Ultimate Photography Course (Using iPhone)

1. Teaser: Have you ever heard anybody say you don't need good gear to take good photos? Probably once or twice. Right. So which is it? My name is Benjamin, and I'm a filmmaker and photographer. My clients have ranged from some of the smallest brands to some of the biggest brands in the world. And I'm here to teach you the fundamentals of photography and how you can consistently take good photos by only using your phone. The good news is that the fundamentals of photography apply, whether you're using a phone or a blood. If you have inexpensive gear. You're essentially forced to learn all the settings. You're forced to learn how to settings work, when to use them and why to use them. It will force you to shoot with intent, and in turn, that's going to make you a better photographer. This course is designed for the beginner or intermediate photographer who wants to learn about what makes a good photo good and how you can replicate that time and time again. We're also going to be covering some basic photo editing. We're not going to be using any kind of third party software for this, okay. Instead we're just going to be using the built in features of the iphone so that you can tweak your photo a little bit and sort of learn the beginnings of editing. We're here to learn actual photography, what's in front of you and how you can make the best of the situation that you're in. When you're done with this course, you're going to be ready to go out in the real world, take consistently good photos, start your journey in developing your own style of photography. But listen, if you happen to have some kind of beginner camera at home that you would rather use for this course, you may do so. But for the purposes of this course, we will be using an iphone. So if you're ready to begin your exciting journey in learning actual photography by using just a device in your pocket, start this course now and I'll see you on the other side. 2. The Camera A Brief History: You might be surprised to learn that the idea of photography goes back way longer than you might think. And it didn't start with a camera. You see, people were discussing the idea of projecting an image. As far back as fifth century BCE, Chinese philosopher Mozi brought up the possibility of projecting an illuminated object through a small pinhole in a box. The idea was that you could theoretically place an object in front of a strong light source like the sun and shine it into a very dark room or a handmade box. When you peep through the pinhole in the box, you should be able to see an image of the object projected into it. This was a very intriguing idea, which many years later was introduced as the Camera Obscura. It was a simple box that could be made with appliances at home. Most notably, the Camera obscura was presented in Da Vinci's Codex Atlanticus in 1502. Remember, this was not a camera in the way that we know cameras, The box didn't even have a lens. But it was a starting point in understanding how we can project images. Later on, during the 17th century, Johannes Kepler, whose name you might have heard by references to planets and Nasa Space Observatory suggested for the first time that if we began using something called a lens, we would be able to enhance the quality of the camera obscura by allowing more light to come in. As a result, we'd be getting clearer and brighter images. Kepler's work on optics and the use of lenses played a crucial role in the development of cameras and the understanding of image formation. So up until this point, we've had the camera obscura and a lens to showcase what's in front of us into a box. But what about keeping what we see, printing it onto something that everybody could see, without having to physically stand where the object is and view it through a box. Well, in 18 85, George Eastman, the founder of the Eastman Kodak Company, introduces the first ever film role. It wasn't synthetic though, but on paper, it wasn't until 18 89 that the first role of film on transparent plastic was invented. This was, as you might have heard from previous references made of nitrocellulose and was highly flammable. Safety film was introduced in 1908. With these inventions, the Kodak camera, the first camera designed for amateur photographers, was introduced. It came pre loaded with film, fully patented, and was relatively simple to use. Now we're at the age where making photography is more accessible, safe, and convenient. 1925, the Leica one is introduced. Marking the beginning of the 35 millimeter film format and the era of modern compact cameras. The camera was fitted with a focal plane shutter with speeds from one 20th to one 500th of a second. This model was the basis for all subsequent Leica film cameras for the next 30 years. So now we had small compact cameras, film roles that could be developed in a lab and turned into photographs. What if we took it one step further? What if you could instantly develop photographs without the usage of a lab? What if you just snapped a photo and out came a photograph developed and ready? Sounds like a crazy idea. But in 1948, Edwin Land introduced the Polaroid Land Camera, The first instant camera which produces self developing photographs. This was obviously absolutely revolutionary. Moving on to 1959, a camera with a through the lens light meter, the NkonF is released upping the level of professional photography. This was the first single lens reflex for camera. Why was this special? Well, because SLR cameras use a mirror system, meaning that the photographer can look through the lens and see exactly what will be captured. It worked in such a way that when you press the shutter, the mirror flips out the light path, allowing light to pass through and for the image to be captured. 1988, Fuji and Nikon introduce the first digital camera capable of saving images to a removable storage device, in this case a semiconductor based memory card. The card was the MC one P, which had a maximum capacity of 2 megabytes. 1991, Kodak releases the DCS 101 of the first commercially available digital SLR cameras based on an icon F three body 2000. Advancements in digital imaging technology led to the proliferation of digital cameras in various forms including compact point and chutes, the SLRs and smartphone cameras. After that 2000 tens and onwards, we reached the further evolution of smartphones and their cameras. This is the latest era, the era in which smartphones single handedly led to a decline in sales of traditional cameras. And here we are holding one of these in our pockets, capable of shooting images with such quality that if done right, is almost indistinguishable from a professional DSLR camera. We've gone through the very beginning of image projection to today's standards, where anybody can just pick up their camera, shoot, and share their photos with millions of people on various platforms. Humanity has come a long way and you might think, well, that means that anybody can just pick up a camera and shoot. Technically, that's true. It has become more accessible. But just because it's accessible doesn't mean it makes you a good photographer. You still have to learn what it is that you're supposed to do and why you're doing it. By understanding the settings, you give yourself creative freedom. You can adapt the photo to your liking, and you can make your vision come true. And not everybody can do that. That requires a photographer mindset. Now the question is, what are those settings? How do you set yourself up for success time and time again so you can consistently take good photos? These settings and the mindsets and the preparation for photography are all the things that we're going to cover in the following modules. Remember, this course will take you through theory and practice at the same time, and to do this as easy as possible, I've created a Facebook group through which you can share the photos that you're taking throughout these modules. So you can get direct feedback from either me or the other students partaking in the course. So you can really implement what you've learned and get some healthy feedback on how you can do better next time. Now that we're done with the theory, we're going to be talking about camera basics, specifically ISO, shutter speed and aperture, and how each of these settings affects your photo. And how you can use them in combination to provide the best result for the particular type of photo you're trying to take. So when you're ready, hop into the next module, and I'll see you on the other side. 3. Iso: Throughout this module, we're going to be talking about the three ways of light intake in a camera. Those three ways are ISO, aperture, and shutter speed. We're going to start off by talking about ISO First and foremost, ISO is measured between any of the ranges of like say, 50 and some cameras up to a few thousand, and sometimes on 100 k and more. Now, you might be wondering, well, what is ISO exactly? Iso. Think of it as some signal boost, a setting in the camera, which amplifies through the sensor the brightness or darkness of the image. If you go in a low ISO range, say at 50, then you're going to get a darker image, necessarily. If you go higher and higher, you're going to brighten up the image. Now, what is considered low ISO? I think low ISO is considered anywhere between the ranges of say, 50 to a couple of hundred. Maybe the mid range is anything from a couple hundred to say 800.800. And up is considered high ISO. One thing that's very important to know about ISO is that it does not artificially add any light that is nonexistent in the scene in front of you. Don't think of it as a solution to lighten up an image, even though it seems like that is what the ISO is doing. But remember what I said, it's not that it lightens it up, it doesn't add any more light than the existing light in the room. What it does is that it amplifies the signal. So it works like a signal boost for the already existing light in the room. So this will be counterintuitive to you if you think that, say you have a really dark place and you want to photograph in there without any good light. And you go, well, I need brightness, I need light here. So let's just crank up that ISO. Why is that a bad idea? Well, because if you amplify non existing light in a room, then all you're going to get is you're going to amplify all the sort of artifacts and sort of bad lighting conditions in the room to be in the forefront. That amplification of that sort of dirt is going to be what we call noise. And what is noise? You've probably seen it before, and you've probably experienced it if you've ever photographed with a camera on bad conditions. Is the grainy looking image, not like film grain. Not a very flattering look, but the opposite. It looks like a technical mistake. It looks really, really bad. You've probably heard before that every photographer wants to avoid that noise to the best of their ability. What does this mean in terms of the iphone? The iphone first and foremost, and this is one of the key differences between an iphone and a high end professional camera, is that the iphone has a very small sensor. And remember, ISO is being taken into the camera through the cameras sensor. That is how it's done. So when you look at really high end professional photography cameras like the Hassle Blood, which costs 9,000 10,000 sometimes even more. They have, as you can see, very high or like very large sensors, which means that they can take in a whole lot more information than phone can. And therefore, it has a more leeway on ISO and handles noise much, much better. That's why high end professional cameras that have higher sensors typically cost more. And this is also why the Hassel blood is as expensive as it is. Whereas the iphone, or any other, you know, phone camera I think has a much smaller sensor necessarily from any other DSLR camera or mirrorless camera of any sort, I would say. So that's one of the main differences between the iphone and a professional high end camera in terms of noise handling and ISO. The second difference is that, you know, you've probably picked up the iphone and photographed a lot in your life, and you might be thinking, well, I haven't seen any ISO setting. You've never opened up the camera app and picked between the ranges of 50 to 100 to 1,000 ISO. You've never done that before, right? And you might be thinking well, does the iphone even have ISO? It does, it just, it handles it a little bit differently. And the terms for it is slightly different than the terms that professional high end cameras use. So you're not going to have ISO on an iphone, you're going to have the exposure slider. I would imagine the average consumer doesn't want to deal with technical terms like ISO and ranges 50-100 to 500. They have no idea what that means, right? So instead the iphone just simply calls it the exposure slider. And the principles are the same. You know, you open up your camera and you pick the exposure slider and you drag it to the right, you're going to get a brighter image. Drag it to the left, you're going to get a darker image. But it's the same idea behind it. Because you're inputting the same sort of command to the iphones camera sensor by saying, you know, drag it to the right means let more light in. Drag it to the left means shut more light out, and so on. So those are the key differences. Iphones have smaller sensors. Iphones don't have the terms ISO and the ranges between them. But it does have an exposure slider which pretty much does the same thing. So what can we learn from this? Well, essentially you might be thinking, well, what if I do have a dark room and I want to take a photo in it, and I want to avoid the noise as much as possible. Like if I cannot or should not increase the ISO or drag the exposure slider, what do I do? And as the modules go on, we're going to talk about the different ways that you can compensate for that light by either adding artificial light, moving it closer, trust strong natural light source like the sun, by the window, and using the other two settings of light intake, aperture and shutter speed to your advantage to get more light into the camera without touching the ISO or the exposure slider. And we're going to get into that later after we talk about aperture and shutter speed respectively. Now, if you really want to use ISO, like the actual technical term, ISO, and you want to know how much ISO you're inputting using your camera app on the iphone, you would have to resort to any kind of third party software, which allows you to do this. In the bonus chapter, in the very end, I will bring up a couple of examples of third party software that you can use where you can properly set things like White Balance, get zebras, change the ISO. A whole lot of other professional camera settings that you can use using that third party software. But like I mentioned in the beginning, we're just going to be focusing on the iphone and the built in features of the iphone. Then everything else will just be a bonus that we talk about later on. But this is just so you can feel comfortable in picking up your iphone the way it is, opening up the camera app and snapping a photo and be done with it. Next up, let's talk about how to expose for an image, where you have to think about and how you can approach exposing an image for the best results possible in any given image. You have, first and foremost, you have highlights, which are sort of the brighter parts of the image. You have the mid tones, which are neither too dark, neither too bright. And then you have the shadows that are the cozy dark areas of a photo. Then you also have whites and blacks. Whites are the peak white, brightest parts. Blacks are under shadows, the very blackest parts of an image. And all of this you have to have an understanding of and we're going to go through them as well later on when we do the editing aspect of all of this. But this is just to give you a little bit of an intro. What you want to do when you expose for a shot is generally speaking, if you take a photo and you expose for the shadows, so you have very overblown highlights, there's a higher risk of you losing that information and later on there's nothing you can do about it. Whereas, it's much, much easier to darken the shadows a little bit and expose for the highlights, that you can then bring up those shadows in post. This is something that photographers typically talk about when they say expose for the highlights. Always make sure to expose for the brightest part of your image. And then bring up everything else in post if you have to, If you're in a situation where you have to do that, ideally you don't want to have to do that because you can just, you know, light up or move the subject around so that everything is evenly lit. But you're going to end up in a situation where you can't really do that. Then you have to make that choice. And you go, what do I expose for? Expose for the highlights. To really make sure you're grasping all the concepts that we're talking about, I'm going to be combining them together with practical exercises. In this case, we're going to do an exercise on ISO or the exposure slider to make sure you really understand what we're talking about here. And for this first exercise, what I want you to do is find any object in the house or any person. It can be a friend, it can be a stranger, but preferably something you're comfortable with and that is close to you right now. Pick any object and use a very strong light source. Either place that object by the window or add artificial light. You have some strong light source beaming onto it, and you have to be the one to make a choice. How do you place that subject in the most flattering way possible according to you? And how do you expose for it using the exposure slider? Drag that slider up and down until you just use eyeball it and see with your own eyes, When does the image look evenly lit? And after you do that, you can post it in the Facebook group and go through the process. And what you did, what was the light source? How did you approach moving the subject or object around? Why did you make the choices you made? And finally, we see the result, and we can comment a little bit on it. Now that the very basics of ISO are out of the way, let's hop in and talk about the two other ways of light intake in a camera, namely aperture and shutter speed. And we're going to start off with aperture. 4. Aperture: When you see a really pretty portrait picture, or in a lot of indie movies, and you have the person in the foreground which is very sharp, looking very good, and the background is completely blurry. Well, aperture is the setting responsible for that effect to happen. Aperture is measured in F stops. You have anything from like the ranges of 0.9 to F stop 22 and up, as opposed to ISO. With ISO, the higher up the number you go, the brighter the image will get with aperture, and with F stops, it's the opposite. The lower you go 1.2, the brighter the image will be. The higher you go, 6810, the darker the image will be. In the same way that you had like the hassel blood. The larger the sensor typically, the more expensive the camera here we have. The lower the F stop on a lens, the more expensive it's going to get lens with. Top 1.2 is going to be significantly more expensive than a lens with an F stop of 2.8 or four. I even have an example here of like some Gimmicky lenses that can go even lower than 0.9 Like the Carl Zeiss Superq Gigantar 40 millimeter 0.33 But this lens wasn't even made for practical purposes. It's not relevant. Typically, if you buy a lens, you're going to be looking at ranges from F four down to 2.8 which is very good. And then you have 1.81 0.41 0.2 and so on. What happens inside a lens to cause it to take more light into the camera? As you lower the F top, the aperture inside the lens is going to widen. Imagine it being like the iris in your eyes under certain lighting conditions. When you look somebody in the eyes, you see that the iris opens up or it closes down, the same way applies to a lens. The wider the aperture or the lower the F stop, the more you'll see the, the twirling inside the lens of the aperture, widening up and letting more light in. The darker you go, the more it closes down. Besides opening up and closing to create a darker or brighter image, the aperture does something else. That's what we mentioned earlier. The blur in the background when it opens up and lets a ton of light, that's also going to give you a very blurry image combine correctly. If you take a photo of someone and you place the sharpness on the object, everything behind that object is going to get blurry. And what's good to know about this is that the further away you have a separation between the subject and the background, the more blur you're going to get. You can do this in two ways. Either you can really, really zoom in the lens as much as possible and back away from the subject to create that blur. But the second way to do this is to physically separate the subject from the background. As you can see right now, I'm using a lens that has 2.8 and I'm slightly separating myself from this background. And you can see the blur in the background right now. But if I was sitting even closer, this background and the books would be completely illegible and that's the effects you get from it. So you want to be using aperture to your advantage to, first of all, brighten or darken an image. And, you know, make things either more in focus or less in focus. Either gain blurriness or remove blurriness. So that's something to keep in mind when it comes to aperture. You may add a ton of light into the image, but you will also lose sharpness or you will gain a lot more blur in the background. Which is not something that you always want, right? Think about it like this. If you shoot a portrait photo, then having a blurry background is only going to complement that portrait photo. It almost always looks good, right? You see it in movies, you see it in photos, in gallery shoots or whatever. You have the blurry background and you have the close up of the face and all of the focus. Our eyes are going to be drawn to the face, which is the point of the photo. So it looks very good. But what happens if you're photographing architecture? If you're photographing landscape and you have this whole scenery that you preferably want, all of it in focus, all of it to be sharp, then you can't really go down to F 2.8 and achieve that effect. But you would have to increase the aperture, go to 11, and as a result of that, you're going to get everything in sharpness in focus. But at the same time you will lose brightness. So there's a give or take with aperture. On one end you get a brighter image, but blurry background. On the other end, you get everything to be sharp, but the image will be darker. And then you would have to use any of the other settings to brighten up that image instead. As always, we are reverting this back to the iphone because of course, on the iphone it's not exactly the way that you don't buy lenses for iphones typically. Right? You could, but that's not what you do. You already have a built in lens or two or three on your iphone, depending on the model you have built in. And you might be wondering, well, how do I change the aperture in this case, unlike that we had with the ISO, the technical term aperture does exist on the iphone. And it uses aperture automatically when you use portrait mode, and you've seen that before, you photograph a portrait mode and you get a blurry background, that's what aperture does. You can actually click the setting on your phone to pull up a slider, which gives you the option of decreasing the aperture, or increasing the aperture for a stronger or weaker effect. One thing that's going to confuse you when you try this is when you go down to 2.8 and you think, well, this necessarily has to add a ton of light. You'll notice on the phone, on your iphone that it doesn't do that, right? You're going to get the effect, but there will be no added brightness, or no added light through the camera's lens. That might be confusing to you, because I just taught you that that's what it does. The iris opens up and you let a ton of light in. But that's one of the key differences between an iphone and a professional camera, is the fact that aperture is not real on the iphone. What do I mean by that? It doesn't actually use aperture the way that a real lens does. Instead, what the iphone does is that it uses a simulated AI technology to simulate the effects of aperture. Essentially, aperture on an iphone is a filter. It's not real, okay? You cannot use aperture on the phone to brighten up an image. You can't use it to compensate for missing light at all. Instead you're just adding on a filter. Shows you the effects of aperture and computer generates a blurry background. But that's it because it's a simulation. You'll notice that sometimes you might have experienced this. But if you've ever used the slider and you go all the way down to 2.8 on the phone and you stand really close to a subject and you take a photo. You'll notice that the effect sometimes breaks like, you'll see that it is a blurry background. But sometimes some of the edges will be cut off and be more blurry or not blurry at all. You'll see the filter break. To avoid that, make sure that when you take a photo using the aperture slider on the phone, make sure the image does not break. You move around a little bit and just accommodate yourself to it. In short, ISO is the cameras sensors way for light intake, and aperture is the lenses way for light intake. The lower the F stop, the more light. But therefore, the more blur, the higher the F stop, the less light. But therefore, more things in the shot will be in focus. For exercise two, I'd like for you to showcase what you've learned here by photographing. It's the same principle. Anything in the home that's close to you use portrait mode. Pick an object or a subject and really show off the effects of the aperture effect, I call it effect or simulation on the iphone. You do this by separating the subject from the background as much as possible. You use it by decreasing the F stop as much as possible. Those two things do that with any object or subject, but also incorporate what you've learned from the first exercise, which is make sure it's lit properly. Obviously, you can experiment around with light if you'd like to, but just make sure that there are no highlights that are overblown, shadows that are crushed as usual. When you do this posted in the Facebook group, explain your thought process a little bit and we can give you some feedback. Now, these were the first two ways for light intake in a camera, through the camera sensor, using ISO, through the camera's lens, using aperture. Next, we're going to be talking about the third and final way of light intake into a camera, which is shutter speed. 5. Shutter Speed: Imagine a bright, sunny day. You're out in an open green field with no protection, no shadow, no nothing. And there's a 12:00 sun beaming straight into your eyes. You have no sunglasses. How would you react? You would probably squint your eyes a little bit. Blink and avoid the strong light source of entering your eyes and burning your nerves, right? This is the way a camera's shutter works. It's essentially a blinking technique that the camera uses. Either let more light in or to block out some of that light and let it in in small waves. Shutter speed is measured in fractions of a second or seconds. When you have a fast shutter, it means it blinks faster and therefore the image will be darker. That's probably the easiest way to explain this. If you have a shutter speed of one 500th of a second, the image will be quite significantly darker than if you had a shutter speed of one 50th of a second. The closer you get to that 1 second mark, and especially more the brighter the image will be. Now, as with aperture, as with ISO, there's always gives or takes, like we said with the ISO, you can brighten up the image, but you're going to get noise with the aperture. You can brighten up the image, but you're going to get a lot of blur and so on and so forth. Same applies with shutter speed. With shutter speed, you can definitely brighten up the image by just bringing the shutter to a slower movement and shoot at one 30th of a second, one 20th of a second, one tenth of a second, closer and closer to that 1 second mark. But what you're going to get is because of the slow reaction time of the shutter, it will not have enough time to capture anything moving in the frame. So the result of that is going to be a lot of motion blur. So you've probably seen like really bad, you know, evening or dark night photography where somebody's in a bar and they use like auto settings on a phone. This is another reason why you shouldn't use auto settings and the camera decides to really bring that shutter speed down. And then everybody in that frame are completely blurry. Anybody, anybody raising a glass? Anybody moving their head. They're just going to have a blurry face, blurry hands, blurry feet, blurry everything. So that's one way to think about how to approach using shutter speed from a technical standpoint of brightening up the image. But then also you can use shutter speed to your advantage to create some really creative shots. Let's say for instance, and you've seen this on social media before, probably a ton of times landscape photographers who photograph a waterfall using a very slow shutter, therefore creating a waterfall that has that silky effect like the waterfall doesn't look like a waterfall. It almost looks computer generated because it's just this like waves of silk falling down from the mountain. This is achieved because the photographer made the choice of photographing using a slow shutter on purpose. What can you do to avoid the motion blur that you don't want and you still want a photograph using a slow shutter? Well, what you have to do is you have to stand very, very still. Either both the subject in front of you has to be very, very still. And you have to be very, very still as well. Because just by breathing and holding the camera and breathing, you are creating motion. The entire image will be blurry unless you're standing still. By placing your iphone or a camera on a tripod, or placing it up against any other or object to make sure that the camera is still as you're taking in the photo. So you might be asking yourself, well, what is the correct shutter speed to use? What is like the standard shutter speed that everybody should use for everyday situations? Typically speaking, the shutter speed is one 50th or one 60th of a second, standard usage. How can you approach thinking about it? Well, there's something called the reciprocal rule. Let's say the standard is 150 to one 60th of a second. That a reciprocal rule basically states that the shutter speed should equal the focal length that you're using on the lens. Let's say that the industry standard is one 50th to one 60th of a second, but you're shooting using a 200 millimeter lens, then you should change that shutter speed to match that one 200th of a second. And if you're shooting with a lens of 75 millimeters, then it should be 1/75 and so on and so forth. This is the best way to keep. To keep the shutter speed in track of the current lens that you're using. The other thing is what kind of situation you're shooting for. So think about it logically. If you're shooting, let's say just somebody sitting at a table reading a book. You can use any kind of standard 150, at 160, at whatever, you'll be fine. But then all of a sudden you get hired for a gig to shoot race cars. Now you have to be much more careful with the shutter speed you're picking, right. Because race cars as you know drive very, very fast. And we want to freeze that motion as much as possible, typically speaking. So you want to go up to a few thousand shutter speed, 1/200030004000 maybe even more, depending on how fast the car is driving. So you have to like, sort of match the speed of the car. And you do that just with practice. There isn't like one general rule for it, because every car will be driving a different paces, you don't really know. You have to experiment a little and see where that's at. But at least you know that it's not going to be any lower than that. You won't be able to shoot with, you know, one 20th, one tenth of a second, and so on. You should opt for a higher shutter speed if you want the motion to be frozen, you don't necessarily want that. Sometimes you want to shoot creative shots and maybe you want the object or subject to be blurry. Then go ahead and do that. An example of how you can use shutter speed creatively besides the waterfall example is let's say for instance, you want to photograph a very populated street and you really like say, a church on that street, but you want just a photo of that church. But the street is very populated, there's a lot of tourists, there's a lot of people walking around with selfie sticks. And they are just ruining your shot for you. What do you do? What you can do then is that you can creatively use shutter speed to your advantage. You can bring down the shutter speed to be as slow as possible. You know we're talking seconds, minutes, sometimes 30 minutes, so that every single movement in that frame is erased. So that way you can photograph entire cities, entire streets with no people in them. Even though that street is entirely populated, you're going to be creating essentially a ghost town, which can be a really cool effect. Photographers have done this a ton in the past and you can do that too. One thing to keep in mind though is that as you go down and you shoot with a slow shutter and there's a ton of light being let in, your image will be overexposed. And let's say then you bring up the aperture to 11 and darken the image, and it's still not enough. You bring the ISO all the way down to 50 and it's not enough. What do you do? Well, that's when you use something called a neutral density filter. This is a separate purchase that goes. The example that everybody gives a pair of sunglasses on top of your lens, the ND filter will essentially just block out additional light that none of your other settings can achieve because of the slow shutter that you're shooting with as usual. Now we're finally talking about the iphone again. How do you use shutter speed on an iphone? There's two ways to do it. One way is already built in and it does it automatically for you, and it's called night mode. If you've ever wondered how come the iphone can take really good photos at night when there's not enough light? Well, it's because it slows down the shutter inside the iphone and brightens up the image that way. But you've also noticed that if you take bar photos or whatever and people are moving around, your photos will be bright using night mode and it works okay. But people are going to be blurred out. And it's for that same reason. The slower the shutter, the more motion blur you're introducing, that's one way to do it. The second way to do it, if you want to achieve that sort of waterfall effect. So let's say you're taking a photo of a waterfall instead of trying to use night mode on the camera to do that when it's bright outside. What you do instead, there's a trick to it, is that you photograph a normal photo, But you activate live photo as you do it. Take a photo using live photo because what does live photo do? Photo takes a small couple of seconds of video before that shot that you've taken. You can see that by going into the photo. After you've taken the live photo, you click on the live photo. And you can see that you can actually pick a frame within the scopes of that little video moment that the iphone took of the photo. You can choose any other frame. It doesn't have to be the one that you have, but this is just a showcase that it records a little bit of video to give you that final result of when you press the shutter. So you can use this to your advantage by taking a photo of say, a waterfall, then clicking on Live Photo in the top corner, and then clicking on Long Exposure. What it does then is that it takes all those frames that it recorded and it creates a compilation of all of that and creates that long exposure effect like with the waterfall. That's, that's the second way that you can incorporate shutter speed using the iphone. First you have night mode, then you have a light photo converted to long exposure. And now we're finally at exercise number three, which as you expect, is going to be incorporating shutter speed, using your iphone to take a photo. You can either use light photo converted to long exposure or if you're shooting when it's dark, you can use night mode when you're choosing a photograph is up to you. But of course, whatever is in the frame has to be moving this Canada be in the form of people on the street. It can be something as simple as your water tap. You're trying to like recreate the waterfall effect, but you don't have a waterfall close to you. Just use your water tap or you know, bathtub or whatever. Anything with movement that you want to show that you've used essentially the shutter speed function of the phone in whichever way you want, either through night mode or light photo converted to long exposure. 6. Using All 3: Okay, so we've finally gone through all three ways of light intake in a camera. We've gone through ISO, aperture and shutter speed. And we've also gone through what you gain and what you lose by changing each and every one of these settings. Now, before we move on to the next module, when we're going to be talking about incorporating all three of these to create the best image possible for you to not get lost in all of this. I'm sure you've taken notes, but I've also created a PDF diagram where I'm showcasing. And I'm describing that when you change ISO, you gain this, you lose that when you change aperture. Same thing there. And shutter speed, same thing there. And this is something that goes beyond this course, because I've put this diagram on my website as a free download. So you can go to the website, you can sign up for the newsletter, and in return, you will get this diagram. And if you've taken notes on your own, then, okay, go for that. But this is just to make it easier for you. Now, for the next module, we're going to be talking about ISO shutter speed and aperture, and using them together to create the best looking image for your purposes depends of course, on what your purpose is. But we have to combine them intelligently so that we get the best result. So we don't make the mistakes of the auto settings on a camera and just play around with them. And be happy with whichever way the camera lights up the image. But we want to be shooting like I've talked about, time and time again with intention, with intent. So you want to be able to use all these settings independently, and also in combination to create the best image possible. Now, how do we do that? Well, the first thing that you have to think about is, and the first question you have to ask yourself is, what is important for this particular shot I'm taking right now? If you take a shot of, say, landscape photography, you can definitely sacrifice shutter speed as much as you want, as long as the camera is on a tripod. If you're photographing a bunch of people on the street and you want everybody to be in focus, then you, of course, have to shoot with a faster shutter, and you have to compensate for the light using the other settings. Ask yourself in terms of aperture, do I need everything to be in focus or not? And base your decision on the answer of that question. With shutter speed, do I need the motion blur or do I not need it? In fact, do I prefer it with or without? And base your choices on that. With ISO, just avoid increasing it as much as possible. Okay? With ISO, you should essentially just be thinking, and this makes the thought process easier in a way with ISO, just think this is my last resort. Keep it as low as you possibly can, and then if none of the other settings can really do it for you, then start cranking up that ISO a little bit, or as much as you need to. This is of course, with the understanding that you do not have any artificial light. There's no way to add light. It's already dark outside. You're in really, really bad conditions. Okay? But preferably, you want to first and foremost add light, and second of all, use aperture and shutter speed to your advantage, rather than increasing that ISO. And of course, where do complications arise when it comes to the iphone? Well, as we already talked about, you cannot gain any more light using the aperture, so you can forget about that. And you can use the aperture as go wild with it. Do whatever you want because you're not going to make the image darker and you're not going to brighten it up. So tough luck. The only other thing you can use is the exposure slider, which you know works fairly well on the iphone, by the way. Like it's not that bad, it's not like cranking up the ISO on a camera up to like 12,000 and getting this like insane grain. It's okay. You can use the exposure slider or you can use the shutter speed function. But of course that has limitations as well. Because I believe that on the iphone, the shutter time goes down to like 10 seconds at most, I think. Not so much anyway. So you can't really achieve anything like insane with the iphone. You can't like set a shutter for like 30 minutes and you know, photograph populated streets to make them look empty and so on. You would have to use actual camera for that, but at least you can use night mode or you can just use the exposure slider. But that's the way to approach all three of these settings in combination. Look at the scene in front of you. Oh, it's architecture photography. Preferably, I want everything to be a focus. You put it on 11, then you have to compensate for that light, because now the image is darker. But considering it's just a building and buildings don't have legs and move around, then you can just use the shutter speed to your advantage and just bring that down to introduce more light. You will not get any motion blur as long as you're in a tripod. The same questions obviously should be asked in any other situation. Let's say you're shooting portrait photography, and there's no way to compensate for that light because you don't want to go too low with the shutter or you're going to introduce some blur and the image is not going to look so good. Ask yourself, do I really need everything in the shot to be in focus? Does the background need to be in focus? If the answer is no to that question, and you might think, well, it might even look more flattering. If I have a blurry book of background, then just open up that aperture as wide as possible. If your lens allows for it, open up. 2.81 0.81 0.41 0.2 If you're really rich, uh, but use the aperture to your advantage then. So, each setting should be, think about what the setting does, that's step number one. Really understand what each setting does. And then ask yourself, in relation to what you see in front of you and the photo you want to take, what do I really need for this shot? And then do not compromise with that and focus on the rest. Instead to compromise for the missing light. Then you go to the next situation and you do the same thing. What do I need here? What is absolutely essential? Now, this exercise is going to be the most fun one, okay? Because now you know all the settings individually and you know how to approach them in combination and how to think when you take a photo. Now apply that knowledge into one final image. This image has to apply all of these settings in one go. Use ISO or exposure slider, use aperture, even though it doesn't really give you light or darkens the image. But use it anyway and use perhaps the slow shutter, but essentially photograph now anything you like. But in your process of uploading this photo into the Facebook group, explain to us, using all three of these settings, explain to us the thought process behind it. Tell us how you approach the exposure slider. Tell us how you placed your subject in terms of the light. Explain how you used the aperture and why you made that choice. Why is everything in focus? Or why is it completely blurry in the background? What effect did you want to achieve using this photo? And then we'll give you a little bit of feedback and see if you've managed to create the photo that you wanted to create. And to create the effect in us as the audience by using the settings in the way that you have. Go wild. Have fun with this and I'll see you in the Facebook group. 7. White Balance: Every form of light, whether it be artificial light or natural light, has some inherent temperature to it. And this temperature is measured in Kelvin. For instance, when you have natural daylight. Typically speaking, daylight is set around the temperature of 5550650700 Kelvin, somewhere in that range. In order for you to create a natural looking image on your camera, you always want to make sure to set the white balance first. And what does the white balance refer to? Basically, when you have something white in the image, like this shirt, if it looks white on the screen, then you are as close as possible to the natural way that the reality of the image looks like on the picture. And how do you do this? It helps tremendously a lot if you're using artificial light and you already know the temperature of that light. Like for instance, the studio light that I'm using right now I know has a Kelvin temperature of 5,600 What I do is I prepare the camera, I go into the white balance settings and I place in the manual white balance on it to match 5,600 and Kelvin. But what happens if you don't know the temperature? What happens if you have natural light coming from the window? And you know it's around the ranges of 5550650700, but you're not quite sure. Well, if you really want to make sure that you have your white balance set correctly, either find something in the image that is already white, but you don't always have that at hand, right? So you have to create it somehow. Like if you don't have anything white in the image, make sure you're bringing something with you that is white. In this case, we have something called a gray card. And in a gray card, you can see right here, we have the various tones and shades of gray all the way to black. But we also do have white. So what do you have to do is you simply zoom in or, you know, approach, place the white in front of the natural or the light source that you're already using. And then set your balance according to this white. So if you're looking at this and you see that it's kind of blue or kind of reddish orange, then you know that that is not the correct white balance. And you need to tweak your white balance manually to make sure that the white looks as white as possible. You can either buy one of these and they can get pretty expensive, but there's probably some cheap ones. Or if you don't want to spend any money on a gray card, you can simply do what I did. Cut out a piece of cardboard, put a white paper on it, and you're good to go. Bigger piece of paper, easier to set the white balance and works equally well as the gray card. Now maybe there are some shading differences in that. This is the perfect white. And a piece of paper might vary, and it's not exactly a perfect white. Not sure about that, but I think this works just fine or a gray card. But it's important to set that white balance because it will give you more freedom later on to use the base to be as natural as possible so that you can color grade it more freely and easily later on in post. The same thing with white balance applies as it does with using regular auto settings on a camera or the phone control. You want as much control as possible. Now why is that? Well, imagine you're taking one photo and the camera does a fine job. It auto, white balances it. You're happy with it, and you can go ahead and use that as your final product. That's great. But imagine if you're doing, say, a wedding shot or a portrait shoot in a studio and you have a lot of subjects coming in and you're planning on taking at least like 800 to 1,000 photos. And you're using auto white balance. For each time you click the shutter, the camera's auto white balance system might slightly differ and might read the light slightly differently based on the new person coming in. Maybe their clothes are throwing off the auto settings, their skin tones might be throwing off the auto settings. And the camera will not give you consistent, perfect results each and every time. Whereas, if you use auto settings, you have it to your advantage. Because if you place the camera on say, 5,600 Kelvin, it's always going to be 5,600 Kelvin. So then you're going to get a range of 800 to 1,000 photos that look identical. And it's going to be way easier to retouch and grade all of those because you have the same fundamental baseline throughout all of them in your white balance. But like I mentioned earlier, you don't really have to think about it that much with the iphone because the iphone already sort of has a built in auto white balance feature that works fine most of the time. However, if you feel like you do want full control of the white balance, then you would have to see that in the bonus chapter in the end when we talk about third party software that you can use, where amongst other things, you can also control the white balance manually. 8. Raw Vs Jpeg: Cameras shoot in various formats from uncompressed to compressed to very compressed. What does this mean? It means that when you shoot in a compressed format, you have smaller file sizes. But therefore, you also have much more limitations when it comes to the post production aspect of taking a photo editing, retouching, and so on. Whereas if you shoot in an uncompressed format, then you're going to get a ton more information that you can play around with. You. Get complete freedom, or much more freedom in adjusting shadows, highlights, darks, blacks, whatever in your image. You're going to be able to play around with the photo much more. But therefore, because of the ton more information that gets into that image and saves on your device, you're going to get a larger file size. Typically, raw cannot really be read by just opening up the image on a computer or whatever. You would have to eventually exported as a compressed format that's readable by other devices. The formats I'm talking about are the uncompressed one being raw and the compressed one typically being Jpeg. If you want to take photos that you know you're going to be editing later on that are important to you, always shoot raw. And if you don't care if it's just party photos and you're not going to deal with them too much, you can shoot in Jpeg. That's one way to think about it. So if you feel like it, activate raw on your iphone to make sure you're photographing raw from now on, if that's what you like. But you don't have to, but just know that that's what Raw, uncompressed versus compressed means. Raw versus Jpeg. One gives you a tumbler information, but higher file sizes. The other one gives you way less information in post but also smaller file sizes. And that's one way that you can just think about whether or not you want to shoot wood raw or with J peg. 9. Choosing Right: When I first picked up a camera, I did what everybody else did. I slapped on the auto settings, snapped a few photos, and hope for the best. And you know what, it worked. The photos were never too dark. It was all nice, evenly lit and exposed, and looked okay. But then I would look at professional photos and see a world of difference. Why did their photos turn out to be so much better? Back then, I thought, well, you know, obviously they were using more expensive gear or they photos the hell out of that image to force it to look good. Which, you know, sometimes is still true, but it had to be that right. What else could it be? After a while I understood that. Obviously they're using manual settings as opposed to auto settings for starters, but does that really make that big of a difference? Well, yes. Yes, it does. And I'll explain why. You see with auto settings, what the camera does is that it uses all three components that we mentioned earlier. Iso shutter speed and aperture combination to force the image to light up. And it does a good job, right? You will get an image that is lit up. But what people fail to understand is that all three of these settings affect the image differently. If you change the shutter speed, you might affect the motion blur, If you change the aperture, you might affect the depth of field. And if you crank up that ISO, it might have a destructive effect and introduce a lot of noise. So, by understanding what each of these things do, how it affects the photo, and how it affects the way the light is being let in, you can have more creative freedom and you can make those choices by yourself. And this will cause you to photograph each and every photo with intention. You might notice in like photography forums or read it every time somebody posts a really nice photo that people, like everybody, keeps asking for the settings. What was the aperture like, you know, what kind of lens, what kind of shutter speed, what kind of this and that. They want to know all the technical details behind it, because they want to know how the photographer achieved that effect. If this was irrelevant, everybody would just photograph using auto settings and then call it a day. Nobody would be interested in what the photographer, what kind of a choice the photographer made in taking that photo. And remember, just because a photo is properly lit doesn't make it good because it might not be good for the type of photo that you're taking. You know, if you're shooting landscape photography and you have your aperture all the way down, you're going to have some weird blurry edges here and there that you don't want and that you might want to have when you do say, portraits or some kind of product photography or whatever. But each setting serves its own purpose and you need to be the one to decide, when do I want motion blur? When do I not want motion blur? When do I want, you know, a blurry Boca background? When do I not want a blurry Boca background and so on and so forth. When I photograph, I even underexpose each photo on purpose so that I can compensate for it later on. This is just to introduce much more color and detail that I might lose on set if I actually just light it all up properly. So to quickly summarize, when we use manual settings, we have full control over ISO, aperture and shutter speed, and we can create any kind of look we want. And we can do it consistently because we know what we're doing. Different situations require different settings, right? Imagine if you're photographing a person walking toward, you know, a golden sunset. If you were to photograph that person with auto settings, the camera will do its best to adapt to all the dark areas and try to light them up. So what happens is that you photograph that person, the shadows will be forced to be lit up. In other words, the camera might expose for the person instead of the sun, which forces the person to be lit up. But then the sun is all overblown. The highlights are completely overblown. You've lost all information, and the photo looks really, really ugly. By using manual settings in that situation, you can make that choice. And you can go, well, you know what, This person walking toward the sunset like this. Maybe they should be in the dark. We should expose for the sun and keep the information in the sun. And allow the shadows to be almost crushed. Because what's going to happen? We're going to create a silhouette. We're going to create a look there, so we purposefully expose for the sun to create the silhouette look. And all of a sudden, we've made a creative choice. And of course, the resulting image is far more interesting than the former one that I mentioned. So forget all about auto settings. We're going to be using manual settings all throughout. It might sound like I'm talking about a regular camera, You know, when I'm talking about ISO aperture and shutter speed, it sounds like I'm talking about a professional DSLR camera. And to a large extent I am, but at the same time, that shouldn't matter because like I mentioned before, the fundamentals of photography apply whether you're using an iphone or a high end professional camera. So it's good to know all these things even if your camera and your small sensor and your phone cannot really achieve certain things. And we'll talk about the limitations of the iphone and all of that. So with that out of the way, let's hop in and talk about ISO, shutter speed, and aperture, and tips and tricks for when you should use each setting and how you should combine them to achieve the kind of look that you want to achieve. 10. Artificial Light: In this module, we're going to be talking about lighting and all aspects of lighting such as artificial light versus natural light, soft light versus harsh light, and the various different lighting techniques that you can use. The first thing to know about all of this is that. And keep this in mind at all times, our eyes are drawn to the brightest part of the image. Or more specifically, because you might have heard somebody say that before. Our eyes are drawn to the most contrasting part of the image, usually we're talking about if everything else in the image is dark and you have a really bright spot in the picture, our eyes will be drawn to that. But similarly, if you have the opposite situation and you have everything around you being completely bright, but you have something very dark in the image. In that case, our eyes will be drawn to that darkest part of the image. Imagine going to a gallery exhibition of portraying some kind of abstract art. And you see this typical modern art situation where you show up and you see a painting which is completely white. There's nothing on it except for in the middle where you have a black circle. Now, where would your eyes naturally be drawn to? Is it about the white around the brightest part? No, of course not. It's going to be in the most contrasting part of the image, which in this case would be the black.in the middle. And this is good to keep in mind because the same principles will apply to photography. Welcome to the Armory. We're going to be talking about artificial light. We're not going to be talking about how to use all of these lights, specifically, we're just going to be talking about the differences between them, what they are and how you can use them, and in what situations. Starting off, we have the main difference between the lights on this side and the lights on this side, namely, the difference between flashes and constant lights. Flashes are the ones that are typically used for professional photography, but you could also use constant lights. Flashes are very, very strong, they produce a lot of light, whereas constant lights, even though they can be very strong, are typically not as strong as flashes. The difference is that in this case, the flash will pop off as you press the shutter, whereas constant lights are, it's in the name, constantly shining. Like the LED that I got set up right here. We'll talk about that in a second. Starting off with this one, we have two different kinds of flashes. This is the type of flash that you would place directly onto your camera, so that when you press the shutter, the flash pops off. You can use it in different ways. You can use it by either popping off the flash up on a ceiling so that you have more even light all across the room. Or you can bend this over like this, shine it directly, or flash it directly into your subject's face, which typically can be very distracting and could annoy people. If you don't want to shoot directly into the ceiling and you don't want to shoot directly into somebody's face, what you do is you place the flash somewhere in between. A little bit up like this, you still get some of that light spill onto the subject's face directly, as well as the ambience around you. Just like with all the other lights, when we talk about harsh light versus soft light, it is recommended. You could use this as a harsh light source or you can buy an additional soft box, small soft box that you place on top. You simply screw it on. Now you have like your own little flash softbox solution going on right here. This is for the flashes that go directly onto the camera. Next up we have something called strobes. Now these are studio flashes. What you do with these is you simply put them on a tripod, 12, several if you like. Then you have a remote which you connect to the shoehorn in your camera. That remote communicates with the strobe lights. When you pop off the shutter, all of the light sources that are on the same channel that you've applied onto the remote will pop off as well. This is more for like professional studio photography, portrait photography, and so on. Some of these flashes are only on electricity, and some of these also are battery driven, which means that you can bring them out with you if you're doing wedding shoots or just shoots outside. In general, these are flashes. Moving on slowly up again with the ladder, we have constant lights. In terms of constant lights, I'm going to start with the smallest one with this loom cube. Loom cube is an LED driven small light. That can be very good for fill light situations because this is very small. You can also use gaffer tape and you can tape it up anywhere, or you can hide it behind certain objects or subjects. You can eliminate parts of the background. That's mostly what this is used for. This is not typically used for as a main light source to light up somebody's face more so just a fill light. So if you're shooting photos or videos in a nightclub, you need a little bit of strong frontal lighting. You can place this directly onto the camera and use it that way as well. Next up in line, we have this LED panel. Aladdin LED panels are very good because they are super small, super portable, and relatively strong. Not as strong as say, this light, a proper studio light, but still can be used very creatively. For instance, if you want to use this as an overhead kind of light, you can easily just gaffer tape this onto the ceiling. And now you have an overhead light which mimics a regular light that's up in the ceiling. This one in particular is something called the bicolor light. Now, bicolored lights are lights that are able to change temperature, so you can go from a warmer hue to a colder hue. Finally, we have a large studio light which is also LED based. So it doesn't have any kind of bulb in it, no kind of tungsten, anything like that. This one, however, is not bicolor. It's the same one I'm using here. This one is fixed at 5,700 or 5,600 Kelvin, which mimics daylight for these ones. This one in particular is electricity driven. I have to have this plugged in somewhere for it to work. But there are lights of this kind that can be used with a so called V lock battery. That same thing applies as when we talked about the flash that you can bring with you outside. If you have a V mount and a V lock battery on one of these lights. You can also bring it outside and shoot outdoor scenes as well. Of course, let's be real. We're shooting with an iphone, this is very overkill. But if you have these lights available to you, and if you have the budget for them, some of these lights are very, very cheap as well, then why not use them to your advantage, regardless if it's an iphone or a professional DSLR camera. And if you don't use natural lighting, it doesn't matter. But this is just so you can learn how light works with the different kinds of lights, their functions, and generally speaking, the purposes that you can use them for. 11. Natural Light: What is natural light? Natural light is light that hasn't been added artificially by us and the technology that is available to us as people that we've created. Right. Natural light is any kind of light that already exists out in nature. This could be sunlight, starlight, moonlight, or any other variation. It could be a fire that you create or whatever. But it's not technology used by just what's out there in nature naturally. Now, what can we do and can't do with natural light? Well, we can't really change the natural light, right? If the sun is up there, it's up there. But what we can do is we can adapt around it. For instance, like I mentioned before, you can just wait a while until there's clouds in the sky and you can shoot that way. However, it might be a little unpredictable because you don't know how long those clouds are going to be there, the movement of them, and how much time you really have to make the shot happen. Another thing you can do is curtains or diffusers that you bring with you that you place in front of the sun. So it doesn't really matter how strong it is, you're always going to get soft, diffused light on your subject. And the third thing you can do is adapt to the time of the day. So there's a difference between shooting at noon during harsh sunlight conditions, or during what you've heard before. Golden hour or blue hour, when the sunlight is far more flattering and looks good. Pretty much, no matter how you point the camera. Let's start off by talking about golden hour. You've heard about golden hour before. It's basically the last hour of the day when the sun is just about to set in the horizon. Now why is this so pleasing to photographers? Well, basically because it's so low to the horizon, it creates a warmer hue in color. And this warmer hue is what we call golden hour because it sort of looks golden, orangish golden, sometimes very red. And that can be very pleasing for photography. Another reason for that, besides the hue, is also the fact that the sun is low. So it means it's not shining on you directly from the top, but it's from the side And you'll see the similarities and how we are going to light later on. When I teach you about artificial lighting and how you can set up lights, why it's more pleasing to place the subject at a certain angle to achieve the best results. And the sun during golden hour is going to do that for you naturally. Now, the only downside to this, or the only worry that you might have is, well, wait a minute, Golden hour is the last hour of the day. How am I ever going to manage to properly do a photo shoot during that last hour? There's not a lot of time right before the sun sets. So how do you prepare for Golden Hour? First things first, and this is a great idea to always do, is research and find a location. You already have to have some kind of location in mind now, either you can do it by naturally walking on the street and finding a location that you really like. Or you can look at Google Maps. Or if you're in a different country, you can look at Google Maps. And you can see sort of an overview of all the streets, Google a few images and see sort of where's a pretty location that you would preferably like to shoot in. And the third thing is you have to know the movement of the sun. So you have to understand where does the sun rise, where does it set, and where is the sun going to be during golden hour because it might not be at all in the location that you want to shoot at. Now, how do you do that? Well, either you pay attention to the sun throughout a whole day and sort of pay attention to it and see where does it rise, where does it set. Or if you want to save time, you can download Tracker AR. It's an app that basically shows you a live overview of where the sun is right now, where it's going to be at noon, where it's going to be during golden hour. It shows you all the hours of the day and the exact movement of the sun on a live feed. What you can do is you can find a location. You can go to that location at any point during the day. Simply point your soundtrack or AR app in the sky and see a visual illustrated version of the sun is going to pop up on the screen showing you exactly where it's going to be located during golden hour. You can already plan for that shot. You can set up the shot, look at the app, and pay attention to, well, the sun is coming from that direction, so I should probably place my subject in this way or that way and you can do all the research and planning beforehand. When that last hour comes up, you will be 100% ready for that shoot. And that hour is going to be plenty of time to get the shot done. Golden hour is a no brainer, really. You're always going to have a good time shooting at golden hour or blue hour. Blue hour is just a simple addition to golden hour, which means the very last few moments when the sun is already just peaking up from the horizon and is just about to set. Then you get blue hour and then you have even less time to get the shot done. You have to be even more prepared, but that too is very pleasing. You can either do all of this during sun set or during sun rise as well. You're always going to get good results by photographing during golden hour. But what if you don't have the time? What if you can't really always plan for Golden Hour, What if the conditions aren't there for you based on your schedule, your work, your family, whatever. What if you want to shoot in the middle of the day at noon during the harshest of light conditions, then what? Because this is the type of light like we mentioned earlier. With harsh light comes harsh contrast. It's not very diffused, it looks really ugly. How do you do it? Why would you photographers always avoid it? But that's why we got to talk about it. First things first, avoid the harsh light to the best of your ability, especially the harsh light, which is directly above your head at 12:00 with no shade, no trees, no clouds, no nothing, avoid that at all costs. This part is true, this is what every photographer tells you, and you should avoid it to the best of your ability. But how do you do that? Well, we've already mentioned two examples, which is waiting for clouds or if you're indoors placing curtains in front of the window. Or if you do have access to some kind of differ, a portable diffuser that you can bring with you and have the sunlight beam through that diffuser to create softer light. And if all of this sounds too complicated and too much for you and you just want to go out and shoot, then find corners of streets where the light isn't shining directly onto it. From above, you can find corners of the streets where only part of the sun is shining in. Or you can go to an indoor location, like a church, for instance. Imagine going into a church with those large windows and you have that harsh light beaming through those windows. It makes for a really powerful image and it could look really, really good. But in the case like this where you, for instance, just want to bring a friend and you want to photograph out on the street. Then find a corner of street and already prepare yourself and understand where will the sun shine during that noon time. Either you can do this by pre preparing like you did with the golden hour. You can either walk a week ahead of time, walk to different locations, see where the sun ends up. Take a few example photos just to make sure that you're researching and you're picking the location where you want to shoot, or like I mentioned before, use the sun tracker AR app and simply look at the map and see where the sun will be during that given time so that you know right ahead of time where it's going to be on the day that you want to shoot. And what are we going to achieve by doing that? Well, imagine if you have that corner street. You have half of the wall of that street being lit up and the other half not. You can do plenty of things with that. You can just place the subject, for example, in a certain angle where only half the face is being lit up and the other half isn't to create this really stylized sort of Noir look. Or you can go even further and you can have the subject, for instance, sit down so that only the face is left in the shadows and the rest of the body is lit up. So you create a silhouette only on the face. This can create for some really cool like mystique effects and it can be a really artsy type of photo. The point is, just as with all the other examples, you have to be a proactive photographer. You can never sit still, stand still. You have to always move around and you always have to do the research and make sure that you get the best photo possible. Because this will be what differentiates you from any other, you know, amateur hobbyist photographer. So don't get too poisoned by, you know, other photographer's advice or Youtube videos that simply tell you you cannot shoot in these conditions or you cannot do this, or you cannot do that, because it's only going to limit your creative mind if you take on too much of that content. Instead, always think individually independently. Well, people tell me I can't shoot under these conditions. Is that really true? That's the way to truly give meaning to the word photographer. 12. How To Light: Understanding light for photography is far more than just the technical how to. It is also about the placement of the light and what effect you can get by just changing up the positioning of the light in relation to your subject. What we're going to be talking about today is going to be a classic three light setup. This is good to know because this will be the basis for any other kind of lighting that you want to use in the future. The principles behind a three light set up is that we have the main light, which is the light that's going to light your subject. Then we have the back light, which is going to light part of the back of your head a little bit on the ear. And then we have the background light or the fill light for the ambience in the background, which is going to be over there. Currently, we only have the main light set up. Now, we're going to start off with the main light. The main light is placed on this side of my body. You would think logically that if you want to light a subject, that you should place the light directly in front of the subject and simply light up the face, right? It makes sense when you think about it, but in reality, it doesn't look too flattering. It looks kind of bad because of the reason that when you do that, you're washing out the face completely. You're just showering the face with light and you're losing any kind of contrast. What we want to achieve with lighting is two things. We want to achieve contrast and we want to achieve a separation from the background by lighting straight ahead. You're just going to be washing out the face. The light in the back or the wall in the background is going to be evenly lit as well. And it's going to look like completely two D. So we're not going to achieve any contrast and we're not going to achieve a separation from the background. That's, generally speaking, always a bad idea. What we want to do instead is to light the subject at an off angle. That off angle, of course, it doesn't have to be completely to the side, but it can be a third of the way right in between from the front to lighting and the complete sideways lighting, which is right around here, where this light is set up. What will this achieve? It will achieve that part of the face will be lit up. Then we're going to have a little bit of shadow on this side of the face. And that's the contrast that we're looking for. That's in terms of the main light. Now let's start building this up and use a second light to our advantage to create even more contrast and even more separation. And that is the back light. The back light will serve as a small light which will radiate off the back of the head and a little bit on the ear. That light will be a separation between the main light here, the shadow area on this side of the face, and the light on this side. We get a layer or several layers of light versus shadow, which adds more to this contrast that we're looking for. And I'm going to do that by turning on the back light on this side. So now with the back light lit, you can already tell that it did a whole lot. It's just a small loom cube light, right, The little LED that I was talking about. And it does a lot. Right? So now we have a big separation between the light that's on this side of the face, the shadowy kind of area on this side of the face. And a little bit of extra pop in the background. It makes the character in front of you really sort of stick out a little bit extra. And finally, we have the background light, which will add a little bit, a little bit of magic to the ambience in the background. I have a second loom cube set up on top of the stairs, and I'm going to be turning on that light right now to show you what that does. Now we have, without the background, we just have the main light and the backlight. And now we have the background lit up as well As you can tell, it's not a huge difference, it's just a small little bit of magic added to the background. What that does is that final step that we talked about, a separation from the background. Because now with only the background lit up, now we have this clear almost three D image of the subject. Thanks to this light, the main light, the backlight, and the background light. Now we've created, we've architected a three D sphere. We've separated the subject from the background, and we have contrast on the face as well. This is how you do a commercial three light set up. 13. Composition: What does composition refer to? Composition simply means the choices that you make in the placement of the subject or object within the frame. Why is this important? Well, it's important for the same reasons that when we choose how to light a certain subject and when we said the brightest part of the image or the most contrasting part of the image is where our eyes will be drawn to. The second way that we can incite the audience to look or focus on something within the frame is through composition. It's very important where we place the subject and how we place them. It goes back to the important point of intention. What do you intend with this? What do you want the audience to focus on? You got to be the one to make that choice. And composition helps us get there. There are various compositional guidelines to abide by. But we're going to focus on the main one that they probably teach you in photography or filmmaking school. Namely the Rule of Thirds. The Rule of Thirds is a compositional grid line system that looks like this, where you have a separation of three different sections. You have the left, you have the middle, and you have the right. You have to make the choice. In which of these sections will you place your subject? One thing to keep in mind though is where is the subject looking? For instance, if you have a subject standing on the left side looking to the right, then you have a whole lot of empty space in the direction where the subject is looking. In other words, what we do in that situation is we respect the direction where the subject is looking. As opposed to if you have a subject looking toward the right and we compose that subject on the right, the image is going to feel very sort of claustrophobic because you have the corner of the frame, right, meeting the eyes of the subject. Whereas the left side, the entire left side of the image is left empty. Which can be distracting because there's nothing there, there's nothing to motivate that part of the frame being empty. So it looks kind of strange. Of course, you can use this in artistic sort of purposes if you like. If you want to create some kind of feeling of claustrophobia, then of course it could work. But we're talking about just the general rules to abide by. So we want to respect the direction they're looking and we want to place the subject appropriately to respect that direction. On the other hand, if you have a subject looking directly into the camera, then it would probably be the most fitting to place that subject directly in the center. Or if the subject is on the right side looking toward the left, we want to keep them on the right side because we're respecting the direction they're looking at, which in this case is left. That's part one in reading the rule of third grid line system. What we also have is the horizontal lines that are crossing across the whole grid system. We have the vertical lines, which are the two lines that separated to make a left, middle, and right section. Then we have the horizontal lines, which will give you an upper and lower field of view. What do we do with those lines? Well, what we want to do there is we want to look at where do all of these lines cross, Where does the vertical line meet the horizontal line? You can see that there's a cross section in that image. It gives you four cross sections, right, on the upper left side, on the upper right side, on the lower left side, on the lower right side, What do we do with that information? Well, that's usually where the sort of center piece of the image is, where the subject should be at most in focus. That means that if you place a subject which is looking toward the right, we want to place them on the left, right. But we also want the eyes of the subject to exactly hit that sort of cross point on the upper left side or on the bottom left side. But whichever it is, we want the eyes, the central focus of the frame to be in those cross sections. Now if you don't have a subject like a human being, but instead you have a bird, bird that's sort of flying toward the left side of the frame. Then we want to place the bird on the right side of the frame. And we want to place them on either the top or bottom of those right sided cross sections. Now of course, these are just rules that they teach you with like film school and photography school and so on. You may use this as freely as you want, but the advantage of knowing the sort of grid line system and knowing the rules behind it is that you can use it so that you can break it so that you know what's technically correct. And then you can use that to your advantage to create a certain effect. For instance, if you're already shooting for a corporate client, they would probably want everything to look correct. Now the client doesn't know what correct is, but they will know what does not feel right. So for a client, you probably want to compose correctly each and every time. So they kind of go, they don't see a problem with it, and they go, okay, that's great. But if you didn't know the rule of Thirds, and if you didn't know any kind of compositional rules, then you would just do it on the fly. And you can end up making a mistake where the client goes, this feels wrong, but they're not able to explain why, and you're not able to explain why, and therefore, the mistake cannot be altered or fixed. That's why knowing rules is a very good advantage because then you can use that in your own creative hobby, or other projects, or artistic projects, or films, or whatever you make to break those rules. Unless negotiated otherwise, just stick to the grid system, the rule of thirds, whenever you're shooting corporate shoots, for your own shoots, do whatever the hell you like. 14. Iphone Settings: You're now finally ready to set up your phone, your iphone, for photography. And I'm going to go ahead and show you how to do that. We're going to start off with the actual settings in the settings app, and then we're going to move on to the camera app and do some changes there as well. This is just to set up your phone for the most optimal settings, but you could make some changes. This is just the way that I use my phone. In this case, we're going to be using an iphone 12 Pro Max. And if you have any other kind of model, especially a later one, you probably have more settings that you could change, but you would have to look that up separately. For this purpose, I'm just going to use the very basic settings to set up the phone for photography. So let's hop right into it. First and foremost, you're going to go into your settings and scroll all the way down until you see camera. Then we click on camera. And for starters, this could be very overwhelming, but we're going to take it through step by step. You can see that the top ones up here are referring to video, so we're not going to get into that at all. Instead, we're going to go down to composition. And as you can see right here we have grid. I have activated grid right here. The visual sort of grid system that you can use to compose according to the rule of thirds and so on. I leave this on a lot of the times. Sometimes I even turn it off because I find it to be a bit distracting. And I can pretty much compose just by looking at an image. We're looking through the camera. But I would suggest that you keep this on, especially in the beginning when you would like to learn composition and try some things out. So leave this on. Moving on, we have this photo capture section where it says scene detection. Scene detection, as we can read here says automatically improve photos of various scenes using intelligent image recognition. Now, that sounds all good in Dandy, right? But the problem for me here is that when you turn on scene detection, the photos turn out to be over saturated. There's too much color. And I personally do not prefer to have this on at all, so I keep scene detection off at all times. And if I ever feel like adding some sort of vibrance or saturation, I will do that in the editing process. So I think this effect is a little too strong, so I'll keep it off. Then we have prioritize faster shooting. Now here it says intelligently adapt image quality when rapidly pressing the shutter. What does this mean? It means that the camera will adapt to whenever you are shooting something in fast succession. So when you're using the shutter button quickly, you know if you have an event or wedding or restaurant with your friends and you would like to catch some of those moments and you need to use the shutter multiple times. Prioritize faster shooting will help you do that and retain the quality. I don't typically go around just snapping 102030 photos all at once. I'd like to take my moment and really shoot and think before I shoot, but I do keep this on because I never know when I do need it. So I could end up in a situation where I actually do have to just take out my phone and quickly shoot in rapid succession. I don't typically do that, but it could happen. I keep prioritize faster shooting on at all times. For that purpose, lens correction. Lens correction is to correct lens distortion on the front and ultra wide cameras. I keep this on at all times. This is a no brainer, everybody should do it. What it basically does is when you shoot with a wide angle on the phone, you'll notice that your photos will become distorted on the edges. What lens correction does is that it helps correct that to a certain extent. I mean, obviously when you shoot with a wide angle, you're supposed to have distorted edges. But with this left off, that distortion will be too intense. I keep this on at all times. I've never changed a setting ever since owning this phone, and I would recommend that you do that too. Finally, we have smart HDR. Smart HDR intelligently blends the best parts of separate exposures into a single photo. What does this mean? Well, basically, this setting is the very reason why smartphone photos look so damn good. Okay. Because what it does is it will take the various exposures. It, it will blend all the various parts of an image and turn it into a single photo that just sort of enhances the quality of it. You know, you will have better lighting, you will have better enhancements in the way that the image looks and so on. So I think this is a no brainer as well. Everybody should have smart HDR on. Your photo will just look better. So leave this on at all times. Now here's a bonus tip. You can actually make your app open up for photography each and every time, you know, sometimes when you shoot video. And then you open up the camera app again, it will revert back to video, or it will revert back to whatever you used previously. But you can actually, by clicking here on the preserved settings button, you can actually make the settings such a way that you always open up with photography. It never goes back to video. So right here in camera mode, you can see that it says preserve the last mode such as video rather than automatically reset to photo. I keep this off at all times. Even though I do video a lot of the times I keep this off so that I always open with the photo app. The reason for this is because you can actually shoot video through the photo app. You don't have to actually change to video to do that. And what you do is essentially just this. You open the camera, you're opening up a photo right here. You just click on the photo and you drag it to the right. And all of a sudden, boom, you're recording video right now. It's just a click of a button and it will save you a lot of time in case you need to photograph something spontaneously. And you end up on the video app, then you have to drag the photo and then actually start clicking. But this way you always have photo. And if you choose to have video, you just do this and this and boom your recording video. This is why I leave that setting on off, sorry to not preserve the last mode, but to always reset to photo mode. 15. Camera App Settings: All right, so now that we have the IOS settings handled and finished, we're going to go into the actual camera app and make some changes there as well. What we do for that is just simply open up your camera app. The first thing we're going to look at is now you can access right up here on the top left hand corner, on and off. I keep flash off at all times. First of all because I think that flash looks really, really ugly. You know, when you shoot somebody, especially like straight in the face and you have this white glaring light just sort of washing out the high lights. It looks really bad, in my opinion. So I don't ever use flash. And you might think, well, what happens when it's dark outside or if I'm at a party somewhere and it's a very dark setting, I probably would need to use flash, right? You could argue that point. And certainly it's okay to use flash whenever you want to. But I think that night mode does it even better because it will preserve all the natural colors of the environment. Imagine you go to this like neon bar and you have all these beautiful LED lights in various colors. By using flash, you're just washing all of that out. I mean, you'll see the faces of the people, but I think it's just horrible, so I leave it off. I think night mode does the job perfectly well. And then we're moving on to live photo. Live photo. You can activate or deactivate by the top right hand corner right here, live off live on. I personally leave live On at all times. This is because when you shoot live photo, as you know, it saves a couple of moments or a couple of you know, frames before that moment is captured. Then we have various aspect ratios that you can shoot in. You click the little arrow up here and in the bottom corner or in the bottom middle part of the settings, you can see that it says four by three. You can choose four by three, you can choose square 16 by nine, and so on. Now this varies, but I typically use 16 by nine or square. Remember, 16 by nine doesn't make your image actually wider. It just zooms in to make everything fit into the frame. But what you can do is you choose 16 by nine and you flip your phone like this and you get shoot it like that or you flip it up and you cover the whole frame. This is good for social media. Then you can choose square squares, the native setting, four Instagram. If you can remember, Instagram had a moment where they tried nine by 16, the format nine by 16, the reverted back to square. And I don't know, just keep up with the news I guess. But Square is the native format for Instagram. If you want to photograph specifically for Instagram and not have to think about zooming in, cropping and so on, Later on just shoot one by one, which is called Square right here. Just remember to keep up with the news, you never know when the format's going to change. But for now, I think we're back to square. Just keep it at square and you won't have to think about zooming in or cropping or anything else in the post processing part before posting a photo. Just shoot at square. Then we have four by three. Honestly, I never use it. I don't know why it's there. I mean, you can use it if you like, but you would always have to make certain adjustments for pretty much any social media that you put it up on. Four by three, I rarely use, I either stick to 16 by nine or I do square if it's for Instagram. And that's it. Furthermore, we got the filter option right here, that's in the farthest right corner. You can see the three little circles. You click on that and you've got filters. So what you can do here is you can have predetermined presets. Sort of like in light room when you download or purchase a preset and you slap it on a photo. Ios has their own built in filters or presets as well, and you simply scroll through and you pick one. You can have vivid, vivid, warm, and you just move down the line. You got the cooler ones, the dramatic ones, and some black and white options as well. This means that when you take the photo, it will be saved instantly in that preset. I don't use filters at all. I don't like them. They're okay I guess. But I like to make the changes myself later on. But what you can do is you can simply photograph using the original without any settings on, without any presets on. And then after you've taken the photo, you can actually just go into edit and filters. And you can change the filter to something else. You can revert back to original or choose another one, considering I can make that choice anyway. Later on I just leave filters off at all times. Now, next to the photo section right here, we have portrait mode. As well as you know with portrait mode most probably is that it creates this blurry background. So you can just, you take an image like this, you put the focus on, and you notice that all of a sudden the background turns blurry. It's a cool effect for any kind of portrait photography, macro photography, whatever you're into, it's a cool effect. And from the portrait section, you can actually choose if you would like to have natural light. Or you can move on right here and you can get studio light, you can get contour light. And it's going to give you a little bit of, you know, different effects. And then you can have stage light as well. Stage light mono, high key light mono, whatever the style that you prefer, you can use that, but I typically just leave it a natural light. If there's any other changes I want to make, I'll do that in the retouching process, so I just keep it a natural light port in mode and boom, finally we're moving on to Panorama. Okay, so Panorama basically means that you collect information from a much, much wider range of the setting that you're in. And the iphone will compile that into a very ultra wide photograph. Now what you have to do for that is you have to keep it up here in like ported mode nine by 16. And you simply choose a starting point. And what you do here is you don't take a photo, but you record the entire setting. So you hold in the button and you slowly move from one corner to the other to capture all that information all throughout the room until you stop. You can go all the way if you like, but you can also stop earlier. Then as you can see, you receive this ultra, ultra wide final image that showcases the entire room or landscape. It will be really good for landscape photography. For instance, just remember that there can't be any kind of movement in the photo. Because for instance, if you don't hold still enough, then as you can see right here, a broken fragments along the image. And we want to avoid that. It might take you a couple of tries before you actually get it right. And especially if you have a person moving in front of the frame, they're going to get all cut up and look weird. So panoramic view, I don't really use unless it's for landscape architecture or inside an empty room, or in the case that somebody sitting completely still, somebody that I can ask you just sit completely still, don't move, and then I do a panoramic view of that person sitting in the room. That's also a cool effect that you can use. Those are pretty much the three main settings of photography in the camera app. 16. IOS Editing: To help with the editing process, I will be doing part of the exercise with you and the photo that I will be taking will be the photo that I'm going to be editing with commentary. We'll be editing using the built in features of the iphone. And I will explain all of the settings and what they do to help you in the process of editing your own photos. What I will be using as an object or subject today will be this lovely Lego made Bonsai tree that I built with my wife. And I will be placing it on this table, contrary to what you typically should do. Right? We have a strong light source coming from the window. Typically what you would want to do is have that light source illuminate the object. And you don't want to point the camera coming from this direction with a strong light source in the background. Because what that will do is it will create and turn this into a silhouette essentially. But for the sake of making things a little bit more difficult for myself, I will do that. I will have this strong back light, and I will instead illuminate this Lego piece by myself from the front. To do that, I have this loom cube that I'm going to be using for that purpose. And I have a second loom cube as well to see if I can make something happen with a bit of back lighting to make it more interesting. We'll see if it works, but that's the challenge right now, to photograph this and with a back light. And then to edit that and take you through the entire process of editing within IOS. Okay, I made a bit of a mistake. Okay, I tried using this loom cube to illuminate the bon side tree, but it wasn't strong enough. Now what do I mean by that? This is the approach that you got to have as well when you focus on making exposure in the shot. Even even in relation to the background, to the foreground. In this case, we have a very strong light source in the background and the loon cube just could not illuminate this enough so that I could evenly light the background to the foreground. I had to bring in the large studio lamp right here to achieve that. Of course, if I were to do this the simple way, which by all means you should, I would have simply placed this tree by the strong light source, place it by the window, and just snap the photo that way. But this is just because I wanted to make things more difficult for myself. Remember, you don't have to complicate things just for the sake of complicating, but I wanted to do it for educational purposes. Now that I got this light here, I noticed that the strength is so much better than the loop cube. And all of a sudden we have even light background versus foreground. I'll show you what I mean, I'll turn this on, it's very strong. We right from the get go have a event lighting, this is on 100% right now, Even light foreground versus background. I'll go ahead and snap this photo right now and show you the result. The choice I'm making in taking this photo is that I have elevated this bone side tree on this vase. The reason for that is when I take the photo, I want to avoid showing the table as much as possible as well as the vase. Instead, I want this tree to be elevated so that in the background we can pretty much only see the big windows and the natural light coming in. And we also have some real plants in the background that are going to complement the tree in the foreground. I'll go ahead and snap the photo right now and show you what I mean. All right, so the photo ended up like this. Now, why did I make the choices I made? As you can tell, I chose to take this photo from a lower angle. Why did I do that? Well, in my situation and the choice that I wanted to make, I wanted to shoot it from a lower angle so that I can show the dramatic effect of this large creation from nature. I wanted it to feel like that whenever somebody is looking at this photo, they feel like they are on the ground looking up at this gigantic tree. I could have shot it just a regular way, directly from the front, but it wouldn't have the same dramatic effect. This is just to tell you that this is an example of how every single choice that you make in photography matters, where you place the light. What kind of light? Is it soft? Is it harsh? From which angle? Are you shooting from a low angle or are you shooting from a high angle? What is the subject? What's in the background? Remember, I placed this right here because I knew that in the background we have a bunch of plants, we have the clouds, we have the sun coming in, we have nature. It's all part of the same theme as opposed to if I just had a white wall in the background, which would be completely boring, right? But now we have a working theme going on. With this photo. Great. So now that we have that out of the way, I'm going to go ahead and edit this photo. And I will do it with commentary and with a screen recording so I can take you through the entire process and I'll explain what each and every setting in the IOS app does. All right, we're finally here and we're ready to edit the photo that we've taken. You've taken a series of photos in a series of exercises. But for the sake of this, I've only taken one piece of photo. And that's the bon si tree, which we're going to add it now. Sit back, relax. Grab your cup of coffee. Make yourself comfortable, because remember, this is supposed to be a fun process. Okay, first things first, we're just going to take a look at the photo. See what we have to work with. Look at it. See the types of choices that were made during the photo. Comment a little bit on it, and then we're going to begin the editing process. As I've mentioned before, what we have here is essentially a photo of a bon side tree taken from a lower angle. And it has been exposed in such a way so that the highlights in the background are not overblown. Had I not used the large studio lamp, I would have to expose for the foreground, I would have to expose for the highlights. And the foreground would have been very, very dark. And there would be a lot more information there that has to be pulled out from the shadows and from the blacks. But by using the studio lamp, I've managed to somehow even it out. Now, at first glance, you might look at this photo and you kind of think, well, it's okay like it works right. But there's always some little bit of tweaking that can be done. And we're going to go ahead right here and press on Edit Start from the very beginning. What you usually want to start with is just to make sure that everything in the picture is evened out. I usually go into the crop tool first and foremost to see if there's a little bit of straightening that has to be done. I'm looking at the board down there that the bon side tree is standing on to make sure that everything is aligned. I can also see that the edge of this table stand that it's standing on goes all the way to the corner on this side, right? But it doesn't do so on the left side, right, we have a bit of a gap. I'm just going to do a slight zoom in, a slight movement to the left to make sure that it's perfectly centered. There we go. Now it looks pretty straight to me and the corners are pretty even. I'm going to press on, I'm going to finish the cropping, and I'm going to go into the adjust panel. Now in the adjust panel, this is where all the magic happens. As I mentioned before, most of these settings are universal regardless if you're using the IOS app or a professional photo retouching app. However, there are some settings in the IOS app that are specific to IOS. Or there might be some lesser known retouching apps that use similar terminology, but these settings do not exist and say light room. I'm going to go through that and I'm going to tell you which of these settings are just for IOS and which of these settings are universal, and what each and every setting does. As you can see, the very first setting that pops up is called auto. As you've already come to learn so far, we're not going to use auto, we're skipping that one. And we're going to go into the manual settings. Looking at this, we can see that it is slightly dark, the image, that's because I had to drag down the brightness as I was taking the photo to make sure that none of the highlights in the background are overblown. Because remember what I said, If you overblow your highlights, you're going to lose that information and there's nothing that you can do about it in post. You'd rather play on the safe side and underexpose when you take a photo. Or at least make sure that it's not overblown so that you can bring it back in post. And that's what we're going to do using the exposure slider. First and foremost, we're going to do a little bit of exposing here. Just going to slide it slightly to the right leg so to make sure that it's not so dark. I think around 21 should be fine with this. I'm happy for the moment being I'm going to move on. And you'll notice that every time I move on, by the end I'm probably going to go back and do a little bit of re tweaking in some of these settings. That's just part of the natural process. The way I like to go about doing this with each and every one of the settings is that you want to try and always go too far and then go back. Don't be afraid to use the sliders up and down, up and down until you land somewhere where it feels right Right now, I've landed on say, 21. But if I were to move around like this and see right here, it's darker and darker here, it's brighter and brighter and now it's too bright and I'm going. See, right now, I'm happy with 16. I'll stop at 16. And I think you should use the sliders for each and every setting in the same way. Exposure is okay. I'm fine with it like this. Let's bring it back to 16. Then we have Brilliance. Now brilliance is one of those settings that is just IOS specific. And like I said, maybe some other apps are using it as well. But it's not something that is industry standard. And it's not something you're going to find in a professional retouching app such as light room brilliance takes the dark and the whites or like the highlights and the shadows in combination as you pull the slider, it uses both the darks and whites at the same time to even out the image. I'm not quite sure how to explain it, so I'll show you using the slider. Let's pull the slider all the way to the right. Let's see what that does. As you can see at the very bottom of the dark areas, it's touching the shadows as well as the highlights. And I guess the mid toe, maybe not the mid tones. I'm not sure if I go all the way back, it does the same and the image becomes all contrasty. I typically don't really touch the brilliance, but sometimes it can help out just to like make those shadows pop a little bit. But I'd rather for most of the part, just use the shadow slider and do that individually. But I'll leave it at say, ten, Just a little bit of a pop. Then we move over to the highlights. The highlights are the brighter parts of the image. Remember what we said? We have the high lights, We have the mid tones. We have the shadows. Highlights are the brighter parts of the image. Midtones are neither bright or dark. Shadows are the darker parts. Then we also have blacks, which are the very crushed black, black color in the image that is like way beyond the shadows, it's even darker. Then we have the whites. And the whites are the opposite. They are like the high lights, but they are the upper most white parts of the image. We're going to first start working on the highlights we can see now as we pull it up, we can see that as we do that, only the sky and the white parts of the Bunside tree are being illuminated or touched by this setting. As we do so, as we start dragging the highlights up, we can see that we're actually losing the blue color in the highlights or in the sky rather in the highlights. We want to avoid that. Let's have a little bit of blue in there. Let's just move this around and because we already know that it's, the image is not destroyed in the highlights, then we can just focus on, well, how much blue do I want? We have the freedom to do that because we haven't overblown the highlights and are not trying to like panic solve the highlights. Being overblown, let's just focus on the blues. I'd rather bring down the highlights even more, maybe around say -15 We'll park it right there for the moment being. Moving on, then we have the shadows. Now the shadows are the parts that are down here. See those are the shadows, as well as the upper parts up here that are not illuminated by any natural light. If we drag the slider up, you'll see that those areas are being affected. But the highlights, see the blues outside are not changing at all. That's because this lighter only touches the highlights. But we want to bring this up just slightly. We don't want to go too far because it's all going to be overblown. But let's just bring it up slightly. Say let's park it at 30. We'll stop right there for the moment being. Then we have contrast. And with contrast, we're adding a harsher separation between highlights and shadows. When we drag the slider up, you'll see that happening. Everything is becoming intensified. You see we go all the way to the right, it's very intense. We go all the way to the left and there's such little contrast that everything just looks flat and boring. We don't want to go that way. We want to go that way. We might want to add just a little bit of contrast for this photo. Let's park it at nine. Then we got brightness, which is similar to exposure. I guess they're using brightness, brilliance, and exposure in the IOS app. They do slightly different things I suppose, but brightness can be used as well to expose the image just a little bit. I don't know the exact technical how to, with the difference between brightness and exposure, but we can use this to expose the image as well. We're going to park it around six. Then we get to black point, which is the darkest parts of the image that's more going to be touching these darker areas of the board. Now in this case, we could either make it blacker and by making it blacker, you'll notice that it's similar to the contrast feature, although this one is only touching the very darkest parts of the image. In this case, I don't want to really add any more contrast. Let's see what happens when I move back. We can see that it adds a bit of a hazy effect in the shadows or in the blacks. But maybe I'll go, let's see. Now I do want a little bit of contrast. I'll do a three. Let's do a three. That's fine. Saturation. We'll be grabbing all the colors and intensifying them. Everything that has color will be intensified. And I'll demonstrate this by going all the way to the right as you can see. By going all the way to the right, we're actually revealing the actual colors and temperature of light that's in here. We can see that the walls are yellow and this is because of the sunlight that was coming in. However, in the areas where the sunlight hasn't really touched, those areas remain blue. Like in the upper left hand corner right there. That's in terms of saturation. We'll leave saturation for now. Now we're going to talk about vibrancy instead, which is more of an ambiental, more of a subtle way to intensify the colors and it has a more even effect. Let's go all the way the right, and you see all the way up to 100, and it doesn't look nowhere near as intense as saturation. You have to approach this intelligently on this side. What is it that you want to use? Do you want the colors to really, really pop the new saturation? I typically don't like that. I would like to intensify things by using the vibrancy feature in order to de, intensify the saturation. And intensify only the vibrancy. What I typically do is I go down with the saturation. I remove all the way up. Usually I park it around 20 in saturation, but I'll take it down by ten, right about now. Then I go over the vibrancy and I increase vibrancy instead, then we have a much more even intensification of the colors as opposed to if I only use the saturation slider or only the vibrancy slider, then we're looking at the overall temperature of the shot. We used a studio lamp which uses a mimic temperature of daylight, 5,600 Kelvin. Now we have the freedom, and the iphone, of course, took an automatic white balance to match that. But now with the warmth feature, we can decide warmth is exactly what it says. You decide is it going to be warmer or is it going to be colder. This has an effect on the white balance. You can see all the white parts of the image are changing and hue as we're changing the warmth. Warmth in other apps is usually going to be called temperature, or it's going to be a subcategory of white balance. But here to simplify things, they just call it warmth and you go warmer or colder. Thinking about it as a picture of nature, we see the green plants in the background, we see the blue sky and we see all of that. We think about nature when we see this. I'm going to prefer to make this photo warmer as opposed to colder. We'll do it right about there. Now, if you were to go into a more complicated, advanced color grading, um, process, in all of this you would grade each parts differently. So you would grade the shadows differently in a different color. You would grade the highlights differently. You have much more control. You wouldn't just use the warm slider. In fact, a lot of the times, I just like to make sure that the white balance is correct. It's not too cold and not too warm, and I only use the color grading tools in light room. But now since we don't have that at our disposal, that's one of the limitations of IOS. I'm just going to go ahead and increase this a little bit so that we can even out. Because remember in the left hand corner right there, we have a lot of blues. On the right hand corner, we have a lot of yellows. By amping up that warmth, I just want to make sure that I'm evening out so it doesn't look awfully blue on one side and awfully yellow on the other. But this way we're at least covering parts of that now. The image is very warm, it's very cozy. Let's move on to the next part. Tint, tinting has two colorations. On the right side, we have a more magenta looking image, and all the way to the left we have a green, undercast, or undertone. Magenta is also used for white balancing because sometimes when you photograph using your phone or a camera, it's always, every camera manufacturer always has a slight more pull toward the greenish tints or the magenta tints. It depends on your model. I'm not quite sure what the iphone does, but in this case, I would like to use the tint more creatively because we're looking at this bone site tree and it is very pink. It's very purple. It has a lot of whites. And I'd rather go in the magenta direction with this as opposed to look at the green. The green is just going to look ugly. Instead, I'm just going to pull it up a little bit toward the magenta so that I can even out the colors even more. So it looks more complimentary to the rest of the colors in the image. I'll park it here at 35. Sharpness simply sharpens the image. It's a no brainer. If you want to sharpen it more, you just pull it to the right. I typically don't touch sharpness because I don't like images looking too digital and too really sharp. I leave this at zero, but you could go to the right and do whatever, but that's all it is. It's just sharpness. Definition is adding more of a pop to the image by making it more intense. Overall look at this, I typically don't use that as well. I think it looks horrible. Definition is the equivalence of if you've ever done photo editing, an Instagram, they call it structure in that app and in the light room, they call it clarity. It just intensifies the photo a little bit, but I think it's a little too much, too dramatic and it's not really meant for this type of photo. I suppose maybe I would do it if I was photographing some architecture and there's a broken down building and you really want to intensify the drama behind that building that has just fallen apart. Maybe I would use some definition or clarity or whatever on that one. But for the purpose of this, I'm not going to do that. Noise reduction. Noise reduction is there to try to fix up all the noise that's being introduced when you're shooting with higher ISO. Not always necessary, but sometimes you can use it even when you don't have noise. Because you can see if we go all the way, it really softens up the image, right? So like you can use it just to add a little bit of a soft touch and I will do that. I'll park it at 15 just to make it a bit softer. Vignetting is just adding darker or black or white corners to the shot, and that's to draw the attention of the viewer into the center. If I do it on this photo, you can see right here all the way to the right. It's creating this focus here. Look at the middle. And if you go all the way to the left, it does the opposite and you have white corners. Instead, I typically don't use vignetting, but let's see what it looks like, because we already have dark corners in the room. We can just intensify them a little bit. Maybe if I park it at around two, You don't want to go too far because then it's very obvious that you're using a mask. But yeah, around 23, I'll stop somewhere. Three is fine right now. I recommend to always take a break when you reach the end, you hold in your finger on the screen to see the before and after. Here's the before, there's the after, Here's the before, here's the after. We've come a long way. When we look at the photo before we see that it's very blue. It's very sort of, you know, flat. There's a lot of things like sticking out. And we look at it after we've managed to make it, we've added warmth. There's more, you know, colors that have been intensified and you can just go back and do little tweaks and changes until you're happy with the photo. When you are happy with the photo, you simply hit done and that's it. So I hope that this has been helpful and I hope that this will help you in the exercises that you're about to do. 17. What Kind Of Photographer Are You: There are a ton of photography types out there. Types of photography that you're probably interested in as a beginner and good. You should be, you should be able to experiment with anything you like until you find something that you're really, really into. Or maybe you've already made your mind up and you know exactly in the type of photography that you want to make. Either way, let's just explore some of the main types of photography that are out there, whether or not these types of photography are for you. First up, we've got street photography. Now, street photography is for the type of person who wants to capture life in real time. Who wants to find subjects spontaneously on the street and create a story around already existing conditions. It's like a documentaristicort approach to photography. It's somebody who enjoys spontaneous moments, who's willing to go outside of their comfort zone to go out there and risk pointing a camera at someone, be discovered, and maybe getting a comment or two about photographing random people on the street, like risking appearing in Creepy. Which most of the time you'll find that that's not the case. Like when you do street photography, nobody's going to comment, nobody's going to walk up to you. They might give you a look or two because they're kind of wondering like, what you're doing. But unless you're really up in the face of someone, like you walk up to them and like shoot directly in their face, they're not going to say anything, they're not going to notice anything, and you can just go wild. But it is for the type of person who really wants to document life and create a story around that. Next up, we have portrait photography. Portrait photography is for the person who wants to represent another human being and their sort of personality in one frame. It could either be in the form of a corporate shoot where you photograph somebody for Linton or for their CV or whatever. Or it could be a creative portrait shoot where you can have a little bit more control and you decide a little bit like what the subject will be wearing, what's the setting behind it? Is it going to be in a studio? Is it going to be out in nature? Is it is it a large production or is it just you and your hobby? It doesn't matter, but the point is you're representing a story through the face of one person. With product photography, we essentially have the same principle, except this time it's not a person in front of the frame, but it's a product, it's a brand. And a lot of the times when you do this, it would have to be commercial shoots. Unless you want to just fake out a portfolio, which could be a good idea if you're a beginner by just using products at home and you're photographing them. But a lot of the times you only need that in the beginning. But all other types of product photography chutes are going to be with a client. And that's when you know you have to sit down with the client and you have to really have them verbalize carefully exactly what it is they want out of the chute and what their branding is and who they are. So pretend is if the product itself has some kind of personality, you want the client to verbalize that personality of that brand to you. So that you can then decide which kind of setting you will create for this product. Which kind of lighting, which kind of grading, which everything will matter. But the point is that instead of speaking to a person directly, that you're going to photograph now the product between the product and you, you have the middleman, which is the client that has to verbally express exactly what they want out of that. They should say it in such a way. And you should ask them in such a way that when people look at that product photo, ask the client, what do you want the audience to feel when they look at that? Should they feel happy, sad, disgusted? Should they feel like they want to buy it right away? Should it look very, you know, satiating? Should it depends on the product or whatever. But what is the point of it? What do they want the audience to react? What kind of a click do they want? And what kind of call of action do they want based on that photo? Once you have all that information, then you go over with them with the actual planning of the shoot and how you're going to achieve that. Give them a few example photos. Talk about how you can achieve this, see if they agree, and just shoot. Now, landscape photography is probably the most, the biggest solo mission of them all. Because most of the time, you're not going to have any people in the shot. The entire point of landscape photography is for you to just find beautiful nature and then adapt yourself for the best lighting conditions possible to snap that photo. So the landscape photographer will be looking to make that landscape represented in the most aesthetically beautiful way. That landscape photographer will make very careful choices as to when the photo is taken throughout the day. Is it golden hour? Is it blue hour? Is it noon? When is it? And also a choice in season, because that same photo will look and feel very different based on if it's photographed during winter time as opposed to summertime as opposed to autumn, as opposed to spring. Now so far we've talked about all the technical how tos behind taking a pretty photo, I suppose. Or just being technically correct in your approach and the sentimentalities in your approach of photography. But taking a pretty photo is just the first step in the process. Let's take it up a notch. You know, instead of just taking a pretty photo, how do you add that little extra pop to it? How do you make your photo stand out? We're talking specifically about the next level, which is storytelling. 18. Adding A Pop: You've found your perfect subject, your perfect angle, your perfect location. All of your settings are in order. You snap a photo and it turns out great. Right. You have an aesthetically pleasing photo. Now what? Well, you can post it to Instagram, get a few likes and call it a day. But the whole point of this should be to take it to the next level. To always think, what can I do to improve this photo? What can I do right now to make this photo better? This is part of the proactive approach that I talked about. In being a photographer, you always want to approach it from, this can be better, how can it be better? And of course, you have to reach a certain limit where you have to decide, okay, this is fine, let's do it, we're good. But in terms of actually creating more substance to that photo, what can you do? This is when storytelling comes in and this is when you can add that little bit of a pop and provoke certain emotions in your audience. The way to do this, most typically is to add a person in the frame storytelling is not just through people, but it's also through objects. And you have to think in all of these terms. What do I add a person? Do I add a prop? Do I change up the scenery? Do I change up the angle? You have to keep this in mind at all times. But by adding a person in the frame, you're not only photographing, say, a beautiful piece of landscape, but you're creating a story out of that. Imagine if you're shooting, you're hiking for 5 hours. You reach the top of the mountain and you find that perfect landscape photo. You snap that photo, you see the beautiful landscape. It might even be like poster worthy or gallery worthy. And then you think, well, how do I make this better? You can have the exact same frame that you have, exact same settings angle, all of it. But imagine then, in your hiking clothes, showing up in front of the frame, sitting by the ledge with, you know, a thermos with coffee with, you know, a little bit of smoke coming out of it. And you're drinking coffee and you're looking out into infinity. All of a sudden, that simple landscape photo turned out to be something whales. Now all of a sudden it's relatable, right? And you look at that and you kind of go of all the sort of dreamers that are looking at this photo and are imagining that they would like to be on top of that same mountain. They want to do exactly what you're doing. They want to experience the, you know, difficult hurdle of climbing this mountain for like 5 hours and then sitting down for your first proper cup of coffee in that afternoon, that would be incredible, right? So adding people in the frame is probably the best way to do this. If not people, then it could be objects, and if not an entire person, then it could just be a hand or a gesture or something like the same thing. As if I were to take a photo right now of just a coffee cup on the table, I could just photograph that coffee cup and you just say, hey, you know, here I am drinking coffee. Or I could add in that frame a hand moving in and picking up the cup, and next to it I add another prop. It could be a book. And all of a sudden the setting is no longer, the focus is no longer on it is a coffee cup, but it's a storytelling you know, moment where I have, I'm drinking my coffee as I'm immersing myself in the world of this book that I'm reading. And it can be very, very, all of a sudden inspirational. So the focus is no longer just the cup. The main part of the story is not a cup containing coffee. You know, that's information. But then now it's a scene. It has a story, it has a purpose. And all of a sudden you get a snapshot of, you know, my life in that frame for that moment, right? And this is the same way that you should approach it as well if you want to take it to the next level and if you're interested in some kind of storytelling, then you can make your photos really go from good to absolutely. Great people love to hear stories. People love to have emotions evoked in them as they look at a picture. They want stories, they want feelings, they want emotion, they want inspiration. And you can make all of that happen just by being proactive and just by thinking one step ahead of what makes for a pretty photo. What makes for an aesthetically beautiful photo? What else can I do? How can I take it to the next level? Colors, people, objects, props, choice in season, choice In the daytime, is it nighttime? Is it daytime? Is it sunset? Sunrise, is it noon? All of the choices that you make will impact the audience looking at that photo, and it's going to impact them differently. In a sort of three way process. We have creating an aesthetically beautiful photo, adding that little pop, that little storytelling, and adding some kind of context behind it. And you can do that context either through text explaining what has happened, or you can do it within the frame and include a second person or more objects, or depending on the scenery. You could also point the camera elsewhere and show the sort of background And people will make the connection themselves. Because through your storytelling and through adding that little bit of pop, you want people to think. You want them to think by themselves. Because if they look at a photo and they come to a certain conclusion on their own, it's going to make the experience much more impactful. And it's going to make people or the audience kind of feel smart for figuring it out. And you will allow them to create their own interpretation of that photo. And this should be the final goal of creating a very, very good photo. 19. Will Ai Replace Us: The new, dreaded modern everlasting question. Will AI replace photographers? This is something that has been on the mind of every photographer ever since the introduction of Cha Chi PT and all the image generating U AI bots. Are we under threat? Well, there's different ways to look at it because there is a yes and there's a no to that question. It depends on what you want to do. Because if you're photographing, say product photography, right, And you just want to create an environment around that product, or you want to just create the product in the best way possible on a low budget. Then of course, you can use AI to generate an image or generate parts of an image that can be used as a tool to further your photography gain. And this is the way you should always approach new technology that's being introduced. Because think about it, every time there's a technological advancement in photography, Filmmaking, anything, there's always going to be an audience, or users, or consumers of that profession that are going to scream, we're under threat. This is the death of photography filmmaking. It was the same in filmmaking when, you know sound was introduced. It was the same in filmmaking when we went from black and white to color. It was the same when three D was introduced. There's always going to be people that are worried that this is the death of this art. And I think that's very overly dramatic and I think it's very exaggerated. Because if we're smart about it, we're going to use it, we're going to use it to our advantage. It doesn't mean that that AI has to replace everything that we do. But we can certainly use it for parts of the photo to enhance a photo and just use it to our advantage. But with that being said, like I mentioned, with the product photography, I've seen photographers generate entirely fake photos, Like they never even picked up the camera and they generated perfectly looking, amazing product photography. I've seen it with my own eyes, and I would never be able to tell that that's a fake photo. And there's probably certain companies that would want to hire people to do that. But then they would be hiring, you know, AI experts and Photoshop experts. But they wouldn't be hiring actual photographers. Another reason why this is not as much of a threat as we think it is is because, remember, AI is generating something, right? So if you are doing street photography or you're doing some sort of historic photography or any of that kind. When an AI generates an image, it's not generating the actual people. And you can tell the difference and you can feel the difference. For instance, if you go to a gallery and you've seen galleries with, you know, AI generated images that have like won awards or whatever. But if you have a situation like you photograph on the street and you see this sailor kissing a woman on the street, and you can definitely ask AI to do that and the AI will generate that exact same image. However, if that photo is in the context of, this is the end of World War Two, and this is a soldier or somebody working in the Navy coming home. And finally, you know, kissing a woman on the street as a celebration of the end of war. A celebration of love and all of that. Remember what we said? Context and storytelling matters. All of a sudden that image that is an authentic image of real people, of actual happenings, will have a much stronger effect than if AI generated that same image. And it's not even a real person context isn't really there. It's going to have a much, much weaker effect. It's going to feel off. Just like when we see AI generated images of faces, we always get that uncanny valley type of feeling behind it. But that's because that's not a real person and it's not a real photographer behind that person. That context isn't really there. It's all just computer generated, a big mash up of you know, wide search internet that the AI has looked for and like generated an image as a result of that layer upon layer. And we get that uncanny feeling precisely because it isn't real and we know it isn't real. We can feel that it isn't real. All of this is to say that photographers are needed. They will always be needed because AI could never replace that human experience and that human creator behind that image. Our minds are needed and our intentions behind a photo are needed. And therefore, we will always be able to provide something that AI cannot provide, which is the human experience behind that photo. Yes, AI will continue to grow. It's probably going to become much more advanced and create even more realistic photos. But in the end, don't fight it. Don't fear it. Don't fight it. It's going to happen. Whether or not you're struggling against it, resisting it, it's always going to be there. This is the beginning of a new era. So instead of that, adapt your photography to it, if you like or don't. But the point is, don't fight it. 20. Developing Your Own Style: I remember in the very early days of my photography and filmmaking career, how I was able to spot exactly which photographer filmmaker made, which work of art. How could I do that? And also how could they do it? How is it possible that you can watch a Wes Anderson film and know that it's a Wes Anderson film without seeing the credits, without seeing anything. This is what we call a signature style that a lot of photographers and filmmakers alike are striving toward. Well, this is something that you could do as well. However, it is a long journey and it does take quite a lot of experience and a lot of time. Developing a style isn't easy. It requires a lot of patience. And this is because that distinct style always comes from a lot of experience. You have to sort of evolve it slowly over time until you reach something that everybody can kind of look at and go, oh, this is your work, something very distinct. In the beginning, you will always find yourself in a situation where you find other styles and you just directly copy them because you like what you see. Don't get me wrong, that isn't bad. In fact, you should do that. You should explore styles. But we're going to go through some of the steps, including that one, how you can begin the journey of developing your own style as a photographer. The very first step is precisely that, finding inspiration in other people's styles. Scroll down Instagram, go to gallery viewings, you look at other images that other people have made, other artists have made, and write them down. Write down their names, and more importantly, write down exactly how you think they achieve that style. If you were to define the style that you're looking at, how would you define it in a paragraph? How would you write about it? What exactly were the choices made by the photographer? And this doesn't necessarily mean that you have to know all the settings of the camera, but you can guess your way through it. Because if you see a photo with a very blurry background, you probably assume that it's a very low aperture lens. It's probably a lens with at least 1.81 0.4 maybe as low as 1.2 But you will know that just by looking at the photo and because you have the technical understanding now of all the camera settings. So the first thing you want to look at is the camera settings. You want to look at the sort of consistency and what kind of subjects does this photographer pick for his or her photos? What kind of subject is it out on the street? Is it street photography? Is it the lower class? Is it the upper class? What kind of subject and then also what kind of colors are chosen in this photo? Is it very earthy, greeny colors that complement each other? Is it cold tones? Warm tones. Pay attention to that photo and write down exactly what you see. Because I believe that the first step in finding your own style is understanding the style of others and being able to verbalize it. The next step in developing your own style is to continuously shoot. Now that you have experience in viewing photos and experience in understanding and analyzing photos, now it's time for you to go out and just consistently shoot. And you can do this by either shooting your own photos or and I encourage this, copy the styles of others. Take their footsteps and sort of see how they achieved the look that they achieved. And make sure that you can do the same. This is highly inspirational because then you will sort of follow the path of that photographer step by step and see how they achieved their look. Which will eventually help you taking those steps, same steps or similar steps in achieving your own style. But you have to continuously shoot, because for every shoot, you're going to slightly learn something new, something better. Which leads us into step number three, which is to do better every time. Every single time you're on a photo shoot, you come home. You import the photos. You edit the photos and you look at them. Do what we talked about in all the previous chapters. Be proactive in it and think, how could I have made this photo better? Maybe if I did it from a different angle. Maybe if I use different lighting conditions. Maybe if I took the extra step and told the person to dress differently, maybe the season is off. Maybe I should have color graded it differently. Maybe I should have, you know, whatever all these choices matter. And once you write down and give yourself feedback or ask others to give you feedback, because you always want a certain amount of audience to look at your photos and tell you honest feedback. And once you do that and you write down all that feedback, then the next time you go out, apply that feedback. And then do the same. And do the same, and do the same. This is a very steep learning curve and you will never end up in a situation where you think I'm satisfied. Now what I've learned is what I've learned. I don't have to learn anything else. You're never going to end up in that situation. Okay? You have to already now mentally accept that you will always be chasing the better. And that's a good thing, and that's something you should strive towards. You shouldn't let your ego get in the way, and you should never just be satisfied. There's always something to be improved. And now as you continue shooting and shooting, you're going to end up in a situation a few years from now, when you've taken thousands upon thousands of photos. Something in your photos that sort of either consciously or unconsciously becomes a sort of consecutive pattern. Now, this pattern, what we call style, this is something that will start evolving. It's going to be like the seed of your style. And when you notice that pattern, take advantage of it. Are you going in the direction that you want to go? Is this really the style that you like? Because like I said, it could be a conscious choice. But a lot of times it's going to be a lot of unconscious choices that you've made throughout all these photoshoots that sort of define you a little bit as a photographer. Now the question is just, do you like that? Do you dislike that? What do you want to change? And you can add some more conscious decisions on improvements for your photos in the future. With that, you finally end up in a situation where just with a little bit of sprinkles of changes that you make, you have eventually reached a point where you have developed your own style. And you can test this out by simply looking at the current photos that you're making. And looking back five years in time. And seeing a world difference. Not just in the improvement of the technical how tos and how to take photos. We'll notice an improvement in getting closer to the type of style that you're drawn to. And then finally, you've reached that point where you're comfortable in your style, you like it, you've evolved and now you just have to continue on that journey and keep adding those little sprinkles of inspiration, keep changing it up. You might even end up in a situation where you want to change the style entirely and start from scratch. Although this time you won't be starting from scratch because you will have so much experience and so much time has passed that you can just go ahead and create something new. But you will always have those little sprinkles of changes that you're going to be making to evolve that style further. 21. Analyzing Good Photos: Art is supposed to make you feel something, right. You go to a gallery, or you even scroll down your Instagram feed and you find that one photo that makes you stop scrolling and you take a good look at it and you go, this is good, and what does it mean for a photo to be good? But the first thing you know here is that being good and you liking it are two separate things. Because obviously you can look at a photo that's bad, but maybe it's taken in such a way that you feel something and at the same time you can also have a photo that's very, very good. But maybe you don't even understand it, or you look at it and you feel nothing. So what you feel versus what is a good photo are two separate things that's important to know. For instance, we have Annie Libovitz and her photo of Meryl Streep. Annie Libovitz is very known for photographing celebrities in particular. And she's taken some very good historic, amazing photos of celebrities in the past, but we're just going to take one of them as an example and take a look at it. What we have here is we have Meryl Streep. And the first step in analyzing what a good photo is, is just by describing what we see. What we see or a greenish background. What we see is that her hair is being blown by some machine in front of her. What we see is she has some painted mask on her and she's pulling on her skin. Those are the things that we can see visually in this portrait. Step number two in identifying a good photo is then talking about the relevancy of all these things. Let's talk about the visuals first. Why the green background? Well, we got a green background which complements her hair. You know, we have these earthy tones. This is drawn more toward the orange tinted sort of colors together with that earthy green background, which gives the slight grounded energy, kind of an earthy feeling to the photo. It's very visually pleasing. The colors are complimentary. It works. Right Then we got the subject, Meryl Streep. Who is Meryl Streep? Well, she's an actress. We got somebody working in show business. We got somebody, you know, performing and pretending to be somebody else as a line of work. That is what she does. She pretends to be somebody else in front of a camera. And with that, we got the final stage of it, which is the painted mask and the pulling on the skin. How is that relevant to everything we've talked about so far? Metal street being an actor, these earthy tones, all of that stuff. Well, we can look at the photo and we kind of go, well, her job is to pretend, therefore she has some sort of mask covering her real face. Her real face is behind this white mask, this sort of theatrical mime, sort of kind of mask going on here. I'm not sure if it actually is a Mi mask, but that's what it reminds me of, it looks like a mime mask. Why is she pulling on her skin? Well, she's pulling on her skin because we could argue this is the way that we showcase her as in her line of business. She's pulling on her skin because behind all of that is the real Meryl Streep. What we see now is just the fabrication. We see her as an actor, not as Meryl Streep, the person With that being said, we revert back to the earthy colors. You know, we have this actor who's hiding behind a mask, but at the same time we got the earthy colors, which can suggest to us that she's a very humble, grounded person. On the inside, what we see is not what we get right. What we see is her as an actress, but we are being told that she is a very down to Earth type of person thanks to the choices in color as well. So this photo is not just a portrait. This photo is very good because it's showing all the aspects of Meryl Streep. It's showing her personality, making a comment on her personality. It's showing her line of work and the fact that she's pulling on her own skin, which shows her to be a very hard dedicated worker, one of the greatest actresses, contemporary actresses that we have today. All of this is being told throughout this simple photo. From the choices in color to the mask, to the action that she was given by Anne Annie Liebowitz by pulling on her own skin. All of that, that entire story exists with this one frame photo. Now, you could look at this and you can totally hate it, right? You can say, I do not like this photo, but this is why we had to separate what makes a good photo and what is it that you personally feel. Because you could look at it and you kind of go, well, I don't like it. You know, I prefer the other one, the one of Dicaprio or whatever. But we can still analyze the photo for what it is, and we can argue the point for why this is a good photo and why it is one of the most popular photos taken by Annie Liebowitz throughout her entire career. This one, you know? So this is the way that you analyze photos. And by analyzing photos, that's the way that you up your own photography game because you get a lot of inspiration from this. Imagine you're a portrait photographer and you look at this and you kind of go, this was amazing, you know, She told her, let's put some, you know, miming make up on, let's have you pull on your skin, let's if she had an idea in mind as she was doing this and it's an amazing story, right? So that was just a couple of ways that you can analyze photos. There are no rules to it. It's just, you know, you start from what you see, then you begin with the interpretation of it, and then you revert back to what you see and how that relates to the kind of message you're noticing in that photo. That's just one way to analyze a photo. It's a very good trick. Like you can just go to a gallery and do the same, just spend a little extra time. And you'll notice in galleries, a lot of the times people just sort of they look at a photo, they're like, that's pretty and they move on. You can't do that, especially not if you want photography to be your business or be your life, or be your, you know, creative self. You have to be able to analyze it far deeper than that. So spend a good five, 10 minutes per photo in a gallery. And I suggest you go to galleries pretty often and see what, you know, really good photographers can achieve. And then you'll eventually go to galleries and you'll see photos that you absolutely hate. But then do the same. You see photos that you hate. And talk about why you dislike them. What is it about this photo that makes it to me? Not really click or you could argue the point, this is a great photo. I just hate it. But it's important to know why you feel, what you feel, because that's going to help you develop your own style later on. 22. You're Ready To Shoot: You've come a long way, okay? You have learned all you have to learn about ISO, aperture, shutter speed. You've learned lighting. You've learned composition and framing. You've learned how to adapt to your environment. How to adapt to what you have in front of you to make the best of the situation. And on top of that, you've learned some very basic editing as well, so you can really tweak that photo to your liking. And most importantly, you've learned storytelling and the very beginning stages of finding your own style. Now what? Well, now you're ready to shoot. And the best part about all of this is that you can achieve it with the very device in your pocket. Just remember that. It's okay to steal from others. It's okay to be inspired. It's okay to copy them. It's okay to recreate. Other styles go wild. The world is your oyster. And over time as you do this, as you keep taking photos, as you keep evolving and learning new things and taking a lot of photos, you will start noticing a pattern in the types of photos that you take. And that pattern is what we call style. And as you go on your journey, I strongly recommend keep in touch with the very same people from the Facebook group. Just because you've finished this course doesn't mean you cannot have access or use the Facebook group. You may still do so. Take some photos in general that are beyond this course. Upload them, get some feedback. We have a wonderful community of photographers, beginner, photographers, intermediate photographers. They can't wait to give feedback. To share their own photos, to connect with you, to bond with you. That's the aim of this Facebook group. For us to create a community together so you can keep evolving in your photography journey. And if you enjoy this course, do feel free to sign up for my newsletter through my website. On that newsletter that I will be sending out maximum once a month. I will not be spamming you in any way. I will be sharing some small things along the way that I've learned some new tech that's coming out, some new photography techniques. But most importantly, I will be updating you on future courses that I will be releasing. And until then, best of luck on your creative journey. 23. Accessories: All right, I know I said you don't need any gear for this. This is just a raw photography course by using your iphone. But let's be honest, we all like a few gadgets, a few extra accessories, and so on. So what I'm going to be doing now is I'm going to do a little, a very short added bonus chapter to this course where I'll be talking about some of the gear that you can buy to enhance your iphone photography game. Now first of all, I don't even have most of this stuff at all. This is just things that I found online that I think can be a good addition to your iphone. All of these items are super cheap for the most part, and they could really, really enhance the type of photos that you take with your iphone, especially when you're using things like shutter speed and you have to stand still or the setting outside is too bright, whatever. This will just help you out on that journey. So in no particular order, here's some cool gadgets that I found online. First of all, we got this wonderful lens kit that you can buy for your iphone, mind you, I don't even have this, but you know, it seems cool and I might actually buy it. So you can buy a lens kit where you can photograph with a macro lens on top of your regular lens on the phone. I think this might be good for you. Imagine if you're photographing something really small, like an insect or something. And you can't approach properly with the camera because it's going to fail in focusing or like whatever. I think this macro lens is probably helpful for that if you're into any kind of macro photography. The second one is a form of stabilizer or tripod. Now, stabilizers for the most part is for video. In case you want to shoot video and you want really smooth movements, I think you just hook on a magnet here, put it on the stabilizer, and it sort of automatically does the job for you. And you can walk around and shoot like in very smooth fashion and it's very useful. I actually do have that one. I've used it a few times and then forgot about it completely. It's somewhere in my closet, but I should probably pick that up again. Or in the case of a tripod, which is for photography, this would be very useful in case you're out there shooting with slow shutter speed, night mode, or whatever, long exposure. Then you would definitely need to hook your iphone onto that to really, really keep still. Because remember, when you're shooting with a slow shutter, you have to stay very still, otherwise the entire image will turn blurry. A tripod in general, I actually do strongly recommend that. Number three, finally we have a ring light that you can hook onto the camera and you can use, I think in either direction, you either turn it toward yourself or as a filler light of what's in front of you. That's in case you just you're out somewhere, you don't have access to proper lighting. You can't just bring that with you everywhere. Then you have the small ring light that you just have in your pocket. You hook it on and you get softer sort of continuous light. That's way better in my opinion than the built in flash or when you turn it your way and somebody calls you on face time, you will be properly lit up. And it will be a more, I guess, pleasant experience for the person that you're talking to. These are not like must haves or anything, but they're just a way to compliment your iphone and get some, you know, cool gadgets along the way to take some extra pretty photos. 24. Third Party Software: So you finally feel comfortable with all of the settings on the iphone and the standard camera app, but you want to take it a notch further. You want to be able to control specifically ISO shutter speed to more lengths than just the night mode on the camera. You want to control white balance. You want to use a more advanced grid system. That's when third party software apps come in. So far, the most popular app that has been out in the market is called Filmic Pro. And I used to use Film Pro. It has all the little intricate details in all the settings that you could possibly want in the iphone so that you can control it. Similarly to a camera, however, Fil Mcpro has gone over to a paid subscription. I stopped using it. However, you could use the Lightroom mobile app, and you can use the integrated camera in that app to achieve similar results. I'll show you all the things that the Lightroom mobile app can do. Now, all you do when you open up the app is you click on the camera icon right there in the bottom left corner. You click on Professional. Now you will have a lot of settings to your advantage. Right here. As you can see, you can control the shutter speed individually, and as you can see, it gives you all the effects of it. The image turns darker or brighter. You can control the ISO right here, increase it, decrease it, and it's going to work the same way as in a camera. Then you have the white balance and you can either choose auto white balance or you can adapt it to daylight, tungsten cloud. Or you can pick here it says fill view with a neutral surface. This is where you can bring out your white piece of paper, for instance, this one. You can simply photograph that and set the white balance according to that white piece of paper, which is great. This means you have full control over your white balance, your ISO, your serio speed, and as well as that, you can choose a white angle or a telephoto also within the sap you have in the top right hand corner. When you click on these three dots, you see you can change the aspect ratio, 169-3 by 24 by three, or one by one. Then you also have a timer that you can set. And then you also have grid levels here. You can choose the various types of grids that are available to you. You can choose this one, You can choose the standard rule of thirds, or you can choose this one. There's plenty of ways for you to set up a grid system. And in the furthest right hand corner right here, you can activate this little thing that shows up, which tells you if the shot is balance, if it's straight horizontally. So you can just make sure that your image is straight as you take it. And it gives off a little bit of a feedback vibration. So you know that you can make sure that the shot is correct as well as that the line in the very middle is going to shine in a yellow color. For you to know that the image is completely even next to the grid system, we have highlight clipping. And when you click on that, you can see hide highlight clipping or show highlight clipping. Which essentially means because we are exposing for the highlights. It's good to know that if in your shot, if you have highlights that are overblown destroyed, then you can make sure that you see that. That's the case right here. As you can tell, there's a ton of zebra on it. Zebra is the thing that's going to tell you whether or not something is overexposed. So that's just some of the ways that you can use Litro Mobile's app to have full control over all the settings if you want to take it a step further from the built camera app on the iphone, and that's it. With that said, you're ready to go on your journey and I wish you good luck.