COMPOSITION tips | Photographing SUBLIME LIGHT

hello hello everybody oh man I have an awful lot of trouble getting kind of excited to go out today in Parksville on the island here it was actually pouring rain this morning and I wasn't terribly excited to to get out the door but I really wanted to push myself after last week's video you know try and get out of this little rut that I'm having so I've driven South South Island a little bit past a town called Nanaimo to a little town called Ladysmith and I've come out to a little regional park called stocking creek and I have been here once before but I never took any photographs I just came here to check it out there's a little waterfall here and there might be a little bit of fall color but it looks like it's it's kind of finished around here as you can see the leaves are pretty much brown but the good news is is that it's it's it's quite foggy here and there's a little bit of light coming through so the light actually right now is it's really quite nice so I'm gonna go and check out this waterfall I know in the summer and in the dry when we're having dry spells it pretty much what it dries right up but we have had quite a bit of rain lately so I'm hoping that'll be enough rain or enough water coming over the water fall to make it somewhat interesting so it's in a kind of a little bit of a gorge right I'm going to check it out and and hopefully it won't be just a recce and all actually well out she take some photographs and try and get out of this bit of a slump that I'm having alright onward okay it's looking quite good there's quite a bit of water coming down the creek so hopefully the waterfall will be in prime photographic condition light is just beautiful right now great looking pretty good there's quite a bit of water coming over it there's actually quite a bit of atmospheric fog in the area too so that's really nice I did notice that the Sun is starting to poke through so I'm gonna have to kind of rush on this try and get a couple of decent shots before it gets too harsh now before I came out here I did check a number of images of the area and the waterfall and they noticed that there's these kind of logs kind of in the way I'm gonna see if I can utilize them somehow in the composition perhaps quite deep down there so I'm not sure if I'm gonna wade in or not but yeah this is looking looking pretty nice okay I think I found a pretty good composition the problem I'm having is that because I'm so close to the waterfall I'm more or less kind of underneath it and I'd like to get these these logs in the foreground but because I'm underneath it I'm looking up more at the waterfall then straight across and when I when I do that I get quite a bit of the sky in which I'm not really that keen on because right now it's just a big white mass of pretty much nothing there's no texture or anything in there good technique for you to find the brightest spots in any scene it it's a squint like this and that's really adds contrast so if you don't sure which part of the composition is the brightest if you just squint or close one eye and squint the bright areas will really pop out and that kind of gives you a good idea of where your attention is going to go when you have the final image now if you do that and you find that the bright areas aren't where you want them to be and that's a good time to you know re-establish a different composition now if you have if you have found a really good composition and the bright areas tend to be on the on the outside then my only suggestion would be so when you process those images is to really darken them down which what they do quite a bit with a lot of my images I use a lot of dodging and burning so I think I've found a pretty good composition and I'll show you what my thought process is for this for this scene here, alright. okay so this is the composition that I've come up with and you see that the top of the falls is the brightest area which isn't ideal but this is about the best I could do if I if I go in too close to the waterfall then I would have cropped it too much now there's a couple of things that are important to me first of all I kind of wanted this foreground log to somewhat frame the right side of the falls and keep your eye kind of in the center of it now I'm not sure if it works better with the this snag here on the outside of the frame so it's not interjecting with the waterfall or to have it kind of crossing over into the waterfall so I'll probably take a couple of images with and without so I'll probably move over to the left a little bit more the other thing that was really important to me I didn't want this foreground log to cross over the background log here so I composed it in in such a way so that this snag in the background here kind of fits nicely into that slot and to do that I had to get quite low with my camera so a lot of these things are important to me it creates a pathway it's somewhat like the the video I did on whether an inch really makes a different difference or not and in this case it's kind of the same thing I don't want to block the viewers eye from going through the frame and one way to do that is make sure you don't have any kind of objects interjecting with one another or crossing over to create kind of a block for people's eye to move through the frame that's the thinking behind it anyway now you'll notice that there's quite a bit of glare on on the on the logs and also the water so I'll probably put up a polarizer on and try it out and see if that cuts down on some of that glare there okay now rather than just have my images to music I thought it might be kind of fun to give a self critique and go over some of the things that I did to process some of these images and also perhaps some of the things that I I don't like about them now you may have noticed straight off the bat that this image is a slightly different composition than the one I was just showing you and that was because I was having a lot of trouble with flare in the in the sky here so I had to include a little bit less than I would have liked to and what ended up happening was that because I was including such little sky or the bright area and top there it felt quite unbalanced and what I mean by that is that the top area felt like it was much narrower than than the bottom section so what I ended up doing was cropping the image I cropped quite a bit off the bottom to more of a panoramic kind of format and I think it works much better the the top now feels quite a bit more balanced with the bottom here another thing that I did was and I kind of neglected to notice this it was quite windy by the edge of the falls and of course all the foliage the cedar here and the ferns are all moving now of course because I had quite a slow shutter speed all of that foliage was quite blurry now what I usually do is take a number of images one for the water at the shutter speed that I want and then if there's any blurry foliage then I'll take some separate images at a faster shutter speed for the foliage and then just kind of paint those in after but in this scenario I actually forgot to do that now luckily I did take some images of the waterfall at a very high ISO I wanted to try and get some texture in there and a faster shutter speed so you'll notice there's a little bit of texture in here and I painted that in afterwards so there's two identical images one at a high iso I think it was iso 6400 and then one a much lower ISO 64 and what I ended up doing was painting some of that iso 6400 image on top of the iso 64 one and you'll notice that there's this looks like mist so that's actually noise from the iso 6400 image now usually I try and get rid of the noise but in this case I left it in because I think it kind of simulated that that mist that was happening around the area and it also not totally but it sharpened up the the foliage here so it works quite well as I said in an ideal situation I probably would have preferred a little bit more sky to play with but you know I made do with with what I had I really liked the composition with the the logs here that worked out quite well okay now out of the three photographs that I'm going to show you today this is probably my favorite and I think it's my favorite because the light was just so sublime with those beams of light in the background there now you may have noticed that with all these images I've warmed them up considerably it was just artistic license I just felt they looked better warmed up rather than that kind of cool blue tone now this photograph was a little tricky to take because I had the Sun blaring right down the front of my lens and of course lens flare was a real problem especially with all that that mist in the air I kept having to wipe my lens clean so those two combinations weren't helping matters so the main reason why I turned this into a panoramic image was that I just couldn't include that much sky I was just getting too much lens flare so I ended up using my hand to block out a lot of the Sun and of course whatever was left was where I cropped so this particular image is a combination of three images and the reason why I did it that way is because the Sun kept it going behind clouds and whenever it went behind a cloud then it really reduced that lens flare and of course when the Sun came out it was virtually impossible to get rid of all the lens flare so I took the three images and then kind of painted them all together to form this image like I said I really like the the crop I like the pano I put the waterfall right in the center of the frame because it just felt balanced to me well, I'm I'm really glad that I can't help today that turned out to be a really good morning I'm not sure if I got anything really great but you know I say that every time but of course you guys have seen the shots already and I haven't I haven't seen them so but I think I'm pretty happy with what I got I was just a little bit worried about the light shining into my lens and all that mist sometimes you just can't see it on the back of the screen and then of course when you open up in a computer then you discover all the all the flaws and everything but anyway that was an awesome time and I mean whether it got me out of this slump or not I don't know but I really enjoyed myself so that's the main thing that's one thing Vancouver Island really does have going for it is that there's no shortage of places to go and they're all reasonable drives except for maybe north north island anyway I'm going to go home and and have a cup of tea I hope you enjoyed this video please be sure to give me a thumbs up if you did and as always if you enjoy the content of my channel be sure to subscribe alright everybody thanks ever so much and I'll catch you next time alright, bye, bye

Channel: Adam Gibbs

Views: 22,282

Keywords: stocking falls, ladysmith, vancouver island, british columbia, canada, adam gibbs, adam gibbs photography, waterfall photography, photographing waterfalls, landscape photography, landscape photography tips, photo critiques, landsape photography in canada, photographing nature, photography, photography techniques, waterfall on vancouver island, quiet light, photographing light beams, photographing fog and mist, how to photograph waterfalls, composition tips, sublime light, d850

Id: jERhzXHG11Y

Length: 15min 45sec (945 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 17 2018