No Photograph Is Worth This...

[Music] in this episode i am dangerously up the creek so i think i'll just shoot one last frame and call it quits because this is terrible hypothermia stage two i've got this lovely little rim sorry mo it looks like the jaws of a shaft pretty much impaled myself right up the clay pipe i'm not kidding i am in the most uncomfortable precarious position oh this is cold this is terrible oh that's sharp yeah i questioned my own sanity why do i do this oh god i think only an absolute idiot would get in there and do that oh oh and i just can't function now i've become incompetent please like and subscribe i don't know why i do this i don't know why i do this nothing beats waking up in a canadian log cabin in a snow-covered forest i don't actually live there [Applause] when i was a kid i would have been so excited about getting a snow day like this i would have just gone sledging found the steepest hill i could find and just go sledging but now that i'm a middle-aged old fat i get excited about frozen waterfalls and taking pictures but back when i was a kid i remember me and my brother we didn't even have a sledge proper sledge of what americans would call a sled and so we used black bin bags and man you could get a right rapid speed on a black bin bag mind your mother wasn't too impressed when we returned home and presented it with these shredded bin bags sorry mo believe it or not we don't get that much snow here on the west coast of canada so when we do i tend to drop everything and make the most of it while i can because landscape photography opportunities like this well they don't tend to last very long that's quite fantastic let's set up a shot [Music] so this is little qualicum falls near coombs on vancouver island and i'll be honest this has been a challenge to photograph this waterfall as beautiful as it is it's really quite difficult to photograph and that is because the surrounding area of the waterfall is very very complicated so what i tend to do when i shoot this waterfall is i tend to zoom in fairly tight and try and exclude a lot of the surrounding area because you've got these fairly ugly fences which are necessary because they keep people from falling off the cliffs but i don't really want those ugly fences in the shot so you have to try and kind of zoom in and exclude the ugly and fill the frame with what's pretty the problem that i have today though is that there are two massive logs trapped in that first ball where the first waterfall drops down and carves out this ball and it just slashes right across the composition it's it's not a good look and i was hoping for a bit more ice so if i go around here you'll see just over there on that side of the bowl well hopefully you can see i don't know if you can see on this but there's quite a bit of ice hanging down but i kind of hope the beer quite a bit more i've been coming here for the last few days checking on the levels and the temperature's been getting colder and colder so i had this hope this expectation that the ice would be a bit more prevalent but it's actually quite sparse so it's a tricky one even if i frame up a composition that i like there's nothing i can do but these bloody ugly logs are in the way so i don't know i don't know if i'm gonna get a shot i mean i'll take a shot but i i very much doubt it's gonna be a killer i think i'll have to move on to a different location perhaps somewhere that's a bit a bit cleaner without all of this clutter and maybe move on to a location that's got more ice because that's really what i'm after today i love the snow and it's really pretty i want to try and get some lovely snow shots but i'm all about those ice chandeliers [Music] okay so let me show you this composition and what i usually love about this bowl that you can see here is on a bright day the center of the bowl kind of has this lovely green sort of aquamarine glow that really pops you can just see a little bit of it in the waterfall there and in the bowl itself but on a day like today of course that that's quite a muted look but anyway what i've tried to do is zoom beyond the ugly fence there's just a little bit of it there in the frame but i'm thinking this is gonna end up being cropped to either a four by two or a sixteen by nine so why do i wanna shoot either a 16 by nine or a four by two well one thing that i love to do with my waterfall compositions let me just kind of explain it a little bit better is with this camera now you probably just see you can see where the waterfall begins and if i go like this you can see where the waterfall ends so you can see where it's coming from you can see where it's going when i shoot pictures of waterfalls i'd much rather give you a sort of element of curiosity and spark your imagination make you wonder where is it coming from where is it going to so often i'll cut off the top and the bottom of the waterfall just because it gives you a little bit of room to imagine for yourself where is it coming from and where is it going to [Music] one thing i've learned about landscape photography and about life in general is that nothing stays the same for long beauty is fleeting perfection isn't permanent and you really have to make the most of what you've got while you've got it so much of landscape photography and life is about seizing the day and enjoying what life has to offer during this short window of opportunity [Music] and so with that in mind i decided to move on to a different forest that required a bit more effort so it's about an hour since i left little qualicum falls and where i've come to now is a spot called nile creek and my hope i really do hope that i'm going to either get some magnifique ice crystals down the sides of these canyon walls whereas this really beautiful waterfall or there's this smaller waterfall that's not quite as dramatic but it has this lovely glowing green pool in front of the waterfall and i shot this back in the spring that would be gorgeous if it was surrounded by deep snow with this lovely green glowing pool and i'm clearly the first human being to come through here today because the only footprints that i've seen in the snow belong to cute little rabbits let's just hope i don't see uh cougar prince that'll be sketchy or bear paw prints [Applause] in all my years of hiking around vancouver island i have never once seen a cougar they've no doubt seen me but i suspect they prefer more tender meat than walking yorkshire pudding after about 45 minutes of hiking i finally arrived at the first photo shoot location only to discover that things have changed since my last visit and not necessarily for the better well that is that is a total disaster so this is this is my waterfall and the lovely green pool that i was telling you about is right there full of dead trees that have just fallen down off that bank so not only can i not get a shot of the waterfall at all really unless i get right in that pool tate is deep probably chesty which i'm not going to do i can't even get a shot with this pool or any foreground it's it's just destroyed i'm rather i'm rather upset it just goes to show like nothing stays the same for long does it like you give it 10 months and something could be completely destroyed so you really can't just take these things for granted you've got to shoot them while you can and luckily i did get some nice shots of this last year but so what i'll do is just abandon this all together head further up the creek about another hour of slogging through the snow in the hopes that nothing terrible has happened in my last chance at getting a tres mendous shot i mean if i get all the way up there and it's it's complete trash i won't be very happy i won't [Applause] well that was very disappointing but i wasn't ready to accept defeat just yet because in weather conditions like these some changes can make seemingly boring subjects temporarily spectacular and it didn't take long for something to catch my eye so as i was just hiking up the trail which runs alongside the river i just spotted these amazing icicles just look at this lot so beautiful the entire log from beginning to end is just covered in these beautiful icicles so i might try and get a shot of that and i think the bit that interests me the most i don't think you can see it here but it's this cluster of icicles here with this bit of river in the in the foreground and then that little rim of ice there so if i could frame something up perhaps where you can just see a part of the log that might actually be worth the hike up here that that in itself might be the shot might be the shot of the day so yeah i'll give it a go let's see what i can frame up [Music] right so i framed up a shot i'm in quite a precarious position and i've got my tripod well two legs of the tripod are in the river and it's it's tight quarters to say the least especially since uh i appear to have eaten football and chips for lunch it's not good anyway so i framed up this shop and what i'm trying to get is a three-stage shot where i have the icicles dropping down and then i have the creek just running through the center of the frame and then in the very foreground there i've got this lovely little rim of ice in the foreground so it's like one two three and the one thing that strikes me when i look at it through the viewfinder is it kind of looks like the jaws of a shark so let me get the other camera on the back of this and i'll show you what i mean okay i'm going to attempt i am in the most uncomfortable precarious position ever but i'm gonna attempt to explain how i'm gonna nail this shot without knocking either this camera tripod or this camera tripod but we'll see it's probably not gonna happen right so as you can see it looks like the jaws of a shark you've got the top set of jaws there the teeth and then you've got the bottom set of jaws at the bottom and then running through the center is that lovely bit of creek so what i've decided to do with this shot is i'm focusing on these icicles here so i'm just rotating my lens manual focus f10 super sharp i've got a two second timer on let's get it to the it's giving me that it's telling me that that is the correct exposure so i'm just going to hit the shutter and take that shot now while i've got the focus in that particular part of the image i might just do an even longer exposure but let's just see let's see what that looks like no actually that's pretty good i was going to say i'd do another one just to make the the background underneath the these icicles a little bit brighter but i think that that's fine and then the next thing i'm going to do oh i'm a bit worried that i might have some crap on my lens i bet i do hang on i'll come back in two seconds i just don't want to get up knock this and go over to my camera bag a true professional would have a lens block in his pocket but you're dealing with me so this is what you're getting right i think i've cleaned it i'll do that again i'll just double check my focus because i might have knocked it when i clean the lens that looks sharp now i i always prefer to stick my eye in the evf and then i know for sure that it's focused but i'm sat here in this sketchy position so i've just got to use my my screen but that looks pretty focused to me so i'll take that five second exposure again now that i've cleaned my lens and we'll see how that shot looks and i've been really careful not to nudge this tripod with my feet so let's have a look at that oh yeah that looks great now what i'm going to do now is focus on this foreground here so i'm just going to nudge this down to about let's say there and as you can see it's blurred it's garbage so i'm going to turn my focus wheel till that shower and i'm not 100 sure so let's get more contrast the edge oh there you go that's oh oh oh that's sharp right so now i'll get that shot but you can see it's a little bit overexposed because they're very very bright there and maybe the light changes ever so slightly so let's just knock that down and i'm going to deliberately under expose it a little bit because i just don't want to blow out those highlights in that little bit of snow on the foreground there so that's that's my foreground shot let's check that yeah that looks great so i've got my foreground shot with focus on this ridge i've got my icicle shot with the focus on the icicles now i want to get a few different exposures with different shutter speeds for this water so what i'm going to do obviously i want a faster shutter speed than 1.6 seconds because that's really slow so i'm going to open up my aperture to let's we'll start off with f4 see how that looks and as you can see that's way too bright so that lets me get down to uh let's well let's get it down to one quarter of a second that's telling me that it's slightly underexposed so i'll open it up a little bit more 2.8 is as wide as i can get so let's take that shot let's see what one quarter of a second looks like oh that's quite good i kind of like that see how much different it is to that shot where it's just mush that's giving me a bit of texture so i'll take another shot as well i always like to take a few because the water just constantly changes i mean look at the texture in that compared to that it's completely different so at one quarter of a second i'll take a bunch of shots so that i just get different shapes and different patterns that's kind of cool look at that they're so different i'll just yeah i'm kind of kind of getting into this so i'll take a few more how does that one look yeah not as good as that one but yeah pretty cool so now that i've got that let's get even faster let's get to one sixth of a second shutter speed and it's telling me it's underexposed i'm not too bothered i could always pump up the iso i'm really not too bothered i'm going to manipulate it quite a lot in post so i'm not going to get too anal about it you can see that looks a bit blown out but definitely there's a bit more texture in the water than there was with these shots so let's just take that iso back down to 50. a couple more of those have a look at that oh that's nice i like that lots of texture i don't like it too silky and mushy you know and then just for shits and giggles we'll try one at one eighth of a second so let's go down to one eight by one tenth let's do that now i will stick my iso up just a smidge let's see how that one looks and let's have a butchers oh that's cool look at that all kinds of stuff going on there let's take another one you can never take too many well you can because your hard drives will fill up and you your memory cards will fill up but we're only talking about a few images it's not like i'm shooting waves at high speed continuous first do another one one more one more and then i'm done let's have a look at that absolutely glorious [Music] [Music] well that was fun i kind of like that shot it might be one of those days where you don't actually ever get the shot that you came here to get and you spend all day just shooting other stuff that just kind of totally side tracks you but that doesn't matter because as long as i get something that i love and that i'm happy with doesn't really matter if i actually get to where i'm supposed to go but i do want that shot so i am going to get back on the trail because i've got at least at least another hour of uphill trudging through the ice and snow and i don't even know if it's going to be worth shooting it might be like this spot down here it might be just a graveyard of trees so we'll see i'm just going to still chance it because who knows what i'll see along the way now you might think that forests full of sharp toothed predators might be dangerous and you'd be right but there are more treacherous dangers so i i was just hiking down here and just i just wiped out and slid down here and then pretty much impaled myself on this rebar that's sticking out of the ground here these sharp steel spikes unbelievable i wish they wouldn't use this stuff on trails to build trails and i think trails like this are built for free by people who just do it at the goodness of their own heart so i appreciate people working on the trails but look at this this is just dangerous oh if that doesn't make you sheriff's goal of a quiver i don't know what will and you can see the camera bag where i fell it's impaled on a piece of rebar there it's actually stuck on and that's what i landed on right up the clay pipe i'm not kidding that's got me a bit nervous about the rest of the trail why do i do this i don't have to somehow get this bag off look at this it's nailed on oh there you go that worked and as if that wasn't sketchy enough the worst was yet to come i'd actually been dreading crossing the chasm of ultimate doom which isn't too bad in summer but today look at this business so this next section requires me to be above this waterfall in this part of the river probably turtles deep in freezing cold water and to get to it i've got to climb along that sketchy icy log there man i don't i don't like the look of this it's one thing to do it without a camera bag but the camera bag just messes up your balance uh but i see that somebody's put a rope there so i might just try the rope i don't know what it's attached to but yeah doing this this summer is easy but doing this right now it seems they'll advise i think only an absolute idiot would get in there and do that then i go then i'm not going to film this because i i just need to focus on what i'm doing so wish me luck well i made it across that little thing there you go and now i've got to go in this stuff here let me show you this so this is this is what i came here for i guess so i'm gonna go away oh right okay oh that's cold oh my god i'm breaking the ice with my knees oh god this is gonna be i thought it would not be quite as bad but it's terrible this is terrible i'm actually breaking the ice now oh oh this is cold this is terrible [Music] oh that got deep at this point the average person with even half a brain would have turned around and gone home but i was just so close so let's speed this up and get to the good stuff i reckon this bit here is about six feet deep so i'm not going in there i'm gonna try and get over that hump and then keep going up but uh time to put this camera away now because it's just gonna get destroyed i think okay see you on the other side i hope there are times when i i just i question my own sanity why do i do this this is the sketchiest thing i've done in years and i'm all by myself if anything happens i'm screwed and i'm i've just climbed over a bunch of logs and now i'm gonna climb under these ones let me show you how sketchy this is i'm not quite sure how i'm going to navigate that but i'm so close i'm probably 70 feet from the spot where i know there's probably an absolutely magnificent shot waiting for me so i've come this far i might have to get into my belly button but sod it i've got to do it oh my god hypothermia stage 1 shivering rapid heart rate and mental confusion why do i do this it's not even that good of a shot hypothermia stage 2 testicular shrinkage decreased reflexes and loss of fine motor skills but was it worth it [Music] as you can probably see what i love about this spot is just this bowl that the waterfall pours into and i had a feeling that it would be covered in these spectacular icicles just dripping down quite magnificent but i'm gonna have to rush because i'm so cold i've got the shakes i don't know how long i'm gonna last in these conditions and it's a two hour hike back to the car and i didn't bring my headlamp so i'm probably gonna be hiking back in the dark using my phone provided my phone still works after it just got drowned i'm looking at my osmo screen now and i think i've killed it i think this is the third osmo that i have killed due to submersion caused by incompetence so that's going to be an expensive repair job replacement so much fun anyway i can't feel my fingers so i'll rush through this tutorial i'll try and give you a tutorial but it might be quite abysmal because i just can't function right now you know it's fun you know i do enjoy myself right okay let's do this all right i can't feel my fingers so let's hope i can get through this because it's it's truly terrible right let me just overexpose this so hopefully you can see my composition so i have the waterfall coming down over here and then i've got this lovely little ledge giving me a nice frame in the foreground and then the sides are framed nicely by these canyon walls and of course they've got that beautiful ice pouring down over the edges now i would have loved to timed it on a sunny day and get some sun blasting into the canyon maybe create some light rays but this is still absolutely spectacular now if i just shut this down a little bit a little bit darker you'll see in this shot the triangle of pointlessness and that's this triangle here it's what you always get when you shoot waterfalls or you're in a canyon or a forest and there's always this useless pointless triangle in the top of the frame now there's nothing i can do about that i could compose it tighter to exclude it but then i would lose all of this beautiful these icicles on this this cliff edge here in the bowl that you can see so i really don't want to change my composition just because of the triangle of pointlessness so what i'm going to do is just shoot it anyway as if that wasn't total crap and then i might just fill it in in post we'll see what i can do with it later so with this shot i'm using an aperture of f13 still quite sharp i focused on the background as you can see this is my correct exposure which is saying two seconds but i know that that won't be bright enough for all of these shadow areas that you could see in the background there so i'm going to increase that to an eight second exposure which is going to be way too bright for everything but those shadow areas and then i'll just mask that in in photoshop afterwards just to bring back all of that lovely shadow detail so i focused on the background and now what i'll do is i'll just make it a little bit darker go to with a correct shutter speed now focus on this oh god my my digits don't work oh honestly i can't i can't function hypothermia stage 3 complete incompetence and unintelligible tutorials all right so now i've got my focus on that little ridge i'm just going to put it at the correct shutter speed and then what i'm going to do is deliberately under expose it because i really don't want the snow to be blown out bring back all that definition let's get the shot oh man i don't know if this osmo is shaking now but i am shaking i'm so cold in all honesty i almost don't care i i can't feel my fingers i mean i don't even know if i've got feet they're just they're completely numb and i just can't function now i've become incompetent so this is when stupid things happen and you do dangerous mistakes so i think i'll just shoot one last frame and call it quits because this is terrible so after all of that suffering and the suffering that was about to come was this shot worth it no it wasn't not only was the shot average but it was a technical disaster there was so much ice and so many water droplets on the lens that this image is just a blurry mess but at least i learned one thing i can sing a better falsetto than just in timberlake when i'm titties deep in nile creek right well that's it i'm done i've packed my gear up i'm gonna get back in the river nipple deep again please like and subscribe i don't know why i do this i don't know why i do this hypothermia stage four questioning one's life choices you

Channel: fototripper

Views: 63,659

Keywords: landscape, photography, winter, snow, ice, hiking, hypothermia, vancouver island, waterfall, canyon, camera, tripod, cold, little qualicum falls, nile creek, trail, nature, adventure, fototripper, wonderland, canadian log cabin, snow day, west coast, composition, zoom, cougar, bear, canada, shutter, exposure, focus, long, foreground, icicles, speeds, hike, tutorial, photoshop, frozen, freezing

Id: ZTTio39zv_Q

Length: 29min 37sec (1777 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 21 2021