How to Shoot Light Rays and Sunstars

[Music] have you ever gone on a shoot where the conditions were less than ideal and the forecast predicted the exact opposite of what you wanted yeah well this was one of those shoots but sometimes just every now and then you get lucky and in spite of that gloomy forecast you get light rays like these even his royal sourness had to crack a smile when he saw this scene unfold a sight which is heart warming and yet deeply unsettling yeah I know you can barely believe it we've come to another waterfall here on Vancouver Island oh this one's ever so slightly different because it's got this beautiful old stone bridge which looks kind of historic and it's surrounded by these gorgeous trees and lovely spring foliage with right now and it made it super bright green and I love that color now we did actually come here yesterday and we timed it perfectly in that we got a really good shot about 6:00 p.m. the Sun dropped down in the West there and just landed over the top of the bridge and I got this beautiful shot with a nice Sun star and lovely light painting these mossy walls here but we were so late that we just didn't have time to do any blogging it was literally just show up and shoot and then leave so today we've come about three hours earlier in the hope so we get similar light or better light than we've got yesterday and we've prepped a little bit and now we're doing a bit of vlogging so when the light kicks off I'm gonna take you through this shot that I got yesterday and hopefully try and execute it today a little bit earlier and get a little bit better light than I got yesterday and literally seconds after I just said that a cloud must've cleared the Sun has popped through and now I've got these beautiful light rays that are hitting the spray that's coming off the water and I've got this amazing magical heavenly light ray blast just in the top of the frame absolutely stunning so yeah we can do it well this light is just on right now it's just getting better and better but because I'm shooting it almost directly into the Sun what I'm having to do is use my hands just just just above the lip of the lens hood there to block out some of that I'm getting these sunspots these flares that aren't that pleasing and yeah that's way better unbelievable yeah so I'm doing these deliberately overexposed slightly longer exposure shots because I find that when the light hits the spray it's not uniform it's it's it kind of catches the light for a split second and then it's gone by having a slightly longer exposure you have much chance of catching that moment where the light is hitting the spray a few times during that exposure and that gives you a stronger beam ha ha ha that is very juicy indeed not bad at all considering we'd only just shown up and got this shot within minutes and you can tell by the angle of the light rays that the Sun was directly overhead so I knew that the light would only get better as the day wore on and the angle of the Sun got lower with warmer tones just look at that texture and detail in the water I don't usually like spotty sunlight in my mossy waterfall scenes but this place is one of those rare locations where the super bright sunlight creates these rich dynamics with lots of pleasing contrasts now while I like this composition I knew that this was the first one of the day and as I gradually work the scene I often use longer focal lengths so that I can fill the frame with what catches my eye the most and with this scene it's definitely those rays of light so much juice Anisa tea I can't stop shooting I know that I'm supposed to be blogging and talking to you back at the white you just kick it off and I'm getting beautiful burn a juicy shot so the light is it's doing such things now that it's illuminating these white strands of water from the back it's got this kind of backlit mixing claw and all of these little particles of bubbles that get off into the air really catch that light in a very pleasing way the other thing that I've noticed as well is that the pool in the distance has a nice green glow to it and that's where that that bounce light that I was talking about earlier comes from it's hitting that pool and then bouncing on the other side of the bridge a cloud just pay more but it's gone now but then I'm gonna switch to the camera view and talk you through exactly what I'm doing with this shot hopefully that cloud will disappear we'll get that same light again okay so here's what's got me all excited about this shot I mean if you look in the distance we've got this moss on these this greenery it's a rock there with some masala that's glowing absolutely fantastic and look at this bounce why that I'm talking about you can see it on the underside of the bridge it's also backlighting this mosque very pleasingly and these little bits of grass in that grass and then the the Sun is blasting in from the side and then moving it in all of this box here so it's like there's so much going on in terms of what the light is doing and the directions of the light like I just said if you look at these strands of water there what were this shows up on the video I don't know if it will but that back light that's hitting the water makes it it's kind of textured and again we're getting particle I can even see backlit in this branchy I can even see spiders webs it's absolutely goddess I would have to stop talking because I need to switch back to see remove the light is picking up okay I'm not gonna lie I did get something of a photo boner just that hopefully you can see this on this little thing but the light rays that are blasting in right now it's just it's transcendence it's juicy it's epic it's everything I ever wanted ha ha ha ha ha I hope you're getting some good shot there because I am getting juice factor 11 right now but the problem is I can't vlog and shoot this at the same time and this light is so good that I just can't miss it I can't miss this shot so I apologize if I'm being a little bit spotty with the vlogging I'm neglecting you a little bit but this is just too good to pass up yeah I'll run through this real quick as you can see these trees for at least tree limbs are lovely beautifully backlit and of course we've got this spray that's pulled up and the light is hitting it if I block the light you'll see that's where it is right now it's black white in everything I've got this bounce light under the bridge I've got back light on these branches I've got light rays and it's light in this water absolutely majestically with a shot like this you can't go wrong you just gotta show up get the right settings and take the shot and keep on shooting that is juice factor 11 this second shot of the day might actually be my favorite as I mentioned earlier I always tend to work further into a scene with tighter focal lengths to really feature my favorite aspects of a scene and in this case I love the balance between the bridge the light rays and the waterfall and again I wanted to capture a lot of texture in the water with only a little bit of motion blur and it turned out that half a second was the ideal shutter speed which is a little bit longer than I actually would have expected what you're looking at here is actually a single exposure and surprisingly I managed to get all of the dynamic range that are needed out of this single raw file which did surprise me because of how contrast see the light was but it turned out to be an easy image to process and if you compare this image to the first shot of the day you'll definitely notice that this one has a much warmer tone to the light simply because the Sun dropped lower in the sky as it reached towards Golden Hour which I guess we call it Golden Hour for a good reason gap in hogging this spot from Uncle jump in for the last hour so I think it's time to let him game now that the light bulb wrap for my joke it is pretty brilliant or maybe not God as I mature as an artist and I use the term that you were very liberally there I tend to find and you've seen this in my other videos I'm sure I tend to find that I look more for abstract details rather than a big scene like the scene that I've been shooting for the last hour or so I tend to shoot the big scene first and then what I feel a bit more relaxed and more familiar with the scene then I'll spot these smaller details and this is a really really interesting detail that I've got here right now so what is that fascinates me about this shot is as an abstract see where you take this away from its background I just love these tendrils of water and it's all about the way that the light is hitting that from the side right now it's a very pleasing look to it if it was overcast and I didn't have that kind of light I probably wouldn't go for this shot at all but I love how these little bits of I don't know I'm gonna call that moss but I'm pretty sure it isn't moss this lovely bit of green moss or whatever it is there it's stationary and the water is just passing through it it's like frozen in time and torrent of bridging motion and the two together it's just a beautiful simple viewer shot and like I said this is as I get older as I do more photography this is tends to be what I look more for I think I've turned it into a more grumpy I figured I'm going around with it way too long take another shot sometimes it's nice to capture subtle images instead of huge impressive vistas and I also think it's a good thing to have artistic goals in your landscape and nature photography and that's why I always challenge myself to look for these intimate detail shots or I could just see that printed four foot wide and hanging on your mantelpiece very taste delicious as landscape photographers we don't always get successful days like this especially with a new location that you still getting familiar with but I was rather ecstatic about this old stone bridge because I could also see the potential for beautiful autumn images and if we get lucky next winter a frozen waterfall see which you know I love [Music] witness the polished aviation skills of grumped n' airways a be sure to check out Adams channel to see that clip so about this brilliant idea for making money with photography what we do is we make these really awful musical jingles and they're so bad the rounds that we use pay us money not to do it anymore look you're rich well let me drop out here earlier today we really didn't have much hope for this kind of light it was quite cloudy but we were almost certain it was gonna rain and had we known that it was gonna be like this we would have been ecstatic we came here kind of almost with heavy hearts and very low expectations and this has turned out to be better than I would imagine we've had light lives we've had backlight we've had all kinds of gorgeous dynamics and the colors this beautiful green is fantastic the water level I would say is perfect and we've just got shot after shot after shot I think what my plan now is to stay put pretty close to this spot and try and recreate that shot that I got yesterday with the Sun stars it sets in the west perhaps just composite a little bit tighter than I did yesterday and see if I can refine the position of the camera just a little bit and get a slightly better shot that this light is absolutely dynamite very very happy right we're talking through this composition so what I love about this there you have to pretend that you can't see this tripod and camera in the shot I'm I'm sure in usually show in your image new foot if you pretend that that's gone what I'm loving about this stuff obviously the light is fabulous right now but I love but in the in the composition what I'm looking at is this I love this tree that's leaning in from the left creating a nice frame and of course at the top of the shot is framed by the art which is lovely and then you've got the water that runs into the center of the frame and then runs out but I feel like it's not unbalanced because I love these rocks you see in the foreground with these largest ferns peppered all over the place now I would probably and this is a sixteen by nine and usually I can pull three by twos in this case I actually prefer this sixteen by nine so I might go with that but I might actually crop it even tighter to a four by two I just chopped off some of this foreground so that it's it's a kind of a narrow shot going across like that almost like a dove and then what I'm going to do with the processing and I think this is a good thing whatever you're shooting if you want to kind of imagine how am I going to process this and then depending on how you decide you're gonna process it they'll tend to govern how you shoot it but what I think I'm gonna do is bring some of this this area here it's kind of dark so I'm gonna bring that out when I process it brighten it up so that it balances out with this side of the frame and also with the top of the frame but the light is so golden yellow now it's absolutely fantastic song I'm have to stop sharing this blog now and crack on and shoot some stills so excitement so how'd you go today Oh some Jew siliceous shots Yui shot and I just love springtime here on I just love the vibrant greens your issue comes at workshop recording well maybe I would have done if you'd have invited me you help me teach you a fixture what teach it with you next year huh sounds like a good idea how many people ten ten people yeah what kind of locations you gonna shoot some Brio Beach got a beautiful waterfall and there's some big trees there and then we've got mystic Beach another waterfall with a cane and then there's Hannibal Beach try pools or that's my favorite what about some gnarly cedar trees avatar grove or some beautiful western red cedar there accommodations included included without meals meals are all included well this sounds brilliant but if I wasn't teaching this I'd sign up for this I were to so this is available for just ten people honest if you want to get on this workshop jump on it to see you there okay so what we're doing now is we're shooting that classic Sun star shot which I don't really do much of that these days but but a shot right there so just I just couldn't resist if I'm doing this I'm changing my apertures to f-16 or or f-22 to give there a better star and then I'm gonna blend that with the other exposures which is shot at f/8 and f/11 but maximum sharpness and that should give me the ultimate shot except this DJI Osmo is in my shot in the bottom corner so thank for you to go write my top tip when you shoot in a sun.star and you've got your shot but yeah it's moved and your star is disappear but you know that the Sun is there you just gotta move your position is off that it'll work this way where you just raise your camera of it oh that works there you go I mean you're tighten up the aperture to 16 frankly expose you and now I've got a few more minutes of some star available to me that I didn't have before just by raising the tripod up and then you know once you tried that and that still doesn't work try moving back move to the side usually you can adjust your position they get a little bit more time out of it if you didn't quite get it perfect the first time around oh the cheeky saucepot just goes to show you can never take your eyes off dr. Grothman stein so here is the sun.star shot as the sun went down over the bridge and this is a blend of two shots one at f/16 to give me a very detailed sun star and another shot at f/8 to give me maximum sharpness throughout the scene and what I'm loving the most is the golden quality of that light I would have loved to have gotten some white rays but by the time the Sun dropped to this position it was barely poking through the leafy canopy so its brightness was somewhat diminished but all in all we'd had a fantastic shoe with some great shots and now it was time to be on our way so that we could start packing for our trip to Scotland it must be not be startled otherwise its pants maybe chat do not surprise an uncle a ship's compass Maximus because they have a tendency to eat a lot of boiled eggs and this makes them very gassy and very fragrant and they release their gases only in confined spaces usually vehicles oh he's moving further into the scene always a sign that this potentially a decent shot as usual when you ask them culeros rumpus maximus did you get a good shot the answer is usually a sour face which you can see in evidence right now okay so nice to finally Oh God shush all wise never to get too close because he does have a passion for boiled eggs which make him extremely flatulent often in very confined space now you'd never want to startle an uncle a shish grumpus Maximus because they do have a passion for boiled eggs and the fragrance that is emitted from those wild eggs often within confined spaces such as a vehicle [Music]

Channel: fototripper

Views: 66,307

Keywords: landscape, photography, uncle grumpy, adam gibbs, light rays, sunstars, vancouver island

Id: hwncjfx74Jc

Length: 19min 23sec (1163 seconds)

Published: Sat May 11 2019