Master Your Wide Angle Lens

in today's video we show you some tips on how to master your wide-angle lens but first everybody knows that if you want to be taken seriously on YouTube as a landscape photography vlogger you really need in your videos a dog so ladies and gentlemen let me introduce to you Cletus the wonder dog Oh your breath Oh God here you go Cletus so we gonna take him for a walk then let's go okay you really cool he's peed on me like no is that normal do they do that Oh God's sake come on Cletus Cletus so Jim nasty boy he may be somewhat lacking in the discipline department but when I saw how good he was that finding sticks well that gave me an idea I know what you're thinking you thinking why Cletus the wonder dog well I bet your dog can't do this it says goodbye and it can you close it now I just need to get moving hey Curtis good job can you carry it as well that is brilliant I could feel my social appeal expanding by the minute now that I'd added the dog to my landscape photography adventures but I did notice though but after his initial burst of energy well he got kinda lazy but at least he wasn't pulling on his leash or dropping curly wirless every five minutes yeah he's a good dog as Cletus after just a short hike we arrived at our destination this beautiful hidden waterfall in the shadow of Mount Benson [Music] [Music] we have the entire Canyon all to ourselves with lots of time to study the shapes forms colors and the textures of this magical little grotto right here on Vancouver Island and that's one of my greatest pleasures in life it's slowly contemplating what I'm going to shoot and how I intend to shoot it pleases I think you did pretty good for his very first night I think that's what Huskies are known for when I went to the store he said what kind of dog you want I said I want the Hostin I said I've heard muskies are awesome love the good runners in that so I got a husky and I'm yeah so they usually smell like that no thanks oh yeah be a breath oh please this what some melon Cletus Thanks Oh II don't like it all right it's not seeing a potentially quite beautiful shot and what I'm gonna do is demonstrate this whole concept of using your lens distortion to your advantage so I'll show you women what it is that I'm looking at and what I'm thinking of framing up and then I'll demonstrate how getting way closer to it and that you find that foreground takes advantage of the beautiful length it's awesome that you probably paid a lot of money for all right so I framed up this shot and it's quite a nice scene it's I've got this beautiful waterfall this fallen tree and these really gorgeous roots and it's the roots that make this shot I mean the waterfalls beautiful but I feel like without these roots in the foreground it doesn't quite have the same magic you know this puts me in this mystical forest you know it's it's the forest creeping in in front of the waterfall to me that's what makes a shot so here I am I'm still at sixteen millimeters right there so this is as wide as I'm gonna get with this particular shot and you'll see in the foreground these lovely roots which come in and introduce you to the scene but what I want to do is use my lens distortion on this lens this sixty millimeter lens to exaggerate and emphasize that foreground to give it more frame space because if you look at the frame good I would say sixty percent of the frame is devoted to the waterfall and that's fine and then only what 10 percent of the frame is devoted to that root system and I feel like there's an imbalance of elements there two very very vital elements to this composition so I feel like I need to give more real estate to one of those elements which is the root system and I think if I do do that it's not going to take away from the waterfall it's gonna balance things out so that they're a bit more even so I'm just showing you this as like a starting point and this is often where where people will end their process they'll get to a shot and say oh yeah that looks really beautiful and stop there but I think if you go that a little bit further and really think what can I do to emphasize this foreground what can I do to balance out the elements and then you'll figure out quickly that you're gonna have to get closer to that foreground so let's now move to that next shot I'll show you the difference okay so I'm much happier with this composition I'm still at the same focal length which is 16 millimeter but I moved significantly closer to this root I would say that I'm now about 20 inches from this this root that you see here and I'm hoping that you agree but I think that that makes a far more dramatic foreground and it leads your eye into the center of the frame towards that waterfall in a very pleasing wave and it also by getting lower and closer look at all the color that I've revealed in these leaves here in this this little sprouting tree it's to me that's a much more interesting composition and all I did is move just I don't know to two maybe three feet closer and it's made a drastic difference now of course I'm gonna have to focus stack this now you're seeing this at F 2.8 and I focus on these roots here but what I'll have to do is stop down and maybe even use a range of different apertures so that I can get the whole thing in focus if that's what you wanted I mean if you don't have to focus stack every single image you see sometimes it's nice to have elements of your landscape completely out of focus but for this one I don't want to lose the waterfall by having it completely blurred out so I have I am gonna focus stack this throughout with a range of different apertures and blend that together but the purpose of this demonstration is to show you how to use that distortion of your wide-angle lens to your advantage and emphasize the more interesting elements of the scene and to balance out the foreground with the background [Music] people often think of wide-angle lenses as their go-to lens for huge landscapes but I would encourage you to reverse that way of thinking and instead use your wide-angle lens for small intimate scenes like this because by harnessing the power of your lens distortion you can usually find the perfect balance between your subjects and with careful placement of your camera you can exaggerate the shapes that matter the most and this is a vitally important aspect of composition and it's also a lot of fun so here's an example of what I'm talking about in real-time so now I'm really happy with that horizontal shot lovely composition lovely color and forms and I have not moved the tripod at arm in the exact same position that I was in earlier and now I've just done it I've just gone vertical so let me show you what happens I'll try and keep this as steady as I can when I move this up and down so if I am go this down here you could see the top of the waterfall and the top of the frame has been stretched so if I bring this back up look how in fact if I if I put it in the middle of the frame look how narrow and small the top of the waterfall gets but as I push it to the top of the lens that distortion exaggerates and stretches that to make it look far more dramatic and impactful and I could do the exact same thing with the the roots if I decided to get closer to the roots I could use that on the opposite end of the lens to stretch those out and make them look longer now with this one if I if I keep this in the same position I think I would actually zoom in a little bit to cut off the top of that waterfall there which I don't I don't want it to be in the frame and I would then angle this down a little bit like that but of course if you look to us the left of the frame there I don't like that the waterfalls cut off so if I turn it more over to the left that fixes that but I'm losing some of these lovely roots here so I think for this composition to work I need to just push over to the right slightly I don't think I'll get closer but I'll move over to the right so that I've got a little bit of a better balance so let's try that out whoa so with this composition what I'm trying to do I'm trying to be very kind to these roofs I don't want to damage this roof system because it's a work of art and to be honest I doubt that I could damage it any worse than this raging river does in the winter but anyway I'm still trying to be very careful not to damage anything and also this moss which I I think it's actually maybe a lichen takes quite a long time to grow so I don't want to damage that so I'm quite precariously perched but anyway so again I mean the whole purpose of this tutorial is to kind of teach you how to exaggerate your foreground or balance them out with your background using that very precious lens distortion which like I said you've probably paid a lot of money for especially if you've got Sony G master equipment it's pricey so use it to your advantage and like I said earlier it's the smaller more intimate seems like this this is where the super wide is called for even a 40 millimeter would work really well with this shot I tend to use longer focal lengths when I'm shooting a big landscape with a grand Vista so this lens works perfectly in this situation so I'll try and take this shot properly now I'll do the focus stacks I'll do the different shutter speeds and if it's any good I'll show it to you but we're actually losing light now it's getting quite dark so I'm forced to use shutter speeds that are a bit longer than I would like which means all of this these leaves in the finish growing trees and the ferns they're sort of moving around and creating a blur which I don't want if it turns out any good I'll show you the shot [Music] whether you shoot full-frame medium format crop sensor or smaller a super wide angle lens is a creative tool and you can make small foreground elements appear huge in the frame just by positioning the camera in a way that flatters your most interesting subjects and you get to decide where to set that balance by using a combination of position elevation and focal length so give it a try then next time you go out to shoot and don't forget to enjoy the process it's supposed to be fun right so I think it's time for us to move on it's getting a bit cold it's got a little bit dark I've lost the best of the light I wanted to shoot a bit more but I kind of came a little bit late but what happy with those shots that I got the hope that was in somewhere useful to you let's get Cletus back home and hear that goodbye are you Cletus Cletus as training begins tonight you'd be doing a full back [Music] yeah not right now no but later though [Music]

Channel: fototripper

Views: 47,264

Keywords: landscape, photography, wide angle lens, tutorial, nature, comedy, funny, humour, puppet

Id: yKffYd6klzI

Length: 13min 1sec (781 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 08 2020