How to Correctly Expose and Post Snow Scenes

[Music] yeah so I was in the Arctic and then I went to the Antarctic or just above subarctic the Falkland Islands and then had about eight hours home and came right here for you guys so appreciate you coming um seems when I show white photographs people in the audience are always in awe oh my god how did you expose for that correctly so that tells me you really don't grasp exactly how this whole metering process works and the goal for today is to try and simplify that show you how to shoot it correctly in camera and then how to make the most out of that in post-production so there's some software and plugins and things that we use to extract detail on the whites that's where we are so how many of you kind of always have problems with white right most of you probably so that all comes down to which metering pattern you're using and we're gonna discuss that as well so let's kind of without further ado thank you cannon Thank You B&H and we'll get into the program so we photographing crazy snow first as we're dealing with pretty strong inclement weather so we can have problems with the cameras operating correctly be careful with how we we bring the cameras inside I did a seminar I think a month ago or two months ago or three months ago I can't remember anymore but on how to photograph in cold weather so that goes in conjunction with this you might want to look that up on the bnh website so photographing in white here we have high contrast subjects black and white but yet we have detail throughout the whole image so what we're doing is ett are exposing to the right we're making these photographs as bright as we can without clipping the highlights that's gonna make the black areas lighter as well then in post-production all I do is select the white areas and extract the detail from there so as long as I'm not clipping those RGB values I know for most of the intensive purposes that I do have the detail in the snow and I don't have to take the dark objects and make them lighter that's the worst thing we could do in the digital world so just like you used to shoot slide film people would expose for highlights right so they would make the picture dark enough to show all the detail and the snow and what would happen to the subject it would block up right so in the digital world would kind of change it around a little bit so we're pushing it far to the right I'll show you the histograms in a minute and then all we're doing is just pulling the detail back for the highlights so you see pictures like this and I know half you're going to oh my god it's a really hard exposure nothing could be easier anytime we have one tone right be a mid-tone a highlight or a shadow it's very easy for us all we have to do is place that value accurately on the histogram there are some things that we do in post again to extract that detail and it doesn't necessarily look like this on the back of your LCD when you're shooting it because we are pushing it further to the right it's like this so I'm metering off the snow right but we have detail on the highlights detail in the shadows and throughout this is a little bit easier because most of the time when we have snow we have low contrast so it all fits within the dynamic range now the other thing to see is on the pictures here there's detail on the bottom but I'm not pulling the detail out at the top so when we do landscapes we always want a foreground middle-ground on the background I want something to draw the viewers eye through the photograph and I'm doing that a little bit through post-production although this detail exists here I'm not extracting that in the post-production process so I'm just pulling the detail out in the foreground and then I have a middle ground I leave the background kind of you know nondescript then I have three different levels to the image and the pictures tend to pop off the screen the other thing I do when I get emails every week about this is why do you pictures look like they pop off the screen that's part of it the other part is I never sharp in the background I only sharpen the subject so my goal is to draw your attention to what's most important for me which is normally the wildlife for the subject right so we're only sharpening the subject same thing here right so I pulled out a little bit of detail on the foreground but I left the background white I could pull that detail out and again I'll show you how to do that a lot of what we do is is being proactive so typically when you step out of the car at an overcast situation or you're on location that light is going to be consistent for hours at a time right so I'm being proactive I'm putting the exposure in the camera before I fire at anything I'm not being reactive so the camera is not an automatic I'm not zooming in on the subject firing off one picture then I back off the camera sees different tonal values gives me a different recommendation I have to correct for it same light same exposure got to kind of burn that into your coconuts same light same exposure I'm preaching that how long Jimmy forever right so that's what we're trying to do if that light similar meter off the snow set it in the camera and then look for what it is that you want a photograph that bison was all the way up that Creek but from the position I was in I could not see his feet I wanted to see his feet so I ran ahead down the road and Yellowstone look for a career spot set up the camera waited for the Bison to step into the composition point and then fired it off and I got the best of both worlds but I'm all about being proactive on this stuff see the picture in your mind first figure out the tools and techniques you need to capture it effectively that's what you want to be you want to be the photographer you don't want to be the tool for the camera right so I want to just tell the camera this is what I want how do I capture it put those parameters in there and fire away same thing here still white snow still have detail on the foreground same principles for extracting that detail but here I need a fast shutter speed so these Eagles are flying around I know they're going to land because back in the good old days we were throwing those fish so he's gonna come in and try and grab the fish we're landing with the fish I'm shooting the 2,000 of a second he comes in bang and I get the you know there's no going forward just as he hits it but the exposures are all set in the camera beforehand none of it is reactive same thing here foreground middle-ground background if I eliminate that bottom part pictures not going to have the same effect I'm also waiting for the Swan to lower its head right so that it's not intersected by that by that horizon line so it's all about the small details not about the big details same thing here being proactive exposure set in the camera I'm laying on the on the ice with my 24 to 70 millimeter lens and holding it in that position in hopes that a swan would wing flap so when it did it look I have 14 frames hit the button and it didn't clip it so I'm looking through the back of the camera not gonna please please make don't clip the wing so I got really lucky but again that foreground is really integral in the in the composition if you eliminate that it becomes more of a snapshot than it does a photograph same thing here right being proactive so after a while you learn the animal behavior and I know when they're gonna do that they do it all the time it's a heavy Raptor so in order for it to jump off the ice it has to reach up as high as it can pull down really hard to get the loft otherwise it goes like this it's just gonna roll over and not go anywhere right so again exposing for the snow all that set in the camera and we're ready to rock and roll so yeah hopefully you got a mouse and didn't hit his head on a log so you'll see the Fox but the white doesn't just refer to snow great we're also referring to the chest of a penguin so why want to be able to see all those little pin feathers and all that texture in there same thing here photographing off the snow what's my constant in all these pictures white right so once I learned expose correctly for the white I can do that all year we go to Yellowstone for a month people like oh my god I'm so afraid to photographing in Yellowstone it's all white it's the same white every day it's the same snow every day so once you figure it out what you're gonna have no problem with in a couple of minutes rock and roll so here's the deal exposure patterns determine exposure priority molds all to the variables you have to understand the difference between those two okay meter patterns that spot meter evaluative or matrix incident meter if you push the button and then you have reference values like sunny 16 or cloudy five six and and things like that that's the pattern that we use in order to determine the exposure priority modes if you use aperture priority shutter priority manual all those do is change variables that's not what we're using to expose that's change in variables based upon the meter pattern and use keep the two together and if you understand that then you know how to put them together right so I know a lot of people use aperture priority if you use aperture priority for a situation where the the the tonal values differ and I have a 400 millimeter lens and I'm real close it with a black bison the camera gives you one recommendation i zoom out now the camera sees more white it changes the recommendation so now I'm adding in compensation to get back to what everything it was the correct exposure so it's a tail wagging the dog right here we have an incident meter what does that do it measures the quantity of light falling on the scene and gives us the mid-tone value so if I hold that meter right here and I push that button and it says 125th and 9.5 and I put that in the camera grades gray White's white blacks black everything falls into perfect line and if we have a low contrast situation all those tonal values are within the capture medium bang dead-on perfect that's what all this stuff is based on the meters in your camera are different they measure the amount of light coming back off the subject and that's what causes the problems so you see the scale on the right people look at that we shoot automatic and all they say is yeah I know that's a compensation scale it's actually more than that it's the same thing here right so you see plus three minus three I'll tell you the difference okay if you use like an incident meter where you use a spot meter that zero is a mid-tone value okay that's the shape mid-tone grey so plus 3 would be 3 stops brighter than a mid-tone value three stops darker than a mid-tone value so if zero is mid-tone plus one is like gray plus two is is white with detail plus three is pure white and then you go reverse if you use evaluative metering that no longer applies because evaluative metering and RGB metering already have a degree of compensation set into the camera so if you point your meter at the white snow your camera already says well that's really not supposed to be gray I'm gonna make it a little bit brighter based upon the scenarios that all these other people put in their predetermine algorithms so it does plus 1 so 0 is not 0 0 is plus 1 so now you add one stop more plus 2 to get to the white with detail I'll clarify it a little bit more so the algorithms change in the evaluative meter pattern what is that it's a histogram what does it tell us it doesn't tell you the exposure is correct all it tells me is where the bright whites are and where the blacks are so 255 is pure white zero is pure black 1:28 dead center is a mid-tone value makes sense right the peaks that just tells you how much of those tonal values so what I'm concerned with with shooting in those bright situations the snow the white egrets things like that is this side I don't want this line to hit here if it does and I'm clipping the white detail and it's really difficult to get it back so if you use an RGB histogram and you clip the red Channel it's not that much of a problem because there's not a lot of red in the snow anyway right but ideally I always have an RGB histogram and I don't want to clip any one of those colors if there yellow or red in the subject and I clipped that it's difficult to get that particular color back in post-production or printing so that's all we're looking for this just tells you what there's a little bit of bright areas that have detail there's a lot of mid-tones but most of the picture is darker than the mid-tone that's all it's telling you it's not telling you its correct exposure and it's a fallacy because some people say well that has to be in the center well yeah if you have everything's in mid tone if I shoot that gray wall all I'm gonna have is a straight line up the middle of the the histogram because there are no other tones if I shoot this group there's some people with white jackets black jackets you know mid-tone values and then you're gonna have a histogram like this right on a canon camera it's divided into five boxes each one of those boxes is four clicks assuming you have your camera set the third stops right so if I take the picture and I look at the back of the camera and that histograms right here I already know it's three clicks to get to there so I don't have to rethink it or take another picture I just go click click click and then I fire off the picture on a Nikon by the way it's five clicks there's four boxes so it's a stop in two thirds Canada is a stop and one-third so four clicks to get from one box the beginning to the end let's do this ok so let me do this first okay here's your incident meter right so incident meter takes this whole scene divides it up the multi segments and says I think this is the correct exposure now regardless of where I move this it occupies exactly the same space within the viewfinder correct so wherever I move it the camera should maintain exactly the same exposure recommendation it doesn't always do that because those algorithms are weighted differently the top of the camera sometimes the sky so if you turn the camera completely upside down sometimes you get 1/3 to 2/3 of a stop different recommendation if you turn the camera vertical and you have your shutter button here and you turn the camera so this is on the top most people won't turn the camera this way to take the picture so it it reads it differently right and that's another dilemma for me now I have to second guess what the camera is doing and I have to correct for it so here's what ends up happening you take this picture and you get exactly the right exposure okay now you take your 100 to 400 millimeter lens and zoom in to 400 millimeters the spatial relationship between the whites and the darks just got altered now you have 50/50 instead of 90 10 so what's going to happen the camera is going to give you a different recommendation you're gonna apply compensation to get back to square one you already knew what the correct exposure was that black circle or that black Raven is in exactly the same light as that white snow but every time you change the tonal values now I got a head shot what happens now now the cameras to do look at that that's real dark I got to make that lighter closer to gray every time you alter the tonal values in the meter pattern the camera is going to give you a different recommendation in a value of meter and you're going to apply exposure up or down or compensation if you're in auto mode to get back to what you already know is the correct exposure that's why I'm saying same subject same light don't change anything it doesn't make any sense it's exactly the same light you have to be smarter than the camera the cameras giving you a recommendation you already knew what the correct exposure was don't change anything that make sense no deer in a headlight looks okay now do this so now move it around now not only is the light on the subject the same but the background changes so if even if I keep this spatial relationship exactly the same but I move that whole thing left or right the cameras gonna see a different background it's gonna give me another recommendation so they are fairly accurate but my I got to play with the big boys my career is not horseshoes it's close enough right I got a nail it every time to the best of my ability so you have to understand the process and how that's working this is what evaluative metering does right and for fast off-the-cuff stuff it does a really good job I mean they're analyzing the heck out of this stuff now with a zillion you know different little compartmentalization Zand analyzing it and and we come up with really close close exposures if you do decide to do that that's perfectly okay evaluative metering works really well but if you need to vary it then variant but you need to lock that in the camera right ie manual mode or I'll show you a little bit later how to use an auto exposure lock hold function those are the two methods you want to use if you're using any of the automatic modes you have to be able to use an auto exposure lock hold function or manual otherwise it every time you move the camera you're going to be playing photo roulette and spinning the deal I see it all the time people are frustrated there's the subject that's perfect like they shoot that when it's ideal then they zoom in this one's overexposed then they zoom out go vertical horizontal that one's underexposed same light same exposure don't change it it'll drive you nuts it's prayer okay let's do this I tend to use spot meeting for a lot of things why do I use spot metering if you look at the picture that's one stop writer than a mid-tone value that's two point seven stops brighter than a Michelin value so my goal is to place that histogram here that line not up against that edge because then I have no detail on the whites right so I want to push it to the right but I don't want to clip it and that snow is going to be pretty bright this one's already pulled down a little bit in the JPEG so if I were to take that value and place it on the histogram where would it go so if we take this and move it and I'm going to move that over to here spot meter makes it great it's not supposed to be great where's it supposed to be well right there's where it blends in so I have to add 2.7 stops of light to the recommendation to place that value accurately on the histogram once I do that that's it leave it alone can't be that easy right hang on I'll show you a little more so again that's what a value of metering does divides it up all into these multi segments the whole scene and tries to figure out what it thinks is correct right the trick is to meter one tonal value so if you have a 100 to 400 millimeter lens and this is the whole scene zoom into 400 millimeters and meter right there fill the pattern with one tonal value then all you have to do is place that value we accurately on the histogram and the rest becomes a piece of cake so you can do it I'll show you in live view where you can fire off a picture and look at the back of the camera right just as a point of reference if you have an evaluative meter in a canon camera and you point it at the snow typically you're going to be about plus 1/2 plus one and a third or two thirds depending upon the contrast that's gonna place that value accurately fire off a picture before you care about it if there's a bison walking I don't care what the Bison is doing I want to expose correctly for the light right so I'm gonna fire off a picture I'm gonna look at the exposure ago my best guess was off a little bit I'm gonna correct for it so that the next picture when that bison makes a decisive moment I know I nailed it in the camera if you're reactive and you leave all this stuff in automatic and that bison does once in a lifetime picture and you go over underexposed I don't care what the subjects doing right it's virtual pixels it doesn't cost you a dime just delete it lid just fire off a test picture I seen people go photograph snowy owls come back cats what do you think oh I think you didn't pay attention what I said because I think you've shown me 300 owl pictures that are all stopping a half to dark because they put the thing in automatic they put no deviation in the exposure and all the pictures come out of mid-tone gray fire off one picture getting a habit every time the light changes fire off a picture and check it make sure the exposure is correct so that when all those other pictures are fired they all are correct nothing more frustrating than coming back and going oh how come these are all wrong because you didn't take the time to just stop for one second and analyze that one particular picture right think ahead so you can see all the granular detail on the snow the striation again on the bottom foreground middle-ground background right same thing any time you see a hard edge shadow like that I know exactly what the exposure is I don't even need a meter I'll show you in a second to kind of reinforce that what does that say 800 at f/8 800 at f/8 800 at f/8 is the subject of exactly the same light it is I know it is because it's a decoy and I stuck it in the same light so it's really a wood woodpecker so it's exactly the same all I did was slide pieces of paper behind it and then take the pieces of paper out right so that's 800 at f/8 800 f88 on Jeanette FA if you took your camera in a valued of metering and you pointed it at that you're gonna get three different exposures and then you're going to play the photo roulette game again and dial in compensation to get back to what you already knew was the correct exposure doesn't make sense again it's a tail wagging the dog here's the reference values back in the good old days when we had that four-letter word called film right Kodak used to have these little first they were pieces of paper then they imprinted it on the box with suggestions for sunny 16 sunny 16 means the Sun is that apex it's typically not going to get any brighter during the day so it's a clear cloudless day let's say between and I don't know 10 and 2 o'clock it's longer than that but let's say 10 and 2 o'clock sounds not gonna get brighter so if I have a fixed ISO like 200 200 ISO where our way okay bouncing off there I'm trying to get on there but my monitor is over here so we have 200 ISO up here it's one two hundredth of a second at f/16 so you have one two hundred thirty sixteen if you have four hundred ISO it's one 430 ft 16 800 ISO one 830 16 that's the starting point okay the other thing you guys have to realize is all these numbers are correct every one of those is exactly the same quantity of light hitting the capture medium but what it does is change the outcome of your photograph so it's not just by the way I'm going to put two hundredths of a second at f/16 in the camera if there's a bird that's going to take off I need over here 1600 of 5 6 if I'm shooting a landscape and I want everything in focus I'm going down the other end 200 at f-16 so which combination of numbers once you get the correct exposure suits your needs what picture do you want to take right so it's important you picked the combination okay there's a bird sitting on the hawk I know he's gonna take off and you're the fast shutter speed enough depth of field well it's a big burden it's gonna take off at a 45 degree angle so what happens then five six isn't gonna get them so I got to go to f/8 how do I go to f/8 I double my ISO so if I go from 200 ISO to 400 ISO now I can double this value so I go from 1600 at f/8 instead of 1600 or five six so now I have a fast shutter speed to freeze the bird and I have enough depth of field the faster you could assimilate those three things ISO aperture and shutter speed the better your images are going to be if you're in manual mode here's a real easy tip for you right manual mode you got your shutter speed normally on the top your aperture for your thumb equal clicks op is directions maintains exactly the same exposure so if I go three clicks up with my eight to the right with my index finger I go three clicks to the left with my thumb so I go from 1600 at five six to eight hundred f8 400 f11 whichever way I want to go so it's a compensatory change in opposite direction right so I don't have to look through the camera I'm at eighty eight which is what I start at for sunlight eighty eight is easy to remember it's an acronym it stands for one eight hundred seven second at f/8 at 200 iso right there and i have cards i can give you with that information printed on the back or feel free to shoot that with your iphone but but that 88 is pretty standard now to take this and go to white subjects okay white subjects in bright sun we have what's called angle of incidence and angle of reflectance if I'm standing right here and the sun's coming this way and hitting me most of the light comes straight back right so if you have the light come over your shoulder hits that white subject most of that light comes straight back to the camera I need to close down a little bit make the exposure a little bit darker so that I don't clip the highlights well I can't make one part of the picture talker I have to make the whole picture darker right plus light illuminate shadow Defiance so we'll follow that light goes straight in and straight back I have no shadow detail I want to take a 3-dimensional world make it look three-dimensional on a two-dimensional plane I have to have shadows so even if the sun's coming over my shoulder and I take one big giant stride to the side right now I have a subtle shadow detail that's what I'm looking for I want that light off axis the benefit for that is the lights going to come this way now and skip off that way not all that lights gonna come straight back into the lens I don't have to close down as much therefore my shadows are a little bit brighter that makes sense to you guys right so that's a big deal so for photographing lunes and there's a bird photographer who said there's no detail in the loons chest anyway well I think the moon would beg to differ so if I get the light off from the side and it skips its way I could see all the detail on his chest and I don't have to close down as much so I see all the detail in his dark head then you wake from the his head to the light right so it works really well so for for Sun and white subjects you're typically going to close down to 3 of a stop to one stop from this so it's almost instead of sunny 16 we're gonna do what's called sunny 22 right so I go to Florida people photograph white birds in Florida and they always tell me I have such a problem with white birds in Florida it's the same sunlight and the same white bird every day so if you have a camera like a 5d 3 that has a bigger dynamic range and you set the camera to 12 50th of a second at f/8 at 200 iso you could shoot any white bird on any sunny day and it will be perfect it's the same degree at sunlight it's the same ISO it's the same white bird it's the same exposure the white bird flies into a dark tree what do I do now nothing it's the same white bird in the same sunlight the only thing that changes the background now the white bird goes on the beach nothing it's the same white bird in the same sunlight just the backgrounds changing as long as that subject is illuminated with the same light it's the same exposure we all have metadata on the camera all we have to do is pay attention to it so if you shoot a picture tomorrow and you look at it and go wow I was outside and Central Park and it was a sunny day and I shot it look at that 1258 f/8 and then you go out tomorrow why do you have to look at your camera you already know what it is you already went through the whole exposure process and got it correct so just look at that but if you put the camera in automatic and you're not sure what it's doing every time you depress the shutter how do you repeat it you can't so slow down stop breathe what's the worst that can happen you didn't get the picture you didn't have yesterday no big deal so that full sunlight right it's in Quebec photograph and harp sales 1215 f/8 shoot the thing done one more depth of field I go to 640 f11 3-up 3-down same exposure same thing here anytime you see a hard edge like that not a soft edge transition you know the sun's basically at peak and that you can shoot at almost sunny 16 so the hard edge sells me hope that's sunny 16 1250 to f/8 and rock and roll you want a little insurance close down one little more and go to 1600 f8 or 800 f11 but that's it it's the same every day guys I promise you now the caveat to that is if I go to Yellowstone at 8000 feet I'm a little higher in the atmosphere right so the air is a little thinner it's gonna be a little bit brighter but I fire off one picture and I say okay I got to close down another third of a stop you go down closer to your crater same thing somes a little bit more intense but it's definitely going to give you a starting point same thing look at the hard edge on the shadow I know right away it's 1258 f/8 same thing here hard edge shadows a little bit dissipated slight cloud cover so I open up a third of a stop it becomes simple same thing here that's the photographer tree in Yellowstone hey everybody photographs the same tree there's 400 pictures of this horizontals verticals tight clothes and then the light changes I mean you could sit there for four days and get you know forty two thousand different photographs of it but it but it's really neat and it's only because the lights come in from the left right almost 90 degrees to the camera that you're seeing those long shadows and that's what given all that depth and dimension and the snow if the light was super overcast and over my shoulder you don't see any of it and here's the Egret scenario so it's the same thing it's the same thing as a snow right it's white with detail so 1215 f/8 shoot away again if you have a camera with a little bit narrow dynamic range 1600 at f/8 that's where you're going to start so I use spot metering quad I'll use spot metering there's no deviation it only does one thing it takes whatever is in the center right of the the viewfinder or unless I attach it to a focus point and makes it a mid-tone value that's the only thing it does accurately consistently every time no deviation takes whatever is in that spot and renders it as a mid-tone value now the problem is you have to make sure the spot covers the one tonal value so if you're gonna shoot this with a 24 to 70 and it's far away your spot meter is not going to cover just that's one right it's going to cover a bigger area so you can't meter that but you could meet our this so how much brighter is that relative to a mid-tone value that's all we're trying to do and I'll show you in a second right the dilemma for some of you is that all the cameras have different size degrees spa meters so the older cameras if you put the grid on in the viewfinder it'll show you a circle that's almost the area for a spot meter but you'll figure that out real quick this is what I was telling you before with the spot meter so if I point the spy meter at a mid-tone value I don't have to make it lighter or darker it already is a mid-tone value if I pointed it something that's like great then I have to add one stop because it's one stop writer than a mid-tone if I pointed at something that's white and I want detail in there plus two stops if I wanted pure white plus three stops so you'll read online all my camera can record 14 stops mm not reality again I've never seen 14 stops come off on a on anything just not gonna happen you may be able to fudge it and open up the shadow detail and all that but if you get seven stops out of there your camera rocks you know that's cool that can take in but once it goes through this whole digital processing and the camera and everything I've never seen that so maybe three and a half right on each side so then you have seven stops between the highlights and the shadow although if you use C log on the new 5d four which is video format you can get get a lot more out of it yeah yep so what we's doing is taking a quick picture of the the size of the spot patterns so just want to show you this okay so here's what I ended up doing with this here's a penguin right it's got a couple different shades on it has black with detail white with detail and pure white okay so this should kind of solidify what we're talking about with these meters right here is mid-tone gray if I point my spot meter right there and that's the only thing in the meter the spot meter is going to take it and make it a mid-tone value well that's where it belongs that's the tonal value of that that spot so I don't have to make it brighter or darker right that's the job this my meters going to take whatever you point it at render it to the center then you have to decide if I'm going to make it lighter or darker so now I'm going to point it over here at something black so I'm going to take this the camera is going to put it there what doesn't belong there how far do I got to go before it blends in right there what does that say - - so all I'm saying is how much light do I have to add and subtract to place that value accurate on the histogram if I point the camera over here with a spot meter what's the spot meter gonna do it's gonna make it a mid-tone value well it doesn't belong a mid-tone value how much light do I have to add to place it accurately on the histogram to full stops that's what a spot meter does every time you pointed it something makes it a mid-tone so the only thing that concerns me is how bright or dark it is relative to admit don't value I add to subtract the right amount of light to put it on the histogram where I want game over that's it don't do anything once that's in the camera I don't care what the background does assume in the subjects your priority right for beat scene where it's backlit it's gonna be a little bit different you're gonna expose for the backlight but that's all you're gonna do if I go +3 over there where's it gonna go I'm gonna put it at the center and I'm gonna place it right there +3 but now here's the deal as long as I place one of those vac values accurately on the histogram all the other ones are accurate so I could take any one of those I don't just have to take the white one I could put the black one where I want and the white ones correct I could put the great one where I wanted and all the others are correct it's all in the same light so the reason the white is brighter is because it's reflecting more light the reason the black is darker is it's suburban more light so some people do what's called substitute metering for mid-tone values they'll take the spot meter they'll find a neutral tone set that in the camera and then shoot away then it becomes easier I'm just expanding that saying okay I know I could meet a black/white or a mid-tone but all I have to do is put that value accurately on a histogram and everything else falls in so LiveView we couldn't make it any easier for them right the camera God said hey guys here real-time just like looking at the back of a mirrorless camera what you see is what you get so you put the camera in live view it has exposure simulation right and all I do is change the shutter speed or aperture and the picture gets lighter a darker if you hit the info button twice on a Canon camera you get a live histogram so the fastest way if you're not sure of any of this it just pointed at the snow dial it so that this comes right about there maybe an eighth of an inch or less off the right side shoot the picture can't be any simpler by the way that's the best method for shooting sunsets nothing like shooting a sunset with 600 millimeters the light goes in your eyes shoots right out your ears so it's way better to look at it through the back of this and burn the retinas out of your coconut but it works it works perfectly what you see is what you get you know you can't mess up so again all you do is hit the info button twice and have a live histogram if anybody has the black team's camera and once in I had to do that I can tell you how to do that to Blinky's if you have the camera set the Blinky's have it overexposed two blinks make it darker so if you have a little bit of Blinky's then it might be one or two little clicks if you have a lot of bling keys and maybe it's three or four clicks here's the other thing to remember if the picture looks too light on the back of your camera turn the wheel to the right assuming you didn't change the dials right but by default if you turn any one of those dials to the right you increase your shutter speed or you make a smaller hole thereby making the picture darker so if the picture is too light turn the wheel to the right right the other one is equal clicks opposite directions maintains the same exposure another tip for you is if you change the ISO if you push the ISO button and go three clicks to the right take your f-stop or your shutter speed and go three clicks to the right and you'll still have the same exposure it would be correct oops they got me so now how do you mean to the white I either take my incident meter pointed at the snow right fill it up with just the white snow the brightest snow if I meet her here that's going to be overexposed right so you meter the brightest snow and go plus one plus one on the third right with your incident meter or I just use the spot meter I'll go right off the snow and typically in the sunlight I go plus two so if you're an aperture priority with a spot meter right what did we just do we define a meter pattern to a known tone right just the white and I'm going to add two stops of light to make the white white so as long as I have my aperture priority set with spot meter and the compensation set the plus two I just pointed it to snow push the auto exposure lock button pick the camera up and shoot for the next hour if the light changes I meter back to the snow push the button again and it maintains the same value if it gets a little darker it increases the shutter speed that's all it's doing but you're defining it to a known pattern so now I don't have to be concerned with okay if I get a head shot and there's a dark background if I go horizontal vertical right that's what's gonna cause these hold dilemmas again all I want to do is place the white where the White's supposed to be so same thing i meter off the snow right on an overcast day with with 5d3 or a 1d x mark - I can almost do plus 3 or plus two point seven so that's a bunch of clicks right so it's six clicks would be two stops because it's in thirds if I go click click click click right or just you don't have to set it to zero zero is always zero so I just lined up the little - tanta in the meter right where it says plus two and shoot it so overcast days it's point two point seven and on a sunny day because there's higher contrast they usually go +2 but the trick is to lock it in the camera right that's the main purpose of the same thing here guys that's a 600 with the 2x at a 50th of a second it's a crazy story it was really cold it was like minus 35 it's the only time I've ever seen that in my life I doubt you'll ever see another photograph like that and I walked through 150 yards of snow this deep everybody else stayed on the bus and said heck no we're not doing that till I made this trough through the snow and then they came behind me like a little lemming so I took one for the team the exposure for this I'm not really sure I knew it was a 50th of a second I was at 1600 ISO and if we had a 2x oh I'm probably shooting f11 so a little part of that is if using converters and you go one stop down from wide open your pictures will be much sharper so if you have a an f4 lens and you put a 1/4 it becomes 5/6 if you shoot at f/8 you're shooting more through the central portion of the converter and the images will be much sharper the best thing to do is put a piece of newspaper on the wall right and use a flash and you get the shutter speed and fire those off and I can guarantee you without any hesitation whatsoever that one stop will be much sharper so yeah so I'm just sitting there in the snow it's windy as heck and I took it breath and right at the end of my breath and I just fired off a couple of pictures and I showed this to somebody a prominent photographer and he said yeah if the head was cocked just a couple inches more to you why you dirty so yeah so spot metering right on up the pro bodies you can link the spot meter to the autofocus why is that important well let's say I have a white wolf and the wolf runs from the sunlight to the shade well if I shoot that in evaluative metering what happens it also takes into account the background right so if I lock the spot meter to the white wolf and my focus is on the white wolf and set it to +2 wherever that wolf runs it's going to stay +2 the wolf will be perfectly exposed so we define a meter pattern right to the white wolf I added the correct amount of exposure deviation and make the white wolf white and life is good so again meter patterns versus autumn priority this is the trick for the cameras and this is a gift from above on all the Canon cameras now you can set it to the a eh function that little H right so the Asterix on the back of your camera is an auto exposure lock normally in the past it would stay for 16 seconds frustrating now it stays there as long as you want so if I'm in spot meter +2 right even if I'm an automatic shutter priority aperture priority or peeper professional you could shoot it at the snow push that button that will stay in the camera till it goes off or standby pretty cool and you can also apply compensation if you wanted to on top of that if you're wrong right the light changes I go back to the white snow push the button again but it will still make the white white that's the fastest way to do it partly cloudy partly sunny which is like the bane of our existence as photographers drives us out of our minds right so you can constantly sit there and keep adjusting anything or you could say you know what I think the subject looks better when the cloud comes by and wait for the cloud to come by so you're not shooting everything so after a while you start to recognize what's going to make a good picture and not make a good picture concentrate on the stuff that does make a good picture so if you set it to 30 minutes right make sure if you're not using the camera did you shut it off right particular if you put it on disable because then it stays on forever and then you go to pick the camera up again and you got a dead battery so my recommendation is like four minutes right so if I'm gonna use that auto exposure lock hold it'll stay in the camera for four minutes until it goes in to go to power off right so here flamingos 1 2 3 it's exactly the same light right it's the same exposure but different renditions of that so this is this is a 4.5 on a 600 at 4:00 or 5:00 right at 3200 thirty second or 25 hundredths of a second 1600 right and that's 400 f11 so I'm changing it I'm just going 3-up 3-down it's three different lenses two different cameras exactly the same exposure it's the same light I already know it I don't care what the camera tells me I already know it's the right exposure so 1 2 3 shoot away don't change anything same light same exposure there's bison Yellowstone I already got the situation figured out I got the correct exposure the reason I'm shooting the Bison here is because you can't see the snowfall on the white but you can see it against a darker tonal value so when the Bison starts walking across the Madison River Idaho there it is so I called everybody over and they're like well how do you know they're all gonna do that well it's herd mentality if one does it they're all gonna do so the whole rest of them start coming by and we start ripping off the pictures you've got the correct exposure then the Bison stops to eat do I need to change the exposure no look at it's exactly the same but what's your camera going to tell you three four stops different than the first picture because now it's filled with the dark it's going to make that gray you want to make it black all now got to make the picture darker this one the camera sees the light that's all I'm gonna make that dark and you got to make it light so if you're an automatic mode you've got to do different amounts of compensation once negative once positive what everybody fights it it doesn't have to be as hard as everybody makes it same thing that's a 600 that's what the 2x I didn't change anything guys it's exactly the same exposure I might have changed those numbers though right this one might have been whatever you know I don't know let's say 88 right this one because I had the 2x I gotta go down there for Levin but same thing then I ran behind the car cuz he got a little cantankerous and the group was laughing at me here's a waterfall in Yellowstone right so we meet it off to snow place the value is exactly where they're supposed to be then I put the one for 2x and I shot that it's exactly the same explosion same light same exposure shoot a waterfall okay what tonal value is the water white so what do I need to do to make the white white inspire me to the water go +2 put the camera in Live View and dial it so it's correct so I'm teaching in one class in a split conference room the other guy is teaching waterfalls and I hear him say out loud hey the guy in the other doesn't know what he's talking about so I said to everybody let's just hear what he says so he said everybody knows that if you're gonna shoot waterfalls shutter priority is what's most important so he puts the camera shutter priority sets it to half a second right fires off a picture it's gonna be all too light because the camera's gonna see all the dark and a value 2 meter pattern he adjusts the compensation and he gets the perfect picture now he moves the camera what happens different recommendation now he goes back to square one again now he's got to figure out how much compensation to apply to get back to what he already had was the correct exposure so I shoot it in manual mode right I get the correct exposure a zoom in a zoom out I go horizontal go vertical every picture is perfect for the water that's the difference so you can shoot whatever you want you know and if you look back on on the class that I did on exposure a lot of this is in there but look it up on the BHS website i get emails like monthly that was that changed my life so hopefully you know to just give you some insight you know and you can pick and choose and assimilate whatever works for you but but that's the crux of a lot of this it's not you know that difficult same thing what's the water plus 2 so I meter off the water two stops so in manual mode you make a cognitive decision you're like okay 20th of a second is what I want how do I know because I shot 20 at 40 at 60th I shot a bunch of them and said I like 20th of a second so I put 20th of a second in the camera then all I do is dial the f-stop so it says plus 2 if the F stops the most important manual then put the f-stop in the camera then just change the shutter speed the only thing the automatic modes are doing for you differently is they're changing it instead of you changing it but in manual it's fixated it's not going to deviate so if this is consistent light I don't want it to change if I decide I want to zoom in and just shoot this I don't want it to change but if I'm in automatic mode what to do back to photo roulette same thing here right it's a 20th of a second that water is haulin so I spot meted right off the white bird plus two he's accurately correct for the exposure and shoot the thing fire off a picture if it looks wrong corrected but what you don't want the camera to do is deviate every time you move the camera so you either have to use an auto exposure lock or manual exposure or something otherwise all you're gonna do is spend your time playing photo roulette and dial in and compensation rather than taking photographs partly cloudy partly sunny right so I'm ripping these off the lights coming it's changing the fastest way for me to do this is point the spot meter right there I go plus to the light changes all now I have to change my shutter speed so I used aperture priority Oh No did you say that yeah so I used aperture priority plus 2 spot meter every time it changes I'd point it back to there and I hit that Estridge button again puts the correct exposure in the camera even if it's overcast I still want to make it white just a little quick thing on proactive here for a second this inadvertently became one of the best teaching tools I've ever done so we're in Bosque del Apache in New Mexico there's I don't know whatever it is five 10,000 snow geese on the ground and Suns getting pretty high and the group says hey Chad's we're gonna go to lunch and I said well I'm gonna stay here they're like why I said well I want to get the birds taken off so their response was you're gonna get shadows exactly I want those shadows those shadows will give this whole sense of depth and dimension to the photograph so they said we'll stay and I'm like okay great what picture do you want to paint like what are you talking about I said well nothing exists well the birds are sitting on the ground you have a blank canvas do you want to make all the birds look spatially separated with a wide angle you want to compress the birds with a telephoto do you want to freeze the birds blur the birds blur the background freeze them what do you want to do so of course I get what do you want to do like I didn't know that was gonna happen so I said alright I'm gonna shoot it with like a 24 to 70 millimeter lens about 70 millimeters so it looks pretty close to what my eye sees the birds will be spatially separated I want to freeze the birds and I want everything in focus right so I know I need 25 hundredths of a second at f/11 to capture the picture the way I see it in my mind right make sense right so I'm not letting the camera do it I'm gonna put those program in the camera here's how the methodology starts kind of bear with me this is a mile high it's in bright light remembered I said 200 ISO you start at 1250 at f/8 right that's not 2500 f11 if I take 200 ISO when I double it the phone tonight so now I have 2500 at f/8 still not enough I need Apple Evan so I take 400 ISO when I double it to 800 ISO now I have 2500 11 f11 so people would say well why did you shoot 800 ISO on the bright sunlight because I need 2500 f11 if I don't use the 800 ISO then I have to sacrifice one of those numbers it's easy for me to take noise out it's impossible for me to get depth of field and the sharpness back if it's blurred right so I'm not sure who or when people started to say noise is a priority over content it's a pixel police on the website I think they download your images and going I see little noise in the background are there too little pixels blinking on the white bird over there I could care less but that's what you need to do you got to pre visualize it in your mind right or visualize it in your mind figure out the right tools and techniques to capture the vision the way you see it so we have two cameras side by side that's the first picture that's the second picture that's the third picture so one is a 24 to 70 this one is a 16 to 35 they're set with exactly the same exposures I picked the camera bah-bah-bah put it down so I put a couple of pictures in Lightroom here just so you can see them so here's a bison the first problem a lot of times is the pictures coming out blue right so anything that's in the shade a lot of times you pick up a blue cast to it sometimes I want that blue cast why because we want to Khanna take cold so if I take the snow and I make it yellow now I got warm snow it doesn't give the same effect if I leave that snow just slightly blue sometimes the picture has a different different feeling to it you look at and go must have been cold out there right so it's just different degrees of color temperature can alter the picture if you want to change the color temperature you can take your color picker and you can click something that you think is white and it does a fairly good job home although for some reason mine introduces a little bit of red but you can do that the other way to do it is preferable to me I open it in in Photoshop and then I go into these NIC filters so if you don't have these get them they're still free at the moment you could just download them and then I use what's called a white neutralizer so this one down here there's a little eyedropper and you click on the white snow and it makes it perfectly white so it'll take all the white things and just negate the color cast right out of there and then if you want more or less you could just do the slider the other cool thing is that Nik automatically makes a duplicate layer so you can alter it from there so if you want to leave the blue in the background red you can leave it in the background or you can put a mask up and you can do whatever you want with that stuff when you're in Lightroom and you have areas that are bright a lot of people will come in here and there start messing with this highlight slider what does it do it Mundy's the whole photograph right I don't want to muddy the whole photograph all I want to do is knock down some highlights so I think it's important for you to learn to use the target adjustment tool and make specific corrections to specific areas not global first thing you're going to do is take this black I do it by eye but if you want to do it by the numbers hold you alt or option key down and just slide this so now it's off now take the whites and do the same so there you go boom come back all right now I got the edges and then you're gonna work your way in the hierarchy that Lightroom gives you from here to there is there a recommendation for following I don't think that makes sense I think you need to start with the whites and blacks and then work your way into the center great so you're expanding the contrast and then you could work your way within those Center parameters if you change some of these some of those edges will change so you do that now let's say I just want to knock the highlights down up here so if you take a target adjustment tool and you click over here where it says auto mask which is definitely what you want to do I can show you that for a minute and you click the old key that turns on the overlay and I go like this that's where it's going to be affected and you'll notice how it's not going into the background or the mountains right staying outside so as long as that auto mask is checked it won't go in here if you click the auto mask here's what happens so make sure Auto mask is checked and you could just fill in wherever you want so if all I wanted to do was dark in that area I hit the O key again and it disappears now I come back up to my highlight slider or whatever else I want to do and I can make that lighter a darker so you want to do specific Corrections to specific areas and that's what this target adjustment tool allows you to do if you want to take the blue out of the shadows right you could just select the shadow and you could change it with the color balance over here in the target adjustment tool that's pretty cool stuff right so if you've got a hot spot on the top of the of something overcast the lights coming straight down so if you photograph something white normally the top of the subject you know whatever it is an Egret or spirit bear that's gonna be a little bit brighter so if you want to pull that down slightly just use a target adjustment tool just select that specific area and then pull it down with the highlight slider clarity slider is a mid-tone boost look let me get out of target so if you use a clarity slider that's a mid-tone boost right so that's going to kick it up a little bit but again I don't kick that up very high you know people always ask well how much post-production need do to your pictures not a lot assuming I shoot it right in the camera I don't have to do a lot and you'll see people boost these colors up to the sky and some of those colors I haven't seen on this planet I don't know where they're living you know and then they print it on metal and it looks like it's wet paint dripping off there it looks pretty cool if you want a surreal image but it doesn't pick the reality of nature for me so this is kind of what we're doing in here the other stuff if we want to extract that detail let's say we go back to this to this picture here okay so we open that up I use a software called intensify Pro it used to be by make fun but now they call it Scylla and I think it's on sale from from them as a holiday package so right here is the pro contrast and instructure sliders the pro contrast I only want to work at the highlights for the moment so I typically kick that up just so I could see it and then rock this back and forth so you can see what it's doing right so I gotta go maybe about there now I could take a brush and I could paint it in where I want so if I only want to put that in certain areas I could just bring the contrast up or down just in there to extract that then you come over here where it says plus and I put in another layer so now I go over the structure right now global is an aggressive algorithm so if I do that there's all the detail I'm just going to bring that up maybe eight or nine Michael was less of a an algorithm so I could pull up a little bit more detail and then detail is the finest so I go to highlights and I could bring that up a little bit and then again I could just paint it in wherever I want so if all I want to do is paint the detail on his wings so it separates the edge there you go so I haven't found a better method or a faster method to extract detail on the highlights but for me because I shoot tons of images in the cold and the snow and all the other stuff with a lot of highlight detail that rocks that rocks it's just the fastest way to do it and it can't really do anything that you can't do in Photoshop but if somebody wants to give me a slider to automate the process for me I am happy to take it so people will say well if you know how to do this stuff in Photoshop why do you get these plugins because it expedites the process and then you could set up actions in Photoshop that will automatically open the filter you know that open it right up to this and I just go like this with the sliders and then close it so it works real fast for me but this thing is killer so now let's say I made a new layer well let's use a different picture so I'm just going to cancel that so you come over to here and I go okay here's my my Fox well this one's perfect okay so we open up this and if you look at it you're gonna say well that looks like it's sort overexposed in the highlights right I beg to differ so we come over to our pro contrast I'm gonna kick this up a little bit so that's increase that's decrease all of a sudden the details there right now I'm gonna leave it on the same layer I come over to structure how much do you want to pull out see it so let's here we go there come here put a little fine detail and all I want to do is apply it to that area so I clicked the brush shrink it down with my bracket key and I paint the detail back in the way so if you look at the histogram it's not clipped those RGB values are in there I know that that details in that white I just have to have a process to extract it and that's what we're doing so we're pushing it to the right so that I don't have to make the the forest any lighter I don't have to make the whale any lighter I don't have to make the the ocean any lighter all I have to do is make highlights a little bit deeper and pull out the detail in the highlights that way I can shoot at a higher ISO as well because I'm not taking dark areas and making them lighter so the picture has more integrity to it so you can shoot 1600 ISO and if you shoot that stuff in the bright Sun you're not really gonna see it anyway it's making sense to you guys yeah so here's the polar bear again same thing I could pull out as much detail as I want it's all there and I see people put pictures up and the snows blown out and I mean again here's just a contrast look that looks pretty good on its own I probably won't have to do anything for that that's what I see I'm shooting it at but the histogram is not clipped and that's how they're posted when that's there so you got to do is or find that didn't come over to their structure they I mean if you guys shoot in the snow this thing is blind belong just pull it out so there's some of the other ones that have tonal contrast ranges and dynamic sliders and things I've tried them all this is the one that I use maybe you have a different preference and you'll see people open up the photographs and six different rock inversions you know engines or software's and they say I like this one best why well the picture looks better the picture looks better because the manufacturers default settings are different than the other ones it doesn't necessarily mean that's the best program the best program is the one you're most comfortable with and you can utilize to extract all the information you want D P P if you shoot cannon right that still has the best extraction for RAW files for highlight detail it does and the lower noise so some of the other companies give Adobe the algorithms to convert the raw files and some don't so I'll leave it at that but but then they have to reverse engineer to figure out what's going on you know so DP P if you're really interested in pulling out those highlight details converted in DP P and then if you want to import it into these other programs you can have at it but it will pull out a little bit more detail initially right from your raw file and give you lower noise which is you know a huge benefit for us and then kind of go from there but again you just paint in where you want you know and you mess with all that stuff here's the Bison same thing so come back to the Bison right this is crazy in a blizzard it was nuts everybody else ran back in the truck he got horizontal blowing snow it was it was insane but when I shot this it didn't really look like that it kind of looked like it was all under a fog so the easiest thing to do in Lightroom is just pull the black slider down and then against the fog problem right kind of like um I don't like it we can kick it up right so you could see that looks like when I shot it but we're gonna do is just kind of pull the blacks up and then I come back in here so I say okay what I want to do so I can pull that up a little bit and again I move the sliders let's say we go there and you'll see details starting to come in the back I don't want that detail well I want this detail in the foreground so let's say we just did that and I'm gonna take my brush and all I'm gonna do is put the detail in here I don't want to put the detail on the back because that's gonna pull the viewers eye through the picture just paint it in where you want right the Fox so this one's bright so let's open this one in Lightroom just to show you where we'd start with it so if I was to open this as a raw file right and this looks pretty bright in here let me get rid of that okay so we're looking at the photograph and it's probably right about where it's supposed to be pretty close to the darkness so let's say for example look I hold the alt or option key down and I do that slider so here's my blacks lips come on so I back off a little bit do the same thing for the whites should be pretty close come right about there right now if I wanted to since there's a lot of whites I can pull that highlight slider down just a little bit no I don't know even know if I'd knock that down but yeah maybe just add right so that's where we're going to start and then I would take it and go into the other program and then extract all the detail that I wanted to in the bottom so shooting it right in the camera correctly is 99.9 percent of it and then the finesse part is in the post-production so we get people on every trip who will tell us hey I just shoot it right in the camera I don't mess with it in Photoshop or any of the other stuff I think you're behind the 8-ball with that I think all this digital world now we need to post process it's coming out of the camera without settings to it right so here's my ad D thing let's go back for a moment the histogram represents whatever you said in the camera for JPEGs right so if you take the contrast in the camera in the picture styles and you have that contrast kicked up high what you're taking is here's the dynamic range and you're telling the camera okay this is what we're gonna work with in so this part on the edge from here to here you're gonna set it here for the highlights you just lost two thirds of a stop Headroom so the histogram is not going to fully represent what the camera can capture so you're gonna set it for Adobe RGB which is a larger gamut right and set the contrast lower in the picture style and then the histogram will better represent what the camera can fully capture so pretty frequently you'll see people shoot the pictures and they blink in the camera then they open them in Lightroom right and they don't blink different camera settings right but we have a little bit more Headroom because the contrast in the camera was said I if you set the contrast slower in the camera pretty off and then if you clip it in the camera it's going to blink in Lightroom but I want to make sure I'm getting all the Headroom that I can when I photograph in the camera I don't want to under expose it by two-thirds of a stop because I'm losing my shadow detail then I got to take those dark areas and make them lighter and then I'm getting back to the noise problem again so just set the contrast lower the pictures are gonna look flatter on the LCD but I don't care because I'm not really worried about the JPEGs I'm just using it as a you know as a reference value to to set the exposure correct don't make sense you guys are chatty okay here's a this one sort of a dilemma right so you have all white but some areas are brighter than others so when you're looking at tonal values forget the color cast just go to black and white make believe your eye just sees just tones right luminosity but not color so which part what I meter off if I want to make sure the highlights correct I'd me draw up the highlight area right here if I mean are over there right in black and white that's not really white it's great so I can't do plus two over here and that's probably somewhere in there so I cheated or I used the tools that are available I didn't have time to mess around so I went like this in live you said it perfectly and then shot live you often I ripped the photographs off as he did it because the light was changing when he jumped out of the river with the Mallory and started walking up here no time to fool around put in live you could just attend it off and rock and roll the game is a tool thank you I'm gonna use it now the color cast right it is a strange one so you can come up here and say okay the shade is blue right so do I want to take all this blue out or do I want to leave the blue in so there's a couple of different different problems with this normally if you were to go into like layers or curves and tunicate blue you have to add yellow right or cyan you're dead red well I don't want to make the whole picture that color all I want to do is get rid of the blue so if I came to my saturation tool and I use my target and I click like let's say right there right now I can negate the blue so not adding yellow on the gating blue Tommy but does that have the same effect as that that looks a lot colder right so there's no real right or wrong and if you look at it by eye there was definitely a blue cast in the snow so it becomes subjective right no right or wrong do you want to emulate what you saw do you want to make it into something that was slightly different you know it's your world you're the creator you can do what you want with it but just bear that in mind all I want to do is negate the cyan and the blue cast I don't want to introduce another color right so if you were to go to any one of these tools like curves for instance and go to blue right in order to get rid of that and drag up and down I have to introduce yellow well I don't want to make a yellow cat so that's not the way to do it and I didn't crop that shadow on purpose so I could have zoomed in a little bit more but I like to like the complete shadow in there again two small details that are going to make the biggest difference in your images here so can I spot meter right there yeah is that gonna be plus to know if we made the image black and white what tonal value is that pretty close to neutral gray right maybe a little bit brightness so maybe I'm gonna go two-thirds of a stop writer if I make this plus two what happens to that completely blows up all right it's gonna be way too bright so I don't want to do that I can also go over here if I want that pure black and go minus three okay here's the eagle how do we do selections in Photoshop let's do this so I just shot this two days ago so we take this guy if all I want to do is work here there's a couple of different methods you need to select specific areas in Photoshop so one is color range I can go to color range leave it on sample the colors and click right here now if I hold the shift key down and drag it'll add to those tonal values and then there's fuzzy sliders like a tolerance control so I could say okay there's the highlight click OK anything that's in a selection now if I click on an adjustment layer puts it into a mask so now if I go like this the only thing that's gonna get lighter and darker is his chest right so I don't have to make the whole picture brighter but what I do want to do is extract detail in the Penguins chest only so how do I refine it with a selection right so there's different methods so this method color range the other method if you wanted to use it let's just get rid of that just come over to here so right here it says quick selection tool so this one's a gift as well boom can't get any faster than that whatever's in a selection if I click an adjustment layer puts it right in so if you look at the mask that's what it select if you want to feather the edge you can do that right here we make it just a little softer transition but now I can come in and I mean I could drive you further crazy if you want to alter the mask just hit command l so now what you're going to do is change the mask so by doing this I can make the mask brighter or darker and just select specific tonal values that way only the highlight to the closer to mid-tone values but that's the power of photoshop it's layers and having having the masks available show you this eagle here for a minute so here's their eagle right so we could do the same thing let's say I just want you to affect this area over here so what I'm going to do is put a bounding box around there with my lasso tool so now if I go to color range it's only going to work on that area it's not going to select the area on his head right so again I Confederate say okay right there click okay so now it's just select those highlights come back in here and I can make those highlights lighter a darker great so if you shoot a subject like an eagle you shoot something that's got a white head and you just want to pull that down a little bit make a selection so the difference between Lightroom and Photoshop Photoshop I can make a selection down a pixel right leg room is a little bit more difficult although that automatic it so the question was he's shooting a mirrorless camera and he's using the viewfinder to judge exposure in the viewfinder if you hit the Display button you should have a live histogram so you can use that live histogram the same way we are on a DSLR to judge the exposure right assuming that it's set up correctly with the lower contrast and stuff it should be pretty close to accurate I don't see a detriment to it you know the advantage for shooting mirrorless cameras is what you see is what you get basically until you come inside and then artificially the viewfinder gets lighter sometimes so that's a little bit of a problem for me but but outside yeah what you see is what you get I mean it's like looking at the back of a DSLR and exposure simulation picture looks light looks dark but if you have that histogram set in the viewfinder you should be able to judge where that clipping point is and you should be able to use it as accurately as a DSLR yeah so the question was that I spot me to this no it's in the bright sunlight again so it's 12 50 at f8 at 200 ISO right and then all I did was fire the flash in just a touch to get a little bit of open detail in the shadows but it's a known value any time we shoot in the Sun it's it's the same thing you know it's always the same I don't have to think about it so people how did you meet earth at well just from a reference value from a known quantity I don't have to meet her it it's the same thing all the time you know back in the old days when we used to shoot wedding photography use 160 iso film you know so we used to shoot it at less than that but it was the same thing open shaded 16 f8 so if you do it enough you know what it is with 1250 at f8 at 200 iso for white subjects in the sun depending upon your camera some of the cameras you'll have to close down 1 . instead of 2/3 so you'll be shooting at 1600 at f/8 for instead of doing sunny 16 it's sunny 22 if the light's coming right over your shoulder there's a question in the back ok so the question is the histogram represents the JPEG they're set in the camera now am I using the histogram to effectively correct my exposure so am I using that yeah the histogram to judge exposure essentially if you do it enough yes yeah so I know how much Headroom I have all the time now because I'm consistently doing it with the same processor right so if I was to pick up luminaire I was to pick up capture one or on one software I might have a fudge factor in there but I know how far I can go before it clips based upon shooting 100,000 pictures a year yeah the other thing you'll see is people tell you you can't judge exposure from from the LCD so if I shut the histogram off at this point because I've shot so many pictures I can't judge it pretty accurately you know again I think that's kind of a little bit of a of a fudge factor yeah if you just picked it up you'd be doomed right so when the bright sunlight I always set the LCD to the brace that could be because I can't see it otherwise outside and I want to see the detail and pretty much when I shoot it outside like that and I come in they look virtually identical and then when I come inside I'll set the LCD brighter darker but don't put it in Auto if you leave it in Auto it's really difficult to judge by the back of the camera you can't do it it gets lighter darker on its own and I I don't have a you know a constant source so what you can gather out of this there's a pretty anal and the way that I shoot right and I kind of break it down into like a formula so i compartmentalize all of it and then it's easier for me to put it together you know same thing when I shoot flash I'm really gold oriented so if I want to shoot penguin portraits I'm just gonna shoot penguin portraits for the next hour if I want to shoot birds in flight I'm just gonna shoot birds in flight and I have what I call a window of opportunity right there is where the lights best that's where the backgrounds best that's the only place I'm going to shoot the picture so I'm going to track the bird from here to that window and then fire the bursts so I track them and I go right and then I'm off the trigger I'm not going and then I got the tail end of the bird right so that's where it's best that's where the motor drive works I can't judge where the wing beat of a snow goose is gonna be and if somebody tells you all right get the hummingbird this way or that way somebody's lying in can't do it but a great blue heron that's got this slow methodical yeah wings up one to pop one to pop you know and then I don't have to rip off 14,000 photographs you'll see when the subjects are walking I always have the foot furthest away from the camera forward I want to see four feet and I want a sense of implied body motion in the picture you know that takes it from just a static post is something that's that's more intriguing so I'm always watching that front foot pop pop pop it's not just you know I'm gonna pick whichever one I think is best be goal-oriented pick specific things shoot where the light is best you know Casey people over here man this is great oh look a bird oh what's that gonna look like who knows so on the websites a funny story there's there's a guy saying you're gonna tell me that your method is better than me putting the camera in automatic and shooting this bird as it flies through dappled light in the forest I said yeah your methods better he goes I knew it why I said because I'm not shooting it I'm gonna go have lunch I'm not gonna shoot a dappled bird flying through time what the heck I'm not gonna get anything it's gonna stink so learning to recognize what makes a good photograph that's what you concentrate on that's where the lights good when I was in the Falklands photographing these penguins it's I wasn't just shooting anywhere I'm waiting for where the lights best everybody else is shooting over here I'm like guys you shouldn't cross lit subjects it's gonna be really hard for you to get anything decent you split light and everything but right here the spray is coming off the waves the lights on the Penguins I mean that's where you want to shoot the things so I'm laying on my belly getting sandblasted and everything else and ruining my camera equipment but but that's what I'm looking for it's specific things you want to photograph that Bobcat walking in the snow every time the Bobcat would start to come level with me I'd race ahead because I don't want to shoot the back end of the Bobcat so as soon as he gets here I'm running ahead okay where's an opening right there there's no log sticking out when he hits that spot man be proactive always think ahead set the exposure in the camera I don't care what it is you know today we're talking about highlights and snow when you step out of the car I guarantee on an overcast day the it's gonna be the same for hours so once you set it in the camera now you have the ability to concentrate on the decisive moment on the camera autofocus incorrectly on getting the correct composition in the viewfinder rather than having to second-guess what the exposures doing all the time you can't concentrate on the stuff that's most important which is the aesthetics now we can't separate the aesthetics from the technique right we look at the picture then both comprise the entity but if you mastered the fundamentals and you understand how that works now you can concentrate on the creative aspects and all of sudden things become simpler you want to tell the camera this is the picture I want to take and set it up accordingly don't just fire off pictures and if you can't judge why you can't repeat it and then you're back to square one every day 50 first dates fifty first camera right I don't know whatever I mean every day you pick the camera you know you're back to square one again so again a value of metering takes the whole thing into account right and works perfectly if you can fill the pattern with one tonal value go +1 off the snow check it if you need plus one and two thirds set that in the camera put fire off a picture beforehand make sure it's correct then go about your business if the light changes then you have to re-meet her right if you spot meters same thing both methods will work all the methods will work you can use any one of those methods if you put in shutter priority and a thousand that F eights the correct exposure you know what the correct exposure in manual is the time zone at f/8 you know what it is in shutters priority a thousand at f/8 you know what it is what it's in a meter thousand at f/8 so it's just I equate it to crayons in the box we do a four-day tech series it's a full day of metering a full day of Flash one on post-production and one on visual skill so the first day of the class I give you a white piece of paper and I give you a crayon and I go draw me a rainbow and everybody looks at me kind of like you're looking at me now right so they're like what are you talking about so the end of the first day it's incident metering it's reference values its spot metering a valued of meeting RGB metering by the end of the class you've got 36 crayons join me a rainbow now so what I'm trying to do as an educator is to put more crayons in your box and I appreciate the fact that people see my photographs and they want to emulate them but my goal is to give you the tools to draw the picture the way you envision it and unless you understand how that process all comes together and how each meter pattern affects what you're doing it's a difficult task how do you correct for something you don't understand so I know I've seen a lot of people who haven't come from the film world right this is all I've been doing for 35 years or however long it is now since 83 so you learn exposure because you go on an exotic trip and you better get it right because you're coming back with slide film and a and a big debit in your checking account so you want to make sure that what you're shooting is gonna be that you know the best it could be so now with digital it's a little bit easier and people who just started out in digital and I see a lot of other people teaching people but it's too light make it dark it's too dark make it light have a good day well why why is it too light why is it too dark I need more info right that's what it's about understand the process and then it becomes much simpler for you guys it's not as hard as you make it people think automatic is easier it's more difficult because every time you depress the shutter you have to assess what the camera is doing and every time you move it again back to square one I'm gonna get a branding iron same light same exposure it doesn't have to be that hard when you go outside on a sunny day set the camera to 800 at f/8 200 ISO shoot every car in the parking lot with the light coming over your shoulder and everyone will be perfectly exposed now you might get some bling keys but that's what's called a specular highlight that's the Sun bouncing off the hood or Chrome or something like that can't close down for that but I guarantee they're all be perfectly exposed they're all receiving exactly the same incident quantity of light they're identical then you have them choice you can salt and pepper to taste if you say hey I want to make the picture darker to ensure more detail in the picture as shot then make the picture duck you want to see more detail on the black make the picture lighter but you have a base you have a foundation you have a control as if in an experiment it does the same thing every time that's what's easier for me I don't have to second-guess every time what the cameras doing so there's another photographer who used to shoot exclusively aperture priority and a valued of metering right and understood that it was difficult and is difficult and came up with a chart to simplify the process for everybody which is perfectly you know I mean it's great but by the time I look at the chart wherever I photograph and moved or if it's flying from the cornfield down here up there you know to all these different places you have to apply compensation so the snow goose in boskie's it's out there it's a hundred yards away now it's coming to me flies in front of a dark green tree flies in front of the cornfield flies in turn in front of earth-tone ground it's in the same light sixteen hundred five six shoot them all but if you put that in automatic every time that background changes the camera is going to give you a different recommendation you're gonna have sixteen different exposures so now you're playing photo roulette again you're sitting there going try to get the right exposure can't concentrate on the picture so I came from the commercial world right it's been a crazy career I mean 35 years worth of a lot of different disciplines and everything and you know I try and draw upon that the best thing you could do as a photographer I know I'm getting off on a tangent is to work in a studio because you're you're lighting everything from the ground up nothing exists so you learn quantity of light quality of light and direction of light that's what this whole thing is about that's your paintbrush right so if I get the light off axis and the light is coming from here I eliminated 50% of the pictures I could take because if the subject goes this way now his faces in the shadow I can't pull the trigger I have to wait for him to turn his face back this way so I'm picking the best background I'm picking the best light but I have to wait for the subject the its head to the light source now I could take the photograph so when I first started this I looked at all John Shaw's books and I said okay I'm done with all this commercial stuff and annual reports and everything else I'm gonna do wildlife photography welcome my pictures don't look like that I got the same equipment maybe it's not the equipment so you know what we do we all go out we buy the best equipment money can you know let me come by you know you just did you eliminated all your excuses so now comes down to the nut behind the wheel my friends that's what it is you know so if you're not happy with the photograph it's not the camera I mean I could pick up any camera in the world probably and do the same thing it's all ISO shutter speed enough stop it doesn't make a difference what makes the difference for me and the reason I shoot what I do is because I'm really comfortable with the ergonomics and I love the layout of the camera that's the bits one selection on the planet so for me it's a no brainer you know and that's why I use what I do so I use the kind of stuff other people might have a difference of opinion that's okay you know it just makes my job easier for what I do and that's what it's all about you know but if you gave me a mirrorless camera or a point-and-shoot camera the composition is the same the principles are all the same so we had a girl show up on a black bear trip now black bear which side of the histogram you're gonna look at the left side not the right side I want to make sure that the black side of the histogram is not pegged otherwise they have no detail on the black so all I'm doing for the most part is using one side or the other in the histogram for reference the middle I don't really care about the middle the ideal scenario is what have the histogram not pegged against the right not pegged against the left then all the tonal values are within the dynamic range of the camera life is good that's your ideal scenario right then you could extract it and pull out whatever you really want to but you know if you look at this whole thing like there's no negatives if you take a picture it doesn't come out and you have metadata and you could look at that metadata and say okay this is why it went wrong that negative now becomes a positive if you just shoot completely automatic and you don't know what it's doing then it stays a negative then you're still reeling around in your mind trying to figure out what the heck is going on so for me you know as you can tell I'm a huge proponent of shooting manual because I think once you learn manual now you can carry it over to automatics you understand how they work here's your patterns here's your priority modes put the two together when they work take them apart when they don't evaluative metering works perfectly in low contrast situations and even tonal values works flawlessly if the lights changing and the tonality is between the subject and the background change mm-hmm how do I use flash for wildlife unless I'm doing a special effect I don't use it all that much except maybe for Birds undulates right hold animals have really bad eye shine you got to get it off the camera otherwise their eyes go right if you're shooting bears and you become the center of attention you probably want to stop doing what you're doing so anything on four feet can outrun anything on two feet so you know stop doing that but getting it off the camera is a gift from above it opens a whole nother world for you and then back to that studio scenario right so now I have a main light and a fill light now I can use my shutter speed to make the background lighter or darker and I could use my flash to light the subject so we do a flash class I should come in here and probably do that Miss Terra can help us with that on how to use flash for wildlife and now you do it the same thing i compartmentalize it break it all down and I guarantee you in an hour all of a sudden you'll go I hate flash - wow this is really useful most of the people that I've come across who say I hate flash don't use it properly every picture looks like it's flash well then you're not using it right if you've ever seen a movie set there's lights everywhere but when you look at the picture on screen you're not going whoo look at the lighting it's horrible because they're using it effectively so it's the same thing for us when we're photographing you know Pat Eric on the back look at some of his tutorials online and how he does it with with models and things like that so there's color gels and there's highlights and shadows and it's all about ratios and once you work in a studio that's all you see even here how bright is the top of your head - this side of your face how bright is this side of your face relative to the background so you start to use it as a paintbrush don't want to blur the background do I want to you know I I mean it opens a whole nother world for you guys it really really does and you'll see now I think because there's so many people who are doing wildlife they're always looking for something different so I just had this conversation yesterday with a guy there's a gentleman who used flash in a place you're not supposed to use flash and if you look at the picture you go wow the picture looks very compelling but not supposed to do it so you went through that in a contest and where does it end up right it's a quandary I mean it really is I see pictures and nests hanging posture of loons so if a loons laying off the nest like this ready to slide in the water it means you're too close definitively you're too close in the Loon feels threatened but I see those pictures and they win contest Wow look at that loon it's in a really cool position yeah well if you know the behavioral aspects you know the guy pissed the thing off that's not really good that's not what we're trying to do we're trying to document a nobler havior without disturbing it how many loons did you have to tick off in order to get one that was close enough to not do that look this one's not upset yeah but the other ten went out of their mind and left the chicks on the nest or you know abandon the eggs I mean I look at this whole wildlife thing you know we're stewards for the Wildlife as much as a photographer so it's you know if you're in a little bit of prominence it's my job as well to to get that out to you guys photograph the wildlife but not at their expense you know not it's not all about the picture per se do I use primary most of the time I would say 95% I'm using spot metering you know and again because it doesn't deviate and does exactly the same thing every time I do use a value of metering but it just depends on the circumstance low contrast situations so here's where evaluative metering works perfect even tones there's no big deviations between the highlights and the shadows throughout the whole scene maybe there's a shutdown a third so I didn't blow the highlight on his nose over here honestly if there's a couple of Blinky's in that snow I don't care I'm not gonna do that to sacrifice the rest of the exposure for the snow leopard and by the way this is a captive animal or somebody else will be showing you this picture so here I take evaluative right and I zoom in to fill it with one tonal value if I back off and shoot this at 100 millimeters and now I have that dark area influence the meter recommendation all right so I'm getting rid of the problems the problem is the tonal variations so if I just meet her off there that's one stop writer how do I know because I fired off a picture and I looked at it then the rest of the days I'm in Africa I know I could spot meter off or if you meter off the grass and go plus-one why would I do that rather than spot metering because the spot meter is really small and really accurate so if I happen to pick up a dark blade of grass rather than a light blade of grass it's gonna throw the me in a recommendation off if I use a value tip it's gonna assimilate that and here's a tip for you sometimes you can throw it out of focus so if you have different tones like that and you're using a spot meter or a valued metering throw the lens out of focus all I'm doing is using it for exposure and it'll average those tones out better then I can get a more accurate reading fire off a picture and look at it OOP it's a little too light then make the adjustment then I can shoot for the next half hour of you know the lion about to eat me in the truck so here I can't meter the blacks what part of the bear is black inside is here so people just spot me to the bear that's not that's great if I made the picture black and white that's not black but what is the same the grass so if I spot me to the grass I have light and dark blades of grass mean that's a little bit of a problem but if I use evaluative which is a bigger pattern that's going to average it out I can get a quicker recommendation for me so now if I made the grass look proper the Bears going to be dark right I know that so what I'm gonna do is say I'm going to make the grass two-thirds of a stop brighter which makes the bear brighter then in post-production all you have to do is take the bear I'll show you this in Lightroom I can't important that's the important anyway so you go to Lightroom and it says HSL hue saturation and luminance so I take the luminance slider and I click on the green grass and I pull it down that takes anything that's green and makes it darker so now the bear is perfectly exposed it's a little bit brighter I see more detail because I made the grass two-thirds of a stop writer and I just pull the grass down so we had a guy go to Africa photograph mountain gorillas right and he shot him all in automatic so he's pointing them all these close-ups of the gorillas and the black gorilla now looks great I see all the detail in there so he makes the picture a little bit darker right but the grass still doesn't look right all the green foliage so I showed him how to do it because oh my gosh now I have to go in there and make a thousand pictures like this I don't know you just click sync and they're all done in two seconds so you know that knowledgebase for that for the post-production is pretty important for you the good news for us I'm going to be 60 soon is it fights the Alzheimer's so so we can all sit there and go through these programs and you know and try and learn them and and keep our coconuts working but you know it's like so I spawned me to the bear so I go plus-one how do I know that plus one because I've shut the spirit bears for five years now so I meter the bear and if the lights the same I don't have to change anything but zoom in and out of that and you're gonna get ten different exposures because of cheetah so the cheetah is in the shade full shade under a tree and the backgrounds in sunlight so all I did was I meted right here right fired it off it works perfect how did I know the background wasn't going to clip because I'd meet her dish and meet heard that and they weren't like that far off so as long as there's not like a three-stop difference between there or more than a three-stop difference I know that background is gonna have detail so here here's your spot meter scenario that right there is exactly the same as that right there but look at the difference in the background brighter not so bright so if you do this in a valued of metering and automatic what's going to happen two different exposures if I did it an automatic but I put the spot meter right there and went from like the dark exactly the same reading so I can use the aperture priority and spot metering or I can use manual you don't want or push the auto exposure lock either way the point is I don't want it deviating once I got the correct exposure so I showed you that so here's another one of these proactive things what this has to do with snow Eric I'm not really sure but here's the deal we're in Bosque okay everybody leaves and I'm like I still think the lights gonna pop it's gonna happen I know what's gonna happen so I see all the pintails landing sandhill cranes mallards birds in the background none of this is Photoshop and it's ethereal fog in the background because it's really cold and it's you know vapor coming off the river they're pretty far away it's a 600 with a 1/4 it's 840 millimeters not a lot of depth of field so what parameters do I need to capture the picture correctly I need 25 hundredths of a second because those things are like Rockets and I need at least f-16 to try and get something recognizable throughout the photograph so I locked the camera down I have these weeds on the bottom I focus on a different bird that came in right about there at f-16 right and then I put the thing in autofocus with a zone for a bigger area and then right when those birds are all coming in I'm just I'm hammering so it's 25 hundredths of a second at f/16 840 millimeters it's 1600 ISO Y 1600 ISO on the bright light because I need the f16 at 25 hundredths of a second if you said all I'm gonna shoot it's 400 ISO this isn't InFocus that's not in focus pick your poison to me the picture is more important than having a little bit of noise I can knock the noise out you ever look at a billboard on the highway it looks pretty good from the highway go close to it can you tell what it is looks like golf balls so you know you ever go like this in a museum you know the stroke on that picture just a little bit off no but that's what you're doing with the noise I mean if you make a picture that big it's meant to be looked at from back here it's not meant to be looked at like that you know if you want to do the landscapes with 4 or 5 s and medium format then you have a different agenda you know but for me the content is still more important so I want to make sure I capture the content I'm in Africa there's a lion going after a hippo that's like unheard of right at dusk so I Jack the camera up to 3200 I'm wide open at f/4 but I heard the guys oh those are gonna be noisy though yeah well yeah it's pretty cool right yeah so let me see yours we wouldn't shoot it yeah it's exactly my point gonna be noisy butts a pretty darn cool picture it's like a once-in-a-lifetime thing okay so the question is do I do I think we kind of took a step back going from film to digital and partly that would be a yes for the people who who just pick it up now who haven't shot film and just put the camera automatic because they believe the camera knows more than they do so we've had people come on the trip ap photographers you know you P you know I mean all these guys come and two things the first applause my mind because a lot of them are not technically oriented at all and I'm not really sure how they even had a career they just put the camera on automatic and they ripped everything off the other thing is that yeah if you just pick up that camera more people are frustrated today they're getting a lot of good pictures because they're shooting a lot more so we used to say you shoot a role 36 you get five good ones right now you go digital you shoot 36 hundred you get five good ones that's not how it's supposed to work right it's not the more I shoot the better pictures I get I mean narrow it down you know and there people come on the trip who who I start to teach this methodology and the guys like that's how I used to shoot my Leica in the 60s I said how are your pictures back then because you know they were really good and consistent I go how are they now not so I said why well because I put the camera automatic and I'm relying on the camera to do everything for me it does a really good job but you got to understand everything has limitations when is it a bet you know an asset and when is it a detriment so you know only you can figure that out what works for you we had a gal her daughter's in gymnastics right so she took the class and she calls me up and she says I always mess up the pictures I says well it's indoors right yeah does your daughter usually go first no so I said so put the camera in LiveView right pick a fast shutter speed like a thousand jack the ISO up to 1600 and just dial yep stop so the picture looks good then shut it off and then fire a picture on the girl who goes two times before your daughter does it look good yeah now don't change anything it's fixed lighting but if her daughter's wearing a white jumpsuit and the other ones wearing a dark jumpsuit and if you put an automatic you keep changing she zooms in zooms out five you know six different exposures set it up on a girl before then rip them up don't wait for that moment again that's gonna kill you you know we're photographing the swamp here comes a bear I'm like okay focus on the Loch why because the Bears gonna walk on the log how do you know well if you were walking through a swamp and there's something hard for you to stand up I'm pretty sure we could stand on a lot so I set up like this the bear walks on their log and they're like wow it wasn't rocket science I mean I've seen it before but you know a lot of its common sense which is you know not so common yeah we just have to pay attention you know it's fun for me the more I understand animal behavior the more it equates to better images because I can second-guess it ahead of time you know so a really cool story is we photograph at a bear sanctuary black bears so three black bears are up the tree and I hear mom give off this guttural grunt so she's like I'm like okay that's the sound to come down so I told everybody stop what you do and come over here set the camera vertically figure out the correct exposure because mom is going to stand up at the base of the tree and touch each cub as it comes down so the bear biologists next to me goes yes sure I'm like okay so I step back and I gave the participants two primary spots and one cub comes down mom stands up and those was it go three in a row so I'm in the background going so I said to the biologist you need to spend more time in the woods and that's what it is the more time in the field you know the better off you're going to be so I told somebody on this falklands trip two days ago when I was still in the falklands what I've learned is there's wildlife photographers and those who photograph wildlife and here's the difference the wildlife photographers are going to spend the time to understand the behavior and it's going to equate to better pictures the other guys we're going to run down the road see a deer jump out of the car shooting it back in a car it doesn't necessarily mean that one picture is going to be better than the other right it just means that person is going to spend more time in the field to try and you know and maximize the craft and yes I started the other way I hate zoos but that's where we started that's where the animals were accessible to us you know what I photograph an elephant in the zoo today hail no no way it's just after you see him in the wild you can't do it anymore you'll never be able to do it you know I see Wolverines and night and it's you know orcas so I just saw two pods of work at seven and five living in the wild and the Falkland Islands it's the best place in the world to photograph natural Orca predation and the world's most accessible place to photograph worker predation and then you see them in a you know an aquarium with the fin like this and it's just that shouldn't be more questions on photography should I get a convertor for my for my zoom lens right there's there's a couple that I said some detriments again you're always gonna lose a little bit of quality right you're also going to lose light so if you're gonna shoot it let's say you have five six you put a 1/4 converter now you're at f/8 so I was telling you stop down one stop which means now you're at f11 so if you don't have a lot of light you're gonna be jacking the eye isola right that difference between how much noise and quality loss versus cropping the picture up to the same thing you'd have to compare the two side-by-side it's a I get the question all the time and it depends on how many pixels your camera has how much you're going to crop it up you know we have a 7d mark 222 megapixels in a point six crop factor right or I shoot it with my one DX which is about the same megapixels but now I take the center portion out now I'm at 10 megapixels to get the same size image I do with the other camera but that camera is not as good with noise what's a better scenario the only way to do that is to have somebody shoot side-by-side and compare the two in exactly the same circumstance so it depends on the quality of the converter any imperfections in your primary lens are going to be exaggerated so let's say for argument's sake you have a 50 millimeter lens 50 millimeter lens is essentially one power 600 millimeters 50 into 600 is 12 times right so anything that you do is magnified 12 times imperfections and technique right then you throw a converter on there so if there's any imperfections in the lens now you're just magnified it again so it's a it's a debacle if you're going to do that by a match converter the Canon again I'm touting the 100 to 400 that's programmed with the chipset in the new one for three verdict to work really well and there were people on the trip who were using it and the results blew my mind I would in my lifetime never put a 1/4 converter on a zoom lens but they were showing me pictures and they were just mind blown but again they were shooting at f11 so five six f8 close down one stop at f11 you got a lot of depth of field and the picture is a real sharp you know but again you got Jack died so often order to compensate for the loss of light so it ya better and more costly and more weight when you travel so yeah though photography should be the art of compromise I mean essentially that's what we do we always lose or gain on one end and you know not so much on the other it's just how it is why do you have a 600 f4 you know I could buy a zoom lens that not a net for you can you know so my 600 the sharpest part of that lens is f5 and I know because believe it or not I checked out every lens opening and third stops from f4 that's 16 so f5 is the sharpest part of that lens at 4 I'm still picking up the fraction on the wide open end past f11 and picking up the fraction so I'll shoot between 4 or 5 and f11 and 5 if I can't help it the further out the subject less I have to worry about depth of field right so if I'm photographing a bison at a hundred yards I could shoot them at 4 or 5 if he gets close and I want a full-frame headshot I got to go down a half 11 so the closer he gets the more I have to worry about depth of field right 3 up 3 down or if you're an aperture priority right just dial the you know you have stop and it'll compensate for the shutter speed but hit that auto exposure lock so you know it's not changing but yeah it's there the whole thing's in our to compromise I just wanted to fall cones we have weight restrictions 22 kilos you know anything more than that you pay for but we're going you know to the bottom of the earth great just above Antarctica so you know if it's another hundred bucks I'm taking the tools that I want but I still went lighter I took two 5d fours I did take a 7d mark - because I only took the 400 you know the deal which is f4 but I definitely use that with the one four and the 2x but that's a real high-end sharp lens you know the 70 to 200 - 8 the cannon is works really well with the 1/4 now you could put a 2x on there and it works fairly well but I guarantee the 100 to 400 at five six is going to be way better than the 70 to 200 with a 2x the only time you want to put that one four on that 100 to 400 is if you're going to shoot more than 400 millimeters if you're gonna shoot less than 400 millimeters pull that puppy off otherwise you lose light decrease the quality a little bit slower autofocus what's the purpose so if I know that I'm gonna shoot consistently more than 400 millimeters I'll leave the 1/4 on but if I'm not pull it off and I see people leave it on all the time just like I see people with polarizes on their lenses well the guy in the store said leave this on my camera hmm so I look inside and they got like polarisers inside lose two stops of light I can't afford two stops worth the light for what I'm doing unless it's a special effect so there are reasons that I use it especially if I'm doing video right so like have a variable ND filter for when I do video now do they have to cut down the light but but yeah I mean same thing you know it's a compromise you do something on one end you're gonna you know lose your gain on the other so that I use polarized about any other pictures that I that I showed this evening the answer's no no because a lot of it again I go back to a two stop loss so I did buy the newer polarizing filters there are a couple of them out there that you lose a stop and a half so that half stops is valuable to me but again if I'm shooting waterfalls if I'm shooting things that are not shutter speed dependent you know hi shadow speed dependent then I can use a polarizer yeah I rarely if ever use filters in front of my my high-end glass right I mean Canon and these other manufactures went through painstaking you know processes to make them the sharpest they can I don't want to stick something in front of it except this trip where I go to the Falkland Islands and I have 50 mile an hour blowing sand it's I could probably make a pearl you know right now from all the sand that I ingested but but you know that's where I'm gonna put them on there you know otherwise they choose up the front element I have to send one camera back because the eye piece got sandblasted so I left the camera on the tripod walk away I come back and the eyepiece looks like you're looking through a fog now so CPS didn't hear that but well yeah so yeah you know I mean takes its toll but yeah so it's it's not all about you know he put a filter on the camera all the time and you know so I'm sitting here for two hours and spewing all this information to you it's not gospel right it's what works for me your job is to take these classes from everybody that you can and assimilate all the information that works for you if one method is easier then use that method you know I'm just showing you what's easier for me and what has worked all these years you know I can't rest on the seventh day because my wife won't let me so but but yeah it's just you know use it all trial and error put it all together you know and what works for you but just realize the biggest thing is that same light same exposure thing because I see everybody getting frustrated with it you know they buy a camera I got to buy a better camera this one's not good it's not the camera the rebels Canon rebels the new ones those things are mind-blowing they're great and if it has manual on that for ninety percent of what you're gonna do unless you're shooting rocket ships moving by a flying subject it's gonna take same picture it's the same thing you know but get the best glass you can that's what you know he's doing it all for you you know they have zoom lenses now that I don't know it's got like you know I'm gonna buy a fifty to four thousand mm-hmm it's not sure you're shocked like really it's just you know not gonna go there yeah so people are like on the chip so you're telling me I got to buy a 1dx mark to for you know for all those dollars if this is what I want we that's how it works yeah if you want 14 frames a second and this megapixels and low noise and fastest autofocus out there and all the other stuff then yeah yeah if you can do it fine if you can't then work within the parameters you know we had a girl come with film on the black bear chip this is it okay if I come like oh yeah it's the same thing you know just make a little brighter when you shoot it but well yeah I don't care it's just a different tool oh yeah you're welcome to come

Channel: B&H Photo Video

Views: 53,629

Keywords: b and h, b&h, bh, photo, B&H Photo, Video, BH Photo, video, bhvideos, bh photo, How, to, Expose, and, Post, Snow, Scenes, charles, glatzer, charles glatzer, canon explorer of light, canon, canon eos, wildlife photography, wildlife photographer, best wildlife photography, shooting in the snow, photography in snow

Id: mvT9TlurUy8

Length: 108min 58sec (6538 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 06 2018