📷 My SHUTTER SPEED & SHARP FOCUS Technique for LONG EXPOSURES || Landscape Photography Tips

in today's video I'll be hiking 43 Mi on the wild Coast to Washington State and shooting one of my favorite sunsets of the year you learn my favorite shutter speed and focus stack and techniques for ocean photography I'll also cover the best f-stop shutter speed exposure and ISO settings for landscape photography and long exposures let's dive in so we are on day three of a 5-day backpacking trip out on the coast of Washington state and it is absolutely awesome weather right now see we're set up in one of my all-time favorite camps give you guys a quick tour around camp and then I'm going to show you this composition that I'm working on for Sunset hopefully we'll get some good light looks like the clouds are starting to form back there going to be working on some different shutter speed techniques today and some focus stacking so cover that here in a minute but I love this Camp huge sea stack right there sea stacks all on the coast Creek running right down here which I just got a 2-minute cold Plunge in and woke me right back up so I'm going to show you guys the setup for this shot before the sun gets down too low and then when the light's good I'm going to keep shooting it then I'll review all the images so little bit more complex shot here see the composition there and I'll fully review the composition here as well once I capture but what I really like about this is that I have a few different water movements as part of the scene so I have this River that's coming out from right here mandering down into the foreground so the water's moving this way and then it leads down into where the waves are crashing the waves are crashing in this way so what I'm going to do is I'm going to use a longer shutter speed for this foreground water moving down so it be like silky smooth leading back into the scene and then I'll try a lot of different shutter speeds back there in the water so as the sun drops right here it should side light all this and you can see this really nice Cloud starting to form here kind of leading back down in that way but as the waves crash I'm going to try a few different shutter speeds there I'll try some short ones and some long ones and then I'm going to also need to re Focus back there because to get this nice and sharp since it's such a compressed view I'll have to focus where the red box is right now and then to get all those C Stacks in the wave shark I'll have to focus back in the middle of the scene so first shot now that I've broken it down I'm going to capture right here so I'll just take my level off there so you can see and I'll just put the center button right here I just control it right here and I'll put that single point spot Focus right down there cuz that's going to be the first shot back button focus on that and then I just use this hand just to dial the focus ring back and forth just a little bit while I watch the screen just to make sure it's really sharp IO 64 I'm going to go with F16 at first let's take a look at the histogram I'm actually going to expose this a little bit brighter and I also have my circular polar ier on I've dialed that in I'm just turning it until the color looks the best on the screen no right or wrong direction just dial your circular polarizer counterclockwise until it looks good so let's try this with a 1.6 second shutter speed put my timer on here 5 seconds and then I'll fire one off so let's take a quick look at how I set up the composition for this specific shot and if you guys want my full composition guide it includes my step-by-step framework there's a PDF link down below this video you can take out shooting with you it's absolutely free so go ahead and check it out but for composition the number one thing that you want to always have happen is you want the eyes to constantly move and dart around the photo if the eyes stop moving the viewer gets bored and they leave and move to the next photo so to do this I use something called The interestingness Grid so this is something I made up you just visualize vertical and horizontal thirds when you're out shooting I'm just going to draw these quickly but you can just visualize them on the back of your camera screen you don't actually need to have them and you want to fill each of these with something new and interesting the light should be changing the color should be changing and the movement should be changing it doesn't have to be mind-blowingly interesting but it needs to be different than the box next to it so you can see that this box is not the same as this box is not the same as this box the same goes up here the same goes up here and by having this grid and having something new and interesting in every box of this grid the eyes are going to constantly move around the photo and stay interested the next thing I use is called leading lines leading lines are anything that's going to grab the eye and move it to different parts of the photo this also helps the image to stay interesting so it can be any line but one thing to keep in mind is that areas that are bright or saturated are going to grab your eyes and draw them in areas that are dark or desaturated won't grab the eyes as much so I usually like to use leading lines that are bright and saturated so you can see if the eyes start down on this side of the photo they're going to grab here and follow this bright saturated line to here they're going to see this wave then they're going to follow over here to this bright and saturated area follow this line back to this C stack and then they're going to move up and out the photo into the sky so this just moves the eyes constantly across the photo if the eyes were to start here instead they would just follow this line right into here and they would be set as well so any way you can set up leading lines to move the eyes through the photo with color and light is great I also use different shutter speeds in this image and I blended them together with multiple exposures which I'll cover the editing for later in this video the other thing to look out for here is balance so anytime you're setting up a photo you don't want everything to be saturated and bright and you don't want everything to be desaturated or dark by having balance between light saturated areas dark desaturated areas all throughout the photo will keep the eyes moving constantly around the other thing you want to have is balance in the scene so this whole area right here is fairly interesting and it's balancing off an area of the same size over here so you have balance between these two on the top of the scene in the bottom of the scene you have balance between sharp areas such as right here and then you have more diffuse areas that aren't as sharp and that's why I like to use different shutter speeds in this and these are also balancing across anything that's sharp is going to grab your eyes anything that is not as sharp or diffuse is going to be an offset to that so you always want your eyes to be looking at variations of very bright and saturated things to dark and Des things as well as very diffus things to very sharp things this is what's going to provide depth and interestingness to the overall photo so let's get into the shooting technique and then I'll show you guys how I piece this together in photo editing just to get an idea it's nice to do this before the sun sets cuz I'd like to shoot this when the sun's right on the horizon cuz I think it's going to light all these clouds up back there so first one see what that water looks like I'm going to try a little little bit shorter shutter speed so I'll just drop the f- stop to f11 gives me 1 over 1/3 see what that one looks like quick review here zoom in that gives a little bit more detail in the water compared to the other one what I always like to do is I like to take a few of these so I'll take one that's a longer shutter speed and then I'll work my way back shorter and shorter and then you can compare and contrast when you get home which ones you like the most and you can just blend that into the final image nice to have all the different options there so let's take one even shorter let's do I'm going to leave it at f11 cuz I want to keep that depth of field so I'm just going to go up ISO and go 320 here that'll give me 1/5 of a second so that'll give even more detail down there in the foreground and this is a hard skill set to get used to piecing the image together but something that makes it a lot easier is when you're looking at a com position on the back of your camera screen piece together what you're actually going to do and when you're looking at it think to yourself which parts of the image are going to quickly change that I won't be able to recapture so you can already see the lights changing down here in the foreground but I know the light's going to stay up in the sky in the background and the waves for longer so that's why I decided to work on this foreground part first cuz I know that light's going to change all right so let's see what that looks like I like that detailed one of that very last exposure I just took but now I have all of them so I just want to check the focus to make sure it's sharp enough in all parts and I also want to check where that focal point drops off I can see it starts to drop off right in there so right back there so I know the focus drops off there that means I want to split the rest of the scene in the back with my focus box so to capture those I'm just going to move the focus box back towards where the waves are and then I'll refocus using my back button focus and then using my finger while watching the back of the screen I'm just dialing that Focus ring until it's sharp there all right so I'm going to drop my ISO back to base ISO here and remember I'm no longer worried about this bottom I already captured that in the previous so for this one I want to work on the wave action and in the sky maybe I can get all in one maybe I won't so we'll see what happens but first of all a second is probably a bit too long so I'm going to go up in ISO here cuz I want to capture these waves as they're crashing and I'm just going to wait for one to roll in like it is right there and as it does I'll hit the shutter button a little ahead of time cuz I got a 5-second timer on there all right so let's see what these look like even that shutter speed could go a little bit shorter or a little bit faster whatever you want to say let's go up to ISO 400 this camera handles high ISO up to 800 really well and sometimes it's just the trade-off right if I don't push the iso up I have to drop the f- stop instead or drop the exposure if I drop the f- stop I lose my depth of field if I drop the exposure that's all right I'd be a little bit under exposed so I could try that as well but shooting at ISO 400 I'm not worried about that cuz I know I'm not going to get much noise but rather than pushing higher than that if I didn't like that should I start to drop the exposure so let's take a look I like that wave action especially right in there it looks really cool let's try a little bit faster shutter here so instead of going up in ISO I'm going to drop by I stop and exposure and fire that off I'm just waiting for these waves to roll I know I have 5 second timer you could even drop it down to 2 seconds if it makes it easier so we could just take this go two second timer since we're trying to time these waves so I'm waiting for these to roll in fire another one there looks like those clouds are really starting to look nice the first thing you're going to want to do is pull up your favorite file of all these images so I just look through all the images this is an adobe camera roll you could use Lightroom too if you wanted I prefer camera roll because it meshes a lot better with Photoshop but it's up to you so I picked the first image that I like right here and I'm looking for an image that I like 80 to 90% of all the color and light in the image so this is going to be my base image and I'll blend in the rest of the adjustments to this main image so I really like this wave crashing I like the water movement here and you can see that all this lights really starting to pour on right here this was shot at f11 and a half of a second and I actually really liked how the half a second shutter speed turned out down here in the water and for this one I focused right in this area right here so you can see it's super sharp here but when I check the back of the shot too I can see that depth of field covered just fine all the way back into the image you can see it starts to drop off some down here in the foreground but these rocks are still acceptably sharp to me so I actually think this is sharp enough even if the foreground is like that because I don't need Super sharp on a long exposure long exposures are never super sharp but I could still blend in one of these other examples so I always edit this main one that I'm going to use first and then once I edit it I can select the others so I select this main photo and I'm going to sync the others to it so I'll hold down shift and click here and then I'll hold down command on a Mac or control on a PC and select these as well and then if I right click over here I can go to sync settings and I'll go to okay and I just leave this exactly as it is set up right here these are settings I don't actually use when editing and you can see this edits all of them to match now due to the light changing while I was shooting here's the base image you can see that the color balance of some of these other images is not the same so if I wanted to use the other ones I could just slightly adjust the color balance so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to look through the other images and see if there are any parts of them that I would like to blend into this base image so this is the base let's start at the top this one I don't actually see anything that I would like to blend in so all I do is hit delete this one the water looks nice if I look back at this main image I actually like the more detailed water you can see this was a half a second for this main image I'm going to use and this one was 6 seconds down here in the water but I actually like the half a second a little bit more because it provides some more detail so I'm going to delete that one I don't need that one this one I like where the water's kicking up back back in here and I also like the long exposure what it does to all the water over here it gives me all these different lines and separation I think that looks really nice so I'm going to leave this one and this area of the base image you can see it's a shorter shutter speed so you have a lot more detail in the water this one I just like that effect more so I'll keep that in the back of my mind this image I'm just scanning through it I just started the bottom and just scan my way through and say is there anything that I like more compared to this image here I don't think so so I'll delete that one I'm going down to the next one this was the one that I focused way down on the foreground you can see the water's a little bit sharper on this one and this is 1.3 seconds so if I look at the base I actually like that the water's sharper on this one it pulls out a lot more of that fine color detail you can see the separation and the colors here very well compared to this it's getting a little soft you can't see that color separation so I'm going to leave this one for the foreground and this one I'm just looking at this wave over here on the base image and then this wave I actually like the one in the base image more and the reason being is because this is getting hit with more yellowish light from up here and I think it's kind of distracting it looks cool by itself but I think the rest of it distracting so I always just pop back and forth between these I actually like what this one does back in here let's see if I can balance the color to get close to my other one looks pretty good I'm going to get a little bit more magenta here and darken it and it would only be for this area in here if I did use it so if I'm on the fence I'm just going to match the colors and you can see how it moved a little bit slightly as well it's not a big deal I can line those up if I use it so I'm always just popping back and forth that main one's going to be for here the base image is going to be everything except the foreground that one's going to be be for the foreground and I don't think I'm going to use this last one so I'm going to delete it so now I have three images here and this is why I really like using camera raw instead of Lightroom I use Lightroom to organize my photos but in camera raw I can go down here to this Bottom bar and I can turn on open and Photoshop as smart object and it will actually open these raw files right into Photoshop and they will stay in raw file format so what I can do is I can select this one hold down command on a Mac or control on a PC select this one and select that one and I can send them into Photoshop now what I want to do before I send these into Photoshop as layers is I want to make sure that the color is close for all these so these are very close this one is a little bit more orange and yellow so I'm going to bring some magenta into it and blue and then I'm just trying to match the exposures as well so I think it needs to be slightly brighter and remember this is only for the foreground so that's what I'm watching here I'm going to bring this back a little bit yellow so like that all right cool now I can select them all and I will hit open objects and this is just going to open up in Photoshop now that you can see all of these it's opened up it's three different tabs in Photoshop and I'm just going to place them on top of each other so first I'll find the base image that I'm using which is this one and I'll label this over here in the layers base and then I'll find the next one which was for the long exposure over here so I can just click over here on the layer and I can go up to edit and copy then I'll go back to my base and I'll go to edit and paste and that'll just paste that on top of there I'll label this one long exposure and then the same for this one over here this was for the foreground only so I'll click over here to make sure the layer's selected go to copy then I'll go back didn't mean to do that I'll go back to my base image which was right here put that back where it started and then I'll go to edit and paste and I'll call this FG for foreground so I always start with my base on the bottom and then I layer these front to back off the base so I'll put FG right there this is not really going to matter which way you layer them it's all personal preference I just do it this way every time so I know which direction I'm working in so now I can go to my keyboard and hit F which is just full screen and now I can go ahead and blend these together so what I like to do is I like to provide a black layer mask on these so while holding down option on a Mac or alt on a PC I think it's alt on a PC if I click the layer mask button it'll provide a black layer mask do that on both of these so now these are hidden and I can only see the base image so for the foreground I'm going to grab my masking brush right here and I want it to be white and then I'm going to go through opacity 40 flow 100 smoothing 100 and all I need to do is I need to bring this end I could even make this 100% since I'm going to blend that all the way in along the bottom and if I need to hide this to see what's underlying as part of the foreground one I can hold down shift and just click on the mask and I can see which part of this I want to blend in so I'm going to blend back into here that whole bottom part of the image and then just make sure I got it all and then if I hit backslash I can see where that mask is in red oh and I just want to make sure I'm on my white brush and then I can just put this exactly where I want it I like to use that mask overview because even though you can look at it here you can't see it overlaid on the image so I'll just get that right back into there and then I go with my black brush I'll make it smaller and I'll go with the lower opacity say 40 and then along this line I can make sure that's a nice smooth Blended transition and I can just hit that back slash again turn it back off so now I've Blended in the foreground see the difference there so the next thing is the long exposure so if I hold shift and click on the mask I can see where that long exposure hits and I'm going to try it right over here we'll see how I like it these are always just an experiment so once again white brush and and I'm just going to start to blend it right along that area I can even ramp this up since I'm going to go 100 in here and you can see in there I actually don't like it so if you don't like it you can just jump back or mask it back out I like this little wave action in there so I'll go to my black brush here and make sure that wave stays in there and sometimes this can take a little while to transition together and then you can just hit here and see what you like I like that long exposure back into this area right here so white brush again I like what it does back in there let's hold down shift and I liked the wave action hitting back here I also like remember when I was in the field I was talking about the Mist that kicked picks up on Long exposures see that going on right there I actually like the initial exposure back here so I can take a lower opacity here and then I'll just fade these into each other and when I do this and I'm actually editing I take a little bit more time to do it but you just want to make sure that those are all meshed together and then I'll go back to my black brush make sure that this wave from the base image is fully Blended in there and I'll just do a few touches here just so it smoothly transitions in all right so let's look at this on the full screen and we'll go before and after see how it's kind of messy in the base image back here and when I blend it in that long exposure makes that nice smooth leading line that brings your eyes along here into the center of the image so so now I can just group these base image blend and from here I can start all of my regular editing now what's nice about the smart object workflow if I wanted to go back and adjust any of these in raw if I click on this base image it opens right back up into camera raw so these are still raw files so if I wanted to change something on it I could do that that one looks nice I want to make sure that these C Stacks are sharp in the background and the whole Coast Line sharp too so I'm always just watching that little box right there and then I'm just going to look for the furthest thing in the composition make sure it's sharp like that looks nice but the sky is starting to light up here my buddy Iron's working on a composition over there that looked pretty cool so might get some killer light here all right I'm going to keep timing these and I actually like that little bit longer shutter speed so I'm going to go back up a little bit in exposure and drop my ISO then I'll wait for this next wave to roll in and then I'll try one with a really long shutter speed that'll just average all those waves out and what's nice about having that really long shutter speed one is it kind of kicks up all this Mist that's coming off where it's hitting the coast over there you can see that effect over there zoom in here and see how these look and I can also see where they're hitting back there on the C Stacks so like right there you can see that one let's try an F-16 here that'll give me an even longer shutter speed then I can go down to base ISO and see how that looks so I'm almost exposed to the right this will give me a really long shutter 4 seconds that'll average all that mist out that I can blend in when I'm editing this one yeah see that averages it all out I don't like what that does over in this area but back near the sea stacks it looks really cool it's like a misty look you can see all there and then over on the coast I like these lines that it makes like a reflective light line so whenever lights popping off like this let's check that RGB you can see the red starting to clip so I'm going to drop the exposure a little bit and that's something that's going to take work to keep in mind right your RGB is not blown out but since the red channel is so bright it's clipping and this is just a JPEG rendering so I'm guessing the raw file will be all right when I check it out we'll check it out here in a little bit but something to always keep in mind and that's why you should always cut be checking all the different color channels when you're shooting so let's go back to f11 go up to 200 I so I'm just working on different shutter speeds here guys and then I'm just going to recheck my focus I think it looks good and then as these big waves roll in right through there I'm just firing these off there's a good one right there lights's getting really nice back there you can see our tents right up behind me we're hiking that way tomorrow about 12 miles all right red channel is Once Again in check some other cool wave action so one of the main benefits of taking all these shots is that I'll have all these different waves that I can kind of blend together they can end up looking really nice now we're starting to get reflective light down on all this water so maybe I'll move my focus point back to that foreground area refocus down there with my finger grabbing the focus ring just jiggling it back and forth make sure that's good and then we'll fire some off here that's a fifth of a second ooo this light's getting good might get lucky tonight and I can also use some Luminosity mask in Photoshop to work some more of that pink down into the foreground let's try dropping the iso here that'll give me me a second long one it's probably my favorite Cloud so far I like that smooth water down there cuz it picks up all the pinks off the sky that might be the foreground water I use try an F16 even longer cuz it's really reflecting nicely in there man lucked out tonight haven't had any good light on this trip yet 3 days four almost H 35 miles of hiking been beautiful but no good light yet but looks like we're lucking out tonight and this is one of my favorite spots to shoot

Channel: Dave Morrow

Views: 20,693

Keywords: Dave Morrow Photography, Landscape Photography, Dave Morrow, Camera Technique, Camera Settings, Hiking, Backpacking, Outdoor Photography

Id: kAa8XdYiMK4

Length: 29min 14sec (1754 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 23 2024