7 SIMPLE photography TIPS I wish I knew EARLIER

so recently looking back at some photos that I took over ten years ago actually and they were fairly rubbish and it made me realize just how far I come as a photographer but it also made me think the things I'd learnt as a photographer over those sort of 10 15 years and why I'm making this video [Music] great to see you all again I'm really excited about this video because when I was looking back at these photos from you know a fairly long time ago it did make me realize just how much I've improved my photography and so I gave it some thought and for what were the things that that made a difference to me what were those wow moments so I've come up with seven things that I think are the key things of that have been sort of stepping stones for those improvements really and some of them are camera things some of the things like you know focus and exposure and lenses and some of them are more sort of soft skills so things like light and things like that so I wanted to put them all together and I've caught with seven and I'm gonna go through and share those ideas now one of the key things about them is trying to make things as simple as possible so what what you'd think we'd landscape photography is you've got loads of time you can go and set your camera or wait for ages you know you don't really need to do things quickly but what I found doing landscape photography is it's sort of the opposite of that a little bit you do have a lot of time you don't have a lot of time with a lights perfect so again turn on your camera a little bit better when improving some skills to a preview improve your efficiency of taking photos you can actually make a big improvement in your photography as well okay let's get straight into it so the first point is using aperture priority in your camera this is actually more about just efficiency of use of your camera really I have a lot of people come on workshops with me and it's quite interesting how many people are using the camera in full manual mode that works obviously you can get results you can you can check until you've got the right exposure trial and error and get things and get things right but actually why not use your camera's metering to get a good shot the thing you care about in landscape photography is depth of field so you might like a shot like this that has a low depth of field took a misson angle see of a lighthouse and I wanted to get these flowers in focus but I didn't care about the lighthouse been in focus I wanted to try something a little bit different whereas on this one I wanted everything focus from the rocks right the way through to the lighthouse and the in the distance so depth of field is really important but by putting on aperture-priority then you're prioritizing aperture if you change the aperture or the camera then changes the shutter speed and by and large modern-day cameras now get that exposure right now if I want to change the exposure then I use exposure compensation on max t2 so a little dial on top and it's really easy to do on my Nikon d810 I can just move the wheel and that changes the exposure compensation so whilst I'm looking through the camera I can really easily change the exposure if it's not quite right by looking at that histogram and I'll come on to the histogram in a minute but the importance of this why this is so important is that quite often you don't want to be messing about with manually exposure changing the aperture the shutter speed all the time to get the right exposure because you might miss the actual shots so quite often I'm in my car I'm driving along a stop at the side of the road Grammer camera that light has just changed and I want to take a shot like this one in Scotland and the light change so quickly the cloud came down and then disappeared I wanted to get a shot I've shown it many times before but I think it's really important I just just pointed it I had two spot metering on the snow and I knew that I was going to nail the exposure so which leads me onto number two which is using your histogram for exposure I think it's really important that everybody understands a histogram it's fairly simple to understand I'm not gonna go into a lot of detail in this video about histograms there's loads of videos I'll link one here but basically it's a measure of how much data you've got a certain tonal values towards the left of your histogram you've got your shadow details to the right of your histogram you've got your highlights you want to expose as far as you can to the right-hand side of the histogram so if you take these two photos that I've got here they're one of them I under expose and it looks probably better than the one that I pushed to the right-hand side of the histogram but for the one I under exposed although I have not blown out my highlights and it actually looks better just straight out of camera when I start to edit that and change and move it from the right-hand side to the left-hand side of the histogram then I'm going to some more noise in my shadow detail so it's really important that you push it as far as you can to the right-hand side of the histogram so that you don't have to pull out detail in your shadows as much but you're just dropping down your highlights and that way you'll get less noises noise in your image it took me a long time to figure that out I always just thought I'll just you know leave a big gap between the the right-hand side cuz I didn't want to blow out my highlights but but actually what you're doing there is is reducing the quality of your images okay let's go on to point number three which is focus now it's probably the thing I get asked most in my comments where did you focus how did you focus what did you think about hyper focal distance and definitely a hundred percent gonna do a video specifically on this subjects I think it's really important but the best advice I can give you and if you just don't take anything else from this video is to understand your camera and what works for you and your lens combination with your camera I did a video on that here so go and take a look at that the things that you need to understand about your camera but it's very different from one lens and one camera to another so my xd2 has a much greater depth of field at f9 than my Nick on d810 because it's a crop sensor and you've got to understand your own camera the one bit of advice I can give you is if you're shooting really wide so say on my Fuji XT - it's 10 millimetres then I would then focus on infinity so the the mountains in the distance and let me just draw this out to just show you and explain why that's the case okay so let's just have a look at this we have a photographer you that put his camera and we'll just say that it's a XT - and he's got it set on F 10 - 10 millimeters and he's photographing an amazing scene here so some mountains and he wants to get everything there's some amazing trees here and then there's some rocks in the foreground then he wants to get all all this in focus so he gets his app out and he decides where the hyperfocal distance is so it works out it's there and then that what that does is it means that he can focus everything from infinity to nought point 8 feet and that's the where he focuses and everything is exceptionally focused in focus from naught point eight feet to infinity now that's acceptable focus now the other thing that he could do is that he could just focus here so he could focus on the mountain and that would be obviously his focus point so that would be in focus and everything going back to around about one point six feet would be in focus so his mountain his tree and he's what he's got here is a rock as well so this is his rock that will be in focus as well now what I think is that you should use this not this because there is a problem with this technique if you work out your hyper focal distance but you don't do you don't set that correctly or you don't work out exactly where the right distance to focus and say you focused here now potentially that might only extend to about a thousand feet saying and you won't get the mountains in focus whereas in this one you always get the mountains in focus and you're just restricted to the minimum distance that you can focus so you just know then that you can't have anything in your to foreground that's closer than one point six feet and anything one point six feet or further on will be acceptable in focus now obviously we're going to try this with your camera but this is better than this okay hopefully that made sense on to the fourth point which is about simplifying your images if you take a look at my composition video here I talked a little bit more about simplification and it's not words occasion I don't know anyway simplifying your images and it took me a while to sort of get this you know when I first started out in photography I used to produce lots of complicated photos like this and they just didn't look great really but they want to start to realize that it's what you cook out of the photos that is more important than what I see what you put into the photos I started to take much much better photos so it's a simple thing really get to a scene think what do I like about the scene and then remove everything else and you'll more often than not come up with something that's really really good I really love Sean took his photos for that I think if you look at some of his street photography in London you can just see how good his simplification of that the scene is you know he'll find a spot that's got really nice light with some good lines in it and they'll just wait for the right people to come in that creates something that's quite simplistic but really powerful yeah go and take take a look at some of his work on Instagram I've linked in the profile below so if you look at this location in bottome I did some drone footage there I mean it's such an amazing location and your natural tendency is who want to take a photo and get the mountains in and just get the whole scene in but actually it's when you start to simplify it when you start to use a something like a zoom camera and zooming in on that location that you start to get much better images and I find that there's using a zoom lens I'll come on to that in a minute makes a big difference so if you take this image that I took I think it was at Whitby at the beach the first image I took I realized was just too complicated there's lots of distracting elements but I saw these two people walking down the beach and when I zoomed in on those and simplified the image then it became much more powerful so if you can just think about the things that you want to take out of the image rather than what you want to put any of the image then I think you'll start to improve your your photography so ya spoke about zooming in on the elements - simplifying which leads me on to my next point and I am now five I think I'm on five I'm a fifth point which is using different lenses so a lot of people look great cameras all the time but not so much get an invest in new lenses so much what I think's more important is just stick with your cameras just don't change it everybody's camera they're using at the moment will be good enough forever if you keep changing your camera then you have to learn a new camera you spend more time analyzing and zooming in on the megapixels I think you always got more dynamic range but actually most modern cameras now have a adequate dynamic range and enough megapixels but that's slightly different with lenses lenses and having a different set of lenses can make a significant difference to your photography so if you look at that beach scene when I went from my wide angle lens to my zoom lens and zoomed on those people then it made a difference and similarly if you go the other end to a super wide angle lens now I tend to prefer 10 millimeter more on my XT 2 or 16 millimeter on my Nikon then sort of that the mid wide-angle range because I like shooting the stuff that's really close to my feet so pointing the camera down like this shot here which was in Snowdonia where I've got the rocks in the foreground that literally was pointing the camera down to get this game because it's a 10 millimeter on my XD 2 and by a sort of embracing different lenses then it can make a difference similarly by just not using the zoom lens but using the prime lens can make a big difference and I did a video here on using just a prime lens it really improves your creativity in photography if you just don't have that ability to zoom and it also reduces the decision-making that you have to make in photography so you can you can actually start thinking more about the scene and what you're going to include or not include by moving around that that image that sort of nicely moves me into the next or six point which is think about where you stand so how often do you go to a location you think this is amazing you get your camera out you get your tripod out you put your camera on your tripod and you take a shot you get higher anything wine earth didn't I just move to the left or to the right so if you look at this image now this first image that I talked I realized that the path was in the way and I move down I'd say about five centimetres to create the next image which is significantly better so if you put those alongside each other you can see that on the one that I hadn't moved down slightly the path is just a distracting element in the image and by removing that path which takes me back to the other point I'm just moving down slightly it made a much much more powerful image so it was simpler I removed that path as an element just by moving down a little bit and the same happens whenever you're at a location by going low going high moving left or moving right can significantly improve your your photography so maybe just go out with a wide angle lens on I quite often do it my 10 to 24 millimeter lens might on my X t2 I happen to do it a lot more when I'm on workshops because I'm not really going out there to do photography myself but I'm showing some things on my wide-angle lens and I found that actually improves my creativity because I'm not getting my tripod out so just take one lens one camera and just go out and shoot and you're fine because you're really mobile you probably get some better images okay on to my last point and it is literally the most important thing in photography and that is light so obviously light is what we photograph in it's it's the the photons that bounce off the trees or the mountains or the lakes and land on that CCD or the film in your camera and I can't stress how important it is to embrace light in photography and try to understand light in photography it's quite quite sad to admit that even my kids now whenever there's good light outside they go dad dad the lights were really good the lights really good so um so they've embraced light but I think I think I don't think I did that so well in the early sort of days of me doing photography I think I often went out at the wrong time of day and cry I really got frustrated why couldn't I take a photo as good as this person and but they weren't started to analyze it a little bit and tried to start to understand what I was doing wrong is I just wasn't going out at the right time of day wasn't embracing the right time of day and and actually being in those locations when the light was amazing so if you take these two images this was a shot at first of all that I talked around about 12 years ago I think it was of mam tor I was really proud of the shot I thought it was really good I liked the composition of there you know there was a little bit of nice light but they never compared it with a shot that I took just two days ago yeah it's worlds apart you know it's a completely different image and now there's going to be people that prefer the first one I'm sure but I think on the whole most people will say that the second one is much more powerful image and and it's down to light really the composition is slightly different but really it's just the quality of that light you know it's quite hazy it was low Sun I got really early in the morning for sunrise that's what made the difference to this image and I understood how that light interacted with its surroundings I was pointing right into the Sun for this shot the weather I would never have done that 10 12 years ago again you know if you go back to the shots that I took in Iceland which was some of my favorite it was all about light you know we'd been at this location for I think about seven hours by this point and the light was starting to get good but if you just compare these two images which were an hour apart you know I could have taken this first one I thought that's a fantastic image and gone home but just by waiting the light got so much better and it made such a big difference to this image so look at the second one you can see that the significant improvement it's much much more character to it it's more dynamic it's it's just got oomph to it okay I hope you've enjoyed this I'd really be interested in knowing what your top tip is or what you've learned to know if you've improved your photography over the last year or five years or ten years what was the thing that you thought was that there were light bulb moment that made a big difference to your photography share it in the comments below if you've enjoyed this video give it a like please subscribe I really really appreciate it and until it's Sunday and it's gonna be a good one next Sunday it's taken me five weeks to produce the video that I'm publishing next next Sunday thanks ever so much for watching and bye my heart is we [Music] open

Channel: Nigel Danson

Views: 2,128,698

Keywords: photography, landscape, landscape photography, how to, photography tips, photography tips and tricks, photography tips for beginners, understanding your camera, landscape photography tips, how to photography, better photos, photo tips, nigel danson, nigel danson photography, nigel danson photographer

Id: jAk_xhs0Rcw

Length: 18min 32sec (1112 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 08 2018