Ditch The Crowds - Haunting Landscape Photography

they both comfortable no I'm not what's it coming up my bum what is that have a look at my trophy Wow it's actually my trophy Oh Gavin Hardcastle the first place you'll bring that to the fair over here I brought it all over the sky and bring it to the ferrets I still need to put it on the front of the rental car sock and lard it I love you I noticed that you were you left the workshop tray ileum went off with oh well poles are a stalker superfan I decided to go with him so you I mean good friends though oh yeah really good friends actually I was actually thinking of moving to Darrin another cold yeah bus yeah we move into Vancouver Island I was thinking about it here when you're gonna do don't know maybe in this summer this summer summer coming near so you'll be like going on doing vlogs with don't go grumpy yeah things aren't over island be good I think it's important for us to see other people give me like other photographers well ya know the vloggers yeah the vloggers it's a good idea I think the relationship has reached a certain level of maturity it's time to move on move on this is because of this isn't it you're bitter about this oh well it's a bit out of order how you you did that really however I won this fair and square ball put a bit of tape on it with your name on this is my award I don't think so out of order out of order completely out the volley I'm out of order you're out of order or out of order glad you're not coming to the Faroe Islands with us well actually Kevin I've invited Paul oh come on this mug Scouse get thankfully uncle grumpy was only winding me up about Paul joining us I'd better not be seeing him on Vancouver Island especially not in let's say November anyway I'm getting ahead of myself let me take you back to a week earlier this is Finnick Glenn and it's the first place that I show to my workshop participants because it's pretty much a Fantasyland come to life and even earned a big grudging nod from the silver top sourness himself well we finally made it into the Finnick Glen on what's also known as the devil's pulpit there and uncle grumpy has never seen this before so what do you think it's pretty Scottish I'd say the water floor is about not quite perfect I would like either a little bit more or a lot less because when there's less you can get down the other end of the canyon and access all of these pools but this is beautiful for the waterfall shot we could get at this side of the canyon and I shot this in all conditions I've shot this in January during a storm I've shot this in the springtime like now and I've shot this in Arkham and in autumn you can probably see all of these leaves down the sides that if the whole place is just carpeted in a blanket of orange leaves it's quite spectacular but this time of year the greens are a little bit more vibrant so there's never an ugly time to come here into a fennec life as I mentioned there I've been to this canyon more times than I can count but it never fails to provide a picture worth taking so here are a couple shots that have captured over the years that I think you might enjoy [Music] this is one of the things that I love about Finnick Glen is this emerald colored reflection that you can sometimes get in the pool when the river levels are low and the water is calm and then add to that those lovely rich brown tones in the water and you have a very juicy color palette [Music] I thought I'd also show you this autumn shot that I mentioned earlier so that you can see that lovely splash of color in the foreground from those fallen leaves oh and if you're wondering if I pasted it in that ray of light the answer is there are yes silly highland cow I really really want to cuddle one but I'll settle for a nice moody picture instead highland cows can live around 20 years and a mature bull can wear upwards of 1,800 pounds I certainly wouldn't be this close to a bull that's for sure we continued our journey west through the always impressive Glencoe in search of the bluebells of ballyhoo lish where those with midge nets were able to capture beautiful photos on harassed by the dreaded scourge of the midge hordes while those without mich nets well how are you coping without your midge net right now just fine yeah love Mitch's cook well you wouldn't go hungry would ya [Laughter] [Music] I'm here at castle stalker in Scotland its near ballyhoo lish and I've come out with it with my workshop crew - we skipped the sunrise because it was just foggy all morning but it's about almost 10 a.m. now and the skies just begun to open up and give us this beautiful bit of contrast a cloud over Castle stalker we've got reflections we've got algae in the foreground of the beach it's absolutely majestic these reflections of these clouds are really what's making this shot I'm kind of far away from castle stalker even at 24 millimeter so I might have to do like a perspective blend where a shoe really wide get that with all the focus snacks and then shoot a little bit longer for the cattle the problem is though I've got these steel rails for the boat launch that go from the foreground into the background and that's always difficult when you're doing a perspective blend when you have a subject in the foreground that continues off into the distance so I'll try and figure out a way to separate that so that I can get this shot the way that I want it in my mind well let's be honest this shot turned out pretty weak but I think it's important that I sometimes show you the weakest shots because as my old friend Ted used to say you can't polish a turd luckily though we had a second castle to visit with a very interesting pit stop along the way so my Scotland workshop group and I would just drive into the Isle of Skye and I'll just on the highway which is only about a hundred feet away we spotted this majestic seen this lawn tree on this bluff backlit by these gorgeous white and grey and when we first showed up some of them are almost black clouds a very very dramatic and very typical Scottish scene very typical of the Isle of Skye and that's what I love about Scotland is that you can come here on a really horrible grim day when you think there's no chance of getting a shot and you're almost unless it's sideways rain you're almost guaranteed a good shot some so let me show you this shop I absolutely love it when I get a bonus shot that was completely unexpected and that's the thing with landscape photography if you keep your eyes peeled you can often find momentary gems while on your way to somewhere else but the trick is to always always stop because if you tell yourself that you'll come back and shoot it later well the conditions will never be the same and you'll always regret not stopping and I'm guilty of this myself but when I occasionally listen to my own advice I rarely regret it deal you had with Skillshare that reminds me this video is sponsored by Skillshare Skillshare is an online learning community for creators with modern twenty five thousand classes some of the classes that I find interesting Ian Norman's nightscape scoffs and Photoshop compositing with Pete Collins as well as color grading by John Brummett whether you want to fuel your curiosity your creativity or even your career skill share is the perfect place to learn new skills and hone your craft I've posted a link in the description below so that you can get a two-month free trial and Skillshare is super affordable an annual subscription comes in at less than $10 a month and if you've got a premium membership you can get unlimited access so you can join the classes and communities that could really improve your photography and post-processing skills so big thanks to skill share for supporting my channel I can now finally afford a new lens cloth alright let's get back to the story I really want to show you this shot this is the very popular 13th century eilean donan castle near the kyle of lochalsh and unlike many Scottish castles it's not actually a ruin and the last time I was inside was about 20 years ago when a friend of mine got married there so you can actually rent this castle out for weddings I've been lucky enough to capture some lovely sunset shots of this castle but on this day the high tide was perfect for that blue hour shot that I've been after for years [Music] what I love about this shop is that it's got that lovely contrast of a warm inviting light sauce set amid a cold blue landscape and I talk a lot about this in a video that I posted a while ago specifically about blue our landscape photography so here's a link to that video which I recommend you watch several times I also love the almost 3d quality of the castle there which I achieved by shooting both the castle and the landscape with two different white balance settings which are then blended to keep the best colors from each exposure the very next day I was lucky enough to capture these conditions at the ferry pools and this would have been my favorite shot had it not been for that bloody big water droplet that you can see on the right of the frame and yes I did have a full photo tantrum about it I had to focus stack this shot by blending an f16 shot where it focused on the foreground with an f8 shot where focused on the mountain in the background I used the lens distortion of my 60 millimeter lens to really elongate the mountain for maximum bosh factor this was another one of those shots that was just 30 feet from the road and I'm so glad we stopped but the problem was as soon as that iPad waving zombie army caught sight of our tripods it was game over this is the queer Aang and I created this image using the time blending techniques shown in my Photoshop tutorial here's a link to that I suggest you watch it several teen times and bashed the out of that like button hard and this cute little shop is for all you Harry Potter nerds I had to shoot a very fast shutter speed of one 800th of a second in order to capture the Chuchu and the smoke was zero motion blur jobs are good [Music] the old man of storr you didn't think I'd forgotten did you know I was saving the best till last no trip to the Isle of Skye is complete without the long busting slog up the star so I ditched the flip-flops but kept the school buy shots now you get extra street cred if you just spotted that little continuity error there post a comment if you are one of the observant ones it's become so popular here that it's literally crawling with tourists but the whole point of this video is about getting off the beaten path ditching the crowds and capturing a unique shot [Music] so I left the trail and ventured off into the mist to this wondrous vantage point that for this visit was mine all mine I'm here at one of my all-time favorite shooting locations on planet Earth and that is the old man of storr on the Isle of Skye when I come to the old man of star this is what I'm after this beautiful mist so I better start shooting it in it comes I love this kind of mist because it gives me loads of atmosphere now the problem when you shoot in in this kind of low-lying cloud or misty wispy rain that just kind of waft in if you've got to shoot and swipe so what I'm doing is I'm shooting and then I'm cleaning my filter and then I'm shooting and then I'm playing my filter rinse and repeat you can't really come up here and take a bad picture in any light you're gonna get a good shot but my favourite kind of light is this it's like dull rainy drab light with with these foggy well I think they're just low-lying clouds really that waft in and out of the scene and it just it just gives a sense of atmosphere and that's what you get when you come to the old Manor start it's that almost dual lid and sinister atmosphere that I absolutely can't get enough of and today the light is absolutely perfect for this type of shot that I'm after so I think what I want to talk about in this video is the the old cliche of getting off the beaten path and this spot here that I've come to in the old man of storr you've probably not seen that many shots of this if any and that is because I'm about 250 feet off of the main trail and I'm the only person up here certainly the only photographer and it is a bit sketchy it's a bit of a climb but it's you know I'm not super skilled or anything like that and I'm totally out of shape so if you're willing to just get off the beaten path a little bit and hike uphill and get us get a bit of a sweat on you'll get a totally different shot to everybody else oh the mist is coming back in again so let me talk you through this shot what I've got here is the main spire in the centre of my frame and then it's it's bookended by these two other very large columns if I move my head out of the way you'll see the other one and and it seems like a very obvious comp and it is but it just works and sometimes don't be afraid to go for those very obvious centralized bang in-your-face types of compositions if it works it works or the mist is starting to waft in now I have just got to keeps you in I'd love if there was a little bit of Sun came through and I got rainbows but I know that's a bit too much to ask and then for the foreground I've got this little Ridge of mossy rocks that come in from the left of the frame I kind of lead your eye in ever so slightly towards that main central spire and if I turn the camera over you can see some more mist or fog waft in its way in so I'll just keep shooting I mean look at look how fast that's moving hopefully you could see that so I'm just shooting shooting shooting just keep on taking pictures and then it's a you know it's a fairly easy process to blend that moment in time with the moment in time from earlier or in the next couple of minutes if I keep on shooting hahaha oh man I just I just love this kinda this kind of condition now you can probably see in the distance while maybe you can on this but there's probably a hundred cars parked in fact I can even see my van where a couple of my group are waiting and then a couple of my group are higher up the hill than I am but I can easily get rid of those in Photoshop that's not an issue just unbelievable this is the shot that I've been after for years and to me there was just so much mood and atmosphere during that moment that I feel this shot captures the very essence of Scotland and sky in particular because even in the ugliest weather it's beautiful enough to completely take your breath away it's not often that I capture a portfolio piece during a vlog but I will be printing this image large for some limited edition aluminium prints so do get in touch if you'd like to order one of those and know I'll be hanging one in my home for sure so this is my last day here on the Isle of Skye with my Scotland photography workshop group and I really just haven't had the time to do any vlogging because I've been giving my attention to my group and I've only even had a little bit of time to even do some photography but it's been a brilliant trip we all got some amazing shots so tomorrow we head back to Glasgow I dropped my group off I finally get one good night's sleep and then the next day uncle grumpy and I fly out to the Faroe Islands to begin that workshop and hopefully there'll be some epic shots from that - oh man I can't stop shooting it's kicking off and look at that two minutes after I took that last shot and said goodbye an entire cloud came in and just completely wiped out the scene so that is my cue to get back down the hill with that shot literally in the bag I was on such a photographer's high that I barely noticed the searing agony of my knees of cheese while hiking back down which brings us back to uncle grump his little bromance with Paul the stalker sorry vlogger there were a few choice words at the airport as you know all too well we've had our fair share of Tiff's and spats but above all else we are mature were professionals and we managed to put aside our differences and reach an understanding by using our highly developed communication skills all that was needed was a little time apart so that we could reflect on the things that we have in common like how I think his face looks like a cat who's sitting in the middle on the handbrake then come on no all right yeah right okay Gavin Hardcastle can we open a window sweats in it hiya Paul oh yeah what are you thinking of doing them off off from the two of that giant bird on you winner into all that's nothing you should see the one on the bonnet the cows fly around here yeah I think to be honest really Gavin you know it's I think it's important for us to start spending time with drama to it to be honest Gavin I think we should we should really start seeing other people or the photographer's oh yeah but not actually know other people I think let's not you know let's keep it photography really and I one dates I earned this this is my award I won this I earned this you're out of order well actually Gavin I've invited Paul tea towel [Music]

Channel: fototripper

Views: 65,958

Keywords: landscape, photography, isle of skye, scotland, old man of storr, adam gibbs, uncle grumpy, skillshare

Id: 8FhKtgp0K7g

Length: 23min 28sec (1408 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 20 2019