Charlotte Bellamy: The Art of Intentional Camera Movement

[Music] hello everyone and welcome to another she clicks webinar tonight as you know we're hearing from charlotte bellamy and she's going to be talking about intentional camera movement or icm as we tend to call it so hi charlotte how are you i'm absolutely delighted that you asked me and i'm really enthusiastic so many people are so excited to come and join us this evening so yeah i hope everybody gains something from it i'm sure they will i mean i knew this would be a popular webinar but it was astonishingly astonishing how quickly it um booked up brilliant thank you very much fantastic well welcome everybody um to my presentation on the art of intentional camera movement um i'm delighted to be here presenting tonight um to you guys i've watched a lot of the she clicks webinars and i really enjoy seeing everybody's icm images on the on the page so hopefully i can ensues and uh invigorate those of you who already do it and if you haven't tried it before and you're thinking of giving it a go then hopefully i'll give you the tools that you'll be able to do that with this evening um those of you that saw a previous uh webinar that i gave for the guild of photographers i know there were a few she clickers on there um i have changed this up a bit tonight so um you hopefully will learn something new tonight as well even though it's uh from the same person so let's get started she says um why limit yourself to what your eyes see when you could have such an opportunity to extend your vision this is a quote from edward weston and i think it really sums up what um icm is to me it's an opportunity to bring so much more than what you just see in front of you into an image there's a chance to bring what you feel what you hear um what you yeah if you're photographing food what you're tasting um and i think it's just it's a really good quote to start the presentation off so i'm just going to run you through briefly um my journey into creative photography back in 2008 i got my first digital slr and i very quickly got into people photography babies children a little bit later i got into weddings when i returned back to the uk and i had my own um uh portrait business back in the uk for a couple years back in 2012 we moved to the netherlands um with my family and i was all gung-ho really excited to get business going again in the netherlands here because i sort of got myself into a rut where i was selling discs of images and i'd set myself quite a low bar and i wasn't really fulfilled i was my husband got to the point where he was actually offering to pay me to stay at home rather than what my clients were paying me that's how ridiculous my pricing was and i was really excited to get started here in the netherlands on a decent level and then when i got here um i couldn't speak the language and i actually put my camera down for six months because i figured what can you do if you can't make money from your photographer from your photography because i've got that so into my head that that's what i was doing as a job and i joined the guild of photographers a little while before moving to the netherlands and i got my first mentor leslie chalmers and she said whatever you do just pick up that camera and take photographs of what you love it does not matter what you're photographing you're photographing for yourself and that's how i started into the landscape journey when i moved to the netherlands i thought the netherlands was flat brown boring um and it turns out that if you put yourself in a new place you can be inspired however flat brown and boring it actually is and these are just some there's a three pictures here that i took very early on in my time here in netherlands so we're talking eight years ago now and these were when i just got into landscapes and i actually embraced the flatness i actually embraced the fairness and i was always looking for contrast so here you have the birds and it was actually a snowy morning it's just enough snow to cover the ground but enough snow to leave a little bit detail in the ground there and it was the contrasts and very quickly i worked on sort of rules of thirds and balancing the image and you see that coming through and again because i was so new to my area um i was finding interesting things you know there's just two circles biking on a bath in the uh biking on a path in the national park in the mist it's nothing special but to me it's actually an image i really love and it kind of sums up the the silence and the emptiness in the places where you can find them here that are empty um big skies here we get massive skies you've probably seen dutch paintings um it's it's true that's what we get here and sometimes it's just wonderful to embrace the skies and just lose the rule of thirds and just um put what's really impressive into your image i'm showing you these just because um it's important for you to understand that i didn't just jump from portrait or i didn't just jump into icm photography but i actually moved into this style of photography through a sort of journey to get there these are a few more images that i took very early on and i was just finding everything in my landscape interesting lines of trees straight roads um bendy park colorful houses windmills bikes anything that got me these are all just for me i mean i've sold probably most of these images that you see here on the picture but they were taken for me to start with they weren't taking it for anybody else these next pictures are just a little bit further in my journey when i've really got into my landscape properly these they're quite a big thing for me i live out in the rural netherlands over and east towards the german border and they come through actually coming through at the moment which is pretty early but they come through and the noise and they just land in hundreds of thousands on the fields around here and it's just they're kind of like rats to the farmers but um i think they're very beautiful and this was just one morning very early in the mist i travel an awful lot um and this is iceland this is on my last night in iceland during the summer a few years ago on a family holiday and i just love the starting sun and the colors and i love the little white fluffy things in the ground i've actually brought some home with me it's just it's just a lovely memory of my last night in iceland and this is kind of a little bit more where my uh landscape photography is sitting now i sat i took this last autumn um and i've been inspired by um a photographer called lars van der gaal he's actually a dutch photographer um but very early on i was very inspired by his woodland work but he worked to make them a very magical feel about his images um and so when you blessed we've missed in the sundays first thing in the morning it's beautiful but then you can add a little bit of something with post-processing that's even better so i did my landscape photography up until um 2016 with much enthusiasm but then i started to lose a little bit of enthusiasm and my interest was waning i was finding that i'd lost the soul out of my images and i was just kind of reproducing what i was seeing in front of me and i was lucky enough to go on a photo tour to the outer hebrides and i had 10 days out there just photographing for me and no one else and it was just the most wonderful thing it really was i came home and i was literally floating i was just so renewed and it was there that i first found out about rcm and these are my first ever icm photos that i took four years ago um stood on the beach there were various beaches here in um at the outer hebrides it's hard to take about photo in the opera house to be fair um but i was stood next to a lady called leslie chalmers who was my mentor and um she was waving her camera left and right and up and down and i was kind of stuck there looking out and thinking she's absolutely bonkers and then i asked to see what was on the back of her camera and when i looked on the back of her camera i was just absolutely gobsmacked what she was capturing compared to what i was capturing and i was so enthused i said can you just give me a few tips which she did and off i went and i played for pretty much the rest of the holiday with icm um it lends itself to these beautiful colors the beautiful lines left and right so that's a bit about how i got into my um icm now we're going to get started on sort of the techie stuff i'll call it so hopefully from this if you've never tried it you'll get a really good feel about what you need to think about when you're going into it and if you've been trying it and you haven't figured out quite how to make it click maybe something in here will make you sort of like bold moment intentional camera movement or icm is when you make a movement with your camera um while you're taking your photo and that movement was planned then you have icm um otherwise it's if you didn't plan it to happen it's a it's an accident it's unintentional camera movement and we've all done that accidentally um why do i do icm um it's an interesting technique for me i can interact with my environment so i photograph not only a location but a feeling um i use all my senses not just my eyes as i mentioned before um like if i'm standing outside and i can hear the wind rustling in the leaves i can hear the sound and i want to bring that into my images or if i'm out in the rain and i've got raindrops on my shoulder maybe i want to feel bring the feeling of that in um and you've got the sounds and yeah just it's more than just what's in front of you it's bringing like it's almost sort of hugging the hugging the image in front of you and embracing everything there and i find that doing icm allows me to be really creative in my photography um makes me looking out for contrast all the time even when i haven't got my camera i'm now like contrast focus the whole time because i find that is what really makes a good icm image and i've never been one to follow what everybody else does i've always been keen to do whatever makes me happy and i think that's an important thing with icm icm is not an opportunity to forget all those technical things that you've learned in your photographic journey um for me personally i believe that icm adds something to an image it doesn't make an image on its own and i think that's probably the biggest um kind of pitfall that you can fall into very early on is to forget everything else you've ever learned about icm and just move the camera and say oh here's an icm image it's it's best if you remember everything else and build on it and so you still need to think about horizontal horizons interest in your image um a reason for making the image other than this icm good light balance so no blown highlights and something to make your look viewer look at the image for a bit longer this is an example of two images on the left you have a static and traditional photo it's got good lines it's got balance depth of field interest points and there's nothing wrong with this photo it's a lovely autumn photo but what i wanted to do as i said before i could hear the rustling of the leaves and that's what i wanted to bring in the the trees i felt were kind of almost like dancing um and then the the path became like almost a stream when i brought icm into it and so the whole image becomes a lot more fluid than static and i found that just it just gives it a wonderful feel this one is in the snow a couple of years ago and this is just an image to show you what i saw to start with and then this is what i created i'd actually gone out purposely that day planning to do black and white because of the snow and the contrast but i'd seen these big tree trunks and i've seen the little spindly one on the left and so i've sort of envisaged the picture before already even brought icm into it um and then by moving the camera i then just really made the contrast really strong within icm so the important elements of icm movement of the camera the direction probably the most important thing in icm ideally what you want to do is follow the lines um it's going to be left to right up and down it might be round and round if you're working with landscapes with horizontal lines um you want to go left to right um you might find if you've got hills you might want to follow the hills rather than you know if you're in some beautiful hilly location which i don't have here in holland so that's not an option um but always follow the line of um of what you're looking for upwards for trees i do try damage sometimes but in general i find upwards works better for trees or plants grass and follow the path of the rip path or a river so like with the um the last image we had there you can kind of follow with your camera the path with people or animals follow their movement if you go against the movement you'll probably end up with very some strange photos and you might have like horses with 20 legs or people who are looking a bit sort of elongated it just doesn't work as well and with water follow the direction of the movement so if you're standing by waterfall you follow the water over the waterfall or you follow the waves as they break or crash along the shore and buildings are slightly different because what you have is you have a number of verticals and horizontals and these are images to show this so on the left you have a left right movement and on the middle you have an up down movement and these are exactly the same location exactly the same place i've taken the photo from and the third picture is where i've actually drawn a square with my camera because i've noticed that the windows the doors are square and you have to give yourself enough time to do this with your shutter speed but what you do is you move your camera very quickly as soon as we're talking tiny movements here we're talking centimeters not like this um and what you end up with it's almost like a sort of sketch um and i find that's the only way i can photograph uh urban landscapes or buildings and to be honest it's not something that really rocks my boat so i don't do it a lot but when i do do it that's how i do it this is a perfect example of where you'd use an up down motion but you can see over on the left there was quite a sharp horizontal line which kind of you can see is actually dropped or it's actually risen it's quite a harsh line because it's not in the same movement as the trees and here's an example of the waterfall so i've moved my camera down over the waterfall to where the water's going this was just some ferns in the local garden center at christmas and it was just begging to be photographed this is just a photo on my um on my phone i was on beautiful black velvet and these ferns were silver um but it's a perfect example it's like where on earth how on earth do you decide which direction to move your camera well it's just a case of playing in this situation um and you can see i moved it very slightly left here just because the biggest amount of directions seem to be slightly left but it's it's kind of a playing situation to figure out when you're not quite sure which way to go when to press the shutter this is also quite important i get asked this quite a lot do i press the shutter before i start taking before i start moving or do i start moving then press the shutter if you want these beautiful fluid lines that you see and a lot of icm were probably what you've seen and identified as being you know icm um you're generally starting to move your camera and press the shutter after the camera started moving and that's how you get your most fluid lines if you want a little bit more control over what you're creating then you need to press the shutter afterwards um after you've um yeah sorry you need to start the movement then press the shutter no stop press the shutter and then start the movement sorry um it's important to remember that whatever you um are having the end of your photo is what you will have in the uh the end produced photo so if you start with a tree and you start at the bottom with your camera and you start at the roots and you go up and when you finish the roots are no longer in your viewfinder you won't see them in the end picture this is when you need to start thinking about which lens you need to use and whether you need to step back a little bit and things like that because you need to remember that if it's not in the viewfinder at the end of the image it won't be in your end image um these are four examples of photos taken in exactly the same location probably all within 10 minutes apart from each other and i've seen this tree in the woods and i've identified it as being a beautiful contrast point um we're a little late in the autumn so a lot of leaves are already on the ground so that i quite enjoy shooting sort of end of autumn when you're just looking for spots of color within the trees for icm and we'll start with the bottom right hand one first because this is an example of starting the movement before you hit the shutter so you get a very fluid line here you can see that you've almost lost the um the tree base out of the image the one next door to it is almost the same um sort of movement but i've started i've pressed the shutter then started moving the camera um the top right and the top left are a good example to show you what happens when you have sun and when you don't have sun it's exactly the same it's almost exactly the same movement picture but on the right hand side you've got the sun i haven't done an awful lot post-processing to this one so i could have brought out the contrasts a little more but it's just to show that you can do icm in the in like dull days and it works brilliantly and i've got a great photo to show you later for that but also a bit of light or a bit of sunlight can really make an effort and just to prove that this is the same location and this is the photo i chose to edit in the end and this okay i've pushed the colors a little i've pushed the contrast i've cropped it to a 16 by nine but essentially um the like the sun came out it's shone on those green yellow leaves and it just made them sing in front of all the other big trunks camera settings and equipment basically you can do icm imaging on any digital sr as long as you can or any phone in any camera or any phone as long as you can control the shutter speed um if you're working on a camera um using manual focus is a really good idea um you can use any lens i have my old portrait wedding lenses that i'm still using 24 to 70 70 to 250 mil i find that 70 to 200 is really useful if i want to get rid of sky if it's right day um and also if i manage to figure out a really nice sort of frame for an image and i want to get rid of everything else i will use a zoom lens sometimes i go out with my 50mm just to make myself move my feet and actually sort of enjoy crouching down and trying to play around a bit very easy to get used to just standing there and sort of moving the zoom and not moving your feet um if you're working with slower shutter speeds you will find filters are really useful spend a fortune on absolutely crystal clear filters because at the end of the day your image is going to be blurry anyway so um i i have my missy filters from when i first started with my landscape and they are quite expensive ones but um it's not to say that you need to get um the most um expensive i think coke can do some much cheaper options and i think i've had people play with those before and they've been very happy with them um with icm what you're always going to try and do is maintain a good exposure the same as with any other photograph and to do that if you're extending your shutter speed you're letting more light in so you've got to manage the light in with your other controls to keep it balanced so the first thing i do is knock down my iso to the minimum possible i've got a nikon d750 and um i can go down to a 100 iso on that and then use the highest f-stop possible so the aperture and the whole the lights coming through is as tiny as possible so there are two ways to minimize the amount of light coming in because i'm going to be taking the picture for longer and when i'm working with slower shutter speeds or i want fluid lines then i'm looking to use a tripod shutter speed you must have long enough to make some movement um if you're looking at anything sort of faster than half a second you will be very you will struggle to make any icm movement you can use many different shutter speeds and you'll see you know every icm photographer has a sweet spot every icm photographer has their favorite um shutter speed with longer shutter speeds you probably want to be using a tripod unless you've got very steady hands or you're doing a technique where you need to be able to move around um i normally work between a quarter of a second and 1.6 seconds i personally don't like using a tripod unless i have to so i try and manage my handshake and my hand movement within a period of um shutter speed that it feels comfortable as you play you will become more aware of what suits you it's taken me maybe a couple of years to actually figure out that actually a quarter of a second works brilliant for me for almost anything um and if not i'm literally just pushing it from you see from the picture i'm pushing it from four to three four to six i'm not moving a massive distance um away from a quarter of a second and you will find that different subjects they do warrant different shutter speeds and also it depends on how much detail you want to capture so for water obviously you lose detail the longer the shutter speed is in the longer the movement my points for success other than all these sort of technical things you should always ask yourself would the photo that you're taking be an interesting photo without icm and i've fallen into this trap a million times i've sort of seen a contrast i've seen a white tree white tree contrast icm done it i've got it's not really doing it for me but why shouldn't it be doing it for me you know it's icm i've done all the things and it's just because actually i would never have taken that photo it's it wasn't a an astounding image to take sometimes i take things you'll see in a minute of things you would never want to take a traditional photo of but just think to yourself whether the photo you're taking would actually be icm would be a good photo anyway expect to take loads of photos very early on i um followed doug chinnery and i've watched a couple of his um webinars and he did one where he took you outside and you followed him out in the field and then came back into doing the post-processing and he took about 400 images and got 10 that he was happy with and i've decided at that moment if it was okay for him then that was absolutely okay for me but i i normally take you know in half an hour i'll take 200 300 if i'm out for a day i'll probably be running into a thousand images so icm is not for the lovers of keeping shutter counts low sorry um play an experiment you you'll just know when you get it right um you'll just get that feel you'll get that squeal moment um it's just um you'll just know when it works for you and try and do what you want to don't just do something because somebody else is doing it um feel your location before you start shooting icm as i mentioned before what you see what you hear what you smell what you feel there are no rules to icm i've given you all this information technically wise but what icm is about is about bringing something extra to your image what you're feeling no one else can feel that no one else can know what's going on in your head that you wanted to put in that image and if at the end of the day your image says what you wanted it to say then that's a perfectly good icm image regardless of what anybody else says if what it says is what you wanted to say then it's a it's a good icm image don't delete your images as you go along it's very very tempting when you're shooting 400 images but you will find that sometimes images you think are fantastic on the back of your viewfinder you get them on the computer and they're shocking and sometimes you'll come across gems that you thought you were going to dump out in the field so don't delete anything while you're out shooting icm try to keep small bright areas such as small bits of sky and sun um out of your images if you can if you're finding it tricky to control the light with these in then you need to try and keep them out basically um yeah it's just distracting so what can you shoot an icm the answer is absolutely anything um you can shoot find beauty in the weirdest things um you can icm photograph in your home the garden the street shop beach the wood the town your bed the bath you name it you can have a go at icm imaging there um you kind of sometimes need to look beyond what's in front of you you sometimes need to have a play and just see what happens and wonder what icm would do to the photo and these are prime examples on the left hand side some of you might recognize this i posted it in the sheetflix page uh about a week ago it's my washing line with a washing um a bag a peg bag hanging on it and i followed a course with paul sanders a couple of weeks ago on mindfulness and he gave us this project to take a photo of something you never you use every day and you never even notice and i just went outside one day and my husband's standing like you are the wackiest person no one else takes pictures of a washing line and i came away with that nine beautiful images i just love them the fact their washing line is a bit kind of a bit weird but proof that you can shoot anything on icm and with all the lockdown during corona if you can't get out of the house these are prime examples the one on the right i've got some campus grass in a bars in my lounge this is actually a double exposure with icm which i do quite a lot and it's just against my the back of my brown sofa and i did just put it through a phone app these are just phone photos other things you could shoot i love horses um i've had a go at shooting pretty much every genre of course they are quite tricky to do if you're getting into icm animals is probably one of the trickier places to start but it can be really rewarding but look forward to like eight-legged horses and sort of heads yeah it's a challenge but it's really rewarding if you get it right um safari um luckily i had three full days on safari last year and so after the first full two days and i've got every picture that i could have wanted of giraffes and zebras and lions and elephants i then got brave enough to give it a go with the icm and these are just two examples of that and as i mentioned before i don't do a lot of urban work just because it doesn't rock my boat at all but i've run a very small icm group with my local camera club and um we went out to the local we went to utrecht station and this was my take on the commutings in utrecht station so you kind of got all these i love the lines basically it was kind of looking at lines looking at um following where people were going and then trying to figure out the movement we're talking very small movements here i probably didn't mention but we're talking literally centimeters millimeters sometimes just to add a little bit but keep the movement of everything else in the image and the last one of these as an example is um i used to do a lot of landscape work still do and this is an image that i um took and i've post processed using the um andy gray i don't know whether any of you have come across and it was graceful with a g-r-a-y and he post-processes images very similar to this and i just fell in love with it i followed one of his tutorials and this is a windmill in the dutch bulb fields and actually the tulips were bright orange but i've done a quite a lot of work to this but it's just an example and hopefully all of those show you that you can pretty much ask him anything so this is a really good time to stop now for angela for um questions okay yes so we have some already um so uh federica um emailed me with a question to ask you which is um what do you advise to people who do uh or want to do icm in bright conditions without filters is it possible or do you need to wait for an overcast day it is possible you just need to look for any opportunities to try and reduce the light first of all you've got to push your iso as low as possible your f stop as high as possible um so for example i wouldn't use my 50mm lens because it only goes to f16 i then put on my zoom lens because it goes to f22 so i've got more chance to not knock out the light as i mentioned before if you're shooting somewhere that's got a bit of sky try and shoot without the sky in the image because again that brings the darkness down um and yet sometimes it's just not if you've gone as uh if you've got rid of all the possible ways of bringing light into the image and you're still not getting a shutter speed slow enough to get what you want then yeah you might have to wait for a dull day but there's lots of things to try before you get to that point i guess you could go somewhere say if you went into a woodland or something with with a dense canopy that will bring the light down you might have some success yeah it's just yes just trying to reduce any yeah if it is bright outside it's just trying to reduce any reflections or glare that you can yeah okay following that you could always attach like you said nd filters yes yeah okay so we have some more questions rose uh said uh re no blown highlights what about shooting high key yeah as i said before nothing's nothing's wrong um normally where you don't want the blown highlights is if they are um creating a distraction in your image the same as if you were creating a beautiful landscape image or you were creating a portrait image you tried not to have highlights in places that were going to be distracting um so yeah high key is absolutely fine um and i've done it with horses and on the snow and things like that you just say okay it's blown but it's not a distraction so it's not a problem okay tina has asked if there are any specific rules you need to hit to adhere to such as tree should be vertical c is horizontal you did touch on this but just perhaps to go over it yeah i think probably the seas being horizontal is the biggest one i saw a few i've mentioned or commented on a few pictures in on the she clicks page recently um people saying what can i do and i said the first thing you can do is make your c horizontal just because c should be horizontal regardless of whether it's icm um woodland yeah you can be as creative as you want i mean a lot of trees don't grow vertically to be fair and you might find that it's quite funky to have your trees going horizontally you know in a different dimension across your image so you know there is as i mentioned there's a few guidelines that kind of like not to think of them as rules more as guidelines because i think that's the beauty of icm you can kind of get away with doing whatever you like really i think they can be very helpful when you're starting out and just trying to get a feel for something i guess and i just you build up your experience you start to see oh well actually i could try doing this and get something a bit more interesting yeah i mean if you're in a woodland and you want to have a go then by all means but try vertical and then try a different angle and then you'll get a feel for what works and you'll say oh yeah it does or it doesn't um yeah um annette has asked if you uh move your camera in a square which direction would you move the camera first vertical or horizontal um i always go vertical i think she says i'm right-handed so i don't know whether that makes a difference or not i don't know also i always tend to look up a house rather than down a house if that makes sense when i look at the building i always go up a building i don't look at the top and then go down so i'm kind of almost going round the door as you would walk into a door almost like that makes sense that's how i do it anyway yeah i guess it makes sense to have a sort of standard protocol so that you don't suddenly think oh have i done that side you know what i mean so you always want to go around the full square yeah not just three sides of it or something yeah now i always go up right down left and you'll find that you need almost a second of time to do that because um you need enough time to move your hands even if it's only a millimeter each way you have to get head for slightly longer exposures for buildings right so that kind of leads on to another question that tina's asked which is what sort of distance do you move your camera i guess you know does that vary by subject it does sometimes if i'm looking for if i'm looking for the really fluid trees i will be stood there going like this with my camera you know if i don't want if i don't care about the ropes and all i want is lines and i wanted very abstract picture the same as if i'm on the beach if all i want is the lines then i will be swinging myself around if you can see me stood next to somebody else that i see i mean you know we can be doing a a good old workout but the majority of my work is probably a centimeter i kind of literally i'm moving uh yeah i'm literally moving a tiny amount jiggling literally you just don't have an awful lot of time to play with when you're talking a quarter of a second it's not that long when you say you're moving your camera are you tilting it rotating it or are you moving it sort of keeping the sensor in this in the same position so um i tend to by trial and error i've found that i try and keep it straight right um especially with trees because you end up with bendy trees if you go like this nothing wrong with bendy trees if that's what you want but that's not what i'm aiming at um so i tend to go yeah i do a lot of up and then slightly right that's kind of a technique i use a lot but yes i do tend to keep it flat if that makes sense i guess particularly if you're using a wide focal length a wide lens if you tick the camera it changes the perspective quite a lot doesn't it so yeah and if you're using wide lens and you've got a sky you very quickly end up with nothing but sky in your image so you'd have to be careful with that okay um annette has asked what type of tripod head do you tend to use for icm i use is it a ball head i'm not very technical it's one that's very fluid it moves around in all directions okay because then and then you can choose how stiff you wanted it and how loose you want it so if you want to pretend that you're actually not on a tripod and you want to do the same sort of movements then you need to have it literally just having your camera resting on it and you can just move it around like this whereas if you want to actually restrict the movement that you're making then you can stiffen you know tighten it up a little bit um yeah the ones that just go left right up down aren't the best options yeah okay oh federico says thank you very much um carol would like to know uh if you can say something about your favorite post-processing techniques i don't know if you're going to come on to that later maybe um not really actually okay um my favorite post printing i always use lightroom so i take everything into lightroom to start with um as i mentioned because i've got 400 images normally what i do is i run through lightroom and i'll probably have i might have 10 20 30 images exactly the same thing but just slightly different and i run through and i work on a starring system if it's any good at all it gets one star so i'll whiz through everything first and then i go through again and i look to see if i've got say 10 images the same and then i start them two and eventually i get down to i don't ever want to be working on more than 10 images from a photo shoot even if i can find them so what i do is i take them in and i've just basically worked through all the sliders on the right hand side of lightroom you know i play with the i play a lot with blacks and whites i look a little bit at the exposure um i sometimes play with the clarity a little bit um then if i want if i've got dust spots i go into photoshop and remove those or if i've got any distractions that i want to clone out i then move over into photoshop and do that and then i play with a lot with the contrast as well sometimes i play with the color as well you can turn it completely different color and end up a completely different image or in lightroom you can push certain colors so yeah i've got a i've got a sort of routine that i do but i didn't even think about talking that because to me i see it's like what you do in the camera and then the post processing comes later but but yeah you can get icm straight out of camera but the most important things in lightroom is to push the contrast and the color i think when you get there because theoretically if you moved your camera enough you'd end up with sort of a smudgy gray image wouldn't you because all the colors would reduce down to gray or muddy brown or something so it is it's interesting how much you can pull back with a bit of contrast and saturation adjustment it is i'm amazed with the colors you'll see there's a picture in a minute of the waterfall and the colors that can you can pull out of something they're just amazing so yeah great uh catherine has asked how do you make camera movement on a tripod and you kind of covered this a bit before but i just want to um you know do you ever because obviously you are going to you are going to pivot the camera a bit more on the tripod aren't you rather than yeah um i mean i i tend to use a tripod when i'm in the woods and because of my hands my natural movement is not straight up i always go slightly to the right i cannot go straight up so if i put it on a tripod then i go straight up so that's when i find that i really use it for straight lines with a tripod that's where my strength plays just because i know from experience that my arms don't go straight um so it's just uh but it yeah if you're playing but if you've got the ball head you can be as fluid as you want you can do figures of eights and you can kind of you can't jump up and down but you can yeah you can be quite fluid when you've got the ball head on great thank you sarah has asked when you're doing a double exposure do you find that it's best to create the icm in the first or the second exposure um i wouldn't say there's a rule normally i will have probably found out that there's a good icm image there to be had and then i'll probably end up going back and take the original image if that makes sense so if i find i've got a really good one and then i think oh but it needs a little bit more detail then i'll go back and take the same picture that's when it's actually quite useful to have it on a tripod because then your image hasn't moved from the location you're taking them sometimes i'll take one and then i'll take the original image and then think oh but they're not actually going to stack on top of each other at all and then i have to take another two and then you don't replicate the icm image so yeah i think probably the icm image comes first then you go and take the static image and when you're doing a double exposure and you're doing your icm do you always follow up with the second exposure or do you sometimes think no i haven't nailed the icm first or do you give yourself you know do you cut yourself a bit slightly well it might be okay when i get the final yeah that i do a lot of winging it sometimes um yeah i i quite often will just go ahead and do it i quite often set my camera to when i'm doing double exposures and cameras i just you can set it to keep running on the nippon so you can set it to do it just once or you can set it to keep going and then i'll just keep playing and then quite often i won't even look at the back of the screen if i'm getting into a zone i'll just be shooting and then i'll look that back and say oh wonder what just happened in the last 10 shots especially if you get a feel when you get a movement you just keep doing it four or five times and you won't even look at the back of the camera to see what's going on and then you look back and maybe one might work fiona has asked does icm work at night she said she's never tried so she's just wondering um i haven't done a lot i did go to a light festival last year and i struggled to be honest because the lights were so bright um and they you pick up every movement you make so it's quite cool because i found all these little sort of pink lights and i end up doing a heart shape um with the camera and that's quite cool because you can do something funky but yeah at night you just need to drop you could try it but you just need to drop everything down so then you end up giving yourself a bigger aperture you end up bringing um increasing the iso if you need to to bring enough light in or go even slower with your shutter speed but it's not something i can advise on with great authority okay fair enough um carol has asked oh sorry no carol we answered that one didn't we um ann said the big advantage of digital photography these days is you can experiment like a mad thing it's a great learning tool i agree with that um it used to be quite expensive to do icm with film yeah i never did it so um tina's asked do you ever change your focal length while shooting perhaps type thing really yeah it's it's not my thing but i've seen i work i'm in a photo club group and some of the guys do it with great effect i sometimes have a play but it's it's you kind of after four years i've got it kind of got into my way of what i like and what i what i enjoy and it you can do it and some people do it really well um it's just not something i do very much okay so i was just checking back um so when we were talking about double exposure you don't do it in camera you do it um separately on the computer i sometimes have a play and a dabble but i'm on a nikon d750 and it gives you three shots and it doesn't do all these funky things that cannons do um anybody that knows about bailey's work and dog jinnery's worked they do absolutely amazing things in camera you just can't do that with the nikon so um and i'm not going to canon just to be able to try and do it in camera i'll just sit and wait till i can yeah figure it out so but i do most of it in photoshop okay rose has asked do you ever use circular movements yes if it works um again it's a kind of uh what do you want to bring to the image so um if i've tried it with flowers because flowers tend to have a circular middle um if i was photographing beach balls maybe um if it was bouncing you know you follow the beach generally not in circular movements but if something says to me it needs to show that in the end image then i wouldn't be against using it yeah maybe a merry-go-round or um yeah that would be very sweet or something yeah that'd be good okay so we just got a couple more questions and we can carry on so claire has asked if there's if you have any particular advice for moving subjects she's particularly interested in dance and specifically indian dance and she's tried slow shutter speeds but she wants to experiment further um i think it's a kind of plain see what you need to do is set a shutter speed and have a play at that shutter speed and see and play with different movements follow the movement of the dancers um see where the bigger movements with your arms have a have a play with different movements of yourself at a set shutter speed and then maybe play with slowing down the shutter speed and again try with the different movements so if you're doing it for a client for example or ideally if you put a longer period of time as i did with my horses i just played and played and played and just tried to figure out what worked and then eventually i figured out oh at this shutter speed with this movement this works and it's just trial and error for something like that but it can be done and i've seen fantastic pictures of icm dancers so um yeah it's kind of the reverse of of sport isn't it um well sorry trying to shoot sharp sport because you know you can sometimes use a shutter speed and you get the person frozen but say if they're playing hockey the stick is still blurred or the ball is still blown it depends you know you adjust to get exactly what you want now sometimes you want that bit of movement and sometimes you want it absolutely frozen so it's a question of deciding how much blur you want exactly yeah that's exactly that it's the same with the water i play with the water because if i get too much blur then i lose the texture and i lose the feel of what i want to produce so yeah it's exactly the same okay now final question uh for this section helene sorry elena's asked should image stabilization either embody your lens be on or off ideally you want to turn it off um i have actually seen somebody taking fantastic photos on a small um one of the mirrorless with this image stabilization on and i was absolutely gobsmacked of what he produced so you can do it either way but generally advice is to turn it off because then it allows the camera won't be trying to compensate for your movement okay and anila has just popped in with another question which is any tips for icm with with flowers sorry any tips for icm with flowers when you're photographed i said this last time i gave a presentation and then i showed a picture because i said i didn't do it as i showed a picture and they said look you do do it um yeah you can do it again it's just figuring out what you want to show i've tried it i go out to the tulip fields every year and i try going up with the tulips to make them seem tall and beautiful and it doesn't seem to work um i've tried a little bit of shaking rather than specific movements and that works quite well because you almost then get a monet impressionist kind of feel about it that's quite nice if you're shooting big banks of flowers in a garden or something like that so yeah icm with flowers is fantastic it's just like trying to figure out i do a lot in my phone actually with flowers and i play with one of my apps that i'll tell you about later um and then i do petals and now i'm looking at the line of the petals and the contrast of the colours and the stamens and things and that's quite nice because then you can get them really close great okay so that's the end of the questions so far right i'm going to try and move through this i hope that i don't keep you all wet in midnight right next um there's a few examples here of an icm shoot i think it's quite useful for me to just take you with me um at a shoot a couple of shoots and just show you exactly what i saw and what i thought and the first one is in new zealand uh a few years ago and this is kind of what greeted me when i walked on the beach we always go to piha beach when we arrive into new zealand it sounds great when we always arrive my sister lives there um i've actually been about six times to new zealand and i've lived in new zealand as well so this is a really favorite beach of mine and it's not that far from the airport anyway we arrived on the beach it's beautiful it's open the waves are crashing over you've got this blue sky you've got these lovely black rocks so there's loads of contrast and loads of color and there's loads of movement already and this is the kind of thing i'm kind of digesting when i walk into any location whether it be at this beach or whether it be a woodland i'm looking for contrast color shape movement and i'm kind of looking for possible images and i really like these rocks on the right and so i stood there for a while and this is the first day we're in new zealand i don't know whether i had a bit of jet lag i just wasn't feeling it and i'm just showing you these because you might say well they're icm images they are but they just weren't what i was hoping to create unfortunately sometimes you can put too much pressure on yourself especially if you're in the location that you're never going to be in again you can say i've got to create this icm image and the more pressure you put yourself under the harder you will find to just let go and feel feel the image and i've produced these three at this location where the waves have been crashing and they just weren't doing it for me and i just turned round to the opposite side and there was this rock and the rock kind of echoed in the ground with the with the black triangle and the blue sky was reflecting on the on the water on the on the beach um and i eventually i tried a few icm and the rock ended up being a bit of a distraction so i just moved to the left a bit and got rid of the rock out of the image um this was the original sort of idea so i've been playing with this and figured out that it worked quite well this is my final image from the series and i think this is probably the only one i got off that beach doing icm that day um and i go traditionally i go 16 by nine with a lot of my images and because i find it's really useful to do that to try and get sort of thirds balance and lines into corners and things so you can see you've got lovely lines going around into the corner you've got not too much sky because although it's blue there's no other interest in that sky apart from the color so i've kept it all down to the the interest on the bottom there so that's kind of like a a little visit to the beach with me when i'm going and i will just say because i gave a presentation recently and i showed a picture of me taking a photo and i mentioned that my husband had actually taken this picture and my family and how hard it was to take pictures and i know in she clicks so many of us are juggling family um time with our photography and even if you're a professional photographer you still go on holiday with your family and you still have that urge to take photos even if you want to put your camera down and this is just an example i've finally figured out after my son's 15 now i finally figured out that the only way i can photograph with my family on holiday is to tell them one i'm going away for an hour so i give myself a time specific and then i know how long i've got and then i make sure they're happy doing something that they want to do so my husband loves to read so there he is sort of relaxing in the sand dunes and my son back then four years ago was happy digging in his hand he'd be looking for a wi-fi now but back then i that's what i did and i find if i can give them if i can be happy that they're occupied then i can take myself off and i can give my whole self to my photography um it's not enough for them to just say it's okay you take photos we'll just hang around that's i cannot relax into my photography like that so it's just a just a little aside in here because i know we're all we're all struggling with more than just taking photos and the other photo is just the two of them walking on the beach that i just love so this is another little shoot that i'm going to take you on there's a bit of um video in here and it's water so apologize if any of you are already sitting with your legs crossed i'm hoping you don't desperately now need the toilet so um for this shoot i went with the idea of capturing movement of water it was during yeah about two months into the corona so i didn't want to go very far um i went to a local park um we were a little bit less shut down here in the netherlands than you guys were i was hoping for some water sparkles in the water i had no idea where the sun was going to be because i've never been to this location and i it was kind of a little bit on a hoof that i decided i shot water before so i didn't know what sonic kind of movements i was going to use and i wanted to capture what the waterfall sounded like um and what it felt like to me so i was looking to capture the energy in the movement and when i got there i was delighted by what i saw because it was all green and there was sun on the waterfall but i will tell you this is in the middle of a park in the middle of our city arnhem and it's not like beautiful fresh water there was a stink going on which i didn't try and break out in the photos but it you know hopefully you can ignore that factor so the next bit next thing that you get here hopefully these are all gonna work okay so here what you have is the waterfall can you hear me okay over the waterfall yes yes so what i've done is i'm just taking a video while i was there because i just wanted to show the things i was looking at so i'm looking at the movement of the waterfall and here you see these beautiful lines coming over the top of the waterfall and you see the way that the difference water is falling on different places and seeing where the sun's sparkling in little places and making it golden and i'm seeing where the reflections are and seeing the colors and all of these things i'm sort of taking in when i'm sort of just stood there looking at this waterfall so the next one it's this is actually going to be related to an end photo this bit now so as i mentioned before you've got these beautiful uh lines coming over the top and you've got all these sparkles of the sun in the um in the water coming over the top and so i used a very fluid movement for this rcm image he says and this was what i created and this was what i mentioned about bringing out the colors you know i've never known there were browns and purples and the vibrancy of the green in there i just wouldn't have really noticed it when i was watching the waterfall and then when i got it back in and i started playing with it i absolutely love it and it's it's a very abstract i mean you wouldn't necessarily know is that waterfall um but this is that's kind of what i saw in the waterfall and that's what i wanted to show in the image was the power of the image the beauty the fluidity and that's kind of what i brought into this image and then the next one we have is um the water was falling on this rock and bouncing off like little sparkles you know with all soap with sparklers as a kid and this was kind of when it stopped now you can actually see all the like sparkles coming off then you've got this beautiful green coming down in the front and like i was saying before you've got to think about how you would have taken that picture before even if you weren't thinking of icn and so i've balanced the rock and the right with the green diagonal that's filled up almost half on the left hand side and the sun's just hitting the green um on in the middle there and you can just see the sparkles sort of hit it's hitting the rock and just coming off and we're talking the tiniest of the movements here because you've already got the movement of the water so you're just adding a little bit more to just just make it softer and just give that feel so it's not so static and you could take a you could take an image with a long shutter speed but then the rock would still be very hard and i think you know waterfalls are just it's it's an overall softness you know if you slip on a waterfall it's quite hard but it's soft the slippiness is quite soft and then here's another one um and here i just spotted this beautiful sunlight it was like someone had put a spotlight on this the top of this rock excuse i'm not the world's best videographer i'm afraid um but the sun had just come down on the top of this rock and it was hitting all this white water and you've got this one rock and then it was bouncing off and this is what i captured and see you just you wouldn't even notice all that green and brown going on in the background and here you can see a very different definite movement of the camera you can see i sort of went down and across because that was the way the water was bouncing down and across um and it kind of looks like lots of green and ground hair it's just it's very soft and very yeah it's quite abstract these images and then this was the other rock on the other side of the two rocks but the way that the water was coming down and hitting it it's almost like a a ray of sun has come down and this is a mountain wax lyrical i'm not a poet poet but it's just yeah it's just the softness of it all and you've got all these little sparkles running down and then the the green in the foreground is in the shadow and so you see the contrast between the the back speedy water which has become more soft because it's moved more during the time of the shutter speed and then this is a slightly wider shot um sometimes i get very focused on small points i kind of have to bring myself out a little bit but you can just see the way that the lights falling on the two rocks in the foreground and the way that the waters almost like shrouds have been put over the um the rocks and these are all kind of things that i noticed when i got there this was what i wanted to portray from the image i wanted to portray the softness of the water but the power of the water and then the beauty of the dappled sunlight and the colors and that's kind of what i wanted to bring out in all these images so now i'm just going to go through a few of my icm projects briefly with you um anyone that has been following me for a little while does know me knows that i love my woodlands um and i took this image um i like the autumn but i actually like photographing throughout the whole year because as long as there's a contrast in the woodland the summer i do struggle a little bit with because it's all just green um but in the winter you have very fair branches so you have the dark trunks uh against the the rest of it in the autumn you have the beautiful colors versus the sort of deadness or in the background or the brown and in the spring you have the the vibrancy of the new leaves coming through and that's the contrast this one was great i stood here for about half an hour with the very bored dog waiting for the sun to hit the um the uh the leaves on this tree and i just literally pushed the camera up just the tiniest amount you can see the the camera movement i wanted to keep the detail in the trees and this isn't a double exposure this is just an icm image but because i've made such a tiny movement it's only really captured on the actual leaves themselves and it looks as though some of the embers have fallen onto the ground and there's sort of a fire going on the ground as well this one i alluded to earlier this was actually taken in the pouring rain this image and it's just proof that regardless of what the weather's doing you can take icm images but it's just looking for again the contrast you've got that beautiful yellows and greens on that uh trunk on the foreground and that's balanced on the right hand side with the browns and the yellows and those those three slightly smaller slender trees in the background this one um again it's a tree looking for the contrast again it's slightly later in the autumn and i quite like how the yellow in the foreground is echoed with um some of the yellow in the sort of upper middle of the uh image here and it's just again balance depth of field looking for interest points and then just putting a little bit of movement into the image this one it was a case of standing there waiting for the sun to come and hit when it was a dull that when the sun wasn't out this was nothing it just kind of all the green trees in the front merged into the green in the back when the sun came out you've got this beautiful green splash of green on the left hand side and then the on the right hand side you've got the darkness this is in a beautiful wood called spalderboss and they've kind of dancing trees and they're just absolutely beautiful and i mentioned spring as well so again looking for the contrast you're looking for that one tree that's got the spring leaves on and the rest are still dead in the around it and in the bottom all the there's lots of little blueberry plants and they had all the dewdrops on it was quite early in the morning and so when i moved my camera the little strats of light um kind of glistened became little silver snakes and this is a prime example where probably a lot of these are blown highlights but they're not distracting they add to the image and here again the same sort of movement i noticed these four silver birches in the foreground so i wanted to make them the sort of important pieces but then you have all these beautiful soft yellows in the background and then you've got the green and the white sort of softness on the ground and here it's almost like a wave crashing through the um through the woodland but again you've got balance when you're shooting woodlands it's very tricky because you need to really find some balance you need to find something anchors the edges of your image um so that you don't kind of get lost out the side and i just uh quite like that i just love the colors that are on the bottom there grass bizarrely i love grass because i love green and this was taken just a couple of weeks ago um i decided to go out onto my road and this is proof that you don't need to go far to do icm and i just wanted to capture the softness of the uh the grass blowing in the wind which is kind of exactly what i did really and it was bouncing around it's very soft so you've got the movement of the actual grass itself and then a little bit of rcm as well in there and this one went in this was a i went out with my 50ml for this one so i had to get a bit closer and then i was actually moving the camera with the the direction of the grass stroke um stems and heads and here you have cow parsley the capacity was just on the cusp of going away and so you've got a beautiful evening or light coming in from the left hand side softening it up and then you've got like a little dancing cow parsley on the right there and then this when i walked back up the road the wind had got up a bit and the cow parcel was bouncing around and it was getting blown all over the place and it was kind of doing it gone from doing a gentle sort of i'm not very good with dance names but it done from doing a gentle ballet so it was now sort of doing a mega sort of celtic irish dance you know it was just manic and it was just trying to capture that sort of excessive sort of more busy movement in the image this is the beautiful road that i live on this is literally 20 meters from my house i'm very lucky and when you get missed and you're lucky enough to get a bit of snow what you can do is you can take these great images and these are just literally moving the hand up um to capture i want to make sure i kept the bottoms of the trees which is why i haven't got the tops of the trees in i can't remember which um lens i went out with i might have gone out in the snow with just my sort of twenty four seven with that which is my zoom lens on and that's why you haven't got the tops but equally i wanted to feel the feel going through the trees so i was trying to capture that but here because you've got the light diminishing in the evening it was kind of blue out really i've done a little bit in lightroom just to push the glue to really accentuate the feeling but then you've got the beautiful contrasts of the trunks very quickly peak district i was back in england last february when we had a lot of snow um i stupidly drove through the picture stripped with a little tiny hire car we went you can see the bottom left um literally the road was clear and nothing else was clear and i went and i've got these great big plans and i kind of stepped on myself a mood board of what i was going to take and then it was all covered in snow and so then i was looking again for just contrasts and lines um and just sometimes i use a lot of movement and other times i don't use so much movement it just it's kind of playing to see what i feel and i just wanted to show the desolate nature of this and how cold it was and how there it was and how sort of really nothing there apart from the snow and yeah just rocks and that's what i was aiming to do um i was in south africa last year um and i tried for the first time some wave photography somebody asked me recently they tried the um wave photography and they said it's actually really hard to do it is you just have to play it's finding the movement of the waves and here i kind of stood right in front of the waves i wasn't trying to catch them going i was kind of bringing my camera with me um as they crashed onto the land and i did take them with a slightly wider shot but i ended up clocking all the sky out because i felt the sky was distracting from what i actually wanted to capture which was these beautiful waves and i like this one because it's got little sort of sun speckles in the top left-hand corner this one's just sort of powering out to the left and then this one's i love the textures you get the with the uh icm here you've got a bit more of the sand coming down and you've got the color contrast they're all slightly beautiful great big waves it's really really tree and it was sunset as well so the light was really soft um i've just got a few pictures in here from a project i did called take a moment to look at the normal you might just see the incredible i got my master craftsman with the guild of photographers in 2018 and i created a panel of images and they were double exposure icms so most of them were two icms placed on top of each other in photoshop and the aim was that they should be themed yellow and blue they should be themed woodland um and that the interest factor was the trees themselves i've only got three here if you want to go and have a look on my website you can see the full set um it was the first time they've ever seen anything like this go through the master classroom panel um my mentor said to me at the time it could be it'll be a case of marmite either they will love it or they will hate it and i was lucky because all five judges gave it a massive thumbs up and a pass was sailing colors but it could have gone either way we just sort of had to wait and see so these are just um three three examples of the twenty and you can see that they've just i've added two pictures together because it's adding a bit of texture um and the colors are accentuating the blue and the yellow this one i've actually i've got all three of these on my wall at home and this one actually is printed on a rag paper and it comes out almost looking like silk and um the blacks look like velvet it's absolutely beautiful very quickly icm with your phone uh this is paris i took these just with my husband when i was walking along and it was pouring with rain so i didn't take my cabbage camera outfits back at all i just grabbed these really quickly um and i was just again looking for the shakes looking for the people this is when i was in peru a few years ago these were just taken out of a window of a bus as we were driving along my husband's son sat and played on their mobile phones and i must have taken like 600 pictures on my iphone just out of the window um movement of the bus and a little bit of icm this is an app that you can use i think i'll flip over this very quickly this is just to show you can use icm on anything this is my um fitness ball and the second pictures across is just to show you what you'll see in the app you'll see the apps in a minute and then the three on the right were my icm images that i created just earlier when i was putting this presentation together these are your apps that you could use the shirt i've got an iphone and the slow shutter cam iphone works really good you can change different shutter speeds um and you can work really well in there the average cam pro um are used for multiple exposures and for those of you who like pet pen toes the kind of style you can do masses and masses of images and that's where i play with that quite a lot ways to keep in touch with me if you are interested i have a website charlottebellamy.com um the left-hand picture is just where the landing page is the hand one if you click on um creative portfolio that will take you to where you will find all my icm images and all the lots more to have a look at if you've been inspired i am on instagram i do a slightly different style because all my instagram images are done in phone pretty much 95 are done in phone i love going for sort of a bit stronger colors a bit wacky a bit bolder and bit bit braver have a nice instagram and just see what happens if people like it they like it if they don't they don't so and to finish if you've been inspired by any of this um tours and workshops i have several workshops running netherlands in the autumn myself and sue bishop with light land i'm running a tour here in the netherlands from the second to the sixth of november um i have a creative retreat from here at my uh everybody's staying in a hotel but we shall use my farmhouse as a breakout place in the afternoon so we shall photograph each morning and each afternoon will be more creative mental sort of um project working so it won't just be full on photography but it'll be really exploring um exploring your creativity and one place has just come up today available um i've then got two tulips tours running again one with lighter land and one i run myself the small group is literally me in a car with three people for a few days and the one with lighting land is with sue obviously an amazing flower photographer and we go for um a few more people and i will be back in the uk next year a few people have already asked me um about possible workshops if you get in touch with me i'll keep you on a list and i'll let you know when things come up um and then have a look if you're interested i do do mentoring and i'm just about to start some um small group mentoring sessions one on icm one on projects and one on is it's entitled mojo please loot lost please return to sender it's kind of uh i've gone through it several times and i've got some very good tips and things i can share to people if they're interested in doing that but just pop onto my website have a look or drop me an email that's it hopefully you haven't all gone to sleep not at all no everybody's uh enjoyed it very much there's lots of great comments and a few more questions don't mind answering those so um now some of the questions came in before you started speaking about the phone so might be a little bit of um uh replication but i actually judy asked this question early on i wrote it down and then forgot to ask it she asked what are the pros and cons of using motion blur in post-processing as opposed to icm um there aren't any pros or cons but you're kind of then you're doing icm post processing you're not doing icm in camera um i have done it what you do need be aware if you're going to do it in computer you will find the edges you will get very sharp lines so if anybody's looking at your image and going oh i wonder how she did that if you can see all these sharp lines on the edge you kind of need to crop off a chunk all the way around your image if you're going to do it in post in just in photoshop and do it um you can do it and now i think some of these people i don't know what you've seen where there's lines of trees which are beautifully done and then you've got some people walking through the middle that may well have been done with that and it's been sort of you know you need to use um masks and things like that so there isn't any pros or cons it's just whether you want to say you've done it in your camera or not really and maybe you could try taking a a you know a sharp image and an icm image and process the sharp one and see what differences you find i suppose that's that's one way of doing it yeah sometimes if i haven't got it absolutely perfect or i've got one that's a little wobble if you just pull it a little bit then you can straighten it so that's when i might use that for that so but it's not something i do very often okay now um someone has asked actually if you would possibly show the screen again with the apps but alternatively you could if you wouldn't mind just drop oh there we go great i did actually screen grab it but um i thought it's probably easier to do it this way i haven't personally used the android ones i just literally saw them on i watched a presentation three nights ago and somebody gave them out for the android so i assume they work fine but the um the iphone ones certainly work brilliantly they're not free they're not very expensive they're like 199 something like that they're well well worth paying 1.99 for you can get some really really good images great um good recommendations there then glynis has asked do you remember your settings for the waterfall photos um i work on quarter of a second so because it was quite a bright day i wasn't using i don't tend to use filters unless i have to to be honest and i didn't take them with me i had my zoom lens so i was working on my 20 70 to 200 um and i would have been at 100 iso and i would have been at probably 22 f um and then it was yeah around four it's my sweet spot a quarter of a second it's i find it anything slower than that with water then you start getting a lot of blur i think when people first start uh trying icm there's a natural inclination for go to go for really long exposure times and you quickly realize actually that's you end up with a lot of mush don't you and too much wobble so yeah especially if it's amazing how much there's no way you can go slowly and keep you my hands wiggle too much so yeah um lorraine has asked she said are all these taken using just aperture i think i tend to work in manual yeah um but you could work in aperture setting there would be nothing uh no you probably won't want to work in shutter speed you're just going to be using your shutter speed and then your phone would do the rest for you and then at that point if you find the shutter speed that you like yeah there's nothing to stop you doing it in shutter i just tend to work in manual because i've worked in manual for so many years now it becomes a second nature but as long as you yeah don't choose aperture to play with you choose shutter shutter priority okay thank you for that uh tina said sorry to ask again but can you explain again how you move your camera for wave icm okay so when the waves are coming over if they were just coming over and crashing you'd probably want to show that with your but if mine were kind of coming through and surfing under and i was kind of not doing the full circle but just coming over with the waves as they were so you've got to kind of go at the same speed as the waves were going so if they were just coming you just looking at the little ones on the beach you'd be kind of tiny little movements but because the other waves were crashing so big then i was doing bigger movements you're kind of just following you're basically following the movement of the waves it's almost like you're trying to come down you might even want to come down and go back up again if that's what they're doing you know it's just a yeah straightforward they say it's almost like you're drawing the shape of a wave isn't it with your camera yeah uh what are the advantages you're using f22 plus or smaller instead of f 2.8 if you're wanting to what you'll do is you'll find the shutter speed you want to be at and if you're working at slower shutter speeds down there a second what you want to do is minimize the light coming into camera in any other way and that's why i work at the high ref stop because then you've given yourself a small hole for the light to come in if you work at f 2.8 you're going to find it very difficult to get even me a half a second shutter speed unless it's pitch black outside or you're in the dusky twilight in which case you could go to 2.8 sometimes if it's it is dark enough it's actually quite fun to drop the the aperture because then you don't have a lot of detail so you can but most of the time you can never drop it that far end and keep the shutter speed that you want unless you're using filters then you can play it that as well so good point um sue has asked when you're processing do you reduce the noise much or is it part of the image um there isn't no there isn't any noise as such because i'm an iso 100 so it's not really noise it's just movement really yeah i think it's yeah i never go with high iso never with my iso for i see okay martina has asked uh do you use a high speed continuous so that you know um so you i think this must be with the waves so continuous shooting no because i always want to follow i want to know where i'm starting and where i'm finishing yes there's no point in me starting and it then shooting as i'm going under ready to come up for the next wave i feel like i shoot a horse jumping as well when i first shoot individual single shots knowing that that's exactly the moment i want to capture then fire off eight and hope for the best so no i would shoot one one one so yeah that makes perfect sense yeah um so i'm just checking uh i think we've reached the end of the questions and everybody's just saying thank you very much very inspiring talk but they also also really really loved your images and i you know every time you showed a new set of images i thought oh these are great these are my favorites so then i thought oh no i like these it's a really uh wonderful collection of images they're all uh it's been about four years and it's an evolving thing you know i learned how to work with projects when i was doing my master craftsmen so now i kind of work in projects and it's quite nice to do that so i do put most of my stuff up on my website when it when it when i would take it if if i like it enough to share it then it goes up there great well thanks very much for taking the time to prepare this talk and to present to us it's been really uh inspiring thank you very much for asking i think it'd be a bit dark now because it's dark outside so yeah yes well maybe it's time for a glass of wine yeah i think that sounds good great thanks very much then bye-bye thank you so much okay you

Channel: SheClicks

Views: 13,022

Keywords: webinar, SheClicks, ICM, photography

Id: odPQk0V82fI

Length: 79min 53sec (4793 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 28 2020