oh look at that business. Ammonite falls
right here in my hometown of Nanaimo onVancouver Island I've shot here many
many times before I love this spot and I know exactly where I need to be to get
my composition there's a shot just right... It's that f*@ing Adam Gibbs! Oh God, it's just a nightmare. Bloody ell! I'm gonna need a strong coffee! Mmmmm... that's nice. (Door bell rings) Oh... who's that? OTT Scream! Ello Gavin! You wankah! Ridiculous screamage... Ah we're not really arch enemies. But I just had to up the ante in response to Adams last video where he had me as his arch
nemesis and I did notice how well practiced he was with the wanker gesture ;) one of the benefits of going out and shooting with a guy in his 60's is that he has quite a lot of local knowledge so the marks on the on these
Cedars these western red cedars are actually from people peeling the bark
off and the the first nations use the bark to weave baskets and hats and stuff
now I'm not sure if these were done by First Nations but that's why these trees
are all kind of stripped like this doesn't kill the tree as long as you
don't go all the way around it. The trail to Ammonite Falls is only about 45 minutes but it has a slippery, muddy climb at the end and I had resolved not to fall again
just for your viewing pleasure. Oh look an owl. We caught our first
glimpse of ammonite Falls and then we begin our descent down the cliff of
calamity. you're waiting for me to fall aren't ya? Well I'm not gonna. Not gonna do it this time we made it down to the river without
falling on our British bums and got straight to work The challenge is
getting rid of the triangle of pointlessness and that is bit of white sky
there, that's almost always triangular in shape
it drives me bloody mental I can't stand it I don't want anything boring in my
frame I want my frame to be filled with delicious gorgeousness such as the big
column of the waterfall and all this gorgeous foreground so that's the
challenge of my composition so if I go over on that bank on the right-hand side
I can completely eliminate the triangle of pointlessness
but then I've lost all of this gorgeous movement and shape and Colour in the
river so it's that balancing act so I'm gonna keep working and refining this
process I'll try different focal lengths but it is a process is composition. You
take some shots you look at them analytically and you critique your own
pictures and think how can I make it better? Well I know how I can make it better... Get rid of that bloody triangle of pointlessness I have to confess this is getting quite
challenging I'm getting quite frustrated with it can't seem to get rid of the
triangular pointlessness and my foreground is getting weaker the further
I get back I've noticed these mossy branches in the
water there maybe I could arrange them and try and create some foreground but
that's turd polishing and I'd rather not do that
I've spotted a bit further down river which I'm gonna tell Adam about in a
minute but I think it involves getting balls deep in some whitewater which I don't fancy doing but I might have to Meeehh, I got one shot I think. How about you? Just turds I have seen one spot that I think.... we could get a shot. But I think we have to get balls deep in the white water.... I'm up fer it if you are. Alright. Are we doin it? Let's go for it. Right balls-deep we go! Adams got bigger balls than me he's gonna go in first he's down into his trolleys. That is a sexy look. Trolleys and Wellies, that's a new look. We have to make sure my 'unmentionables' don't fall out of the slot at the front ere. Bloody cold!.............yep. It was bloody cold and Adam doesn't have all this seal blubber that I've got. Even on the GoPro the composition looks better from ere. The ultimate Adam Gibbs underwear hero shot. Oh there's nothing quite like a
photographer in his trolleys, polishing his glass! and then it was my turn to
gain to the white stuff. I hope my insurance company's not watching well this definitely wasn't as productive as my last two photo shoots. I'll show you what I got anyway. Yeah it's alright. It's definitely filler and not quite killer. But..... that day I did get a shot of
something truly sublime...... order your high-resolution print at Fototripper.com you know when it comes to the actual photography though, what would you say is your average failure rate? take lots of images on that last okay so
as an example that last trip we went on to Ammonite. How many images do you
think you took? Two! How many turned out? Zero! I took two . I got one that I quite liked so 50%. I know some people like to take hundreds and hundreds of images and then just
kind of pick the best ones but I'm more you know from the 4x5 days a
bit more deliberate with my composition so , it's usually the light that fails me not
so much the compositions all the time how often do you get pilot error? Pilot error? Where you f$#ed up! Probably 90% of the time! ........laughter. Gavin...... how bout you? Very rarely, I'll be honest very rarely. The one thing that we can't fix after the event is focus. you can fix white balance you know you can do noise reduction if you messed up your ISO but if it's out of focus I don't
care what these software packages say that all we could fix a a blurred image
that you didn't focus properly no you can't I think focus is one of the major
ones with me usually I don't take enough images if I take me more you know but
kinda compositionally I tend to not take enough so then I'm stuck with a bunch
that I made the same mistake in and I haven't adjusted it so yeah I did the
same thing last month at Water Sprite Lake it was a shooting Astro and I
always take time to get perfect focus on a star. But I moved my location and I
must have just nudged the the lens a little bit and not realized it but I
just assumed it was still in because once you focused on a star it doesn't
matter where you move after that point it's all in focus right but it must have
nudged it and it didn't realize until after the moonrise had finished and I'd shot all these frames and they were all crap. Yeah I make them probably more mistakes than a lot of so called "professionals" but
you know it's all part of that it doesn't it doesn't bother me too much
unless it somewhere where I've spent a bit of money to get to time to get to
but in those cases then I generally take more images anyway just to make sure
that I have the image so I like to have more than one go, one attempt to get
the shot, because often you don't realize till you get back to the hotel
you download your images and you study them to make sure that you've got them all
correct and everything oh that would have looked so much better if I've got
lower and four feet to the right so it's nice to have that second chance
yeah but you have to do it straight away because other way you'd say well I'm
gonna go back next week or wherever it's never the same but never change too much
yeah I don't know how many times I've done that I've done a location
''oh well go back'' you know you go back and it's nothing like when you were there
the first time that's why astrophotography is good because the one
thing you can almost almost guarantee if you've got like five days of blue sky
down in California then you're doing Milky Way photography you're pretty much
in control of everything that is underneath of that Milky Way you can
light it however you want you can place things wherever you want within reason
and that's that's kind of quite liberating freedom to determine that's
where the lights gonna be so what is it about the island that you that you like
the most? you can take pictures of the mountains,
lakes, waterfalls, the coast you could do all that in one day even Milky Way if
you're in the summertime you know there's so much diversity, crammed
into a little space at most, it's between a three and a six
hour drive at the absolute most, usually two hours or less. I'll ask you the same
question. They're pretty much the same thing I mean I first of all I like to be
in an area with there's lots of you know there's there's lots of things to
photograph that are reasonably close together. I don't really like driving all over
the place just to.. Well my grapes don't it either... Just need a bit of a trail lube. But no I I'm in the forest here I love the forest and then today I mean
it's it's just miserable out but at least you can still go out and photograph
waterfalls. This time of year are great because there's lots of water running
except well except for this waterfall is too much running too much but in the
summer it's it's not that great for waterfalls but it's probably better in
the Alpine. Spend some time in the Alpine if you can deal with the bugs.Oh man...I can't. I looked like I'd been shot with buckshot when I did that Triple Peak trip. I think what
honestly it was like a there's a line of them it was in a line, like one Mozzie thought ''right I'm gonna dine out on this guy'' and It took like three weeks for
it all to disappear. Well they like the English blood I guess. Well it is delightful. And salty
