How I improved my street photography.

hey guys gavin seim here and today we are gonna look at editing this street photo i took last week maybe one of my best street photos that i've taken but i think it really had the feel i want and i wanted to come back to this and show you guys how i selected it what was going on there because i took some videos and also how to edit it and we're going to look at three ways to edit this photo i'm also going to show you my rejects and why i chose the one i did i've been out doing a lot more street work and i was just out with my xc3 a 23 mil f2 which is a 35 equivalent and trying to think different right i have a lot of experience with family portraits wall portraits landscapes and when i'm doing street and documentary style photography it's journalism and i have to think a little more differently a little more on my feet yes i know weddings are very documentary in nature also but i'm having to step outside my boxes and i'm gonna along the way throw out a few tips of things i'm learning as i push myself in the area of street and documentary photography because i feel like the streets in particular are one of my weak areas so i actually just got an x100v this week also an x 105 and it has that same 35 millimeter equivalent but you can't remove this lens and when i first saw this i was like no why would i want that but i challenged myself to put a 35 equivalent and leave it on for weeks and it's all i've been shooting with on the street with this and this camera is not water sealed and it's been monsoon season and i've almost ruined it a time or two but i've got some really good images and so i spoiled myself a little bit with this because i want to keep pushing myself on those streets and not thinking so much about changing lenses and all that but really in looking for the light and looking for the emotion and looking for the moment but let's get into the photos here and i'm going to show you guys what i have you can see that these are color now when i'm shooting lately i'm actually going out and i'm setting it to black and white i'm shooting raw so i have all the information because if you have a color when you go to black and white you have more to work with i'm going to show you that doesn't matter if you're manually editing or using silver presets or black room we're going to look at all that today but if you look here here's my photos and here's our color images and this square i was in this square and honestly they were just going crazy these birds were all over the place guys and they were flying around like it was the end of the world and they would swing around every few minutes and start circling around they would stop go and start circling around that church tower and i'm like this is it because this centro this is central ezekiel montes in kind of the central plateaus of mexico and they've got a really pretty center here it's usually bustling it's a great spot for the street photography but and it's usually really pretty and there's people selling things and doing things but these birds that was it right there that was where it was at with this and i was just like wow so i went in and i just started shooting one tip i'm gonna throw out there that i've been doing more with streets if i'm doing landscapes or artwork i'm very methodical and i'm shooting slow and one frame at a time and i've done that for a lot of years to the point where i think it's almost a rut and i've realized if i go out and i set it to a higher frame rate three frames five frames eight frames doesn't have to be crazy fast but enough so that i'm shooting boom boom boom boom i'm not pressing the shutter every time so if you have a low shutter speed when you do this if you have a low shutter speed every time you press there's a higher probability in my opinion of movement and so if you're pressing and holding you get more of this fluid motion and i'm realizing i get shots that i would otherwise have lost because i'll have like five frames of the same scene and the way movement works one of those frames even if i'm a slow shutter speed tends to be sharp and i'm going to show you that but the first thing i'm going to do is go to here and i'm just going to run a quick preset from silver 4 and what i've been doing i'm shooting in black and white on the camera and then they come in in color now i believe depending on the camera they will actually convert to the fuji profile and in capture one it does better converting to the fuji profile but the fuji profile is not really that important i'm shooting in across so i can see that black and white preview and so i've just applied something like silver simple silver from silver four which is a very similar process to something like across throws in a little bit of contrast a little bit of dynamic range but it's not an over-the-top process okay so let's flip over to the screen and you can see i have all these and the first thing i'm going to do is i was shooting in black and white and depending on what you're editing and where you're editing if you're in capture one it may read the profile of your camera but in this case it's not it's just showing me a color image and so i'm going to do and go down to silver 4 and just put on the simple silver preset because it's a very similar gentle black and white controls the balance the dynamic range things like that similar to what i'm getting out of across on my fuji okay so now i'm black and white and you can see if i start flipping through here i have a lot of kind of interesting images but it's all about the line and the light and we have this really nice evening light backlight in the sky and this church was where it's at this clock tower is bright these birds are moving and i was so glad i did a rapid frame rate because they were moving fast and some of these are a little soft i'm going to go through and show you why i chose the one i did though and that's because not only are some blurry but the movement this is my favorite number 11. and it's my favorite because not only is it really sharp up here in the clock tower and throughout detail all the way down into the lady in the wheelchair the people walking across the square but the birds are moving and they kind of lead us all throughout the frame so your eye is drawn to that clock tower but then it's going to follow and kind of fly with these burns and they almost go into infinity in fact i'm not going to crop this for the edit but in the end i can crop this a little bit and i can crop it right there and that line of birds is just so mysterious and it kind of leads me out of the frame now there's some other good ones here 13 is actually really good it's really full of birds it's really sharp but all of these were shot in about 15 seconds right and i was just sequentially shooting to try and get these birds while they were around the clock tire tower because they weren't flying around it consistently they were moving they were very like agitated and it was pretty wild but ultimately you can see out of all these images and lots of them are interesting but one thing that i've learned over the years and this is my final right and i'm going to show you how i got to this as we look at the three different ways to edit this let's go back though to the raw file so here's my raw i've done the simple silver now i could do this in color let's examine three ways three ways quickly to edit this i could do color for example i could go to belladonna and i could use let's reset it it's a little flat but it's got good lighting it's got good highlights up here the histogram is looking good so we've got a lot going for this image and it's sharp even though it was only 1 125th of a second and that comes back to having some extra frames so i could pick out the sharpest i think this came out really good and as soon as i saw this i'm like yes this is my photo of the week because i've had kind of a cruddy weekend of shooting i hadn't gotten anything really exciting and i was super excited about this one so then i come in and i could say well let's let's do some different color images right the backlight enhancer or something like that to make it intense atmosphere maybe go to natural hdr3 and get some dynamic range effects like something like this or who knows i mean there's all kinds of mixes i could do if i wanted more of a bold color i could use classic tone map from natural hdr3 but my visualization here was a black and white so we could edit this in color i always reserve the right to change my visualization don't get too stuck with your own rules that you limit your image making process and i think that's important and that's one of the things i'm trying to do with street the second way we can edit this is just go to silver and we can edit directly on the raw if i had a group of images i could do this i could do something let's go down like the hdr silver this looks really good hdr silver two i could go down to the filmic silvers and get some really deep blacks and there's a lot that i could do i could do light fade and then push my exposure a little bit so i could get eighty percent of the way with just the silver presets in fact let's take this raw edit and go down i'm going to select my final that i uploaded to my page into my instagram and just compare those two so the left is the raw and the right is my final but you can see a lot happened between my photoshop that my lightroom raw and my photoshop and this is why i created black room and this is why i'll go into photoshop for images like this one that i'm going to go to print on and i'm going to stick with the class simple silver because it's just a good simple process okay and then i'm going to use this restore color as i showed in a video a couple weeks ago for black room users you've edited in silver you've got some tones and dynamic range you can see that the preset has done different things over here and it's looking good but there's more we can do when we're editing the black and white if we have the color so all i have to do is click the restore color for black room it's going to leave my tone settings alone but restore my color information and then i can just open that up so i could do that if i was editing in lightroom or in capture one with silver now i'm right here in photoshop and what i'm going to do first is i'm going to take our actions and we're just going to go right into black room i'm going to run the black room master tool okay so here we have a black and white it's looking pretty good remember we brought our tone information that we had done in lightroom brought it to photoshop now we've got our black and white with all its respective layers and we can do whatever we want we can also look at the tones because that's the loomist tone map is built in the black room as i showed in last week's video on the channel in black room we don't have all the zone selection tools but in the latest updates black black room works synergistically with lumist so as soon as you run blackroom and have your conversion you can actually now go into loomist and just use it you don't even have to run the loomist live map start tool or anything like that because it's already in there as part of black room so the first thing i want to do is let's look at these tones my clock tower is about eight and nine yeah i got about eight and nine a little bit of zone seven but i'm going to select zone eight and nine from loomis so i have both of these loaded in my actions and i'm just gonna select eight and nine right down here in my lumis controls and essentially we're just doing luminosity masking it's just with loomis i feel like it's there's so much more that we can do it's so much simpler and there's a lot of control and it's very zone based which not only is easy to edit but it helps you understand your light better in my experience if we think in terms of zones in the edit we start thinking in terms of zones when we're shooting i'm just going to feather this so that'll feather my selection and you can see loomis is showing me what i have selected with this kind of close-up uh green and red dots okay so now i'm just going to go down and run a lightened curve from loomist and what it's going to do is automatically apply what i just did this isn't a huge change let's zoom in here and i can go you can see here's my auto mask curve right here and i can double click it and i can go up here and i can edit it and make it more intense if i want in fact i can show the map okay and edit in real time and the map will change and show me where i'm placing those zones so i'm going to push it up into zone 10 but not to where it's white see how it starts turning white that means we're truly clipping top 20 of zone 10. i just want to be pushing a little bit into the reds okay so you can see we're lighting up the side of the clock tower and we're lightening up the building just a little bit it's not a huge huge change and it's really not that big of a deal but that clock tower is an important feature in our image okay now i'm gonna go back up to black room and i'm gonna go to the foundry tools and i could individually run all these black room actions to my heart's content but a lot of times the founder tools which are a combination of eight or ten different actions a lot of times running synchronously and just putting everything in its place within the black room folders i'm gonna run the street kick effect and it's to run a combination of actions and you're going to see the layers are all changing down here if you're watching in 4k you can kind of see the details it's building all these layers it's putting a grain layer and so the foundry tools each one is kind of geared towards a specific kind of look and this is specifically geared towards a street sort of look okay i'm going to select the vignette turn it down a little bit it's a little bit too intense but i want a little bit of vignette there okay and honestly we're very close and so you can see it added some curve layers it changed the mix of the black and white a little bit it did quite a bit here i'm going to look at my map again i would like to see a little bit more lightening here and so i'm actually going to hide the map and i'm going to run a lightning curve from loomis but without making a selection and if i don't make a selection it's simply going to apply it to everything automatically okay so it's putting it right up there at the top and it's too much so now i'm going to turn it down a little bit i just want to bring a little bit of lightning it's just a quick way to get a curve set up in there right where i want it and i want to bring out the whites and the contrast just a little bit but not too much okay and right now we're looking pretty good i'm going to look at the map and i want to see something here if i go and show my tones i want to bring a little bit more into these birds i want to look at my black room layers that i added here and if i go to my all effects the street shot curve is flattening a little bit you can see how it's lightening my shadows up a little bit it's lifting so i'm going to turn the street shot curve down not entirely but a little bit okay and let's go ahead and hide my map so i can see in real world what we're looking like now we're bringing more contrast back into that and i don't want to lift the blacks too much because i really want those deep blacks down there at the bottom and i'm actually going to select what what zone are our birds in our birds are red and dark orange so our birds are in zone one zero one and two i'm just gonna take just zone one and i'm gonna select only zone one i'm gonna feather it and again i'm switching back and forth between loomis tools and black room tools and just using them both so you can see i've made the selection that also selects a lot of our lower shadows and i'm going to do a darkened curve and this is going to darken our birds and contrast them more with the sky as you can see right here and it darkens some of our other areas it brings our blacks out a lot what i can do is just select my mask now i'm going to take the brush tool adjust the size a little bit and i'm just going to paint black remember white reveals black conceals on a mask and i'm going to bring in some details here and there so i don't lose too much in those shadows just a little bit of manual control over that mask and turn down the opacity just a little bit okay so there we have it now we have an edit that's pretty close to what i just showed you was my final and you can see here that we brought in an image from the raw in lightroom and then we just ran some atmospheric tools and mixed it up a little bit and the result i think is just a great image in fact we're gonna go and we're gonna take a print our image here's our final image and then i'm gonna go right over here to the printer always try to print if you can okay so we have our screen and let me switch back here and we have our finished print printing is a final step of the process yes some images i'll just post them to instagram or facebook or share them but this image has atmosphere this one i'm proud of this is a street image that i'm like yes this is what i was looking for and printing out an image is that process once you have a tangible whether it's a small print a big print i'm a wall portrait guy i like big prints but having something tangible like this that i can now go hang on a wall and present this and it's reflective of what i have here guys i just really like this image let me know what you think i wanted to share with you my thought process for this image kind of a little bit of what i learned along the way with this image because i think one of the most important lessons that i learned is simplicity i'm going out and i said you know what i'm going to force myself to shoot street style to take a 35 equivalent and just use it and go out without other stuff and that's how i'm going to shoot the streets for the next month or so it doesn't mean there's never a place for a wider lens or a longer lens or anything like that but i wanted to conquer and i'm still working on concrete to take better images journalistic documentary style images on the street that are all about the light and the emotion and the feel and the drama remember cameras are just tools the cameras don't make the images we make the images here we make the images here but it's all from here it's all our visualization but a tool that works good a tool that's an extension of your hands a tool that inspires you i think those are the best kind of tools because they're going to help you want to make images and that's actually one of the reasons i picked up the x100v is people said i just want to shoot with this camera there's nothing i don't have to think about changing lenses it's not complicated it's beautiful it's functional and the images look good and i just want to shoot with it and so that's why i've kind of been doing this exercise of i have all these lenses back here and if i'm out doing portraits or or landscapes or whatever or street all those lenses all those vintage lenses all those new lenses they're all great but sometimes simplicity is what i need to get myself to challenge and say no gavin no gavin look for the light all right you guys i hope you enjoyed this video let me know what you thought i hope you will go out and look for the light and find whatever tool or concept or approach inspires you let me know what you think of the birds let me know what you think of the image i chose as my final and of course what do you think of my edit in my way off base i think i got a lot more out of this edit by taking it further and going into black room and that's why i love having both those options i can edit quick for workflow get beautiful results or if i want to i can go into photoshop and without having to spend a ton of time i can use black room instead of having to open a plug-in or something like that and just get a really artisanal infinite kind of control black and white and i'm pretty excited about this image all right you guys you have a good one stay safe and let me know what you think

Channel: Seim

Views: 349

Keywords: gavin seim photography tips photographic school zones system, luminosity masking, photo tips, photos hands on, getting it in camera

Id: PzGqsN7NjVU

Length: 19min 41sec (1181 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 15 2021