Beyond the Snapshot: Fine Art Landscape Photography

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] the first thing is you know how did I get started in photography it basically started with my dad who happens to be here who is a professional photojournalist and a very good one starting in the 70s and going on through today so I've always been around cameras but I never really took the time to learn much about them I didn't know the difference between aperture and shutter speed for a long time but there he is in his glory days shooting the second space shuttle mission there on the left and anybody have a guess of who the guy on the right is I don't know if you're familiar with photography that's Joe so dad and Joe go way back Joe loves that picture by the way it's the best he's looked in a long time so in 2009 my neighbor decided that he needed a hobby and being the capital said he was realized there was a thing called iStock where you can take pictures of forks and put it on there and sell it for twenty-five cents and get three cents on the dollar and he thought that would be a terrific idea didn't sound so great to me but I thought this would be a good way to get more in touch with what my dad used to do and start to appreciate some of the things that he had been able to accomplish by understanding it better so I decided I was going to do portraits so I got a couple of umbrellas and my dad got me some strobes and I set it all up and Matt the guy that it suggested we do this Hobby sat down in the chair and was gonna be my model so I looked at him and waited for him to do something and he looked at me and waited for me to tell him to do something I got nervous went over the strobe it flashed in my face and that was the end of it so then I decided while do self-portraits so I didn't have to deal with how to handle a model so I set up my strobes took that that was the end of my portrait career so decided to try something a little bit different and found out that I live in Portland Oregon which is one of the greatest places in the world if you like landscapes so I found a local landscape photography workshop took it and 15 minutes in I decided that maybe I didn't want to be an airline pilot anymore which is my day job I wanted to go do landscape photography then found out that that was a really dumb idea because you can't make any money at it so I just decided I keep it as a hobby and over the last three three and a half years I've been pretty passionate about it spent a lot of time out there reading studying processing learning and failing along the way had some good times freezing this is in northern Sweden in the middle of February outside for ten hours at minus 30 degrees waiting for the Aurora to do something and melting this is on the Big Island of Hawaii we were talking about this earlier shooting the log with my good friend Bruce amore we can talk after the fact if you want to go try to see this for yourself he does offer tours and I can help you get set up with him but I lost about a quarter inch of my tripod because it was sitting right here and a little bit of the soles of my shoes frequently I spend a lot of time soaking wet if you're gonna shoot the water you're gonna get wet and this is why we talk about camera insurance at some point you're gonna want to get that because I've lost a few cameras to the water salt water and cameras don't mix very well and frequently I've spent a lot of time awestruck just at the places that I find myself if you're going to shoot landscapes and you're not real good like I'm not at the intimate little scenes you're going to go to these bent grand dynamic places like Bryce Canyon and you can see all sorts of just spectacular scenery that I wouldn't have ever seen if I didn't pick up photography so my goal over the next couple of hours is to take you through some of the things that I've learned about starting from the beginning to the finished product of landscapes and if you're an advanced photographer hopefully maybe there's a tip or two that I can impart on you that helps you with your process if you're new some of this might go over your head because there's a lot of information but hopefully it gets you maybe inspired to find your own journey so that when your gout on your trips either on vacation or out they're actually trying to take pictures you're not just taking a snapshot that you can bring home you're turning it into fine art landscape photography that you could print and hang on your wall so the very first part of the process starts way back before you go to shoot and it's planning in preparation wanting to make sure that when you get out there you actually have the best chance of capturing something that you'll find interesting to take home that's inside a ice cave in Rainier try not to get that crushing me so I've know I was in and out there pretty quickly but has it melted out you can see the strips coming down first thing that I like to remind you is this is not a studio you don't get to control the light like my dad did when he was setting up these brilliant lighting situations to make his images mother nature is going to control your light for you so the best you can hope to do is try to learn how to read the weather and get that light to be as dynamic as possible in this case it's just a satellite picture you can find it on the internet if you're going to go shooting it helps a ton to be able to see where the clouds are because those clouds if you get it at the right time are going to be spectacular so if you can start to learn how to read where the clouds are going to be when you're gonna be at the location you're shooting you can come up with some pretty spectacular results biggest tip that I probably can think of is to shoot during what we call the golden hour if you want to make spectacular landscapes golden hour starts about an hour before sunrise ends about an hour after sunrise and then you take a time out during the day starts again an hour before a sunset and ends an hour after sunset means are going to be getting up really early in a lot of places to get into these locations where you're set up an hour before sunrise you're gonna be staying out late you're not gonna get a lot of sleep if you're gonna actually do this for fun but the idea is if you can get the light to light up those clouds as the sun rays go down they get longer and more colorful and I won't bother with the physics of why but if you can shoot in that period of time just as the sunsets or sunrises you can get the color in the clouds and that usually makes a more spectacular backdrop to a scene that during the middle of the day would just be a snap shot so I mentioned that the weather is going to be a big determinant in what kind of a shot we're going to get so what are you looking for when you're trying to figure out how to make a fine art landscape picture the general idea and this doesn't work all the time but at general approaching storms at sunrise and clearing storms at sunset the reason that you want to do this is if you can get these clouds coming in over the top of you but have a gap on the horizon where the Sun is you're gonna be able to get the color lighting up these clouds then it's going to reflect like a big soft box on the rest of your scene and you get nice colorful pictures since rather generally here in the northern hemisphere works from west to east at sunrise with the Sun coming up in the east the weather coming over it you're going to get those clouds covering where you are but the Sun hopefully can still get through the exact opposite at sunset sunsets over here and the west coast if the clouds have moved across they're still over your head but you have a little bit of a gap on the horizon that's when you're going to get in the most spectacular dramatic conditions and if you can get that over a pretty location guaranteed you're going to have a nice picture another rule of thumb the worse the weather the better the shot that being said you know let's not get crazy out there on the top of the hill during a lightning storm but this was shot up in Glacier National Park we had a huge thunderstorm rolling through just around sunset and when you get clouds and drama like that it can make the scene spectacular so typically you'll see in the national parks as the storms roll in in the summer everybody heads out in the landscape photographers head in things are going to change depending on where you are and what you're doing in Oregon I've got local shots that are spectacular if you're living here in New York City and you're trying to go take landscape pictures and you've booked a trip or you're on a trip with your family and you're only gonna have you know one period of time where you can try to get a shot it's gonna change how you approach things for me this is two and a half hours from my house so I knew basically what I wanted in this shot I wanted good light and the right tide to fill in these little sea stacks here so I went back to this about 10 times before I finally got what I wanted that's the benefit of living two and a half hours away if I had been only there for a day and I hadn't gotten these perfect conditions I probably would have tried something else to at least attempt to come away with a keeper of an image change your composition you know maybe if you're not don't have a dramatic sky just get intimate on this water coming in and the waves crashing on the sea stack something that makes it a little bit more dynamic since you don't have the option of returning time and time again seasonal considerations we're in the fall right now you can get some spectacular shots if you know where to look and boy here in New England if you don't have to drive very far and you've got the best trees in the world as far as I'm concerned this is in Portland we have one tree that works everybody shoots the same tree you'll see this tree and 15 Peter licks got this tree you think in three different seasons so nothing you know too unique about it but do keep an eye if you're traveling somewhere and you're with your family and you want to try to go make an image or two what time of year is it what you know if I'm going to the mountains and the in the winter where can I find some good snow snow escapes if I'm going somewhere in the fall where can I find some good color things like that the Sun is what creates all our light except for in the night when with the moon helps you in the stars but if you know where the sun's gonna rise and the angle it's going to come up at you can help with your compositions there's a website called photo ephemeris that is the Bible to landscape photographers in terms of determining where and when the sun's going to arrive so this is a shot that I've been working on unsuccessfully now for quite some time right where that spot is so if you want to go shoot crater lake that's where you want to be and on the right hand side you can just set the calendar so I was looking at this particular day I can see that when the Sun rises that's the angle it's going to be at so when I'm sending out my compass composition out there I can take my compass and find out okay the Sun which is going to be that bright point is gonna be right here how do I lay that into my composition same thing with the moonrise in moon set and it gives you the x sunrise at sunset and moonrise moon set how much moon all you do is just put in where you are and the date and play around with this website but it's great information for determining where and what quality of light you're gonna have with the Sun you're gonna be shooting the ocean and out here in the East Coast especially if you get up into Maine they've got some great coastal scenes you're gonna want a tie graph find out how high to tie it is first for your safety so you don't get swept out to sea second a lot of these locations that this you know during a high tide is completely covered during a super low tide there's no water in this little channel so I knew I wanted this scene at sunset so I'm on the west coast so where is the tide gonna be and I know now okay I want a five foot tide after some experience that what day is that tide gonna be five feet at sunset on that tie graph I found out went to the spot hope for good light and got a little bit lucky on this particular day so you're gonna be out there in the elements you want to make sure that you're prepared that's number one your coat if it's cold you need a good coat and if it's raining you need a good raincoat but you're gonna be out there for quite some time a lot of times you're gonna be hiking around for a mile or two and you're not gonna be right by the car so I just make sure you're prepared for whatever elements you think you might find Footwear kind of goes without saying you don't want to be out there and your TVs or your sandals if you're gonna be hiking on some rocks if you're gonna be out in the on the beach or on slippery rocks you want some good footwear called Reef walkers or something that's going to keep you from crashing into the ocean and drowning and getting swept away waders are great if you're going to spend any time in creeks out in Oregon with a gentleman here from Hood River that whole area that Columbia River Gorge you can sit in the water for hours it's usually pretty cold so waiters will help you Kate stay dry one thing about the way it is if you can ever use them careful you don't slip because they can fill up and you drown that way so bear spray not a big problem here in the city but if you're going to be going to Glacier National Park Yellowstone Yosemite no joke and you're gonna be hiking out there you're gonna want your bear spray can't fly with it so you pick it up there but they don't let you bring guns in the park and you don't want to shoot the Bears anyway but they are there and they do eat you so bug spray makes sense if you out there in the books food and water are probably the two biggest things making sure that you have enough if you get stuck out there for a little while to stay hydrated and keep your you know energy level up this image was in the Columbia River Gorge and the reason I put it up here for the gear for the element so this was a exceptionally challenging place to reach and I shot it in the middle of winter so temperature was just above freezing ingest deep no running water for quite some time you got to make sure you're prepared you can end up three miles into this Canyon getting hypothermic and it can be pretty serious so making sure that you're all set move on to the photography gear which is much more exciting you know what do you need to go out there and take good landscape shots first thing that people tend to overlook is a sturdy tripod and the folks here be nhk help you with that it's where I get all my tripods so I hope when I started this I thought I'm gonna try pot who cares I got a flimsy you know $29 tripod immediately realized that wasn't gonna work went out and bought a 150 dollar tripod immediate wise that wasn't gonna work bought a $700 tripod which made me choke a little bit but I have just wasted through you know three hundred dollars to realize I got to get a seven on our tripod I shoot 99% of my pictures on a tripod if you're gonna do landscape photography typically going to be using longer exposures you want to be able to take your time compose the scene it's something that gets overlooked but it's maybe the most important piece of gear that you have besides the actual camera usually carbon fiber is the more expensive ones are carbon fibers they're light they're easier to carry and they're rock solid thank you sure the lye lenses are probably the most important thing that you will shoot with even more so than the camera I've heard you know from a lot of folks you buy a good camera buy great lens because the glass is probably the most important piece and if you're going to be shooting landscapes wide-angle is usually the way you're gonna go I'd say 90% of my stuff has a the widest angle lens I have on there if you're shooting full-frame it's gonna be 16 to 35 if you're shooting a crop sensor you can go 10 to 22 but that's the one if I was gonna be doing landscapes and I was going to invest in a lens I'd get a good wide-angle lens first filters for the most part everybody's gonna want a polarizer filter if you're gonna shoot landscapes that's sort of the go-to filter and then from there there are other types there's the neutral density and the graduated neutral density filters and what those do is just allow you to slow down the shutter speed they darken the scene I use the regular neutral density I don't use the graduated and I'll talk about that a little bit later and it'll make a little more sense cable release typically when you're shooting fine art landscapes the idea is hey I'm gonna go out and take a picture and I want to be able to print it and put it on my wall it's a lot cheaper than buying somebody else's and it's a lot more satisfying so the idea when I'm blowing up something big is I want the quality to be absolutely at its maximum I don't want to have any camera shake I don't want it to be blurry or fuzzy I want it to be tack sharp all the way through from front to back just having a cheap cable is just something that's you know for 10 bucks that you can press the button and it triggers the camera will keep your hands off it and keep you from shaking the camera a little bit extra batteries if you have a camera that has the live view I spend a lot of time composing in live view eats the batteries super fast and if you're in the cold out in Norway where I shot the Aurora that was batteries last a half an hour so you need to make sure you've got several batteries that you can then swap one out keep it warm last thing is you want a lot of memory memories cheap these days I take a lot of shots I heard moose Petersen come in here and say that you know what's your ratio to keepers and he said something like well you know I pretty much keep 90% of the stuff I shoot I trash 99% of the stuff I shoot I just take a lot of pictures and I pick the best one because it's free so here's an example of what the lens can do for you this sun.star which is sort of the the whole point of the image is made by the Canon 16 to 35 mark to sun.star or mark to lens just produces a great Sun star when you're down at f-22 so that's how just a particular lens I knew that about the lens that it makes a beautiful Sun star and I figured well I might as well incorporating to the scenes just a little bit of an extra highlight okay so you've planned your trip you know you're going to be out there now we've arrived on location and what are we going to do let's find your spot the biggest thing that I can tell you that's going to help especially when you're starting out is to arrive early to scout and buy early I mean it depends on how much time you can spend you know out there but several hours early to find out where you're going to be with to get the best composition where the sun's going to be what the conditions are going to be get yourself plenty of time to set up think about what you're doing next thing you want to do consider your composition through the lens the world looks really different at a wide angle and also at a telephoto than it does if you're just putting a your eyes out there and it's taken time to move the camera around and find the absolute best composition will yield the best results lastly I check the composition in all directions and I learned this the hard way being out there several times and shooting one direction and all of a sudden the light goes off over there and I haven't checked anything this direction so it's too late for me to find a composition because I'm not good enough yet to get over there and find something quick no that is Death Valley so this is the prime example I got lucky here to get a shot at all I went down with a friend we took our very first photo trip in 2009 had never done a anything like that we took ten days off and went to the desert Southwest and cruised around had a great time we arrived in Death Valley the night before and got stuck out in the middle of nowhere didn't have time to look at the dune so I knew the next morning we wanted to shoot the dunes I really wanted to do in shot got up you know tried to get out there and scout and the moonlight couldn't see anything went went to bed the next morning the sun's coming up you've got about 45 minutes before the Sun comes up to see where the compositions are the dunes are big and they're hard to walk in and I'm out of shape so scrambling around in the meantime the sunrise you can tell is going to be absolutely epic Sun comes up color explodes in the sky and I've got nothing I have walked all over my own shot so I've got footprints ruining everything that I wanted to shoot my buddies up on this Ridge not not this gentleman but this R is just taking in this majestic scene and I'm running around like a total completely blew the shot on the way back to the car dejected I'm walking along with my bag and I this guy climb up on the top of the dune happen to turn 90 degrees to the Sun and saw that there was a you know a nice little s-shaped pattern that provides a nice leading line to where he is up on the top tried to scramble up the dune I got one lens going down that side one lens going down that side tripods at the bottom of the hill my water bottle explodes I finally get up there hand-held this is about the only handheld shot I've ever taken that worked and fired off three frames before he actually turned around and walked down the hill ended up with this shot would have been a lot better if I'd got in there early enough to scout and find it this composition beforehand or something that would have worked I could have been a lot more calm yeah yeah a little sandy but I did get him so a question that comes up frequently and actually I've talked about this to other people I could take up the whole time do you stay with your composition or do you move with the light and in this case I ran down to this beach in Norway at warp speed falling into the snow to try to get something where the light was actually just going off over this mountain got there at the very tail end set up a composition as fast as I possibly could snap the picture if you're new my advice would be find the composition that works and just sort of stick with it hope that the lights gonna work out in your direction as you get better at finding compositions quickly you can then change if the lights going off off to your left you can move over here and take a shot hopefully you've pre scouted that a little bit so you know what to do but in the meantime if you're starting out find a composition that really works and then hopefully the you get the light that's going to be in the correct direction okay so basic compositional elements so that you're not just walking out there taking a snapshot you want to think about what you're gonna do to compose this picture to make it look nice this is again there's no way to cover this in five minutes I mean this is a this is a whole book so it takes some time and learn this if you want to the first thing is the direction of the light is the lights what's gonna make the image one way or another there are front lit scenes which happen to my favorite I love shooting into the light it's very dramatic you get great shadows technically it's a little more difficult I had to blend three exposures to make this work I like front lit scenes that's my personal favorite side lit scenes give a nice texture and depth it's always nice to have depth in your pictures and the side lighting will help you do that it makes it look a little bit more 3-dimensional on your two-dimensional circles also very good light my least favorite is the backlit scene where the Sun is directly behind you and that's the one that everybody that's taking a snapshot does they because the lights on their on their friend or their family and they take the shot the quality of the light is in my opinion the least pleasant if you look at forget the rainbow but just look at the rest of the scene it looks nice of Bruce my buddy here but from a landscape perspective it's just there's no depth or texture here at all there's no side lighting and the one thing it will give you is a nice rainbow if you happen to have a rain shower that backlit will give you that so if it's raining and you got some sunlight breaking through do keep an eye out you might be able to snap a quick shot probably the most fundamental rule that people will talk to you about in landscape photography is the rule of thirds so it's an it's a nice rule it works fine sometimes so the idea is if you take your sensor in your image and make it into a tic-tac-toe board you've got four points where the lines intersect and those four corners are a third of the way in a third of the way in and a third of the way in a third of the way in in general if you put compositional elements of importance in those four corners it will make a more pleasing composition than if you Center it up if I'd centered this house right here the shot would not be nearly as dynamic so I try to put it this particular little bit of light I tried to put into the corner here this is in the you know a third and a third it didn't work so well with the horizon it's almost halfway which normally you'd want a third sky or a third ground usually a third sky and two-thirds ground but then the house wouldn't have worked so it's a good example of hey I was trying to work within the rule of thirds but at the same time that rule doesn't always work if I'd used sky here that shot would have just completely been blown because the the house would have been totally off the top of the screen so it's a great way to start and think about composition and think about getting yourself set up but it doesn't have to be the end-all beyond if you need to break that rule to make the shot work do it and the composition is either going to work or it's not regardless of what the rules say now that I've told you about the rule of thirds and you never want to break it you're going to break it for reflections because in a reflected scene if you just sort of keep in mind it's nice to just go half right down the middle and put the horizon in the middle of the frame then you've got the two sections creates the nice yin-yang for the scene in general favorite trick of landscape photography these days a little bit overdone in my opinion but people are doing it more and more with with good effect oversized foreground elements and then following that into a visual path so these four this flower here is tiny so I was right up on it with the camera literally about that far from the first flower with a wide-angle lens that makes these look much much larger than they are and they create an interesting little element in the foreground which then can anchor the scene and you try to find a nice visual flow that goes up keeps your eye into the middle of the picture so when you're thinking about making a composition the the goal is to keep the eye in the picture you want people to look around at it for a while and you want to do that on your own wall when you're looking at your own picture you want to stay in the image you don't want to get in here and then lose interest you know you get here that gets disjointed and you don't care anymore so if you can come up with something that gives you that visual path that's gonna benefit you greatly along the same lines pardon the pun leading lines so these lines are coming from the corners it's nice to if you can get them right in the corners into the center of the image keeping things nice and tight your eye gets kind of moving around in here and you can see all the elements if these had been going out my eye would hit these go off the screen and then I'm lost so if you can keep the leading lines moving in toward the center of the image from the corners that'll help by the way I'd like to pretend that I knew the moon was going to be there and I planned I had no idea it's just dumb luck definitely better be lucky than good somebody asked about the Palouse this is the Palouse right here and there's a place called Steptoe Butte or you can stand up on top and see these rolling hills in Eastern Washington and right before they harvest it it gets to be this golden color which is really nice but the best time is in the spring when the all the greens start doing if you close your eyes and look at a picture do try this at home it just doesn't matter what picture you're looking at and open them and think consciously where did my eye just go it's usually to the brightest area in the picture so that bright area you don't want it in the corner here because then your eyes stuck out here it could exit the shot if you can keep your eye into the bright areas toward the center of the image which is going to be in this area of the field and then this tree your I will then tend to stay inside here this is totally Photoshop trickery by the way because if the scene was fairly uniformed bright so I just took a dark vignette and in Photoshop brought this dark area around so this became the bright area of the scene one of the things if you're planning on getting out there and trying to get some pictures that you can hang on your wall is you're gonna spend a lot of time with that picture they're not cheap to print and they're not cheap to frame so if you're gonna do it you want to take the best shot that you can and I promise you later on you will nitpick your shot to death so while you're in there composing the shot make sure you're checking your corners and that there's not a distracting element or something that's out of whack just because here's the exciting stuff right I've got guys that are coming over the waterfall again I'd like to pretend I knew they were coming I had no idea also they just start plopping over the falls but at the end of the day I shot these images and I started realizing that that over there had been needed and I had blurry corners in this upper left side so luckily I had taken a bunch of shots some with faster shutter speed some with slower shutter speeds and later on I was able to in this image blend in the sharp area over there so do keep an eye on what everything's going on in the whole scene when you're setting up the composition through the viewfinder and make sure there's no distracting elements in the corners that blurry bush would have been very distracting to me later on by the way I hate all my stuff about six months after I take it hate it all that's just being critical of my own stuff hopefully try to get myself better but so I before I print anything and put it on my wall I wait for at least a year if I still like it then I then it has a chance sorry no I didn't I didn't I was just set up to shoot landscapes so I just you know tried to time it as they were coming across most important thing to me in all of this is compositional rules a great rule of thirds leading lines all those things that you want to do to me it's it's all about balance it's I looked at this shot for a long time didn't process it I was going through all my images of the the lava that I took when I took my ye trip and the boat had been in there and a couple of frames and I waited for it to leave and I and I I hate you know putting man-made objects into my landscapes this is just my thing so take the boat out of here and this image is completely heavy left I've got all this detail and bright area down here and then up here in the corner there's really not much and it just felt completely unbalanced and then it dawned on me wait I got a boat up there and one of my shots so I went back in and found the frame that had the boat and to me it balances this area very very nicely even though it's a much smaller thing it's bright enough and it's by itself enough that it provides a counterpoint so if you can think about areas in terms of heaviness that bottom looks heavy and dark and big on the right I need something to balance that oh yeah I see that yep I knew that I did that intentionally as usual so basics of exposure we're trying to figure out how much light is actually hitting the sensor and there are three things that are going to determine that and that's how we're going to determine what we are doing for our exposure first one if I'm going to pick one a shutter speed so how much shutter speed is going to determine in a water shot for example what this water looks like in some cases shutter speed doesn't really matter if there's nothing moving in the scene shutter speed can be one hundredth of a second or it can be ten second it's not gonna make any difference but when there's things moving it is going to make a difference on how it looks so for me when I took this shot the most important element was I wanted the correct texture in the water so I knew I wanted a certain shutter speed in the water itself so that became the primary driver of my exposure so I knew in this case I did some experimenting shot a quarter of a second a second it was about a half second was what I wanted from there since that was the most important thing now I can adjust my aperture and my ISO to the next two to make this exposure work with the shutter speed that I wanted to anchor with some cases though it's not the shutter speed you don't care the aperture becomes the most important thing for example I talked about the Sun star recently if you want that Sun star to come through when you're shooting directly into the Sun you need a nice small aperture f-22 is the best you can get it down to about f-16 then you start to lose the Crispus of the Sun star so in this case I knew the Sun was coming up through that little gap I wanted that Sun star I set my aperture to 22 and whatever else came came it turned out it was a pretty dark scene in this foreground right before the light came so I could get a fairly long exposure here I did have to put a filter on this to get the longer exposure so it's just a dark piece of glass over the lens that allowed the longer exposure and the ISO at this point I'm gonna keep at my absolute maximum quality which on my camera was iso 100 things changed a little bit when you want to shoot at night this is this spot that I was showing with the ephemeris where I'm still trying to get a good shot from right up in the top of this crater lake area but this will have to do for now when you're shooting these night images the sensors in these days of these cameras are amazing they pick up way more light than you can actually see bless you so this was ISO 3200 the new cameras can get there pretty easily with relatively little noise typically as you go up in ISO the noise goes up and that's kind of deaf if you're gonna print the picture big here on this website well that's actually pretty big web size on your computer not a big deal you want to print that 20 by 30 iso 3200 is gonna get fairly noisy but in this case I know I wanted as much light as I possibly could to hit the sensor I also knew that I could clean up the noise at ISO 3200 about well enough that I could maybe do a small print of it any higher than that's not going to work so my upper limits 3200 I know that I've got as much light into the sensor as I can is my goal so I open up my aperture all the way on this lens it was f 2.8 getting as much light in and I also know that the shutter speed is important here as well because anything more than about 30 seconds on a wide-angle lens these stars are gonna start to trail so I wanted to keep them nice and pinpointed so for a star shot that actually worked out pretty well now what would be the downside of that at F 2.8 none of this is gonna be in focus because I focused out here in infinity that's that very shallow depth of field so I had to shoot another another exposure for the land which I did before it got completely dark made sure this was all and focused and nice and clean and then shot the sky separately blended them together in Photoshop so general settings if you're gonna go out and go take some landscape pictures and you want to know just I'm a beginner and I just want to know a general idea where to start the first one be f-16 that's they used to say in photojournalism f/8 and B they're basically meant to set the camera to f/8 get the picture in landscapes it's f-16 which is a little bit smaller the reason for that is you want in most cases the image to be sharp from front to back all the way so f-16 gives you enough depth of field that almost the entire frame most cases will be in focus if you get really close to something you might need to go up to F 19 f-22 but if you do that you start to sacrifice a little bit in the in the fuzziness the lens has a thing called diffraction when you get down to the smallest apertures it doesn't stay sharp especially toward the corners so f-16 is kind of a nice compromise it gives you nice long depth of field for most images but it's still a nice quality sharpness for the lens iso 100 on my camera if you're using an older Nikon it's iso 200 is the base iso setting for your camera that's going to give you the least amount of noise and the highest quality typically whatever shutter speed that gives you unless you have a specific need for shutter speed you have things moving in the foreground you need to freeze you have water you want to have a specific look to that's gonna change the shutter speed these are the settings that I start out with and then I start to solve the problem from there lastly if I'm gonna be at f-16 and ISO 100 in most cases I'm shooting on the edges of light right because I'm shooting in the beginning of the sunset or the beginning of the sunrise there's not a whole lot of light out there god I had me on a tripod because your shutter speeds are gonna be way way longer than it would be to be safely hand-holding and keep it sharp throughout okay so we're out in the field now we want to set up the shot again this is Norway okay before you press the shutter what am I looking to do here what settings do I have to have on the camera to make sure that I get the best image if you're not sure who here shoots in RAW oh that's great okay forget the raw everybody knows to shoot in RAW way better than JPEG for landscape photography you got way more latitude when you're post-processing who shoots in manual mode okay good they put an asterisk next there I know one guy at teaches shooting in aperture mode because he sets at f-16 and then he gets whatever shutter speed he wants I typically like manual mode because I will be adjusting stuff around and I like to you know make a little bit more control of the thing but if you're not shooting in manual mode already you're gonna want to start shooting in manual mode you have way more control over the exposure LiveView for manual focus worked great until I switched to Nikon and their lives is terrible but typically you can get better focus if you get into your live view the screen on the back of your camera and you zoom in to ten times or whatever the point is that's the highest magnification you get into the spot you want to focus on and you do that manually you'll get much better critical focus than you do with the autofocus system especially as the light gets lower nikon doesn't work I have to autofocus for the first time so the live view is really really bad for some reason cameras great live use not so good sorry Nikon I'm probably gonna get never gonna get on our camera but d800e mirror lock-up again we talked about the cable release early on which is also the next thing we want to keep the camera absolutely still for two reasons one we don't want it shaking when we're taking the picture that's going to destroy the quality you just spent all this time and money to get to this spot and take this picture if you've got blurry pictures cuz you bump the camera that's going to be really unfortunate the other thing is a lot of times meet personally I blend exposures these days that seems to be the way to do it we'll talk about the other possibility here shortly but when I'm blending exposures it's critical the camera doesn't move if it moves and you've got this picture here and it's just ever so slightly off and you bumped it the pictures don't line up it's a lot harder to blend exposures and you got to go into Photoshop and try to line them up manually if you just keep your hands off the camera with the cable release the mirror lock-up just pops the mirror so there's no mirror slap when you're taking the picture you'll have the highest quality images the last thing especially when you're beginning is take your time get there as early as you can relax make sure you have everything set up find your composition so that when the light goes off you're shooting and you're ready to go and you've got everything set you not to think about all that stuff later on okay so this is the one I laughed I just put it through he's having a discussion with gentleman who doesn't like this but under and I understand why general idea for how to focus on a scene in landscape photography is you're gonna focus in close and if you have a a nice wide depth of field with that narrow aperture you know f-16 that we talked about the rest of its gonna be in focus but you need to be able to check that somehow so where do I start with the focus there are several different ways you can do it there's an app on your iPhone you can find out exactly where I can focus and get the whole screen and in play and you can change your aperture and focal length but as a general rule in this case a third of the way into the scene wouldn't really work but somewhere in this foreground area the lot more of the foreground is going to be critical than the background if you're in about a third of the way up the up the screen and I focus on this spot right here chances are this is going to be in focus still at f-16 and the rest of it will still be in focus the biggest thing though you've got to review that because the last thing you want is to have get this incredible scene you've just taken off 800 pictures and you get home and every single one of them has a blurry background and the shots read I've done it many times so after you shoot take a couple test shots you've gotten there early you've set up you shot I've made sure I got my focus where I wanted I play it back go zoom on in and go all the way around the image all the way into the corners from front to back and make sure that it's nice and in focus okay I've alluded to this a couple times but there are two alternatives for how to control your exposure you can bracket the exposure or you can use AG nd which is a graduated neutral filter so why do I need to do this if I shot this with my camera in the snapshot orientation which is what a lot of folks do you will see that the sky might be exposed correctly and the foreground is completely black the other alternative is I expose this foreground correctly and the sky is totally blown out if you look at people's snapshots that's the most common problem that they have well the reason is because your eye sees the scene beautifully but it sees 20 stops or so of exposure the camera is only going to see effectively five to eight depending on your camera there's no way to keep the information on the file all the way across unless you do one of two things I either use a graduated neutral density filter which is usually a square top half which is dark the bottom half is completely clear I can put it over this let's just assume that I'm looking through my camera here if I put the line of the neutral density filter right here this bright spot will come down two or three stops and I can expose correctly for this foreground still keeping the sky in check that's the way to do it in one image a lot of people like that if you want to go in the National Geographic you better start shooting with those because they won't accept blended images so that's the way to keep that scene in check works out great I can keep one image and take the whole shot how are you going to do that in this shot so if I put a graduated I got tons of light pouring through this cave if I put a graduated neutral density filter right across here there will be no detail oh this will be correctly exposed still but I'll lose this entire top of the frame that's why I bracket exposures because it works every time I can it doesn't matter what the situation is I can always come into Photoshop later combine the exposures and I'll show you how to do that quickly it's a whole art and take some time but keep practicing it and it allows me to make images that work in any situation so when we talk about how do i bracket pictures is it done with the aperture or the exposure and why so in this scene I definitely had to bracket I had this bright light coming in here and this area was still almost completely in shadow bracketing is done with your shutter speed reason being if I'm bracketing with my aperture I've got this shot set up let's say I start shooting at f-16 that keeps this sky nice and exposed but I need to brighten this up so I changed the aperture to f/8 then I go to f56 then I go to f/4 3 then I go to f28 to get my different exposures well if I'm at f28 this might be in focus because I just focused here this is completely gone it's totally out of focus because it's such a narrow depth of field so if I keep whatever I've decided that's gonna work for me in this case it was f-16 that's my go to aperture and then just change the shutter speed quicken the shutter speed up and that comes into focus lengthen it up to get this area still bright enough to work with okay the water is going to change a little bit the clouds might move but I can work with that at least the scenes all in focus hundred yep if you're in manual mode you won't need to use the plus or minus you'll just actually change the shutter speed but what the the plus or minus is exposure compensation so it depends on what mode you're in if you're an aperture priority mode that that will stay that f-16 will stay for you the options can stay and then when I plus or minus is going to change the shutter speed if you're in shutter speed priority mode and the shutter speed is gonna stay and it'll change the aperture so so I wouldn't use the plus or minus so what you're gonna do is you're gonna set your aperture and let's say I 16 works for that scene the whole thing's in focus and you're just gonna change your shutter speed so I take a shot let's go back here I would take this shot at ISO 100 nice base highest quality shot f-16 and let's say that to expose this correctly that took a second just just for easy numbers the rest this is totally dark then I'm going to take I shot at two seconds I'm gonna take another shot at four seconds I'm gonna take another shot at eight seconds moving up a stop each time now this is going to start to blow out but this area here will come into the correct exposure and then I'm going to blend them later on I don't use HDR manually blend well it is technically HDR but it's I'm not using HDR software I just manually blend and I'll show you how to do that no I use ISO 100 if I'm shooting that scene I want to keep the highest quality that I possibly can I got a tripod I don't care how long the shutter speed gets so I'm gonna keep the ISO where it is now in certain stoom you know circumstances I might need to change the ISO if I've got flour L actually here's a good example take lots of shots to blend the certain areas okay so I got to this scene thunderstorm in the North West rare thing I was freaking out a little bit I knew I wanted to get the lightning so I've got the longest exposure I can I got f-22 ISO 100 for the quality and I'm shooting about two seconds as long as I could get I hit and got a lightning you know pattern in one image now I got to shoot this foreground because two seconds it's blowing these flowers are all over the place so then I'm going to change things up a little bit I no longer care about making sure this is in focus I want to make sure this area is in focus so I can go a little bit narrow on my depth of field crank the ISO up to 400 800 still get good quality but I need to freeze these flowers so then I'm gonna take a lot of shots at about a 50th or 60th of a second thirtieth of a second hopefully you can get you know these flowers that are nice and still throughout but if you take enough shots chances are hey in this one frame these flowers might be in focus but these are moving around the next frame might be flipped if you got enough of them all the same settings you're just taking shots then you can blend them later on I can take this area of these flowers this area these flowers which were sharp and blend them in the same image you come in one frame where everything works throughout yeah yep that's it carefully as you can I mean you're playing with the camera for sure and that's why you want to spend $700 on a tripod because if you get it completely solid you can move stuff around without it bumping the camera too much it'll just stay pretty solid okay after I've taken the shot I need to review my histogram if you're not doing this already you're going to want to do it don't rely on your LCD on the back of your camera is everybody ready histogram before they know what they're looking at right here is anybody not cool oh we go moving forward I looted to this one so we'll go back again you want to check your focus make sure that the whole scenes in focus before you leave and preferably before you start shooting and in the heat of the battle you lose the moment it goes without saying it sounds like most of you are advanced here but as i zoom into this scene I think I shot this at 80 millimeter so the depth of field becomes much more challenging if I'm out wide at 16 millimeters I can easily get the whole scene at f-16 there was no way this was going to work at f-16 because I'm zoomed in so tight so this leaf I could focus on this background would be completely out of focus so I can either go to f-22 hope that makes it and in this case it didn't so I had to take two shots focus here then focus here and that was enough to get the whole scene in focus and then I can just blend it just like I did with the exposures you can also blend focal areas so I've got two shots here this backgrounds and focus and one the foregrounds and focus on the other and I just layered them off and ended up with one image no not not they're not cool I just I just don't keeping your situational awareness when you're out there shooting you know lights getting good you're in this fantastic location that you've probably spent a lot of time money to get try not to let your deal itself get so distracted that you don't pay attention to the fact that stuff could be happening around you in the sky or different areas that are spectacular I was shooting completely other direction with my buddy this is the same you know first photo trip that I ever took shooting this way where the Sun was setting which was a total dud not a cloud in the sky and I'm getting you know frustrated all of a sudden looked off to the right and saw that the sky was going crazy off on our side here ran down quickly found a composition that sort of works and took that shot so make sure that you still are paying attention to what's going on around you also you know if there's danger in the area you want to make sure you're paying attention to what's going on with the waves if you're shooting the lava where the lava is where the Bears are I I specifically did not polarize that because I wanted the reflection if you polarize it you can eliminate the reflection but in this case I wanted that on there okay so generally taking images from snapshots to landscapes we talked about a lot of the technical stuff but it's a general theory there's a raging debate do I do I go shoot icons if you're gonna get into this you know as a real passionate hobby people are gonna criticize you if all you do is go shoot the icons that everybody else is shot so this is the wave in Arizona and that shots been done 15 million times so in trying to do something maybe slightly different I mean I wanted to see the wave that's why I do this for fun is I want to go see these places that I see in everybody else's shots it's fantastic I hadn't really seen any of sunset because you got a hike five miles out or whatever it is so I waited to set my GPS and shot this a little bit later in the day hopefully got a little bit better lighting conditions then your typical person that goes up takes a snapshot the middle of day oh and the lights super harsh and hopefully it's a more pleasing shot yeah GPS and a headlamp so icons with a twist this is in the narrows in Zion great hike if you haven't done it oh man spectacular this huge thousand foot canyon wall with the river running down but everybody's got the same shot Jason's corner water comes around glowing walls that's great it's a nice shot I took the shot you know I'm there I might as well but while you're there you can also try to look for something that might be just a little bit different there's these national parks that I shoot in mostly our unbelievable amounts of beautiful scenery so do keep an eye on try to do something a little bit different after you bagged your icon shot sometimes you get somebody that changes the game a little bit in this case in the North West his name's Mark Adams if you haven't been to his website my opinion he's the best out there right now in landscape photography but he the poor guy has a problem and I'm guilty as anybody he goes and finds these spots that are unbelievable and then everybody else goes and shoots it this spot here I don't know if he's he's probably not the first person to ever discover this shot but he's certainly the guy that took this you know put this a shot of this area and famous so all the Pacific Northwest guys see this shot we all go scrambling now we want to see it for ourselves and take the same shot so the guy gets credit for me for doing most of the heavy lifting for the rest of us and he keeps going further into the field right now I think he's in the middle of the Yukon Territory you know so nobody can track him down but that's in the Columbia River Gorge in just outside Portland so if you're out on a vacation and you're thinking about hey I need to try to get a shot here what am I looking for that might make an interesting image that I can put on my wall start with an event in this case the pigeon point lighthouse once a year and they've stopped doing it unfortunately sorry you knocking about get this one for a while but once a year they change to the old 1800s lens that had all these beans that would come out and they have a lighting in the lens right at sunset and for photographers they very generously freeze it for five minutes and you got five minutes to try figure out how to make that exposure and then I tell you when you're doing 30-second explosion you don't have a lot of them so I was going totally crazy now what you don't see are the 300 other guys that are standing right here I was two hours of the clone stamp tool and actually call this shot Attack of the Clones stamp tool next thing you might want to look for is color particularly contrasting color so if you're out there and you can get the yellows and a blues to contrast if you just look at your in Photoshop look at the the the three different sliders we've got yellow blue and red and you know cayenne and then green and and magenta if you can find those contrasting colors and put them into one scene that creates a nice tension in an image I didn't did this was I really want to go back and shoot this again we've been talking this is I was still fairly new to photography when I went and shot the lava ocean entry but there's about 10 minutes when you can get this nice blue light it's still the before dawn and that lava just fires in too early and it's all black around it and it's hard to expose but there's about that 10-minute window if you need to shoot during the middle of the day you're with your family and they don't they're not going to give you supper time to go shoot around the edges of light if you got dramatic clouds try changing it to black and white black and white actually works really well with those dynamic contrasts so if you get the harsh light in the middle of the day you can change that to black and white darken it down and the shadows and bright and highlights up and you can still make a dynamic image what I'm usually looking for though when I take pictures is atmosphere I want this is a clearing storm right at sunset you get that great color and this is where I shoot during the day I just don't even bother I'll go Scout and I'll go look around but I'm not going to shoot unless that's the only chance that I have some guys are great guys and gals excuse me are great and making images during the middle of day I am NOT one of them when you're out there and you're taking pictures and you're just you know in the moment try to look for shapes that might come up in this case I call this for for obvious reasons but here I am at an event and I'm trying to figure out okay I want to there are 10 million rora images out there how can I make this just slightly different if you can find a shape that people recognize and it creates a highlight of interest in the image for the viewer you're gonna be ahead of the guy that was standing next to you that missed that shot that just got some green in the sky also our nature you want to look for patterns this case this is near the wave as well if you can get these sandstone patterns and then some nice shadows just something that's a little bit different a little bit more interesting than just looking at a general landscape can't talk about this picture I'm sorry I get in trouble but you want to be a spectacular place that was the for me when I started doing this I really didn't understand I sees people make these great shots and why is it that I can't go out and make the same shot and I started figuring out that it's not going to happen in my backyard some people are very good at taking abstract images and making them beautiful I'm not good at that so for me I need to be in a spectacular place it becomes much easier to get a good landscape shot if you're in a beautiful spot and you get the benefit of having to actually get to go and experience these things as well lastly though it all comes down to the light it's all about the light that's what makes photography so you want to try to find a time and a place where the light is stunning I didn't need a huge incredible sky for this the that late evening light with this particular place seemed to work out fairly well so how do i improve if you're like me constantly trying to figure out what I can do to make myself a little bit better first thing your did brilliant that they have this here I wish we had in Portland the fact that you can come here and enjoy yourself by the way if you're bored you can leave but I'm not paying for your parking because it's expensive and I'm not refunding your tuition that you pay to come here but this is a great environment for you to come in and listen to different people find out what they do you might only pick up one or two things but hey those one or two things help your photography it's great workshops I I've taken three and they were they were great especially when I first started so if you want to get in touch with me I'll put my website email address up there if you want to get in touch with me for recommendations on who to take workshops from I know some some folks in various parts of the country I'm happy to share that information if you're going to do a workshop definitely take the time to find out is it a photo tour where they're gonna take you to cool locations but not really help you with how to take the picture or is it a photo workshop where they're going to take you and still work with you on hey how do I get this image to look really nice some people just want the tour other people really want to learn more tutorial books this is the best book I've ever read by a wide margin mountain trail trail photo team they don't even exist anymore but the book is still available I think it's still on Amazon mark Adam is the guy I mentioned Ian Plante who's become a friend of mine wrote it with some other guys and it's a fantastic fantastic book takes you through the basics but man even just to buy it for the pictures that are in there there's stunning ebooks are becoming more and more prevalent the best I've seen is by Ian I've got his website coming up too so you can write that down they're cheap although he just wrote kind of the manifesto about composition which blew everything that I just said out of the water so but they're they're inexpensive they're easy to get you can read them on your computer and really good information there perhaps the most important thing that you can do is actively look at a lot of shots both your own shots and other people's shots I spent a lot of time online looking at places that have photos and looking at the images and figuring out the ones that speak to me why why do they speak to me what is it about this picture that I like can I figure out what that is so that when I go out and shoot I do the things that make that same thing happen or hey this picture doesn't work for me usually it's my own why not what did I do wrong what can I do the next time with I'm out in the field and improve on that participated in photo critique if you get gutsy and you want to join a website like NPN or 1x you can post your pictures up there and get some pretty harsh critique on your work at 1x you have to actually get your pictures accepted into NPN you can post them up there and as you get better you'll get more and more critique but they're harsh and it's a great way to learn if you're on Flickr there's no critique on Flickr it's great shot super light you know it's just you can post anything and people gonna say the same thing so if you're looking for critique that's not the spot practice as much as you can getting out and shooting getting your I used to what you're looking for so that especially determining composition boom I sit down I've got a composition I can shoot away the other thing on that is then I can stop worrying about what the settings on my camera are I don't have to look at my camera I don't have to think about what I'm doing I can change stuff without even thinking just by practicing you can even do that in your house or your apartment taking pictures of plants changing your set or speed getting used to manipulating the camera so that becomes second nature last thing for me I do a lot of Photoshop some people hate Photoshop I happen to enjoy it for me it's a I'm not the best at any other form of art so I get to go and be you know creative in Photoshop so if you want to have that type of an image then you need to learn Photoshop as best you can and learn how to process and the last thing is you got to be careful because nature photography in particular everybody you'll find yourself if you really get into this you want to top the guy that just shot the last image and to do that there's a lot of people out there shooting nature photography so you're gonna have to take it to the next level and get out there a little bit more on the edge and in this case this was literally on the edge this underneath was there was nothing the waves were crashing Bruce was I figured if Bruce started running I'd start running he didn't run so I hung out but do be careful please don't kill yourself out there get swallowed up by a wave pay attention your surroundings there's not a shot out there that's worth dying for okay so we'll talk about processing and then I'll get in and do some photoshop I'm not terribly good at it but I can show you maybe something that might resonate with you a little bit so some tools and references for your Photoshop needs first thing is man I found that I found a muse this kid Ryan Dyer happens to live out in the northwest he's a punk rocky guy the last guy that you would think I'd be friends with he's a great kid and I really enjoyed his time he is a genius and he was kind enough to sort of take me under his wing early on and I learned so much that way if you can attach yourself to somebody it's really good and spend time out there in the field with them and learn that's the quickest way to get better if you can't do that there are some resources ian has the ebooks I talked about he also has a processing video that's great Ryan and I are going to do a processing video at some point but we keep on getting the giggles and we can't finish it so we'll we'll get to that eventually but Ian's got went up right now that shows a lot of great information you can take your time with it I think it's 40 bucks or something as ebooks or ten bucks a piece whatever it is but it's a good way to get information and learn quickly the guru of all things Photoshop is Tony Kuiper and if you want to get serious about your processing this is the guy that has the information he has a bunch of actions that he's built that you then load into Photoshop and I think they're 40 bucks as well it's everybody that's doing an advanced level of Photoshop is using Tony's actions he's a total genius he also has tutorials on how to use the actions I warn you I got to read them four or five times to get it it's very advanced and very good information but just keep at it it's it critical if you're gonna do the type of processing I like to do if you're if you want to do everything in camera not that big of a deal but for me it's been very helpful I use Adobe cs6 you can use any of the photoshop's elements I don't work with much but I like to use layers and blending but any of the you know cs4 or 5/6 are great how many people use Lightroom cool I don't know how to use Lightroom I use Adobe Camera Raw but the thing to remember is if you're using Lightroom a lot of people process totally in Lightroom and that's fine the engine is the same in the developer so if you're using Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom when you process the images they're all this it's doing the same thing the difference in most of it is the presentation and Lightroom is a lot more organized you can use either though and yeah absolutely the the the engines were had a processor are exactly the same so you can get the same effects out of Camera Raw you can't with Lightroom I use couple filters in Nik color effects Pro it's not you know required there was a couple things in there I really like it's just a recommendation for something to look at I haven't tried that yet I heard it's very nice bringing in the yeah yeah that's good I'll have to try it I haven't haven't played with that perfect resize seven if you are trying to make big prints I've changed from the Canon 5d to songket one got the 5d three changed the nikon d800 so i got a 36 megapixel file that's great if I'm gonna make a 20 by 30 if you're shooting with something that maybe has a little bit less megapixels and you want to still make a big print out of it you get the shot of your life there's a thing called perfect resize which blows it up bigger and keeps the pickles in place not a required item by any stretch but if you're gonna make big prints it's not a bad thing to look at photo kits sharpener to sharpening is a hold I could spend two hours on sharpen actually I could because I don't know anything but the people that know about sharpening could easily spend two hours on sharpening I use this for print sharpening I use Tony's actions for web sharpening real easy to do but you'll definitely want something to help you learn how to sharpen or just do some research online lastly I use these guys in Portland it's not they're great it's a recommendation for them but the point is find a lab if you're going to make a lot of prints that you can work with that will help you determine how to get the very most out of your file for me it works better to have a local now there are some great ones online Mpix and West Coast imaging of various price levels that can help you take your your final product to a nice wall size print that you're happy to hang on your wall so this is the image I'm going to basically process quickly it took me about three hours to do I slow but I'll show you the basic idea of how I got to this final shot it won't look exactly like this but the idea will be the same and you can see some of the techniques that I use to process if you want to contact me and you've been in the class here I am happy to answer any questions when I you know we have more time and I can sit down and write you there's my website and my email on the bottom just mention that you were here at the class and any questions you have I'd be happy to start a dialogue when I'm not flying somewhere but you know let's keep keep that handy and if you come up with anything just let me know ok so here I am in bridge which comes with Photoshop and these are my images that I took of this scene that I'm gonna then process and I'll show you why I blended them so I'm going to open them up with Photoshop and I get into Camera Raw if you're a Lightroom user the developer settings over here on the right should look familiar to you because they're the exact same okay so very quickly I'm going to select all these images and do a couple of things first and foremost so I select all make sure they're all highlighted on the left over here on the tabs over basic okay if I go to these lens correction functions the first thing I do is enable the lens correction profile and you can see it changes a little bit of the distortion and gets rid of some of the natural of and getting of the lens then it is color tab remove chromatic aberrations and what those are if you see if I can zoom in and show you real quick this is cs6 yep okay and if I go over here you want to get rid of this right now because later on it's a total pain to get rid of but if I don't have that selected you can see very faintly this green line it's just a natural flaw in the lens but the software's gotten very good at one click boom it knows what lens I'm using it gets rid of it and you want to do it now if you forget now and you're in Photoshop good luck I don't know I'm not sure see I know cs4 five and six have them those are the ones I'm familiar with I don't know if C elements does yeah am i what yes I am on a Mac in image capture in the bridge so bridge has the image capture and that's how I bring him in okay so I'm back to screen size I've selected all the images and basically I'm trying to get a feel in this basic developing area here of I'll just start kind of top to bottom and show you the ones that I use first one typically especially in Canon I find I like my images warmer then they come out of the file and in the auto white balance which is what I shoot it I don't because I know I'm gonna fix it in raw later and I like them a little more magenta so I'm gonna warm it up and add a little bit of color into the sky not too much but just something along those lines that gets me into an image that's you know not if you look back at the old one that's much cooler brings in a little bit more magenta a little bit warmer just personal preference okay again selecting all exposure I'm not going to play with here because I've got several different exposures so if I start changing exposure of everything it's not going to work what I might do is focus on the area of the image that this frame is going to be so in this case down here in this land file I know I'm not going to use this for the flowers right because they're all blurry I know I'm not gonna use it for the sky because it's totally blown out but that Sun star looks pretty sweet down there on the bottom and I kind of want to keep that so I'll use that section this section is blowing out in the sky so I'm going to be using this sky file this wouldn't work but again because I was shooting can at the time if I get into 100% here and look into the sky look at the shadows this is why I switched right here this is at ISO 100 okay now you can't see too well on this but even at ISO 100 these shadow areas got really noisy and I can fix that in Photoshop you can take out noise but when you do you start to lose quality and sharpness so rather than lose quality and sharpness in this file I'm just going to take a little bit better exposure of these shadows and darken it down so now I've just clicked on this one file okay and I'm going to darken it down with the exposure to sort of match this top file what I'm gonna use as my sky file I want to get fairly close now you look at the clouds have moved right I'll show you how to fix that here in a second so this probably has to come down a little bit more I don't want it too dark but I want to get it down to about that area and it'll be a lot less noisy this way if you have something that's got a brighter exposure and you bring it down then try to bring the shadows back out shadow recovery is death for noise when I get down here to the flowers this looks like it might be if i zoom in a nice sharp flower shot so those look pretty nice and sharp so I'll probably using this for my my foreground but here I am I'm at ISO 100 and f/8 because I needed the 190th to freeze of flowers what f/8 look how soft this gets in here that's not gonna work if I blow it up 20 by 30 so I know that hey these foreground flowers are nice and sharp looking good here mid grounds not so hot so I'm gonna have to take a different mid ground file and blend that in and remember back up here when I said I liked that Sun star this I shot at f-22 so I know if i zoom in flowers don't work here right they're all blurry but the mid-ground area is looking pretty good this all looks sharp if I look at this barn its sharp all the way through no not that I know of not that I know of I'd assume into a hundred percent and scan around till I find out what's sharp I'm gonna keep going here and I'll try to get to your questions but I want to keep it rolling yeah okay so here I am I've got several images that I'm going to be blending and I played with the exposure on one or two of them most of these are looking pretty good clarity is a nice little slider if you want to sharpen up your image I don't play with it much because I tend to do that in Photoshop but a lot of people give it a little bit of a pop in clarity okay and vibrance and saturation a lot of people play with this too and get your colors down for me I like to do that in Photoshop as well so at this point I'm done except for one thing over here in the noise and sharpening area okay you want to pre sharpen these shots but when you take a picture in raw there's no sharpening applied the JPEGs will be sharp in a little bit in RAW there's no sharpening so effectively what I'm doing by pre sharpening here is bringing it back to the natural state of the file of a sharpness and I tend to go to about you know 60% 65% on this sharpening amount leaving the radius in detail where it is that gets me started on a crisp file but this is not the final sharpening I'm gonna do it just gets rid of the camera softness so if i zoom in to 100% I can keep this sharp if I had gotten rid of it here the preview you see it's just sharpening up a little bit I don't know how I you can see it on these screens but just sharpening up a little bit yeah that's that was a good one okay if I was going to do noise reduction a lot of people started asking about what's the best noise tool and there's noise Ninja and there's define and topaz tools has a noise reduction if you have Adobe Photoshop cs5 or 6 they've changed the noise reduction I in my opinion it's the best in the business so if I do noise reduction I'd do it right here so if I was going to play with this top file there's no not much noise in this image because I shot at ISO 100 and was fairly well exposed but in this top image up in the top part of the of the screen if I was going to play with this noise I'd do it right now so start with the color noise maybe you know this is again we're just playing with sliders here to try to get it a little bit a little bit of noise reduction in there I'm not gonna spend a lot of time making this fancy here in the interest of time but getting rid of the noise now softens the image down a little bit but we're in the clouds and they're moving anyway so it's probably not gonna be that big of a deal so at this point selecting all my images I'm going to open them up into Photoshop yes you were shooting all of these images you were on a tripod yes before you're keeping your aperture standard yes it's okay sorry keep going yep I know correct good question it is and I'll explain why right now at f-22 or f-16 when I shot off 22 for the sun.star that would have been great to keep this whole thing in death field had about a 30 mile an hour wind so at f-22 I got my ISO to about 800 which is as high as I wanted to go because he get above that you start getting noise and the quality starts to decrease I was only getting you know maybe a second for my exposure that's not fast enough to freeze the to freeze the flowers so at that point I've got to change something I've either got to change my shutter speed which I can do and make it darker but if I make it too dark it's good to bring the shadows up I get a lot of noise I can change my ISO to make it faster and get up to ISO 3200 that would fry frieze of flowers but then they'd be super noisy so what I can do is change that f-stop so I was using f/8 for the flower shots knowing that okay remember when I showed you hey these flowers are sharp but it's it's the whole depth of field is gone that's why because at f/8 I was able to freeze the flowers I got to a 90th of a second at ISO 400 or 800 at f/8 that was enough to freeze the flowers by doing that I've sacrificed that depth of field and so now I've got to go back in and say all right well I better make sure that I take a shot that the rest of that's in focus oh good good good catch I should have brought that out a little more clearly okay so now I've got my my exposures up here in Photoshop and I'm just gonna start showing you how I blend things that was the sky file and I want to find the other sky file that had the a dark area sorry I'm not used to working on a laptop here there it is okay so this is the main sky file that I'm gonna use but I do want to blend in these clouds because they're less noisy so if I take this first file and I go up here to select all I get the marching ants so I've selected that frame and I'm going to copy that I can either go up here to edit copy or I know that it's command C on a Mac copies it into a scratch pad and then I just want to paste it on top of this image that I'm going to blend it to I go to command V and it pops it into the layers tablet here okay so that the other way to do that would be edit paste by the way if you're not familiar with layers this is going to be pretty far over your head you're gonna want to get a a processing video somebody that has put out a video that takes there and you can rewind and do this but I'm down to 40 minutes left of time so I'm gonna try to just do this in a quick overview and and we'll see how we do so I've taken all I've done now is I've got in the layers palette here I've got the two images one on top of each other okay if I turn off the eyeball on the top one here I can see the image underneath so that's all I've done is layered these two images on top of each other in layers I can very simply reveal what's below it that's the beauty and the power of layers if I put this little washing-machine symbol here in the bottom press on that I get what's called a layer mask on top of that and it's all white if I change that layer mask to black I'll go command I which inverts it again that's you'll be able to see that now I'm looking directly through the layer by making it black okay so white conceals black reveals so I can toggle that back and forth but I want to just take a certain section of this bottom image I just want to use this up in the clouds here I don't want the whole thing so if I paint some black on to this white mask let's see what happens use the paintbrush tool which is here I can use B for brush okay and up in here are the selections I can use an opacity of a hundred percent or less the passage just means that how much of the brush is active a hundred percent of the brush or no percent I can change the brush size and on this I got the mass selected here I'm just gonna paint right over the top and nothing's happening now why is that I got a white mask and I got a white brush okay so if I hit X I change the brush to black now if I paint across I can see it start to come in underneath okay and if i zoom in again these it takes a while learn Photoshop but if i zoom in you can see that there is the rest of the sky changing there so I've just painted in this section of the sky and now I've got a lot less noise in that corner you can also adjust the hardness of your brush I like to keep a nice soft brush when I'm blending it just keeps things looking a little bit more natural and to me right there that looks natural but I've also gotten rid of that noisy area with a different exposure no I just got the one Sun right here okay so at this point there's most people say they want to keep all their layers intact I flatten I'm just a flattening kind of guy but if you a lot of people don't flat I'm confident enough in myself that I am NOT going backwards so at this point I'm done with this image right I've now combined it to this image so I'm gonna close that out don't save it don't care anymore and now yeah I don't play with those much either so now I'm gonna do my mid-ground and the reason I'm doing the mid-ground here is it's got the bottom of this Sun star that I really like leaking out into this area here okay this works too but this is completely dark under there so what I'm going to do is combine these two together so that I've got this mid ground underneath this Sun and I still have some nice detail in there so if I take this image I do the same thing I go select all I'm gonna copy it by going command C I'm gonna paste it on top of this layer command V and now I've got my two layers here and in the interest of time I'm gonna do this quickly normally I take a long time blending and making sure lines up perfectly but I select my little washing machine again and I can just brush this thing straight across a hundred percent opacity and Wham I know I'm not gonna use this foreground so I don't care because this is not working I can get in nice and close here and I can lower the opacity now at 100% opacity when I do one brushstroke the whole thing goes and if I want to delete that there's a couple ways to do that but control Z works so history is where I'm in right now I can go back to that brush tool if I lower the opacity a little bit down to 20 30 percent and I brush along I'm just doing that in increments does anybody use a tablet besides me yeah tablets are and tablets are great I'm just doing with the pad yeah it's hard to do so general quick thing because I want to show you some of the tips that you might not find somewhere else this this information is available a lot of different places how to blend images okay so there's a very very quick blend of the mid-ground and the sky and that's looking fairly close to what I want I'm gonna flatten again because I'm a flattening kind of guy and my computer's really slow at home getting rid of that and then we're just gonna find some nice foreground flowers make sure these are in focus that looks pretty good so I'm going to take these flowers and do the exact same thing onto this file so I go select all command C command V on top of this again my washing machine okay and this is going to be my foreground so if I take my brush tool make it nice and big and just paint over this I'm going to go back to 100% opacity at this point because I want the whole thing across okay so now I've got the beginnings of an image I've just taken three exposures or four exposures and blended them together so that if you look at this the dynamic range appears to be all there I've got information on this one thing now I can play with this file so I've got and normally like I said I would take a lot longer with this and make sure it's really pretty and all the sections are working I'm going to close the rest of these now just for simplicity I'm only gonna work on this one file okay so this would have been another area probably not going to bother interest of time that was our last one that we had just played with okay so I'm down to my my one file for a lot of folks that like the photorealistic look this next step you'll probably want to ignore if you like the more painterly feel and that kind of glowy feel especially when you're looking into the light that light tends to glow sometimes this is a technique that is called the Orton effect Orton Oh arty oh something and so the first way to do it is I take my background and I'm gonna just duplicate it because if I do stuff on this background layer then I can't mask it into various places and it becomes very hard to get rid of later so I want to do stuff that I'm going to be changing the image on a separate layer that I can get rid of if I goof it up so command J just made a duplicate layer right here so I have the background layer one it's the exact same thing if I turn off the eyeball on the top layer you'll see nothing's changed then I'm going to go up here to my filter setting go to blur Gaussian blur and you can see that the whole image just got completely blurry I've got a radius of 26 it doesn't really matter I'm gonna fine-tune it later but in that 25 to 30 range and hit OK well my whole image is fuzzy that's not gonna work taking the opacity of the layer itself I can lower that down and as I do you can see that the blur starts to go away a little bit if I go to 0 the opacity of the layer is nothing so that there's not none of the effect if I go to hundreds the full effect I'm gonna come down to somewhere where it looks glowy but not too ridiculous usually you're about 15% or so seems to work so now I've got a little bit of softness in the image and this is really soft because it's on this screen but a little bit of softness in the image but it's not totally crazy and I am gonna come back and sharpen it up a little bit more so you maybe leave it a little bit softer than you might normally this is a Ryan Dyer ISM that I will share with you here on that same layer so I'm still playing with this same blurred layer if I go in here to image and adjustments brightness and contrast I tend to crank the contrast all the way up and bring just a little bit of brightness back into the image and that tends to sort of give me a nice final setting for the glow that I want and if I'm looking now and zooming in a little bit and I turn off the layer below that's just what it looked like before sharp and crisp and it's got that if you look around the Sun particularly just got a little bit of a soft glow to it on top of that just a brightness just a smidge of brightness yep okay so Nik software oops demo we don't want to buy it filter that I play with in here is called tonal contrast and if you crank this up I can show you what the effect looks like a little bit easier it just gives you a super contrast II and crisp image is very similar the clarity slider when you're a camera raw but I'm not gonna do that at 75% oops I'm going to do that at 10% 10% all the way down and hit OK and again these settings are just they work pretty well I usually use basically the same settings every time so now if i zoom in turn off the contrast total contrast you can see what it does to that glow it brings some of the Christmas back but it leaves a little bit of the halo glow around the Sun so that's just a technique that I use and it again if that's too strong I can go into this opacity of the layer turn it down turn it back up to suit so it's all to taste at this point you now you're being an artist you're just trying to figure out what looks best to your eye so I'll bring in a little bit of that contrast so it's crisp and nice and if I check it it you know 100% which I can't see on this small screen but again my blends got some goofs in there that I would have fixed but that gives you an idea if I turn that off and turn the glow off this is what I started with it's just got a little bit more a glow around the flower and around the Sun okay so next thing I'm going to do is quickly introduce you to remember I talked about Tony Kuiper and his actions and this is where I do 90% of my processing is in this action tab that you get from Tony you download and here it is on your screen a lot of this stuff triple play is is very complicated but if you spend the time in the tutorial you can actually learn quite a bit what this does is really crisp up the image it's a lot like that tonal contrast but in a more controlled setting it doesn't work well on this particular shot but if you're shooting sand stone or something you'll want to play with all that stuff the big thing is is anybody here familiar with luminosity masks okay just to just one or two so I'm gonna introduce you to what the concept of that is and it's the most powerful thing you can probably do with Photoshop if you take away one thing from this it might be hey I'm gonna go learn what luminosity masks are if you want to learn how to process a little bit better so I'm just going to give you the quick and dirty you can flatten or you can make it a little flat layer which is shift option command in shift option command II gives you this layer 2 which is just a flattened layer but you're keeping the layers below it personally I don't care so I'm gonna flatten but for you that you like to keep that the layers open which most people do you're you're in the majority I'm gonna flatten fur to make it easier okay so luminosity masks all we're doing when we mask an image if I take this this area here I'm gonna make a copy of the layer so I'm playing around on a layer that I can then delete and I'm just going to make a selection with this little selection tool here let's say I wanted to make this selection around the Sun and I've got the marching ants all a selection does is means that if I make a change this image it's only going to apply to the area that's selected so if I go down here and I put in a new layer of brightness and contrast and I move this down it's only going to be in that section so what this allows you to do is target areas that you want to change something and without changing the whole image okay what a luminosity mask is is a selection not based on where I draw my lines around the image but based on a certain level of brightness and that allows you to control things very finely without having to make a very complicated selection because if I wanted to select let's say the areas of this Sun star and I wanted to do it manually I'd be in here for hours drawing this little line in here and then trying to mask it out and get it nice and close it's an almost impossible to do if I go in here and load these luminosity masks already I'm just gonna load up all the masks here just by pressing this all masks button and again tony's tony's website gives you the tutorials when you buy this stuff then i go down here to the chin i was in layers i went here to channels now every time that you open the image you're gonna have the RGB red green and blue these are just the channels that you're presented with these luminosity masks and layers are all loaded up here under different brightnesses and if i click it I can see what will be selected if I was to make this as a selection so if I activated these expanded lights everything that is bright and white is going to be selected everything that's black is going to be not selected everything that's gray is gonna be somewhat selected and nice and feathered and a nice nice way to do selections if I go down to bright lights I can see that there's a lot more constricted and just this area would be selected but again feathered in none of this would be selected so you got to choose what it is that you want to play with when you're gonna make these selections and I'll show you sort of an example so if I go to light lights okay this is the selection that I'm going to load up so to load it I can just drag it down to this little circle on the bottom and release it and now you can see you got some marching ants around this area now you know they're not really showing you anything because not everything's going to be marching ants out that you want to do so I can hide those by going command H or I'll just leave them up so you can sort of get a feel for what it was that I was changing now if I go back to my layers I got my selection still okay that's just the lights areas that's the luminosity that I'm choosing I go down here and make another selection again you can do it here or up here either way is fine although it sounds like there might be some differences that I'm not familiar with and let's say I go to a levels layer and now it comes up in red which just shows you again what stuff is selected just click on the mask once and you can get rid of it now if I make a change you can see that remember when I did the mask before was all white or all black because I had nothing selected well now it's done this beautiful little selection of just the area that I want to change the gray is yes that's why it's feathered some of its you know just you know barely catch the edges of the adjustment and somes not so if I make a brightness adjustment the only areas that are being adjusted are the areas that were masked out okay so if keep an eye on the trees here right these are the darkest areas the image I didn't select those I just selected the brighter luminosity for the mask if I make a change the trees don't change at all so what's that because it wasn't part of the selection because not part of the bright the lights that I did I selected some of them did not as much if you look at the look at the huge changes that are made in the Sun area okay so as I as I move this around watch the changes in the Sun big changes but the flowers some of that is and you can see it here in the mask just barely some of that is selected because that is the same this brightness level may be the same as this brightness level may be the same as this brightness level so all you're doing is making a selection of that brightness level wherever it is in the image is what's going to adjust you sure can you could do it two ways first I can click on the mask itself okay so I've just selected this mask and if I want to only let's say I only wanted to do that selection in the sky so I've made a big selection here I can make it a little bit more dramatic okay I brought let's say I brought this all the way up but I didn't like what it did to the flowers I want to get rid of that so if I take my my brush tool and again a black means that it's not affecting the image so I've got my black brush selected right here and I paint it back over at 100% opacity painted over this flower area you'll see the effect go away okay so I can mask it out that way no well I don't I don't think he can use layers in Lightroom I haven't I don't play with Lightroom but usually this is just a layers thing I know I know his actions are only for Photoshop so that's the way and now you can see the effect is only in the sky if I turn that layer on and off okay next thing I will try to do quickly color work people play with colors in a lot of different ways and Tony's got some great stuff here that are vibrance and saturation masks which do the same kind of thing as the luminosity but just for color so it's only going to select certain areas of color and those are fun to play with but what I do is very simple and I start with down here making a Selective color layer okay and then that brings up the colors that I can play with and then different slider adjustments I start with the gray because the neutrals that's the one that makes the most change and with these color sliders I can play with things to get the color to suit so I'll maybe make some changes here dark it down once I've got the neutral done now I can change it right here and go back up to Red's and play with everything on the same layer if I want the problem with that is let's say I get down here and I find that the Reds work pretty well but now I don't like what the neutrals we're doing I wanted to go back I can't really do that so what I actually do is make a new layer for every color so another selective color layer I'll play with the Reds then another one I'll go with the yellows here okay and you can make some changes there notice that the yellows affect the Greens by the way if you see where that is so keep that in mind if you want to play with your greens you want to actually be in the yellow slider okay so I'm just playing with this quickly another selective color layer I'll come down to the greens it I'm three hours in Photoshop for every shot I just like Photoshop I like to play with it and see what I can do there's a lot faster ways that are you know perfectly great and you you don't have to play with it nearly as much I like to make mine look a little bit more painterly so magentas will target you know mostly the flowers there I can brighten those up if I want I'm gonna finish this pretty quickly because there's a couple things I want to show you and then take some questions okay so at any rate that's starting to look color wise where I want it I would flatten or not this is one of the cooler things that Ryan again showed me if you want to play artsy fartsy there is a temptation if you're looking at the Sun you know you got to squint and it looks very bright and glowy out on the edge and you can see here there's a little bit of that glow that just falls in this area just there on the sun.star but for me i kind of like to make that area expand so what I want to do is paint some of that color and warmth into the image where it would naturally be falling I'm not gonna paint it over here because that shadow wouldn't be naturally highlighted by the Sun but I want to create that effect myself in Photoshop using Toni's actions I can load up a Dodge burn layer here and Dodge and burn you know his should be familiar to all of us he puts it on this nice grey layer okay and then I'm just going to go over here to my color picker so I'm in this square here where I set the foreground color select that and then that opens up this nice little eyedropper and I'm gonna pick a nice warm color that's in the Sun set already and wear this little circle is is the color that it's selected you can see the new versus the current if I go up toward the top I want it to be a little bit brighter I want that nice warm bright light but I want to now same warm color palette that the Sun stars in so just a little bit brighter toward the top and select okay now I've got that color loaded onto this brush that I'm about to use now if I did 100% opacity that looks a little strange okay so I'm gonna command Z delete that I bring the opacity down about 25% and then I start painting in this is where a tablet is great just start painting it in a little bit right around the Sun and as I go out further I'm gonna make the effect less and less so right around the Sun I'll drop this on several times and then down in this warm field down here I want some of that warm light may be picking up into the trees a little bit into this area where the Sun would naturally be falling based on this shot and I can get this effect again toward the Sun more of the effect as it spreads out a little bit less the effect just to pop here and around the trees get that nice warm glowy light people go crazy for this by the way it's it's Ryan's technique that you taught me and it's one that we we don't let out too much although if we make the video we're going to but if you play that's why you're here so if I turn that off you can see the difference in the image okay and again I can go to the opacity of the layer lower that down and get lesser more of the effect a little bit of a heads up it becomes quick that you run out of the effect I'm right on the Sun now I'm pressing pressing pressing I'm not getting anymore the effect of it I want more in that area right around the Sun because to me this is too harsh of a contrast the area I want it to look like I'm looking right into the Sun it's bright and it's blinding load up another dodge burn layer and do it again but just in this area so now I can do it here you know again feathering it out a little bit manually but right around and if I want to do it again load up another Dodge burn layer okay so if I back out if I turn all that off I've turn all these layers off that's what we started with and that's what we have now again I would spend a lot more time with this making sure that the Flair isn't there that there's a little flair there I'd get rid of that but and make sure that it's just a nice warm expanding light where it's really intense in the beginning and then it just fades out but if you play with that technique a little bit it's just kind of fun same technique slightly different application this looks ugly to me I don't know about you this brown area unfortunately I don't have any grass around these flowers I want to grass around the flowers so let's make some grass around the flowers here okay same exact idea okay I'm gonna I'm going to put a Dodge burn layer but I don't want to just color it in I want to select the area that it goes in so I don't hit the flowers if I select a color range okay and I put this picker down here what this is basically telling me is the stuff that's white is what's selected so it's just gonna be that color well that's not going to quite get it done because I've got some behind it that I need to include so if I change the fuzziness up a little bit more now you can see I'm starting to get the area around the back I'm also getting some of the flowers but or the the interior leaves but none of the flowers themselves so they're protected so I might do this a little bit more I'm gonna make that okay and there's my selection the stuff that's in the marching ants that gets confusing if I go command H you know this is new so I the extras command H the ant the ants are still there they're just hidden from view now I'm gonna do the exact same thing I'm gonna go to my dodge burn layer I'm gonna change my color picker though because now I want this green color okay I want to bring that into the foreground so I'm gonna bring that green color by clicking on it and I might brighten it up just a little bit hit OK now if I take my brush I'm going to bring the opacity up a little bit more because I want more pronounced effect so you can see it start painting in okay that's too dark and it's not green enough so let's go a little bit brighter maybe bring this a little bit more green okay try it again it's still too dark brighter I'm trying to match that color that's way too much but for now watch this we'll just kind of paint it in here and then if I take the opacity of the layer down okay so this is super fast and dirty cuz I'm running out of time but there's the before there's the after you can see though if you change you play with that color you can paint it in there and get you can change that make it nice and pretty last thing I want to show you and then I'll take some questions before we get in the coolest thing if you're going to put stuff up on the web one of the things that you can do to make it really pop is make it nice and crisp and sharp without losing some of that nice glow so there's lots of different ways to sharp and I think Tony's is far and away the best if i zoom into a hundred percent it's too big for the screen but you'll see that it looks nice and and pretty but it's not terribly crisp over here he's got this web sharpening thing that I love to death you just select the size that you want so I'm gonna say a thousand pixels and then WHAM here it comes and there's a hundred percent and I don't know if you can tell how sharp and crisp that is but there's the before there's the after now if it's too much that's probably a little too much for this image cuz I want to solve I can lower these adjustment layers down but he does all the work for you you gets all these layers in there and you can mix and play but if you're gonna get Tony stuff and play with it that sharpen for web is awesome really really great tool anyway I'm I want to leave enough time for questions so I'm sorry that was super quick and dirty on the Photoshop but there's maybe one or two tips that you might be able to take with you if you get confused or lost and want to get more in depth feel free to email me we can talk about it in for the detail yeah do you have a full-frame camera do you have a 5e - or what are you shooting right D 30 so you so you got a crop sensor the can intended 10 to 20 - I think is a nice wide angle lens and Canon makes one Sigma makes one but I think the Canon one is better so that Canon it's either 10 to 22 or 10 to 20 is is the one that I would recommend for for the crop sensor camera if you have a full-frame camera the 16 to 35 - is I think a great Canon lens the sun.star is fantastic as you can see here that's what I was using for this shot your that they are zoom they're 10 to 20 yeah you know some people love the primes and the primes are better quality but I like the flexibility having a little bit of zoom the the Holy Trinity for Canon is for for full-frame the 16 to 35 - and the 24 to 70 and they just came out with 2472 which'll the budgets a little high but the original 2470 was great and then the 70 to 204 landscapes I like the f4 was fine for me non image stabilized because I'm on a tripod it's a cheap lens a great lens super sharp but it's those three three lenses in is basically what most people carry for landscapes for the city for the wide-angle that's where I would start the 1635 - works pretty well the nikon 14 to 24 is even sharper and they make an adapter some people are using that nikon on the canon bodies sure 14 to 24 and then the 2470 and the 70-200 it's that's exactly what I have same thing I used the really right stuff BH 55 so it's a ball head and it's got a little bit of a plate on the top and then I've got a an L bracket that I use on the camera itself so that it slides in the ball and I can quickly switch from vertical to horizontal without having to move the tripod way over it's fairly stable that way hey thank you so much for coming and indulging me very soon for more information please visit us online give us a call or stop by our New York City super store you can also connect with us on the web [Applause]

Channel: B&H Photo Video

Views: 128,520

Keywords: bh photo, bh, B&H, miles morgan, beyond the snapshot, pro audio, video, BH Photo, BH Photo Video, event space, photo, bhvideos

Id: ZcgdzSSiOGI

Length: 110min 55sec (6655 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 27 2012