Expressive Landscape Photography: Shooting locally in the Scottish Highlands.

[Music] well good morning uh you're watching express photography my name is aleister ben and welcome to the scottish highlands uh well what a morning it is uh we've got some snow in the hill we've got frost on the ground here we've got fog rising up enveloping these mountains around us and this is a road we drive quite a lot we're traveling back from my mother's house down in perthshire back up to our house on the west of scotland we've been down giving her a bit of emotional support for a few days because she's nearly 90. now i drive this road so often what makes me stop today well the key question or the key answer to that question is atmosphere we're once again as we were in a couple of the videos over the last few weeks enveloped in fog and it's that hide-and-seek nature between the mountains and the fog and the sky and it's all just being enveloped with this beautiful atmosphere and that's what we're going to explore today is so we're playing hide and seek with the mountains and then we're going to process them to fill them with this atmosphere so yeah scotland does its best [Music] so what is it about fog and mist and atmosphere that kind of gets us all photographically excited and stimulated well i think one of the key things is it's kind of abstracting the landscape things are getting diffused scale relationships change distances between things change and the fact that we can't see all of something allows us particularly with these long lenses to isolate bits of landscapes juxtaposed with all this wonderful atmosphere and i think the second thing about it is is it's constantly changing i think when i first got into landscape photography there was this kind of feeling that the moments of the day that were useful to us photographically were actually quite short um you know sunrise and sunset predominantly it is currently 11 20 in the morning here on the west well in the highlands of scotland uh in january and you know the light is incredible you know so this idea that we can only photograph at sunrise and sunset i think just kills off huge chunks of the day so at this moment in time with all this heavy atmosphere the mountains behind me are starting to get shrouded in and there's stuff over there that's flowing and the beautiful the way the fog is just rolling over the landscape it's a truly fascinating place to be it's a beautiful thing to look at and we have to expand our horizon of opportunity in terms of how we see photography and what photography is the experience of being here with ann christine behind the camera in front of me is a joyful and wonderful thing we're surrounded by this beautiful atmosphere in this beautiful quiet landscape and this experience is incredible now it's my job i guess as an expressive photographer to make the photograph somehow reflect that and that's what i'll be diving into the studio now to see what i can do with these raw files these diaries of engagement as i call them to see if i can somehow express something of the joy and peace and tranquility of being here in this beautiful highland environment so the thing that made me stop the car as we were driving across the mirror there was the just these beautiful mountains shining in the in the sunshine there with snow on them and kind of the the mirrors themselves were quite dark and and without snow and ironically connecting back to the train spotting uh video from last weekend this isn't terribly far from where the guys got out the train and we're kicking the beer can around and complaining at how rubbish scotland is because all it is is bogs and mountains uh so i think some city folks think of it that way but for us this is the the very essence of scotland to me is the mountains and and the drama and that feeling of isolation and space now what i've done with this is i've made quite a a gritty and somewhat oppressive black and white conversion of this and the reason i've done that was to just demonstrate one thing which is what we see isn't necessarily what we want to express and how we feel when we're sat in front of the computer has a big impact on the final photographs if we compare the the raw file on the left to the word file on the right hand side you know the one on the left is lovely and it's it's a really delicate scene and it looks particularly lovely and realistically in many ways i prefer it to the black and white photograph but processing is such a powerful tool for us it's one of those things that can change tonal relationships it can create drama it can create contrast and one of the key things about photographs like this is to understand the impact of those decisions it's something i talk an awful lot about in some ways the one on the right is a distillation of the thing on the left it's got the contrast it's got the structure it's got the luminosity but at the same time it's changing the relationships a little bit and as soon as you see two images side by side you make a choice you make a preference and i'm sure those people sat watching this who are thinking oh well you've ruined the beautiful raw file the one on the left looks way better and there's others who are going to feel the black and white a lot an awful lot more and this diversity of human interaction with our work we've got no control over some will prefer the raw some will prefer the black and white some will hate both and that is also fine i don't have any ownership to the working of this file i worked purely to demonstrate how dramatically we can move raw files especially in black and white in color you don't have that same amount of freedom because the colors tend to get a bit crazy the blue in the sky there would get really crazy the warm tones and the mountains there on the mowers would get a bit crazy if i however look at the second photograph this photograph is far closer to what the camera saw um and it's a very ethereal rendition and the only contrast is up there on that ridge line which is really what caught my eye in the first place and it's a very rounded yeah i want to keep coming back to those core principles that i talk about so often luminosity contrast geometry color and atmosphere all five of those things are present in this photograph and all of them have an influence if we think about the luminosity you've got the global luminosity in terms of how bright the image is which is instantly uplifting if it was to begin darker it's going to get more sinister let's do that it's already been i've increased it by 0.85 of a stop so i'm going to take a quick history snapshot here so i've made a quick history snapshot there and if i just darken this image how different that is from the previous version now you can see as i added the contrast there how blue the image has got the saturation has increased because in lightroom you increase contrast you increase saturation they're linked and i may have to come down and actually tone down the blues or the vibrance a little bit and i can even just dial in straight onto the the blue saturation slider itself now if it gets less blue it suddenly becomes a bit quieter again if i take that blue back up it's expressing itself more and this is the thing i really want to hammer home particularly in today's video all of these little tiny adjustments that we make all have an impact but it's not just a visual impact there's an emotional impact and this is what i want to really hook on to this image i could work innumerable different ways because if i suddenly went into black and white and hit my bw mix and suddenly just took all the blue out of that very quickly we can make a very dynamic and impressive i mean they're so different you know if i make a snapshot now for black and white and we skip between those two this is the beautiful area ethereal version we had and this is our dramatic black and white which one is right which one is wrong which one is better which one is worse does it really matter it's all expressive photography and it's what we choose to express is what is important a case in point of there is that mountain behind us which was why we stopped the car as we're driving across the moors here is completely enveloped and cloud now and we've just got this very odd chunk of very black cliff that's showing there now and the whole place has changed the mountain is still the same but the way the fog and the light has changed has changed the subject it's changed the feel of the subject and isn't that curious how it's not reality that's changing it's the atmosphere and the elements and then our perception of that that changes and therefore everything changes now this final scene this was the last thing we really shot before we got back on the road and this i want to emphasize how important aspect ratios are this is cinematic pano which is 2.35 to 1. and if you want to know how to do that you can input it as a custom in your crop tool in lightroom and i'll just show you where that is in your basic panel hit the the crop tool and you'll see here i have a number of custom ratios if you want to put in a new one you just enter custom and it asks you and you can put in 2.3521 and that will give you this aspect ratio and this is basically if you went to an imac cinema this is the format that they show their movies at which is why they feel so expansive so what this is doing is it's focusing our impression of the mountain as this vast expanse even though it was actually quite a small slice of the mountain it makes it feel really wide and and as i said expansive this is what the panoramic format does it's also slightly blue you can see here in the histogram there's a lot of blue in the highlights and that's just a little bit of uh temperature that i've moved to the left-hand side there just to cool it down so what this photograph is saying if we think about the expressive qualities of the of the photograph we've got this dark looming cliff which is a heavy thing if you think about visual weight as a concept the angular lines create dynamics so we have a very strong contrast point in here with this black and white line at a 45 degree angle that creates dynamics this is a softer line and it's slightly shorter angle so it's not as dynamic but it's between two white surfaces so again it's taking some of the energy out of this scene and then we've got the slightly more atmospheric misty side which kind of diffuses the side of the frame that's a natural it's not a dehaze vignette or something that i put onto the photograph myself so the contrast luminosity color and geometry and the atmosphere in this photograph are telling a bit of a mixed story where we have the strong i was gonna say the strong strength um which of this big looming cliff but it's in a softer environment and i think that's uh that's one of those ones you could kind of dive on to a metaphor with and sort of make yourself lots of stories about strength and resilience and the softer side of life and things like that but yeah at the end of the day at the end of the day these are four very different photographs all taken within a reasonably short space of time i guess we're only doing you know 45 minutes to an hour and a lot of that time obviously we're filming and flying drones and making b-roll and all that type of stuff but the thing that's clear to me from photographs like this is the diversity of expressive options we have through processing anyone who says that this is a gross manipulation of reality is realistically unaware of what black and white photography is if you go and shoot black and white film is that somehow a purer version of creating a black and white photograph than using a color raw file from a digital camera i'm not interested in the morality and the ethics of expression i really just want us to be able to understand this diversity of expression that we have as usual i hope you enjoy my approach to landscape photography i'm all about the expressive qualities of it and i don't want to take away from the fact that we utterly loved being out of there as i mentioned on the film and christine and i were out there in the countryside the sun was shining it was a very beautiful place to be and the photographs that we make of course so many of them are for me there's a utility to it i have you know i'm showing i'm demonstrating i'm educating i'm trying to share some of the knowledge i've gained over the last 20 plus years and hopefully you get this so if you do please hit the thumbs up button and give me a comment or subscribe or all of that type of stuff that really just helps us out and we will see you next week um and maybe we'll have another little surprise for you so thanks for watching have a good week everyone stay safe wherever you are and uh yeah thank you [Music] you

Channel: Expressive Photography

Views: 5,903

Keywords: Lightroom, Photography, Alister Benn, Landscape photography, how to, tutorials, composition, educate, expressive photography, barriers, vision, experience, tutorial, lesson, be better, motivation, inspiration, inspire, Luminosity, Processing, Understanding light, Light, engagement, better photographs, landscape, mountains, process, meaning, emotion, personal development, Adobe, Nikon, creativity, KASE, abstraction, development, atmosphere, Scotland

Id: UI_MiU4vJQs

Length: 18min 35sec (1115 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 21 2021