From Grumpy photographer to Happy Photographer - in 5 minutes

[Music] hi everyone you're watching express photography now uh we're down in an area of scotland where my mum lives and we're here to offer her a bit of emotional support she's quite old she's nearly 90 and we're down as a part of an extended family bubble so even though we're in full lockdown we're allowed to be here now also uh we're here making this video this is our job and again by the law we're allowed to come out and do this um we're in an area of scotland uh it's quite famous really for its folklore and its history and i'm sat next to the bard as he is known mr robert burns uh and it just goes to show that people have been coming to the countryside with their with their tablets to make notes uh and to engage with the world to find peace and tranquility for hundreds and hundreds of years and robert burns wrote prolifically about the scottish countryside about nature about the birds and animals and the environment that we live in so this isn't a new phenomenon people have known for hundreds of years the benefits of being out in the landscape absorbing nature feeling at one with the environment now i'll be honest the last few days i've been kind of struggling a bit not with mental health particularly i'm not depressed or anything but you know you're getting a bit of a funk and with landscape photography when it's your job that pressure to feel as if you've got to make photographs all the time and engaging with the social media all the time is a genuine pressure um and you know as tom heaton has said so many times you know there's only so many birch trees you can photograph before you're terrified that people are going to get birch tree fatigue so what we've done is i decided to come and find water and i was in a bit of a funk and when we first got to the river there i was really struggling because i came looking for a particular set of rocks that i've seen on a number of times before and i couldn't get it to work and you'll see from the photographs i'm going to show you now it just doesn't feel balanced it doesn't feel harmonious and even when i tried to get in really tight there it just didn't feel like it was working for me but following my own advice and the thing that i see on this channel so many times if you just notice the things that are speaking to you and the relationships that already exist in the landscape that is the most likely place that we're going to find ourselves and the photographs that mean the most to us and the second scene you can see there we've done a vertical and a horizontal version of this and i'll talk a little bit more of that in the studio but i found something that was harmonious i found the shutter speed that spoke to me in terms of the aesthetic the color palette i think we're going to be able to do some interesting things with in lightroom when we get them home and i found peace i found peace in a mad world during a mad pandemic and the countryside once again has delivered the thing that i need it to do the most which is be itself and just remind me that there is beauty and harmony and peace and tranquility all around us and we carry our clouds with us and it's that carrying the cloud that has the most negative impact on our own landscape photography so and christine and i are going to wander up the canyon here it's a bit icy and a bit frosty so we're going to go steady but hopefully we might find something else that brings us that peace and harmony that we so badly need in this current climate so we're back here in the studio but it's about six weeks after i recorded that stuff in the field there when i was sat next to the old bard and it's so funny to kind of look back in your catalogue sometimes with that kind of what was i thinking mentality um if we look at this first photograph like i said i've there's a an amazing rock here which is this really stunning i'm not entirely sure what it is whether it's a schist or something like that but it is an absolutely beautiful rock and i look at this photograph of it and it's just like what was i thinking really compositionally it's just all over the place we've got this bit at the top it feels like it's twisted it's a very slippy area it's a very very dangerous area to try and walk which makes it awkward and i will go back and get this one day but this is not it um so yeah i'm not going to start processing this in any shape or form but i will some of the others i love the thing i really really love the thing and when we left the house it was i really wanted to go and make a photograph of this rock surface um but when i got there again there's that making a video expectation there's the performing expectation there's the i'm a professional photographer of course it's going to be amazing expectation and all of that is nonsense anybody who thinks that professional photographers live in this utopian zone of perfection where everything we do is amazing is delusional we have the same fears and anxieties and pressures that everybody else feels whether you're just picking up a camera for the first time so this was my first attempt the second attempt is not a great deal better and is probably worse actually and this is this is me trying to make something work so this is me consciously exploring and for me it's just not a good way to work it doesn't work for me the first one i think i could probably go in and do something with it and let's hey there's no time limit for this so let's just dive in here and i'm going to crop it down a bit i think if we get rid of that top section and pull in that right hand side a little bit but that there's bad because i kind of like this bit is okay the main it's a bit so so we need to get rid of that right hand side crack so that cr that that composition is a lot more um coherent i'll brighten up the water a little bit and i'm just going to use my hsl with the luminance to crank up the color of the or the brightness of those rock surfaces there to try and bring out some of that warmth that i felt when i was there because it is quite a beautiful thing and then i'm going to use my camera calibration slider and that will give it a bit of a boost as well and then i can come in with my temperature and tint and you know that way we're bringing out the richness of the rock that i know to be real i've kept the water reasonably neutral there is a little bit of coolness in the shadows there but you know it's not a dreadful photograph but it doesn't quite do it for me so let's move on so this one we don't like this i thought right maybe i can try and zoom zone in just on the textures there even worse and i this was the last one i tried and at this point i'd taken four photographs was feeling truly miserable about myself and thought i am wasting a very lovely day by stressing about all this nonsense of trying to make photographs of something that doesn't want to be photographed um i do i do drift the same as everybody else does from being quite chilled and zen-like i suppose and relaxed and calm to another phase which is kind of lock down syndrome at the moment where we're feeling claustrophobic and trapped and we just can't wait to get out so it's easy for us to fall into that trap of feeling cranky really and i hate that about myself i really hate feeling cranky when i've got so much to be grateful for my marriage and christine my office my guitars living in the countryside uh you know i'm very grateful for everything that we have so i stopped looking for compositions and instead decided to um notice the things that did catch my eye and i quite like this uh arrangement of the water i felt it sat in the frame really nicely now again this is my sixteen point sixteen by nine uh cropped in camera so this is basically full frame in camera cropped to 16 by nine so i've lost the pixels i need to stop doing this i i need to start shooting full frame again but the first thing i noticed immediately was that this is a tenth of a second and it just it didn't feel perfect to me i liked the arrangement but i didn't feel that the shutter speed was perfect so i did another one at a third and i quite liked this right hand side i think is beautiful um and and i do quite like the left hand side it's got a little blurry on the left hand side um but the right hand side i think is really good and then i did a a third one that's also a third of a second and then i did one for an eighth of a second and i think i zoomed in slightly for that last one yeah there's this area of white up on the right and the left hand side there so i zoomed in a bit tighter to get rid of that and and that feels really intimate and if i look at the three the four of them that's too detailed that's very mushy i do quite like the last one that i took because i think if i if i process this one this white area is going to get really out of control so i think i i will just quickly and photographs like this don't need anything it's just a case of understanding how bright or dark you want the frame um i think i'm going to make this one reasonably open i'm going to open up the shadows a little bit to try and get a little bit of the warmth and richness in those rocks i'll open up my whites a little bit to get some luminosity into the water now you can see a bit of greenishness in the water there that's the color of the water there's a bit of peat in it so it does it can get a little bit uh colorful i don't want to cool it too much water always looks cool when it's cool um it's it's just the way our brains i think respond to i'm gonna use my camera calibration again and you can see we're bringing in quite a lot of interesting tones but mostly in that greeny side so i'll just use the magenta slightly if i wanted to tone that greeniness down we can cool that further and just neutralizing it really um with a little bit of the opposite if it's a bit green you can add magenta if it's a bit yellow you can add some blue or vice versa and that doesn't bother me so much now so very quickly we can end up with a photograph that's kind of just clean and it's it's showing the key elements that i liked i said in the introduction to this video that we've shot both a horizontal and a vertical version and the vertical version looks kind of dark now after we processed the first one but i have already processed this one i like the way this shield of rock came in from the bottom there this this shield it felt uh uh like it was very organic to me even though of course it's rock let's look at the worked image um which i think is too bright um the way i process images is they are snapshots in time and i think that our preferences and our perspectives change over time and i can process an image today and it suits my mood or it suits the music that i'm listening to or it suits the weather outside or the type of day i'm having and it's i think i like that you know there's no definitive version of a photograph there's no perfect version of a photograph because even if we think it represents reality our perspective of reality or our perception of reality can change as well so i think it's important to allow ourselves to be flexible and fluid in terms of how we finally represent our photographs and both of these compositions and if i just grab the two that i worked there both of these compositions are essentially of the same content and you can see this one on the right hand side here is taken from a little bit further on to the right hand side so we're looking face on or a little more obliquely onto those falls but more face on and then we've come across them for the image on the left hand side and we're shooting across the falls and what that does is a profound difference of the dynamics everything on this side is a little bit softer angled the the slopes here are all um it feels less severe it's open and it's a 16 by 9 horizontal and the thing with that is it's going to feel more expansive and relaxed the one on the left feels tighter and more intimate and everything feels much crisper and sharper and i think this is a really good example of shooting one thing from slightly different angles and seeing how profoundly can change the feel of the content um and i i do like these two photographs i really do in fact at this very very moment in time the the horizontal is the one that probably speaks to me the most and i think yeah that that's uh i'm happy with that the one on the left i processed maybe five or six weeks ago when i first got back and i've made it a bit crunchy and a bit punchy and it feels a little bit overdone um to me uh maybe in the last month i've the conversations with joe cornish and rachel talabart are changing my perspective on the type of photographer i want to be and the type of person i want to be and i believe now i'm moving into this direction of um [Music] real life like uh like a witnessing approach to landscape photography um i've been doing a lot of gobi images and so many of them are heavily abstracted and really really dark and i'm moving more when i'm back in scotland now to representing the landscape much more as it is and just a now allowing the natural softness of the colors and the tones to to be themselves so we're all on a journey we're all on a path and maybe this is the way the channel is going to go now is exploring my own development a little bit more because like i said at the beginning this concept the professional photographers are somehow a finished article is madness you know everyone i speak to who's who makes all of their income from landscape photography we're all on a timeline and we're all evolving and changing up i mean i'm doing so on a weekly basis at least but at least a monthly basis i noticed changes in myself and how i'm approaching the landscape stick around on expressive landscape photography we we do hope to try and bring a more emotional and self-development attitude to youtube and to landscape photography these images are not about being popular they are just representations of my relationship with the landscape of course if you folks like them then that is great um because it's how we make our living if you want to support us please have a look at the membership channel every week we're posting some really in-depth videos uh covering some of the more technical and philosophical approaches to landscape photography where i go a lot deeper than i can do on the main channel our ebook collection is growing massively on our store with all the products that we brought out plus books by tj thorne and the wonderful sarah marino there's new products coming very shortly with my processing videos and of course my photo book of the gobi will be coming along in 2021 as well which i'm super excited about thank you very much as always for joining me here and um yeah i look forward to bringing you rachel talabart on vision and light in the coming weeks and uh yeah apart from that have a good time everyone and i hope you're safe and well wherever you are in the world and thanks once again for supporting and watching expressive photography all the best now bye [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Expressive Photography

Views: 4,297

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

Id: 6IR4e9LXz2Q

Length: 22min 11sec (1331 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 07 2021