I Wish I'd Learned This Sooner - My Best Landscape Photography of 2020

[Music] well it's 4 p.m i've had two hours of sleep and i do have a face like a grieving angela merkel but i'm ecstatically happy because i've got fog down here at piper's lagoon and piper's lagoon is one of my favorite spots because of these gary oak trees that you can see here and if i can get a shot of that with fog behind it just to isolate it a bit and ideally backlit maybe even with light rays i'll be one very happy photo tripper so while i'm waiting for the perfect combination of light and fog to hit that tree what i thought i'd do is give you guys a tour of some of last year's best images and what i'm going to do is explain to you exactly how i shot those images and put it all together so you might even want to grab a pencil and a pad make some notes this is going to be a good one now there's one thing i wish i'd learned sooner when i began my journey as a landscape photographer but before we get to that just do me a favor just hit that subscribe button and tickle my bell but we will get to it eventually just bear with me okay so this first image is the epic wave shot down at cape disappointment last january shot with the f4 boys all of us shot thousands of frames that day and there were 200 people on that beach everyone probably shot thousands of frames and what's funny about this shot is i picked out of all of those thousands of images the exact same moment in time that adam picked when he picked his favorite shot from that whole trip i had no idea what he was going to pick and he had no idea what i was going to pick and when we both shared our images to decide which ones we were going to put in the video for the f4 road trip we both picked that exact moment in time totally different compositions adam focused on just the wave a nice disembodied wave shot was a brilliant shot and then my shot was different because it had that landscape in the background but still quite interesting that out of thousands of frames we both picked that one little millisecond of time as our best shot from that day and i also got some other really good images from that day but i'm going to spread those out through this video now did this image make it into the book of course it did so there's the fog it looks like a pretty high wall of fog i really hope that it doesn't just pass me by what i need is for it to be behind the tree there and then i'm going to get an epic shot but fingers crossed it might just pass me by i'll keep waiting well it's actually happening the fog came in it's backlit by the sun absolutely fantastic it's so gorgeous i've actually got the shakes i have wanted this shot for years and the reason why i want the fog is because the background is so complicated you've got lots of trees in the distance loads of houses a hill it just kind of interferes with that beautiful shape of the tree but when it's backlit and separated by fog and light in such a way and also side lit as well uh it just just absolutely perfect and what i love about that light that you can see on the trunk is that it's soft it's very it's very bright but it's very muted it's got a very even graduation from bright to shadow area and that's just going to be so easy to process oh man this light is fantastic oh god [Music] i'm sure that you know that feeling when something that you visualized and dreamt about for years suddenly becomes a reality it's such a fulfilling experience which to some people might seem quite ridiculous but to me the advent of that little bit of fog and light is absolutely priceless oh and i promise i will get around to that one thing that i wish i'd learned sooner well the fog rolled out again so let's talk about this next image of the alabama hills and this was shot while we were on the f4 road trip and that morning i just finished shooting a tutorial with greg and then he disappeared to go and film a tutorial with uncle grumpy and i was just kind of walking around just wondering what to do just looking for extra compositions and then i found this shot and i was so overjoyed but at the same time really upset because greg had gone and it would have been so cool if we'd have been able to film me shooting that and giving you a tutorial of it uh honestly i have been waiting years for these conditions i've come down here hundreds of times and i've never seen this perfect combination of fog and beautiful side light slash backlight oh honestly i feel like it's my birthday and christmas and i've won the lottery yeah i think what i might have to do is just concentrate on what i'm doing get these shots then head home and shoot the rest of this video [Music] tremendous you can just see the beginnings of a ray of light wrapping around that branch as the sun slices through the fog to illuminate the trunk of this majestic gary oak tree and there must have been a gap in the fog at this point because the sunlight was more intense and had a much warmer glow so i can't decide if i prefer this warmer light or the cooler light from the first shot oh and i haven't forgotten about that one thing i was going to tell you well that is it the sun has gone down i've lost that lovely side light and backlight and the fog's just vanished just like that it's just gone so i'm probably just going to call it quits head home and we'll get on to the next image right i'm back at home after that wonderful shoot so let's get on with the next image and let's do this one this sand cut beach moonscape so in order to get this shot i had to focus stack obviously because i was so close to those rocks in the foreground that you can see all that shiny wet sheen on that i had to focus stack and of course with it being a night image it's a long exposure i think that's a 30 second exposure so what i did was i focused on that light in the background so hopefully you can see that orange glow in the distance that's what i focused on and this was the zeiss batiste 18 millimeter so i took an arrangement of shots with the focus on that so the next thing that i focused on was the tip of that cliff there and i didn't change any other settings i just kept all my settings the same the only thing i changed was the focus and then finally i focused on that little ridge that you can see in the foreground immediately in front of the camera i didn't auto stitch those in photoshop i just masked in that foreground manually which was dead easy to do because you got that bit of white water there as a nice little separator so it felt complicated to do at the time because it was dark i was in a precarious position it was uh rather stressful but in the end i'm really happy with the finished result and what i think i really love about this image is that contrast between warm and cold so everything's quite cold because it's a moonscape but then you've got a lovely little warm light in the distance there so i really like that one okay so this image from tent ridge it really is one of those images that is caused by the light when we first got up there i was looking down in this valley and i didn't see anything particularly interesting so i was actually facing the exact opposite direction and i was quite happy with my composition the light was really good and it's that classic story of look over your shoulder look at what's behind you and so i did i did the classic turnover and that's what i saw and as soon as i saw that lovely patchy light down in the valley i thought right that's my shot and i just abandoned the original shot focused on that got that very very simple and pure composition and i really love how that turned out i'm not even sure if i even bracketed that but what i did do for sure is i definitely did quite a lot of dodging in those highlights just to brighten them up a little bit and i made some of the darker areas a little bit darker so it's kind of like overall it was kind of a selective contrast boost and then in those highlights one of the things that i did was just added a little bit of a yellow tint to those contrast dodgers in the highlights just to bring that that highlight a little bit warmer and just set it off against that cooler shadow tone and i'm really happy with the end result on that one quite delicious you might be asking is this in your book chasing or with gavin hardcastle the answer would be yes oh this one this this was a right bugger to do i i won't lie so this image required five vertical frames to put together this panorama and so if you look at those mountain peaks there they're really pointy and stretched well in real life i mean they are quite dramatic but they're not as pointy as that i'll be honest so the reason how i got them so pointy is because i angled my lens my 16 millimeter lens down quite excessively and that of course stretches the peaks because they're at the edge of your lens distortion in that sweet spot and then when i stitch the panorama together of course when you stitch a panel you can kind of choose how it looks if it's spherical there's all these different shapes and the shape that i like definitely squeezed the mountains a little bit so i was really happy with that result and what i also did with the river there is i did a quick selection of the river so so i had a layer mask that was just the river and i i turned the brightness down quite a lot on that because it was jumping out of the frame and i didn't want the river so bright that you don't pay attention to the mountains because to me that composition is all about those mountains the river's important but without the mountains it's nothing the other worst thing about doing this images i was at an absolute break point with the mosquitoes i'd been shooting for i think 10 days maybe two weeks and i had all kinds of welts all over me because i've been basically dined on by an army of mosquitoes and i was just sick of it by that that point and i was recording a tutorial for my course uh tricks of the trade and i was just losing it during that tutorial i was full-blown uh losing my patience get out of my frame mosquito there's nobody there get out geez get out okay so while i'm waiting for the light to do anything interesting and if you're wondering if this image is in the book chasing or with gavin hardcastle it is oh this beautiful sunset at moraine lake [Music] what made this image good again is just the light and getting an original shot of moraine lake it is impossible i'm not even going to say that that's particularly original so down by this spot i got this lovely composition that massive reflection i've got this lovely rock in the foreground which obviously i had to focus stack and if you look at how bright those highlights are in the the distance up on the top right of the frame of course i had to expose your bracket because the the dynamic range was insane but it's that light it's that smoky atmosphere with that lovely bright side light coming in and the smoke gave it this really soft tone to the light it was very very pastel and you could see you know it was with the naked eye it wasn't just what you picked up on the camera and i'll be honest i i kind of poo poo moraine lake because i've shot it thousands of times but maybe hundreds of times but i've shot it so many times you see so many pictures of it that i just kind of lost interest i was there to shoot content for my course but when you see light like that you get inspired you get excited and you shoot away and that's also in the book this spot the chilcotin river in bc i absolutely loved this spot now what i had to do to create this image i actually started off with a wider frame and i just had like one tenth of the frame was the sky what's the point you might as well just get rid of it it's not providing anything whatsoever so i just zoomed in a little bit tighter excluded the sky entirely and then the composition really came to life so for me it's all about those abstract shapes and forms just the hoodoos these bushes in the foreground the curve in the river and of course the curve in that winding switchback road there's so much going on in this image that i could stare at it for hours but the colors also really set it off in terms of the technique really i didn't need to do that much i do think i focus stacked it i probably did focus stat this so with focus on those yellow bushes in the foreground then i probably focused a bit further down the ridge just before the river and then i will have focused in a far distance on that windy road so just three focus points for a focus stack there and it probably stitched together quite easily and then of course i i dodged a lot of those highlights so if you see the highlights in the yellow trees there i think they are poplars but the river there believe it or not when you look at that river you think oh that's a bit that's a bit blue it's bit uh intense actu actually i had to take the vibrance down in the river like you wouldn't believe so what i did is i used photoshop's quick selection tool made a selection of that whole river and then i just reduced the color vibrance quite considerably because it was so blue and vivid it just looked completely overcooked and fake so i had to reduce that quite a lot and then i i kind of popped the contrast in it just so that you could really see definition in those shadows that are caused by the light blasting through those trees there but uh what an absolutely glorious morning that was fantastic is it in the book i don't think you need to ask it's in the book oh this image of amethyst lake in the tonquin valley of jasper national [Music] park honest to god that that was one of the best mornings of my entire life not just in terms of my photography career but personally as well it was it was just a fantastic adventure and it was hard one you know we really had to hike a long distance and uh suffer a little bit but it was totally worth it i'll put up with any amount of suffering if i think there's a chance of me getting a shot of that well not maybe not any amount of suffering but i'll put up with a lot of crap if i think i can get a shot like that and it was just an absolutely perfect morning it's it's it'll stay with me for the rest of my life you know you're there it's pretty much silent you can hear the odd loon making its call off in the distance and then the only other sound was just camera shutters going it was just absolutely it was sublime and then when we got that light when those peaks just lit up like that oh it just what more can you ask for and the reason why i was there was to shoot content for chapter three form and flow which is my my composition course and what i needed for that whole chapter is i needed somewhere that had really interesting abstract shapes because i was doing a whole video about abstract shapes and when i stumbled upon this it was just like it was like it was made to order it couldn't have been more perfect but then even once i'd once i filmed that and i got my shot i was just stood there gawking just i just couldn't believe what i was seeing absolutely magnifique is it in the book i think you know oh oh yeah this shot of lake o'hara that's another one that was hard one it wasn't easy to get we we had a very long hike only 22 kilometers but we did it all in one day we hiked up and then we hiked back and this shot was just it was just begging to be taken and even though i've seen gajillions of shots of lake o'hara i've never quite seen this composition before so i was quite happy to find something that i'd not seen before and then when i got these clouds and i got that light it was just absolutely tremendous and what i did to get this shot is obviously i focus stacked so the rock that you see in the in the very close foreground there that had to be focused on its own separate focus point then i focused on the rock right in the middle that's just inside of that reflection the peak there focused on that and then of course i focused on the distance and then once i was focusing on the distance and i was doing that shot i basically just kept shooting to get different cloud shapes so that i could choose the one that i liked the best but what an absolutely fantastic day that was the the park warden didn't believe that we were stupid enough to hike in 11k take shots and then hike out 11k and uh she looked at my camera bag and said uh are you camping i said no it's it's just full of chocolate and then the rest is camera gear is that in the book yes it is so this is the best tip that i can give you in your landscape photography this is far more important than anything else forget about gear forget about photoshop skills none of that makes any difference if you don't have this one thing and that one thing is persistence so this image here it's the storm season on the west coast of vancouver island and of course i've got crashing waves i've got gulls going crazy some beautiful light just mist everywhere absolutely fantastic so to get this shot i needed to have persistence i did not get this shot on my very first attempt i watched the forecast everything was looking good seven times i went out there to try and get this shot each time was a complete bust except for the seventh time and every time that you go it's a seven hour drive and a full tank of gas so it's a long day out you're sacrificing any of the work that you would get done you're spending money on fuel and food and you're spending all of your time but most painfully is the disappointment because you get excited you get your hopes up you set off thinking i'm gonna get this shot and if you're anything like me you'll have this vision in mind this was the vision that i had in mind and i wanted it i wanted it so bad so when i repeatedly went there and i didn't get it it was a heartbreak every single time so this time when i finally got the shot after much persistence it just felt fantastic i actually vlogged this so this will be coming up fairly soon as i said persistence is by far the most important aspect to your landscape photography if you're not there if you're not in the right place at the right time it doesn't matter what gear you've got how good your technique is how fantastic you are at processing all of that is a complete irrelevance if you're not in the right place at the right time you've got to be able to just kind of say well i failed that time and that time and that time but you just keep going i know it's painful but when you get there when you finally get that shot it's absolutely worth all of those failed attempts and to just witness this moment it was just fantastic to be there the pounding of the waves eagles going crazy spray hitting your face and your camera and is it in the book yes it's in the book this shot another wave image this was one of those disembodied wave images when we were doing that whole f4 road trip and we were here at cape disappointment i wanted an assortment of wave images that featured the landscape but i also wanted some disembodied waves that had nothing else just waves and birds going crazy and this was just i could see this wave rolling in i thought right that is that is the shot for me and you know dead simple really to get that shot all i did was i put my camera in high speed continuous burst i had back button auto focus with a wide flexible spot and you just basically track the wave as it's coming in you hold down auto focus constantly focusing on that wave and at the same time if you're hand held i would have my vibration reduction switched on on my lens so as you hold down the shutter it stabilizes that 100 to 400 lens which you really need it on a lens like that because otherwise it's going to be super blurry although i was shooting at i think i think one thousandth of a second so i mean it kind of i don't know if you really need vibration reduction when you're shooting with a shutter speed that fast and also one of the things that i learned was to drastically under expose my images because if you look at that you'll see the light was hitting the wave from behind and then of course the front of the wave was in shadow so there's a lot of basically very dark shadows and very bright highlights so i exposed for the highlights which meant that i had to drastically under expose that image but that also helped with that super fast shutter speed so that i didn't have to have too much of a high iso what a moment what a fantastic day what a fantastic experience again that goes down as one of the best shoots of my entire life okay i really liked this shot of mono lake in the sierra nevada of [Music] california [Music] this was immediately after the f4 road trip we just finished filming and we just spent i think maybe four days in las vegas which to me is the of the united states and it's just a grotesque and horrible place that i couldn't wait to get out of so as soon as we escaped we drove north and on our way back to vancouver island stopped off at mono lake and this was a sunset i did shoot a vlog about this so you can actually see me creating this image but i basically had to get right down on my knees because these two for mounds are very very small i would say that at most three or four feet tall so to get right low down to the ground and shoot up towards these twofer mounts and to get this shot i had to focus that the foreground middle and the background and then of course with that sun star that you can see for that particular exposure i think i shot at you see the f16 or f22 all of the other exposures would have been i think f8 or f11 blended those and then at the end i blended in the sun star shot with the much narrower aperture just because it gives you a more pleasing sun star combined all of those obviously auto exposure bracketed and it was actually a pretty easy shot to put together i dodged the highlights with a contrast curves adjustment layer just kind of brightened up the already bright areas and that was it i didn't need to do a lot to that image and if you're wondering if that's in the chasing or with gavin hardcastle landscape photography book it is frost glow the most photographed little tree on planet earth [Music] i've shot this tree so many times it's ridiculous and this morning i wasn't actually going there to shoot the tree i was driving past on my way to the beach and it was about eight eight am i think the sun had just popped up but the light hadn't hit the um the lake until that moment that i was driving past and it was just a glance it was just driving past it whoa bloody hell i love i love some of that so i pulled a hook turned around and parked up and got right in the lake to get this shot so there's a vlog all about this i'll put a link a link to that there but um what a beautiful moment that was and there's not really much to tell you about that image i i don't think i even bracketed for that i think it might have been a single exposure and it was shot wide open because i wanted a little bit of blur in the background so that the tree really popped and jumped out of the frame very very simple i don't care if it's a cliche when you see that light you've got to stop you've got to pull over even if you've already rinsed it it's in the book oh i'll be honest i'm quite proud of this image [Music] actually the reason why i picked this particular frame out of the 4000 that i shot that day is because it's different to all the others all the other frames that i shot that day i was concentrating on the moment where the wave is at its biggest the most dramatic you know well what i thought was the most dramatic and i was looking back at these extra frames and i thought wow i really like the moment when the wave collapses it looks like this column of rain just falling down and that's what that moment is that is the collapse of a wave the wave has just reached its absolute total moment of power and then it's just fallen just completely destroyed and i just loved that moment in time so then i started to really pay attention to those so rather than shooting the wave come in as the wave crested and peaked and exploded that's when i would hit the shutter and i would shoot that collapse of that massive wave and i will confess that i i think one of those birds was pasted in i'm not going to tell you which you can you can post a comment and let me know which one you think but yeah that's a single frame except for maybe one pasted in bird and all i did is a bit of a split toning effect and then some dodging and burning so i really wanted to accentuate those bright highlights and make some of the darker areas even darker and then i i darkened the sky a little bit to make that collapsing wave pop a little bit more so yeah from one of the 4 000 or more shots that i i captured that day that was one of my favorites and yes it's in the book ah this shot of the twofer mount at mono lake so that was another f4 road trip shot so we all got to mono lake the night before we didn't even check the weather we just had this itinerary and we just said let's just go whatever the weather and we arrived at mono lake and i've never seen it snow there before i've been a lot of times in the summer but i've never been in the winter and in january it snowed quite heavily the night before and we were just in raptures at how beautiful all of this landscape was with this snow on top of it so that next morning this is a sunrise shot the next morning the other three guys nick page thomas heaton adam gibbs and greg snell sorry brodie mcbride they walked down to the beach to get some super wide angle lens shots and i looked up at the sky and thought uh the sky is not going to do anything so i'm going to try and get a shot that doesn't require any sky so i hiked all the way up this hill so that i could get above the twofer mounds and i shot with the 100 to 400 i think at 400 millimeter to get this composition and i really love how different it looks it's i've never seen a shot like this of mono lake but of course by the time i got up there the clouds lit up so i was kind of pissed off because i knew they'd be down on the beach getting these epic pink clouds but in the end i didn't care because i was really happy with this no clouds no sky no nothing just beautiful glowing side light on those two for mounts so there you go those are my best images of last year and quite honestly some of the best moments of my entire life and i hope you wrote down some of those notes there because that was a lot of tips i thought there was a lot of tips there persistence will improve your landscape photography more than anything else and of course my book chasing awe with gavin hardcastle is available for pre-order there's a link in the description below those will ship out next month all right thanks for watching everybody bye bye do you

Channel: fototripper

Views: 62,415

Keywords: landscape, photography, pipers lagoon, mono lake, cape disappointment, thomas heaton, nick page, adam gibbs, greg snell, fog, alabama hills, moraine lake, lake o'hara, jasper, tonquin valley, sunrise, sunset, waves, storm, foggy, vancouver island

Id: vVNUJz7KNb4

Length: 30min 51sec (1851 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 17 2021