5 SIMPLE tips to improve YOUR seascape photography

that is incredible [Music] morning everybody fantastic to see you all again so in this video it's the third of my trilogy of videos from madeira and it's by the ocean and i wanted to show you just a short section of video that i did on a lazy morning when i was just photographing some stunning crashing waves in the morning sunlight and then talk a little bit further about some of the things some of the shots that i took in madeira of some sea stacks but also how i go about shooting waves shooting seascapes and five tips that i use all the time i've sort of thought about the things that i you do most often and what's most important and i've also got a bonus tip from rachel talabar i've speaking to her and she's given me a really useful tip for doing seascape photography so i was staying in this little hotel by the ocean i could actually throw a pebble into the ocean it was absolutely amazing and just down from there there was this section that i could see this amazing lighthouse the waves crash in and i decided just to go there after breakfast it was super easy i wanted a lazy morning and see what i could get so will join me there just before sunrise oh i am having a relaxing morning this morning i didn't get a take away breakfast so i've had my breakfast it's about half past seven and i'm here for sunrise actually and and i'm staying in this hotel which is quite amazing it's got these natural pools rather than the swimming pool and the tide comes in fills them in and then you can swim in those um it looks really amazing unfortunately the tower's been so rough recently that nobody's been able to use them but there's hardly anybody here so and it's quite it's it's it's not super warm but it's not it's about 18 degrees c so yeah i'm going to take the sunset here i was here yesterday in the middle of the day taking some shots of the waves crashing they're not quite as big as they were yesterday the forecast looks good but to be honest the forecast is so difficult i think on madeira because it's the island in this middle of the atlantic ocean and it just changes so rapidly okay right i'm gonna take a shot of this i think and hopefully the sky is going to light up any minute so i better get on i'll get back to you when i set my shoulder okay so i've got a wide shot of them at the moment i'm going to do some wide shots and i'm going to do some close-up shots as well um with my 7200 so i'm shooting around about 35 millimeters just a standard shot really of this um the cloud doesn't look like it's gonna light up it is about eight minutes before sunrise and i think there's blanket cloud on the horizon which is a shame um but there's two different shutter speeds that i need to be thinking about here so there's one shutter speed for when the water comes over the rocks which is about half a second that captures just this really nice lines in the water and there's another shutter speed for when the water sort of crashes and the waves crash outside at sea and they look better around about a thousandth of a second [Music] that is incredible okay so as you can see over here the light has definitely come out and it's catching the waves this is so amazing so what i've got is i'm hand holding my 7200 now and i'm doing some really tight up close ones to the ways where the the incoming wave is hitting the outgoing wave and it just goes smashing into the air like that and just creates this amazing sort of i don't know sort of cascade of wave over there's a few things that are really important um so the the first thing is that i find for those waves you've got to have on a super fast shutter speed probably a two thousandth of a second and then the other thing is with the light catching it um you can't rely on the histogram because the histogram looks like it's okay but as it goes in the air it catches more light so you've gotta underexpose it by almost two stops so i'm i'm just i don't want to blow out the highlights because the highlights contain all the detail in the wave which is so important um looks like the sun's just going in so i'm just gonna carry on taking some shots uh right okay so so i've focused on the spot i know it's gonna break so i'm not worried about focus too much and i'm just gonna lock that into manual focus and then it's just a question of waiting for one and just getting it [Music] so here's one there it looks dark when you look through the viewfinder you've got to be so careful not to blow out those highlights though [Music] oh that's amazing now here's one it's going to be a good one now [Music] [Music] so as you can see i had an amazing hour or so shooting those waves it was so so stunning and um i want to share these tips with you but this isn't meant to be a definitive guide to seascape photography it's meant to just be a few informal tips that may help you just get a little bit more out of that genre of photography i feel that seascape photography is quite different than woodland or sort of big vista photography i feel like it's more dynamic you've got more changing elements and because of that you can probably be a little bit more creative in this type of photography and that's why i like it i feel like it's something that i mess about with quite a lot there's a lot of trial and error i always come back when i do seascape photography with so many photos that are just useless um but i occasionally get those gems and that's what makes it really rewarding and wanting want to go back to it the first one and i touched on it in the video there which is all about uh shutter speeds and how important shutter speeds are and i think there's two key shutter speeds for me there's the slower shutter speed um the sort of maybe a quarter of a second to a few seconds um and then there's a really fast shutter speed this you know where you're shooting maybe a thousandth of a second i want to go through those two there is a third one which is a long exposure which just flattens everything out but that's not really my genre of photography so um i don't feel like i'm best to sort of talk about that because i don't do it very often so i'm going to talk about those other two so the first one is the the slower shutter speed and this tends to be when i'm shooting um conditions where the the water's coming in and maybe hitting a rock and then going back out again or i'm shooting some rocks and the water from the tides coming in and then going back out again and i usually for that shoot about a half of a second now it does change so this isn't a hard fast rule what i tend to do on location is try i start at half a second then try a bit faster and a bit slower but i find a half a second works it gives me something like this shot here and i like this i like the textures in the water if you go much slower than this then you can get it can look a bit messy like this shot and if you go faster then you can get something like this which i feel doesn't it's not soothing it doesn't really tell the story of those moving waves so much so for me starting at half a second is a good bet for those um shots where water is changing direction now you can use that for anything so there's don't just use it for that but that's what i tend to use it for the other one is the fast shutter speed so that's what i was doing when i had my long lens and the waves were crashing with the backlit and i want to really capture those droplets of water i want to really capture that dynamism dynamism is that word dynasm dynamism i want to capture that dynamism it's probably not a word of of the water as it comes in and you can see that um in fact i'll show you some shots on my ipad right so if i just get my ipad here you can see in these shots here um i mean this is a 4 000th of a second um you know i've actually got these droplets of water uh you know it's capturing you can see as well this looks fantastic because it's backlit with a dark cloud as well but you can see it's capturing this this these droplets of water so well you know this one is a four thousandth of a second again in fact i think i put it on shutter priority um no i didn't i did it on manual i just set it on f5 that's how i did it um and i focused there so you can see that these faster shutter speeds look really really good for those waves crashing and throwing all the water up high and and i find also if you just got a wave that's breaking and the wind's blowing the the um water back again that faster shutter speed tends to work although i have had success with slower shutter speed with those types of shot as well so again it's not a rule it's just some tips the next thing to talk about is height and your height because i think that is really important for seascape photography ideally what i'd like to do is be much lower than i was up on that promenade there because when i was there i was shooting just slightly down at the waves and i always feel if you want to make those waves look more majestic then you want to be lower down and they'll tower up above the horizon line so for instance this shot here you know this was a really big wave but it didn't look as majestic as it perhaps should have done this is this was me testing things before i got the backlit um sun on on the wave um but if it had been lowered down it would have looked a lot better so just an example here are a couple of ways so if i just show you some shots that i think that works a bit better for so this was in iceland um so you can see here that you know i'm lower down and this wave which is probably about i don't know three or four meters high maybe five meters high compared to this sea stack in the background which is maybe 60 or 70 meters high looks really majestic so by getting quite low makes a really big difference if i look at another shot here where i was really high so this was in cornwall you can see shooting down on the wave here i've created a very different shot it's more like a vista shot with the wave being part of the environment so height makes a really big difference when you're doing seascapes so just just bear that in mind so the next thing is just think smaller think about other things in your environment maybe just look down i was recently just chatting to rachel telebart who if you haven't seen her work then there's a link in the description below she is one of the worldwide best seascape photographers her images are just phenomenal and the there was an image i saw actually on her instagram profile called touch and it was this beautiful shot of the shell with the wave just sort of lapping over it and it was a longer exposure with some beautiful light it just looked amazing as you can see so i asked rachel i knew i was doing this video so i asked her you know what is your top tip for shooting seascape so i'll put this one in because it's so important um and that's patience just being patient you will no doubt get lots of shots that don't work i'm sure rachel for all those amazing shots she's got has got a lot of shots that you know haven't worked because a lot of it's trial and error and just having that patience to be able to you know just keep trying something and and um you know eventually you'll get something that works so that was rachel's top tip um and go and check out her work it is phenomenal oh the other thing that rachel said um an extra tip really is that when you're taking shots like this that are down by the beach just watch for your reflection on the water or on the um shell because obviously you don't want to get your reflection in the shot so just just bear that in mind it was another top tip that she gave me and it's well worth bearing in mind okay on to the fourth one and that's light and how important light is uh and that's just borne out by those morning shots that i got you know that backlit light is what made those shots you know we just looked at that shot from rachel there it's the light on that wave that makes it so phenomenal um you know we're just looking at this shot here um and it was that light on here that looks so good you know again these these shots here look so good because of the backlit nature of them always think about that always think about light just going to a location and thinking about how the light hits the land and it might be that you don't want a lot of light you know it's not always good to have tons of light but thinking about it and understanding how that light interacts with what you're shooting is really important and the best way to do that is trial and error i like shooting waves that are backlit it makes a big difference but it doesn't mean that you have to do that so try different things and then if you don't have any light it doesn't mean you can't get an amazing shot in fact one of my favorite images that i shot from madeira is a shot i'm going to talk about now which is a shot called janella which was shot of these amazing sea stacks so let me just get it so before i show you this print i want to just talk a little bit about shooting with no light because i think if you don't have any light or you just maybe just have some reflected light um maybe you know you're in the shade the bit that you're shooting is in the shade and you've got some blue reflected light or sun's gone down or it's just cloudy then again look at how that light's interacting with the waves maybe taking some shots and seeing what works trying different angles maybe trying to polarize it with or without a polarizer can be really interesting way of um shooting things onto this shot here so this was this was a shot that i i'd actually gone here um it was the last evening and um i'd hoped that i'd be able to shoot this location but i wasn't 100 sure i'd have time because i had lots of other things in my plan and as you i spoke about in the last video i wanted to concentrate on two locations and get the best i can out of those and then try other locations if possible so i had one evening to go down to this um i had one night when it was almost dark gone and just wrecked it for 10 minutes and yeah i went i went down here and i was hoping for the sun to come through this gap you can see there but it didn't it went down just over to the left and we didn't get any sunlight so i just had to shoot with this flat light but because the waves were coming up and all these rocks here were wet and they were catching some of the reflected sort of tones in the sky and there were some interesting blue tones in the sky and the rocks i feel like it created a very moody dramatic something just a little bit different image and yeah i really really like this image it's one of my favorites now it is a stack of four images so there was a slightly different wave pattern here that i i stacked um there's this element here um and then there's a couple of focus stacks to get the the sharpness in the rocks down here and the the sharpness here you can actually see i'll show a digital version of it now as i'm talking but you can actually see the bird on top of the stack there which i didn't notice when i'm shooting it and then the detail of the um little barnacles in the rock as well it's so sharp this it looks so good printed big so yeah so this is going to be added into my print store um i'm really pleased that you know i can offer this this shot now as a limited edition print um and i've actually added a few more that i want to show you as well um but before i do that we're in lockdown now in the uk so it means that we're not meant to go out apart from one form of exercise a day and you know i i am a professional photographer but i want to sort of um be within the spirit of that and you know i can stay at home and edit or print things um so what i'm gonna do is offer 25 off my prints for the next week so if you are interested in the print i'll show you the prints that i've added then you can go to my store they're linked in the description below and you can get a print for 25 off i offer them in a3 a2 and a1 so there's this one which is um janella which yeah is fantastic and there is a and then there's this one here which is finale family which yeah i really like it the light just came through and you know it created this really amazing atmosphere in the fog of this sort of orange glow and these um five trees here remind me of my family um you know i've got a little daughter um she's not that little aunt now she's 12. so she's running out in front but yeah this this is fennel family and uh i really like this this is definitely going to be going up on my wall then there is the one that i showed in the video last week which was um this shot here which is called resting time so this was this bird that's just having a rest here on this amazing tree this seemed to be a really popular print in the comments from last week everyone seemed to think this was really good um yeah i mean i was so lucky on on this it's probably one of the best mornings photography i've ever had yeah and this this worked out really well so i'm offering that i spoke about this in last week's video so you know all about this a passage in time and you can actually see venus there as well in the sky and a few of the stars this looks fantastic and then the the other one the final one is this one here which is a shot that i took a couple of weeks ago um which is called prima um i i feel like it looks like a prima ballerina and it was shot in these amazing sort of horfrost snowy misty conditions it was really cold and yeah this just looks so good again i think i'm going to put this on my wall it's one of my favorite images from last year so if you are interested um the link's in the description below with the offer code for 25 off i really appreciate it i've got nothing to do for the next week so hopefully be printing some prints it helps me and my channel and hopefully it'll give you something um that's that you like so it's beautiful to put on your wall okay thanks ever so much for watching hope those tips have helped and until next sunday bye [Music] you

Channel: Nigel Danson

Views: 58,006

Keywords: photography, seascape, seascape photography, photography tips, seascape photography composition, tips, nigel danson, Nigel Danson photography

Id: I1u-AJs28Pc

Length: 20min 56sec (1256 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 10 2021