton of different compositions. The second compositional technique I like to talk about is the idea of balance. A balanced composition would mean that the right side of the photo is equally reflected in the left side of the photo. Maybe you have a cup of coffee on the right, and to offset that, to make it balanced, you put a book on the left. Your images don't always have to be balanced or symmetrical. In fact, they can be asymmetrical or unbalanced. There is no right or wrong when it comes to balance. You can have a completely unbalanced image and it can still look really cool, or you can have a nice balanced image that's easier to look at, and that can look cool too. But I just want you to be cognizant of balance in your frame and be deliberate with how you place things within your frame. If you're going to place that book in the background, why are you placing that book in the background. Is it adding to the composition? Is it adding to your subject? Is it subtracting from it? Really think about all of the things in your frame and how they're affecting your composition and the balance of your composition. With these three topics; lighting, styling, and composition, I want you to know that they all affect each other in some way. For example, if you change the direction of your lighting, well, it might change your composition. You might have light rays entering, and that's going to shift your composition. If you change your styling, if you move things around, well, that's going to change your composition, and it can also change your lighting as well. If you put something in front of your main subject, that might block the light, resulting in a different lighting scenario than it was before. I really want you to think about these three factors while you're shooting; lighting, styling, and composition. Think about them in accordance to themselves alone and also in accordance to the other factors as well because they all play into each other in some way or another. But now that we've talked about what constitutes a good still life photo, let's take a look at some images that I think really execute these principles well.
6. Evaluating Beautiful Still Life Images: All right, guys, in this lesson, I want to take a look at some images that I think have done a really good job at, all the things we discussed in the last video, lighting, styling, and composition. I'm going to take a look at these photos on Instagram. Instagram as a platform where I save a lot of my inspiration. It's really cool that you can save photos from other people. You can see I have a ton of different photos here. All kinds of different content areas and just major inspiration for me for when I go shoot certain things or go to a certain place, something like that. You can see I have a folder here titled Still Life, and this is just a bunch of images that I found on Instagram that I just really, really love. I think they've done a fantastic job at all the things we discussed in the last video and there's a few I want to highlight because there's a few that are my favorite out of this bunch here. The first one is this absolutely beautiful image by _goodoldfashioned on Instagram. She has so many beautiful photos on her page, but this one was one of my favorites because I think all three aspects have just been done so well. First off, I love the subject. It's the backend of a bicycle with a basket. There are some books and some flowers, and the setting as well it's in a field, so it gives this idea that you're going out for a picnic. Maybe it's brunch, you're going to have some food. You're going to read a book and it's just a nice relaxing day somewhere peaceful, somewhere quiet, and the subject matter and the styling really gets that across and I love that. This image is so good because of the styling. But let's talk about the lighting and the competition as well. From a learning standpoint, the light is nice and soft. It's beautiful and I think it just really adds to the scene as a whole. It doesn't detract anything and it really complements our subject here. Lastly, the composition, I really like how this photographer decided to use a zoom lens, seem like a 50 millimeter, an 85 millimeter and really zoom in on the subject here because it blurs the background and allows us to really focus on this main subject here, which is the back of the bicycle. I also like how a shallow depth of field was used to really isolate that subject and I also like the placement of the subject in the frame. It's not right in the middle, it's off to the left a little bit. It makes us think, it makes us wonder what else is happening in the scene. I think this image has done a really great job and overall, I really, really love it. The next image I want to take a look at is a little bit different. This one is a lot more stylized. It's a lot more thought out and you can see everything was very meticulously placed. This is by a photographer that I've always looked up to 1924us. He's amazing. He has some really fantastic work on his page. I really like some of the stuff that he does with still life. There's very adventurous rugged vibe in all his still life photos and he's an amazing stylist and amazing photographer. This image in particular stood out to me because of how well the styling has been done. First off, we have this map on the bottom. This map just adds so much interest in so many dynamic lines of interests into the scene. It really makes it what it is and I love the fact that it says adventure in the middle. I also loved the boots, all the things in the frame just really nail what this photographer was trying to go for, which is this idea that you're planning a trip. You're going somewhere into the mountains and you have all these things with you that you need to bring, field notes, sunglasses, a compass, and it's beautiful. From a lighting perspective, I also love it as well. We have a nice soft natural light coming in from what looks like the left side of the frame. Maybe there's a big window there. This photographer uses light really well and if you look at his page, he does a lot of really beautiful things with soft light from the windows and composition wise, it's a flat lay and a top-down or a flat lay composition like this is really great for styling because you can really control where everything is in your frame. It's just very good for stylized photos. Overall, a fantastic image and one that I really wanted to highlight. The next image or images I want to highlight are by a photographer named Brian Chorski who shoots on film and I wanted to include a film photo in this section because I think film is a very beautiful form of photography and it's still very much has its place in this day and age. It renders much differently from digital and I love how it looks. I wanted to highlight this image in particular because of how simple and how natural the subject matter in this frame is. We have some books and what looks like an old iron or something like that. I'm not sure what the other thing is, but they're just sitting in the corner of a room looking extremely ordinary and that's what still life photography is all about. It's taking these seemingly normal everyday objects and depicting them in a beautiful way and Brian has really done that here. What really makes this shot in my eyes is the lighting. We have this beautiful soft light spilling in from the window and it is creating a bit of a harsh highlight on the wall, but I think that really adds to the composition in this case and our subjects are still under very nice soft lighting. The harsh light is not necessarily hitting our subjects, those are lit very, very well. I also love the composition here, it's perfect. He didn't go too close to the subject. He backed up a little bit. He let the composition breathe. It's nice and balanced and I really like, like I said, how that highlight cuts into the wall and really balances out our composition in a very beautiful way. Also I like how he positioned the books in that way, or maybe they were just like that. But you can see because the light is coming in from the side of the frame, it's adding so many interesting shadows and making our subjects look really 3D and that's ultimately what we want to do when shooting still life. He has a few other images in this post here that I really like, particularly the last one. It's very, very simple and perhaps you could say it's not the strongest composition, but I think this image really tells a story. There's some cigarettes and some lipstick next to a window. I mean, that could mean so many things, but it gets your mind thinking a little bit like, oh, where are they? In this case, we know he's in Mexico. We know that he's at home, but without that context, it make you think a little bit. It's a beautiful little scene and I think from a styling perspective, it's very good. I just love how natural these images are and how realistic they are and I also love that they're shot on film, so I wanted to highlight those. The next image I want to highlight is a little bit different from the others, and that's why I want to highlight it. It's by this photographer named Stefie Reads, who has so many amazing photos on her page. I could just select so many of these photos. They're all fantastic still life photos. But I like this one in particular because of how different it is. Obviously, our main subject here is a book, The Roald Dahl Treasury, which is beautiful in and of itself, the cover is gorgeous. Then we have all these other books in the background that are really setting a beautiful stage for our main subject here, this main book in the middle. I love how you can only really see the cover of this one book. You can see the cover of the book above by Beatrix Potter, which is one of my favorite books as a child. But all the other books in the scene, they're not distracting from this main subject of The Roald Dahl book, they're just in the background adding interesting lines and adding lots of interesting angles. I really love how this scene is styled, I love how simple it is, but I love the emotions that come along with it. We have this beautiful old books surrounded by a bunch of other old books. There's a few plants and it's just a beautifully styled photo. Lighting wise, the light is nice and soft. A very characteristic of this photographer, a lot of her images are very soft and gentle, and this one is no exception. I like how warm it is too, it's warm, it's cozy, really emphasizing that vibe of maybe it's a rainy day and you're going to read a book. Just kicking back, relaxing, very gentle vibes. I really love the edit here and I love the composition as well. It's simple, it's straight on. We can see our subject and then it's very balanced as well. We have the shelves cutting through the frame on the top and the bottom, which creates a lot of balance and then all the other books are just really balancing out the frame and allowing us to focus on our main subject in the middle. I definitely wanted to highlight that image because I think it's done all three things really well. The last image I want to highlight is this amazing photo by a Pastryandtravel, and this one just gets me going. I love it so much. I love autumn. Autumn is my favorite season by far and away, I love the seasonal vibes and this image just really nails all of those things perfectly. Let's start off with the lighting. It's very easy to see the lighting in the scene. It's coming in from the top right corner, big windows spilling in a lot of nice soft natural light. It's not diffused, which makes me think this was shot in the morning or the afternoon or more likely during the day with clouds in the sky because those clouds make that light really nice and soft. From a styling perspective, that's where this image really shines. In the last lesson, I talked about having your styling look natural and you could definitely argue that the styling of this image isn't the most natural thing ever. Why would you have some torn out pages of a book and marshmallow sitting on top or a leaf inside. But you could also make the argument that aesthetics can stand above everything else. The story doesn't necessarily have to make sense if the image is incredibly beautiful and I think in this case, that doesn't bother me one bit. I think it looks absolutely amazing and the styling is spot on. I love the cat, I love the main subject here with the marshmallows in the middle, and I actually really love how the pages are adding some really interesting diagonal lines of interest. We have leaves that just enhance that autumn mood and then in the background, we have a few pumpkins and we have this orange scarf, which actually I think does a really amazing job at adding so many interesting lines to the scene because it has creases. We have a lot more interesting shadows. The light is hitting it in interesting ways and it just looks amazing. Overall, this image is beautifully lit, beautifully styled, and very well-composed as well. We're looking down at a 45-degree angle on our main subject here and we can see enough of the scene to get a vibe for what's happening in this particular scene, but it's still not showing us too much. I think that's a stylistic choice by the photographer. If she showed us everything in the scene, it wouldn't allow our minds to think as much. Our imagination wouldn't be able to really flourish like it does in this scene. Overall, a very, very beautiful image and there's so many beautiful images on Instagram. It's so hard for me to choose just those few images. There's so many on here, but I can spend all day talking about these images. But I think you guys know now how to critically look at other images and dissect them. That will help you when you go to shoot because you can take a look at some of the other people's images, really dissect how they've gone about creating those images and hopefully that will help you out in your shoot when you finish this course. I hope this course has been helpful, but now it's time to talk about how to select a location at home to shoot. There's a few things that you should really consider when you're searching for a place at home to shoot. Let's dive into that section now.
7. Selecting a Location to Shoot: All right guys, as you can see, I've stepped away from the table and now I'm standing in the room that we're actually going to be shooting in very soon here. The reason why I'm standing and showing you guys more of this room, is because I think it's a fantastic example to show you how you can find the best place in your house to shoot. When you're looking for a place in your house to shoot, there's two main considerations. The first one is, of course, lighting, the end-all be-all, most important factor in still life photography. You have to make sure that you're in a room with nice, soft, natural light, and also lighter colored rooms, white rooms, light gray rooms, tan rooms. Those are perfect for shooting because the light enters the room, bounces around on the walls, and then casts nice, soft, even lighting onto your scene. I also really like shooting in dark rooms too, because then you have a lot of interesting shadows. If you shoot near a window, you can get this really cool dramatic look. I love shooting in dark rooms, but I always say just try to shoot in a neutral colored room, so white, black, gray, tan, neutral colors, and also a room that has windows as well, because you really want that nice soft natural light. If the light is too harsh, of course, you can use a bed sheet. We have a bed sheet here today, because there's a balcony hanging over the top part of the house. The sun doesn't actually come into our room until later in the day, and where we're going to be shooting, we actually don't need to be softening the light at all because the light is nice and soft and I'll show you guys that in a little bit. Lighting aside, the other factor that you should really be thinking about when finding a place in your house to shoot is, of course, styling. When I say styling, I mean the overall setting, the overall mood of the room, or of the scene, of the corner of the room that you're going to be shooting in. As I said before, you really need to have a setting that matches the style of your still life. If you're shooting whiskey, you might want to be shooting in a darker room, maybe brown tones, really dramatic lighting, where if you're shooting tequila, you might want to shoot that on a beach with lots of bright light. Maybe it's surrounded by sand, lots of bright colors. So the setting is just as important as the lighting. I'm going to be shooting coffee today, and you can really shoot coffee anywhere. Coffee can fit a lot of different vibes, but when I think of coffee, I think of this nice cozy, warm feeling with blankets, and books, and glasses, and steam. That's what comes to my mind when I think of coffee, and I really want to capture that vibe in the photos today. Today when I was looking around my house trying to find a scene to shoot the coffee in, I was thinking, I want something cozy, I want something soft. Then, of course, I want good lighting as well, and that led me to this beautiful room here that we're standing in. As you can see, I'm very well lit right now. We have two major light sources coming in, basically both halves of the room are open, big windows. There's all this natural lights filling in, and just filling this room with nice soft natural light, which is absolutely perfect for still life photography. Lighting aside, we have great lighting, the scene itself is actually really perfect too. As you can see here, I have this nice green couch, which is nice neutral color, it's beautiful, and it also has this wood here, and then I also put some blankets. This is actually the first scene that I'm going to be shooting today. I'm just going to walk you guys through it a little bit because I think this is a good example of a setting that just works for the purpose of what I'm trying to shoot. We have this nice green couch, we have some blankets because I think the blankets really add to this scene. We have a book here that I laid out, some glasses, and then here is the coffee cup. There's no coffee in it yet, we're going to get that. But overall, this scene here is actually really quite nice for what I'm trying to achieve in this photograph. It's natural, it makes sense. You would be drinking coffee in this scenario. I think one of the biggest mistakes I see with still life photographers, is when they start styling, it looks a little bit unnatural or the scene in which they're shooting, the part of the house in which the shooting in, just doesn't line up with the theme or the story that they're trying to tell in their image. This is one of the scenes I'm going to be shooting today, and then in the next lesson I'm going to talk more about the styling, but I just want to go over why I chose this part of the room. Another part of this room that I really like, especially a little bit later in the day when the light actually does spill into the windows, is this corner over here. I love this couch thing, I don't know what you call it, a day bed perhaps, and maybe in about two hours or even less, you can already see the light coming in here. The light is going to spill in here and create some really dramatic diagonal lines. I know that I said that soft natural light is the best, but you can do some really cool things with hard light too. If the light comes in while we're shooting, I'm going to try to shoot some of that. If not, I still think this is a good place to shoot. I'm definitely going to try to experiment with different parts of this scene. I might try to shoot on the table a little bit, on the arm rest. Maybe I'll put some stuff on the couch, maybe play with some foreground. But overall, this is a scene that I'm pretty happy with. Now, when it comes to selecting a location in your house, like I said before, think about the lighting, and think about the setting, and the styling and if they match the story that you're trying to tell. But just some general ideas of where you could shoot, I always think the kitchen is a great place. The kitchen has a lot of emotions attached to it, it's often very bright. There's often a window in the kitchen, if you have that, that's great. If you're going to be shooting something like food, it would make total sense to shoot food in a kitchen because we prepare food in kitchens. You would expect to find food in a kitchen. If you have like an old garage, or something and it's dusty and old, that's actually perfect. You can shoot some really cool stuff in there. Just play around with some of the stuff that you have in there. Mess around with the lighting, get creative and I think you could come up with something cool. Beds are also really awesome, there's a lot of emotion attached to beds. If you have nice natural light coming into a bed, you can do so much with the sheets, and the comforter to add a lot of diagonal lines of interest, and come up with a really cool styled scene to shoot there. Those are some of the places that I recommend shooting within your house. Just really think about those two things, lighting and setting, and also make sure that it makes sense. Don't shoot in an environment that doesn't make sense. Don't shoot coffee in the Sahara desert, like that just doesn't really line up. Maybe it could, maybe I'm completely wrong, but just try to make sure that that scene makes sense. In this next lesson, I'm going to really dive into the styling of the scene and talk about why I laid things out, and how I styled it to match the story that I'm trying to tell. Let's check this out.
8. Styling Our Scene: In this lesson, we'll talk about how I styled the scene. Everything that you see here is actually pretty deliberately placed. I really thought this through and I want to talk about why I styled it the way I did and how I came up with this idea. As a whole, I was going for this comfortable, cozy vibe, and it would be perfect if we had a cat here. These little kittens running around. They might make an appearance. I hope they do, but they're always running around. Unfortunately, I can't just put them here and hope that they'll stay because they won't, they'll run away. But maybe later in the afternoon, they'll get tired and they'll plop down right here and that will be perfect. That will complete this nice cozy, warm scene of drinking coffee in the morning, reading a book, you have your reading glasses. You have this blanket here, and I also really like this pillow and this blanket. There's also a ladder right here with a lot of blankets on it. There's a lot of textures, there's a lot of visual interest in all of the objects in the frame. Not only do they add visual interest, but they also add to the style, to the story that I'm going for with this photo shoot. We've already talked about lighting and as you can see, the light is really nice and soft, and we have shadows over here because there's no light source on this side. All the light is coming from this side. We have a lot of really nice shadows, especially on this blanket here. The other aspect that I like so much about the scene is the colors. This green couch is beautiful, it's neutral, but it's also very beautiful, and it compliments everything in our scene quite well. We don't have any colors that are contrasting harshly. Everything looks good. Our mug itself is neutral as well, and I think it looks really nice on these dark wooden sides here. Now, I laid everything out here with the idea that I'm going to be shooting it largely from over here. The reason why I want to shoot from this side is because we have our light source coming in from two sides. If I shoot over here, I'm going to be shooting with the main light source back there, and that is going to allow me to get some nice cool shadows over here, shadows over here, and capture depth. In that lesson, earlier on in this course when I was talking about lighting, I talked about not only the strength of the light source, so having nice soft diffused light, but the direction as well, that's just as important and because I'm going to be shooting into the light or with the light to the side of the subject, that's going to lead to some really cool shadows and add so much more depth and interests into our image. I'm excited to shoot that composition. I think it's going to look really cool. Some of the other props that I have here, I have an old medium format camera. I've been playing around with film photography a little bit and I love shooting with this camera. It looks really cool. Maybe we can find a place for it in the scene if it makes sense. I don't think it would make a lot of sense to put it here, but we can play around with it. I also have a newspaper, this is in Bahasa, Indonesia. I cannot read a single word, but it's cool. I think it can add to the scene as well because it would make sense that you be reading the paper while you're drinking your morning coffee. Maybe we can play with that a little bit. I also have this really cool plant, it's dead, but it looks cool. A lot of interesting colors and it's also tall. That's great because it'll have some contrasting height, which looks really nice. Not sure, this might be too busy, but we'll play around with it when we're shooting. But everything else I laid out here for a reason. I put this shawl here, this scarf here, because I like the texture that it adds, the interests that it adds, and it adds this cozy feeling. In overall, I think this is a really cool scene, and I'm really excited to shoot this scene in the next lesson. We're not talking, we've talked about the styling more than enough. Let's get onto shooting. I'm excited to shoot the scene. Let's go.
9. Shooting At Home: All right, guys. I brewed up some coffee, it's super hot and we are ready to shoot. I'm starting with the 85-millimeter F1.4, one of my favorite lenses. Once again, this is on a Sony a7 III. I'm shooting an aperture priority. I'm also going to be shooting with the iPhone 11 Pro Max a little bit. Just to reiterate, I have these three lenses, the 85, the 55, and the 35, I'm going to be mixing them around shooting with different focal lengths and just trying to get a bunch of different shots. I'm also going to be testing out different apertures to see if I like it with a really shallow depth of field. When I'm shooting it like F1.4 or if I like more focus throughout the frame, might like F5.6 or F8. Without further ado, let's start shooting the scene here, and let's see if we can get some cool shots. You can see there's little kittens playing here. Just to reiterate about the lighting, a lot of the lighting is coming from this side, so it's giving us some really interesting dynamic lighting in our scene. I love this with the 85-millimeter shooting a F 1.4. Now let's stop down to 2.8, and see what that does. A little bit more focus and let's go to 5.6 and even more focus. I'd love to have a latte, but I can't do latte art. We're just doing black coffee because that's what I make. One thing to note, composition's going to come into play a lot here, and we talked about perspective. Perspective is everything. I'm just shifting my perspective with every shot that I'm taking, trying out new angles, just trying to get a bunch of cool shots. Let's try some with the iPhone here, because I just love this angle so much. I'm shooting in portrait mode because portrait mode allows me to get this really cool background blur. Dark and misting a little bit, that looks pretty cool. Also just come up here like this and shoot it from here. Maybe shoot a top-down here, iPhones are great for top-down. They're just so good. I'm also really going to try to play with this foreground here. I love this plant, but I think it's too busy if I put it in the scene, I think it's just too much, but I can place it right here so I can have basically it filling the bottom right part of the frame, but it's going to be like out-of-focus, but it's still going to help me create balance and depth in my scene. That's why having a foreground is so good is because it allows you to create so much more depth in your scene. I want to try to shoot this at 55 millimeters as well; 55 millimeters is it going to be a little bit zoomed out so we can see more of the overall corner. Let's give that a shot. This is the 55, and I'm curious to see if you guys like this look better than the 85 because we can just see more of this corner of the room here. Let's shoot it from here as well, get some kitties in there, and I want to get close too and I want to see if we can get some close-up shots too; really like this angle here. That's quite nice. I wonder if we can make somehow working this camera, I really like this camera. Let's just try it. Maybe it won't work, but we got to give it a shot. I think that works. We can also try to shoot it from here and get some foreground in here. I actually really like this a lot right here, that's really quiet nice. I'm always throwing a newspaper right there. The reason why I'm putting something right there is because I have a lot of extra green space in the composition, and I think if I do this, that would fill it up a little bit, and it does. Now, I also want to shoot with the 35-millimeter. The other lens that I mentioned in the gear section. This lens is even wider than the 55 so we can really get some overall wide shots of this entire corner. Let's try that out. I really loved shooting with the 35, it's probably one of my favorite lenses. I'm going to shoot F4 right here because I want to get a lot of focus throughout the scene. You can also try shooting top-down shot with the 35; it's quite good for that. [inaudible] , you want to get on the couch? I'm sorry.
10. Editing: Archives. We finished shooting and now we're in the studio and it's finally time to edit. And editing is a really important piece of the creative process. You know, the editing phase is where we take everything that we've done and really put it all together and really enhanced the story that we're trying to tell in our image. And editing is a massively important piece of the puzzle. And I'm excited to show you guys how I'm going to edit the photos that were shot in the last lesson. Now, I edit using Adobe Lightroom classic. It's one of the most popular editing softwares out there and I'm sure you've heard of it. If you're interested in photography. However, there are a lot of really amazing editing softwares out there and you can use whatever you like. Like I said, I'm going to be using Adobe Lightroom. And a lot of the features in Adobe Lightroom are actually found in other editing softwares as well. They have a lot of the same sliders. They have a lot of the same adjustments. So even if you don't edit and Adobe Lightroom and you edit it in something else. If you're free editing program or something like that, you can still get a lot from this lesson did because they really do work the same way for all you mobile editors out there. I'm also gonna do a short mobile editing lesson at the end of this video. And I'm going to be editing using Adobe Lightroom Mobile, which is honestly just as powerful as the desktop version. And actually I edit a lot of my images nowadays using my iPhone because it's the same exact editing software. Iphone is more than capable of producing some absolutely beautiful edit. So at the end of this lesson, I'm going to be editing using my iPhone using Adobe Lightroom. But if you are an iPhone editor or a smart phone editor, I still urge you to watch this first part because I'm gonna be using all the same sliders on desktop that you can use on mobile. So it really is the same editing software and they're both incredibly capable. I'm just going to start on desktop because I think it's easier to see everything and do everything. And then I'll show you how I do the same thing on mobile as well. Archives will jump in on the computer here you can see I have a bunch of images that we shot during the shoot. A lot of really good images, some of which you've probably seen already in the shooting section. But I want to show you first off how I sort the images that I really like, and then we'll get into the actual editing. So the first thing I'd do is go through all the images and the ones that I really like, I give them five stars. So that's kinda my first line of defense when selecting the best photos. And you can see 85 of the 400 photos that I took, which took a lot of photos. I gave five-star. So those are the ones that I really like. And after I give them 5-stars and I select My Favorites, then I'll go a step further and select my favorites of the favorites. And I do that by designating them as red. So I, all I do is hover over and hit six on the keyboard and that will make it one of the favorites. And then when I'm done with that, all I have to do is sort by red and I have all my favorite images here ready to edit. And I really want to highlight how important it is to organize your photos if you guys have seen my other Lightroom editing courses, you know how important it is to make sure your photos are nice and organized. So in 234 years down the road, you can come back and know exactly where everything is. So I do want to highlight the importance of staying organized by giving those few little tips there. But now it's time to start editing. And I actually edit a lot of my photos using Lightroom presets. And if you're not familiar with what Lightroom presets are, it's basically a save to edit that you can apply on your photos. So say you edit one photo a certain way and you really like how you edited that photo. You can save those settings as a preset. And then when you go forward and you edit other photos, all you have to do is click that preset and it applies. It's kind of like a fancy photo filter. I'm going, it saves so much time and it also helps me get very unique looks that are just difficult to get if I'm doing it by hand. So I am going to show you guys how I use Lightroom presets to kind of book edit all my images. But I'm also going to show you how to edit without the presets there amazing tools, but I do want to show you how you can create your own and come up with your own kind of editing as well. So first, I'll show you how to use the presets. I edited all the images in this course using my food and cafe preset pack. And actually I used the urban contrast filter, which is probably my favorite of the bunch. It just really add so much contrast and so much interest. You can see there's the before, there's the after, just a lot of color. A lot of contrast looks really nice. So after I apply the preset, what I'll do is just go in and kind of adjust the basic adjustments here. I'll increase the shadows a little bit, maybe go down on the highlights, maybe adjust the exposure. The contrast if i want to, but honestly, I think it looks really good. Maybe I'll add a bit of clarity. And that's pretty much it like I really like the way this edit looks. And if I want to edit the others, I can do the same thing. I can just apply the preset and go from there, which is really nice and easy. Or what's even better is I can click the first image that I edited, hold shift on my keyboard and then click the last. So I'm selecting all the images in the bunch. And then all I have to do is hit Sync. And then make sure the settings that I want to synchronize to the other images are selected, so pretty much everything. And then hit synchronized. And then it'll basically take the edits that I did on the first image and then apply them to all the other images. So all our images are basically edited. All we have to do is go through and maybe crop a little bit straighten and make sure that the exposure looks good. And that's actually how I edited all the images that you saw in the shooting lesson is by following this tactic. And it really is nice and easy and it saves me so much time. So if you guys are interested in checking out my Lightroom presets that are available on my website. You guys can check those out via the link in the description of this course. Another good thing about presets is they're actually really good for learning. You can apply the presets and then look at the settings that it's changing. You can kinda deconstruct it and see how it's doing, the things that it's doing, and how it makes your image look a certain way. So that's a good feature, but I do want to highlight how to edit without presets as well. And it's actually pretty simple. You know, I think these images look good already. They are all shot in RAW, but they do lack color, they do lack contrast, and I want to make those things pop. So let's go through this photo piece by piece and edit it in a way that really enhances the colors and really enhances the scene. So the first thing I'm gonna do here is go over to the basic adjustments panel here where we have basically exposure contrast highlights. Shadow is just the basic adjustments, but they're very important. And what I'm gonna do is just go down the list. So I think exposure is pretty good. Maybe bring it up a little bit. I'm gonna take the highlights and go down all the way to minus 55. And I'm gonna take the shadows and go up all the way up to maybe 30 will be 30. And what this is doing is basically just increasing the dynamic range of the image. So we have more information on the highlights and more information in the shadows. I'm gonna go into the whites, which is affecting the white areas of the image and drag that down by 25. And I'm gonna go up with the blocks. And this is once again just flattening our image, making it really low contrast, but a lot of information. So then when we go in and add all the contrast and the tone curve, everything is just going to look really nice. So once you've done those, I actually skipped the presence tab and the virus Vibrance and Saturation. And I come back to that. But I move on to the Tone Curve. And tone curve is really going to dictate how your image looks. And I always use what's called an S curve, which basically makes the curve looks like an S. I start in the bottom left-hand corner and I drag this down a little bit, and that's just deepening those blocks. And then I drag the bottom left corner up and that's softening the mouse. We've made them deeper and now we've soft in them. And now I'm gonna go back to the middle and bring that point to the middle, backup to the middle. And you can already see what this is doing is adding so much contrast to our image. And then I basically drag the top up and the backside down so you can see it looks like an S and it adds so much contrast and so much interest to our scene. And it really makes it pop. So once I've done that S curve, I can kinda come back up here and adjust these settings a little bit more and maybe add some contrast. Bring down the highlights, bring up the shadows more. Adjust the exposure back down. And just really make sure the tones are right where I want them. And overall, I think that looks really nice. After that, I can come up here to the temperature slider and adjust that. If I want to make this image former, I can do that by dragging this up, cooler, dragging it down. I think how it is looks really nice. About fifty eight hundred fifty nine hundred. That looks really nice. And I don't think I need to change that. And after I do that, then I can come down to color. And the weight color works in Lightroom is you can adjust it the HSL slide, there's the hue, which is basically the tone of the color of the actual color. Are the reds more pink or the more orange, other greens more blue or yellow. So you can adjust all of those things here in the hue. Saturation is the pureness of the color. So how bricks that color is, how true that color is, and luminance is the brightness of the color. And you can kind of go through all these different settings and really adjust things to get a very specific look. But I honestly really liked the colors and they're seeing they looked good from the beginning. However, there are some things I want to change. And I can do that by just looking at all the colors in our scene and then deciding what to change one by one. So I want to play with the orange is a little bit, I'm going to go down to the orange slider and drag it may be to the left a little bit and just make the side of the couch a little bit browner by dragging it to the left. And that's just really making that color nice and rich and really interesting. And I loved that it makes it a little bit more red, but it just looks much more natural and much more oaky, much more interesting. So we'll leave that there. And then I can just kinda go through and just see what each slider does. Leave that where it is. I really like the greens in our scene, so I'm gonna leave you the greens there. The UK was, it's not doing a whole lot, so I'll just leave it in the middle. The blues, there's some blue and arsine there, but I don't like what it's doing either way. So I'm just going to leave it in the middle. And then purples and Magenta has, we don't really have much of those in our image, so I'll just leave them where they're at. Saturation wise, we can come here and play with the colors once more. I want to bring the greens up a little bit, maybe a tiny bit, maybe bring up down there. We'll do that. We'll bring them down by minus 15. I often do that. Bringing the greens down, they bring the origins down a little bit. The yellows, during the yellows, just kind of playing around with all the different colors we have and making sure that everything looks good. We can also adjust the global saturation and vibrance here. I sometimes like to bring the vibrance up because it kind of brings up those colors that are kind of hanging out in the background and brings them up a little bit. So I'll bring those up to maybe eight or maybe seven just to really make those colors pop. Let's see how far we've gotten here. Here's the before and here's the after, four after. So our photos looking pretty good, it's nice and high contrast. What I'm gonna do is just bring up the shadows of bits, ie exposure a tad. We'd bring the blacks down, just kind of playing around with everything. Whenever I'm editing, I often come back to this basic adjustments panel and just make sure everything looks good. You know, whenever whenever you're adjusting color, it is going to affect the basic adjustments a little bit. So it's always good to kinda come back and reassess and make everything, make sure that everything looks really good. But once we've kinda got our color diode, and the next thing I'd like to do is turn to the split toning. And split toning is one of the most overlooked pieces of Lightroom. You can do so much with it. And what it allows you to do is basically add color into the highlighted areas of your image and also a color into the shattered areas of your image. So this image here, I would like to make it a little bit more warm. I think this image would look good. It kind of captures that mood of this nice cozy and warm scene. And I want to capture that. So instead of using the temperature slider and going up, which kinda washes everything out. I'm going to add the warmth using the split turning. So here on top is the highlights and on the bottom is the Shadows. What I like to do is hold Option or Alt on your keyboard. Hold that down and then drag that slider and that will show you what a 100% saturation will look like on the image. We're not going to use a 100% saturation, but that's just going to show you so you can really see the color that you're using. So I'll go over to this kind of warm yellow tone, leave that there and then I'll go down to saturation and I'll slowly drag that up a little bit, maybe to ten. And then I'll go down to the shadows under The same thing. I'll add warmth into the shadows here. And I'll just drag that up. And it's a really subtle difference. But let me turn off split toning. See you guys can see the actual difference that it makes. It adds so much color depth, so much color interest. And it just really makes the image look really nice, bringing those down a little bit. Alright, the last thing I'd like to do is add sharpening here. I'll maybe go up to 45 and then go down to masking pulled option and drag this up. And this will basically show me what part of the image is being sharpen. So here everything's being sharpened. And now I can kind of make sure I just want the COP and maybe the stuff in the foreground, so I'll bring it up to 60. So just these, these areas here being sharpened. And I like to believe that at 45, so our cup is nice and sharp. And that's basically all the adjustments that I like to make to my images. You can see here is the before and here's the after. And it, honestly, it looks really nice. I think our edit looks great. And then once again, if I want to copy those edits over to the other images, hold shift, click to the end, it sink, and then synchronize all those edits. And then all our images are basically done And they look really great and all the images look consistent as well. So when we put them online and we put them wherever we are going to be using them, and we put them next to each other. We're going to have this very consistent, beautiful style that looks really nice with all of our images. After I apply the settings, I do like to just go through each image and make sure everything looks good. Sem images, you might have to adjust the colors a little bit just to make sure everything's in line. But for the most part, since we shot in one scene here, everything looks really nice and I'm really, really happy with how everything came out. I'm just going to crop some of these images here and make sure that they look really nice. And you can see this image looks just way too warm. The last image, really love this photo. So I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna get rid of the split toning there. And I'm actually just going to drag the white balance down and just make it a little bit cooler. Drag the exposure. And then if I want these oranges to pop, I can just go into saturation and bringing those up a little bit. And there we have a really nice interior image. And we still have our still-life subjects there. But that's how I edit on Adobe Lightroom using presets and without presets. And as you can see, you could do some really amazing things with just a few basic adjustments. So I'm really happy with how these images came out. Now I do want to show you how you can do pretty much the same thing using your phone. Like I said, all the adjustments in the Adobe desktop app are available on Adobe Lightroom Mobile, which is an incredible app. And I'm going to show you guys how I use it real quick. So I imported all of the images into a specific album called Still Life Course. And these were all shot on the iPhone 11 pro Max. And I have all my images here. And as you can see, basically we have all our settings, we have light, color affects, everything is there and it's all really easy to use. We also have presets. So I have my preset, sync that up on my mobile phone. And as you can see, I can just go through and apply these different presets to my image. There's the urban contrast, which looks really nice. Sleepy street, pumpkin spice. I really liked the pumpkin spice one. Maybe we will use this one. I like how warm it is, so we're use pumpkin spice. I'll go ahead and do a little crop. Just the exposure a little bit. Just to make sure it looks nice. They'd bring down the highlights, bring up the shadows. And there we have it. There's the before, there's the after this, this image of shot on iPhone. And then I can swipe. We'll do this one discipline of CSA. Same thing, go to presets and apply the preset that I want, or is it sleepy street, pumpkin spice? There we go. Looks really nice. And then if you guys didn't want to use presets, it works the exact same way that we just covered on the desktop version. You can just go through and adjust each setting to get the look you want. Tone curve is here in the light section, so I can do my little tone curve. But a quick S curve. I can go into color. I can adjust all the different colors here and the color mix bring the hue to the left like we did on desktop. Saturation. We bring it down a little bit, so little bit saturated on the iPhone. I can adjust the greens here. And overall, it's very easy to use if you guys are editing on your smartphone, but you're just not interested in Adobe Lightroom, honestly, there's so many good apps out there that you can use. You can use VSCO, You can use snaps aid, you can use Instagram. And they all have some pretty good filters that you can apply and they look pretty good. I personally like to have that control over my images. So I use Adobe Lightroom because it gives me full control over all the different aspects of my edit. So I can really hone in on the mood and the emotions that I want to capture and really bring those out. So like put the shoot today. I wanted the images to be punchy. I wanted them to be high contrast, but I wanted them to be warm and soft at the same time and enhance those emotions that I kinda felt going into the shoot, which was this idea of being cozy, you know, Lord, kittens and coffee. Maybe it's an autumn day, maybe it's raining outside or just an overcast day. But those are the moods and emotions that I wanted to capture in the shooting phase. And I wanted to really enhance them in the editing phase. And I think we did that, so, but I am super excited to see how you guys are going to edit your photos for your class project. And you've gotta do that class project. Let me know kinda how you edited your photos. Did you use an app on your smartphone or did you edit on your computer? Did you use a preset that you not use a preset? I'm super curious to see how you guys got the look that you did. And I'm super, super excited to see how those photos look.
11. Conclusion: All right guys. Well, I hope you enjoyed that little editing session there. I hope it was helpful for you in some way. But we've officially made it to the end of the course. But before you go, I just want to hammer in a few things, just to sum everything up a little bit. We talked about a lot in this course. We started off with talking about how you can find objects to shoot, what you might want to shoot. We talked about the anatomy of a good still life photos, the three things that comprise a beautiful image of still life. Those three things are lighting, styling, and composition, and how they work together to tell a story. I showed you guys how I styled my scene, how I chose places in my house. We also did a live action photoshoot, which I hope was helpful for you. We finished things off by editing a few of the images and going over some tips. But now it's time for you guys to put these to practice. Go take the things you learned in this course, get up and shoot and post those images in the student projects so I can check those out. I'm super curious to see how you guys do. I'm really curious to see what you guys choose to shoot and how you shoot it. I think their photos are going to be amazing. But just know that, if the photos don't turn out how you wanted them to or maybe they turn out way beyond your expectations, it's okay if they're not exactly how you wanted them to be. Every time you shoot it's an amazing learning experience, and I always urge my students to just shoot as much as you possibly can, and shoot anything at all, because every time you shoot, you're learning something new, and you're putting these principles to practice. It's just an amazing way to become a very talented photographer. Go ahead and post those photos in the student project. I can't wait to see what you guys create. If you guys are interested in learning more, I have a ton of courses you can watch. I recommend checking out my photography essentials course, where I cover all the basics of photography. I really dive into the exposure triangle, and composition, and color, and lighting, we really talk about those things in depth. I also recommend checking out my Lightroom course where I talk about not only how to use Adobe Lightroom, and all the sliders, and all the theory behind the sliders, and how everything works together, but also how you can find your own unique editing style, which I think is super important for every photographer out there, is to have their own unique look, because that is really how you can set yourself apart as a photographer. I have plenty of other courses as well that you guys can check out, so there will be links in the description of this course. Also if you enjoyed the course, please leave a review. I actually have a notification set, so every time a review comes in, I can read it and check it out. I take that feedback to heart for all my future courses so I can make sure that I'm providing the best material for you guys and presenting it in a way that's easy to understand and easy for you to put it into practice. Please leave a review. I'd be super grateful to seeing you in some of my other courses.
Sean Dalton, Travel Photographer
