Welcome to the ultimate travel and
landscape photography to tutorial. This tutorial includes all of the raw
files that you're going to see on the screen. Crazy. I know this is by far the most
ambitious tutorial on YouTube, filmed over two months
in Iceland and Japan. Links to all the raw files and a full
table of contents are in the description. If you get a lot of value from this
tutorial, we are not asking for any money. All we ask is that you
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email to a friend at checkout. I'll even reshare the best ones. Thanks for watching and we hope that this
is the most valuable photography video that you've ever found
online. All for free. [inaudible] [inaudible] welcome to this tutorial. We are going to go through a lot of
different variations of situations you can find yourself in, in
Iceland and in Japan. Uh, here it's gonna be a lot of cityscape
tutorials in Iceland's gonna be a lot more landscape driven or shooting everything
on the Nikon mirrorless series. But all of these tips should apply
to any camera system you're using. I'm going to start off the
tutorial by telling you, I guess the thing that helped me the most, when you're learning to see light and
you're just not sure what is good light and you're not sure what
are good compositions, you're really just being distracted by
the fact that everything is just color and you're used to looking
at the world in color. But if you set your preview
on your camera to monochrome, you really simplify everything,
so it's pretty simple. You just hop in here and you go from
standard to monochrome and there is no negative doing this. This is just the
JPEG preview. You should be shooting raw, and if you're shooting wrong, you're
still shooting the full color image, so you're seeing the black
and white simplified version. You're seeing the light, you're
seeing the composition a lot better, and then when you get
back to your computer, you can choose whether you want it to be
black and white or whether you want it to be the raw color version. Another tip to start off here. This
is a bit of a higher level tip, but I think it's an important foundational
element. To do your best work, you have to go to the places that
legitimately have meaning to you. Meaning will inspire you when inspiration
isn't coming naturally and meaning will make up for technical flaws. It
does not have to be as far as Tokyo. It could be that path that you walk
every day or your childhood backyard. Our culture is so caught up in just doing
things for the internet likes and it is very easy to create a body of work
that doesn't actually have any meaning or value to you. While Tokyo and
Iceland are the examples here, please resist the urge to think that
you can only do good work in far off places. The truth is you're probably going to
create your most valuable images really close to home. We're here in Tokyo, which is one of my
favorite travel photography locations. There's just so much going on here, and I'm gonna ask this random gentleman
a for landscape photography tip. Excuse me, sir. Do you have a travel
photography tip? So me and my son, one thing is there's a lot of, there's a lot of people out here
that just stand out, you know, their style is different
and there's a lot of like, this is the New York of the other side
of the earth I guess. And when I see, when I see a lot of signs and a lot of
things that look different out of the ordinary from what I'm used to, I usually tend to photograph
those things as well. So mostly looking for things that
just stand out of the ordinary, something that just stands
out out of the crowd. Yeah. Cool. Well thank you.
Random stranger does. She to add to Mandy's point a little bit to
travel is to be inspired by the ordinary to be fully present and aware, unless your jet lag 12 hours and existing
only on hotdogs from gas stations like we are. Let's talk about gear. Welcome to the gear section of this video. Originally I recorded this in Iceland
with the ocean and the mountains. Everything is beautiful. But even
though we were in the middle of nowhere, there was a lot of radio interference
on my wireless microphone. So as a note, always monitor your audio.
If you're doing video, I'm going to walk you through all of the
gear that I use and I'm attempting to break this down into way
that will hopefully save
you the most amount of money possible or at least make sure that when
you spend money that is in fact in the right places. Uh, that is my number
one goal I think with this video. So I'm going to break it down kind of
character style, like a video game. Uh, one other thing to kind of start this
section off with that I think is important to talk about is that we
as landscape shooters, we go out there into the world and we
get really tunnel visioned on getting the shot of that waterfall
or whatever it might be. And we tend to forget about the
people. We're actually on that journey, on that adventure with. And I think that it is important for us
to remember that while we do want that like amazing waterfall shot, that when we come back to the
most important images, 10 15, 20 years from now are going to be the
photos of the people we were actually on that adventure with. So try not to get too focused too tunnel
vision in creating just the landscape aspect of things. Tried to
involve friends, family, whoever you're on that trip
with as much as possible. And I feel like those images are going
to be a heck of a lot more valuable 50 years from now. And also, um, I guess
humans add scale to images as well. We'll talk about that
in the future, but they, there are some helpful
things that technically they, people do make images better for the
most part. Landscape images I think. Uh, so to break this down, I think that
there are kind of three character types, or at least I'm going to simplify
it to three character types. There are a lot more, I guess,
niches of photography out there. But to break it down, I feel like there is kind of the portrait
shooter that you're out there to grab photos of people. Maybe it's a
higher commission and you're out, you're traveling, but you're also
photographing people. When I'm at home, I'm a wedding photographer, so I
feel like I am this like this human, like a a hundred percent pretty much.
And then on the other side of things, in the travel and landscape realm, there is the purest landscape
photographer and the purest landscape photographer. Simply
out there, maybe alone, I feel like I do maybe one third of
my trips alone. And when I do that, I feel like I'm a lot more
on this side of things. Traditionally on a trip I am more
in the middle, which is kind of, I'm going to call it hybrid character, I guess that we can have
portrait shooter over here. We can have the purest landscape
photographer over here. And then both of them kind of
come together in the middle, I think to make a travel photographer, which I think is more of a hybrid shooter.
I'm not talking photo video, just um, or I guess you could be, but I'm talking more just that you're
out there to document both people in places a little bit more kind of like
street style and, or you can, if you want, but then also have the ability to create
those great landscape images as well. Um, my, I guess number one thing is
that I want my kid, I want my lenses. I don't want to carry anything
that's too heavy all of the time, uh, that when I'm out traveling I feel
like I don't even want to check a bag. So if I can do everything carry on only, that's one thing that these Nikon
mirrorless cameras is ed six has been incredibly helpful with that. It really did make a lot of my gear a
lot smaller so that I'm able to travel with it a little bit more. And, um, especially when we're traveling
with multiple other photographers, it's very easy for us when we're all
on the same system to share lenses. So there might be some value in that if
you're traveling with somebody else to actually, um, kind of just like
pool lenses together and be like, these are the things we're gonna need
to bring so that nobody has to check any bags specifically. Never check a bag
with lenses or anything in it. Um, or batteries I guess as
well. Let's start this off. Let's talk about the purist
landscape photographer. And when I'm in purest landscape mode, I use a lens that I never use when
I'm a wedding and portrait shooter. And that is the 24 to 72.8
and I like the 2.8 version, not necessarily because it's a 2.8
rather than the F four version. The four version is the kit lens that
comes with this. Um, and the kit lens, I feel like we've kind of given that
a bad name since the 18 to 55 days, but a 24 to 70 that comes on these new
Nikon cameras or really any kit lens you get with most systems now is really
an incredible tool. And well, I don't find myself necessarily needing
to shoot at 2.8 which I think is usually the reason to upgrade
to something like this. I do find myself using this a lot and
I think it's important as a landscape shooter to go out there and to know what
you use the most and then to iterate on that gear. So start off with kit lens. Don't just go all in and just spend a
bunch of money to have like the best of the best that you can. Start off
and you can find out what you need, what you use, and then at that point go to that next
step and then get that 2.8 version or the next version up. So as a
landscape, purest photographer, number one is this 24 to 70 this is
the most important piece of kit or equivalency if you're
shooting on an APS. See body. Another lens that I bring with me that
I never bring with me if I'm in the wedding portrait space, is this
14 to 30. Uh, it's an F four. It's a super wide angle lens. And what you're going to see me using
this lens in a lot is when there's a very interesting foreground, I feel like
as photographers and myself included, I have this weird obsession with going
as wide as possible cause I think it's the most impactful image. And I've been trying to kind
of reel that back over time. And I know when I'm using a super
wide that whatever's happening in the foreground is the most important or I'm
trying to distort reality a little bit and make it seem a little bit
more strange than real life. Uh, which I do in Iceland because I feel
like it's a strange environment and you kinda capitalize on the strengths
of that. And by using a super wide, you can make things look a little bit
weirder than life. So that is my main kit. If I'm out there just to do landscape
photography only. The one edition, and I feel like this is in
addition to any of the characters, is a 70 to 200. So this is
not my Nikon D eight 50. Uh, you can use the FTS ed to put it
onto the mirrorless body if you want, but by using a 70 to 200 I find when
I'm in bigger environments with lots of mountains for big landscape, you almost need a big lens and we'll get
more into this on the actual shooting. And for the most part I am usually
really happy when I do bring this lens. Again, you don't need to start
with the 2.8 version of this. You can start with the F four if
you find that you're using it a lot, you can upgrade to the 2.8 at some point. I use this a lot for the wedding
and portrait side of my business, which is why I own kind of the best of
the best for this because this is a main key lens for that. But big landscapes
need a bigger lens some of the times, so that's a nice to have but
not necessarily a hundred
percent requirement right out of the gate. But definitely depending on the location
and depending on the trip, it's a very, very important lens. So
landscape photographer, those two lenses with the option of the
three moving over here to the wedding and portrait shooter, what I would actually be bringing
is probably an 85 millimeter lens. I feel like that is my comfortable place
as a quiet introverted photographer. Uh, so my 85 is not here, but
it's in the office over there. It's essentially this size of lens. Uh, if you prefer the 50 millimeter
focal length for portraits, you can bring this 50 as well.
It's a 1.8. It's very good. Um, and then depending on the situation that
you find yourself in that specifically when we were in San taurine
filming this upcoming project, I found that the 35 millimeter lens
was really as telephoto as I could comfortably go. When I want
to integrate the scene, I want to integrate the people into the
scene a lot better and I don't have the space to move around. I found
the 35 to be incredibly helpful. So if I am going out into the world
to do a wedding and portrait shoot on location travel style, I am going to bring a 35 millimeter
lens and am I 85 millimeter lens. These are the two lenses that I
would pretty much entirely bring. If I'm shooting a wedding, usually I'm
on a 35 and an 85 85 on my main body, I would say 95% of the time, 35 of my
second body and I'm super happy with that. The addition to that I think is adding
the 70 to 200 that I talked about that if you're in a place that you're really
not going to be in control of the situation, like if you're in
a big church or something, you can definitely bring this. It
will definitely help you out a lot. But I find that when I'm
doing travel commissions, usually I have freedom over
where I actually stand. So it's pretty easy for me to use an
85 and get a little bit closer. Um, another thing you can do is you can, if you're using a full frame camera
and you have an 85 millimeter lens, you can usually go into crop mode. Uh,
at least on Nikon cameras you can, uh, you can just hop quickly into DX
crop mode and get that extra reach. So you turn the 85 and two 85 times
1.5 and a little more range out of it. So as my kit, 85, 35 from up there to shoot just
portraits and then the hybrid kit. So because I have this very nice 24 to
70, I would usually be bringing this, although it is quite happy. So I will do, actually is I will bring the kit lens
with me because it's a lot easier to travel with. And usually a 50
millimeter lens, which is right here. So this 50 and this kit lens
is all I will usually bring. If I'm just out on a trip, sometimes
the 35, sometimes the 24 1.8, which is what I'm actually recording on a, if I'm specifically interested in Astro
photography or something that's gonna be happening at nighttime, that I do need
a wider aperture, 1.8 aperture for um, and also the whiteness of it. Uh, what I've discovered though is that using
the super wide or even using the kit lens at F four, if you are shooting stars, that with just high ISO performance and
cameras now it's actually surprisingly easy that you don't need to get that 21.8
or whatever the lens is that you think that you need to shoot stars with.
Um, if you're just doing it for fun, for enjoyment, for yourself
to create great images, you don't really need a whole
lot of gear. Fortunately, what you do need a lot of gear for is
if you want to like really get deep into the, the actual, um, star clusters and everything and
start pulling detail out of that. But there is a whole literal world, a universe of information to
learn in that sector of things. What you'll see in the on-camera videos
that are upcoming here is that we just kind of do the basic star photos
that you would expect to see, that you would be happy to capture when
you're out there or in Northern lights, photos. Uh, and all of those can realistically be
done with this kit lens is 24 to 70, which is really, really cool. So I am super happy of the high ISO
performance of pretty much every camera that's coming out now and
specifically these Zed sixes, um, I think are kind of the perfect
travel camera for me. Um, the other thing I love about them, uh, I guess to speak to the
actual camera bodies. Uh, the thing that I liked the most
about this ad six is that one, it seems to be like super
well weather sealed. Like this is a very good combination that
you would not worry too much if you're out in some late or even medium rain. But the other thing I like
is just the ergonomics of it, that if I'm carrying a
camera around all day, whether it's for landscape photography
or it's for wedding and portraits, uh, I want something that just feels nice
all the time and that the buttons are all kind of in the right spot.
And I find that for my brain, Nikon has designed that camera
perfectly hybrid character. I would be happy to bring the 24 to 70
as well as the 50 a or potentially a 35 depending on how I'm feeling or what
kind of landscape I'm finding myself in. If I know I'm going to be in somewhere
that's a little bit tighter quarters, um, I'll probably bring a 35 if I know I
have more freedom to explore and to go wherever I need to, I'll probably bring
the 50. So to recap, the characters, landscape, photography, human,
uh, you want a super wide likely, it's a nice to have. It's a very nice to have and a
kit lens is typically a 24 to 70, and that is my most
important lens for that. Uh, and also the nice to have is this 70
to 200 up here as well moving into the hybrid character. Uh, 24 to 70 is great. Even if it's an F four and either a 50
or 35 depending on what you think you're going to find yourself in
when you're out in the field, you can also bring all of them because
quite honestly like that's a pretty easy lens trifecta to bring with you.
Um, when you're in the field, if you think you might be using it. And then moving over here into the
more portrait, maybe wedding, um, travel human, you pretty much like the
things that I would want the most. 35, 85 and I'm happy to shoot
those all day. You can also, depending on what you're comfortable with, if 24 to 70 feels right for you when
you're out photographing people, then maybe that is what you want. But I find that with a 35 and an 85, I'm much more conscious over
my compositions and with
people I feel like shallow depth, the field does
fit a little bit better, that you can separate them from the
landscapes a little bit and still leave as much detail as you want depending
on what I've stopped you're at. Um, but if you want those really
shallow depth, the field images, which I feel like just
feel the best for me, that when the focus is entirely on the
couple are entirely on the person. Um, I feel like that kind of, that sits
best with me. So those are the cameras, those are the lenses. Let's
get to part two of this video. I'm going to put all these somewhere
else and we're going to get to all the random objects that I bring with me
when I'm out traveling. All right. For random objects, the most important
ones for me, I guess one is bag. We'll get to that in a second. Two are these ND filters that
if you want to be out there, and we're going to get to this a
lot in the on camera section, uh, these ND filters, just big
sunglasses, very cameras. I personally prefer the
Scrawn type because they're
easier to travel with that. I can bring a few of these with me.
Uh, usually I have one for my 24 to 70, the kit lens version where the basically, if I know that if I'm going to be shooting
with an MD that I'm probably going to be stopped down a little bit
to get a longer exposure. So I bring an MD for that and it fits.
It's nice and small for the super wide. I also have one, it's a little bit larger,
but uh, it's worth bringing for sure. Um, when you want to get really nice and close
to water and actually get that motion up-close, which I think is very,
very powerful. So two MDs, that's it. You can buy the plate NDAs if you want, but I've just found that these are much
easier to travel with and for the amount that I use them, it's not necessarily worth bringing
that full glass plate kit for me. If I was playing the landscape
photographer character a lot more, maybe that would actually make more sense.
You can get slightly better quality. You can get different
variations of filters as well
that you can get those like graduated Andy's as well so that if you
want just the sky to be a little bit darker as the scene comes down. But I find that we'll actually get to
this more in the postproduction aspect of things that I can get it pretty
close to what I want in camera. And when it comes to landscape images, I'm okay with going in and retouching
a little bit more like that. Um, to actually get the sections of the
image to what I want them to be. Uh, if I'm shooting a wedding and
I'm delivering 2000 frames, that's a little bit more challenging. So I want to get that as right
as I possibly can in camera, but when I'm just going to be
kind of finalizing two, three, maybe four images from a trip day, um, I'm happy to go into light room and just
kind of make them as perfect as I can in order to save myself time
and frustration in the field. Next up tripod. I like
this little Manfrotto guy. I'll put a link in the description. I'm
not actually certain what it's called, um, and it doesn't say on it, but it's very inexpensive and it fits
in a traditional a carry on suitcase. So it like, uh, carry on suitcases about this
big and it fits easily in there. I've been carrying around
with me kind of everywhere, I guess over the past couple
of years. It does struggle. If you want to put like a 70 to 200 on it, it's probably not going to
be the right tripod for you. But if you're using a kit lens, again, I'm usually stopped down if I'm using a
tripod. So I don't mind using the kit. 70 to 200 and uh, yeah, I have
no problems with it. I love it. It fits pretty much everywhere. It's never annoying to bring with
you and it's always nice to have. This one specifically goes to like, I
think five feet and a little bit. Uh, so it's not quite the six foot, seven foot tripod that you might
want if you're out there to, I dunno, whatever you might want to
be doing with that, but, uh, it's worked for everything
that I've needed it for. You'll see it in action later in this
tutorial. Next, the other important thing, uh, that I use a lot is bags.
Um, these peak messenger bags. This is the sling and it's, I would say my favorite just
bagged to have out in the field. It fits the two lenses and the camera
body that I need and nothing more really. Um, you can put some filters
if you want into it. Overall, I'm a heck of a lot happier to bring
something of this size with me rather than a full backpack that has everything
I could possibly ever need. Um, I think there's also something to be
said about really kind of doing the best with whatever you currently have with you
that I feel like you get more creative and you take things, um, you take images and create images that
you would not traditionally do. Um, so I'm kinda happy to do that and
I'm happy to let my selections, my gear decisions almost dictate
the work that I do out in the field. I think that there's a lot of good
accidental discovery that way. Next up we've got these action cans to
GoPro or this is the Osmo action and this is a GoPro seven. Um, pro eight is out
now, but I haven't really upgraded yet. Uh, three 60 cans are also a heck
of a lot of fun for a little while. So if you're looking at three 60 cams, I've been using both the Insta
three 61 X, which is great. And the GoPro three 60 camera as well,
which is also very, very good. Um, I use these a lot just to have in my
bag and I do a lot of video content. So it's nice to have. It's also
an incredibly versatile, um, anything after a really go pro, I think six is when they made the
massive updates to underwater. So if you have seen GoPro footage in
the past and you haven't been that impressed with it and you haven't
used one of the new newer cameras, uh, get one of these new cameras for if
you're going anywhere underwater, even if I could buy a housing for
one of my actual camera bodies, I would still probably prefer to go down
a swimming or snorkeling or whatever with this and a selfie stick. If I'm maybe out there to shoot like
surfing or something that's a little bit more intense, I would go for
the actual proper water kit. But in most circumstances, I am totally happy with the
performance of this camera. And they're also just an incredibly
versatile piece to have with you for time lapses. I also shoot everything in linear
mode, so that's an important thing. So you don't get that weird kind of
circular fisheye distortion on it. For drones actually use the Mavic mini,
which I really, really love a lot. It's very small. It doesn't shoot raw
photos, which is the only downside. So I'm hoping version two of the
Maverick mini will shoot D andG files and that's really the only
thing that I'm waiting for. When you're shooting with this
and you're shooting JPEGs, you just have to be a little bit more
conscious of where you're exposing and what you're doing. Or you
can be bracketing exposures. The other option is to go for something
like the Mavic two that has the Hasselblad lens, that it can do everything
in raw that you would ever require. And we use that for a lot of
commercial video production. But when I'm traveling to carry that with
me, I don't, I don't use it every day. So to carry something that's, even though the footprint of a
Maverick too is still very small. Um, I prefer to bring this just because
it really does just fit legitimately anywhere. More gear, cameras, straps.
This is the sling light by peak design. I like this a lot. It clips onto
your camera, the little clips, and you can take this off your camera.
You can leave it on your camera, you can do whatever you want.
I feel like that's just, it's the easiest travel
strap. I found it also, it's lived like a full lifetime and it
still looks completely brand new. Uh, which is something that I really like
about peak design stuff in general. Uh, it just never shows any real wear, which is really great when it comes to
travel that you don't have to worry too much about scuffing things. Uh,
this Joby GorillaPod might be, I guess another solution for bringing
a tripod with you for storage. I bring solid state hard drives.
These are very inexpensive now. They're incredibly small and these are
the Santos, the ones you can find these, they're in the link description below. Uh, but I bring these with me
everywhere and I usually bring two. And if I am leaving my things in a hotel, I usually bring all of my photos and
footage with me as well as I still have a backup in the hotel just in
case. If you are traveling, if you're this landscape photographer
character, this is a NAR box. Entire reasoning behind having one of
these is essentially to do field backup but in a weather sealed style environment
so that you're not too worried about anything happening. I'm like, you're not gonna get your laptop
out if you're in a waterfall, but you can find a spot to download your
card if you absolutely need to on this thing. Um, they're super helpful and
they come with a battery and everything. So it's, it's pretty much a full computer inside
here that you can do the file structure and you can load images to your phone
so you can actually download the raw images on your phone through their
app. Very, very cool product here. Lash light, always nice to have as well.
Um, that, I dunno, there's no real, just go on Amazon. Find whatever kind of looks the best
to you and the last thing I'm going to touch on is if I'm out there to
do video production of any sort, but on a smaller scale I bring this
Zan, we will S it's very, very small, easy to pack. This is the little tripod that comes with
and it's a great stabilizer for video and you can also set your camera
up very, very quickly on it. I find that I stick to the prime lenses, so my either my 35 or 50 or sometimes
the 24 so it's pretty much balanced and ready to go as soon as I put the camera
on it, which is really, really awesome. For video microphones, I use
the road video, Mike pro, I like the road video mic pro, the best of all of the shotguns of this
size that I have used at least and that includes the pro plus, which
is a little bit more expensive. The benefit with the pro plus is that
it powers on and off with your camera, which is really nice. Whereas this,
you have to actually hit the switch, but that's about it. Uh, and then what I'm actually recording
all this audio on is this task cam dr tunnel. So if you ever need good clean audio
in the field where it's a very noisy setting, these tasks cams are really
incredible with just minimizing noise. Uh, in Japan we actually went Mario carts. Um, you can do Mario carts on the road there, which is a bit insane and
should not be allowed. Uh, but I had a microphone under
Michael's, um, his Yoshi costume and it sounded like he was in a studio. I actually had to bleed in noise from
the GoPro in order to make it sound like he was actually on an active roadway,
um, because the audio was so good. So a Tascam dr tan owl is really
a fantastic and amazing product. If you just want good clean audio and
you don't want to have to worry about the issue that happened with my gear
video where the wireless channel is, didn't go through. Um, you also kinda have a redundancy as well
that if you have a road video mic on your camera, you have that audio do you use and then
if you also have one of these packs on you, you can kind of switch
between audio sources. So having more options is always
a good thing. Uh, that is gear, that is everything that I use. Hopefully this helped a little bit and
hopefully it kind of simplified things to know that you only really
need two or three lenses. Hopefully there are lenses
that you already have or
maybe just one more to add. I'll close this video off by saying that
if you don't have the money to buy the lenses that you want to buy, that you're seeing all the YouTubers or
whoever use that you can go to the back catalog of lenses that your camera
manufacturer has that we've been using a Nikon 50 millimeter, 1.8 E which was actually a kit lens for
an old film camera a long time ago and on. And that comes out of six. It
actually just looks really great. Like we were surprised. We wanted it to look like a vintage
lens and have all those like bad characteristics and flare and
we used it and were like, no, this is actually like really good and
it stands up even against the 50s today and with that maybe comes a new reason
to explore a little bit more into photography to learn a little bit more, which is always a positive
thing off to Iceland. All right. Let's talk quickly about camera modes, which is your aperture priority
manual or your shutter speed priority? I shoot a lot in manual. This is
not something that you have to do. Having an EVF and a screen that actually
shows you exactly what the image you're taking really actually speeds
up the learning curve of
learning to shoot manual. I learned it essentially
because I shoot weddings, I shoot high volume events where I
have to deliver like a thousand photos, so by shooting manual I can
keep everything a lot closer
and I can speed my post production workflow up. For landscapes, I'd have no problem shooting
on aperture priority. I tend to shoot a lot closer to wide open. So something like a 2.8 or not four
out here. I actually kind of like the, the natural way that a
lens looks wide open. Uh, you can definitely kind of season a taste. If you feel like that F eight image
is great, then that's awesome. And you can shoot at FAA if you want. There's no real right or wrong
way to do landscape photography. It's whatever appeals to you, whatever
images you like looking at the best. So maybe the next time you're on Instagram
and you're flipping through images that you really, really like, maybe take a moment to figure
out what their settings are, at least what they appear to be. If
everything's nice and sharp detail, they're probably shooting
at something like F eight. But if images almost have a
feeling you can't explain, there's probably a good chance that
they were shot closer to wide open to my camera menu system. Uh, I'm gonna walk you through basically
everything that I change, uh, or that I use within a camera
menu system storage folder. It's not really a starting point, but we're gonna start here anyways
by starting a new folder. Basically, I do this every single time that I
downloaded cards so that I know where my files are at. Uh, that I know I just
need to download the next folder. Next time I go in a simple file management
trick, uh, choose the image area. I do typically stay on full frame
mode, but I will switch into Dex mode, which is crop sensor mode. Uh, from time
to time you can also set up a button, uh, uh, fast button on your camera
to just kind of do that quickly. For image quality, always shooting raw
and always shooting JPEG for landscapes, I'm shooting JPEG fine for weddings I'm
actually shooting something more like JPEG basic just because I want to be
able to upload everything as fast as possible. Image size, always full. Um,
unless I'm shooting on a D eight 50, which has 40 plus megapixels
I believe. And uh, in that case I actually shoot on medium.
So I always kind of want that 24, um, ish megapixel look and feel to my images. I know for landscapes you can
definitely go bigger, but, uh, I'm quite happy with 24, uh, for rod recording I leave lossless
compression on. Um, I think that's fine. I'm not, I'm not seeing any huge negative drawbacks
with that and bit depth to go up to 14. Uh, especially when you're shooting lots
of things with a lot of dynamic range. Moving down. Picture control is another
thing that I have set to standard. Um, I think it comes defaulted
as auto standard basically
just kind of gives me the same profile across all images and it
doesn't let the camera make too many decisions for me. Uh, active delighting
is one thing that I also change. I know there's lots of different versions
of this depending on the camera system that you use, but essentially it's kind of adding back
a little bit of dynamic range in the JPEGs, uh, just to kind of give me the final look
and feel that I want to be editing too. Um, I also find that this is very
beneficial in a video mode as well. For focus mode, I'm usually
going between AFS and AFC. Uh, depending on the situation.
AFC pretty much all day. If I'm at a wedding or a portrait shoot
a F S if I'm at a landscape shoot. And then I'll also go in here and I'll
show you kinda how I set my auto focus settings. Um, when I'm shooting AFC, I want the priority to be on my
release. So when I touch the button, I want the shutter to go off. But for AFS I'm okay with it selecting
and making sure that it actually has focused before it actually hits the
shutter. And for landscape photography, I want to make sure everything's good
and in focus for focus continuous for portrait sessions, I work
just a little bit faster. So when I have time to put
everything together properly, um, I would prefer to make sure that the
focus is correct and I would like the camera to also tell me that
yes, the focus is correct. Before setting off the shutter. Another
thing you can do is AAF activation. Basically this is setting back button
focus so you can set it so only your AAF on button on the back of your
camera, uh, generates focus. Uh, so that shutter would not, I'm okay
with my shutter button doing focus. I have no issues with that at all. [inaudible] what most important aspects of photography
is light and timing and that is not technical. That just means
waking up early in the morning, going for a walk and seeing what you got
because the light is a lot better and a lot more interesting early in
the morning or around some time. Light is interesting because it is
what all photos are made of on both a technical and also an artistic level. We will spend our lifetime
as photographers observing
and learning light, but we will never master it. Just learn to see it better and
learn to use it in new ways. To generalize what good light is for
landscape photography, I said sunset, sunrise because that is when light has
the most direction, it is off access. It is not directly above your head
and that leads to a greater three dimensionality of the light. So you can actually feel like you can
move through the space of the photograph. All right, so this is
a little out of scope, but I thought that it was the best way
that I could summarize my thoughts on lighting for landscape photos
but teaching through people. So I am a wedding photographer. I made this wedding video down
South destination wedding. All of this light is good as coming
in through a window with all has good three-dimensionality. There's
no competing light sources. I'm very happy with it. Overall you can see for the most part
everything is kind of backlit that I'm always kind of on the short side of the
light that I am keeping their faces in the shade whenever possible because I
feel like that is when people look their best. I take all of these principles
to my landscape photography, so if I'm out photographing
a waterfall in Iceland, I actually want it to be either
in the shade or kind of side lit. I'm never looking for it
to be in direct, harsh sun. I'm always looking for flattering light
for people and I'm always looking for the most flattering light for
my actual landscapes as well. So that unfortunately means waking up
super early some mornings and getting out there before everyone else does
because as you'll see right now, the light makes a bit of a shift and I'm
no longer in control of that light and it's daytime and it's kind of that 2:00
PM noon and I can do the best that I can, but really it's not going to look as
good as it does during the most beautiful golden hour. Even if I bring $10,000
worth of lenses and camera bodies out, uh, what I do, and I do this for landscape
photos as well as my weddings, is that I really do focus a lot of
time on those golden hour moments when everything looks really, really
fantastic. I know that's what I'm going to be getting my key shots and I do
everything to kind of prep for that. So as you'll see, it rolls back into golden hour here and
everything photographically just looks a heck of a lot better. So it's important to get out there
during those times to capitalize on those moments when everything is amazing
and you don't have to wait for luck. You make your own luck by actually getting
out of the house and going and doing the thing. And hopefully you'll
be rewarded more often than not. An app that I use pretty often, it's called Alpenglow and basically what
it does is it tells me when the golden hour begins, and here in Iceland and
November, golden hour is actually all day. So from sunrise at 10 15 until
sunset at four Oh five, uh, it's just golden hour the entire day. So it's one of the good
reasons to come here. The potential is to get
something like this, but the bad potential is that
it's going to be windy and rainy. But weather here changes
every few minutes. So, uh,
what's going on back here? Very rare to get a sunset in Iceland,
but the easiest way to get a sunset, nice land as to where
laser cat space mittens. It is the number one cause
of sunsets in Iceland. Unfortunately the laser cat
mittens are not super functional. When it comes to photography. One other important thing is to get it
right in camera and what that means in this case is to set your
white balance correctly. So I am setting this to a shade white
balance because my camera is seeing all this nice, gorgeous warm light and it's trying to
counter for that and make it a little bit more boring. I like to set a shade
and make the image nice and warm. I also really like to
take advantage of flare, so in this case I'm pointing
my lens directly at the sun, which traditionally will give you a lot
of kind of ghosting and just weirdness to your image. But in this case
it's a nice really soft flair. With this 50 millimeter lens, we'll be getting into more editing later, but I've loaded these two images in
and all I've done is add my color 2019 preset. Those presets are available in the
description below if you're interested. And as you can see, this frame doesn't really hold together
so well that while the flare is nice and interesting, it really kind of has a
little bit too much going on with it. It also has too much dynamic range and
you can bracket which means just doing multiple exposures and then merging them
together in post. But in my experience, those images end up feeling a little
bit too forced and a little bit too artificial. Uh, what I suggest is playing around a
flare but not necessarily photographing directly into the sun like
this for landscape images. Uh, we're going to talk a little bit later
about how you get that nice little Starburst sun if you're
interested in that. Um, because right now it's a bit of
a blob one because it's kind of, I guess mainly because it's
obstructed by clouds. Uh, over here is a better image. So
it's the exact same settings. Um, this, you can see my settings kind of
up in here. So 50 millimeter, 2.8, uh, maybe slightly different settings. I
have stopped down, little bit opened up, uh, just to get a little
shallower depth. The field, I felt that it was more of an
artistic photo this way, uh, compositionally and also holds
together a lot better to uh, that here you really have no idea
what you're officially looking at. You're looking at a lava
field, you're looking at this, I could easily Photoshop this
out. You're looking at a sky, whereas here is an image that you can
put somewhere that integrates better into a scene that actually has some sort of, I guess meaning overall to the image and
some sort of aesthetic appeal to it to speak to why personally,
I like this image. Uh, it is because it's at a
hotel that I absolutely love. It's a silica hotel in Iceland
and it's a very cool place. You're integrated into the
rockets, rips I blue lagoon. And I think that for me as a takeaway
that I've been to this hotel a number of times and it would be nice
to have this image somewhere. So that's specifically why I took it and
specifically put the effort in to make it look as good as it possibly could
so that if we put it up on a wall somewhere, it actually, it makes sense on a number of levels
rather than just being a pretty thing to look at. And hopefully that's the value that you
can get from this landscape course is that when you go places now, you can just take your own images
that actually means something to you. So next we're going to talk a little bit
about rule of thirds and just kind of in a simple way, I feel like it's not necessarily a rule
that you need to abide all of the time by, but I think it is important
to know. So let's, uh, let's go inside the
silica hotel. All right. You've probably heard of
a rule of thirds before. Basically what that means is that
you're never doing a center composition, that you're keeping things
kind of off to the side, okay? To show rule of thirds
in an actual setting. Essentially what you're doing here is
you're making these lines and you want to be placing your subject at one of these
intersections. So somewhere around here, or for instance right here, Mike
McCauley is standing or up here or here, it leads the eye a lot
better into the photo. I'll show you some more examples
here. So something like this, having everybody down here, it shows
kind of a sense of exploration, the way that everything's kinda coming
in and the other element is kind of up here. The people are down here, everything comes together pretty
well to do one more example, just something like this that if
this was a center composition, Donna would kind of be staring at a
wall and by putting her off to the side, even though she's a little bit
away from this intersection, I think the image still works really well. The alternate to this is if you are
actively center composing people, and while this does work, sometimes it kind of starts to feel
a little bit to West Anderson. Maybe let me tell you about my boat. [inaudible] right now we're just gonna do a
very simple shot of this lava rock. And because I like to travel
with as few things as possible, I don't always bring a 10 stop ND with me, I've actually stopped down to [inaudible], which might be something that with
older lenses you might not want to do, but with new Nikon mirrorless
system, it is actually, uh, the lenses are good all the way
to F 22 moving into light room. The reason that you don't really want
to shoot at [inaudible] with a lesser quality lenses, these mirrorless
lenses for Nikon are amazing. But if you're shooting a lesser quality
lens and you're shooting wide open at something like F 1.4, you're going to get something that kind
of looks a little more like this extreme example. They all, all lenses
react a little bit differently. Uh, but basically you're going to have that
edge creep in and it's going to get a little bit darker on the
edges as you get to have 22, you're going to get the opposite where
it's kind of a little more white. Again, extreme example, but you will start to
notice it with these lenses. Technically, optically, I'm super happy with
them. For actual rule of thirds, what you're looking at here is essentially
to make a perfectly technically correct rule of thirds image. It would be something more like
that where the top here is sky, the middle is grasses, lava rock here, and then the bottom is
this blue lagoon water. Uh, that is a technically
correct rule of thirds image. The other thing you can do is you
can start adding things that again, like going back to this little graph here, is that you want your subjects kind of
in these lines along these lines or the exception or the most common exception
is if you do want to send or compose something, you really do want to
have perfect symmetry on both sides. So this is a very symmetrical image. If I was to take a photo of
a person standing right here, I think that that image
would work. But in general, you do really want to keep your subject
kind of off the center of the frame just to make things a little bit
more interesting. In this case, I'm very happy with it. Uh, you could also do something like if
you were to rotate it this way, um, that this would be a vertical rule of
thirds image that you'd want to keep like this a little bit crazy. I know, but basically you want to keep
the same principles aligned, whether you're shooting
horizontal or vertical, you want to make sure that you're at least
abiding by rule of thirds to a bit of a roller coaster. Now, now I have no idea what reality
is because the water is so blue, but you want to make sure that your
subject has never sent her composed. If there's too much going on in the frame, it'll make for a chaotic image to simplify
images like I spoke to very at the beginning, like shooting in black and
white and seeing the color
and seeing the composition to simplify things. I feel
like this is a good way. So it is a good rule to know, but not always a rule that you have to
100% abide by and you'll eventually just kind of start naturally using it in your
photography over time and then there's one, there's a next level to rule of
thirds. That is a bit of a spiral, but I don't know if we're
going to get to that. We'll talk about that in a video
dedicated to it at some point. That's all for the computer. Back to the back to the picture taken
before we get back to photography, we have to find the perfect
cinematic transition song. [inaudible] what do you think? Let's do cinematic. That sounds good. All right, let's go. [inaudible] we stayed. The mountain is the tap. I say that. Just scratch the fish. Yeah, we started at the bottom
with no option but to go up. The reason that I, she didn't live you specifically
for situations like this is one. I just kind of want to see exactly
what the image is going to be. A, I'm a digital SLR background, so I'm usually looking through the
viewfinder and the image that I'm actually seeing through the viewfinder on a digital
SLR is not the image that I'm taking on this mirrorless body. The image that
I'm seeing is exactly what I'm taking. So it kind of takes some
of the guesswork away. And the other thing is that it just
gives you an opportunity to kind of see a situations are changing around you so
that you're kind of more consciously aware of everything rather than kind
of tunnel vision. Exactly. I'm kind of what you're doing and there's
a lot of good opportunities around here, uh, in this forest here, forest
of lava, lava fields on a forest. All right, moving into the actual camera. I have my camera set to AFS mode and
I have one of the front buttons set to white balance and I have one of the
front buttons set to control my focus. As you can see at the top there a AFS
is highlighted. If I've moved this way, manual focus, if I move this way, they have C and I like to set this small
little box that I'm moving around here to be kind of my focus select. So I know that I'm focusing
on that exact element there. Another strategy you can do is if you're
in AFS and you're holding down that button and you can move through the modes
in the front there and something like this just gives you kind of full zone
so it selects what it thinks is the correct subject for you. This will also activate face detection
and if you're on auto focus, continuous, uh, face detection when you're
selected and it's tracking, somebody will actually be
really, really accurate on them. For landscapes specifically, I'm going to stay on AFS
and my single point here, you can make a bit of a wider box if
you're focusing on a little bit more. Um, but I just like to know exactly what
I'm focusing on and I don't think it's a negative thing to, uh, just have a
smaller focus point to select from. White balance is another thing
that I'm super adamant about. I very rarely stay on full auto. I'm usually on natural light auto if
I'm outside in the world or on something like cloudy or shade depending
on the situation. Uh, as you'll see later in this, I prefer to shoot shade over sunsets
because I feel like it makes the camera kind of counters for the warmth of the
light because it's not really natural when you get that really
nice, beautiful sunset. Uh, so I like to put my
camera into shade mode. Another thing we'll touch on a little
bit later is if you are in a mode like fluorescent that has a number beside it, you're actually able to move
with the front wheel, um, through a lot of different options for
fluorescent lights, which are very, very helpful because not all
fluorescents are the same. Not all lights are the same. And I find that I can get some pretty
good and accurate white balances based on that specifically during blue
hour. So something to think about. Don't just leave it out at
one and just forget about it. Find the exact correct one and get as
much right in camera as we possibly can. So today in this situation, I'd probably just be or like
that and I'd be happy with that. And now I'm going to talk a little bit
about viewfinder versus monitor and Iceland. I'm going to shoot pretty much everything
you're going to see on this entire tutorial, all on the monitor only. But
again, there is no right or wrong way. If it feels better for you to take
through the electronic viewfinder, that is totally fine. If it feels more normal for you to
take images just on your monitor, that's totally cool too. So I'm going to be photographing these
mountains and because it is overcast, is holding the tones of these
mountains together very, very well. And I'm using my big lens because I want
to get really up close and I want to really kind of display the textures. And I'm also because I want to be showing
the texture and showing that detail. Um, I'm actually gonna go to F
eight cause F eight is great. So even though I had the depth that I
had the detail actually process this a little bit soft, this is through my black and white green
preset and it really feels almost like a gelatin style print that you
might see from, I don't know, like an angel Adams era photographer
and I really, really like it. It's a maybe something I'm not going to
like in a year and that's why you keep the raw files forever. But for now
I'm enjoying this image. I like it. I'm happy that I created it and it's
a lot different than the images that I usually create. And I think it's important to experiment
in all different facets of photography and bring back what works
to the photography style
that you actually want to be doing. For big landscapes, you need a
big lens, not necessarily physically big. You can go with something that's a
lot easier to travel with if you want. I just happened to have this
one. I know it's fantastic lens. This is the 7202.8 F L, uh, through the FTZ adapter
into this Nikon Zed six. And what I mean by having a big lens for
big landscape means that if I was just trying to photograph this entire
Panorama, it would look great, but there'd be a lot of different
elements going on and competing with one another with a bigger lens. If
I zoom all the way into 200, I can make a frame out of the most
simple subject that I can see here, which I think usually
makes for the best photos. So here's an example of this
photo shot at 70 millimeters, which works okay. And here's a shot at
200, which I think works a lot better. It's blue hour, which I actually
like a lot better than golden hour, golden hour. I feel like it's
very easy to take photos in a, what we've noticed in national parks in
different traditional photo locations around the world is that everyone is
there for golden hour and as soon as the sun dips down, all the
photographers leave, they pack up their
tripods and they're out. I find that sticking around for blue hour, you get images that no
one else really gets. Now I'm going to take the camera off
of the tripod and I'm going to go for a walk around. I'm going to set my shutter speed to
something that's a little bit more reasonable. The general rule is that if
you're shooting a 200 millimeter lens, that you should be at one slash 200 of
a second as far as shutter speed goes. So just to make sure that you're nice
and stable and there's not too much blur. Uh, with this VR, the VR, and this is actually really incredible
and the InBody stabilization is also really incredible. So I could probably
go down to one slash 10th of a second, even at 200 and still get a
pretty sharp frame if I wanted to. But best practice always stay at the
shutter speed of your focal line. You can also obviously go higher
if you want, but as a minimum, stay at 200 if you're shooting at 200 or
stay at one slash 40 of a second and if you're shooting a 40
millimeter lens or 50 or 60 all right, so we're just gonna wait
for Northern lights. Now, hopefully a, it is a four on the Aurora forecast, which
is not super high, but a clear skies. So even if there is anything at all,
we're going to be able to pick it up. Basically the way Northern lights
goes is that if it's a very, very faint Northern light, uh, you can still run a very long exposure
and pick it up and get a pretty good shot, even if it's not completely
visible to the human eye. But the obvious best cases, if we can actually see everything and
it's nice and bright and it's actually eliminating us in the ground in
the water and everything. So, uh, hoping to get some Northern
lights tonight but we'll find out they title this section one
locations. Just don't work. I did not bring my tripod today cause
it's daytime and I rarely need one. So what we're going to do is we're going
to crank to F 22 and we're going to add to a one second exposure and we're
going to wait for the trains. All right, here we go. [inaudible] all right, one second is too long
and the train completely disappears. So we'll try it again with this train man. So this is more of a
one 30th of a second one, 30th of a secondF 3.2 and
uh, getting a nice trembler. Also we are here on the bridge and there
is a lot of bounce just kind of from the physics of this bridge, not being completely stable but the embody
stabilization seems to be keeping up for that, especially when it's
only at one 30th of a second. I almost kind of want to get like a
super wide and get the road down below. What do you want? Why don't trade and we're back Marshall's
on the 24 to 72.8 which is probably the best lens right now for Nikon
mirrorless series. I do prefer primes, but if you're into zooms, if you're in
a 24 to 70 which is a great travel zoom, it is probably the best thing for
any camera company in that range. Right now we are waiting for another
train which appears to be coming right now and I am at roughly 15 millimeters. Here we go. So that was me working through a situation
that just didn't end up working out. I think it was mostly the fact that the
bridge is kind of just a slight angle. If it would have been perfectly squared
eyes. I think it would've been a really, really great shot. But
because it wasn't, it's fine. Spent a lot of time here and tried
to make it work. It did not work. No one to give up and know when you
keep doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result that
you're just gonna make yourself crazy. So moving on to a slightly better
train location on train Tuesday man. All right, we're outside of the East exit
of the year. Yogi station, a Yemen Otay line passes here, ground level on the street and I
feel like this is a nice frame. People on both sides and hopefully the
train goes a little bit faster cause right now it's not really
moving a whole lot. I like the chaos of
everything's happening up top. It's kind of rule of thirds image where
you have a little bit of control and normal list down here. If the
train through the middle and then up top you just have all
kinds of whatever that is. So Nope, three trains. The shot works really well. I feel like it could work a
little bit better at nighttime. So we're going to come back at another
time to do the same shot again. Photographer TJ, six dash
three dot. Seven let's begin. Ready? Yes sir. Recite your baseline. A system of frames of the
yellow mirrorless began to
spend a system of frames, interlink within frames,
interlink within frames, interlink within one stamp frames, dreadfully distinct against the
dark gray and frames through camera. Big frames, frames, frames.
Do you use natural frames, frames, frames, interlinkage or leg technology and
creative interlay language are linked to Japan and photography are interlinked or
language. They're linked within frames. Interlay with the in France
interlinked three times within France. Interlink within France, interlink
within France. Interlinked. We're done. You can pick up your
mirrorless. Thank you. Whoa. What was that? I call this section frames. Frames. Do you use natural frames? Another thing that I look
for is natural frames. So right here we have the perfect natural
frame of a building, a little fence, little tree, the Tokyo tower, frames,
frames. Do you use natural frames? So this is an example of a natural frame, but I don't know if it's
the best example I do. Like how the tree kind of
tilts in the building. Tilton, everything goes together,
everything's angular and interesting. What I don't love is the juxtaposition
of the tower and kind of the newer buildings Sewan forbid have a walk around
and we found these older buildings and it's very nice the way everything
kind of came together here. I would prefer to have also something on
the top to kind of frame the image and I feel like it's a little, not
quite balanced in this composition, but it's middle of the day
we're doing what we can. And the other thing that comes in really
handy is using these natural frames and framing out elements you don't want such
as taxi cabs and buses and there sure are a lot of them around
the base of the Tokyo tower. What we're looking for here is natural
frames out in the world and I feel like finding good natural frames just really
bring your images to a whole new level even if you're shooting them at 12 in
the afternoon so the light isn't really doing anything that interesting. But what you can do is add interesting
compositional elements to make a much better photo. If you can also
tie that in with great light, like coming back here,
golden hour would be great. We have other plans for golden hour.
Hopefully they work out today. But uh, for now let's take this photo, this image, it worked out okay. It's
not the greatest image I've ever taken, but I can show you a thing here that
you can use and other images that are better than this image in the future. So what I like to do is get
this graduated filter here. You can also do it with
the brush tool if you want, but by just using this graduated filter
and bringing exposure down just a little bit, you can kind of drag in a little
bit of your own natural frame gradient. You can do it kind of as many times
you want. So something like that. Maybe to get started, is
there another one up in here? Another one kind of over here. And you can really kind of start to
frame whatever subject that you want to have. Basically the entire image kind
of pointing out that every good image, you should only really have maybe one,
potentially two or three subjects. I guess I, if there,
there's human subjects, but for the most part I want the
entire focus just to be on Fuji here. So that's what I would do. I don't know if this is the greatest
image I've ever taken. Probably not. And probably also remove this in
post-production to get rid of the, uh, the sewer cap. But other than that, it's kind of as good as you
can do with the image. Uh, there is a lot of data and everything
else, but as you start to brighten it up, it really starts to just
kinda, I don't know, there's almost too much
going on in that image. So my bad for taking it
and thinking it was good, but you can use graduated filters to bring
in and create your own little natural frames through dodging and burning. Uh, you can also just grab the brush and do
an actual Dodge and burn if you want as well. Um, dodging is making an area
lighter. Burning is making it darker. Uh, they have dark room history, but for now pretty much you just
grabbed the exposure brush. Um, one other thing maybe
I'll mention here, I'll, I'm sure I'll mention it again in the
future, uh, during the editing section, but to lighten a thing, so
usually to darken a thing, I'll just bring the exposure down a
little bit and I'll use my pen tool. Uh, if you don't have a small tablet, I
really recommend the way calm tablets. Uh, they have really changed my game
when it comes to landscape photography. So for just kind of burning in things, you can control your brush tool with the
bracket keys and you can add just kind of like a little bit here and make it
look a little bit more natural than maybe dragging in a graduated filter, uh, for the going the other
way and actually dodging. I bring contrast down and shadows up
rather than bringing, just exposure up. I find that when you bring
just the exposure up, it's very visible where you made
those, um, those local edits. But whenever you bring the
contrast down in shadows up, you can kind of brighten things without
them looking, unnaturally brightened, uh, such as that. So you can't really tell that I just
like went in there and slammed a exposure brush on there. But by doing
it with contrast and shadows, it seems to hide it and integrate it
a little bit better into the scene. Another thing that would have made that
image better is having a polarizing filter. One of the things you want to make sure
that you have if you are coming out to photograph something like Mount
Fuji is a polarizing filter. What a polarizer does is it essentially
takes down the reflection that you see on the mountain behind me
and I did not bring one. So we're actually in the parking lot
of a camera store and we're going to go ahead and grab a new polarizer
for the 82 millimeter, uh, 24 to 72.8, which is a filter
size that I do not have. I prefer the screw on filters.
It might be an unpopular opinion. They're easier to travel with even though, ironically I didn't
bring one with me today, so let's go buy a polarizer
and a go photograph about Fuji. Oh, it might be a challenge.
So they have lenses, but yeah, I'm going to guess they probably don't
have them. Yeah. So this is what I need, but I need it for, yeah,
I need it for Navy too. So these are all for 77 82 what's yours? Is this a that's an 82 that's okay. I'll pay him back all
the highlights and post some bad news. There's unfortunately no 82
millimeter or 72 millimeter filter, which could be used on the 24 to 74
Kaitlin's does that series a or the 82 millimeter lens, which is the
24 to 72.8 is that as well. So you got your paint back,
those highlights and post. I guess technically that doesn't really
work as well as just capturing it in real life. But we're going
to make do with what we have. Travel photography is all about doing
the best with what you have with you. And today we've hiked all
the way to the Dakota here. Uh, that overviews Fuji. I'm sure you
recognize this from lots of postcards, but we're not here during
cherry blossom season, which is probably when you would
recognize it. We're not here during fall. We're here during no leaves on
the tree season, which is winter. And we're also here at an
inopportune time of day, which is approximately 12 noon
ish. Uh, the light is not so great, but I'm going to do the best I
can. And then in post production, I'm actually going to show you how to
make the best of kind of bad light in a photo and what you can do to make your
photo a little bit better if you don't have control over the time of day that
you're visiting somewhere that you think would be a good photo. Another thing that can make your photos
a lot better if you're sick of seeing just the sun as a blob is if you stopped
down to something like [inaudible], you make the sun into a nice, beautiful Starburst rather than just
that blob with kind of a weird slash through it. Depending
on what lens are using. I find that it's a lot nicer if
you have the sun in the frame. If it looks like a proper kind of Sunstar
and up here I'm not too worried about getting really shallow depth of field, so I'm happy to shoot at F
16 which is not an F stop. I would traditionally shoot at a, I'm also under exposing a lot because
the tiles are reflecting pretty much the entire sun directly into
my lens, unfortunately, but we're doing the best we can up here
and we'll fix it in post. All right. One last thing. If I know that I'm shooting a file that
is going to need a lot of help in post production, I'm doing everything I can
to shoot it at as low of ISO as possible. So on this camera right now I'm at 100
ISO so that I know that I have maximum depth of field when I get into post and
I can drag up those shadows and down those highlights. I don't
want this new balance. Spicer, it's pretty great. So this is the 2:00 PM image. I am okay. Happy with this for being at a
very inopportune time of the day. The 24 to 70 handled the sun really
well. The way that that flares, it's, it's really nice. I ended up staying
at F 14 at 16 have been fine as well, but if you're pushing to like F 20 or 22
you're really going to get a prominent Starburst that's going to pretty
much take over the entire scene. I feel like this is kind of
bordering on it, but I, I don't know, maybe I could roll it back a little bit. We'll get more into it in post production. And I guess as a cautionary tale that
this is nice if you can come here, you can take this photo,
you can get this photo, but if you stick around until golden hour, so we just literally sat there for like
three more hours because we came way too early. This is the shot that you can get and
in comparison it is significantly better in every single way. So if
you do have control over time, aim to show up to the places that
you want to be at in golden hour to potentially be rewarded. But you can do
okay things a any other time of the day. Right here at waterfall on, I'm going
to show you how to do a long exposure. I have my little travel
Manfrotto tripod on. I love this tripod specifically because
it fits easily and carry on luggage or on the side of your feet cause I backpack
and I have the 14 to 30 millimeter lens. I my Nikon's add
six with a 10 stop and, D let's go take some photos and I'm
going to be trying to do a ten second exposure. I don't normally like to clog
up a pathway for other tourists, but today it's not very busy here. So I'm going to set this down quickly
and I'm going to try a few exposures here before a more people show up.
This is an eight second exposure, F four 100 ISO with a 10 stop neutral
density filter on the waterfall. All right, so that's
starting to look really good, but compositionally I feel like a
vertical subject should be photographed vertically. So we're going to
turn the camera on its side here. I'm going to do the exact same thing
just in a vertical frame. Well, I don't have any sort of protection
on my camera for the elements. The mist is totally fine. If
I was behind the waterfall, it would be a little bit more wet. Uh, what I would recommend though is just
finding a good spot to change your lenses away from any sort of mist or a water
that could potentially get inside your camera body. Talk about this image for a second. There is a little bit of water on the
front element of the lens or on my ND filter as you can see, and I don't really mind that it
kind of adds almost to the ambiance. I like to make my photos, maybe not
look as that they're just a stock image. I like to have some texture there.
I feel like that adds to it. There is also a very strong vignette, uh, the darkness kind of coming around the
edges and that is from shooting a super wide lens with an MD,
with a screw on filter. So if you want to get
rid of that vignette, if it's not something
that feels right to you, I might recommend that you actually
get the plated glass filters. If you'd like to shoot super wide out in
nature while you could technically fix the vignette and post it just,
it won't ever look exactly right. The other cool thing about doing a long
exposure is as long as the people keep moving the other tourists in the
frame, as long as they're moving, they kind of disappear so
you can't really see them. But if they're standing still taking
photos, they'll just appear there. But you can easily remove people
in such a wide shot like this. We will actually do that later in this
video when we get to post production. Welcome to the park, Hyatt, Tokyo. We
somehow were assigned the penthouse floor. Come on in. I have one important
thing to show you. It's this way. Okay. These are the things that I hang. This is the first time I've ever hung
anything in a hotel room over here. Marshall's things and in here a motion activated toilet. We've named him Toto. It's also a button. Put that up on the button, put it down over here. That's where you can have your baths. It's pretty noisy. I might start a fire. That's very nice. Oh, hello there. You might recognize me
as Scarlet Johannesson in the film. Lost in translation. We are currently in her bathtub to do a
lot of exposure with this 50 millimeter 1.8 and then I icon said
six of some traffic. So we've been waiting patiently
for blue hour to happen. I've been sitting in the bathtub and
I'm going to be running an eight second exposure and waiting until the traffic
moves so they actually get some lights moving cause it's kind of gridlock right
now and everything else you're going to see on the screen for settings. And one big thing for shooting through
windows like this is that you really want to minimize whatever's
going on inside the room. So turn off all the lights and uh, if you want you can get kind of a lens
hood or even a black shirt works, uh, to put over top of your lens in order
to make sure that there's no reflections kind of coming in, um, to hit
the lens with light in a set, a quick two second self timer. And even though the self timer is gonna
flash off this glass when it actually takes photo [inaudible] I'm trying not to breathe even
though not holding the camera now. It's pretty good. I'm
pretty happy with that. I might try a few
different framing options, but for the most part I
think that's pretty good. And I think these Scarlett Johannessen
bathtub time-lapse challenge is complete and we'll see the rest of
the editing later in this episode. Oh, that's way more blue hour over here.
Should've been out here before. All right. Same principles apply. Get as close to the window as you and if
you're seeing any reflection somewhere over here, um, get something to
cover it. But I think we're okay. Um, also don't wear bright clothing.
That's a silly thing to, to worry about, but does have an effect. All right. Two second. Self timer, 32nd exposure. And these cars are actually
moving just a little bit. So, uh, hopefully it looks cooler and then just
tinted all purple to make it look like Tokyo, blade runner nightlife.
And here's the final image. Fresh out the kitchen. I'm pretty happy with this image but not
100% happy with this image because the frame, I couldn't frame it exactly how I wanted
because it would be impossible to move our hotel room to be kind of
symmetrically pointed down the highway. However I am happy overall with it. I would go into Photoshop and clean up
the lights of the cars that change lanes so that you don't get those little
swervy lights and everything is nice and linear, but that will happen later
in this video when we get to editing the time that I would want to use my
14 to 30 millimeter lens is a situation like this where there's a lot of good
subject interests in the foreground. This water is really good, not
a whole lot going on out there, at least from eye level here and
by using a super wide angle lens, I'm really just kind of accentuated in
the foreground and almost distorting reality and a little bit of a way that
this is much wider than your eyes can see. So when you get nice
and close to something, it really does make it stand
out in a lot larger than life. This angle right here is pretty good.
Uh, there's a lot of waves in the water, so I do have my 10 stop ND filter with
me to put on here to smooth out some of those waves, do long exposure, but I think the shot is going to be
from this little lookout point over here looking back at the hotel and distorting
reality in a way where the water looks large and the hotel actually looks like
it's very tiny and integrated into the scene, into the lava rock landscape. All right? So it was legitimately too windy out
here to record any audio or really even keep my camera steady, but I'm doing an eight second
exposure F for a hundred ISO. This is what the final edited image looks
like and we're going to edit to that image in post at the end of this video. All right? You may find yourself out in the field
when you did not bring your ND filter or your tripod. All I actually brought
was this peak design a sling. So what I'm actually going to do is do
a long exposure with a lot of smaller exposures. So I can stop
this down to [inaudible], which will give me about a one second
exposure. In this lighting condition, I want the water to be a lot
smoother than a one second exposure. So I'm going to take multiples. I mean they combined them in
post to make a longer exposure. Essentially what you're doing is you're
stacking those one seconds on top of each other to build a five
or eight second exposure. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going
to set my camera to continuous high shutter speed during
a one second exposure. I'd have 22 and I'm pretty much
just going to focus on any point. Everything is going to be in focus with
this wide angle lens at [inaudible]. I'm just gonna hold down my finger
and take a couple of frames. It looks pretty good. So basically
that's just five frames at second. Then I'm going to combine to essentially
make a five second exposure in post. To show you what I'm talking
about a little bit here. You also don't have to limit yourself.
I stopped at just a couple of exposures, but you could take 30 exposures or you
could do a hundred exposures at one 30th of a second so you don't have to
shoot at something like [inaudible]. So this is the image. This is the
one second exposure. It looks okay, that looks back of a lot
better. The blur out here, it is much, much nicer, much softer, especially if you're getting really close
up to the water or the water was the main feature. You can really notice
it over in this area up in here. Um, let's see. Yeah, a lot better,
a lot softer. And again, you don't have to limit yourself
at just a couple of exposures. You can do as many as you want. If
you want to do a hundred you can. You can do a hundred live your life. We're here at Shibuya crossing a home
of the famous scramble that you've probably seen many, many times
in all kinds of Japanese Bureau. It's really kind of the GoTo shot and
there is an amazing football slash soccer depending on where you live, stadium
right here and when it lights up, which hopefully will later today, it's
going to be a really incredible shot. Um, right now we're going to actually go down
to the crossing and we're going to try a few handheld shots. I'm going
to do some longer exposures, kind of embraces what's going on with
just the amount of movement, the, the normal travel photography stances
that like you wake up early in the morning and you get there before
there's any people, but the people kind of really
make the shot here today. So, um, I feel like that's what you got to take
photos of and it gets busy after like 5:00 PM here. So it's dark,
you'll do some photos. Hopefully this turns on right? I'm trying to do a really,
really slow shutter speed here. We're going to handhold one fourth
of a second. We're going to go lower. Going to handhold at one
slash 1.3 of a second. Well, it's sharp. The
embodies stabilization is actually really good and
also it started to rain, so there's some water droplets on my
lens, but I actually kind of liked them. It kind of frames the buildings in. It adds interest to the sky where
there would've been no interest before. So sometimes technical
flaws and imperfections come
together to make a better image. If I had to pick the exact opposite
location of this should be a scramble, it would probably be this glacier and
this ice cave photographing ice caves. The number one thing that I would
recommend is to find and use those natural frames. So going through the ice cave
is the most obvious natural frame. You can really find a, we expected to
see the ice cave and photograph that, but this was a little bit of a surprise. This looks like an interstellar
movie landscape of some sort. Another thing you want to be looking at
for is complimentary textures as well as images. So you want that
one big shot of the glacier, but you also want some
closeups of different elements
that come together to tell the story. If you have a space in
mind, we're going to be printing these. It's very easy to kind of
take those images if you're
unsure or if they're going to be for somebody else,
they're going to be for sale. I would just suggest getting as big a
variety as you can to tell the story so when you get home you can select the
individual elements that of ended up working out the best. I find that when
you're in the actual space, it's hard for you to decide
which the best images, but when you actually remove
yourself from the scene, you can view it from kind of more of
a third party angle back to the city. Unfortunately this is
closed. It's closed, closed, so the bad news is we don't get
to ever get that photo again. So we got that photo at one time. Really we are out here at, it should be a
scramble, which is the crossing on. A lot of people were here last night
to try to get some photos of the actual people. Tonight we're here to get some one slash
30th of a second exposures of the older taxi cabs. So you're doing panning shots as the
taxis go by and I'm trying to get one of the yellow ones or the green ones or
something that is a more vintage Japanese taxi rather than the newer uh,
Tokyo Olympics ones. So yeah, there's a lot of variables, a
lot of randomness. It's raining, which actually kind of like, cause it's making the ground here a lot
more reflective and bringing the light back up. And when you are
doing these types of shots, you either want to put your
vibration reduction, uh, your in-body stabilization either
into sport mode or off entirely. I turned mine off entirely and I'm just
doing my best to kind of keep steady as I, as I roll through. There's a lot of opportunities here.
Pretty hit or miss. I liked that one, but it's the composition's a little bit
wrong. If it would have been back there, it would've been a lot better but
completely obstructed by a van. Also don't feel bad being
out here in the rain. Uh, as you can see there's
lots of rain on my LCD, um, because everything is properly weather
sealed so I'm not not stressed about that. Yeah, we'll be editing this image
later on in the video, but for now I'll let you know that I
cropped it in a bit because there was a little bit too much Headspace for
just stuff to be in there to be very distracting and it's a pretty distracting, pretty bright image and I kinda
tried to simplify it a little bit. Here's the full version
of it. Here's the crop. I personally liked the crop a lot better. We're here in Shibuya at the all new
just opened maybe a couple of weeks ago. It is a lookout point.
It's actually open air. So photography wise it is the absolute
best because you're not obstructed by glass like this. They were able to give me this beautiful
Nikon strap because I didn't bring a strap on my camera and apparently
that's required up here. The one corner that you want to take
photos from is kind of obstructed. This is the line for the crossing photo. OpenAir will shoot to the glass instead. It's worked out better
than I thought it would. Some things started to come
together for this photo, but at the end of it it just kind of
looks like a massive city with no specific subject rule of thirds. The road almost kind of started
to line up but I don't know. There's no specific subject
to make it a great photo. I don't think heading downstairs to
the main observation deck level that's covered in glass to hopefully
get good scramble photo. I think the ideal spot is kind of in
this corner and it doesn't seem to be too popular under demand, even though there's a huge line
up up there to get the same shot, but you can just come here
and shoot it through the glass scramble kind of lines up in the rule
of thirds corner where there should be a subject in trust, but again, it's
just kind of a bit of a mess. The more that I zoomed in on
the actual scramble crossing, the more that it just kind of was
hazy from shooting through the glass. It was illuminated from the bottom. I also found it very difficult to frame
anything that I would want to frame just by the physical placement of the building, but tomorrow we're going to the Mori
tower for blue hour and the Tokyo tower, which is a shot that I've
wanted for a very long time. Not designed necessarily for
photography, this platform unfortunately, but still I would say
probably worth coming up here. Yeah. One of the things that you look for in
photography is symmetry and reflections. And you very rarely if ever, find
something this perfect in real life. And right now the water is perfectly
calm and reflecting the sun off of the water with this little
land feature out here. Uh, so we're going to take some photos
with the 50 millimeter 1.8 lens and everything out here, it looks amazing and I'm going to
try to build a Panorama from it. So basically when we do, I'm gonna start
over here and sweep all the way across. I'm going to shoot vertical frames
and keep it nice and centered. And as I go across, I'm going to build
something all the way across here. Um, one tip for panoramas is you have to
expose for whatever the brightest part is going to be and then you kind of have
to fix it in post, unfortunately. So I'm going to make sure this photo
works and I'm going to start over here and sweep across in vertical mode and build
kind of like a 100 megapixel version of this scene. And another thing you want to do is you
want to make sure you lock your focus so your focus isn't changing and also your
exposure so that everything is good and consistent. It's one other reason to shoot manual
white balance as well so that everything just kind of looks good and when you
import it into light room and build the Panorama like we're going to do
in the future. In this video, everything's going to look great. So
let's begin. So starting off over here, it's pretty much a completely black frame, but I do need that because as
I get towards the sun here, things are going to get
a heck of a lot brighter and that came up pretty good.
I'm pretty happy with it. But the downside with all
travel photography is that
after being in a scene like this, when the image that you take really just
doesn't convey the feeling of how it felt when you were there, you will always feel a little
bit let down by yourself. But try to let that not discourage you.
I am happy with how this came together. Panoramas are a little bit more difficult
because if you're shooting them raw, you're usually shooting them pretty
blind and you're kind of guessing at what your composition is going to be.
If you're shooting in camera JPEG, Panorama style, uh, that's totally fine. You actually get a readout
of what it looks like, or maybe you can use that as a test frame, but to stitch everything together and
post with raw files is kind of the way to do it, especially if there's such extreme
dynamic range in a scene such as this one. But we'll get to that in a few
minutes. In the post production a, we're going for a drive through Tokyo
right now and I'm doing one slash 13th second exposures at the car window
here of again, the older taxis. Uh, I guess this is part two of that
series and I'm really enjoying it. I like the, just the random element of the fact that
a taxi has to come up beside us and I have to pan with it. And uh, it's kinda like a video game in
real life to create art, some sort. And the images I'm getting I think
are some of my favorites so far. So we'll see when I get back to computer
because when you're in the moment and you're creating, everything is awesome. And then sometimes when you get back and
you actually curate what you've done, it's a, it's not as good as you thought
it was or that you want it to be. So, uh, we'll see. This one is my favorite from the series a, it's a little too center composed for me. I wish that the taxi was maybe to the
left a little bit. I could crop it, but it didn't really, it is basically the variables of
driving in a car with another car, moving and trying to get the shot and
also trying to get it mostly in focus because they're shooting at one 13th of
a second and you're moving in a car that the car is moving in,
you're trying to pan. There's a lot going on and I'm happy
with it. It was a fun little challenge. I think that I would love to do
this more often. Uh, in cities it's, it's actually a lot of fun. Maybe that's the takeaway from
this is to also make work for fun, that not everything has to be
serious, that you can just go out, you can have fun, not everything has to have meeting and
you can practice your skills for whenever this is an important car, whether it's
your friend's car, your dad's car, whatever, and you can kind
of replicate the same shot. Now that you've learned the skills for Astro photography, well, a wide shot of just the stars is a really
beautiful image of much stronger image I feel is if you involve
the human element. So I'm actually going to
use these pillars here. So I'm going to set my
camera back right about here. I'm going to do a six second exposure, a F 1.8 and I got started 1600 ISO and
see kind of how that looks and move from there. And I'm going
to keep framing around. I have this nice little
kind of natural friend. Do you use natural frames? It's
coming together pretty good, but I kind of obstructed the part that
I really wanted to see behind the T pillar there. But something
else more important, we're starting to see Northern
lights, but they're very faint. So I'm running a ten second exposure at
F 1.8 on this Nikon 24 millimeter ass lens and it starts to look like this. That's where I put an image. Basically what you want to do is you
want to turn off stabilization in the camera body and put on manual focus and
aim into the sky into what you're seeing is Northern lights. They usually start up just as kind of
a faint little green light that you can kind of see and then they get a little
bit more intense as the evening goes on. Now you guys might not always
see the Northern lights, uh, that if are very dim like they are tonight, that you might actually have to be running
a time lapse or at least taking kind of test exposures whenever you see a
little bit of light in the distance. It could be a cloud, but it
could also be a green glow. And then things picked up a little bit. I was photographing on one camera and I
was doing these time lapses on my other camera and I was using
the TimeLapse movie mode, which basically just takes longer
exposures, whatever you set it to be. So I was doing five seconds at F 1.8
and just letting it run and it pieces together. Movie file for you.
It's amazing for convenience, but a negative in, you're not gonna have the dynamic range
to process from if you were shooting just a series of raw files and putting
your own TimeLapse together in post production. Here's what happened
over the rest of the night. [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] huh? [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] talk to me. [inaudible] [inaudible] we're up here in the Moria tower to get
the quintessential blue hour shot of the Tokyo tower when it lights up all
orange. The rest of the city is blue. The reason we came up here is
really for the natural contrast, the fact that the city's all kind of
this nice blue gray and then the Tokyo tower really punches out in that bright
orange. So, uh, looking like a postcard. All right, so what I'm doing right here, you can see on the screen is that I'm
kind of framing at that taller building on the left. I want everything to kind of be as flat
as possible and those buildings kind of compete with my main subject,
which is the Tokyo tower. And I'm getting just a little bit closer
and somewhere right about there is probably the friends that are going to
be photographing and I'm just going to do it over and over again because our blue
hour is really only 11 minutes long. Um, I'm now going to be moving down to F 2.8
and I'm going to be moving my shutter speed down to one slash 30th of a second. The stabilization in this camera more
than makes up for any small shakes that I might have or this really might have.
And I'd rather keep my ISO down. Just so that I have a little more data
and a little more dynamic range in there because the Tokyo tower
is a vertical subject. I feel like I would regret it if I
don't do a few vertical frames here. So I'm starting off with
some vertical frames. They're a little bit overexposed because
I kind of want the shadow detail or access to it or access to more of it. Um, so I'm happy to go a little bit over in
this case because I know that I still have the highlight of the brightest
cloud and a few vertical frames. So is almost perfect for
this. Uh, for this frame, I feel like 24 looks good, but there's
just a little bit too much going on. 35 looking pretty good. And then
70 is kind of where it's at. I am super happy with this image, even if it might be considered
to be a cliche image, I'm happy that I was able to come here
to capture it. At the end of the day, the photos that you
make should be for you, something that you personally want to
create, something that you want to print. And this image checks
all those boxes for me. [inaudible] we're going down to the pool, which is
kind of funny cause it's rooftop pool, but you go down, you go to another
building, the pool is there. We didn't get a shin Juku city view
room, so I want that photo a lot under 45 club in the park on the business every day. Hustle, every day. Everybody left. We're here alone. Here
we are in the yoga studio at the park, Hyatt, Tokyo. And the downside is
that there's lots of pot lights, so we can't really get a
great photo from up here. But I figure if we're probably on the
ground that we can probably do a little bit better. And all I'm looking for is eight second
exposures to get the traffic moving. We're going to wait until the lights
turn and then we can just get a couple of shots and I think it'll work out pretty
well. This is the perfect timing. Tokyo Skytree is visible, which is
kind of rare from this far away. You got the Tokyo tower, the Como
tower got a little bit everything. It's still getting a lot of
reflection off the floor. Maybe put the lens hood up and I'm going
to get as close to the windows I can. I don't know if that'll be good
enough or not though. All right, so lens hood still lets light leak in. No lens hood also still
at slightly. Again, I would if I go over here I think that's
about as good as I'm going to get. All right, try one of those 32nd exposure and see
how it does have a look and then iterate. I feel like we only have 11 minutes
of blue hour doing a 32nd exposure. Really kind of capitalizes on a lot of
that time but here we are already hit the button. Can't stop it now. All right, so this concludes the tutorial or at
least the on-camera section of things. Next we're going to get into the
full postproduction of all images. I hope that you enjoyed me from the yoga
floor here, park Hyatt in Tokyo. Uh, I'm happy with these images and I hope
that are going to have some fun with all of the images that you're provided
with. You can download them, put in your email and I'll send you
a link with everything download. So check those out and don't put them on
the internet as your own images or it's going to get awkward for everyone because
I feel like a lot of people are going to be aware of the fact that
these images are out there. Welcome to the studio and welcome to
the editing section of this video. If you have not yet
downloaded the raw files, there is a link in the description below. And if you have not yet subscribed on
YouTube, it might be time to do that. We've spent about an hour
and a half together already, so hopefully you're enjoying the content
and hopefully this is bringing a lot of value to you. Uh, I set out with a goal to create basically
the the thing that I wanted to exist whenever I was first getting
started in landscape photography, something that was easy to watch that
would give me the skills that I needed as well as some inspiration to get out
there and start creating more images. The hardware that I have in front of
me, I do have a tablet. I love a tablet. I love specifically for travel
and landscape photography. I love using this tablet for
my wedding side of things. I'm a lot more process driven, but for landscape images and images
that are simply kind of that one or two select images that I want
to be absolutely perfect. I'm a lot more tablet driven. I'm going to do my best to unwire that
and use the mouse and keyboard because I know that not everyone has a
tablet. If you are interested, this can essentially, I guess
it can't replace your keyboard, but it can replace your mouse. You've
got some customizable buttons up here. I find that the medium is the perfect
size for me. I had the large, the large, it's a little bit too big to
have on a desk all the time. I found the medium as good, the
smallest, a little bit too small. This is kind of that perfect size and
the main benefit for landscape and travel photography by having a tablet is simply
the touch sensitivity that when you go into light room where
you go into Photoshop, that rather than just having a hundred
percent capacity with your brush, whenever you click that it does that
100% that you can kind of touch things a little bit softer and bring in your
own, I guess artistic element to it. So you're kind of drawing on the image
with dodging and burning and you can create depth and layers
that you really, it's a, it's much more of a
challenge to do with a mouse. The other hardware I have up here is the
solid state drives that I talked about earlier in the gear section of
the video. They are super small, super easy to travel with and
very, very fast to operate. When you're with a computer
light room has traditionally, or at least word on the street is that
it's a resource hog and it slows your computer down. But by
using solid state drives, you really do speed
everything up quite a lot. And the other mess I have here is a to
execute QT readers that are gaff taped to the bottom of my computer. Um, so that's why that looks a
little ridiculous because
I've literally gaff taped with that black tape, um, card readers to my computer because I
use them quite often and I specifically when I come home from a wedding day, I want to get everything loaded in as
fast as possible and to have those two readers right there, it really
does speed up my workflow. And there's also two SD
readers and two USB ports, so well gaff taped on and
completely non elegant in any way. It is super functional. So going into
my computer, I use light room for, I would say 98% of everything
that I ever do. Photoshop, I actually started with when I was like
11 years old. So I'm very skilled in it. But I've noticed the more
that I use light room, the more that I can really just do
everything that I would require for photo retouching in it. If I want to get into
something a little bit more artistic, obviously I have to go into Photoshop,
but for day to day for travel, for landscape photography, I would say pretty much everything
can be done in light room. Now the other program that I use, you
can actually use light room for this. Now light room is getting a little
bit faster and it is possible. The other program that I use is called
photo mechanic and essentially this program, all I do is select images in it. I like to have two streams of process. So in photo mechanic I make all my selects
and then at that point I bring them over to Lightroom. You can do this in light room and you
can select images in light room and do everything in one spot. But for bigger projects I like to have
the standalone select program and then also my editing program. I
feel like file management wise, it makes me a little bit happier but
that might be an unnecessary expense for you. This program is wildly overpowered for
what I use it for but it's helpful and it's fast and I like it a lot. So essentially what I do is I go through
every day when I'm out in the field on my little tiny MacBook air, I have an 11 inch MacBook air and I
select the images that I think that I'm going to want to edit when I get home
or sometimes I'll do a few just for Instagram. The other thing you can do is if you are
using the NAR box like I talked about in the gear section of the video is
that you can load up the app and you can actually just go in and
download the raw files to your, to your phone and you
can edit from there. Um, I've found specifically that the MacBook
air that I use and I feel like any MacBook air with the older screen is
actually difficult to get color corrected. And I feel like the other
challenges that I like to, when I'm kind of doing
official final files, I like to be in a space that I
know is good. This space here, everything is kind of
ambient level, good light. Whereas if I'm out in the field, I'm usually editing in darkness and if
you're editing on a tiny screen in the dark, it's a little bit more challenging
to get it right. You absolutely can. But I find that by working in consistent
settings in daylight and ambient, then I get my files a lot better. The
little pink boxes that you see down here, essentially I've just kind of gone
through and whenever I select things, you hit one through nine and all
of them are different colors, which is kind of cool because you can
just select maybe your absolute favorites with a different color and you can go in
and you can edit everything or you can just kind of get rid of all the pink
ones and only have those orange selects. So all of your options are up here.
It's the same with numbers, but I dunno. Colors are nice too. You can also
do numbers and colors you can get, you can get very, very complex here. So what I do to get all of
my files into light room, I hold command a or control
a, if you're a PC user, select everything. Drag it over here, control tab over here
into light room, drop it. That's kind of all you
can build. Smart previews. I'll try to walk you through as many
of the light room basics as well. Smart previews. What I use smart previews for is
specifically when I'm outsourcing. So if I load a wedding or a portrait shoot
in here and I have a thousand images, I build those smart previews and I said
that entire catalog to my editor and they edit from the smart previous, which I believe are between
four and six megapixels. And when you edit from those, you can kind of have a full version
of the image that you're editing. And then when you export, you
reconnect to the original media. So it may be if you're traveling and you
want to be editing photos while you're out on the road that you can build those
smart previews and edit from smaller files. I find that by not doing that,
it doesn't really slow me down too much. The other thing you can do is if you
have a preset that you want to use, you can add your own preset here.
So whenever everything imports, it's automatically given that preset I
find just by figuring out which one I actually want to be using,
which is usually one or two. We'll get to that in a minute. But I find by just kind of adding it and
then sinking it across is just equally as efficient for me. So I'm going to go ahead and
I'm going to import everything. So this is library view. The one thing, the main thing that I use library
view for is global corrections. So say for instance, you shot everything
at a slightly wrong white balance. I go in here, I select everything and I change the
temperature so that everything's good and consistent. If you're in develop mode and you're
trying to sync those settings across everything, the problem will be that if I've set this
to be exactly like 5,000 Calvin and I sync that across the board, all of
the images will be 5,000 Calvin, but if everything's just
a little bit too cool, if I sent this gallery to an editor and
everything came back and it was just a little bit too overexposed that I can do
this and I can click just buttons to do small corrections but global corrections, so it'll take it down 0.3 of a stop or
point through three of a stop every time that I click this exposure button here
rather than setting it to exactly the number that I'd be sending
it to and develop mode. If you also want to get really into file
management, you can go into keywords, you can keyword your images so that
they're easily to search afterwards. I find by using a program like photo
mechanic that I kind of keep things organized organically on their
own and I don't have to do that, but if you're somebody that wants to
have full control and full access to everything they've ever shot
and know exactly where it is, you can keyword and that will
speed up your search in the future. I don't use really anything
other than this develop tab. I use develop most of the time library. Some of the time I do all of my
editing here in develop mode. What you might notice if you
are upgrading your light room, if you're part of the Adobe subscription
and you keep getting new light rooms, sometimes these presets will be a
little bit grayed out or there'll be an italics and basically all that means is
that it is a partially compatible file. So every now and then I will update my
light room and it will just kind of give me these gray files and
that's totally fine. You're still using pretty
much the full functionality, the differences that sometimes
this profile just won't exist. The one that you're trying to, to go
to and it'll just revert to standard, which usually doesn't make
that big of a difference. When I was editing this video, I realized that I left out a
pretty fundamental section here. So this is going to be the basics. I'm going to talk you through everything
in light, the sliders, everything like that. And then we're going to
get more into editing afterwards. If you are really familiar with light
room, feel free to maybe skip the section, but if you're maybe uncertain
about a couple of tools, please stick around and watch. So to your
left here, you have all your presets. These are my presets that I've created
over time. Uh, you can download presets, you can buy presets, there's
lots of them out there. And essentially what they do is they
control all these sliders and tone curves in different ways. So moving
over into the main section, I would say that typically I don't
go too far outside of this section, that I have my preset set up so that it
just kind of does everything outside of this pallet that I want. And then
I'm able to go in and fine tune. So well a preset would be beautiful if
it was just that one click and finished. It rarely is because lighting
conditions change, colors change, all kinds of different things. A
profile up here is essentially, I'm kind of almost creating my own
profile by changing all those settings. But Adobe has some kind of basic
ones that you can use if you want. I leave it on the basics, uh, for this little eyedropper tool
for white balance specifically, if you're ever just kind
of uncertain what it is, it'll give you a little preview. You can
see it up in the top left hand corner. They're kind of changing around.
So depending on where I drop this, it'll change your file to be that.
It actually looks pretty nice to, uh, what this is essentially doing though
is kind of overriding the fact that it's blue hour, uh, and correcting
it to be technically correct. So I'm not really that into it. You can always take complete control
here and change your own settings to whatever you want. Um, double clicking anything at any time
kind of resets it to I get a zero or in this case, kind of back to what
it was originally set at. Um, this is kind of your shadows
tints depending on if
you're in different lighting conditions, um, specifically
like fluorescent bulbs. Sometimes you need to
tweak that a little bit. I find it's easier just to drop the
dropper on something like somebody white shirt or a color or a black suit or
something that's kind of like that medium gray to make a, a better
white balance a lot faster. Moving down here, uh, auto tone is surprisingly
good a lot of the time. Um, I'm kinda disappointed with
how good it can be. A lot. Like if you're completely lost, sometimes you just click that button and
it ends up working out pretty well. Uh, what it does is essentially just changes
all these settings to what it believes to be. The best values exposure
is your overall global exposure. If you're shooting anywhere camera, you won't really start to see
any negative effects of it. Maybe until like 2.5 and at this point
you'll start to get some grain introduced and I'm talking if you've underexposed
your image and you're brightening it up just with the exposure dial contrast, I tend to not really use
this contrast a whole lot. I have a few of my presets kind of set
it down somewhere around here and then I add contrast in different ways. That's
a little bit more of an advanced, I guess method of doing it, but I find that the contrast
that naturally comes out
of a raw file is usually pretty good. Adding natural contrast
with these sliders below here, highlight Slatter is essentially just
like whatever is bright in your frame. If you have overexposed areas or if uh, for instance if there's a sky or
something, we can go over here. We'll reset this. Um, so say you have a sky that
you'd really want to bring back, you can use the highlights and you can
bring that sky back as you can see in the original raw file. Nothing.
Now highlights a shadows, kind of the opposite of highlights that
playing with the shadows that you see here that you can really kind of get
some advanced dynamic range just by bringing highlights down in
shadows up like that. Um, whites is a specific control over
your whites. You can add, again, contrast kind of with that. And black point is one that I use a
lot more often and basically I guess my method to adding, I guess more of a feel to an image is
usually by bringing exposure up and bring the black point down. And I feel that is the best way to add
contrast to an image rather than just like cranking this slider. I feel like that it feels a little
cheap almost and a little obvious. But by doing something like bringing
exposure up and black point down, you add a little bit more natural
contrast coming down here, I'm gonna get rid of this image because
it's not one of my favorites will go to this guy, he'll go to this guy right here. Can you go back to how it was originally?
I'm coming down here in two texture. Maybe this is a poor example for texture.
We'll go to, we'll go to one of these. Um, so for texture specifically, you can slide up this way to add
texture and it basically like, um, texture is a newer introduction
into the Adobe light room. Uh, ecosystem and clarity was what
we had for a very long time. And clarity is a much
more intense adjustments. So if you are working specifically with
a portrait of somebody and you crank the clarity slider, you're gonna, it's, it's a really extreme effect whereas
texture is a little more subtle. Uh, you can also go negative texture on skin,
and we'll talk about this in a second, but if you use the spot adjustment brush
and you can actually brush in where you want the texture to be removed from. So for people and for
skin softening and um, just kind of working with what you can
do in light room rather than going into Photoshop to kind of put
the final touches on things, you can do a lot of good
things with this texture. It's a little bit more subtle clarity. Basically just kind of like almost
cranks that mid-tone contrast really, really harsh. Um, it's
good for some things. It's good for this shot specifically,
but if you're shooting a portrait, you might basically want to keep this
at zero or maybe like plus two or minus two. Uh, I don't really put that too far, but for landscapes they're a little more
forgiving because it's not going to be a human that's mad at me. D Hayes, um, is, I'll see if I can find a star photo here. D Hayes is one of my favorites. Um, for any sort of Astro stuff. Um,
Astro photography really kind of, it helps out a lot. It
tends to, it's kind of, I would say all of these are pretty
similar texture clarity and D Hayes, but D Hayes tends to be specifically
optimized for any images that you, um, are a little bit hazy,
something like this as well. Um, this Astro shot pretty much so you get, this is the basic straight
of the camera version. I'm going to at least correct the white
balance for demonstration purposes. So this is the more, a
more correct white balance. And just by cranking D Hayes, you just
get a lot more depth in there very, very easily, very quickly. Uh, and
it does a pretty good job. It's not, it doesn't really degrade the
image. Um, there's actually, we'll talk about this in a moment, but
there's actually noise in here that I've, that I've added. Now maybe there's not,
I guess I haven't done anything yet. So there's noise that's
added in my preset, uh, because I'm guess I'm cranked 2.5. There's
a little bit of noise coming up here, but nothing too extreme. And by
cranking D, you just kind of, you, you get more depth out of an image.
Moving down here to vibrance, um, I feel like vibrance, where's an
example of vibrance that I can use? We'll go for, let me just go for this.
So back to the original image here, I'm gonna reset things. So vibrance, in most cases it's going to give you
a more natural saturation boosts. So by bringing this up, you kind
of bring it almost the good colors. If you move the saturation slider. I
tend to see that it's a lot more acidic, um, that if I'm cranking this, it, it
tends to almost make things more cartoony, whereas vibrance sticks along the
lines of what I would believe to be an acceptable, um, color
palette for pictures. So I always use vibrance
over-saturation whenever possible. And that concludes the, uh,
the top little section here. Moving down in a tone curve. Um, you can
play around to this if you want your, if you have presets, there's a pretty good chance
that somebody has gone here to, to really make everything
as good as it can be. Um, my issue with playing with the tone curve
is that it's very hard to finalize and be happy with where it's at because you
can make such fine adjustments to it that I almost want my preset to just
set it up and then I operate from there rather than me trying to individually
control every image like that because it would just stress me the heck out. Moving
down to the HSL slash color palette, you can basically change
any color that you want. Um, we'll use this as an example since
there's a bright ready pinky orange, um, that you can change
the color of that red. So if you want to have the Tokyo
tower be kind of that weird orange, you can do that. You can crank the saturation of that
orange and you can make it a very, very bright orange if you want. Um, you have control individually over every
single color. And again, the presets, uh, that I've made and the many other
people have made really do kind of go in depth, uh, and make those, the color choices for you so you don't
have to go in and change each individual one. Um, there's also, actually I'll jump into this now
cause I think it's important for your calibration down here at the bottom. This is specifically for
your camera calibration. So if you are using a new camera and you
just don't love the skin tones as much as your old camera, you can go in and you can tweak these
and then any image that you are importing from that camera is going
to go by these new settings. So you can make some adjustments to
kind of the Hughes, the saturations, the green primaries, the shadows, um, that is essentially the same
as what you can do in here. But it will just always take effect to
that camera whenever you import files. Moving down here into split toning, um, what split toning does is essentially
it adds either a highlight tent. So if you want to add some, like
I'm going to say purples here, do you want to add some purples to all
of your, we'll find a better example. Again, if you want to add some purples to
your highlights, this is how you do it. So you can change just the highlights.
So, um, obviously extreme example, but you can change it around quite
a lot. Uh, and then the shadows, same goes. So if you want kind of
that like nice blue shadow, um, you can do that, but don't,
uh, don't crank it too hard. I tend to find a nice place, maybe just around a little
saturation of just yellows. So adding just like a little bit, a
kind of golden hour to every image. And then just like a little
bit of blue as well. Um, I think something like that kind of fits
the best for me. Detail I'm sharpening. I don't really touch too much. It's just kind of whatever default comes
out of my preset now I'm pretty happy with it. Um, noise reduction,
I don't use it a whole lot. I don't mind there being noise in my
images. I actually in fact add, um, grain as I spoke to earlier
into my images. But um, if you're shooting something that you
just maybe incorrectly exposed and it's after dark and you start to see
a lot of noise, one first step, you can make a black and white. If that
doesn't, or if that is an impossibility. If it needs to be a color image, you can come in here and you
can tweak these around. Um, it's probably worth maybe either just
experimenting and if you can't get it right, then watch a video
specifically on that. Um, moving down to lens corrections,
one that I use a lot is, um, just the distortion here. I don't really
find my lenses like fringing too much. Uh, purple fringes essentially if like around
the edge here and this contrast point, if there was just like
a huge purple glow, um, you can get rid of that and you can
customize kind of how to get rid of that. I find that with, um, some of the lenses that I use or some of
the lenses that I've used in the past, uh, that I just need to correct the
distortion just a little bit. Uh, you can also do this automatically
if you want. Um, and it should, if you click that, it should automatically
select the lens that you, uh, that you have on your camera and should
[inaudible] should just know and it should correct for essentially like
vignettes and distortion that is known to that lens. Um, I find that I
actually like that natural vignette, so I pretty much always that
off. I want the lens, like hover. It's been designed, I want it
to look like that. Um, I trust, I guess an icon a little bit more than
I trust Adobe or whoever's making the profiles for that. Coming
down here to transform. Uh, we talk about this a little bit more
in the, uh, the rest of the videos, but here was an example
that we use. So this image, yeah, in the beginning kind of looked like that. You can use this to make your
environment a little more impressive. Um, extreme example. But by doing
that you're taking, I dunno, an image that's like really, really
nice and making it a little bit larger. You can also, if you have lines that
you're trying to correct for, um, there's another one in here somewhere. So something like this, uh, if you really just kind of
have like those weird lines, you can tell it's a wide angle lens
shot from down below that you can adjust things. You can also click auto and just kind
of see if it's going to figure it out. I would say it does a pretty
good job most of the time, but if you're just trying to correct
simply because you're pointing up with a wide angle lens, do you want to make
it look a little bit more natural? Um, that's how you do it. And same goes. Uh, there was an example back over here
somewhere that I used a little bit of the horizontal, um, because essentially I'm kind of a little bit too far off
to the right so I'm distorting that building a little bit so you can kind
of make it a little bit more so you're almost kind of more square on or the
appearance of being a little bit more square on than you are. Um, moving down I also clicked the constraint
crop button just so I don't have to worry too much about like usually there's
little pieces that I'd have to crop and use the actual tool for for
effects. I don't ever touch this. I'm, I don't worry too much about
post crop vignetting. Um, I'm build my vignettes as you're going
to see with these settings up here. Uh, for grain I always add a little bit of
grain cause I actually like the texture and calibration we talked about earlier
going into these buttons up here. Crop pretty self explanatory allows
you to crop however you want. You can constrain it, you can
constrain it by aspect ratio. So if you want to totally be square
and you want to move that square round, you can do that, um, angle. You
can also, uh, adjust like that. I tend to shoot everything on
like the same small angle. Um, you can also use the ruler. So if you have a straight line in
here that you want to follow, um, this isn't gonna work cause
this is a distorted line. But if you wanted to kind of make it
exactly level to that, you can use that. Um, for example, sorry about that
spot removal tool. Um, you'll, we'll get into this a lot because I have
a lot of sensor dust on my camera. Uh, essentially what it does is if there's
a spot that you want to be removed, um, like maybe we'll use one of these
rocks. You don't want that rock there. It's gone. Boom. Uh, you can also
adjust all these with the brackets, keys to the open and closed
bracket makes smaller and bigger, uh, brush here. And that's, that's pretty much global
between all of Adobe's products, which is kind of cool. Uh, right eye is not a thing that I've
had to use in a very long time, which is great cause I dunno, just
don't use direct flash. It's weird. Uh, graduated filters, we will get into
this a lot more, uh, over this video. But essentially what I use graduated
filters for is, um, as you can see here, um, that it begins right about here. So this is up to kind of
like rolling in 100%, 100%. And then here it starts to roll
back and by this line it's at 50%. And then by this point it's just
not even affecting the image at all. So as you can see, I can roll this kind of back
and forth and has that effect. You can rotate it as well. You
can put them in any way you want. What I personally use these for
is making small natural frames. So something like maybe 0.26 and then I
can come in here and I can kind of frame this a little bit more naturally.
And well, a vignette is nice. You don't have full control over a
vignette. It's kind of more circular. I find that this kind of fits
at least what I think is good, a little bit better radio
filter, the exact same as that, but you can just kind of do it
by a little spotlights here. You can also do the opposite, so you
can affect only outside of the circle, which I find I use more often. And you can also kind of build
vignettes this way as well. But I personally find using the graduated
filter to be a little bit better. Uh, and then moving in here, this is kind of the same thing as
graduated filter and the the radio filter. Now you just have all of
those controls on a brush. So if you want to bring the exposure
down in a specific spot, now you can, uh, just draw that in like that.
And if you have a tablet, it makes things a lot easier because,
well, with the mouse, when I click, it's just like 100%, whatever
it is or pretty close to it. Um, with a tablet and a brush, you can kind of paint in
what you want it to be. And you have a little bit more control
over everything you do. So, um, those are the elements. We'll get more in depth into
them over the next little bit. I'm going to go chronologically through
all of the images that we did in this tutorial. And I would say most
of the time I'm using my 20, 19 color preset. This might not
be exactly what your taste is, your taste might be something more like
this and that is totally fine as well. I like kind of the, the grade blues
of this preset specifically here. Um, and I'm pretty happy with it
so I'm going to be using that. It doesn't mean that you have to use this
profile if you don't like when it's a little bit gray rather than a
pure black, that's totally fine. You're welcome to do whatever
you want. Again, as I said, really edit the images for yourself
that you are your end client, you are your end consumer and if
you create work that appeals to you, you will start attracting clients that
will actually want what you're selling and you'll be able to create and sustain
a good visual brand rather than just trying to be somebody else
and to emulate somebody else. So this is all chronological order.
Um, we went to Iceland first, we went to Tokyo second. What I'm going to do is I'm going to
click this 2019 color preset and I'm going to hit command a to grab everything and
then shift command S which brings up this synchronized settings. It's also in the settings menu
up here for sync settings. You can easily do that
through there as well. What I recommend is if the, for the things that you keep using
over and over again in light room, if they are a bit weird, a bit difficult like shift command S is
a bit of a weird one that I would rather maybe it just be command D that you can
remap all of your own hot keys if you want just to make it simpler on you. So what I'm going to do here is I'm not
going to be synchronizing white balance because all of my white
balances are different. Everything else right now
is just a straight import, so I'm happy to synchronize
across here for this tutorial. So that's usually what I'd be doing
for this tutorial specifically. I'm actually going to leave everything
as it is just so you see the before and after versions of everything, but know that this would be the way that
I would usually do things that I would come in here, I'd load everything that I need in and
then I would find that preset and I would start from there. If it doesn't
work then I would switch it up. For presets in general, I think it's important to find at least
a look in a field that you like and to stay good and consistent
with that over time. I feel like one of the negative things
that I see with good presets being so easily available out there on the
internet now is that people tend to bounce around a lot and to create
a good cohesive style. Specifically if you are somebody that
wants to be doing portrait photography and travel photography and
different styles of photography, if you're able to tie that all together,
at least with a similar color palette, it goes together a lot better specifically
on Instagram and in your portfolio. Then if you're editing your portrait
photography with one preset, that's a very specific field and
your travel photography with another, so I would say keep it consistent. I
feel like the presents that I have, you can buy them if you want, but they're not requirement to do this
course at all by keeping a color and a contrast pallet consistent throughout
your work I think does a lot of good things as well as it almost restricts
you when you start flipping through presets and you're like, Oh that looks
nice, that looks nice, that looks nice. The one that you usually go with, the one that is the most true to your
style I feel like should always win. So hopefully that can at least bring you
back to the same couple of presets over and over again. I find that for pretty much all my work
this year I've been using my 2019 color preset and I don't even really know how
much I'm going to tweak it for 2020 or if I am, I might release a
new preset pack in the future, but that's not happening at least for a
couple of months, maybe even until July. So as you can see, the front shadows
here are a little bit underexposed. So I'm bringing up these shadows.
That's not something I usually do. I would say most of the time my preset
is a one click and then I bring the black point either down or up. In this case specifically because
it is a bit of a contrast, the natural contrast, the setting, I
had to move the shadows a little bit. Another way you can do it is actually
by coming into here and going into your brush and modifying things
locally rather than globally. So a global edit is something from this
panel here where when I dragged the exposure it changes the entire
scene. What a local edit is. If I come over here and I
change the exposure just in
the sky here with just the adjustment brush, that is a local edit. So what I would recommend is
that if you are ever in a place, maybe we'll start the
editing story with us. If you do ever want to raise the exposure, say specifically of these lava rocks
here and maybe a little bit over here. The thing that I do to raise exposure
rather than just like cranking this and drawing in like it's very obvious. It's obviously an extreme example but
it's very obvious what you've done whenever you do something like that. What I find myself doing is moving the
contrast down a little bit and the is up and I feel like when I make those
adjustments they fit a little bit better. Another thing to be conscious of, if you are making more exposure in
places that were underexposed that you're going to have to add a little
bit of color back to that. Whether you do it through saturation
or vibrance on the other panel, which I think is a little bit better. I've found that usually what it does is
it kind of makes my stuff a little bit colder and if I just warm it up like this, just this is just only this brush right
here that that kind of gets it to where I want to be. So to change the
brush settings, as far as size goes, you use the bracket keys, so bracket
left brings it smaller bracket, right? It makes it bigger. Most of the hot keys are the default keys
at least will be the same in Photoshop as well. So you don't have to keep relearning
things over and over and over again that once you learn the keys somewhere, they're going to be pretty much good
across most of the Adobe products. And then if you want to do the opposite, so say you painted a little bit more into
here and you didn't really want that, you hold down the option key or I guess
the alt key and make your brush a little bit bigger and you can kind of paint this
down. And again, by using the tablet, I'm able to control by
how hard I'm pressing, exactly how much is being affected. So if I wanted like something
to just be 100% effected, I would just hold it
down as hard as I could. But if I wanted to kind of
paint that back a little bit, I could just use a very, very
light stroke to remove some of it, but not all of it. So I'm going to make a bigger brush and
I'm going to draw a little bit in here and I'm going to see, I
like the natural vignette, kind of how it comes down here, but I think it might be just
like a little bit too extreme. I like to see some rocks. Cool. So as a phase one I'm
pretty happy with that. I would like to add a little bit more
contrast to the sky as well as a little bit more blue to the water. So I'm going to click the new button
here and I'm going to reset these. So by double clicking or just
double tapping, if you're
using a tablet on those, you reset them. And I'm going to try just adjusting the
temperature a little bit here and I'm going to see how that works. I feel like a lot of editing is really
just kind of seeing how things react and learning and adjusting from there. And I feel like this is doing a very
subtle job of what I want it to be doing. But that's okay cause I can
see at least where I'm drawing making that water a little bit more blue
and I feel like almost this might be a future thing, but I'm also probably going to change
the sky up a little bit as far as the color goes. So as you can see if I added
the full minus 10 temperature, it might be a little bit too extreme, but I would like to be somewhere
around there. Maybe the, I guess the competing element was the
fact that when you're out there you want to shoot for to at least get the best
white balance you can on the scene. So I was shooting something a little bit
more like a shade white balance to get all the rocks and everything,
the perfect color. But by doing that it really kind of took
most of the blue away from the water here. And I feel like the blue is kind of the
reason that you come to blue lagoon. So I like that. I think that
looks pretty good so far. I'm going to experiment a little bit
with the sky here and see what I can do. I feel like dragging the highlights
down in the sky a little bit, so that is obviously a
little bit too extreme. I'm going to roll it back a little bit. Something like there [inaudible] and I think that's pretty good. So I think that's the one thing that's
bothering me is this little white line through here, but we might go in and Photoshop and fix
that and then there's this other little blip over here. You'll also notice over the course of
this tutorial that it really gets pretty sad with how much censored us
to have on my mirrorless camera. It was really my first couple of trips, I guess we've done some trips in the past. We did like three weeks of stuff
earlier, but this was really kind of, it's my first year into the mirrorless
scene and there is a lot more sensor dust in those cameras than I'm used to
in the traditional digital SLR. So I'm happy with that right there. I'm going to come in and vibrance and
I ended up vibrant, set up saturation. I feel like always gives like that like
weird like that does not look good, but if you were to crank the
vibrance it kind of looks okay. Obviously like you don't want to do it
100% but I feel like vibrance is a lot more softer and less acidic in general. Another thing I'm going to do is I'm
going to add a little bit more contrast and a little bit of texture and clarity
just because it is a little bit more of a rock hard style landscape. I'm also going to move the overall white
balance up as well to kind of rematch for this year because I think
the blue is working pretty good. I might even go back here and I might
even make it a little bit more Ballou. Cool. I'm going to do another one and I'm
just going to see if I had just like a little bit more blue to the sky up
here. If, if I'm happy with that. Ooh, that's starting to, I
feel like that's too much, but it could definitely,
it could definitely work. So something like this and then I'm going
to paint it in just a little bit more kind of just around the building here. And I don't mind if it kind of bleeds
a little bit into the building because again, I can just hold down my option key, make the brush a little bit smaller and just painted to remove what I don't want
there. And I'm pretty happy with that. Right now. What's bothering me on this image is
if you scroll down through here is that the vertical horizontal is a little bit kind
of wonky that as you can see that this edge is, I dunno like this big,
by the time you get over here, it's almost like on this like weird angle. So I'm going to correct that a little bit, but not a whole lot because I don't want
it to look too unnatural to how I took the photo. So even just by going down to something
like minus eight I feel like makes it look a little bit a little bit more
natural and I'm fine with using constraint crop. The crop mode, the crop button up
here is also how I rotate everything. So just by doing that I rotate it
to be a little bit more straight. The thing that will forever bother me
is that I did not shoot this square on, but it's impossible to shoot it
square on kind of where it's at here. So I think that's as good as it's gonna
get right now. I'm pretty happy with it. I might remove a little bit more contrast
just from kind of this area over here and we're moving contrast. I'm
just getting rid of shadows. Cool. Overall I'm pretty
happy with that image. We're going to load it into Photoshop
and a little bit and maybe do something with this little white line next up. This entirely from the keyboard and mouse. So moving the exposure up a little bit
and the highlights down a little bit. Just add that natural contrast
curve. This is a much simpler edit. I think this is pretty much done
here. I usually do play around, just see what happens. If I make it a
little bit maybe warmer than it should. I feel like it becomes more of something
that is artistic and that you can actually put up on your wall. Whereas if you're actually going
for a real correct white balance, it might be somewhere
more kind of around there. I'm happy to have it nice and
warm and nice and I don't know, it almost looks like a piece of
art now, which I kind of like. There are some elements in here that are
kind of bothering me a little bit and I wish I would have got
a little bit tighter, but the way the natural contrast and
the natural vignette come around, I don't really want to crop too much
because then I'll start to lose kind of that natural frame. I also like that it's a little bit just
off complete center here for the sun. I like to, for things to be just like a little
bit broken if everything is perfect, an image looks a little too
almost like a stock photo. So I want it to look a little bit
more, I guess, natural and real. So I'm okay with breaking things and
you'll notice that even if I set up the perfect shot, that usually I'm modifying it just
a little bit to make it a little bit different, a little bit kind of my own. If you wanted to add more
vignette to anything, I don't recommend using the vignette tool. What I do is I come in here
to this graduated filter
and I reset the temperature so I'm not adjusting the colors and I
bring exposure down just something small and I drag it in like this. And I find that by creating
my own vignette this way, or by creating my own vignette
specifically with, um, kind of like drag it in
with the pen tool here, uh, that that creates something
that's a little bit, um,
that I'm just happier with. It feels more organic. Um, I don't know if I need it on that side
or this side cause it already kind of exists, but I liked the way that
it rolls in the bottom here. Um, you'll probably notice in most of my
photos that I actually build a little bit of an exposure frame like that. Um, I don't know if exposure frame
is actually what it's called, but it's what I've been using
and I'm pretty happy with it. I'm good with that image. I might even add just a little
bit more vibrance before I, uh, check out of it here. So
I'm good with that. Next up, moving into purple hour here, going to click my 2019 color preset and
again bringing highlights down a little bit, even exposure down a little bit. I feel like blue hour changes how I edit
a little bit and I go a little bit more purple usually. Then I typically
would, and I do this for, you'll see this in the night night scapes
as well in the city and as well as out here, I'm starting to
pick up a little sensor. So if you notice that you
have little dots everywhere, like I do all kinds of them, you can
use this spot removal tool and again, changing the size. You can either drag and drop it or you
can just change it with the brackets keys and doing something like this and just
selecting an area that's similar to it is a, is how I hear that there's a, there's
going to be a lot of these. Second, I'm going to not do this for every single
image because you'll probably get sick of watching me do a basic
redundant over and over again task. But this photo right now, even
just with that one click preset, I'm pretty happy with it. What it's missing is texture and clarity
and maybe even a little bit of DJs just because it's such a distant photo
that this is pretty far away. Um, it's also not entirely in focus. It's
pretty close. It's pretty close. Um, but five second exposure. Uh,
I don't know what happened. Probably just tripod. I'm also shooting the 7,200 on the small
Manfrotto tripod that I bring with me really isn't the most ideal solution. So if you find yourself using
a 7,200 more often than not, it is worth the money to bring at least
a good tripod head with you as well as sticks that can support it. So
it's pretty close. It's not exact. Next one's a little bit better. I
think. Moving over into the next image, I'm actually going to copy
everything from the last image. So if you are on an image like this and
you make those adjustments and you get rid of your sensor desks and then
you can click to the next one. I'm just using the arrow keys
down here left and right. What you can do is you can just hit the
previous button down here and it will just copy over all of the
settings that you just did. Um, I've missed a few pieces of
[inaudible]. Oh, they covered it. Just took a second there. Um, or I
guess because I zoomed in a little bit, the my spot removal
wasn't quite big enough. Alright. There we go. So I'm pretty
happy with this. I think framing wise, let's talk a little bit about composition
that I would want that out of it. I feel like this kind of
makes it a better photo, although that does kind of work. It leads you in because it is kind of
that circular bracket into the scene, but I think I'm going to get rid
of it. I'm also going to remove, this tutorial is now just all about me
removing sensor desks from my mirrorless camera. So I'm pretty happy with that. I might add a little bit more
purple and into the scene. I really think that the purple
works well with the mountains. If you're ever looking for an exact
perfect, correct white balance, use this dropper tool right here and
because you're shooting something that's white or if you're shooting something
that's black that you'll just instantly be able to correct to be
technically correct for it. And I think that's a pretty
good technically correct
photo. My color palette, I prefer something like that. Even though now seeing kind
of both versions of it, it is significantly different.
But I dunno, I just, I just kinda like the like
that is technically great. If that's what you like to
look at, that's awesome. You're able to add it like that. I prefer something a little bit more like
this even though maybe it is a little bit more extreme. Um, again, I'm going to build a little
bit of that exposure vignette. I might get rid of the one on the side,
but I feel like the water one, it just, the way that it kind of
leads into the scene, I almost want that darker water and then
I know I'm going to want it a little bit more texture in the sky here. Um, I don't do a whole lot of
sky replacements easily. You could just kind of go through and
select everything and just pop a new sky in there. But I do want to at least
keep some of the truth to the photo. If I was shooting this
for a commercial client, by all means like replace the sky and
make that image exactly what the client wants. But for myself, for my
Instagram, for my sales process, I'm happy to edit with
whatever exists on the day, even if it's not as
perfect as it could be. I feel like this is a
pretty similar image. So I'm going to click previous
and see how that works out. Yeah, I'm pretty good with that actually.
Uh, you can go in here and crop, so basically it copies
over your crop as well. And if you ever want to reset that you
can just click the reset button down here. But I almost kinda like what it did. Cool. I'm pretty happy with that. What I'm actually going to do though is
I'm going to come down here and as I did with the other scene, I'm going to try to make that
line a little bit straighter
and I'm also going to constrain crops on, have to worry about doing that so that
way it just kind of gets rid of the fact that I was shooting this on a little bit
of an angle and squares it out a little better. Um, it's still kinda a
little challenging I guess, but I'm okay with it. If it doesn't line your spot up perfectly
can come in here and you can adjust where it's sampling from and make
something that's a little bit closer to at least looking natural in the scene.
And I'm pretty happy with that. Another little cheat that you can is
if you want to make the mountains a lot bigger, you can use the vertical
transform. Maybe not in this case, but you can usually use the vertical
transform to make mountains just like significantly bigger if you
want them to be like even that, like that starts to look like an
entirely new photo from the photo that we already had. You can't really
adjust too much of the, both the horizontal and then also
cropping and then also doing this. But if you ever just want your
mountains to be a little bit bigger, can you use the vertical
perspective? And quite honestly, that I think ended up looking like a
little bit better of a photo then that it does. But for demonstration
purposes, hopefully, hopefully that was good enough for
you. All right. For nighttime photos, usually I'm not going to
be using my color preset, although kind of looked pretty nice
at least as a starting point here. As you can see, I'm way under, my
camera is always set to delighting high, which means that it's actually increasing
the shadows a little bit in the JPEG preview I'm seeing, so if I'm
shooting and I'm doing test frames, or if I'm looking through the EVF or if
I'm looking through the monitor on the back, I'm seeing a slightly modified
version of what the Raphael is, which is great for shooting video, but kind of a negative whenever you're
in these more difficult circumstances and situations. So something like
that. It's a good starting point. As I said in the video, the main cluster
that I wanted was kind of right here, but we've got Northern lights and then
by the time all the Northern lights were gone, it was completely
cloudy again. So unfortunate. The rule for at least me is I
shoot daytime white balance. So just the sun when I'm
shooting nighttime photos. But for some reason it was a little
bit kind of too orangy today. So just by using the dropper tool and
selecting something that's kind of that white gray, you can just kind of
make a good natural exposure. So adding a little bit more
contrast to the scene here just to make those stars pick up. Another thing you can do is you can come
in here and you can add a little bit more kind of contrast or D haze.
So by using the D slider here, you can add a little bit more to kind
of the specific star areas that you want or at least you see have a
little bit more depth to them. I feel like just by a few
kind of light touches there, you can add a little bit
more depth to your photo. But overall I'm pretty happy with that. We went on next Northern lights. So again, just using that natural white or gray
or black in the frame to correct for the white balance. Um, there are a bit of
distracting elements, which is just this, the city down here, I kind
of wished that it was just uh, that had cropped in something a
little bit more kind of like that. Not much I can do now because I just
included too much of the scene because I really just wanted to get as
much as I possibly could. Um, one thing that I'll go over here is one, you can kind of amp the
vibrance up a little bit. Uh, and maybe we'll do just a quick little
to haze and texture and clarity. You can come down here into your colors
and you can actually adjust what your colors look like. So in
this case, this green here, you can really kind of play around with
it and make it look like whatever you want. Obviously this kind of
looks a little insane clips out, but if something you just want it like
to be a little bit more of that kind of like Emerald Ygrene, you can do that.
You can add more saturation to it, less saturation to it. You can completely get rid of it
and you can also make it brighter. So if you want to make the Northern
lights a little bit brighter, you can do it by that. You can do this
with water. You can do this with any, any sort of color that you see up here. That's essentially what my preset has
done is it's kinda gone in and modified the colors to be the way that I want
them to be. So whenever you click it, it adjusts everything slightly. But for when images get as
specific as Northern lights, the preset is pretty good. Kind of
for things you'd naturally find. But for things more extreme like
this, it just doesn't really, um, 100% work exactly out of the box.
All right, moving into here. Um, these are the images that
actually process black and white, I think with grain and
the original video. Um, I'm kind of happy with that and this is a time that I'm going to
go down here into transform and look at that. You can just, how big, how
big do you want the mountain? It might be too big. [inaudible]. It looks all right. Pretty
happy with that. Um, it might be a little too much actually. I'm just going to go down to get down
to there. I think that looks good. I'm going to crop in a little bit to get
rid of just these distractions on the bottom and then I'm actually going to
bring down the highlights so that I have a little bit more of this over here as
well as my sensor desk that's back again. Or is this a new, a new sensor dust.
And I'm pretty happy with that. I think by maybe dragging down a little
bit more of a frame you can create something a little more interesting. And I feel like that's pretty cool image
and I'm pretty happy with and I feel like this is going to be pretty much
the exact same edit cause it's the same scene. So just by clicking previous
you get pretty close. And again, not an image that I would
normally be creating. I don't think that I'd be posting
this necessarily on my Instagram, but I think it's a cool experiment. So now and I'm out in the field again
and I see a texture pallet like this coming together, I know that I can add it to something
like this so I can shoot that or I can shoot the scene with this in mind. Moving over here into the
extreme Northern lights, I feel like, well a lot of this could get kind of
destructive to the image that if you're just really kind of cranking sliders, like if you're bringing
everything up as much as you can, you really start to introduce a lot of
noise. Um, I am kinda fine with that. As you'll see like these presets, every single one of them adds
some level of green to the image. And that's kind of, I guess what
I like looking at. I like texture. I like seeing the tactile
miss to a digital image. So I'm okay adding texture, I'm okay doing things that might add a
little bit more green than potentially they should. So what I did there was I tried to
drop her and just kind of figure out if there's a different white
balance that it should be. But I think I kind of liked the green
and again you can come down here and you can, what kind of green do you
want? Do you want that green? That green looks pretty nice. I would say as far as what it
actually looked like when I was there. That was pretty close to
what it actually looked like. I feel like camera's exposed a
little more kinda to this palette, but I feel like in real life this is
kind of more of what it looks like. So I'm happy with that. Can even maybe experiment with the
black and white image of it. I dunno. I think it's a Northern lights
image so I think you have to, I think you got to leave it in
color. So I'm happy with that. I am actually going to copy those
settings over to here and see how they do. It's a little too extreme in a
dial that back just a little bit. We're going to start again from the
beginning here, clicking there and pretty happy with that. The um,
the other Northern lights images. So we're using this Northern lights
section officially for a show that we're doing. Um, that will be out in March
I believe. So stay tuned for that. Uh, there's going to be a lot more
Northern lights in that. So today, kind of the preview in the future, a
lot more in depth into Northern lights, um, photography. So something like that. I'm kind of happy enough with even
bringing the white balance down. I think what was happening was that
because it got a little bit cloudy and it got a little bit green, my camera just really didn't
know how to handle that properly. So by modifying just a little bit
like that, I'm pretty happy with that. Overall editing, Northern lights, images are really challenging because
there's a lot of different colors that you're not usually seeing. You're
not getting comfortable editing. But I think by doing a color palette like
this and even like this guy over here, I'm pretty happy kind of
overall with it. All right. Moving into the waterfall that was kind of way under. It was a lot darker than I think I
anticipated it to be when I shot it. Um, but you, you learn more and the exposure
I was doing was 15 seconds, but it wasn't really enough to really
kind of fade all of this as much as I wanted it to be. I wanted it to
be that nice like soft stream, but unfortunately I couldn't really
get it to that with even a 15 second exposure. So, um, a little upsetting. You can also see that there was some
missed some water on my lens here, which I don't necessarily hate. Again, I said I kind of like the slightly broken
element to photos that if this just looked like a stock photo, I could have
just downloaded that from anywhere. But by having this water, by having a
little bit more texture on the image, I feel like it's kind of a, a
more interesting frame overall. So I'm kind of happy with that. I'm going to add a little bit of clarity
only to get kind of the rocks and um, everything's going on here. Back to I guess 100% because I feel like
it is a little bit soft just because of the water and um, cause the
ND filter and everything. But yeah, I'm totally happy with that. I'm going to come in here and
remove these people quickly. Not everybody disappeared. I talked
about it a little bit in the, in the actual tutorial that if you're
doing a longer exposure that usually what that means is that people will just kind
of naturally disappear and that didn't happen entirely today. Cool map with that. Again, there are some green in the image and
that is simply because actually added that grain the way the natural vignette creeps
in, maybe it is too extreme for you. If it is too extreme for you, you can actually come down to the vignette
here and you can change it however you want. Um, you can
modify it marginally. The vignette is mostly in this case
caused because of the ND filter. And I was shooting super wide
and it's pretty good at 14, but it does add a little bit of kind of
that vignette. But I am happy with that. All right, moving into these images here, this is the set that I am going to combine
to create a longer exposure than it is in real life. I was overexposed here simply because I
was trying to make sure that I could at least get kind of a one
second exposure, um, so that I could do this example for you. So first I'm going to come in here and
I'm going to make the exposure closer to what it should be. And I mean to do an edit on one of the
images that I'm going to sync it across all of them. I'm also going
to get rid of, again, my desk. Uh, I'm going to leave
these people in it for now. I feel like I'm gonna remove them kind
of after everything and that is totally fine. So I'm happy with the way that this
is. I might do this just a little bit by doing highlights only, you're
more effecting just the sky. It gets a little dirty in the sky.
When I do that by doing exposure, it'd be also kind of
including that mountain, but I just kind of want just the
sky to come down a little bit. Well, I'll do a quick little look on all of these. So what's happening essentially is
that when I'm shooting wide open, because the depth of field
and the f-stop is wider, it's letting most of the sensor that's
kind of pass without noticing it. But when you go down to
[inaudible] like this image here, it really just kind of shows everything. So I'm going to sync this across by using
command shift S and I'm going to copy over absolutely everything because I
want everything to be consistent and I'll be exporting this and we're going to
go into Photoshop to piece this all together to make this a longer exposure. Essentially what I'm trying to do is
turn this one second exposure into something that is a one,
two three, four, five, six second exposure by
using media and in Photoshop [inaudible]. All right, so I'm moving
over here into Photoshop. What I'm going to do is I'm going to
go down to scripts and load files into stack over here. Real select everything. Align sources because I wasn't really
using a tripod for this and create smart object, active loading
layers. Click through to this and now it's essentially just going to
stack everything together and it's going to auto align everything, which
means it's going to change. If something's a little bit more tilted
or whatever I might've done that's wrong. It's going to align all of those. You can see I'm gonna have to crop this
in a little bit just because it leaves the edges a little bit plank, but
right now I'm going to go up to layer. I'm going to go down to smart
objects stack mode and click mean. What that means is just going to
take the mean of all of these images, which means it's going to slow down this
water a little bit and make this a six second exposure. When it does it, I will zoom in to show you how it
changes. So now that this is all together, I can show you how things
change a little bit. We're at 200% that's why it's not
exactly perfect and coming down here, this is what just the single image looks
like and then when you click to the six second exposure combination of everything, you can see that things get a lot softer. So if I was photographing a waterfall
or something that the water was the main subject of it, this would
be really effective. You also don't have to worry too much
about keeping this to be six exposures total. To combine that, if you want to do a hundred exposures
at something that's a little bit more reasonable, like maybe at four and
one 30th of a second, you can do that. You can combine all of those to make
an even longer exposure or you can get impossibly long and create like a 10
minute exposure if you want based on this so it's completely up to you. I feel like that's one of the creative
things that you're able to kind of take with you and kind of use
wherever you see it fit. I feel like this video overall is really
just kind of gives you the skill set and at least a few ideas so that you so
that you can come back with some images that you absolutely love
back into light room. This is one of the more difficult
images that we had to take. You can bracket, you can shoot something that would expose
for the interior of the ice cave and then also the sky and then also
the exterior of the ice cave. But this was a little bit of kind of a
challenge to the Zed six and I think like if you zoom in here, you can see a little bit of
color noise starting to come in. But if you stop right about there
and you come down here to the noise noise reduction, I think you can definitely
get away with that. I think that that is
definitely a good print. My white balance is kind of
way off cause I had no idea. Well I guess there was a lot
of challenging things going on. So one we're in an ice cave that, how do you set a white balance for
something that you can't really see inside here and then to, it
was the end of the day. So realistically it was
like kind of post sunset, almost blue hour in an ice cave.
So, um, yeah, as you can see, even at 50,000, uh, Calvin, it still looks okay, but I would say
something a little bit more like that. I would say bringing the highlights down
definitely does not work like that at all. Um, just adding a little bit
of sky back, I'm pretty happy with, I'm also going to crop this in to be a
little bit more of a square file, um, to kind of just create that
natural frame and again, kind of work in rule of thirds here. It's a bit of a weird rule of thirds
where the natural frame is kind of the center of the third. Um, but overall I
think that's a pretty interesting image. If you wanted to go more extreme, you
could definitely bracket and exposure, but I think by doing something like
this, I'm pretty happy with it. Um, overall I might even crop down a little
bit in the top here. Natural vignettes, natural frames, adding a little
bit more of a natural frame here in the corner. That looks pretty cool.
I'm pretty happy with that. This is a really incredible spot. I would recommend a hundred percent if
you're ever in Iceland to go on one of these ice cave tours and then find out
where the ice caves are and then just drive there on your own. If you have a vehicle that can do it
the next day to take more photos. Uh, I, that was pretty much a one click. This is just a close up of some ice and
I'm going to bring down a little bit more of a, that looks pretty good. Um, I'm going to actually experiment and
see if I darken this down a little bit. What that kind of looks like.
I think that looks pretty cool. I think it's a little bit more
on the abstract side of things, but if you had four or five images like
this to put together with your ice cave photo or with this photo
kind of after here, um, I think it would make a pretty
cool set wherever you, uh, wherever you'd want to put it
in your house or to sell it. [inaudible] cool. I feel like that was almost
a one click that I like the gray, the boringness of up here because
there's so much going on right here. And then simplifying the lava,
the vault, the volcanic Ash, uh, is also kind of, I dunno, I feel like this image just kinda
came together naturally. Really well. I don't know if I'd want to add anything
more to kind of the ice cave here. I might bring again, contrast
down shadows up maybe a little bit and maybe a little bit of texture and
clarity just to add a little bit more. Again, if you want to get really crazy, you can come down here
and you can be like, Whoa, look at how big this glacier is.
But I feel like, I don't know, you kind of start to mess with reality a
little bit too much and it's not really exactly what it was, but you can can make things look a
little bit better than real life. So I feel like something like that I'm
comfortable with. I might even get rid of the full stream leading up there and fill
the frame a little bit more with just the ice. Cool. Happy with that. Moving on to this big Panorama.
So panoramas you want to again, kind of edit whatever you want
it to be. So if you want to do, Mmm, for the first time in this tutorial, I feel like the color is not going to be
the one that I want. Do I want styled, I'm going to try style. This one
is only available on Patriots. If you're a Patriot member, you'll have access to styled and
subtle and these ones here and then the destination pack as well.
Um, actually no, if you, if you purchase them you get
2018, which has all these 20, 19 and the travel plus commercial, but the other ones are
only available on Patriot. Uh, and I feel like something like that is
kind of where I want it and I'm going to sync that across. Um,
so by going like this, selecting everything and then using my
arrow key to find the one that I just edited. Then sinking everything. You could also build this, the Panorama
first and then adjust everything. That's fine too. You're basically, when you build a Panorama in light room
like this, you are building a DNG file, which is a raw file. So you actually
still have access to all this data. It's not like you're just exporting a
JPEG and then you have to edit from that. But I think just just by
editing and seeing what I
actually want it to look like before helps at least get
me a little bit closer. So now you're going to click the
Panorama button and you'll let it load. All right, our Panorama has loaded and it adds it
down here to the bottom of the screen. And again, you can
begin editing from this. I would say when you're
working with such a large file, because now this is the addition
of all of these frames together, it will slow down your
computer a little bit. Um, so that's why I like to do my
main edits kind of before. Um, I actually kind of get to this point here
and I'm going to add a little bit more warmth into this scene here to kind
of make a balance a little bit. And I'm going to bring down the
highlights a little bit too. I might actually have to paint
those back in specifically. That might be a local adjustment, but
I'm pretty happy with this right now. Let me read about there
is where I want it to be. So that looks pretty good for at least
the left hand side section of this. I'm going to bring in a
little bit more color, um, and just exposure into the
side of the scene as well and then a little bit of temperature
just to, to match that. Cool. I'm pretty happy with that. It might
be a little too contrast in here. We might have to go into Photoshop
and kind of fix this up a little bit. It's not loading 100% yet, so
you're not seeing the full, the full final version of that. But um, I can clean that up a little bit in
Photoshop, in Lightroom here, the easy solution might be to just kind of
do a one click like that and bring the highlights down. That's a little bit closer
to what I want it to be. Actually I'm pretty happy
with that to be honest. I wish that I would have gone down to
something like F 10 F 16 so that I could actually get that, that nice sun flare.
But that is all for, for Iceland. The Iceland edits are complete,
hopefully. Hopefully you enjoy it. So now getting into Tokyo, Tokyo is a lot more challenging of a city. I think overall to edit to
that, when you're in Iceland, everything is landscapes. Everything
is for the most part kind of similar, the shady white balances. And it's easy in Japan it becomes a little
more difficult specifically at night that you have to select the color
palette that you really want to go with. If you just kind of naturally let
the photo be what it is, that's fine. But I feel like you can kind of make it
look even more how it feels by adjusting colors slightly. So by coming in here, this was the longer exposures that we
attempted to do that 80% worked out. Um, I'm going to, so right now this isn't the
photo that I want it to be. I'm just basically selecting what
I want the sky color to kind of be. And I feel like something like
that is maybe what I actually want. I'm going to try the commercial
cool as well. May be a little too. All right. We're going summer 2018 cool. And then I'm gonna bring this back to
something that's a little more reasonable highlights down to bring all these
screens back. There's a lot going on here. And then just bringing
that up a little bit. I feel like I'm always adding purple
to nighttime scenes like this. And what I'm going to actually do
is I'm going to start dragging in Mmm kind of my frames here to start
framing the scene a little bit better. And then I'm going to get back to figuring
out what I'm going to do with all the lights. So I'm okay with this. There's a lot of distracting people
down here that are being lit up. It might be actually like one
person, maybe two people. Um, that I'm going to fix that in Photoshop
cause it is very difficult to fix here. What I am going to fix though is
how everything is overexposed. I'm going to bring the highlights down
and maybe a bit of exposure and I'm actually going to use my tool here, turn my tablet back on and then I'm
going to just kind of paint in all the highlights that are around here that if
I tried to do that and I try to bring the highlights back of the entire
scene, the global adjustment, it's going to be much
more difficult overall. I'm also noticing that there's maybe
even a little bit too much distortion as far as kind of wide angle. The fact that I'm taking a photo
and pointing up and everything, the buildings kind of
look a little bit strange. So I think I'm going
to start with there for something that is pretty good and then
maybe go down and basically what I was doing with the mountains, I'm going to do the opposite where I'm
going to bring the buildings almost a little bit more like that. And I'm going to try the auto cause I
feel like it might just get me to where I want to go cause this is more of a complex
thing and I feel like that's good and I'm going to constrain
the crop. Maybe I'm not, maybe that's not exactly
what I want it to be. All right, we're going to go off.
Um, and I'm going to manually do it so that I'm happy with it. It's
not necessarily going to be the most technically correct. It's better than losing out on all
these slow exposure stuff I did here. Cool. So I'm happy with that. Um,
as I said in the video before, uh, the little light spots
up here from my lens, having a little bit of water
on it from the, from the rain. I am actually kind of happy with, I like again the way that that kind of
all comes together and we're going to go on Photoshop and I'm going
to change out some of the uh, the people here that I don't really
want to be cause I feel like they're a little bit too distracting. And if I replace them with kind of these
darker colors and maybe even bring in kind of the, the corner here to make
it a little bit more of a vignette, I need to be happy
overall with that image. And then I'm going to add
maybe just a little bit more to a few of the spots here. Cool.
I wish that there was something, I feel like the screen right here is kind
of the focal Mark or the focal points of the M of the photo. And I wish that there was something
more interesting up there. But uh, unfortunately not today. You can
add something if you want, but I don't know what I would add. All right, now it's daytime back to these color 2019
presets and I'm happy with that. The one I'm going to show you
a little bit more of is the, the wider version of it and I did not
include this photo because it's my favorite photo of all time in the history
of time I recorded it or I included it because I simply want to go into
Photoshop and I want to fix these guys and remove the things that um, cause I feel like it's a little bit more
of a complex edit and I am happy to do that with you guys in a few minutes. Uh, for now I might even come back down
here and transform vertical a little bit and cool. All right. I'm happy with that
for now. I'm going to send this to the gallery so that I'm able to do some
edits to it with you in a few minutes. This guy too. What else
did we want to right? Some more outdoor stuff. I feel like this is all going to be pretty
much one clicks again on my favorite photo of all time. But just
by bringing up the shadows, you bring up the colors and by building
even more of one of those frames, um, you can even get more extreme
and kind of go over your subject. But I feel like I can add maybe
a little bit more just in here. And that's obviously to do with
your mouse. You can't control the, how much you put in. So
by using my tablet here, I can draw in kind of
exactly what I want it to be. And then I'm going to do a
new one. And as I said before, contrast down shadows up, and I'm going
to do a little more on the tower here. It's getting a little too like crazy
saturated with the color that it is. Um, so I'm going to actually roll down, I
guess I'm adding D haze to it as well. That's why it was effecting
that to be a little bit weird. Cool. I'm happy with that for now.
Moving over to this guy here. Uh, same deal color, [inaudible] highlights down and I'm going to paint and around
I'm going to remove D this time. The downside is that when you're editing, sometimes you forget to put
those sliders back in. Um, they affect other things that you did not intend to be affected by them, but I'm actually going the
opposite way with this. Uh, but I didn't notice it doing anything
weird to the last photos as I was changing things. So, um, I think
that maybe the one that, so these images here, they would
have had the D Hayes on them, but I actually think it kind
of worked out as a benefit. So I'm going to add a little bit back. So just be aware of where your
sliders are at. Um, don't be like me. All right. So I'm happy with that.
Going to hold down alt or option, I guess on my Mac here and going to make
this a little bit smaller and I'm just going to remove the, the stuff that I drew onto
the actual Tokyo tower. You can zoom in if you want more
clarity over what you're doing, but I'm pretty happy with
that. Um, as you can see having a tablet and being able to just
kind of draw exactly what you want helps out enormously. I'm okay happy with that. I feel like
this just overall is the best image ever. So it's, um, it's kinda hard to edit, to make a great image when you're not
really that happy with it overall. Um, I feel like it needs that top frame
that I talked about as well as, um, I don't know. There's just, it's not, there's sometimes there's the composition
just doesn't come together the way you want it to. And I feel like this in my mind was a
great photo and then I got home and it's, it's okay moving into blue hour, I'm going to try the color 2019 preset
and I'm pretty happy with that to begin with. I'm going to add some shadows here
and because for the most part, I was just like entirely happy
with this straight into camera. Um, that's about, that's about
all I'm going to do to it. Uh, there's this green guy down here that
we're going to get rid of the Prince hotel. Um, I also added
grain to it and a might, I might remove that from this image. So
I want it to be a little bit cleaner. So I'm going to remove this Prince
hotel logo. But other than that, I think everything is going to stay. I'm very happy with this image and
I'm going to do a quick little, uh, see if I bring down the highlights
of the sky fit makes it a little more cohesive. I think it does. And also there's this weird cloud here
that it's actually not censored us for the first time ever, but it
was a bit of a weird cloud. I felt it was distracting and it
kind of looked like sensor desk. So I'm happy with
everything here. This, um, the 24 to 72.8 is like
honestly the best lens. Um, I'm very happy with
everything and as you can see, like everything is just so
good in this image somehow. So, um, I optically very, very impressed with this combination
getting into some more nighttime photos, color presets, still working very
well. Um, I'm gonna crop this down. I feel like by cropping it down like that
you actually kind of add a little bit more speed to it. And I'm
going to add just a little bit. I do this when I do car photos I just
add a little bit more brightness to the, uh, to the actual rims so you can kind
of see them spinning a little bit better cause they tend to tend to hide, uh, a little more vibrance, a little DJs,
little clarity, a little texture. And this is looking pretty good. I don't
love the fact that there are a little, I dunno, the way that these
dots kind of came together. Um, I guess this is the walking
man sign and I don't love it, but I'm not going to get rid of it. I feel like it's still
all all works pretty well. I'm actually going to just a little
bit more brightness I think to the car overall as well that make it stand
out just a little bit better. Cool. Um, and just for
experimentation purposes, which I feel like is a
lot of what I do here, I'm going to just start dragging
some things and to create again, those natural frames. [inaudible] I feel like that's even looking more
like a nighttime nighttime photo. You can also start to add some purple
elements to make things look even more different. And overall I'm
pretty happy with that photo. This guy here, I was
in a car didn't really, wasn't really as straight
as I guess I could be, but I think that's starting
to look pretty good. So I'm going to go into color here. I'm going to actually kind of make it
almost look like it's more nighttime than it was. Same deal as
before. I want to make the other rims, I guess a little bit brighter
just cause, um, that makes it darker. Just a little bit like that.
And I'm actually in a tent, this one purple a little bit and I'm
gonna throw some purple into my slider here. Um, as I kind of drag things down and then I will be going
back in and adding a little
bit more brightness to our, uh, to our friend here. Cool. Happy with that.
How it's coming together. We're going to add a
little bit of clarity. Um, yeah, good with that. Happy with that. You can even make it a little more
blue if you wanna make it a little more nighttime, but I kinda like almost the
purple vibe that's got going on to it. Moving into the nighttime photos
from the Shibuya scramble tower. Uh, I like to make these kind of as blue
and city blade runner as possible. So just by adding the preset
and cranking the shadows there, you kind of get most of the way there. Um, and honestly like I can probably
just go from this preset and again, the 24 to 70, even with the green out
of that's in this preset looks really, really fantastic. I am going to go up and exposure a little
bit and then I'm going to bring down what's going on over here simply because I think it was an easier starting point
that it's a little bit too bright in the bottom here, but everything
else I wanted to brighten up. So I'll maybe just go in with a brush
and I'll just paint in anything that I want to be a little bit brighter. So
like specifically this area over here, these areas over here, maybe this guy over here. Cool. Um, and then back into here and make
it a little bit more purple. That's a little bit too, too
purple. You've got to find that. Find that happy point. Feel like
right there. I'm pretty happy with it. It might be a little too blue for
you. It's a little too blue for you. Don't worry about it. Edit it.
How you would want to edit. This is also the Excel hotel right here, which is where we shot a bunch
of the other stuff from a, if you're looking for a good, a good
angle on the crossing that's over here. If you get a high floor at this
hotel, you get a very good view of it. Moving over here to new photo, kind of the same. I probably could
have copied those settings. Um, I added a lot of DJs and clarity and
just presence in general to it. Um, because I felt like it wasn't necessarily that
my lens was lacking it. It's just that I feel like by amping
that up you kinda changed the photo into something even a little bit better. I'm also going to add shadows cause I
feel like you're not really seeing the full scene and I feel like that's starting
to come together pretty well. I'm going to again go through and brighten
up some of the areas that I feel like should be a little bit brighter.
Tower records down here, maybe these rooftops here and
Uniqlo and whatnot over there. Um, so this is again the, the
hotel on the corner here. So if you have one of these rooms,
you have the perfect viewpoint. Um, even more perfect than up here. Cool. So I'm happy with that a more correct
and real white balance would probably be something more like that, which also
looks very good. Um, you know what, I think I'm convinced. I
think that that is a better, I'll go somewhere in the middle of it,
but I feel like that's pretty good. Cool. So I'm happy with that. Uh,
that's why it's important to click in, just like continue to experiment. The downside is when you just keep finding
more versions of the same image that you like a little bit better, a little
bit differently. And if you do find that, I would say just export all of those
versions and load it onto a different device loaded onto your phone or your
iPad and have a look at it maybe like two hours, three hours tomorrow even, and
decide which one you like based on that. Because it's, it's hard to sit here and figure
out exactly what the best edit is, especially if it's a global
adjustment like that. Um, so to load it onto a different device
and to get out of this space that you edited in usually is quite
beneficial. All right, loading over here to the
pagoda again, shooting it up. 22 R F what am I? F 14.
So you get this nice, that's nice. Sensor dirt, dust. I guess it's both. Um, so the daytime image of this
is more challenging to edit. The ideal is that if you can just hang
out and you can wait until golden hour, that is the most ideal situation
ever. But if you can't, I think that this preset, specifically 2019 color really does help
out cause it kind of boosts the shadows and it gets rid of the contrast that
makes this photo almost like unusable in the beginning. I'm going to show you the, so originally this is what it looked like
and then with just a few quick tweaks, it's already starting
to look a lot better. What I would be doing is exposing and
making this look all correct and Fuji and everything looking good. And then I would go in and I would
again build my natural frames, um, to kind of frame the image
as best as I can. Uh, with a polarizing filter. I don't even know if it really would have
helped in this case because the sun is kind of pointed directly at us. I
probably wouldn't have done a whole lot, so I am fine with not having one. Um, I know that we made it a bit of
a thing in the, in the video, but I think overall it wasn't really that
necessary or as necessary as it should have been. Um, and you can kind of
see the, on the tower here, the, the shingles might have to
go in and do a quick little highlight brush just to see what
I can kind of do with those. That's obviously too extreme, but I'm just kind of seeing
where I'm painting first. Okay. I think that's probably
good as far as area goes. Um, they can still be, it can still be bright, but I just don't want them
to be completely clipped out. Something like that's pretty good and
I might even see if adding, sorry, adding tint to it. Still adding
a little bit of warmth to it, kind of cleans it up a
little bit more. Cool. Overall I'm pretty happy with that. Um, I think that it's as good as you can do
when you're out there at this time of the day. Obviously best case you
can wait around, tell golden hour, but if you can't then uh,
then this is pretty good by me maybe into some more nighttime
photos of Tokyo here. Again going to crank this up and that's already starting
to look pretty good to me. I'm probably going to make this a lot
more blue cause it is blue hour after all and I feel like the composition's a
little bit wonky. So down that comes up, this goes, I wish these cars would
have moved a little bit more. Um, you can't really Photoshop
that gridlock traffic. What I was looking for was kind of this
sweeping over here and I didn't quite get it on this side,
but that's totally fine. Not everything's always gonna work out
perfectly. A hundred percent overall. I'm pretty happy with that though. Maybe build out some more of these
natural frames with 'em rather than just some different colors in there and
it might even roll back the purple just a little bit. Cool. Overall, I'm pretty happy with that and
we'll go into the next image. I feel like everything I just did there
is going to be exactly what I want to do to this image. So I'm going to click the next button
and it's a little bit too underexposed or the black point is kind of one more shadows, less blue and cool. I'm happy with that. All right, last image and then we're going
to get into some Photoshop stuff. The last final additions to it and up here care to these guys. Um,
what you're actually seeing, I think this line right here
is just a reflection cause the, the room we were in was
actually really hard. These are the pot lights from the room
we were in and I'm not sure what that is, but I'm going to suspect that
that is also from the room. This kind of blends as a cloud. So I have to go into Photoshop to do a
content aware remove of this and see if that works out. Usually that's
the way I kind of start that. I start with the content aware fill, which we'll get into in a moment and if
that doesn't work then I get into other versions of it to hopefully
figure out something that works. So I'm going to bring some highlights
back over there and then I'm actually going to go in and I'm just going to
paint this road down cause it's very, very bright and bring highlights down talking about there. It's
probably pretty good. Ah, cool. Happy with that. Can I export that and we'll get into
Photoshop and figure out if content aware we'll remove this line here cause that's
bothering me and a few other things. Moving into Photoshop. Photoshop isn't
a program that I use for everything. I try to do everything that I
possibly can inside of Lightroom. I find that light room is just in
general better for photography. I feel like anything that I can do
in there feels natural to an image. I feel like in Photoshop you can get
a little bit carried away and you can create a lot of different things that
maybe should not exist in real life. There are an unlimited number of things
that you can do with this program. I will show you at least
kind of my basics today. Most of what I use it for today
at least or just in general, is pretty much for removing things from
images or patching things up in ways that just light room is just not
capable of. Um, so in this case here, what I want to do is I want
to remove this gentleman here, this gentleman here and this
blue tarp from this frame. So there are a few ways to do it. The
one, the one and I guess most simple ways. You click your last suit tool here and
you select what you want to be removed and you hold down shift, delete and you do a content aware
fill and you hope that that works. And in this case it was pretty close. I would say that that was 90% of
what I would've wanted it to be. Um, the other way that you can go into this
mindset is by doing the patch tool here. So you click on here patch tool and you
select whoever you want to disappear or whatever element you want to disappear
and then you drag in whatever element you'd want to replace it
with. So something like that, it doesn't really work in this case. Do you also go in here in the clone
stamp brush and you can clone him out, which is, I feel like this was kind of the original
way to remove everything that if you want that little sewer to
disappear, it's going to do that. And then you can kind of paint him away
based on what data you already have inside this, uh, inside this frame. So you hold down option or alt to set
the point you paint from and all you're doing is copying that small
little area and painting over him. So I feel like this is always
the, for the most part, the most accurate way to do things.
Depending on your needs for the scene, you can do content aware and sometimes
it is very good if it's a very simple adjustment, sometimes it's even easier
for content aware fill to do it. But I find in most circumstances the
cologne brush is kind of what I'm using. Um, and you can also use a multitude of
them. So maybe you come down here and, and now you're happy with it. So
I feel like that's pretty good. I feel like that's not too noticeable
where it's a little more noticeable cause you're staring at it. But I feel like from this distance that
you can kind of see a few repeating things. So maybe if you see some repeats, tear it of it that way.
And then I would suspect that under here, if you
select it correctly, it's probably going to do a pretty
good job. I'm pretty happy with that. And then this guy here, I don't know
if you can do a content aware on him, if you can be very impressed.
Honestly, that's pretty good. Well it doesn't line up 100%. Um, I
can go in and I can quickly fix that. But that did a pretty, a pretty good job of getting
rid of exactly what I wanted. So I'm going to click the clone brush
again and I'm going to fix it up just a little bit. Usually what I do is I find
when I'm selecting my elements, so holding down an option to
select where I'm painting from, I paint on a lines that I can come over
here and I can kind of line it up at least the best I can
somewhere maybe like that. And then once you start painting, um, you're actually painting from kind of
you've established where you're painting from so you can kind of move
around a little bit more. And I'm almost actually going
to redo this section here. So what I want is something kind of like right
there and just repaint it back in and I feel like that's
not super noticeable. There's one repeating element there. Pretty much all you have to worry about
is when things look obviously like they've been like kind of pattern stamped, but overall very easy to
make those people disappear. All right. A more
difficult edit potentially. You never really know
until you get into it is, I don't know why I'm using that is potentially this guy here.
We'll try content aware, did a pretty good job, maybe
come down here to the uh, the patch tool and I think that's going to do a better
job in to zoom in so I can actually see what I'm doing and essentially I want
to replace it with something that just naturally fits like that. And then I'm going to go in and I'm going
to fix the edges with my clone brush here. Depending on the complexity of edits,
you can also change the pace city. So if you just want to kind of like
paint it in slowly over time and have it slowly, gradually disappear,
you can do it that way. Um, the challenging part with that
is specifically for the, I guess the presets that I use is that
there is grain on them and when you paint in with a brush that's only like 50%, you're kind of covering up some of the
grain and adding new grain and unnatural places. And that kind of doesn't really
feel exactly correct to me all the time. I also find that it's easier just
to go in and just like quickly do this rather than doing
it in a enlight room. I'm trying to decide what this is. I feel like this is a
reflection in the glass. We also didn't a hundred
percent correct for this, uh, for the vertical of that either. Um, try patch tool, try that again. I think that looks pretty good and then
go in and just kind of fix the edges cause they're a little, a little crispy. Cool. Overall I'm pretty
happy with that. Um, the repeating element that you see in
here is actually kind of from the actual image, which I don't love. I'm
mostly gonna fix this real quick too. So yeah, this little, I dunno area there, it looks like it's kind
of a stamping repeat, but I didn't actually
change anything there. So I'm overall happy with this image. Now two more to go. This section down here is something
that I would like to disappear and if I do content aware on it, it's not going to work in this case or
it shouldn't work because it doesn't really know what to replace
it with because it's a, actually I did a pretty good
job so it added a rock up here, which I'm going to get rid
of and just goes to show you. It's always a surprise with what works
and what doesn't when it comes to content aware it. Phil, I'm such
a pretty good job overall. I'm kind of happy with it.
I don't mind that at all. The having another little rock up there
that didn't exist and that's a lot better than the original
version, which was this here with this kind of line.
Not a big edit, not a big addition, but I think it definitely
does add something, pulls the image together a little bit
better rather than having something that kind of pulls you out of the image. It keeps it together with
the tones a lot better. All right. Moving into the last edit.
Thank you so much for sticking with me. In this tutorial. One of the things that I'm going to be
doing here is really just removing any elements that caused me
to focus on them a lot. So this blue shirt here, just going to replace
a little bit with that, that can go away and I'm just using the
clone brush for and just kind of lining it up over top of anything I don't want. The one thing that I do for sure want to
get rid of is happening right there and I need to keep pulling from
kind of different spots so
that I don't give it away too much. That was a total
giveaway that I've edited this, but maybe something kind of from
over here. You can also go through, and again as I said, changing the flow of the brush. It didn't really work out
as well as I wanted it to, but [inaudible] I mean it would down here,
this is the burn tool. What this does is just darkens corners
and areas and I gonna to bring this in a little bit more like that and I
feel like that is all right by me. There's nothing else that really
stands out. Maybe this foot in here, it looks like a little
little too duplicated and while I want it to be good, I don't
necessarily need it to be perfect, so I don't want to just like go through
and edit every single person's feet and everything in this because I feel like
this is good enough the way it is. And this concludes the travel
and landscape photography
tutorial and you were spending all this time with me. This was not a short video by any means
and I appreciate you sticking with it and hopefully you've learned a few things
and hopefully you feel a little bit more comfortable to go up there and any
scene that you find yourself in that you have the tools now to make the best of it. And if you can't make the best of it
and you can't make it perfect in actual real life, you will hopefully have the
post-production abilities
to make it exactly what you wanted it to be when you
get behind the computer screen. I feel like with travel
and landscape photography, it is important to create something
that actually means something. And it is also just kind of a
fun challenge sometimes too. So find your stride in that and
whatever brings you the most happiness. Whether it is actually creating those
images that really truly means something to you or if it's just another
level of something that you can do, you can go out there in the world and
it's to push yourself to create something kind of like video game like I spoke to
in the character selection gear phase that if going out and creating cool things
and interesting things is what you do for fun. Like that's totally cool. Don't let anyone sway you against what
you want to be doing in photography because it's not what they're doing
on YouTube or whatever. So go out, find what you enjoy doing.
Photography should kind of, for the most part be about
your enjoyment of it. So go and start to create and just
find yourself in as many situations as possible. And when you start to travel to new
places and see new and interesting things that inspire you, you'll be 100% capable to get the best
image possible in that exact scenario every time. Now, thank you again so much
for watching and subscribe on YouTube. If you're not yet subscribed and maybe
follow me on Instagram and follow along there. We've got some cool stuff
coming up over the next year, so thank you again for being here, and I hope you have a great day and I
hope that you learned something today. [inaudible].
