HOW TO Photograph SUNRISES and SUNSETS

hey everyone i'm will and in the video today i want to talk about hdr images what are they what does it even mean and how did i create this image right here so we're going to go out into the field i'll show you how i shot this exact scene but more importantly we'll come back here in the studio and i'll run through some of the post-processing tips that you might want to keep in mind when you're shooting directly towards the sun which is one of my favorite ways to photograph the landscape as always your likes and comments really mean a lot and please consider subscribing if you haven't already and if you have any questions about anything covered in the video please leave a comment below and i'll get back to you i've also put together a massive seascape masterclass so if you do enjoy some of the things covered here check out the link in the description to the master class where we go way more in depth and cover a variety of different topics out in the field as well as here in the studio alright guys with that out of the way what is a hdr hdr stands for higher dynamic range now most of the time when people are referring to a hdr they're actually thinking of the technique where you'd shoot a series of exposures at say different shutter speeds so you'd have a dark exposure medium upright blending it together in the computer in order to have that full range of light in the file so dynamic range it's referring to the range of light from the shadows to highlights and a high dynamic range is when there's a big divide between the two an example of that would be in your house if you are in dark interior have a window in front of you and the sun's blasting outside there's a big difference between the shadows on the inside of the house and then those highlights arts outside that's a huge dynamic range right there a high dynamic range so in landscape photography particularly in the early digital days the camera's sensor was not good enough it didn't have a big enough dynamic range in that sensor the ability to capture that huge range of light so all you could do was either take one exposure and leave details either under or over exposed which would have happened a lot in the film days or take a series of exposures and then blend them together in the computer that's why typically you'd see in a lot of film photography in early digital most of the time the photographer would have the sun behind them or off to the side so the subject matter was somewhat evenly lit and the dynamic range wasn't so great now for me i actually love shooting straight towards the sun i like the mystery it creates by backlighting certain subject matter and i love that strong light source there which effectively catches the eye and pulls the eye into the scene that's an absolute nightmare in theory shooting straight towards a flaming ball of fire and then having backlit subject matter but the technology we have now the sensors in our camera the dynamic range is so high that we're actually able to do that and capture that detail in a single exposure and then it's all about the post processing so a big tip really guys is to understand the ability of your camera sensor so hopefully you've got a relatively modern camera anything in the last say three to five years should have a high enough dynamic range now on the sensor and you can just google your camera model and dynamic range and hopefully it's above say 13 stops or more that's how it's measured and if it is then you're probably going to be able to get by a lot of scenarios by taking a single exposure but then it's about knowing how to process that file that's the biggest thing because when you're shooting a scene straight towards the sunlight if you have a lot of backlit subject matter which will be most of the time that file is not going to look that crash hot on the back of the camera it's just not because the camera we can't get the shadow details looking good as well as the sun and vice versa all we can really do is what i like to do anyway is shoot for the highlights and then we reveal the shadow details later on so it's about referencing your histogram and we'll go over this shortly referencing the histogram and understand that you're actually just capturing data out in the field you're not necessarily always creating that final exposure you're capturing that data bringing it home and then you might have to continue the exposure in the computer it'll make sense when we pull up the raw files shortly so what we're going to do is head out in the field you'll see how i just shoot straight towards the sun here with this scene and then i'll pull up the raws and you're going to see how flat the raw files look they look pretty garbage uh but like i said the whole point is that the exposure was done to get the sun details nice not too concerned about all the backlit subject matter because it was the processing techniques which allowed me to pull out those shadow details so no longer really do you have to shoot multiple exposures and blend them together which can be really tricky it's time consuming and if you use software to do that work for you can sometimes get the results really bad which is what happened to me when i first started my photography journey years ago anyway i think that's enough for in here let's get out there we'll take the shot and then we'll join back up here on the computer and have a look at the results what's going on guys just uh mochiki beach on the west coast i thought i'd just do a bit of a vlog today share with you some seascape photography as you can see the access here is questionable uh there are a few ways to get to this beach this is kind of the i guess you'd call it the shortcut but it is a bit sketchy looking at the sky there's definitely potential for a beautiful sunset today we've got multiple layers of cloud low medium and lots of high cloud hopefully a bit of a gap on the horizon there for the light to break through that's the hard part it's hard to say at the moment either way should be fun it's good to get out by the coast let's go see what we can do this location has multiple sea stacks so there's quite a few ways you could photograph here so i'm going to go for a bit of a walk look i've shot here before and so has a million other photographers over the years there's definitely some sections that work better than others but you also got to factor in the light and where the sun wants to be i love having that backlight just to draw the eye in so i'll probably be walking a bit further looking back towards the sun once we identify what the main subject matter will be then we can worry about the framing if we're going to use water flow is it going to be something in the foreground etc it's about taking notes and just deciding for yourself what is it that you enjoy about the place what is it that you would like to share and not share and then how do we put that into an image really got to pay attention to the tides at a location like this where you have the cliffs right by the shore so this is more or less a low tide only location even now it's it's almost low it's still coming down and it's already coming up to the cliffs here so i just had to double check that i did read the tide chart properly might be getting some wet feet haven't even got the camera out yet but there's no point just getting the camera out if you haven't even decided for yourself what it is you actually want to photograph that's a cool frame so although i've come down here to photograph the ocean and the coast have a look at the water it's so flat and uninspiring i'm just not feeling it and i don't want to force anything once you force something i feel like the creativity truly suffers and it will come through in your work so instead what's caught my eyes all the greenery up here so i'm going to jump up and see if i can utilize this in the frame with the ocean and sea stacks in the back it's obviously when you're getting something so close in front of you you need a wide angle so i've got a 16 35 on i don't think i'll be shooting at 16 because then the foreground will just be overemphasized but let's have a look see what we can do if you go too wide then the background is just tiny as well something else to keep in mind a lot the light is just coming through that's got me excited again i think when i know the lights going flat i just lose all motivation so with the light coming through it's gently it's still diffused which is perfect because it's not harsh on the foreground it's lighting that up gently the ocean and there's some rocks down there there's just multiple layers of detail just referencing the histogram slightly underexposing knowing that i can pull these darker details up later and i'm at f 16 for that big depth of field can actually pick up the the cliffs as well which just adds another layer of detail there because it's got that light on it visual arts all about balance and the way i'm going to balance this scene out is by utilizing the sun on the right the sea stacks in the middle and then the cliff on the left and giving all three an equal portion of the frame and getting it eaten alive by the sand flies nice look at that sky whoa i'll pull up the files in a moment but i end up shooting at f 16 for the depth of field 1 25th of a second and iso 100 just focusing in that mid-ground area just really thankful hey really humbled okay let's have a look at these raw files now i want to talk about the exposure the composition and then we'll jump in and do a bit of processing as well you're gonna notice straight away how bad the raw file looks look how flat it is it lives up to its name it's raw stripped of that color and vibrance the dynamic range is just extremely you know there's a lot of high contrast here and the raw is not showing us any of the details in the shadows or the highlights compared to say an iphone video that you can see here this is unedited iphone video it's got an algorithm in it that actually does do an edit so i say it's unedited in the sense that i haven't touched it but there's an algorithm there that says raise shadows up lower highlights add saturation when it comes to the raws we don't get that we get the absolute raw and that's fine it allows us to make the adjustments and get the result that we're after that specific result that we may want instead of letting the camera do the work for us and that's why sometimes it's a bit hard when people say do you use photoshop and the enter's an answer is a yes primarily for this reason so let's have a look here firstly the composition and then we'll talk about the exposure and getting the details out compositionally i love those three elements in the back sun stacks cliff just balance everything out nicely you can see that here but look at the foreground there's a bit of a imbalance going on we've got all that flax primarily to the center left but lower right i didn't have anything so i scrapped that composition and found a better portion of flax the problem now is so the flax is a lot better in this one way more balanced and i like having that opening so you could see the sand and the rock down there but the problem now is look at the light the sun broke through for a moment gorgeous light actually really nice would have been unreal for a portrait but it lit up the flax a little bit too much for my liking the greens there were starting to take away a little bit from the background also the sun because it basically broke through the cloud for a moment the sunlight itself was a lot brighter the highlights were really strong it was actually a challenge for me to expose for them at the end of the day you can't just shoot the sun once it gets a certain degree above the horizon it's very hard to shoot it and retain the detail it just won't look realistic even if you did do it it won't look right and so there's just too much of a highlight there to correct that you can frame it out and that's what i've done here i zoomed in framed out the sun but i didn't like the way the balance was lost in the background just having the cliffs and the stack so what i did was i waited patiently because obviously i knew the sun was going to keep getting lower eventually hit the cloud again and that's where i was able to take this exposure and that was the the right balance where i was able to zoom out and still shoot the sun and retain the details which you'll see shortly in the raw but also there was a nice amount of light hitting the flax and the cliffs but it wasn't as bright as it was before so i was able to still get that darker edging and the eye could transition from that dark into the light in the background i want people to float into the background i don't want them to get fixated on that foreground too much so that's what i did here with this shot this composition exposure wise how do we expose for these high dynamic range scenes for me it's all about the highlights referencing my histogram and making sure that my exposure is not too bright that i'm losing all that highlight detail it's as simple as that so i'm just looking at the histogram i get my detail across to the right and then once i see the highlight starting to clip that's where i stop so i'm using my shutter speed to do that i'm setting the iso for the noise and the f-stop for the depth of field the shutter speed is my light regulation so i just adjust that accordingly looking at the histogram shooting to protect those highlights and then where the shadows fall they fall and i'm confident that i can pull up that detail in post particularly when there is still light in the shadow zone like there is in a shot like this and that's going to be the case a lot of the time it's pretty rare that i'll have you know extremely underexposed shadows most of the time i'm shooting landscapes that have light somewhere in the scene so i've got that confidence that even though the histogram will be showing a lot of darker shadows or almost underexposed i know that i'll be able to pull them up in post because ultimately shadows should remain dark anyway that's what they are they're shadows so i know that i'm not trying to recover them to an amount that's going to make them extremely bright i just need to recover them enough so the detail is visible let's jump in photoshop and we'll open up this raw file and you'll see what i mean and how within just a few clicks of the mouse we can get those details out and you can correct that dynamic range very quickly really for me that's 50 of the image process if not more just balancing out that dynamic range when we look at that raw file there it looks terrible how do we get that to look more like what the eyesore let's have a look alright so now we have the raw file here in adobe camera raw in photoshop and let's just have a look at how you can bring out that dynamic range on a single exposure and and get all those details out you can see that histogram there the top right hand corner and as i said it's just starting to clip now analyzing the photo eighty percent of it is too dark really the sky looks okay or at least the sun area but everything else is too dark if i just grab the shadow slider and pull that up the problem is it's only raising shadows and it's neglecting all the mid tones in this area you know there's more than shadows down in that foreground for example so it starts to look a little bit off it doesn't look right so what i like to do typically and this will happen in most of my images like this is the first thing i'll do is bring the exposure up as i do this it's going to greatly bring up every single tone evenly and that's what we want it's even so it looks natural it's just bringing up the exposure of course the problem is now we've overexposed the sunlight you can see that in the histogram now you can look at the sun that's washed out that's okay because now i'll use the highlight slider to bring that back to reveal those details if i go too far two things are going to happen one the cheese will start to the the sun will start to look like cheese you can see that yellowy tone in there it doesn't look normal at the end of the day let a highlight be a highlight it's okay to leave that partially blown out it's going to look more natural the other thing that will happen is the highlights will get lost in our foreground and mid ground there's highlights down there too so if you're doing too much of a highlight recovery you're losing those natural highlights in the rest of the landscape so i'll recover this say about here negative 40 but i'll leave it at that the other thing i can do now for the sky is push g to get a linear gradient so that goes straight to the masking otherwise you can click the masking button and go down to linear gradient and this is going to allow me to work on one side of the frame at a time i want to work on the upper portion just on the sky only and what i'm going to do is in order to recover some of those tones and lead the eye back to the center i'm going to pull down exposure and some highlights partially click and drag i'm going to angle it away from those cliffs so i don't affect the cliffs too much and this way now i can just slightly apply that to the sky and the whole point of that is to push the eye back towards the center where the main subject matter is now for the foreground and even that mid ground shadows can come up this time but they're not going to be going up as high as if we never did that original exposure adjustment so let's say we bring that up to plus 40 for argument's sake even plus 45 and you can see there instantly now let's do a before and after if i push p on the keyboard so we're underexposed now we've got the details there without losing that sky detail too much and one other thing i'll do is whenever i have sunlight like this where it's a highlight i'll diffuse that warm it up and soften it and just i'm kind of embracing the fact that the light is there and it is overexposed so what i'll do for that is i'll push k to get an adjustment brush or masking tool go down to brush and what i like to do is warm it up so i'll chuck some warmer white balance on the brush a bit of magenta and yellow and the key is re-hazing so i like to just add some haze and i just gently apply this to that sunlight area honestly sometimes i'll just run it along that whole background as well because the re haze it's actually it's like a micro contrast and anything further away should have less contrast it gives it an effect of looking further off in the distance and that's great it helps us separate the foreground from that background or the mid-ground and the background so i'll apply that like so so there you go so many of my images will get the same application bringing the entire exposure up recovering highlights to a degree and then locally recovering highlights in the sky then i'll bring shadows up but you're not bringing them up too far and that's a rough ballpark and again if i push p you can see the before and after we've instantly got that full dynamic range you can even see the difference there with the histogram highlights are more or less staying the same but all our shadows and mid-tones are getting pushed to being brighter so i've got a high dynamic range scene captured with a single exposure now unfortunately we don't have time to do the full process today on this image but that gives you a rough idea and really there's not much to do from here on out anyway a little bit of vibrance and saturation perhaps some localized boosting of the light in the mid in the mid ground area and the image is pretty much done so nature was doing all the work for us anyway [Music] all right guys i really hope you enjoyed this video leave any questions in the comments below i'll try to get back to you and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: William Patino

Views: 37,570

Keywords: hdr, high dynamic range, what is hdr, how to shoot hdr, understanding dynamic range, what's dynamic range, landscape photography tips, landscape photography tutorial, mirrorless, sony a7, sony, will patino, photoshop hdr, histogram, what is histogram, gradient, composition, photography, free tutorial, improve landscape image, better landscapes, better photos, pro photo tips

Id: Wu2aaozm5eA

Length: 20min 32sec (1232 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 28 2022