I cant BELIEVE i've never tried these techniques before!! (landscape photography tips)

hello how are you i hope you're doing well in this video i'm gonna be talking about two different um techniques that i can't believe i've never used before and you're probably gonna watch this thinking gareth are you crazy i've done that a thousand times what are you playing at but no generally i've never done this before so i'm quite surprised and um yeah it was a bit of fun but we'll talk about that now um and the first one is basically i was down the beach with my mate dan um it was the first time i've been down the beach in absolute ages so i felt like a bit of a novice i hadn't got a clue about skate photography or all my skills and all my abilities seem to just bugger off and leave me i didn't have a clue what i was doing so yeah i felt like a complete novice once again so i didn't know what to do with filters i didn't know what to do with composition i was literally like oh you know what and as the the pretty much the tide was going out we were down mumbles bay and as the tide was going out spotted a composition i thought this might work i'll give this a go but i didn't know what to do with filters i thought i'd just get the composition and get my skills back and try and jump back on the bike slowly so as i was waiting for the seventh wave to potentially not even bother coming back i thought you know i'll just focus on the sky the sun is about to come up over the headland i will just focus and meet up for that uh lighthouse in the background and meter for the sky just so i've got that shot i've got the shot with the sky um and i know any second now probably before a chance to get a filter out uh because my bag was goodness knows where um then the sun would have come over and been too too bright for the filters anyway so i thought get the sky shot in the back and then i thought well i've got the magnetic case filter which just slaps on the front of the lens what i'll do now is i'll do um i won't put a grad on because i'm expecting that sun to go up anyway so what i'll do is i'll just expose for the foreground so focus on the foreground which is about a meter or two meters away from the lens i was on a wide angle lens i was on about f11 with a polarizer on i say the case nd8 magnetic filter and i literally just exposed for the water now what i wanted to do and for the rock so keep it on the histogram but i wanted to keep the exposure as close as possible to the background because obviously i wanted it looking natural but i wanted a one second exposure or as close to one second exposure as possible just so when the water came in if it ever did come back in again i could wait hit the shutter and wait for the water to go back out again so luckily it did it came in one more time and i got one shot though annoyingly being in novice mode i didn't actually put the cable release to use you know so i actually have to press the camera button so don't do that if you're using if you're in seascape photography always use a cable release just so you can get the wave action perfect and you're not knocking your camera so yeah there's two techniques in this video that is basically an exposure blend focus stack but only in two shots so talk us through the process of photographing the and the uh the detail the details should we say we've got the heads we've got the bums over there yeah we've got the we've got the bums bums are over there by the uh for the coffee and now he's photographing the heads looks good with your extension tube on a 50mm lens is it yeah coming out all right yeah how many mils now you've got you've got an 11 mil and a 16mm or is it an 18 mil 18 mil yeah 11 mil and 18 mil extension tubes on a 50 mil lens what aperture your camera's still switched on you take the lens off without the camera off yeah yeah oh you're daredevil you are the second one we went the other side as soon as the sun rose we went the other side of mumble's lighthouse on the side of the lighthouse other side of the sort of beach um to get a different angle using the sunlight on the on on the um the lighthouse and i flew the drone over and i was i had a shot and i thought i'll take this and dan was looking at the screen and he does this all the time and i don't know why i don't think to do this but i know he does it a lot so it's a 12 megapixel raw file and he said why don't you do a vertical pano so take one of the lighthouse at the bottom one of it in the middle and one of it at the top so you have three hdr bracketed raw files per shot so you're basically tripling your file size almost if you were to able to um the raw file the overall photograph would be almost at least double the file size so it gives you you know a workable file and i thought you know what i don't know why i don't think of doing this because you can't put on the dji what i got air mark one you can't rotate the the camera to shoot lan and shoot vertically you can only shoot landscape so i thought i'd give that a go uh no filters just straight forward and that came out really really good so a bit of a bit of a learning curve for me on this morning and i thought i'd work through the the one of the photographs and see what you think and whether or not it would help you because it meant i didn't really have to worry about grads and stuff like that so yeah which is which can be dodgy by the sea because obviously it splashes on your grads it can ruin everything right let's have a look at these files so we're in lightroom and we have got our base image which as i said was focused on the lighthouse and metered for the sky and we've got a foreground shot which again has gone back to flat even i've just changed that to landscape there we are so that's adobe landscape i always photograph them in adobe in the camera flat so i get more detail in the shadows i can see a bit better but a lot of room seems to change that back so there's our um exposure for just the foreground so you can see the sun has just come up over the headland and clipped that there so what we're going to do is we're going to merge two together and end up with something that looks a little bit like that now i'm just looking at this for the second time after i did it a couple weeks ago and i actually think it's hideous i think it looks really hdr but it's not natural looking but then you have to remember the light is the other side of it so it's kind of a bit of a balance but i do think that looks a bit too cooked for me um if you know what i mean so first thing we need to do is we need to get the white balance the same because we're going to merge two of these photographs together we're going to let's get rid of four let's get rid of that so i'll hit star four and get rid of them um i will hit the select both of them and put the white balance to about five and a half i'm not going to touch the tint but this goes about five and a half so that's got the white balance it should be the same on both again not doing it let's go that there right got the white balance five at five and r for that one copy that one apple and c on a on a on a mac and then obviously brings up this so we can just select uh check none and then clear clear everything and click white balance so we want the white balance the same on both photographs because obviously we want it to look natural so let's place the white balance on that one it's not about photograph already i suppose it gives you an idea of what it should really look like but yeah 5.6 and 12 on there so i'm going to do a very very basic on this photograph on the first paragraph we're just looking at the sky so this this is basically what the grad would have given us so we're gonna lift that a little bit i'm not gonna go too mad at this point i'm gonna merge the two of them together in photoshop and bring them back in and then we can do a bit more cooking if you will um but yeah i'm gonna try and keep it as natural as possible i'll notice in the horizon's not quite straight there and i'm probably gonna put a bit of something over them in the sky to give it a bit more color but if we come back to this one and what i'm going to do is lift the exposure this is obviously the one with me for just the water so we can see the sky's gone there now if we get that exposure about right i'm not going to do much to it because to be honest with you it it is what it is you know i don't want it i don't want it to look fake so literally that's pretty much all i do to this photograph i'm not going to do anything else the only thing i do is select both of them come down to lens correction enable profile corrections that's all i'm going to do so for this point now all we're going to do is right click both of them go to editing open as layers in photoshop click that let it open in photoshop and uh yeah we'll do some more cooking man my computer's gone slow right here we are in photoshop so there's our sky and there's our foreground first thing to do is select both of them go up to edit and auto align layers now that's important even though the camera hasn't moved the tripod hasn't moved i always click auto i never do anything else the camera hasn't moved but because you've moved the focal point there's going to be some sort of focus shift if that makes any sense because there's a physical you can see the movement in the edge of the picture there so there is some focus movement that just means now the lighthouse should be aligned in both images um which it might not have been because of the extreme difference yeah okay so that is fine so there would have been some focus shift some movement because of the difference in vocal uh range if that makes any sense so okay what we could do is we can go on to the first layer which is the sky and we can put a layer mask on that i'm gonna do a quick edit now just give you an idea and what i'm going to do is click on the layer type i'm going to go to darken and that basically gives us the ability now if i hit brush and press d that will reset the brushes so that will basically mean that we're back to black and white and d will always give us a black background so we don't want to press x and i'll switch swap them back around and then all i'm going to do is just bring back and you can see on the right hand side it's just bringing a hole in the filter that we've created there so i'm just going to gently do that 40 percent to be honest with you i'd probably even do it about 20 if i was doing it properly but i'm going to try and do it quickly and then i'm not going anywhere near the sky and i'm not going anywhere near the top of this the ocean because i want that water and everything to kind of blend in to this photograph i want it to introduce gently i don't want it to look fake you know although it is fake i don't want to look fake so yeah very very gently do that down to 20 by pressing two on the keyboard just to bring the water back into the frame but i'm really cautious about it looking fake i just don't want a fake looking image my problem is because i know it's fake it's gonna i can't get past it so i'm just gonna very carefully bring back and you get the point i don't need to go too nuts you get you get the idea so apologies if you think this already looks very fake i do but yeah and if it does all you got to do is go back and adjust the base the original raw files and just make sure they're not because this side of the rocks needs to be dark then it needs to be pitched back the lights the other side of the cast of the lighthouse so this side of the rock would be pitch black there's no two ways about it you have to remember the original file i can't do it now coming the original file is um it's black so um right then so i'm actually not that you know i want to do a quick edit here i don't want to go nuts just give you an idea i'm going to just crop that now just to get rid of all that nastiness around the edges but i'm not going to do any fancy cropping i'm just going to do that i'm going to try and get it try and keep it as is i'm just going to do i think now just bring it back into lightroom um faff around with that sky a little bit more i like the dark foreground because i know the sky would have been really really bright and the foreground would have been naturally dark so i'm gonna apple shift and e will merge those two layers now on the right hand side you see them just disappear into one layer so that's just flattening that and now will we save that as sport now just click apple and s and export that now as a tiff back into lightroom and we can work on that let's jump back into lightroom right here we are back in lightroom and here is our tiff file so we can see the uh the dark of the sky there and the foreground off that foil there and see how much dynamic range we've got but it's it's looking you know i want to keep it natural looking i don't want to go nuts do i so um what shall we do well i think it needs a bit of clarity just to make the rocks kind of pop and the detail on the rocks part but i never go above 20 with the clarity i'm not going to touch dehaze because that's going to add contrast i might hold my alt key and lift the exposure a little bit until it starts to click and you can see when it starts to clip there it's it's gone there but i'm not gonna go that high and what i'll do then is i bring the highlights down which will only affect the sky that's pretty much all i'm gonna do and now i'm gonna i still feel like that foreground is too bright so i'm actually going to put a grad on the foreground coming from the bottom hold shift let's keep it square bring the groud away up there it always goes to that for some reason let's go to exposure and that's just darken that foreground a touch but i'm also going to lift that white balance up in the foreground just to warm it so it's catching that sun so i've warmed that white balance right up so you can see if i get rid of that mask so you can see what it's done it's just warmed that water up it's got rid of that blue in the water and that's pretty much all i'm gonna do i might add a bit of clarity in that groud as well i might lift the whites in that grad just so it makes the water pop a little bit and the rocks the detail and the rocks might be quite nice so but again i don't i don't like doing much in the way of editing um i might drop the shadows at touch blacks again as well just just to give it more natural looking image feel now what i could do now is get the brush and i could brush around this area here if i give that a gentle brush now and press o you can see what it's doing and i could use that brush layer just to brighten up that water which again is not sort of the sort of thing i would normally do because i tend to i'm quite a lazy editor so i tend to edit things in in seconds and um yeah that is it so we're gonna do now is enter that that's looking a bit fake to me but there we go enter that and we'll go into the crop tool and then we'll with the crop tool hold command and in the mac i can use that level then just to go across there and straighten that horizon because that's doing my heading so i always do this twice because it just to make double sure horizons have to be perfect for me there we are now it's not a perfect picture because there's far too much mid space in this image so i'm not really mad keen on it but um oh we didn't change the aspect i'm going to change there's no cropping this toy is there let's put a 5x7 crop on there and then five percent crop and a bit more of the foreground i think the camera should have been a lot lower to close that gap in the middle and bring more of that detail in that rock in the foreground so um let's adjust the exposure bring it back up we want the histogram pretty much touching on the right hand side but i don't want it looking fake um yeah so chop the shadows a little bit so we've got a bit more natural look and on the sky i might even brighten the sky slightly hear my dog trying to get into the background just scratching at my door exposure there and then i think the sky is a bit too warm so i'm going to bring the temperature down a bit and that's it there we are i'm going to leave it at that i probably would fluff around with a little bit more on this one actually just lift the shadows a little bit i don't know i don't know you could go nuts couldn't you i find i if i can't edit a photographer normally in like less than two minutes i'd kind of bin it but yeah you get the idea and um that is the endish oh didn't have my brightness right up yeah there you go it's quite natural looking just needs that gap closing in the middle and i don't like this white bar going through here probably photoshop that out whatever that is and this clump here which looks a bit unnatural as well i don't know what it is it's hitting the rocks funny i thought i got a better photo from that but the idea was there so i thought i'd share it with you anyway i'll stick the drone photograph up and uh yeah hope you enjoyed the video hope you found it useful and i'm definitely going to adopt this focus stacking exposure blending i'm sure there's a shortcut name for it anyway cheating that's called a cheating technique from now on anyway but anyway hope you enjoyed the video if you haven't already hit the subscribe button i'll see you again soon thanks for watching guys take care [Music] you

Channel: Gareth Danks

Views: 11,082

Rating: 4.8915987 out of 5

Keywords: Landscape photography, fujifilm photographer, landscape photography tips, photography vlog, fujifilm xt3, landscape photography, tips, how to, photography tutorial, landscape, photography tips, gareth danks, drone photography, exposure blending photoshop, exposure blending lightroom, focus stacking, nikon z7 landscape photography, slow shutter photography at the sea, nikon z 7 landscape photography, mumbles lighthouse

Id: 00ob99TN754

Length: 17min 4sec (1024 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 12 2021