Landscape Photography: Parys Mountain, Amlwch, Anglesey (Ep #181)

this video is not sponsored and has no adverts hello and thanks for joining me for some more landscape photography i've got a couple of shoots for you today we're going to start off just a couple hundred meters from my front door down at the river [Music] you probably can't see it from there but there's one single red hawthorne berry left over from autumn hanging over this stream and i'm only a couple hundred yards from my front door and i walk around the lake here pretty much every day when it's not tipping down had a lot of rain recently which is why the river is so full at the moment i spotted that berry on the way home from my walk today and i thought there's got to be an image there it's all by itself and it's right at the end of this gnarled little hawthorne twig hanging over the river and i thought oh yeah well with all the white water running down through if i drop that out of focus and get my shutter speed just right that make quite a nice backdrop i've been playing around with the shutter speed and because i've got the background dropped out of focus i'm shooting at f 7.1 but because i'm quite close into the berry and luckily i've got absolutely no wind at all so even with a long shutter it's not moving so i can get it nice and sharp if i used it longer than a second what's happening then is the water is just smoothing out into just a big white smudge and i'm losing the nice streaky texture that i'm looking for so i'm using a three-stop nd filter to keep my shutter speed in combination with an aperture of 7.1 shutter speed of a second that's just about perfect my composition is i spent quite a bit of time working on it actually and i decided that i wanted the low half of the image with the streaks leading you up to the berry the berries right at the top and the end of the twig just reaches into the top right corner so a lot of negative space but i just quite like the overall look of it that's all i'm going to take today just that one image it's actually the middle of the afternoon on a working day so i've got to get back to my desk now we'll have a look at it on the computer later see what i can make of it so what i want to do is just quickly run you through the raw files and demonstrate to you what was going on in my head while i was capturing the pixels and then you'll see what i did with them so here's the first image a five second exposure pretty overexposed although not at all clipped as you can see from the histogram but that gave me an idea of what i was going to be working with and so we dial down the shutter speed to just two seconds that's looking a bit better but when i was down with the camera i didn't like this area of twigs up in the corner and this area behind the image here kind of didn't work for me either so by angling the camera down a little you can see that i've now created this negative space at the bottom i've got this nice triangular shape going on here i need to offset this slightly more but my composition is getting closer to what i was going to be happy with playing around with a shutter speed we're now down at one second this is shot at f 2.8 and the problem i had with this is that this area here just isn't working for me the depth of field is dropping off too quickly and i really want to have these bits of twig a little bit sharper to give them a bit better separation so if we narrow down our aperture f7.1 yep that works much better as far as i can see i'm liking the composition i've got this slightly offset i'm shooting at a second and really it's just about picking the best exposure for the definition in the water another one that i took had a bigger splodge of of white water going up through the middle um yeah not too bad but with just a little bit of cropping i felt that this one worked the best i've got two distinct lines of water coming through it and i decided that this was the raw file i was going to work with now one thing that's really important to me is i always check around the edges of an image to and make a note of of what i'm going to need to do with it now in this case there are two key things that i needed to deal with firstly this little highlight up here that runs off the edge it it's pulling my eye away from the berry so that's gonna need to go also over on this side you see this little uh branch way off in the background that's completely out of focus but it's still a distraction so we'll get rid of that as well and then while i was at it i thought this little stem here where the berries missing looks a bit lost so i think we'll probably deal with that as well and after a pretty basic bit of processing on this image this is what we end up with um and i was quite happy with this i'll let you have a longer look at that at the end in the little gallery that i always put up of the images for each video now i'm going to take you out to the north side of anglesey up near amlok a place called paris mountain it's quite well known a huge copper mine area with quite another worldly landscape [Music] paris mountain really is a fascinating landscape and if you ever get the chance to come to anglesey and you filled your boots with coastal photography it's well worth a visit it's almost like the surface of mars it's how you might envisage it with all the really fantastic colors dark reds bright golds and oranges in a landscape that is really struggling to come back from the impact we've had on it which is why of course uh it's one of the targets for my project i've picked this afternoon as exactly the sort of conditions that shows this place off to its best my tip to you if you come to visit is forget it unless the sun is shining brightly and ideally not in mid-summer you want to be at this time of year somewhere between november and february because you'll get hours of really nice side light not too intense but enough as you can see from the backdrop behind me to really pop the colors because without any sunlight it just looks drab and uninteresting it's next to impossible to get a decent picture out of it what i've been doing is trying to get some close-ups of the uh out of season heather with the gouge in the landscape as its backdrop i'm not sure that that's been particularly successful but we'll have a chat about those images when we get back what i'm working on here is shooting right across the uh the pit to some buildings over on the far side now if i walked around there and got any nearer to them and filled my frame with them they lose context what i wanted to do today was to use the fact that the sun is in just the right angle to illuminate the ground in front of them there's a spoil heap that's bright red in color and the rain has washed these uh ridges in it and each ridge is catching the light so it's almost like uh almost like a you know when you bake a flan and you tip it out and you've got that rippy edge you know what i mean you'll see it in the pictures anyway my challenge is using the long lens around about 100 120 millimeters in a really stiff breeze as we've got today has been getting my shots really sharp so i've taken a bit of a gamble with the iso i've cranked it up as far as a thousand uh and i'm shooting f 3.5 i've done some test shots gone in really close and at f 2.8 which is as wide as this lens will go the building because it's so far away from me is just ever so slightly softer than i'd like it so just by closing down my aperture a touch to 3.5 getting it quite nice and sharp but that's allowing me to get my shutter speed up to one over 640. it's really nature is really struggling to come back and that's because the ground is is open rock there's no soil formed at all and it's really toxic unbelievably toxic and that makes it very very difficult even for pioneer species to to get any sort of a hold but because of that it still makes for interesting photography because there is quite a lot of heather i'm gonna head up and have a go at shooting the tower in a minute with this nice side light on it and that'll be it for today [Music] i'm in danger of looking like a wildlife photographer tucked in down here at this low angle but to be honest with you i'm on a pile of rocks and if i knelt down it would crush my knees terribly so my arse is slightly more padded than my knees anyway um what i've done is i've found this absolutely fantastic wind-blown stunted hawthorne bush that's clinging on here and it's about the only little bit of vegetation any higher than the heather for miles around now i'd thought that my image from this angle of the pumping tower would be across this bed of heather where i've got the light catching the layers in it leading you up to the tower and i mucked about with that for a while and when i spotted this bush it was a no-brainer this this was going to be far better i've been so fortunate with the light today it's absolutely fabulous this beautiful soft golden side light for the last couple of hours and it's still going on right now i'm not going to bother shooting sunset from up here this is probably going to be the last one for this particular session but it's a time of year when the this got loads of berries on it and most of the bushes around where i live as you may have seen from the shot that i showed you earlier they've got hardly any berries left so i'm amazed they haven't all been blown off but what it does is it gives me that fantastic juxtaposition of the derelict old tower with the vegetation making an effort to reinstate itself i'm not actually going to talk much about the settings on this one because i've taken a whole range of them and we'll settle on uh what the final image is going to be when we get back with it so you'll be able to have a look at what i settled on there i've tried higher compositions the problem with that was that the bush was kind of being lost by the background a little bit so i felt this was better perfect light for polarizing of course i'm angled onto the sun and it's really punching that saturation quite nicely for me even though of course it's likely that i'll dial it down a bit in post but it just really makes those colors nice and rich and vibrant the difficulty as has been all afternoon it's a really sharp breeze the tree is blowing around and i want those berries pin sharp i've got some lovely uh lit up bits of grass in the mid ground i don't mind them blowing around a little bit a bit of movement in the mid ground and i've kind of got a slab of not much going on over to the right hand side so they'll put something in that part of the image but um i've got essentially i've got the bush on the third and the bottom left and the tower on the third or the top right it's a bit formulaic but nevertheless i've spent quite a bit of time uh trying different positions out and and that really was the only one that that really seemed to work well now i've got three images that i decided to work with when i'd been through my raw files and what i'm going to do is just show you the steps of interest in my sequence going from the raw file through to the finished item and we're going to start with an image that i didn't really talk you through when we were out and about now this was the first image i took and it's always been a tough composition for me trying to get across in a single shot how epic the landscape is looking across that chasm having decided which raw files i'm going to work with one of the first things that i do is i look at them really carefully and i consider every aspect of them and sometimes i'll even write notes as to what i'm going to want to do with them so why don't we start at the top of this image work our way down and i'll tell you what my thought processes were as i started to tackle it starting up here in the sky as you can see it it's completely overexposed there's no detail in it at all it's not clipped there's plenty to work with there but that's going to need quite a bit of attention coming further down you see these wind turbines now i don't have a problem with wind turbines in the landscape but in this context they are distracting and i want to get rid of those so they'll need to go now coming over here see there's a little snake of ramblers they're gonna have to go coming down uh this pond is too bright gonna need to tone that down a bit as with this one further down here as well and then the path that runs round here in this lovely sweeping curve that's going to need to be brightened up a bit to give it a bit more punch in this mid ground the composition overall is straight out of camera i haven't cropped it at all what i liked about the way i got this set up was the way this path rolls around and then nestles in this sort of v-shaped framing at the bottom so i was really happy with how that worked out gonna need to tone down these highlights over here and especially on this rock this whole side of the image there is is way too bright in the foreground i really like the detail and i'm going to want to retain that but that will need to be darkened down because what i'm going to be looking to do is to kind of create a 3d effect with dodging and burning to run you through the image out to the building in the file side there so having worked out what i want to do with the image in this particular case it is very much a complex series of dodging and burning some colour control because the whole image is i think a little bit washed out it looks a bit muddy and then of course there's the cloning to be done so fast forward about an hour or so and this is the sort of thing we end up with actually as a representation of what an amazing landscape there is at paris mountain pretty happy with this one so this is the raw file of the first image that i was talking to about while we were out and about and the only thing i've done with it pretty much is a square crop again as with the previous image the first thing then i need to look at as well what needs to be done on it straight away you can see this central area here is too bright it's distracting from this there really isn't anything contrasting in between them i have dropped the background off so that it's slightly soft so that's okay and i'm going to use dodging and burning to create that 3d effect that i'm always looking for in my images so it doesn't look so flat and washed out so i'm going to want to kind of create kind of pull the background and the foreground apart but let's just start at the bottom of these layers and head on up through them so the first layer is just a really simple bit of cloning just to get rid of some of these little brighter highlight boulders around the edges that's those dealt with and the next layer up is a topaz d noise layer and as you can see from the mask i've only applied this to the very top of the image so i'm just denoising the sky and these misty areas in the background and the next layer up is where i'm doing my sharpening and again this has been masked and i'm using topaz sharpen on this one this is the mask that i've applied this white area is the building this is the entire foreground and then these two blobs here these two little areas of rocks here so i've just sharpened those slightly but i didn't want to apply any sharpening to all of this heather and these grasses here in the mid ground because i'm going to want to kind of distract you from those in the final image you'll see what i mean later on the next layer up is a color effects pro layer and all i've done with this is applied some pro contrast it's masked so that it's literally just this area of the building itself just to pop these boulders here along these edges and make it stand out now the next layer up is where most of the magic is done this is the camera raw filter and this is a huge amount of dodging and burning and global color control so with all of that dodging and burning applied we're now getting towards that 3d look that i was after at the outset and so that's the finished image on this one so the final image is the hawthorne berries and all i've done with this so far is just cropped it top and bottom i haven't cropped it from either side at all i don't do really detailed color or contrast work in camera raw i'll use nick viveza for that let me show you why here's the image opened in viveza as you can see i've added a single control point here and targeted one of these red berries what that allows me to do is if i show you the mask that viveza has created you can see how accurately it's just picked out the berries and what that's allowed me to do then is because i've desaturated most of the image across the board using camera raw with this i've just added back in a little bit of brightness a hint of saturation and an extra bit of red channel enhancement to pop those berries in the final mix and the rest of the processing of this image is very much along the lines of the other images and the final result looks like that i'm reasonably happy with those three paris mountain images i really enjoyed capturing them and i really enjoyed processing them i'm going to leave it there for this one thank you ever so much for joining me i really hope you've enjoyed it and if you have why not subscribe now and join me next time cheers [Music] you

Channel: D Griff Gallery

Views: 2,507

Keywords: landscape photography, landscape photography tips, landscape photography locations, landscape photography for beginners, landscape photography vlog, landscape photography micro four thirds, landscape photography settings, landscape photography tutorials, landscape photography tip and tricks, olympus, EM1, north wales landscape photography, north wales photography locations, anglesey landscape photography, anglesey photography locations, parys mountain, amlwch, anglesey

Id: 1gX2ydLcYDo

Length: 21min 4sec (1264 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 14 2021