Learn Photography [Full Course] by Australian Geographic Photographer Chris Bray

[Music] hi I'm Chris Bray I'm gonna say lien Geographic photographer and I've also had my work bought by the likes of National Geographic and Discovery Channel GoPro and for the last seven years I've been running this photography course all around Australia and I finally got it together to put it online before you get stuck into actually learning I thought I'd give you a heads up as to the structure of the course that you're in for so we start with a really easy lecture on basic photography that's just things like you know setting your camera up getting it ready holding the camera really steady holding it properly things like that then we look at composition that's basically just what are you looking for when you look through the viewfinder on your camera how do you organize stuff in your photos so that it just feels more balanced or this more aesthetic then we look at exposure you know sometimes the photos come out a bit too bright or a bit too dark why does that happen how do you fix it up quickly to look at histogram graphs and things like that then we look at aperture and what that does to your depth of field and then shutter speed and how that affects things that are moving in your photos and then we look at ISO what's that all about lighting lighting of course there's so much to learn about lighting in photography but just understanding the basics of it like the different types of lighting and the different directions of lighting that can be an enormous improvement to your photography lenses obviously so many different types of lenses in the world good to have a bit of a handle on hey categorize them how you know what they do what you need what you don't and so on and then we'll finish up with a lecture on just practical advice just it bits and pieces I'd hate for someone to be able to do a photography course and not be told everything from a little bit on post-production to keeping your camera clean and where to from here and that sort of thing [Music] okay so basic photography in this lecture we're just going to look at some very simple things like how the camera works and how to set it up ready to start taking photos now you basically got three different types of cameras really you've got compact cameras like these ones and the beauty of them is obviously just that they're so compact you can take them with you wherever you go and you can always get some kind of photo sure it might not be quite as high quality whoo I have quite the same amount of creative control as a as a big DSLR camera or something but at least you can get a picture and obviously the best camera is the one you have with you at the time sometimes when people buy their big DSLR camera they start to dismiss the compact camera and sort of think huh that's only for social photography you never take a professional photo and sell it from one of these or something and that's just totally not true you can take amazing photos with these kind of cameras especially if they're waterproof shockproof little jobs like this thing where you can bring it out in situations where even if you had your big deer solo with you you're not gonna bring it out if it's pouring with rain or if it's really dusty or something you know at least these kind of cameras you can boys get a shot then you've got DSLR cameras like this one bristling with all these buttons and dials to bring out that creative control to your fingertips so you can set up the photo to come out the way you want you can use interchangeable lenses and in general just have a lot more control and you can get much higher quality of photos then you've got sort of in between cameras mirrorless Micro Four Thirds bridge cameras they still have all the same theory you know all the same aperture and shutter speed and all that kind of stuff but they're just often smaller sometimes you can change lenses sometimes it can't that is more convenient more portable and increasing they're doing better and better jobs are taking incredibly high quality photos okay so how do these things actually work well just simply the light comes in through the lens obviously that's where you're doing your zooming and your focusing and so on but importantly the light has to pass through a variable sized hole in the back of the lens and that's called your aperture and you can set that hole to be whatever size you want you just tell the camera hey I want the hole to be this big or the hole to be this big and the size you set that hole that controls what's called your depth of field in the photo now depth of field is just the amount of stuff that's nice and sharp and in focus in your shot in front of and behind the point that you focused on so you can see this is a very more shallow depth-of-field you know we've focused a camera here but very quickly the background becomes blurry and anything in the front becomes blurry whereas if you used a different sized aperture hole maybe you'd end up with a big depth of field or a deep depth of field and you can see here that much closer is still in focus and much further away is still sharp and you can see the effect that has on your photos for a photo of a person obviously the one with the nice soft background looks a whole lot more professional because the model stands out against that soft blurry background looks more 3d whereas on the other photo where there's a larger depth of field you kind of lose your subject against the background it kind of feels very flat and two-dimensional you can't really see where the hair finishes and the sticks in the background begin it's all very kind of flat but that's actually what you'd want a big depth of field for a landscape photo if you think about it it's for a landscape shot you want your close-up rocks and flowers to be nice and sharp but also they're distant mountains and clouds and because everything is interesting in a landscape scene now obviously if you leave your camera in auto mode your camera has no idea what kind of photo are you trying to take it'll just pick a value is somewhere in the middle and it won't give you a very good job at either situation so you can see how much creative control you're gonna have just by playing with your aperture and it's really not that difficult at all when you actually take the photo the mirror kicks up out of the way there's still a shutter in the way though the shutter will then open and close for very precise amount of time to collect all that light for your image and then the mirror will fall back down and you'll be able to see through the camera again but the amount of time that that shutter stays open for that's called your shutter speed and that affects how things that are moving end up looking in your photo obviously if that shutter has only been open for a very brief amount of time nothing's had a chance to move anywhere while the photo is being captured so you end up being able to freeze even quite fast movement but if the shutter is open for a long time then anything that moves while that photo is being captured ends up being smeared through your image and you kind of end up with movement blur which can look really nice in a lot of situations not only waterfalls and classic shots like that but anything that's moving can just add a bit of life if you let the shutter drag a little bit let's say you're photographing someone hitting a big drum in Auto mode you probably end up with a pretty fast photo and the guys hands just gonna be frozen there and you can't really tell is he hitting the drum or is it just standing there or what but if you allowed your shutter speed to be just long enough but the guy's hand could move from here to here while you're taking the picture you'd end up with this tricky blurry hand moving towards the drum it might just add a whole lot of life so there's a lot of situations where having a longer or a shorter shutter speed can really change the effect in your picture okay starting at the real basics hopefully at least you know how to turn your camera on zooming in and out obviously you just twist the barrel of the lens and you see the image get more zoomed in and more zoomed out worth double-checking if you've got an auto focus manual focus switch on the side of your lens good idea to make sure that's set to autofocus if you've got a stabilizer may as well turn that on different brands call it different things could be optically stabilized OS vr is all these different things if you've got any switch on your lens for now you may as well turn it on now I'm sure you're all aware all shutter buttons work the same way you know they're a two-stage button you know you can push them halfway down and they come to a natural stop and that's when the camera is trying to find something to focus on hopefully it does but it won't actually take the picture until you press the button all the way down so it's supposed to be that two-stage step don't just plunge it all the way and then wonder why it didn't get the photo no half until it finds it and then press the button carefully now when you're given a camera for the first time I think the first thing we're always told is hold the camera really steady and most people just think yeah and I know all that kind of stuff but actually you'd be surprised I took a photo of the word shake when I was designing these lecture slides and it was late at night it was a classic long slow exposure gonna have a lot of camera shake in there and this was holding the camera as steady as I possibly could but just doing a few basic techniques wrong like holding the camera in the wrong way the way I see a lot of people hold cameras and then this is taking the same photo again but just doing a few basic things right like hanging on to the camera correctly so let's take a look at even how you're supposed to hang on to the thing with your right hand it's pretty obvious there's a giant grip there you can't go wrong but with your left hand you see all kinds of awkward things happening just because there is nowhere really obvious to hang on to it and people end up just clasping the side of the camera often and that just means you're pressing all these buttons here without meaning to but the worst thing is you're not supporting the camera your left hand is supposed to be underneath the lens in fact the further out along the lens it is if it's a big lens this steady of the shot will be rather than all the way back here just clasping this side so your left hand underneath the lens supporting it that also means you're able to recompose the shot zoom in and out all the time you don't have to kind of change it and then come back and hang on to it and then that's all very awkward you should put your elbows in that keeps it steady so if you just hang on to a camera like that it's able to wobble around wherever it wants to be but if you put it all those in you've just got a nice inbuilt rest and it just keeps it really steady and if you're taking a vertical shot you should actually have the grip on the top of the camera not the bottom because we'd have the grip on the bottom then your other hand ends up tangled underneath here as well and you can't get to any of these settings on the top and it's just kind of top-heavy it's just propped up there like that but if you have your grip on the top your other hand comes underneath you can still put your elbow in your chest keep it really steady and you can get to all of your settings at once yeah it means everyone can see you go to sweaty underarm but that's kind of the way it goes don't do these ones yeah make sure this is up the top pulling it down keep it really steady and probably the most important tip is don't press a button too hard because it just shakes the camera at that critical moment when it's trying to take a picture it should just be a case of gently squeezing until it takes a shot obviously one of the huge advantages of digital photography is that you can now look at the picture as soon as you've taken it and check that it worked out and if it didn't you can quickly change the settings and take the photo again before your subjects gone go on to the days where you come back from the chemist two weeks later and then you're flicking through your photos and then you're like I had the lens cap on or something but sometimes you need to remind yourself to do that check you know when you take a picture and it comes out for two seconds on the back that's because you're supposed to look at it it's worth your time just having a quick glance seeing if it seems about the right brightness maybe zooming in digitally on the little magnifying glass plus - zoom in on the picture you've taken go right in and check that the detail is still nice and sharp if not quick change of settings and take it again while you still can so having taught this course a couple of times there's a few things we've learnt that it's good idea to try and catch early on this might not be a problem for you you might already have it set up but it's still worth checking so when you pick up your camera make sure that it's on P mode to start with on your big mode dial P for program will just sort of use that as a stepping stone from here it opens up some more options for us but then we'll move on to using things like aperture mode and shutter speed mode but for now you've got to at least get off auto and go to pee mode you want to make sure you've got the right quality setting on your camera as well how much good taking low resolution or heavily compressed pictures so go into your menu find your quality make sure you're on large fine quality JPEG or a raw file if you're interested in doing that now the autofocus in your camera can actually work in one of two different ways it can either just do a single focus so af-s or one shot and that's when it focuses you find something and as long as you keep your finger half pressed if you move the camera around after that it doesn't shift the focus so it only focuses once or you can change your camera focusing mode to AI servo which other brands call AFC for continuous and that's a tracking focus so as long as you hold your finger down halfway on that shutter button it's constantly updating the focus wherever you point the camera most of the time you want to be on one shot AFS the single focus so you can carefully focus on something and then maybe recomposed your shot a little bit before you press the button all the way down to get the shot you've probably also noticed that a lot of cameras these days have a lot of auto focus points on them these are all the different points that when you try and focus these are all independently trying to find something anything to focus on and by default all these points are turned on so they're all active which means you have absolutely no control over where the camera is going to focus it'll just find the first thing that's brightest does has the most contrast and often it's not what you're interested in now in Auto mode all of those points are turned on and you can't do anything about that that's one of the big problems of auto mode you can't even tell it where to focus but thankfully in all the camera modes we're going to be using on this course so that's P mode and anything better than that you can choose exactly which point to use and if you just set it to the center autofocus point that's honestly the most useful point to set it on from 99% of your photography and then it's very easy for you to accurately choose exactly what you want to focus on to change which autofocus points you're using different brands different things but Canon has a little button on it there you press that and then you can choose between your different points Nikon in through the menu auto focus area mode and you can just go to single point you can move that wherever you want also if you've ever noticed as you're looking through your viewfinder if everythingís always looks a bit blurry even the numbers and things down the bottom inside there that's not your eyes or anything you've just got to change this little diopter adjustment it's like setting the right pair of glasses for you if you bump this little diopter adjustment off everything always looks a bit blurry but not a bad idea to go outside and wake the camera up press the button a little bit so there's some numbers and things displaying in there deliberately squiggle that thing way out of whack and we'll all go blurry and then just move it back and forth until it just becomes the easiest to see and you might find that suddenly it's just so much more natural to look through you don't need to force your eyes to focus on stuff anymore so in summary if you're about to start shooting pick up your camera check you're in program mode or something better auto focus on stabilizing on check you're on the right quality you know high quality JPEG your focus system maybe you have one shot rather than the tracking and then change yourself to the center autofocus point that's a good place to start okay now that you're all set up ready to go the next lecture is on composition but before we go I just want to leave you with this really tacky cliche great photos are made not taken which is kind of true though because you'll find a lot of the best photos aren't just auto mode if you had a lot of thought put into ndu you want it to be brighter or darker composition do you put your subject off on the side and you want the blurry background or not there's there's a whole array of different things under your control to make the photo come out the way you want rather than the way auto mode gives it to you so that's we're going to look at from now on [Music] composition in this lecture we're going to have a look at how you organize things in your photo just so that it feels more balanced or complete so we can have a look at my top 10 composition tips starting with what you think would be an obvious one try to make sure your horizons are horizontal but some people just have an inability to hold the camera square and every single photo they take is just a little bit wonky sometimes they say odd it doesn't matter it's digital surely we can just rotate it and crop it later on but you'd be surprised how much you lose in a picture when you rotate it and crop it just because it was all in there when it was wonky doesn't mean you'll be all in there or look any good by the time you've cropped it you lose huge wedges of every corner you also lose quality on your image obviously photos are horizontal and vertical rows of pixels and if you have to rotate it a little bit and then save it back into horizontal and vertical rows of course some pixels get smeared from here to here and you just lose a bit of clarity so you're better off getting it right in shot my best technique for that is really just look for something that's supposed to be horizontal like a horizon and then try and just check that it's parallel with the bottom of your viewfinder just match it up just to check it's parallel or a building that's supposed to be vertical just check it matches up with the side of your viewfinder a lot of cameras these days have that inbuilt digital level which is handy as well but the main thing is just spend a couple of seconds to make sure your photos square because it ruins a lot of photos and you don't have to try and fix it later rule of thirds you've probably heard of this one before it's a pretty important composition rule it's basically saying that yeah he's a nice enough photo of a hiker walking along a beach but for some reason this just feels a little bit nicer it's a little more balanced it's hard to work out exactly why but in its simplest form the rule of thirds is saying try not to just put your subject slap-bang in the middle of the photo as tempting as it is it normally looks nicer if you can deliberately put your subject off on the side give it some space in front of it and what's actually going on here is the rule of thirds let's just we're in your head you mentally divide your viewfinder up into these vertical and horizontal thirds and just trying to arrange as much as you can if your photo around those lines so if you've got a strong horizon you might put that on the bottom third or the top third depending on which bit of the photo needed more space if you're putting your subject off to the side you might move them off to this third or the other another example here see it's just in the middle it doesn't look that exciting it just looks a whole lot nicer when you pull it off to the side in fact where those third lines intersect there's four points in a photo there if you can put the key bit of your image either your subject or the key bit of your subject on those intersection points that's a really powerful point in the photo and it looks really good sometimes you can have a bit of a dilemma as to which side of the photo do you put your subject on which third and you can just try and remember it as always try and give your subjects room to move into or see into you know if they're looking or moving in a direction no one cares about what's behind them what it's been and gone they want to see forward so you crop out all the stuff behind them give them extra space in front some people call that nose room you're just giving space in front of things that's the same thing as a rule of thirds of course we all have a bit of a problem now because in the previous lecture we all went and put our center autofocus point on so the camera is only going to focus what's in the dead center of the shot and now here I am saying oh but it looks so much better if you put your penguin off on one third now what that does mean is you do point directly at your subject first of all while you're focusing and then after I've found that focus lock keep your finger half pressed and then you can reframe the shot and put your penguin off on the third or whatever you want for good composition before you depress the button all the way down to get the shot obviously otherwise if you start off with your penguin off on the side and you try and half press to focus it's just going to focus on the sky behind the penguin and you end up with a blurry subject so you point directly at your subject to start with ideally focus on its eye actually that's a good side tip if you have a photographing a person or an animal and you can see their eye in the shot that's where you've got to focus on that's the important part that has to be sharp so here you just be focusing on the eye of the penguin half press it until it gets the focus then you keep your finger half pressed while you reframe to the side rule of thirds and then you depress the button all the way perfect so there you go that's how you use that a center autofocus point to allow you to focus on exactly what you want in your image but you can still then recompose and put it wherever you want in the photo before you take the shot that's why you have that AFS or single-shot focus rather than the tracking system I think about the only exception to the rule of thirds reflection photos where you don't feel like you have to put that horizontal division on the top or bottom third because the symmetry of what's going on is what make those photos beautiful anyway think in the vertical plane it still still applies but the key part of the photo where your eye is drawn to is obviously that tree phone so that's in the top third corner and bottom third corner kind of bounces it out vaguely still fitting the rule of thirds so try to imagine this is a view at the back of a boat that you're on and you're trying to get a nice you know postcard shot of this bird and the sunset and things like that using the rule of thirds have a think in your head how you might frame that up hopefully you're thinking something along the lines of that you can see your horizon is obviously a strong bottom third the clouds make the top third line there's a little bird he's a subject he's moving into the shot so he want to give him a space to move into so we move him off to that right-hand third but then you have some people jump up and down and say ah but you missed a lovely golden lightning over there and the blue sky at the top what about that and just goes to show that the world doesn't always fit into nine magic boxes and you've often got to make a call between good composition and try to fit everything in and I really think it's always important to try and have good composition people don't know what they're missing if you don't include it in the photo but what you include it's got to look nice framing is another good tip this is good for your landscape photos particularly framing is when you deliberately include something up close in your photo it tends to make it seem a bit more 3d gives it a lot more depth it also stops your eye falling off the edge of the photo you kind of frame it or hem it in by putting something along the edges in the sides look at this example here this is taken in Papua New Guinea you can see some nice volcanoes puffing away but it does look a little bit flat compared to this one which just has so much more depth to it and that's because I've deliberately got some close-up foreground elements there as you can see it also tends to pull our attention back towards the middle of the photo again it stops your eye just slipping off the edge and you probably have to admit that a lot of people make this mistake with their landscape shots where you know you get to a lookout and the first thing you do is you get everyone out of the way and if there's a fence there you've got to get over the fence because that's in the way and if there's a tree you know you always fall off the edge of the cliff trying to get away from the tree to cut that out and you go to these great lengths to get an unobstructed view of the distant mountains but then the problem is everything in your photo is a million miles away and it just looks flat you're better off crouching down and trying to find a tastic of grass that you can pop up into that corner or if there's a tree there great use that frame half you shot off with that same with this example sunset not a particularly good but it was a nice sunset but there was a stupid tree that kept on putting branches in the left-hand side of the shot and I had to keep on edging off to the right I almost fell off the balcony trying to get a clear view of the sky until it finally dawned on me it was probably nicer to let that tree come into the shot so it frames off that side of the shot makes it more 3d pulls their attention into the sunset looks a whole lot better another one here including those bushes at the top just frames off the top of the shot check your backgrounds this is my favorite tip from the entire course actually it's the easiest way to make your photos just look ten times better without having to do any kind of complex theory or anything at all the problem is the human eye is really good at ignoring what's going on in the background of your photo it's not until you get a picture back and then you'd be like oh really distracting element back there and can completely ruin the shot you know the car coming at the back of the elephant or it could be a power pole coming out of someone's head or a bright yellow car in the background that's just really distracting but the thing is it's like another whole level of consciousness you'll finally get to with your photography where the background is just one of the things you remember to check and you'll be like guru background oh wow that's really awkward if I just move a little bit to the side you don't have a telegraph pole coming out of your head anymore or whatever it is like this example with the lion you know the lion just blends in too much with the background you know it's the same color as a grass but if you get down lower you can get him again it's a bit of the sky and it just pops out there much nicer against that blue background so what about this example on Kangaroo Island I was photographing these little birds on a stick and he kind of sneaked up as close as you can get and you think that that's probably the best place to take the photo from but look at the background behind the birds there you've got blue brown green no matter how good your lenses are blurring it out it's still a really terrible background the birds are dark and the background just behind them is dark and they all blend in you can't really see them you've got to look around and say where can I find a nice clean contrasting colour to use as a background here what are our choices really it's just the sky reflected onto the water that nice blue color that'll be fantastic so if somehow I've got to get that behind your subject it could be a case of just getting a little higher like tippy-toe job or in this case I actually had to walk slightly back up the riverbank which seemed kind of counterintuitive because I had to walk further away but then you can get the most amazing blue uniform background that look spectacular well this one an ant on a stick that gray background there that's just the road like the ash felt on the road but you can see there is a bit of a green glow to the side there that's actually a leaf just out of shot so if I move the camera about a centimeter to the right you can end up with a green background which looks so much more beautiful honestly if you can just remember to glance into your background when you're taking a picture and just check if there's any distracting elements there or if you can just turn a bit and get a cleaner contrast in color makes a world of difference clear photos fill the frame sometimes I think photos just could do it being cropped in a little bit tighter people have this urge to try and fit everything in all the extremities and often the most important part if you could just concentrate on that it's a much more usable photo look at this one that might be the way you're tempted to take the photo because you want to fit it all in but actually that's probably better in fact that is a far better composition for the shot we all know that yours have a big pointy bit at the top and that's not what we're interested in this it's just the interaction between the whale and the yacht and now it we've zoomed in more the subjects are bigger it's more interesting you can see the detail it fits the rule of thirds so we have the yacht on the top third intersection whale on the bottom third so they kind of balance there for this example I was trying to keep swimming as far ahead of this lady as I could so I could turn around and get our oil in shot but you know you have to summarize that photo you probably say that's a woman swimming with a blue starfish but really this is exactly the same thing a woman swimming with the blue starfish but it's a much simpler cleaner sort of shot and it's probably more usable you know you could imagine that in a little brochure on a local dive resort or something not they should be picking up starfish but yeah compared to the other photo there's just too much stuff going on they're too distracting you're like what is that yellow thing she's carrying it's actually her shirt but looks like a bag is she's stealing starfish know sometimes it's nice that a simplifier photo down just to the key parts and they're often much more usable same with this one I saw this lady walking down the street carrying a bunch of fish and I was like well that's interesting get a photo of that but then luckily pretty quickly I realized hang on a second what is actually interesting here pretty sure it's not her wonderfully happy expression or the fact that there's a tractor coming along or she's got no shoes on well those power lines coming out of her shoulder you know you got to think what actually caught my attention here was the fact that she was carrying fish so maybe they zoomed in and district a photo of fish carrying you're much more interesting shot even half the Fisher cutout but it doesn't matter you can still tell their fish you can imagine a photo like that turning up in a little brochure about the local marketplace whereas that other photo it's gonna go nowhere even if photo like this you don't need to fit the whole thing in you don't even need this whole head in there it's still enough to tell it's a beautiful shot of an elephant works quite strongly so just try remember you don't always need to fit everything in cropping more cropping tighter often looks better leading lines now a leading line is any line coming into your photo from the outside and it serves to guide your eye through the photo like this one your eye comes in along the railing and then he goes out to where the people are and you see that they're people and you gaze out along there and you see the rainbow and it all just ties together very neatly otherwise some photos can just feel a bit disjoint you have to kind of look around for a while then go oh that's interesting and all that's interesting over there as well it's just not as smooth if you can link things up with a line it often looks better sure you don't always have convenient leading lines around but if you look for them you can often find them and if you do have a leading line good tip is to make sure it comes in through the corner of your shot leading lines always look a lot more effective if they come in exactly from the corner anything but I level this composition tip is just saying try not to take every single photo from just normal standing up height because then everything always just looks the same you know getting up high of getting down low can be a way to just add a whole new angle of interest to a photo completely different perspective on an otherwise quite boring subject perhaps yeah that's just a photo of Jess on a bike not the most exciting subject in the world but because it's taken from that really low vantage point these are the kind of photos that stop you when you're flicking through a magazine because your brain basically goes yeah I know that's a bike but gee that's that's weird are taken from down oh I get it same photo of a penguin taking it to different heights you can really feel a different vibe in those two photos this one feels quite tall and regal the other one feels like a little penguin shuffling around on the ground at the very least though if you're not trying to do some creative angle you should always try to remember to get down to the same height as whatever it is you're photographing so if you're photographing the family dog get down to dog height or kids because you otherwise just end up with photos where the kids are kind of having to look up into the photo and you feel very separated so here's a photo of a gecko obviously that's taken down low but it's not low enough as soon as you get down to the same height as whatever it is you're photographing you end up with a much more intimate connection there it's just a much stronger photo and you can see this photo is also a good example of rule of thirds that geckos I the key bit is in that top third intersection corner and you can see how important it is to focus on the eyes as well so you can see the front of his nose is blurry everything behind the eye the rest of the body is completely blurry very thin depth of field but because the eye is sharp that's all it matters when you look at the photo look for details that's part of the fun of being a photographer I think you start to spot little things that other people didn't even notice and then when you get a photo of it it's amazing people just go how did you even see that let alone get a picture it's very easy to get interesting photos if you start to look for the little details you could just be walking through your garden or a jungle or something and find the way that beautiful little leaves have little pearls on the end of them or raindrop than the back of a leaf or the way this spores grow on the back of a fern leaf feather details we were out photographing all aroo a couple of years ago and you know the Sun went down we got some nice photos and then we'll just sort of thinking what we can do now and Jess actually spotted the reflection of Oliver in my eye but she's got far more beautiful eyes than I do so he swapped positions and I got a macro lens out and I took a photo of all the reflected in her eye people love this kind of photo you know technically it's a terrible photo it's just about all blurry but just because it's one of those little details that people go wow how did you even see that that's a great shot so keep your eye out for little details and textures and things like that they can be good photos okay gotta remember to take some vertical photos as well a lot of us just only ever take horizontal photos and that's a bit sad because some subjects just fit a vertical frame a whole lot better even long sweeping landscape shots like this one you can still have a vertical version of that and it still works actually when I went on my first Australian Geographic assignment I was reading the contract points and one of them actually said every single thing you photograph you must take a horizontal and a vertical version of every single thing and then blew me away often one of them might look better than the other fair enough but you can always take both and they always work this one the feeling is more wow what an amazing open view she has out that way Wow wouldn't that be incredible and the other photos a bit more like oh don't don't stand so close to the edge your eye travels down the mountain instead it feels taller now if it feels awkward for you to take vertical photos and that's a good sign not taking enough of them maybe pretend your own assignment for a while next time you're taking a picture force yourself to work out how to make it a fit nice composition vertically take some of that as well it'll just be good practice for you and the last one break these rules sometimes you know photography is a creative outlet it's not like engineering where you've got your top ten checklist and you better double-check you've got every single one done otherwise the bridge is gonna fall down you're gonna kill someone yeah photography is fun especially with digital you can try all these different settings and weird angles that you're pretty sure aren't going to work at all but sometimes they do and you're like that looks cool yeah I know you might hate it I don't mind it though I can imagine it turning up in a magazine somewhere but you know I think it breaks it every rule I can think of the dog's eye it's probably the key bit in the photo and that's in the dead center there's no rule of thirds going on it's probably about 30 degrees wonky and I know I say don't always try and feed everything in but I wouldn't normally just cut off a third of someone's face and cut their toes off but yeah sometimes do away so feel free to break these rules it's really just there as a scapegoat you know if you failed on all nine of those other points you can just say you're concentrating on the last one so in the next lecture we're going to look at exposure you know sometimes the photos are a bit too bright bit too dark how do you fix that histogram is that kind of thing start to learn a lot more more advanced stuff [Music] exposure in this section we're going to look at what makes your photos come out a bit too bright or a bit too dark how do you control that a bit of a look at histogram graphs as well and just a reminder this is all covered in the exposure section of the course notes booklet that you can buy online and also there's little plastic summary cards there's a little exposure section there just shows you how to change that brightness as well but firstly what actually is exposure well exposure is light falling onto your image sensor and you can think of it as the entire time the shutter is open more and more light is landing on there and it's just collecting more and it's getting brighter and brighter and hopefully when the right amount of light has gone in there your photo finishes and you end up with perfect exposure obviously half the time that's not what happens and you end up with incorrect exposure so underexposed just not enough light got in there yet and everything's come out looking too dark overexposed too much light got in there and everything just comes out looking too bright correct exposure just the right amount of light but the problem can be that by the time you get you know this part of the photo looking correctly exposed some other part will still be too dark or too bright and that's caused by what's called a contrast limitation all cameras have this problem where they can't see into the bright and into the dark at the same time so you've got a situation like this one perhaps where we've got the foreground having correct exposure but by then those background rocks in the brighter Sun there now massively overexposed and you go well that doesn't look any good maybe we'll set the camera up to get correct exposure for the background but now of course the foreground is too dark and there's nothing you can do in the one picture to fix that up you could deliberately take both and merge them together using HDR high dynamic range or something like that there's just nothing you can do to get around that problem of really harsh lighting having such a big difference between being in the bright and in the shadow but the thing is when I was standing there looking at that view myself it looked great and then you get a picture like that back and you're left wondering you know what is wrong with the camera it's not particularly that the human eye has some incredible ability to see into the dark and the bright at the same time it does have a better contrast range than a camera but still the main thing to remember is that the camera has that variable sized aperture hole in the lens and your eye has exactly the same thing in your iris or your pupil the thing is when you're looking at a scene the pupil changes depending on where you're looking so that everything looks correct for you so when you look up here and the bright part of the scene pupil would shut right down and cut out all that light so that would be correctly exposed but then when you look down in the shadows your pupil would open up and let more light in and then the shadows would look correctly exposed but the thing is you remember when you looked up to the top that's what it looked like and when you looked down in the shadows that's what it looked like you're kind of just building up a mental picture of the world that seems wonderfully exposed wherever you look but it's because it's changing a lot of course for the camera though is stuck with the one setting for the entire shot and there are just going to be some bits that are so much brighter that they become overexposed or underexposed and there's just not a lot you can do you've just got to remember that cameras can't cope well with seams that differ too much in their brightness so really strong lighting like midday lighting that's why it's such a bad time to take photos because the difference of the the side that's in the Sun and the side that's in the shade just next to it you know it's a million times different and the camera just can't cope you're gonna end up with black shadows or overexposed highlights so collecting the right amount of light you can think of it as a volume of light you've got to get into your camera somehow and it really doesn't matter whether it all comes in at once or if you just gradually let that light trickle in as long as at the end of the shot you've collected that same total volume because that total amount of light is what determines how bright your photo is that brings us to this useful little analogy this is the size of your aperture hole here if you make that a really small hole obviously the light can only gradually trickle in and it takes a camera quite a long time to collect the amount of light it needs for that correctly exposed photo so typically have quite long slow shutter speeds associated with those tiny little holes conversely if you open the aperture up to really big hole like that the lights able to rush in very quickly and you typically have quite fast shutter speeds associated with the large aperture holes that makes sense to that level but the key thing to realize here is that both of those photos are correctly exposed they both look exactly the same in terms of brightness but they're creatively different due to the effects of having different shutter speeds and different apertures so for any given scene there's actually a huge range of values you could choose a whole bunch of different aperture shutter speed pairs that will all end up with correct exposure and the photo will look fine but you get to choose whether you want long shutter speeds or fast shutter speeds or big aperture whole small aperture holes to get the creative effect you want like if you wanted a really fast shutter speed to freeze an eagle coming past well you can just tell the camera hey I want a thousandth of a second for the show speed and the camera will work out and go gee I've got to get all that light in in a thousandth of a second I'm gonna have to open up that aperture hole really big I need to work out the size of the hole and set that for you well maybe you're interested in a long slow shutter speed like have a waterfall you want to see all that flowing movement so you could just tell the camera hey I want a one-second photo and the camera will then work out that it's gonna have to let the light come in slowly through a little hole and it'll set the size of the hole for you well maybe you're not interested in shutter speed at all you want a particular aperture will learn in another lecture about how the actual aperture links in to what's going on with your depth of field but for now let's just say you wanted you know this much aperture so if you tell the camera to make the aperture hole that big it'll in work out the shutter speed has to be this long to go with it you don't need to try and balance these two things yourself unless you're in manual mode or something and they'll almost no call for that unless you're in a studio or a few other things there's a bit of a misnomer around that you know to be a real photographer you need to use manual mode just completely not true so how do we actually start to shift this balance how do we unlock some of that creative potential from the camera well yep that's when you've got to step out of auto mode so P mode or program mode that's one step up from auto mode and as you'll see that starts to unlock some creative options for us we use this mode as a stepping stone and sooner or later we'll end up not using P anymore we'll just start using it aperture or shutter speed depending on what you're interested in now in program mode when you go and take a picture the camera automatically suggests a particular aperture shutter speed combination for you that it thinks is about right interesting it's exactly the same set of values it would have given you in auto mode normally it's just that if you wanted to in P mode if you're brave enough you're allowed to start scrolling away from those default middle values and try and choose something more creative so as you scroll one way you might find that that but your hole is getting smaller and because of getting smaller the shutter speed will stay open longer for you or if you scroll the other way the aperture might be getting bigger and therefore the shutter speed gets faster but it's still giving you the same total amount of light in the end so this is typically how it works you touch your shutter button the camera wakes up suggests those middle defaults that are values for you that's the shutter speed one hundred and twenty fifth of a second and over here that F four point five that's the size of your aperture but we'll learn later on about what that actually means and how that links to your depth of field but as you scroll around now you find that the aperture hole is getting smaller and because the hole is getting smaller the shutter has to stay open for longer and longer so we're still ending up with the same total amount of light so the brightness of your photo is not changing you're just choosing how you want that light to come in and having different creative effects now for different apertures and different shutter speeds now the great thing about P mode is you're entirely safe it won't let you scroll off the edge of the earth and start getting in correctly exposed photos they'll always keep you within certain limits either a shutter speed limit you'll find the fastest photo your camera can probably do is about four thousandth of a second some cameras can do eight thousandth of a second but that's a physical limit you know the camera just can't take a photo quicker than that so if you were scrolling around and got to four thousandth of a second you just wouldn't be able to scroll anymore fair enough or if you're going the other way the slowest longest shutter speed most cameras can do is thirty seconds you can take a longer you know two hour star trail photo but to get longer than the 30 seconds you do need to start plugging in external devices more commonly though you're going to come up against an aperture limit because whatever lens you've stuck on the camera the hole the aperture hole can probably only open this big or go down and small so you'll be scrolling around and your f numbers will just stop fair enough so how does it camera work out how bright you want the photo to be well it's actually very simple inside here there's a thing called a light meter and when you have touched your button you know it's trying to find something to focus on it's also looking at how bright the world is out there and it just decides how much light it needs to collect to give you a photo on average mid brightness you're halfway between being totally black and underexposed or totally white and overexposed just on average mid brightness but a lot of cameras have different metering modes in them matrix metering evaluative metering and so on all those things are doing is just telling the light meter which part of the photo to look at which part will come out being mid brightness or whatever you tell it to be so let's take a look at the one that I recommend you use which is pro Canon evaluative metering or Nikon calls that matrix metering now that's where the light meter is looking at the whole picture overall and making sure it comes out mid brightness or whatever you tell it to now that actually works out quite well for most photos because your typical scene actually has as you know about as much dark stuff as it does bright stuff and on average it's mid brightness but of course it's not gonna be perfect for every situation take a look at these examples so here we have a bird in a tree that's correctly exposed but it is actually quite bright isn't it there's a lot of bright sky there so what tends to happen in these situations is your camera looks at the scene and goes well I'm gonna collect enough light to be mid brightness overall and your photo ends up looking a little bit like this quite dark and drab compared to what you actually wanted that's because it's giving you a mid brightness photo but actually what you wanted the real world was quite a bright scene so you need to find a way to tell your camera to make the photo brighter another classic problem is when your photo is backlit like this one there's so much bright light in the background though the camera just goes well I'm gonna collect enough to make it a mid brightness photo for you and you end up with a shot a bit like that your subject just looks like a silhouette we've all done this before you know when you accidentally catch a window in the background of your photo and your subject is just a dark shape like that you have to think about it that photo is still mid brightness overall yeah half the photo is black and the other half white but the thing we're interested in our subject is way too dark so again we need to find a way to control this exposure brightness quick little detour onto a compact camera you might have noticed these things just have so many different scene modes these days there's like pet mode underwater mode snowman mode and I never used to really use those modes because I didn't really understand what they what they did but I've since learnt that a huge amount of programming have gone into those different modes and it is totally worth scrolling to the different setting if you're taking photos of fireworks you know go to fireworks mode or you know snowman mode what snowman mode is doing is just saying hey I'm in the snow I expected a lot of bright and white stuff around collect more light than you're going to give me a nice bright white photo not a dull gray snow but back on a real camera baby is supposed to use different metering modes now different brands of course and different cameras offer different things but basically you've got quite a few options there normally but we'll go through them all so you know what they are and why they all exist but I'll prove to you that you honestly don't need these other three you can survive quite happily on evaluative or a matrix metering and still getting the complete creative control out of your camera so let's take a look at partial metering that's where the light meter just looks at the middle region of the photo and make sure that comes out mid brightness and it doesn't look at the outside stuff so in a situation like this that would kind of work because it doesn't get blinded by all this extra bright stuff on the outside what about spot metering now spot metering is lethal it's one tiny little point that's all the light meters allowed to look at and it bases the whole image of making sure that little point comes out exactly mid brightness so that's great if your point that's supposed to be mid brightness so for a photo like this one yeah maybe that would actually come out all right because that dot is supposed to be mid brightness but what if you missed and you point it over here instead the camera make sure that that part comes out exactly mid brightness which just looks terrible or if you pointed over here something that's supposed to be quite dark then the camera is going to make sure that dark thing comes out being mid brightness and you end up with a massively overexposed shot most of the time you just left wandering going why do they give you such a crazy over-the-top setting that ends in disaster most of the time it does have a use but it's designed for in a studio setup where just before you take a picture of a model or pack the cornflakes whatever you're photographing you quickly hold up what's called a gray card in front of your subject you know a bit of cardboard or perspex that is exactly mid brightness and you'd spot meter off that and go make sure this comes out exactly mid brightness because it is mid brightness take it away take the shot and lo and behold you end up with perfect exposure every time now that's great if you've got a great card in a studio but out in the real world it's just impractical some people will usually say about now that they find that if they're photographing you know a bird in a tree and normally comes out being silhouetted if they change to spot metering and then try it then it might come out better yeah it probably will come out better but the problem is it still won't be right what happens if it now it's too bright or it's too dark are you supposed to then change to Center weighted averaging metering no there's a whole system in your camera everyone's camera designed to help you control your exposure plus/minus brightness exposure compensation you've all seen this little slider indicator before softer on the back of your camera even inside the viewfinder when you're looking through it's really important if you leave it in the middle on zero that's when your camera is going to collect enough light for your photo to be mid brightness on average but if you move it down minus one minus two it's going to collect less light if photo will come out darker or if we go plus plus one plus two then your photo comes out a predictable amount brighter than mid brightness obviously how you change it depends on what camera you have but most of the time you'll find your camera has a little plus/minus brightness button on it just like that don't get confused by one that looks like that little plus/minus brightness with a lightning bolt next to it that's changing the exposure of your flash something totally different but you're just looking for a little dedicated plus/minus brightness button you have to press that button in and keep it held in while you scroll one of these wheels and then you'll find that little mark we'll move up or down and then wherever it is when you let go it'll stay there and the next photo I'll be really dark and so will the next one in fact even if you turn your camera off and pull it out again next week and take a picture it'll still be on minus one or whatever you put it on so you've got to get in the habit of checking where you've put it for some other Canon cameras about halfway up their range or better you don't have to press and hold some awkward button in while your scroll on these ones there's a whole wheel dedicated to it right next to your thumb and anytime you bump that wheel the photo becomes brighter darker it shows you how often you're supposed to be doing this exposure compensation there's a whole wheel there right next to your thumb so generally you take a picture you look at it on the back of the screen and you say well I think it's a little bit too dark so then you need to brighten it up so you'd go hold the little plus/minus exposure to compensation in plus one plus two take the photo again and then hopefully it comes back looking better I know that sounds like a little bit of trial and error but you'll get a whole lot better at judging it and you won't need to take the incorrect photo at first you'll be able to say I'm in the snow it's quite bright I already need to have it on about plus 1 and 2/3 a plus 2 or whatever it is so it's really important to be able to control the brightness of your image not only because the camera gets it wrong sometimes and you need to be able to correct it but also because it now opens up creative options for you to deliberately make a scene much darker maybe for a good silhouette rich up the colors in the sunset or something or to really over expose the photo deliberately and end up with it's really bright washed out effect but a lot of the time of course you actually want to get perfect exposure and if you want to be really sure looking at the photo on the back of the camera it's really hard to tell which one is correctly exposed is it this one maybe it's maybe it's that one who knows and to make it worse you can change the brightness of your LCD screen on the camera if you put your screen brightness on plus 10 all of your photos are going to start to look really overexposed you know they're not your screen brightness is just too high also you know when there's sun shining around and everything's reflecting and glare off there and you can't even see what's on the screen anyway there's plenty of times where you just can't trust what's on that back screen so these are the situations when histogram graphs can come in handy now you've probably seen these little graphs from time to time they just pop up and people are like yeah what is that and how do I get rid of it but it's actually very simple to understand and really very useful and it's the only graph we show you in the entire course so bear with me a histogram graph just tells you how much of different bright you have in your picture overall you know a spike on the left-hand side of the graph doesn't have anything to do with the left-hand side of your picture or anything like that it's an overall brightness scale so going across the bottom that's your brightness going further to the right is getting brighter and coming back this way to the left is getting darker so pure black is at this end on the left and pure white is at the far right hand end and the height of the graph at any point is just the amount of that particular brightness you have in your image overall so we can look at this one and say well how much black does this photo have and you look at it and go black is at that left-hand end oh yeah there's a fair bit of black there and then there's nothing really until we get to the mid brightnesses there's a huge amount of mid brightness stuff in fact slightly darker than mid brightness that big spike and then there's nothing until we get to the bright stuff there's a fair bit of bright stuff there and then there is a tiny little bit of pure white there as well now looking at the picture that came from that makes sense you can see we've got some black there we've got a huge amount of slightly darker than mid brightness stuff and we've got some bright stuff and we do have that little bit of white in the highlights just there so why this graph is useful is at a glance you can see the true brightness of your image irrespective of what you might have your screen brightness set to or if there's sunshine around you can't tell you can just look at a graph like this one and say well look all the information is shoved down the dark end of that graph unless you wanted a very dark photo that's probably underexposed you need to brighten it up and take it again what about this graph you can see here there's a huge amount of white lots and lots of white and lots of bright stuff and then the graph kind of Peters off you've got no mid brightness stuff no blacks no dark stuff so that is a very bright photo so unless that's where you wanted that's probably an overexposed picture what you're after with your typical histogram graph is just a good spread you know they say most photos should have a little bit of black in the darkest part and the brightest part of the photo in the highlights are probably just supposed to be white so it's okay if it kind of gets to the two ends of the graph but most of the data in the graph you want between the two ends you can think of it as a goal post if you like you want all the photos safely between the two ends not so dark that it's still black or not so bright that you've just blown it out and it's just become white don't worry about spikes people often freak out about that all the spike is saying is that you've got a lot of that particular brightness in the picture in this example fairly big spike there towards the bright end that's just the water in the background it's quite bright and there's a lot of it so you get a bit of a spike building up in that part so what do you think the histogram graph would look like if you took a full-frame photo of just a zebra skin so black and white obviously the graphs can look a little bit like this one where you've got a whole lot of black and then it comes some shades near black but then nothing until you get to the bright stuff some bright stuff and a lot of white now you can't just look at a histogram graph on its own and say all that photos underexposed or overexposed because it depends on the image maybe it's supposed to be a very bright white subject but generally speaking you just want your histogram graphed safely between those two ends so to look at your histogram graph you've normally got to be in review mode playback mode looking at a picture you've taken and then you either hit info or display a couple of times or for an icon it's up or down and it just cycles through different pages of information and one of them will finally bring up your histogram don't worry about the one with all the different colors you just looking at that white one that's the overall brightness graph okay so now it's probably a good time to go outside and do our first practition so pick up your camera make sure you're in P mode and then just go and find something to take a photo of doesn't really matter what it is take a picture initially it should come out being mid brightness on average and then work out on your camera where that little plus/minus brightness button is press and hold it in and scroll do something quite dramatic like plus 1 or plus 2 take the same picture again and you should definitely see the picture then looks a whole lot brighter and do a darker one as well you know - 2 - 3 check out that maybe bring up your histogram graph as well and watch all that information shove down the dark end I'll move up to the brightened and try and get it up just about right safety between the two if you think that's all too easy you've done all that before a good extension can be to try and take a photo of something that's mostly white like a sheet of white paper or something if you take a photo of that initially it's gonna come out being a mid gray sheet of paper mid brightness and you'll be able to look at it on the back end to say mass to dark I'll go +1 take it again and then it comes back looking brighter and you might think that's ok but actually if you checked your histogram graph you'd probably find the first photo than mid brightness that's spike the histogram will just be basically one big spike in the middle lots of gray and you'd say ok so you go +1 take it again that spike will move towards the the white end but it won't be anywhere near it so you'd have to go up plus to take it again and the spy could move even further and you'd probably surprise yourself how far you actually need to scroll to bring that spike near the white end which is where it's supposed to be if what you're photographing is white so give that a try when you come back from that prac it's time to move on to the next lecture which is all about aperture and how that affects your depth of field so aperture and depth of field now a lot of people think this is about the most confusing part in photography but that's only because people insist on teaching it in a really stupid way there's a very easy way to understand aperture and it'll make perfect sense I promise and just a reminder that this is all covered in the aperture section of our course notes booklet as well that you can buy online and also the plastic summary clip cards there's the aperture sector there which tells you which way to move your F number to do what we did depth of field and all that kind of stuff as well pretty handy so as we already saw in the basic lecture aperture control is what's called your depth of field and depth of field is just the amount of stuff that's in focus in front of and behind the point that you actually focus the camera on so this is a very small or shallow depth of field and this one is a large depth of field where much closer is still in focus and way into the distances still sharp as well so typically for a portrait type photo where there's only one thing you're supposed to be looking at your subject you want the softest blurry and you can to make your subject stand out against it look more 3d so you want a small depth of field for that blurry background but contrast to that in a landscape you actually want a big depth of field because the close-up plants and flowers and the distant mountains and clouds everything is interesting and you want the viewers eye to be able to travel everywhere in the scene so for a landscape you want a big depth of field and as we already saw in our basic photography lecture you know using a bigger a small depth of field to affect the background has a pretty significant impact on the photo so here's a shot of a zebra using a fairly large depth of field so the zebra is kind of sharp the background is kind of sharp it all feels quite flat and stuck together as opposed to using a smaller depth of field where you can see now beautiful blurry background the zebra just leaps out against that you can see individual hair detail on the mane so what actually is aperture well inside your lens it's this variable sized hole and you can just set that to be whatever size you want and it's defined in these things called F numbers or F stops so you can see here that's F 8 F 4 F 2 and then you go hang on a minute the F number is getting smaller but the holes getting bigger and that's about when most people get to trying to understand aperture they suddenly realize there's this whole mental gymnastics you've got to go through to work out what on earth you're trying to do with your F number to do what with the hole and what does that do to the depth of field anyway and it's all just way too confusing but that's only confusing because for some strange reason everyone insists on talking about the size of the aperture hole instead of the F number you know you live in a world of f numbers if you're setting your camera up to take a shot you're scrolling the F number you're watching the F number get bigger or smaller you know watching the size of the hole inside the lens you hear phrases like open the lens up more or stop the lens down use a bigger aperture this is what apparently is supposed to go through your head if you're trying to take a photo of a person or a portrait shot obviously you want a small depth of field for a small amount of stuff in focus a nice blurry background so you go okay we need a small depth of field well it turns out you get a small depth of field with a large aperture hole so you go right so I've got to flip it there in large aperture hole how do you take a picture with a large aperture hole will you go to remember actually a large aperture hole is a small F number so you flip it again it'll cleanly that's just stupid so if we just stick with F numbers it turns out aperture is incredibly easy let's have a look if you use a smaller F number guess what you get a smaller depth of field if you use a larger F number you get a larger depth of field it's pretty straightforward now the actual range of F numbers you can scroll to depends on what lens you have but some of them will go up to numbers about F 40-ish and down to about F one point something so let's pretend F numbers goes from about 1 to 40 so this photo was taken at F 2.8 so as far as F numbers go if that's a small F number gives us a small depth of field a small amount of stuff in focus but if we used a bigger F number like f-22 that's a big F number big depth of field big amount of stuff in focus another example you can see here this photo was taken at f/2 point eight so that's a small F number small depth of field you can see the background is blurry and just Jess and sharp there in the front if we used a large F number though like F 32 you can see the difference there the background everything is sharp now but back on that small F number small depth of field of course if I'd focused on that bollard half way back or something then that bolide would become InFocus and the ones behind it will be blurry and the ones in front of it and Jess would be blurry obviously whatever you focus on is going to be in focus the F numbers just scroll up or down that depth of field around that point so if you're taking a photo of a thing you're a person or an animal the subject you want to use a small F number for a small depth of field nice blurry background to help it stand out but if you're taking a photo of a landscape shot where you want a big depth of field you just use a big F number like this one f-18 there's another way that I find some people find even easier to remember the whole F number thing and that's just to try and imagine that there's a whole lot of F's lined up from the end of your lens going out into the distance F F F F F F F F F now if you only wanted two of those s to be in focus it doesn't matter which two whichever two you focus on I guess but if you only wanted two FS to be in focus you'd pick F two if you wanted yeah ten F to be in focus you'd pick F 10 if you wanted all four TS to be in focus you just pick F 40 basically you can boil it down to the more things you want in focus the more F's you want aperture doesn't get any simpler than that and it really is quite easy aperture really is your most powerful creative tool for making your photos look much more professional you know using a small F number for a small depth of field is a really powerful way of directing the viewers eye exactly where you want them to look like in this photo you can't look anywhere else really your eye is just drawn straight to that one chest piece also blurring stuff out that you don't want it's incredibly useful in a zoo you might have mesh cage mesh in front of what you're photographing in the real world you're gonna have a bird deep in a tree somewhere and there's little sticks in front of it or they'll it's a grass popping up in front of your lion if you can actually focus carefully on your subject though and use a very small F number for a small depth of field you can make your subject nice and sharp but anything in front like these little sticks start to become blurry and if you use a small half F number and you can get close enough to that thing you're trying to blur out you can actually make it disappear look at this example this mesh here is a one centimeter mesh so there's no way I could hope to poke my camera through there and get a nice clean shot but if I carefully focus on the cat inside there that's a cat in there and then use a small F number then anything in front of the cat becomes blurry and the cage wire as you can see has completely disappeared that mesh you can see in the background there that's the other side of the cage behind the cat but there's literally six or seven wires going across in front of its face but you just can't see them because they've been blurred out pretty amazing another example bird on a stick so f-22 that's a fairly big F number they depth of field so the bird is sharp the background leaves it quite distracting there and obviously the chicken wire in front is really annoying but if instead we just scroll down to a smaller F number F five point six and take the same shot again then look at the difference there the background is now a nice soft pastel II kind of background and the chicken wires gone fantastic and don't think that that is something you can only do with really expensive incredible lenses I deliberately took that pair of photos with the cheapest crappers lens money can buy but even with really cheap dodgy lenses you can do amazing things with the depth of field so you're supposed to be thinking now before you take a photo ask yourself the question where do you want the viewers eye to go in this photo what are we supposed to be looking at is there only one thing of interest ilat one subject then you probably want a small F number for a small depth of field nice blurry background to make it stand out but if there are multiple things of different distances like a landscape then you want a big F number for a big depth of field and make them all come out nice and sharp incidentally if your camera has a landscape mode basically that's just telling the camera to pick a larger F number for you so you get a larger depth of field or a portrait mode that's just telling the camera to use a small F number give us a bit of a smaller depth of field nice blurry backgrounds now that's definitely better than Auto mode for sure but it's nothing like as powerful as going over to aperture mode like we're gonna have a look at in a second to really drag that F number exactly where we want because often your landscape mode doesn't pick a very big F number it might pick about it seven-night whereas you could probably drag your F number all the way to F 20 if you wanted to so you can just get much more control and more exaggerated effects by going to aperture mode and telling the camera exactly what you want it's worth realizing that the region of stuff that's nice and sharp is not she's centered around the point that you focused on turns out that about two-thirds of the Union focus stuff is behind where you're focused only one-third of it comes forward and you might think who really cares about that seems a bit pedantic but it's actually really important particularly for a landscape shot where you're trying to maximize your available depth of field so a situation like this one we want a huge depth of field so we're going to use a big F number like f-22 or something great but then where do you focus a lot of people make the mistake on their landscape photos of focusing on the distant mountains and the problem then is sure you've got a big F number gives us a big depth of field but if you focus on those mountains two thirds of that depth of field is now wasted behind the mountains only one third of it comes forward and your foreground rocks and pebbles and stuff are still gonna be out of focus so the actual answer is when you're photographing a landscape scene you just try and arbitrarily focus about a third of the way into your shot so you just briefly point the camera down about a third of the way in focus lift it back up and take the shot now it's just maximizing the the use of your available depth of field okay so let's take a look at aperture mode so aperture mode on a Canon is a V and for every other brand it's just called a so in aperture mode you can pick whatever aperture value you want as long as the lens is capable of it and the camera will pick the right shutter speed to match up for it so that you get correct exposure or whatever exposures you've asked for if you've asked for a darker or brighter photo so be using aperture mode whenever depth of field is the almost creatively important element in the photo so if you're taking a portrait shot or a landscape shot which to me is most of the photography you ever take so I actually stay on aperture mode almost all the time and this is typically how aperture mode works you wake your camera by pressing the button and it comes up with the last F number that you used and that's quite different to P mode remember how P mode always gives you that default auto mode middle kind of value you can always scroll to the same f-number if you wanted to but it rapidly gets pretty repetitive in P mode if you're taking a bunch of landscape photos for example in P mode you go and it comes up and says how about 5.6 and you go how about f-16 for a big depth of field scroll scroll f-16 take a shot then you try and take your second photo and you have press it and it goes how about 5.6 and you're like ah how about f-16 again and you have to keep moving it or if the lighting changes or you point somewhere else in P mode you're not really nailing anything down everything keeps kind of shifting around but in aperture mode if you put in f-16 it'll stay on f-16 no matter what the lighting does or where you point the camera the shutter speed will just keep being updated for you so you end up with whatever exposure you asked for let's say you make the photo brighter so you use your plus/minus exposure compensation and you say plus two so now it's got to be a lot brighter in aperture mode it's not allowed to open the hole up anymore because you're still saying the same f-number but it's somehow it's got to let more light in so your photos brighter so you're just fine that it leaves the shutter open for longer so more light comes in or if you ask for a darker photo you'd find it would just be using a faster shutter speed for you so there's not so much light got in basically aperture mode you pick your F number it works out the shutter speed so that you end up with whatever exposure brightness you asked for so looking here obviously as we scroll our F number are bigger and bigger getting a bigger depth of field good for landscapes and so on you noticing the aperture hole is getting smaller and therefore the shutter has to stay open longer and longer so we still end up with that same correct exposure that's something to be aware of really large F numbers really small holes they often end up requiring quite a long slow photo so you've got to hold the camera really steady or put on a tripod or something that's why landscape photographers and things always bother to bring a tripod where someone else can just walk past with a happy snap and go click didn't need a tripod but no they're using such a big F number for such an amazing depth of field that the photo is going to be quite slow going the other way then scrolling smaller and smaller F numbers getting smaller depth of field good for portraits nice blurry backgrounds and conveniently also nice fast photos at the same time just a point to note don't expect to see the depth of field change when you're looking through your viewfinder it's not actually till you get the photo back that you'll see the depth of field because when you're looking through the viewfinder in a DSLR in fact the lens stays open to the largest hole it can so you can see wouldn't be much good if you'd asked for f-22 which is a really small hole and the lens just shut down you wouldn't be able to see through the camera anymore so in fact it stays open no matter what F number you ask for until you actually take the shot and then it briefly jumps down to a different size takes a photo than open back up again so you can see it just means you can't see the depth of field changing in real time the other thing to remember is you're not entirely safe anymore in aperture mode it won't stop you selecting an F number even if there actually is no shutter speed to match up to it for that current lighting condition maybe it needs more than 30 seconds or maybe it needs faster than the four thousandth of a second limit that the camera can do so you can pick whatever F number you want as long as the lens can do it but there just might not be a fast enough or a slow enough shutter speed to match up to it so you've got to be aware of that the camera will warn you it'll sit there flashing the F number at you or it might go red or nickens normally say high or low there'll be some some warning there letting you know that the F number you've picked is basically out of range for the current lighting conditions it'll sometimes happen in a situation like this let's say you're trying to take a photo in the dark and you make it worse by using a large F number now when I say you're making it worse that's because the large F number is a small hole so there's already almost no light out there and you're forcing it to come in through a pinhole it's gonna take forever to get enough light in there for the photo well and truly more than a thirty second limit that the camera can do itself but it won't stop you taking the picture it'll just flash 30 seconds at you're basically saying don't do it if you take this photo it's your own silly fault it'll just stay open for as long as it can which is only thirty seconds and then it'll give you a photo back that just looks dark it's just it couldn't stay open long enough to give you the correct brightness the same thing can also happen at the other end if you use too small an F number so too big a hole and you're pointing straight at the Sun or some really bright light source then so much light comes gushing in there the camera really needs to be open for a millionth of a second to get the correct exposure but you know the quickest photo it can do is maybe four thousandth of a second and still too much light's gonna get in and you'll end up with an overexposed photo so that's a bit of a telltale if you're looking at a photo you just seem to be getting inexplicable exposure like I asked for it to be brighter and it's not getting brighter or something like that it probably was telling you that there was something warning something flashing at you you just missed it so just don't use such a large or such a small F number until it kind of calms down and doesn't have any flashing warnings that you another thing you can do to combat that is change your ISO but we'll leave that to the ISO lecture an interesting side effect you can get with using a large F number apartment having a large depth of field actually tends to make any point light source turn into a bit of a star bit of a starburst it can look really cool some people hate it but I think of its views properly it can be quite nice so to get that effect you have the Sun actually hiding behind the leaf or the building or whatever it is while you're half press and set the exposure and focus all that kind of stuff because remember if you have the Sun already in the shot it might throw out your metering you'll end up with a silhouette so you have the Sun hidden half press beep and then just move to the side just until the Sun Jeff starts bleeding over the corner of the building take the photo just before you go blind basically obviously don't look at the Sun with a really long lens this effect works better anyway with a very wide lens if you look at the Sun through a long lens you're actually risk going blind it's like looking at it through a telescope you can just burn a hole through the back of your head so try not to do that alright so it's time to go out with your aperture crack which is actually a pretty straightforward prac you just pick up your camera make sure you're on aperture mode AV mode or a mode and then you just want to find a subject and take two different pictures of it one with the big F number one with a small F number and then just compare the two and you should be able to see the background blur out in one of them and become sort of sharper and more distracting in the other one but look at these two photos which one of these has the smaller F number the smaller depth of field definitely it's this one in fact the closer you get to your subject and the further away the background is and the more you zoom your lens in that'll all help to give you a nice blurry background if you're really not able to see any difference between your big F number and your small F number shot you just probably didn't pick a good example you know you got to get closer or find something that's not so many different things that are similar distance away it's getting closer you'll get there in the end you should be able to see a fairly dramatic difference another common problem you might have with this prac is if you're using your large F number so if the big depth of field you expect the whole thing to be nice and sharp but you might actually have a problem where the big F number makes your photo so slow there yet camera shake and in fact the whole thing goes blurry just from subject movement and camera shake nothing to do with the F number so if you're getting camera shake problems and just turn your ISO up more and then come back in and look at the next lecture which is exploring shutter speed [Music] so in this lecture we're going to look at shutter speed and the effect that has on things that are moving in your photos it's nothing like as long or involved as a previous lecture on aperture because it's pretty obvious really the longer the shutter is open then more things can move the more you get movement blur and so on you might still pick up a few interesting little tips and don't forget this whole section is also covered in our course notes booklet that you can buy online and also there's little plastic summary clip cards as well as a section there on you know using shutter speed to freeze or show movement and how you do all that kind of stuff so what is shutter speed well as you know it's just how long that shutter is open for how long the light is allowed to shine onto the sensor for so if you use a very quick shutter speed then nothing's had a chance to move anywhere while a photo is being recorded so you end up being able to snap for use even quite fast subjects like these ones no it's worth knowing that almost all of your cameras should be able to do four thousandth of a second you can also now freeze photos like this if you know how to control it properly and slow shutter speeds on the other hand show movement blur so anything that's moving becomes streaked across your image and you can create some really beautiful effects incidentally sports mode if your camera has a sports mode one of the things that sports mode tries to do is give you a nice fast shutter speeds they don't have blurry people running around but the problem with all of these basic modes are that you can't change anything yourself so sure it might try and give you a fast shutter speed but what if you wanted to brighten the photo with your exposure compensation or you know use a different autofocus point or something you can't do any of that kind of stuff yeah they're incredibly limiting modes to be in you may as well be in aperture or shutter speed mode over on the creative side and you can do all of these things and more in any of these modes here's a photo of a waterfall taken in Auto mode and for whatever reason the camera thought that fiftieth of a second would be about right now 50th of a second is not particularly quick or particularly slow so we haven't frozen the waterfall or shown that nice flowing movement but if instead we ask for a one second photo then now you can see that lovely flowing cascade effect that looks so beautiful in waterfalls there's a lot of situations where showing a bit of movement in your photo can really just add a bit of life you know if you take a fast photo of a helicopter normally you end up with a really fast shutter speed and the blades are just frozen there and it kind of looks like the engines turned off and it should just be falling out of the sky but if you're allowed just enough shutter speed that the blades can turn a little bit it just looks more natural like the engine still going most low-light photography has to be quite long slow photos just cuz it takes a long time for the camera to get enough light in there to record the image but this is some of the most beautiful creative photos you can do I think like this one six seconds so obviously the camera has to be absolutely motionless so ideally on a tripod or at least sitting on a rock or something where you don't have to touch it but not only does the camera have to be motionless of course your subjects do as well and you can see actually she has moved so she's blurry there it would've been alright this one 20 minutes so now we're getting beyond the 30-second limit that the camera can do by itself so to get this kind of shot you've got to plug in some external timer so after 20 minutes obviously the earth has started to rotate and the stars get dragged past the sky there and beginning to get a bit of a star trail but it's cool to see the star trail is not actually a straight line is it it's a bit of a curve and if you can work out where the center of that set of circles are you get a photo like this one so to work out where that point is where all the stars are spiraling around in the northern hemisphere it's a bit easier there's a giant star there called the North Star and if you can recognize that easy in the southern hemisphere though it's a bit more complicated but you can work it out from the Southern Cross so if you find that constellation and you just draw a line down through the middle of the Southern Cross like a string coming down from the kite and if you just extend the axes of the Southern Cross down by about four and a half times the height of the Southern Cross so you just kind of go there it is one two three four in a bit that's the same point that's where it's all spiraling so you can put that somewhere you know for good composition in your shot and also if you're lost and you're trying to work out where South is find that point and then directly down the nearest bit of horizon straight underneath that'll always be due south so that might come in handy as well we've actually got a whole lot of really good tutorials on our website including one on star trails it's quite popular they look quite long these tutorials but it's just because I've worded them in a way that they're really easy to understand and they don't assume any prior knowledge so it goes through everything like what lens is he gonna use and how do you focus because it's in the dark what are the common problems you might come up against like a plane what are you different ways of being out to do it you could do one really long exposure or you could do a whole lot of short ones and then stitch them to using free software there's a whole lot of different options out there and it's really worthwhile having a look at these free tutorials so go to the website Chris Bray photography.com and have a look there there's so many different tutorials now longer slower shutter speeds they give you time to be a bit more creative with light and come up with some really cool photos like this one it's a photo of someone walking through the snow carrying a torch you can't really see the person in the photo because they've kind of smeared themselves across the whole image but the torch was bright enough that wherever it went it really left a mark on the sensor this was our Christmas card photo a couple of years back so there's no fancy Photoshop or anything going on here it's just a 10 second photo with a flash at the end of it so initially all the camera can see is just black and then the sparkle is right merry xmas and then we stand to the side and then the flash goes off and fills us in there it's pretty cool you can do with these kind of things or this one you can tie a light to a string and spin it around why do you walk in a circle and you end up with a light orb looks pretty cool we could draw pictures just in free space you just use these little torches draw shapes or symbols and then the reflection there is because we've done it on a wet beach and if you haven't tried a photo like this one before you really have to is great fun it's actually steel wool you wouldn't think steel wool would burn but it just sort of smolders a little bit but if you tie it onto a bit of string and spin it around absolutely it burns and it just sends these beautiful shards of molten metal up in these wonderful arches and just looks amazing you got to be careful though there's a few tips you probably don't want to learn by trial and error like some of the bits of steel will go straight up in the air and come down land in your hair so good plan to wear a hat and best not to just tie the steel wool directly onto the string because otherwise you'll find partway through it just burns through and you just send this burning meteor onto your neighbor's roof it's not a good you're better off actually using a Bulldog clip clipping the Bulldog clip onto the steel wool and tying the string onto the Bulldog clip you know a few little tips like that that might just save you a little bit of embarrassment we also have a light painting tutorial on the website and that just goes through all about how to take these long slow exposures where you can draw things with the light like the light orbs or drawing pictures or the steel wool so you have a read through that as well and have some fun what about this photo of the glowing tent now as much as MSR would like us to believe that tents are wonderfully warm glowing havens they're not than miserable cold horrible wet dark places but to make it glow like that you've just got to do whatever you can do in 30 seconds with light so I've actually just dived inside the door of the tent there you can still see my legs hanging out and then the white lines in there that's just me waving the torch around trying to give it an even spread of light from the inside but the thing about all of these low-light photos you can't even begin to do them unless you have a tripod I think that's the main reason why it's worth going getting a tripod just opens up this whole world of photography for you don't get an enormous lean giant heavy one you know lots of people have that but they just never take it with them anywhere get one that's small enough that you can be bothered to take it with you when you're buying a tripod I consider getting one that's with a ball head that's nice and easy easy to move around you know the old ones where you have to kind of adjust one lever this way and then some other adjustment here to go vertically and it's quite awkward to use a ball head is what I like where you just undo one thing and you can point it wherever you want lock it and then it's nice and quick and all tripods have a load limit that they're designed to support so you've got to make sure your tripod is strong enough to support your camera and your heaviest lens but don't go and buy one that's can support 10 times as much because it's just too heavy and too expensive and you will never bring it with you anyway now even if you've got a tripod sometimes you'll find these long exposures are still blurry and normally what's happened there is you poke the camera it's you pressing the button that started the whole thing wobbling so you could use some fancy timer remote so you can press it without bumping the camera but you're better off just using the inbuilt self timer you've got on your camera you know that 10 second countdown bbbbbb and then it takes a photo if you're ever using a camera on a tripod you may as well turn that delay on it just means you can press the camera all you want and it'll wobble a little bit but after 10 seconds it'll be perfectly still and it'll take it for you also it's a good idea if you're shooting on a tripod and you know everything is nice and stable you should turn the stabilizer off on your lens because some stabilizers actually end up introducing camera shake if the camera is really steady so turn that off just remember to turn it back on again afterwards let's have a look at the different drive modes you might have in your camera so you either have a button that's called drive or a button that has these kind of symbols next to it or you'll find your way there better get options like these ones singular shooting that's what you normally want that's when you press the button once and you get one picture that's normal well you've got rapid fire continue shooting high-speed continuous and that's when you hold your finger down and the camera just takes as many photos as it can as quickly as they can until you take your finger off and that's good for a situation where there's something rapidly happening in front of you and you don't know quite when to get the perfect moment so you just leave your finger down and get all of them and then go back and hopefully find the perfect moment in there somewhere this one is the 10-second delay the countdown timer normally good for with your friends so you can run around and stand and be part of the photo but as I said it's also good for a few cameras on a tripod to keep it nice and steady so it's not wobbling anymore by the time it actually takes the photo funny story getting this photo though up in the Arctic so I didn't have any fancy timers with me or anything during that trip all I had was 10 seconds to run around from behind the camera pick up my hiking poles and pick up the harness and make it look like I just hold the kayak up the hill I actually had to take this photo seven times because the first couple of photos of me just sprawled on the ground somewhere slipped over you know it's just ice when we actually finally got home I did talk to Cannon and say why don't you make a variable time limit on these things like out to a minute or longer where you could calmly walk into the distance of your own photo and they basically said yeah but then no one would buy any of our little timers would they but they did bring out the two-second mode which is actually five times less useful than the ten-second one but I gather it's more useful for when the camera is on a tripod and you want to press the button and step away the camera will have stopped shaking after about two seconds so it saves you a little bit of time and yeah I guess it's good for coastal exposures or something where you're photographing a wave coming over a rock it's hard to predict ten seconds out when the waves going to come so two seconds a little bit easier to use but it's basically for when the camera is on the tripod some cameras have a self timer continuous mode like this one it looks like a variable time limit but it's not you're still stuck at ten seconds but that's the number of photos it'll take after ten seconds normally with the one second gap between them so that's useful in a situation like this where maybe Jess can hang on to the bikes I can set the camera up press the button run back and then it'll take a bunch of photos as we slowly cycle towards and then you can go back and pick the best one or more commonly useful for a group photo you know normally you take a group photo then you have to run back and check and then you find out that you know someone was blinking and you had to go back and do it again so instead you could just tell it to do the ten-second delay you run around join your friends and then it'll take a whole series of photos afterwards and hopefully everyone's eyes are open okay let's have a look at time value mode TV mode on a Canon or s mode for every other brand and in time value mode you can choose whatever shutter speed you want and the camera works out the aperture to go with it it's just like the opposite of aperture mode so you'll be using TV mode or S mode when getting a particular shutter speed is what's creatively most important to your photo so maybe you really want a 1 second photo to get that waterfall or maybe the most important thing is to have a four thousandth of a second photo to be able to freeze a bird or something like that and it works just like you'd expect you touch the button the camera wakes up and it starts with the last shutter speed that you used and you can scroll around and pick whatever value you want you can see here we're scrolling to slower and slower photos and to prevent more light coming in the camera is automatically using smaller and smaller holes for us at the same time but you can see we're gonna run into the same kind of limit in the end that the camera just can't make the hole any smaller after a while so as we ask for longer and longer photos here sixth of a second noir point three of a second that seems to be okay but if you try and go any further you find the camera just can't shrink down that hole anymore so it can't stop any extra light coming in so then you're gonna get into that same situation we saw in the aperture lecture where it just starts flashing warnings out here saying you know the value you're picking is inappropriate for the current lighting condition but again it won't stop you taking the picture so if you really wanted to you could scroll all the way to 30 seconds or something during the day take a picture and it will try and warn you but if you ignore those warnings it'll just take a full 30 second photo for you and it'll come back and just be massively overexposed so just watch out for those flashing warnings again and just reminder you can always get to the same photo exactly the same settings on any of these other modes like aperture mode it's just which variable do you want to make sure you keep it the same value if you really want a particular shutter speed all the time then you'd want to be in shutter speed mode if the most important thing was to have a particular F number the whole time for a certain depth of field then you stay in aperture mode so some cool tricks with longer shutter speeds the panning shot is a good one to practice that's where you want to show movement in a subject but rather than just holding the camera steady and having a long shutter speed and letting your animal or your car or whatever it is moved past because I wouldn't look very good you just end up with a blurry subject instead you can actually follow the subject with the lens and goes past and if you can keep the your subject in exactly the same part of the photo it stays nice and sharp but the background kolak becomes blurred and streetpassed it's a much nicer way of showing your subjects moving than having a blurry subject experiment with different settings start off with about tenth of a second or twentieth of a second so that's still fairly slow and then just look through and follow it as it comes along click and take that when the animal or the car is right perpendicular in front of you and you should end up with a pretty cool result it's just practice you'll get a lot better even in the first couple of times you try the zooming in shot trying to Majan what your photo would look like if you zoomed in while you were taking a picture kind of weird yeah but it is kind of cool it creates all these leading Lions kind of pulling your attention into the subject which can be a nice creative effect now for our shutter speed prac what you want to do is just go outside and find something that's moving you know it could be a car driving past it could be a friend walking back and forwards in front of you ideally it might even be a waterfall or a fountain so then set your camera up on a tripod ideally and then wake it up that's an important step you've got to always remember to wake up the camera so that its alert and looking at the lighting out there and stuff otherwise you wouldn't know if it was trying to flash warnings at you or not and then try and scroll down to the slower shutter speed you can so you wake it up scroll slower and slower watching your shutter speed and eventually you'll get so slow that it'll start to flash warnings at you so then come back one and then it should calm down that's the longest slowest photo you can take so go ahead and take that one cool link and you probably see that shows the movement in the fountain or the waterfall or the car going past that'll show movement blur and then take the same photo again but now with the fast shutter speed so you'd wake it up and then go the other way faster and faster and then finally it'll get too fast it'll flash warnings at you come back a bit okay then that's the fastest photo you can take in that situation so take it and you should find that the movement has been frozen or at least less movement has occurred now because we haven't really covered ISO yeah that's in the next lecture coming up for now just put your ISO on a middle sort of value like ISO 400 that'll be fine [Music] okay we'd better have a look at ISO and how that all fits together and just a reminder there's an ISO section in the booklet that goes with this course as well as the little summary set of plastic clip cards I've got a handy little reference there if you ever forget any of these key tips so ISO is basically a variable setting for how sensitive your camera is to light how much light it needs to collect to be able to give you a correctly exposed photo now ISO is go from about as low as a hundred that's a fairly low value uncensored that means it needs to collect an awful lot of light to be able to get you a picture or you could crank your ISO right up to 1600 several thousand and then it's very sensitive it doesn't need much light at all even a little brief amount of quite faint light and the photos already finished and give you a correct exposure now there's all kinds of ways people have managed to get themselves confused about ISO what it is and how you use it basically this is a simplest way to understand ISO the higher you turn your ISO the more sensitive the camera is to light so doesn't need to collect so much light anymore to give you exactly the same picture so instead of having to leave the shutter open for ages and collect this huge amount of light even just the first little bit of light coming in is enough the shutter finishes and that means you're able to get faster shutter speeds and you otherwise could now that's a real advantage to be able to have faster shutter speeds than you otherwise could particularly in low-light when otherwise the photo is just too long and slow and you end up with a lot of camera shake and you get blurry photos even if you have your camera on a tripod your subjects are still moving around so they're still blurry whereas you can have a fast photo great you can handhold it no one has moved anywhere and that's great or even just for extra fast photos during the day like if you are trying to freeze a bird in flight maybe the fastest photo you could normally take would be about 500th of a second that's pretty quick but it's not quick enough to freeze the wingtips on the bird so if you turned your iso up you might then be able to take four thousandth of a second and absolutely freeze those wings it's the same thing if you think about it by turning the ISO up we've been able to get faster shutter speeds anywhere otherwise could either in low light or just could be one an even faster photo during the day so here's a little example to help that syncing I wanted to try and freeze these water droplets so with a very fast shutter speed but because it was early morning wasn't much light around the quickest photo I was able to take was only 20th of a second now when I say that was the quickest photo I could take if I was in P program mode then that means all I could scroll to was 20th of a second and it wouldn't let me scroll any further or if I was in shutter speed mode that means I could happily scroll to 20th of a second but if I tried to go any faster like 50th of a second or hundredth of a second it would have descent they're flashing warnings at me saying now and we've had to have come back anyway so no matter what I couldn't get it fast a photo than 20th of a second but if I cranked my ISO up to ISO 1600 then all of a sudden I'm able to scroll all the way to three hundredth of a second to get that creative effect I wanted to freeze the water droplets but it's important to realize that other than that the photos look the same if just by turning your ISO up you can get away with faster shutter speeds now if you crank your ISO too high you do have the downside of losing a little bit of quality in your image it's called ISO noise the same thing used to happen with film due to a totally different reason but it looked similar when you zoom right in on the image you see it looks bit gritty and grainy you get these kind of random speckles of color now this is nothing like as big a problem as people make it out to be you know you really only see is a noise if you zoom really a long way in or if you blow the picture up really huge let's take a look at a series of photos taken of the same patch of blue sky at different ISO levels and you can start to see the higher you cranked your ISO the more we're starting to get these random little speckles of color in there but this technology is getting better and better all the time this example is a Canon 5d Mark - that's ancient in terms of cameras so the same example again now with a 1d Mark 4 so even that's a good couple of years old and now you can see the ISO is much better unfortunately you still have people going around saying oh no no don't turn your iso up more than about 800 it'll be unusable noisy it's just completely not true these days you can crank your ISO to ridiculous values and you can basically unlocks photos that were previously not even possible I'd much rather have a little bit of speckly noise in my photo because I've used a bit too higher so they're not having a use high enough ISO and end up with the shutter speed being too long and slow and have a blurry subject you know blurry subject is really obvious and it ruins a shot having a little bit of ISO noise it's not the end of the word and in fact post-production is getting better and better at being able to kind of smooth out that anyway let's zoom out this photo this is the example photo of the really ancient camera the 5d mark ii at the 12,800 ISO which was the worst that camera was prepared to offer us and by the time you zoom all the way out it just looks nice uniform blue sky if that was a full-frame photo of a bird that would be fine so I actually on the side of safety by having slightly too high ISO than too little now all this has been about turning your ISO up to help you get faster photos but the reverse is also true if you wanted to slow your shutter speed down and get really long slow photos with lots of flying movement in there it helps to turn your ISO down so if you dropped your ISO down to ISO 100 something like that you'll find you might be able to access much longer slower shutter speeds than you could before so the take-home point for ISO if you like is basically to treat it as an extension tool for your shutter speed it's something you can completely forget about and ignore really until you find yourself going gee I just can't get it fast enough photo you know the bird's wings are still blurry or whatever it is then I turn your ISO up then you'll be able to access much faster photos and you could before or if you're like oh I wanted to get a slower photo then I seem to be able to get I want a longer photo for more movement blur then drop your ISO and you might find you'd be attic access much longer slower photos but to avoid noise the idea is just to keep your ISO as low as you can there's not much point having your eyes so super high and getting really fast photos if you didn't need to because you get also going to get that little bit of noise quality loss so that's it really for ISO you've already covered aperture and shutter speed and together those three things form what's called the exposure triangle they're the three variables you can control to affect the way the light ends up in your photo you know so your shutter speed is how long the shutter is open for how long the lights coming in for your aperture is the size of the hole so - how much light is coming in and then your ISO is basically how much light it needs so by varying all those three things you've got complete control over your camera now before we go out in practice ISO I just want to touch on a couple of other camera modes things like manual mode now unfortunate there's a real misnomer around with manual mode in that people think unless you're shooting on manual mode you're somehow not getting the full creative control out of your camera that's just completely true value is like you know aperture mode shutter speed mode they're still giving you a complete control you can still get to every setting you could imagine you through got exposure compensation so you can still get the photo brighter or darker a lot of people think you need to go to manual mode for that in manual mode you've got to do everything yourself you've got to pick your own aperture your own shutter speed your own ISO and it doesn't help you match them up so if the lighting changes or if the scene changes you just end up with in correctly exposed photos all the time unless you're forever watching that little light meter and balancing all these values and juggling them around now manual mode is useful in situations like in a studio where you want to be able to set your values at once and you don't want anything to change depending on you know different subjects moving in front or complex flash work you don't want your camera to respond to the ambient light because you're gonna change the whole world with different flashlights things like that then manual mode has a use but normally out in the real world running around where the lighting is changing and that kind of stuff is just slowing you right down bold mode is another mode that's worth looking at this is how you can get beyond that 30-second limit and start taking longer you know to our star trail photos or something like that if you don't have a bulb mode don't worry it'll be hiding inside your manual mode so in bold mode you can pick whatever aperture you want but then with your shutter speed is determined by how long you leave your finger on the shutter button for so you could actually hold your finger on there for an hour and get an hour star trail photo or something obviously to introduce a lot of camera shake and your finger would get a bit sore so that's when you're actually designed to plug in one of these external timers so that's the same as pressing the button on the camera and that's the same as leaving your finger on the button and then you could come back later on and turn it off now if you don't have one of these fancy timers that's alright you know on our photo safaris we go out to these beautiful places where the sky is super dark and the stars are so rich everyone wants to take star trail photos not everyone has those timers but you can still experiment just by you need you need to find a way to hold that button in without hanging on to the camera the best way is just to hold it in with a bunch of rubber bands you might need to put a little stick or and just that'll hold the button in there and then you can step away and the camera starts taking the picture you come back an hour later don't worry about you might be wobbling the camera for the last hundredth of a second as you pull this stick out it doesn't matter think about the ratios involved if it's taking a whole hour for the for that faint light to register in your picture the last hundredth of a second of wobble isn't gonna make any difference obviously it's more convenient to have a fancy timer and you can get one eventually but just to start with it's good to know that you could go out tonight and take a star trail photo just to see if you like that kind of thing so for our practitioner on ISO you should test out how it affects both aperture mode and shutter speed mode start off in aperture mode and then just pick whatever F number you want and then look at the shutter speed that the camera is going to use either take a picture and look at it or just look through the viewfinder touch the shutter button and just look at the shutter speed it's suggesting there let's say it was going to use you know 50th of a second you find if you turn your iso up you'd find the shutter speed it's going to use is quicker so if you doubled your iso it's gonna double your shutter speed so that's convenient if you ever remember when we were taking the large f-number photos and they were quite slow a lot of camera shake involved if you crank your iso up you'd find them the shutter speed becomes faster again and you'd be able to handhold it without that camera shake changing your ISO and shutter speed mode just affects the range of shutter speed values you're allowed to operate within so you know let's say if you're in shutter speed mode so TV or s mode you wake your camera up and you try and scroll and find the fastest photo you can get to it might be five hundredth of a second or something before it starts flashing warnings say you come back a bit but if you turned your iso up you've then be able to keep scrolling to much faster shutter speeds you know to four thousandth of a second or if you wanted to get longer and slower photos initially kind of scroll down and you go on the slowest I can get is 50th of a second or something but if you drop your ISO all the way down like ISO 100 then you might find you could scroll to an even slower shutter speed 20 to the second or one second a thing like that the same thing exactly happening in both situations if you think about it by turning your ISO up were either able to get to faster shutter speeds in shutter speed mode or in aperture mode it's automatically picking faster shutter speeds for us and if you turn the ISO down in shutter speed mode you can get to slower photos you just still need to scroll there but in aperture mode turn your ISO down it'll automatically big slower photos for you now what about auto ISO a lot of people ask about that now auto ISO in shutter speed mode TV s mode there's such a quite handy because then the ISO will only ever lift up just enough so you can get whatever shutter speed you're after but auto ISO in aperture mode is actually not that good because all it ever does is lift your ISO enough that you're getting enough shutter speed not to have camera shake that's basically all that's trying to do so it's giving you a quick enough photo that you know it's shaking around often there's nothing like quick enough to be able to freeze the animal or the bird or the person walking around you still end up with blurry photos so I don't use auto ISO aperture mode but I use it quite a lot in time value mode shutter speed mode so after you've done that practical session make sure you come back and find the next lecture in the series which is on lighting there's so much you can learn about lighting just the simple stuff like you know the different types of lighting in the different directions of lighting how that affect your photos it's a really powerful thing to know so in this lecture we're going to look at lighting now I know that sounds like a fairly broad topic but at least being able to understand the different types of lighting and the different directions of lighting and how that affects your photos and flash and things like that that'll put you a lot further forward in what you can get out of your photos and just a reminder that the in the course notes booklet as well there's the same lighting section that matches up and with the little summary clip cards as a section there that tells you about you know the directions of lighting which way that puts your shadows and so on so that's pretty handy but in many ways lighting is probably the most important part in photography really you know you can do as much as you want with your aperture and shutter speed and blah blah blah but if the lighting is terrible there's almost nothing you can do to get a good photo let's just look at the various types of lighting you get in your average day starting with lovely golden morning lighting now as you know morning lighting is beautiful for photography you know there's some means low in the sky so it's nice and soft you don't have that contrast problem the shadows are not too dark and it has that nice warm glow to it as well it's a really beautiful time for taking photos while you can certainly take beautiful photos before the Sun comes up as well you've got about an hour afterwards that's what they call the golden hour when the lighting is just perfect after that pretty rapidly the Sun starts to climb higher and get stronger and you end up with harsh lighting when the Sun gets too strong then you end up with contrast problems so the bit in the Sun is a million times brighter than a bit in a shade next to it so the shadow just becomes jet-black or you end up blowing out your highlights they become too bright it's just not a good time for taking photos also middle of the day the Sun is quite high so you end up with top lighting which means you get shadows in the eye sockets of people and you know photographs of animals and things they kind of become very bright on the top and very dark underneath it's not a very nice direction of light either not a good time for taking photos if you have to take photos in the middle of the day in the Sun you're better off going and finding some shade literally going in standing behind a building or something where it's just total shade lighting because the light that gets into the shade is actually really beautiful you don't have any contrast problems because you're already in the shade so there's not going to be any shaded side of your subject it's just nice and even it's the same with cloud lighting you know if you wake up and it's just a blanket cloud cover day you might think what a boring day for taking photos sure your landscape photos might look a little drab if there's too many clouds but photographs of things like people and animals fantastic cloud lighting is beautiful it's just such a soft light and the light has bounced off from everywhere so it's coming from every direction at once so it fills every little nook and cranny evenly it's a very flattering kind of light for portraits wrinkles and things don't really show up it's a great time for taking photos and it means you can shoot all day long because there's never any harsh sunlight here's a good little tip if you're photographing an animal that's sitting in the Sun like a little crab or a lizard or something yeah if you can actually shade it with your body sort of move yourself between the Sun and your subject cast your shadow over it then you've got it in Nice soft shade lighting and it'll look beautiful all the colors will look nicer and it won't be so contrast Y anymore moving on then you get to evening lighting much like morning lighting I guess the Sun is low in the sky and you get that nice warm orange glow again and the contrast problems not there anymore you can see in this photo you can see the shadows but they're not too dark at all they just provide a bit of interest it makes it look a little bit more 3d you can still see into the deep crevices in the rock and obviously this photo is taken with a large f-number you can tell from the large depth of field so everything is in focus but also the Sun has done that starburst which remember in the aperture lecture you get that with the large f-number and finally moving on to low lighting now low lighting is tricky to deal with just because there's not much light around and it's take the camera quite a long time to collect enough of it to give you an image so you're gonna have to expect to have quite long slow shutter speeds so you're gonna have to hold the camera really steady or put it on a tripod or turn your iso up or a few other things there's a little trickier to deal with but it's worth persevering because you can get really beautiful results don't always let your flash pop up you know it's worth knowing that in all the camera modes we've been using on this course so program mode and everything better than that the flash will never pop up on its own if you actually want to use the flash you have to press the little flash release button next to the flash and then it'll pop up but if you leave it down then you're forcing the camera to use that natural ambient light and you can get such beautiful results all of these sort of photos would have just been ruined in auto mode the flash would have popped up BAM and you'd lose all that delicate lighting of the fire or the head torch whatever it is it's a persevere so the other important factor of the lighting is not only the quality of the light but the direction that it's coming from because that affects the shadows as you'll see so let's start with the front lighting that's where your subject is lit from the same direction that you're looking at it so there's some pretty telltale signs of front lighting your subject ends up being completely illuminated so you don't have any shadows on it of course because if you're shining the light on the front of it all the shadows around the back so it's great if you want to be able to see every detail like for a product photo for a catalog or something there's a lot of drawbacks to front lighting if your subject is at all reflective or glossy the light just sort of shines straight back into the camera and you get that nasty glare same on the skin of people or if they're wearing glasses or if you're trying to shoot through glass it just bounces back at you so it's not that nice and the worst thing about front lighting is it tends to make your photos quite flat and 2-dimensional you can't really see the shape of things you need some shadows for that and that's where side lighting comes in so side lighting reveals shape and texture through the shadows so side lighting is good for portraits or anything where you just want to make it look a little bit more 3d now backlighting when you're starting out in photography people often try and avoid it because you end up with dark silhouettes and things like you saw in the exposure lecture when you accidentally have the girl in front of the window or if you get the Sun in the background of your shot and your subject just comes out as this really dark figure but in that exposure lecture we learn how to fix those kind of problems using exposure compensation so could just go Plus to brighten the photo back up and then great so after you've learned how to deal with the problems of backlighting it can give you some really beautiful results it can give you a nice glow or halo around the edges of things rim lighting it can give you really nice silhouettes and for people it gives you nice highlights in the hair so backlighting can be a really beautiful light to use you might just find you need to overexpose the shot sometimes and you've also got to look out for lens flare you've probably seen these little splashes of light that come across your photo from time to time that's caused by direct sunlight coming in to the front of your lens and reflecting off every bit of glass inside your lens now getting direct sunlight in your lens is a problem for several reasons not only do you get lens flares but you also lose some of the saturation of your colors and if you have little bits of dust or something on your lens they tend to show up more autofocus can struggle you know getting sunlight in your lens is not a good thing now if the Sun is actually in your photo then you're gonna get sunlight on the front of your lens clearly there's not much you can do about that so you probably have lens flares and all the other problems but often the Sun is not in your shot maybe it's up here somewhere you wouldn't have even really thought about it maybe you wouldn't think it's backlit at all but in fact the Sun can still see directly into the lens so we're getting direct sunlight spilling across the front of the lens and we're still getting all those problems so that's what these things are for lens hood the whole point in life is just to shade the front of the lens so you don't have lens flares so you get to keep your nice rich colors and so on now most lenses come with lens hoods and often times people just tend to forget about them or they just you know leave them on backwards all the time which is a bit silly that makes it smaller so you can put it into your camera bag but every time you're photographing you really should get in the habit of getting it out and putting it on it's almost never a problem you know people think oh it's cutting out light and you might need that in low-light or something it's not true it's only ever cutting out light that you don't need to photograph it's just cutting out stray light coming in from the edge the only times you might ever want to take it off is if you're doing really close-up flash work and you pop your little flash up and it couldn't quite see past the lens hood so you end up with what's called a hood shadow on the bottom of your photo or if you're trying to get that much closer to a window or something then sure then you can take it off but in every other situation it's never doing you harm and you should get in the habit of using it so it's worth taking just a couple of seconds to think about lighting before start taking photos you know if someone asks you to take their photo in the Sun realize that they're going to be really harsh shadows go and find somewhere in the shade well maybe if there's no shade look up in the sky and you might find that the only reason it's harsh sunlight just now is that there's a hole in the clouds but it looks like if you wait about two minutes there's gonna be a big bank of clouds roll in front of the Sun and then you'll be with nice cloud lighting totally worth waiting two minutes for some nice cloud lighting before you photograph someone or at least think about the direction of the light as well rather than having the Sun over there and getting lens flares and things maybe bring it around here and shoot from that way then you get some side lighting it looks more 3d it doesn't take long to think about these things but it can make a really big difference in how your photos look look at this example of a little beetle on a leaf you can see that's just fairly boring top lighting but instead if you turn the leaf up to the light and have the light coming through it then you get beautiful colors coming through the leaf and there's a real silhouette of the beetle and it looks fantastic okay let's take a look at flash definitely not just for nighttime use in fact I use my flash a lot more during the day than I ever do at night because if you use it during the day you can fill in those harsh shadows caused by a strong sunlight this example is crying out for some fill flash look at those harsh shadows under the hat and it's just also contrast II but if we just pop the flash up take the same photo again that looks much better and the great thing is it doesn't even look flash does it looks quite natural if you take a flash photo at night normally it looks pretty flashed but during the day you can just slip some light into the shadows there when you're doing that it's a technique called fill flash and all of your cameras can do this even your compact cameras even your smartphone cameras you can normally force your flash on now you could just try and lift up the overall exposure until your subject was nice and bright but by then the background would be completely blown out so you're better off just popping your flash up throwing some light in there and filling in those shadows to being the same brightness as the background and then it all looks great you can also use your flash to add a little glint or a sparkle into the eyes of people or animals it's called a catch light makes a big difference just brings them to life a bit more it doesn't have to be a flash you just need to be able to see the reflection of something quite bright in their eyes it could just be a window or something like that but a flash is an easy way to try it so maybe in the last of a batch of photos you've taken pop your flash up just see the effect you get okay we better have a look as to why you'd buy one of these giant external flashes if you already have a little inbuilt or pop-up flash in your camera most people just assume it's because these are obviously bigger more powerful you can penetrate the dark further that's true but that's actually not the main reason you'd buy one of these it's because of the amazing creative lighting options these kind of things open up to you because with a pop-up flasher an inbuilt flash all you've ever been able to do is just hush front lighting and we saw before there's nothing nice about harsh front lighting you know you get reflections and glare and it makes your photos look very flat and two-dimensional that's all you've ever been how to do before but if you put one of these on instead then instead of harsh front lighting you can turn to the side and get bounce flash you bounce it off a wall and it drifts back and then you've got soft side lighting of course you do need a wall or something to be able to reflect the flashlight off no much good being outside and turning the flash to the side and hope you're gonna get some light back but in those situations you just take the flash off the camera you know you connected via a hotshoe extension cable or a lot of flashes and Wireless now and that just lets you get the flash to the side a little bit to give you some side lighting so your photos look more three-dimensional of course it would be fairly harsh because you've got a flash gun pointing straight at your subject but what you can do in those situations then is just pull out a little flash diffuser or in fact a lot of flashes you can buy big external plastic diffusers and they just make the light come from a softer more gradual kind of area and you just end up with more three-dimensional photos using flashes these days is just so easy used to be quite complicated you have to learn about things like inverse square laws and guide ratios and that kind of stuff but these days it just does it all for you modern ETTL flashes in fact when you take a picture the flash it actually sets off a little pre flash first and the camera looks at how bright that's made your subject and then adjust the power of the flash for the real photo so you end up with exactly whatever brightness you've asked for on your flash exposure compensation it's just so easy bounce flash you know you just turn the camera to the side and take the photo again and you'll still end up with the correct amount of light look at this example so this is classically front flashed looks like a stunned rabbit and looks a bit two-dimensional but now just turn the flash to the side bounce it off the wall and you get nice soft side lighting it just looks so much nicer and more 3d let's look at white balance white balance is about making your colors come out correctly making things that are supposed to be wife making them come out looking white not slightly blue or slightly orange it's quite a tricky thing that your camera's got to do for you actually because you're never photographing under pure white light with the entire spectrum in there you know most indoor lighting is a little bit orange shade lighting is a little bit blue and if you use the wrong white balance setting your colors just come out a little bit off now thankfully all of our cameras have auto white balance AWB and honestly that's the one you want to leave it set on almost all the time not only does it do a really good job at working out what kind of frequencies are lighter out there and adjusting it properly but the main thing is it will remember to check it every single time you know you see people running around trying to set their own white balance and most of the time they just forget and you end up with photos with weird colors but the reason you need to know about white balance is because eventually your photos might start looking like one of these if you ever find yourself thinking gee there's something weird in the color department color is a white balance problem so go and check your white balance setting you probably find you've just accidentally slipped off auto white balance and you're on shade or a tungsten or something like that put it back on auto it'll probably fix it right back up if it doesn't if you literally on auto white balance and the colours are still weird it's a pretty unusual situation maybe the camera got tricked because there are two types of life around or something then and only then when you bother going into your white balance setting and actually choosing one of those values tungsten daylight fluorescent flash cloudy shade and if none of them are right there's even a custom white balance in a lot of cameras where you can just photograph something there's white and tell the camera to make that come out white and then it'll correct it for that but I've never even really had to use that you can tweak your color later on in post-production as well and if you're shooting a raw file it really doesn't matter white balance is entirely an afterthought you can choose it from a drop-down list later on so don't worry about it just leave it in auto white balance most of the time and then will keep you out of trouble okay let's take a look at filters now starting with polarizing filters like this one now polarizing filters just like polarizing Sony's they hope to cut out glare and reflections and things like that can make this guy look a darker richer blue clouds look better leaves and things leaves are quite waxy and if you can get rid of the glare you end up with a deeper richard green leaves indian landscapes really cool bit of kit to have particularly for your wide-angle lens you've got to realize how they work a lot of people buy them and just screw them onto the end of the lens and then forget about them there's so many things wrong with leaving a polarizer on the end of your lens it's not even funny firstly you've got to screw it on but you'll find the actual polarizing filter then keep spinning and you've got to set that every time you're taking a picture because as you twist that you'll find all the reflections disappear and then they come back again and you've got to choose it because the lighting is different in every situation and the other reason why you shouldn't leave it on is because it does make the world quite dark out there and your camera's forever going jeeves quite dark I have to ya the shutter will have to stay open longer to collect more light so you end up with longer shutter speeds more camera shake or you have to turn your ISO up more and also every bit of glass you put in front of your lens you're potentially reducing the quality of your lens so you get where you pay for particularly with polarizing filters if you buy a really cheap one take a photo zoom right in you might find your lenses it's not sharp anymore so only put it on when you actually want to use it but you can get really beautiful results have a look at this one so here's a photo taken with and without the polarizer when I say without it is on there I've just twisted it so there's not much effect happening so you can still see all the reflection of the sky onto the water so it's hard to see into the water there there's a bit of that white haze in the sky but if we turn the polarizer so the effect is more visible now have a look all the reflection disappears on the water so you can see straight in there and you're left with a darker richer blue sky which looks great really cool bit of kit to have but as I said only put it on when you actually want to use it as opposed to these filters they're clear UV filters these ones should be on your camera all the time now a UV filter not surprisingly filters out UV light but actually all of your digital cameras have a UV filter built into the sensor these days so the fact that this is filtering out UV light too is a completely useless bonus but the real reason why you should still all have one of these on is just because they protect the front of your lens you know the front of your lens is actually really delicate it's got very fine anti-reflective coatings on them that are very easily scratched and if you put your fingerprint on there it's quite hard to clean the front surface of a lens but if you put one of these things on there not only they're very to clean but they're pretty well bulletproof it's actually quite hard to damage a UV filter and if you do check it out buy another one they're replaceable they're much cheaper than the front of your lens but again you get what you pay for with these things so if you've spent a lot of money for a really nice sharp lens spend a bit of extra money and get a good quality UV filter otherwise you're just gonna lose all that clarity again so that's it for lighting next lecture is all about lenses good idea to have a bit of a handle on how you classify these things you know what that what you're paying for what the different features are what they do and so on so thanks very much for watching this one I hope you enjoy the next one as well all right in this lecture we're going to look at lenses there's obviously a million different types of lenses and it's a good idea to have a bit of a handle on how you classify them what the different types do and so on and just reminder that there's a whole lens section in our course notes booklet as well that you can get online as well as those plastic summary clip cards little section there reminding you what you want to do so lenses basically you can divide lenses into about four basic categories things called standard lenses whatever they are and then you've got wide-angle lenses telephoto lenses and the rest you can just safely sweep into the the other category they just do creative interesting things we'll look at them as well but a standard lens just sees a similar view to the human eye so that means if you put the camera up to your face nothing seems to change about the view when you're looking through the lens it it doesn't suddenly become looking through a telescope or looking really wide it's just a normal sort of view it's just a standard sort of shot that's a standard lens but a wide-angle lens obviously lets you fit in a wide-angle view for situations like this where you just wish you could fit in more for a landscape or a really cramped situation like indoors you know all real estate photography's wide-angle stuff no much good showing people what that bit of the kitchen wall looks like you've got to see the entire room or if you're in a car and you want to photograph the driver and the Odyssey up through the window see where it's driving towards you know there's a lot of situations where wide-angle lenses are quite handy not just landscapes and then you've probably all done this as well where you take a photo of a little bird and it turns out like that whereas what you really wanted was a photo more like this one which is like where you've got a telescope stuck on the end of a camera so that's what a telephoto lens does like a telescope it lets you zoom right in and see distant things and make them feel the frame and those other lenses just do creative things like a really detailed close-up photo of just the eye of this bird well a macro lens will let you focus very close you've still got to get very close that's a pretty tame bird to get that close but a macro lens is pretty amazing you can get really quite close to things and the lens will still function whereas most lenses have a minimum focus distance of quite a long way away so you can get really close to even small things and make them look really big so there's actually a whole world out there of amazing little detail photos yeah not only bugs and things like that but you know raindrops and reflections and textures and feather details you know honestly I really love macro lenses you know if you're trying to think of what lens to buy next you've got maybe you've already got a wide and a fairly long lens what are you gonna buy next it's basically the a bit wider or a bit longer than you've ever had but it's sort of more of the same but really a macro lens will open up a whole new world that you've never been able to experiment with before I'd really recommend doing that and don't forget they don't only focus up close it's a normal lens in every other regard you can focus a long way away as well in fact they're excellent portrait lenses because normally macro lenses go down to a nice small F number about F 2.8 so that's great for portraits as well small F number small depth of field beautiful blurry backgrounds they're really nice lens to have other interesting creative lenses would be fisheye lenses they just give you a really wide angle of view almost 180 degrees they kind of have a bit of a distortion or a bow on the horizon as well tilt shift lens there's all kinds of other lenses they're just do creative things really it really it all depends on the angle of view that the lens can see so if that was wide-angle that might be standard and that might be telephoto but the way you measure the angle on the lens is with what's called the focal length so if you pick up a lens it'll have a measurement written on there it might be 16 to 35 millimeters and you'll sit there going sixteen to that even relate to focal length is just a measure of how the light is focused inside the lens you can see if this was a 20 mil lens then maybe this would be a 50 mil lens would be 150 but you get the idea the longer the focal length the kind of narrower the field of view the more like a telescope and the shorter the focal length is the wider the view becomes but it's the only thing you really need to try and remember is that it's all centered around 50 millimeters that's standard that's a normal value so 50 millimeters that's what the human eye sees so anything shorter than a 50 mil lens becomes a wide-angle lens you know 24 millimeters that's a wide-angle lens 10 millimeters is super wide anything longer than 50 mils is then a telephoto lens so 100 mil is a telephoto 200 400 600 millimeters is a super telephoto lens so this brings us to a useful little rule of thumb that some of you might find useful people like to know what shutter speed can you get away with hand-holding you know when do you really into dig out a tripod no one likes tripods there is no one flat answer for it it depends on your focal length of the lens depends on how much you've zoomed in which kind of makes sense if you think about it have you ever used a really long lens or a telescope and tried to handhold it your own handshake is just sort of jumping around everywhere and to get a sharp shot with that you need a superfight shutter speed but if you have a really wide angle lens you can wobble around and you barely see anything change so you can actually get away with quite long slow photos for a wide-angle lens so basically the rule of thumb is try not to handhold anything slower than one on the focal length of the lens now I know that sounds like an Einstein equation and people tune out as soon as they see a fraction but it's actually really easy to use and it's not exact science anyway because things like stabilizing comes into play as well and whether you've got a full frame or a crop body all these different stuff but it's still a good ball park gives you an idea so it's saying if if you're using a 50 mil lens or you've zoomed your lens in until it has about 50 on its focal length measurement there you'd want about a 50th of a second to be able to get away hand holding it but if you're using a 500 mil lens so a telephoto lens then you probably want about 500th of a second otherwise you're going to have camera shake it makes sense it's just saying the longer the lens is the more it's going to be wobbling around so the faster you need to be if you're going to try and handhold it so what does zoom lenses zoom just simply means you can zoom between different focal lengths so this one for example 24 mils to 105 24 being wide-angle and 105 being a bit telephoto so that's quite a versatile lens I'll leave that lens on my camera a lot of the time until I've got a reason to put something else on like this lens which is a 100 to 400 millimeter lens so that's telephoto to super telephoto that's an excellent lens for sport or wildlife it's really convenient a lot of guests will take this kind of lens on on photo tours with us what about lenses that can't zoom at all they called prime lenses or fixed focal length lenses and often confusingly they're even more expensive and I used to think why would you pay so much more for a lens II can't even zoom what's going on well it's basically because as soon as you allow a lens to zoom you introduce all kinds of problems you know the highest quality lenses are the ones that are designed to do just one job and do it perfectly take a look at this one so this lens is trying to be a good 70 mil lens it's also trying to be a good 300 mil lens you know they're completely different lenses really they should be each bit of glass in there should be shaped completely differently to do those two jobs and also see how it's got to slide in and out that means there's got to be slop in the system you can see it wobbles that's no good so you zoom out and sags down a little bit so all the optics aren't perfectly aligned so you get little chromatic aberrations and rainbows and just not very sharp photo at it so many ways the more lens tries to do the less good it is at any particular point along the way becomes a bit of a jack-of-all-trades now that's not always true you can pay a fortune and have lenses that actually do a really good job even though they're quite versatile but it's just a general rule of thumb you know you find lenses that do all the way from you know 18 millimeters to 250 or more incredibly like versatile you never have to change lenses and it's lightweight for traveling so they've got their their pluses as well but it's also not going to be the highest quality lens okay the last bit of jargon what is the speed of a lens people talk about oh it's a fast lens what does that mean the speed of the lens is just the smallest f-number you can get you remember back in the aperture lecture it was all about scrolling down to really small F numbers which gave you beautiful blurry backgrounds and nice fast photos well that's a small F number is a fast lens it's called speed just because you imagine a small F number being a big hole can let lots of light in quickly and you can take quite fast photos even in low light so that's it we can now understand the naming convention that they write around the end of lenses either around the edge or inside the rim sometimes so let's take a look at this one EF that's just canons branding electro focus 24 to 105 that's just telling us the range of the focal lengths how much it can zoom between so 24 being wide-angle 105 being a bit telephoto great f/4 that's the speed of the lens that's the smallest F number you'll be able to scroll down to some lenses have different minimums depending on how much it zoomed in so you might see a lens that says yeah f three point five to five point six and if you're zoomed all the way in as small as you could get is five point six but if you're out a nice and wide maybe you can scroll all the way down to 3.5 L in Canon lingo just means luxury they could equally replace that with a dollar sign and that would mean exactly the same thing they also mark these runs with a red stripe around the end just so you know not to drop these lenses but they're just basically higher quality more professional they cost a lot more but they've got better glass in them so you get sharper results they're both from got better answer you're flecked avoding z' on the front so you catch the colors better they've got better environmental seals so if it rains you might be able to still use it is that's just canons wording for image stabilization so in lens stabilizing and it's incredible different brands call it different things you know VR OS but it's the technology is getting amazing now you can handhold photos where there's just no way you should have any data to do it without a tripod take a look at this kind of example this is hand holding a 500 mil lens so a super telephoto lens without any kind of rest or anything trying to take a photo of this little sailboat going past at 50th of a second now thinking back to that rule of thumb just before if we're using a 500 mil lens we should be using about five hundredths of a second to get rid of camera shake but here I am trying to hold it at 50th of a second let's take a look with stabilizing turned off zoomed all the way in that's about as good as you could hope for but if you turn there stabilizing on how much better is that that's amazing there's no way I should have been able to take that and stabilizing has come a lot better since that even sure it costs a bit of extra money normally it's an extra 20 or 30 percent of the value of the lens to get a stabilized option but it's becoming more and more commonplace they just don't have the unstabilized option these days for a lot of them because it's just so invaluable the last bit USM that's just a measure of the speed of the autofocus motor which sounds a bit obscure but it is kind of important that tells you how quickly it can focus you know some old lenses just kind of hunt forever and if the animals moving quickly it kind of almost never finds it you'd have to search your own whatever lens you're looking at you'd have to look up whatever those letters mean for yours because there's so many different types but USM ultrasonic motor it's pretty quick that's good what about manual focus when would you ever use manual focus because then you've actually got to peer through the viewfinder and twist the focus ring back and forwards and try and decide when you think it's sharper yeah autofocus is way more accurate than manual focus could ever be it's just unfortunately there are times when auto focus will fail you and then you've got a resort to manual times like low light I'm sure you've all done that you try and take a photo in the dark and the camera just goes you can't see anything so you could switch it over to manual focus and try and guess it about right yourself another situation where auto focus will normally fail is on a very plain uniform surface or like the clear blue sky with no clouds or anything the lens can't really see anything to lock on to it's looking for contrast really an edge so just see straight through it so you could switch over to manual focus and try and get it about right but instead I'd actually stay on autofocus they just point the camera briefly at something that's a similar distance away like a tree on the horizon or something and go and then bring it back and take the photo the time I'll actually use manual focus quite a lot is to lock in the focus maybe it took me quite a long time to get perfect auto focus because it was low light or something but after it's finally got it like maybe on the 10th time mm-hmm great then if you switch your lens back to manual focus as long as you don't bump that focus ring from now on you can go and take as many photos as you want and it doesn't start hunting for it each time so that's a good little tip say if you're photographing some little animal in a tree or something at nighttime so it's pitch black you can't autofocus you manually focus either because you can't see what you're doing either good tip is to shine a light on it light or that then you'll be able to autofocus on it no problem way better than you could have with manual so and then with your camera on a tripod you can then go and turn your water focus over to manual focus turn your torch off and then you can go ahead and take a full you know ten-second nighttime photo knowing that the focus has already been locked on and that perfect distance so next up we have one last lecture on practical photography just bits of advice really that I hate for someone to be able to do a photography course and not be told so don't miss out on that one for this final lecture in the online photography course we're going to have a look at practical photography so it's just an eclectic bunch of things I'd hate for someone to be able to finish a photography course and not be told things like keeping a camera clean trying to break into the industry a little bit of post-production and so on but to start with you've probably all got to agree with me that one of the big advantages of digital photography is that you can just take so many photos and delete all the bad ones later on right well deleting them later on is something I'd encourage rather than at the time some people have this urge to sit there going through the photos then and there while they're taking them and working out which ones to delete and so on I think that's a bad idea for several reasons first of all you're gonna run out of batteries before you know it next it's just too hard to work out if a photo is perfect or not looking at that tiny little screen on the back of the camera two photos that look identical they never are one of them is better I don't know be sharper or maybe there's a little bug flying past in one of them or something wait till you can get home and put on a big screen make a proper informed decision it's also just too easy to accidentally delete the wrong photo I've seen it too many times on our photo to is people just be deleting that ah that was the wrong one and there's no undo on the back of your camera the only time you ever really need to start deleting photos out in the field is when you accidentally fill up your memory card and if you've got to bring a spare with you and this normally only ever happens if you just don't get into the habit of clearing a memory card after each holiday you know of course if you never empty your card it's gonna fill up you should just get in a good habit of every time you come back from a photo session just download all your photos back them up and then Matthieu memory card in a camera and start fresh then hopefully you'll never run out of space in the field and you won't have to start frantically deleting photos being able to take so many photos is mostly a good thing means you can hold your finger down and rattle off 70 photos and get that perfect moment that you would have almost never been out of time with film and because each photo is free it doesn't really matter you can try different angles and weird settings and you know fluke some really great shots but the fact that you can take so many photos now it's not always a good thing because it kind of means that people put less effort in you know if you went away with a roll of 36 exposures on a bit of film used to put the time in and think long and hard about how you'd frame up the shot and even if you didn't know anything about theory you still make sure people were smiling properly and so on but now it's a bit like yeah yeah whatever and you probably spend the same amount of time you're a minute to take a photo or something but you take sixty photos in that and actually none of them are any good because you didn't put any thought into it because it didn't feel special so that's often the mark of a good photographer is someone who actually takes a bit of time initially to think about lighting you know the direction of the lighting the background what kind of settings do you want small F numbers for blurry backgrounds all these kind of things and then you just take a couple of photos and there may be a couple from a different position as well don't just take one because chances are there'll be something wrong with it take a couple but don't just go nuts and take lots I just want to touch on storage of your photos on memory cards and things like that I don't think it's a great idea to buy the largest memory card that exists yeah one hundred and something gigabytes whatever up to these days because it just means you're putting all your eggs in one basket risk wise you're better off splitting it between a couple of cards because they can fail obviously you get what you pay for and good brands like sand discs and things seem to fail less than they're really cheap alternatives but even Sanders cards can fail but they are pretty durable you know you can normally put these things through the wash and they're still okay as opposed to these things the USB powered your portable powered hard drives they're pretty easy to break if you haven't broken one yet just count yourself really lucky you should always have two copies of anything on a hard drive like this because it doesn't take much of a bang for them to stop working and because they're so huge you know two terabytes or something you can be catastrophic the number of photos you could lose in one go so if you're using these sort of things and we all do just make sure you have two of them and you always have the same data on both of them so that when one fails treat it like it's going to fail at any moment because it probably will you could then got time to go and get another hard drive and then copy it across these days it's starting to get more and more affordable to be able to use these solid-state hard drives and that's great for when you're traveling because they're small they're durable and they don't use too much power what about keeping your camera clean now the outside doesn't matter so much the front of the lens yeah use a lens cloth or a tissue if you can but if you have to you can still use your shirt particularly if got a UV filter of the front it's pretty easy to clean but the important part is obviously inside that the camera sensor and if you get dust in there it'll just find its way down and sit on the sensor and it just blocks light from getting to that part of your photo you just have a little black dot on your image from that photo onwards every single photo from then on you know back in the days of film it didn't matter so much if you've got a bit of dust in there because each new photo is a clean a piece of film pulled out of the roll but with a digital camera it's the one sensor back there for the entire life of the camera and eventually you will get dust in there and you'll start to get little spots and you've got to work out how to clean it I actually take a test photo every couple of days or weeks depending on how dusty of the environment is that I'm in just to check so I go on to aperture mode and use a really large F number think of it as a big F number for a big depth of field it'll show up all the dust and then you take a test photo that should just be empty like a plain wall or blue sky or something and then a zoom riding on the back of the camera move all around just check you don't have any of these little black spots these are all bits of dirt sitting on the sensor if you can see them looking through the viewfinder then they're not on their sensor they'll be on the eyepiece up inside the eyepiece you can clean that if you want to I don't generally bother mine's covered in dots but if it's turning up on the picture then it's on your sensor and you've got to work out some way of cleaning it now most manual cleaning options are pretty scary but there is one kind of option you've got which you can do yourself that's these little air puffers you know normally you just take your camera to your nearest camera up and get it clean but this would be cheaper than getting it professionally cleaned once and now you can clean it as many times as you want wherever you are it's pretty easy to do you just go into the camera go into the menu and go to sensor cleaning and say you want to manually clean your sensor okay and it'll lift up the mirror and it'll pull open the shutter and you'll just be able to see the sensor sitting there and ideally hold the camera upside down so any dust you dislodge tends to fall out you're used to shedding there give it a good blow and that will clean the sensor something like ninety percent of the time you'll get it spotless with this and you really can't damage the sensor by carefully puffing air at it like that don't use a spray can of compressed air or anything like that but um it's pretty easy and now you can just do it whenever you want okay let's take a look at post-production now I'm not going to try and teach you Photoshop in the next two minutes but I just wanted to touch on the program that I use and so how much I get involved in all that I recommend a program called Adobe Lightroom it's pretty much industry standard now there used to be a bunch of other programs around and most of them have fallen by the wayside because Lightroom is just so good it's about $12 a month and it's just the best money you could spend on your photography each year for sure it basically does two separate things half of the program is about keeping your photos organized so it helps you with that logical workflow progression of downloading your photos onto your computer give them logical file names putting them in a logical date folder structure so you can find things tagging them with keywords and ranking them and pulling them into little albums so you can kind of access them all conveniently but the other half of the program is actually tweaking your photos a little bit not to the level of Photoshop but you don't need to do that most of the time you know Photoshop is more about you know opening up these four different images and completely creating something new stretching the girl's legs and bringing a different person in the background and getting rid of that I mean coming up with a new digital image you know we don't need to do that most of the time we just want to be able to fix up the problems with the photo you have you know make it brighter or lift out the shadows or if it's wonky fix it up square it up a little bit simple stuff like that I mean library is quite powerful you can do a lot beyond that but just a simple stuff and it makes it very easy it's normally as hard as grabbing your slide and sliding it left or right and going wow that looks amazing that looks incredible a little bit too - unbelievable maybe I'll pull it back to about here great you can teach yourself Lightroom in a weekend really there's so many free videos online about how to use it but it's just a really good program so where to from here well it depends on where you're trying to go I guess but if you are trying to get your work published because you're trying to make a career out of photography well then even just starting with your local paper even free of charge if it has to be I wouldn't do that for long though because that just devalues your own work but initially sure you know inside the front page of every newspaper you'll find the email address there for the editor so you could send them a photo of some you know topical event that just happened don't do that kind of stuff to magazines though you know if you send your top 40 photos - you know something Geographic magazine the editors not even gonna have time to look at it you know that's not their job the best way to get into a magazine like that is you're in the front couple of pages or the back there's often a section there of readers photos and I know that sounds like you know you actually won't get paid for your photos but it's still a good way in because if you send your photos there someone's job it is to go through all those photos and pick the ones that are the best and then if they like yours then they'll contact you and then you've got it you've got your foot in the door you've got a contact there and then while you're talking to them sending them the high-res version you can say oh you know next weekend I'm going to this you know colorful climbing festival up in the mountains I'll take some photos and you know give you my best ones and you might have a bit of an in there I know people who have got into magazines like that through the free readers photo section and then submitting an article it's worked quite well entering competitions that's a great way to get better with your photography basically because it makes you practice it's all about practice now having done this online photography course you've got more than enough theory you could possibly need to know it's just about getting quicker and using it you know and how to apply it in different situations without having to think too much and so on and that only comes with practice so competitions you know give you an excuse to get out there and take photos often it's outside your comfort zone you have to use some particular technique or has to be taken at night or something and great that just extends your skills sooner or later you start winning stuff that's great you become an award-winning photographer stick your website if it's a good competition you probably win camera gear it might even be linked to a publication so then you get your photo published somewhere as well so you get a contact in the industry there as well it can all start happening at once for you if you start winning competitions so but even if you don't it's just about practice so go and find some competitions make a website it's getting incredibly easy to make websites these days you can do it yourself for free if you've got any sort of computer now at all other ways can get someone else to do it pretty cheap these days and then do go learn a bit of post-production you do need to do that to be able to get the best out of your photos some people think that post-production is just cheating you know they think if you touch the photo at all after it comes out of the camera then that's cheating because he couldn't do that with film but of course you could do that in film you could do quite a lot of tweaking you know just how long he left the lamp on for when you're exposing the paper that was like changing your exposure you could dodge and burn cover up this bit for a while and then let the light come through so you could be doing basically local adjustments and that kind of stuff and that was just black and white you could do even more with color so it's a bit silly to say that I just because it's digital now and it's too easy you shouldn't be allowed to do anything I think that's true but then some people say oh I'm pretty sure it's OK to get this photo of a ship and this photo of a dolphin and merge it together and clone the dolphin and now we've got two dolphins jumping over the ship that's well they're both digital images right so it's still digital photo no I don't think so it might be a digital image as its uses but it's not a photo anymore but it's important to realize that even the strictest magazines around like the Geographic series and really strict competitions like wildlife photographer of the year that whole you know huge cash prizes and whole careers are built off this thing any image you've seen in there in the last bunch of years they've all been digitally manipulated but then we basically try and draw a fairly clear line in the sand different competitions have different rules of course but basically they say you can do whatever you want to the image as long as you do it to the whole image so if overall the image is too dark you can brighten it up if the colors are a bit flat you can increase the saturation but you can't just go and get the girl's eyes and make them go green or get rid of the person in the background or bringing a seagull you know you start actually changing one area and making it look like something completely different not at all like it did at the time then that's pretty universally accepted as cheating or at least creating a digital image anyway but you shouldn't feel bad about going and tweaking your photo up a little bit fixing up the colors and so on because that's the whole point of shooting in RAW you know when professional shoot RAW files is because you get to slide the colors and everything around to more accurately represent the scene because otherwise you're leaving that to the camera so in a normal camera all that light comes in and they start off as a raw file and then the camera works out how blue is this normally and how bright and dark the shadows and it ends up with this kind of passes it through an on-board averaging algorithm and you end up with a picture that it thinks is the best representation of the colors and it's not quite right so if you're out there and it's a particularly vibrant blue day out at sea and the ocean is just that amazing sapphire blue color and you take a picture of it you look at the picture you probably think sparrow was bluer than that and it was you know it really was it's just passed it through an on-board averaging algorithm and giving you a JPEG so you should go back there and punch up the vibrance of the blue make it look nice and vivid again just like it did at the time now some people have particularly vibrant memories I think and when they go and tweak their photos they come back looking a little bit unbelievable don't do that yeah of all the photos I've judged in competitions and things that's the easiest way to ruin an otherwise great photo is just to over saturate the colors and things like that you're just trying to make it look like it did at a time and that should be totally acceptable so if you've got any questions or anything you can send them through our website Chris Bray photography calm or if you're on Facebook have a look for us on there Chris Bray photography we've got a group there of more than 10,000 people most of them have done the photography course so it's just a great knowledge base of photographers there you can ask questions if you want feedback on your photos or should you buy this lens or this one you know rather than asking me I will reply it but my answer is not necessarily correct even but if you've got a list of 10,000 people there who are giving you feedback the average of that probably is about correct so it's a good resource we try and keep it current with you know news photography news new cameras that have come out or competitions you might want to enter so go and have a look for us on Facebook we're also on Instagram if you want a beautiful photo sent to your smartphone every day or to go and sign up on there and then go to our website and look at all those free tutorials as I said we've got so many free tutorials they're covering so many different topics from things like light painting and star trails photographing fireworks and lightning using custom modes flash basics the moon and more advanced stuff like you know the real difference between JPEG and RAW okay now that you've finished my photography course online if you enjoyed it I really recommend you go and take a look at the course notes booklet that goes with the course from the website it's just a handy little refresher of everything in the entire course one little section at a time and you can just sit there and reread it until it all makes sense it's just a convenient thing to keep with you in your camera bag you know this course used to be four hundred and eighty dollars per person and now it's just online so the least you could do is go and buy that course notes booklet the same with these little summary plastic clip cards the ideas you might clip them onto the neck strap of your camera and that's just all the really important parts from the course boil down to these couple of little cards you know so next time you're wondering about or which way to I scroll my F number to do what with my depth of field and why my photos all blurry all the answers are in this thing so if you keep that with you that should keep you out of trouble so you can get them on the website as well and lastly if you really want to improve your photography to the next level then you should join us on one of our photography tours there really is no better way to improve your photography than traveling as part of a small group to amazing destinations around the world with photography assistance there to help you learn and just surrounded by inspiring test subjects 24/7 [Music] so log on to our website Chris Bray photography comm and check out all the amazing destinations we're running these tours too and hopefully one day you can join us on one of them now if you've enjoyed this online photography course please do share it with your friends on Facebook or whatever we want as many people as we can to see it and thanks very much for taking the time to watch this course I really appreciate it [Music]

Channel: Chris Bray Photography

Views: 1,134,302

Rating: 4.9026747 out of 5

Keywords: learn photography, photography course, photography, learn, course, camera, camera course, composition, aperture, chris bray

Id: LxO-6rlihSg

Length: 144min 16sec (8656 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 13 2020