Photographing autumn colour on an ATV

[Music] hello hello everybody I hope you all doing really well we're in for a treat in this video because Jeremy and I are going to do a bit of redneck hunting yeah that's right hunting for photograph so we have two ATVs we have a ton of tools just in case we break down we we have a chainsaw we have a generator we might take a generator we've got the camper on top of the big truck yep this is an environmentally friendly camping trip not the reason why we're taking all this stuff is we're going into an area called the the Chilcotin which is in kind of central British Columbia north central and the Chilcotin there's pretty much a wilderness area and you definitely don't want to get stuck out there especially this time of year when there aren't really that many people around so we're going to be taking ATVs into some areas hopefully some new areas that haven't been photographed very much and the reason why we're taking ATVs is because you know otherwise you have to hike for a week to get to any area so that's the plan it has snowed so we'll have to wait and see what the conditions are when we get up there but I'm pretty excited about this trip I've always wanted to go into the Chilcotin and and spend more time there it's an area that I haven't been to very much at all so right now we're in chalk so it's about a nine-hour drive so it's going to take a while to to get up there but we're almost done Jeremy's done a great job of packing I've just been standing watching [Music] Wow after a bit of a drive yesterday we made it to a town called Williams Lake and now we're on our way towards the coast we're going westward we're not going to end up at the coast but the mountains get quite quite a bit bigger to the west here and we're honored on this dirt road so the dirt road it's about a hundred and five kilometres to an area called choco Lake which I have been to once before probably about 20 years ago and it is absolutely beautiful in there so but we're just stopping on the on the way in and I mean check these Aspen out they are beautiful and of course there's no absolutely nobody in this area right now the colors are still vibrant so there might be some photographs here I might have to do some more ICM I don't know it's one of the situations where the colors are beautiful but finding a composition looks like it's going to be even more challenging here than Jasper because it's it's quite busy but the colors are beautiful right I'm gonna see if I can find a composition and if I can't then I'll just go and have a cup of tea all right I think I might have found a composition it's funny that first image is always for me anyway the hardest one to come up with and then you know kind of once you've found something then you can kind of well I find that I get it get into the mood a little bit better this is absolutely beautiful are these grasses here with the I think it's yarrow that's all kind of brown but the the sweeping grass is going in different directions is really wonderful so I'm gonna see if I can get a composition lab but actually what I'm concentrating on the the aspen trees at the back there there's some that have lost their leaves and then some that still have yellow vibrant leaves and there's a few few in there a little bit of orange in there as well I have a 70 to 200 they're fallen on and I'm racked right out so I should have grabbed the the two to five hundred I think I would have liked to have zoom into some of those areas but the cars way over there and you know anyway I'll just make do with what I have the only thing I don't like about this setup is that you'll notice I have my center column fully extended personally I'm not a huge fan of Center columns I'd rather just have the tripod without a center column go to maximum height of say 70 inches or so reason why I'm using this this tripod here is this is a Colorado tripod company tripod I really like the tripod the thing I don't like is the height now this is more of a travel tripod and I've said this before so right now I'm just kind of make doing with it because they are coming out with a much taller version that I'm eagerly awaiting so now I'm just for now I'm just using this and the three-legged thing that I've had I do have a couple of old gets those which I really quite like problem with the get Zoe's is that they're the old versions like both of them are almost twenty years old and the legs get stuck so easily and when it's cold out and you get a device in there there's just impossible to use so that's why I'm using these tripods here so I'm holding off so I have to be extremely careful with this because a racked out at 200 millimeters with a center column up like this there's a really good chance that it's going to move so I've locked the mirror up I have it on a five second timer and so far the images look pretty sharp so hopefully ill will be okay for now [Music] okay so the Chilcotin is known for its wildlife and what you're looking at here is Bear poo quite fresh actually and there's lots of little spots around here where you can see where the bear has been rooting around so there's quite a bit of Bear poo round here so you know he's got to be a bit cautious of bears just make lots of noise and generally speaking your will be alright most of the time the Bears just run away as long as they know where you are then they usually avoid humans so right now I mean it's it's really pretty in here and the light is it's perfect it's really beautiful because it's overcast but we have a bit of directional side lighting coming here so this area that I'm looking at right now the colors are just so vibrant and the the aspen trees have a bit of directional light hitting the side of them but it's usual thing you know composition is a little bit difficult because there isn't really any centre of interest I'm trying to find maybe a an evergreen or just something to draw your attention to it but with this scene here I think I'm just going to go for the color and forget about the center of interest I quite like the panel idea actually so you can take a number of images doing a panel and then I'll take some individual images of just the full color beneath these trees here whenever I'm photographing trees like this what I always try to do is as as best I can is tried to separate each tree so they're not overlapping with say a tree behind them it's not always that easy to do because you know this in this case there's just so many trees in the background but I do the best they can the main trunks I try to separate as much as I can it just looks more orderly to my eye that's why I why I do it [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so we come down to the the father's point of the road and it's a solos Provincial Park which is right by Shalom lake and it's absolutely miserable out here so Jeremy brought the truck down with one of the ATVs and I drove behind him it was pretty wet but we've got a fire going you guys should check this out this is this is really cool check this out Wow just feel that that heat so yeah it gets really toasty in here really quickly and of course we have our she's our beverages the only way to camp [Music] okay now I did make a pan oh so I'm just gonna go over that really quickly with you what I would do for the processing first of all we have the two images here now I have done some basic adjustments on both of these images as you can as you can see here just brightened it up a little bit I've brought down the highlights and the blacks I've brightened up I just kind of lined it out because I like to add contrasts and all that kind of stuff in the post-processing phase of putting this image together so the first thing I'm going to do is just select both of them and then right click go to photo merge panorama now this will take a little bit of time so just be patient here all right so I'll leave it on spherical if you go to perspective it'll just look weird hysterical is usually the setting that I use just going to go to auto crop and click merge and here is our panel it's gonna zoom in it's done a pretty darn good job I'm always impressed the the pano function in lightroom okay now I'm gonna have to crop this quite a bit because there's a few things in here that I'm not that keen on and I didn't really notice these when I took the photograph you'll notice that the the trees on the right hand side up to about here look really good and there and it's quite even but we're missing a bunch of trees in here this looks like it's a bit empty it would have been great if there were a couple more trees in there I guess at the time I thought that perhaps this little tree with the fall foliage would be enough but it just looks off-balance to me also the white sky I I didn't want to include in the photograph it's just too distracting so I'm just gonna go up to the crop button here and you can see the original crop that we made and now this is gonna be pretty drastic I'm gonna crop it think about there and then I'm gonna bring this way over to there no another way I could have made this pan oh I could have just taken a shot with a wide-angle lens and included more and then just cooperate that way the problem with wide-angle lenses is that a lot of time you're kind of pointing downwards or upwards and it just makes the the trees converge even at 46 millimeters you can see that some of the trees are leaning over a bit but we'll sort that out in in Photoshop okay so there's our crop first thing I'm going to do is reduce this to 1/16 size and I'm going to grab a radial filter here and I'm going to darken a lot of the edges what I want to do is bring people's attention to the center of the frame especially this tree here I really like this background tree and the fall foliage this here definitely be darkened a bit and I can darken up here a little bit so I'm gonna bring this way way way way down lesson the feather just a bit sometimes I darken it a lot this all makes sense later on when I stopped processing this thing in Photoshop okay and then I'm going to grab another one except this time I'm going to invert it I'm just going to fill the frame with the image and I'm gonna bring up the whites quite a bit now the thing is I don't want to blow out my my highlights you'll see if if i zoom in here oops zoom in here I'm starting to blow out the highlights so bring the whites down just a tad bring the exposure up just kind of want them right on the verge okay let's try that okay that looks pretty good right we're done with that and now I'm gonna open this up in in Photoshop okay the first thing I want to do is just straighten the trees up just a little bit you'll notice that these trees on the left are leaning over to the left the middle ones leaning over the left a little bit as well these are more or less straight on the right so let's just go to select all and then we'll go to edit transform and we'll just use perspective and perhaps what I'll do is just bring the bottom out and then slide it over I'm going to go by the the middle tree there well that looks pretty good go command D get rid of the marching ants and the first adjustment I'm going to make is levels I always seem to do this I just adjust the levels a little bit the whites the blacks so you notice we've got a little bit of room in there for the whites I'm gonna bring that up up as far as I can without blowing them out the blacks are fine and actually I might flatten them out a little bit so I'm just gonna bring the slider bar in just a little bit here and you'll notice that it's brightened it up quite a bit just zoom out there we go okay the next thing I want to do is it's just darken the bottom a little bit more and then maybe some of the shadows there's a couple of ways we can do this we could just freehand it with a with a TK dodge and burn or we could do it with luminosity masks I think in this case I'm just going to use the Dodge and burn so I'll just click on the burn button and you'll notice that it creates a mask for us we've already got the paint brush it's on black I just want to make sure that either our flow or opacity or lower I always use the opacity for whatever reason I just it's just something I've got into the habit of doing I start off with 10% and then go up from there so let's just zoom in whoops just zoom in here get our brush and then just start painting this in just to make it a bit darker and I think I'm gonna do here and then I'll load up the the luminosity masks and I'm looking for a mask that will only affect the shadows in the background not the highlights so it's probably gonna be a mid-tones maybe it is a dark sort is a dark okay so you'll notice darks too so white reveals black conceals so we'll pick that and then we're going to go with a burn layer let's get rid of these marching ants so we just press command H and that just hides them you'll notice that they're still active I'm just gonna zoom in here and with our paintbrush just gonna paint now I might have to use a higher oh it is darkening it I'm gonna try 20% don't want to do it too much we wanted to look as natural as possible okay and command D for deselect okay now there's areas in here that I want to brighten now I could use a luminosity mask and we just have a look what we have here lights lights okay let's try lights - I'm gonna go with Dodge command H to hide them there you go 10% they will notice now that it's on our white brush and I'm just gonna paint in this tree back here and then some of these leaves I want them to be as bright as possible but not blow them out so let's try 20 so I'm just sweeping across here across all the brighter areas the full foliage in the center there maybe a little bit in the back should bring make that smaller so I don't affect the side of the aspen trees there and of course if you want to see what areas you've affected then you can just go to the layers and click on the little I button here so it's quite subtle okay command H no sorry D get rid of those okay and lastly I just want to give the trees a little bit more dimension so I'm gonna create I'm just gonna go over these freehand a little bit more of a shadow and a little bit more highlights on some of them you'll notice that most of the trees have brighter area on the on the left side darker on the on the right so let's start off with the Dodge again we'll go to 10% and I'm gonna cheat here a little bit I'm gonna go quite quickly with this just make the brush quite small just click on the top and because those trees are straight I'm just gonna hold down the shift key and just kind of paint that in a little bit though it's quite easy to overdo this so you'll notice that it's brightening up the sides of these Aspen here this one we don't want to brighten up any more because it's pretty bright because it's pretty bright already this one here we can do a little bit more just the main trees not all of them what I want spend hours on this thing the last tree over to the right here alright and then we're gonna do the same with the burn tool we're just gonna darken those shadows just a little bit so we'll start over at the at the right here now this one's already quite dark so we won't bother with that one shift just two or three times here you'll notice that this one's more in the middle there's actually got bright on the on the left side on the right side as well so we want dark on that little tree oops shift and then this one here I don't think we brightened that one up it's a Dodge there let's zoom out that looks pretty good I don't really like this bright sky up here so I'm just gonna get rid of that so we'll just crop that out more cropping okay I've said this before in previous videos loading up all of the luminosity masks is probably not a great idea because it just bogs your computer down I've pretty much finished with them I didn't do a lot with them so I'm just going to clear them all so it doesn't take up too much room and just gonna go through one last step here and then we're done and I'm gonna create a copy of this so I'm on a Mac so it's shift option command and then II and with this layer I'm going to just blow this up a little bit I'm not terribly keen on all the sharp edges so I'm just going to give it a little bit more of an ethereal look so what I'll do is add what's called an Orton effect named after Michael Orton and then where we do that we just make a copy of everything go up to filter blur Gaussian blur and I'll keep it around just under 40 pixels that's okay and then I'm just gonna bring the opacity down to roughly 17 and then from there I just want to add a little bit of brightness and contrast to that layer so we have brightness of conscious now if I just leave it as it is you'll notice it affects the whole image so if you go down to the bottom here you'll see little box with an arrow just click on that and it now it's only gonna affect that layer there and you just adjust to taste you can add more contrast or take a little bit away I don't want it too bright that looks pretty good and then I'm gonna take those two layers select them both command G and group them and then add a mask on them and then from there I'm just gonna paint out the parts that I don't want the Gorshin blur on really I only want it kind of in the background and perhaps on these background trees I don't want it on everything so I just grab a paintbrush make sure it's black and I'll just make the opacity around I don't know 50 50 % it's gonna make my brush larger here and I'm just gonna paint on that mask and I'm gonna mask out the parts that I don't want the blurriness on mostly the foreground just reduce the side of this just paint trees a little bit and there we go and if you click on the mask here you can see where I have masked out the the Gaussian blur that's option on a Mac click and I think that's pretty much it it's not a bad image it's quite busy I think I prefer the one that isn't the pan oh but I just wanted to go over the processing with you because most of my images I more or less process in the same way with of course a few variations but that's more or less what I do - most of my my images let me know which one you prefer do you prefer the pan over j'en or do you prefer this version [Music] alright that's it for this week folks thanks so much for watching if you enjoyed the video please be sure to give me a thumbs up and also if you enjoyed the processing part of the video in the last half let me know in the comments if that's something that you would like to see in future videos I might offer it as part of a subscription base which I can join when I reach 30,000 subscribers let me know in the comments below until next week bye for now [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Adam Gibbs

Views: 26,434

Keywords: adam gibbs photography quiet light adam gibbs, adam gibbs, quiet light, chilcotin, canada, landscape photography in british columbia, chilko lake, atv in british columbia, photographing autumn color, photographing autumn colour, photographing aspen trees, landscape photography tips and tricks, landscape photography tips, adam gibbs top tips, nature photography, quiet light photography, top landscape photography tips, photographing autumn colour on an atv, landscape photography

Id: nAptFCxV6Ec

Length: 31min 17sec (1877 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 12 2019