STOP shooting at ƒ/11 (YOU SHOULD TRY THIS!!)

[Music] so i was here last in this very location in the summer last summer summer of 2020 and it is completely different this is one thing that i love about returning to the same places and nothing to do with photography at all but just seeing how completely different landscapes are just from season to season it is incredible in the summer all of this all of the these ferns and reeds and heathers were in bloom and it was like an absolute jungle getting through that i'm telling you it was tropical in the summer and now it feels a lot more open it feels more like a moorland but it's good for the walk and anyway a real warm welcome back to the channel guys actually it is quite mild it's uh sitting about eight degrees absolutely piping hot compared to what it has been obviously throughout winter quite pleasant actually i must admit with that being said we've got rain and we've got wind and i must admit i've missed it a little bit um i feel like where i live at least the weather's been quite settled and pleasant over the past few weeks so it's nice to be back out in the elements in the rain we've got the waterproofs done we're living the dream today i want to touch a little bit upon aperture and f-stops and why i believe that we myself included especially as landscape photographers could be a bit a little bit obsessed with always having to shoot in that sweet spot between f8 and f13 something like that depending on your camera and yeah i want to give probably a couple of reasons today why i think it's okay that we can open up our apertures and actually sometimes where it might actually be better so let's crack on all right so let's get into it let's get straight into it here look at this scene um actually i'm on my way up to a peak called cloth a pike if anybody watched a video that i did in the summer when i went up this mountain you remember i came over this little style here and i said one day i'll come back and grab a shot now this as i've been saying so often recently it's not going to be the best shot in the world but i want to get into apertures and why i believe we should allow ourselves to shoot at sort of open apertures um a little bit more often and because this is a wonderfully creative type of photography and type of landscape photography but you just don't really see it that often you know and i definitely don't do enough like i always say about these videos i'm often making them just to tell myself just to give myself a little bit of a reminder and some advice um so what it is really this first one is all about playing around with depth of field and yes of course as landscape photographers we always want to shoot at f9 f11 f14 these sorts of things so we can get a nice um a nice depth of field throughout the image whereby everything is in focus from front to back so if you're gonna do that here you know generally speaking i'd want the style pin sharp i'd want the hills in the background pin sharp more convey i'd want the grasses down it you know what i mean whereas sometimes i think it's nice to just do the complete opposite and so this first one just more as a means of as an example really is going to be very very simple and it's just really going to be a straight shot of this style so i'm going to focus on the style um and there we go f4 so i'm deliberately shooting at f4 and in fact i'm going to zoom in a bit really just fill the frame and with the style and this by the way as well zooming in a little bit will actually increase that depth of field that shallow depth of field effect whereby the background is going to be a little bit blurry and this is great and it's it's limitless so let me just grab this shot now in fact i'm going to underexpose a little bit just because i know my camera so one 125th of a second f4 iso 100 lovely perfect histogram and yeah it's just it's limitless you can do anything so i mean even look at this here look at this tiny little sort of hole let me see if i can get down here to show you um so what i'm going to try and do is find a way where i can get the view the vista in the background but i'm doing it the opposite this time so i'm still shooting f4 but i'm going to focus through that little gap in the rock there there we go some folks on the background the rock is in fact going to be blurry it's going to be very dark in the foreground let me just get that focused off there there we go lovely and then again f4 1 120 in fact i'm going to bring that back up a little bit and it's like frame see how that's like framing the vista in that little hole in the wall iso 100 f4 160th of a second let's grab that lovely and again these are just things i'd never ever do like with my camera and then for example say if we're gonna keep it at f4 see how this wall kind of leads us out into that vista there and it's exactly the same as a little hole hang on so we'll grab this and i'm going to do the same again so i'm focusing hey guys all right i'm focusing right off in the background and what we're doing here instead of shooting f9 f11 we're deliberately blurring that foreground and it's an effect so let me just do that here now so the settings are going to be pretty much the same for every shot i'd say because um the light obviously hasn't changed at all so 160th f4 and iso 100 it's not ideal because you can see there the walls kind of leading out the way it's going left it's kind of going the wrong way so i'm going to use the rule of thirds [Music] lovely we haven't over exposed any of them highlights and this is class because honestly you can kind of leave your camera in f4 um and you know if you haven't got a lens that kind of goes that wide open f4 you can still get this same effect and it's mint because you can just wander around and do the same thing get these deliberate shallow depth of fields on like foreground elements or like we did and with the with the style with that first image you can do it the other way around so i mean even look how cool these rocks are guys look at that that is class so zoom out a little bit and again it's gonna we're gonna focus on the rock and if anything it's going to really put emphasis on this rock or these rocks let's say let's get these three in the foreground it's really going to put emphasis on them in the foreground because they're going to be in focus the background is going to be completely out of focus so let's try that there 160 at f4 iso 100 absolutely class i'm just going to do that again because i potentially overexposed let's try it 1 100. lovely it's just cool and again some of that i really wouldn't do that often and i think people generally landscape photographers i should say definitely wouldn't do it you'll see it a lot in street photography you know i urge you to watch some street photography videos on youtube um i absolutely love them and you can really see the creative ways in which you can you know play around with a shallow depth of field it is fantastic right so that's a little bit long-winded there well let's clap uh crack on up cloth a pike see what else we can find and we'll talk a little bit more about aperture of course [Music] so i'm going to grab another quick one here um and again what i want is the foreground to be blurred and the background to be nicely in focus so let's get the camera on that's a fantastic bit of advice for you if you want to take a photograph make sure you get it on so yeah same again as before guys we're focusing on the background and we'd like to say deliberately blurring out the foreground but what's going to be cool here is it's going to be really really blurry right sort of right in the foreground here we've got these sort of gray colored um areas of heather and then it's going to slowly slowly come into focus and it'll snap into focus around here somewhere and i absolutely love that effect as well i'm zoomed right in at 35 mil which again is gonna um increase the blur let's say that we have in the foreground so iso 100 f4 one uh one 160th of a second and look at the sky look at that that is absolutely beautiful so let's grab that now rule of thirds bosh absolutely glorious stunning tell you what we're getting quite a few patches of light now um across sort of more conveying stuff you never know you never know [Music] so this one's definitely going to be the best example so far i'd like to think beautiful dry stone wall leading us down into morca bay and into actually quite a substantial amount of um the lake district fouls back there i think coniston old man so so cool and just going back to what i was saying earlier this i'd just never do this sort of thing usually always f9 f10 f11 f8 something like that you know to make sure i get everything in focus so here one 125th f4 iso 100 beauty so we should have a nice nice nicely out of focus and blurred in the foreground it'll just fall into focus as we get to some of the big names back there coniston old man and of course beautiful morkan bay so he's blowing a gale now he's nearly on the deck it's blowing a gale now i'm taking shelter behind me dry stone wall this is class we're back in action guys back in the element and the real british weather um so there's one more thing that i want to talk about with regards to aperture why i think we should open up our aperture on occasion even as landscape photographers um even shooting wide vistas that sort of thing and it makes a lot of sense it's definitely something i don't do a lot don't think i'll do it too often but it's an option you know i love to be out especially when i haven't got a tripod knowing that i've got all these different options with regards to how i choose to use my camera as the photographer sweet so we'll get into that i'm gonna get a little bit further up now probably up to the peak actually and um i'll talk you guys through that let's uh battle against these elements [Music] [Music] oh goodness me the winds have picked up now oh it's proper weather um all right we're chilling out on a rock guys look at this we're living the dream relaxing gorgeous view in the background this this is where we talk about this next little bit of aperture as we get these little hikers approaching on us i always feel like i'm winding people up like they just want to have a chat and they're thinking oh no he's filming he's filming everybody be quiet uh i'll tell you what i absolutely love this sort of scene this is forester bowling lake district snowdonia scotland this is it moody look at the clouds we've got a few little bits of remnants of snow down there you can see that all these crags oh it is just gloom and doom and i mean that in the most beautiful way possible now admittedly we're not gonna have the best example here guys so i apologize so we're gonna have to use our imaginations um aperture right so so much of the time as landscape photographers like i've been saying we want to shoot at f9 or f11 something like that now if we've got a tripod we can do that so if if you use your tripod all the time like i usually do this is this is completely and utterly irrelevant i have to be honest with you um but if you've been watching me a lot recently you'll know i've been shooting hand held and this like i said before it's just great to have the option all right so say for example right let's get this this composition locked and i'm focusing on them crags down there iso 100 f4 and then as i'm choosing my shutter speed it's telling me 1 80th of a second but say it was a lot darker and to get the correct exposure i needed to shoot at say one one third of a second now on my camera i cannot shoot at such a slow shutter speed so what i would usually do is no i still want to shoot at f9 i'm not shooting at f11 and i would um sort of reluctantly increase my iso yeah all right reluctantly increase my iso but then of course we've always got an other option of opening up our apertures which again like i said before i just never do that and i never want to do it and it's usually because i don't want to have a kind of shallow depth of field but if we're shooting a vista like this you know unlike the other shots that we've been taking we don't have anything in the immediate immediate foreground like we did with the dry stone wall or the style earlier it's just a big vista so we don't have to worry about depth of field but then the other thing that i've always worried about is sharpness you know i know that my lens or this 16 to 35 millimeter lens performs perfectly around about f9 so i'm always reluctant to shoot at f4 but if you need to open up your aperture a little bit more to get more light into the lens so that you can have a quicker shutter speed because you're shooting handheld what i would urge you to do is do a few tests with your lens oh i've done a few with this lens and shooting at f4 compared to shooting at fa yes it's a little bit sharper at f8 or f9 honestly or f11 something like that honestly it's really not that much of a difference we get a little bit more more of a blur in the in the corners of the image and in this sort of scene you know what it doesn't bother me at all but i'm going to get this shot here anyway f4 whatever my shutter speed wants to be at 1 30th of a second focus on them crags and you're going to see here there's going to be no problem with depth of field and definitely no problem with sharpness actually there we go 160th of a second that is a beautiful gloomy scene absolutely gorgeous so once again a little bit long-winded but i hope that makes sense to you um just remember to sum up really you've always got that option of opening up your aperture um rather than increasing your iso and if there's nothing in the immediate foreground and as per your tests if you're confident it's not going to dramatically affect the sharpness um in a negative way of your image just to open up your aperture don't worry about it the wind's picked up it's nippy i'll just have a nice little chat with these two here gotcha and luke i think they're going to watch i think you're going to search my channel on youtube so nice to meet yous both i quite i must admit what i'm talking about in a minute because of the lockdown and stuff just not socializing i don't see any of my mates already in my family so i'm just like mad to chat to people it's quite nice oh guys oh i've come back out the window a little bit beat it's nippy let me tell you it's sniffing giving it the big and before at the start about how warm it was oh right so aperture i really hope you've enjoyed it um and again it's all just about options you don't have to go out and shoot with an open aperture all the time but like i said especially with that last one it's nice to have the option you can choose you know if i want to increase my iso then i'll do that if i want to open my aperture at this instance you know you might be reluctant to increase your iso it might be really dark you could do both you can increase your iso a little bit open up your aperture a little bit you know you've got these options as a photographer and that is amazing again especially when you're not using a tripod right i'm going home i'm out for a cup of tea and uh thank you guys so much for tuning in as always if you have a quick second if you can spare me one please give the video a thumbs up it really helps my content here on youtube and yeah cheers for tuning in hope you enjoyed it and i'll see you on the next adventure out you

Channel: Henry Turner

Views: 74,360

Rating: 4.9325328 out of 5

Keywords: landscape photography, photography tips, f11, best aperture, aperture for landscape photography, Nikon d7200, uk photography, landscape photography tutorial, depth of field, shutter speed, landscape photography tips tricks, manual settings tutorial, thomas heaton, nigel danson, outdoor photography, street photography, creative photography, lockdown photography, gopro hero 8 black, landscape photography tuition, landscape photography open aperture, iso, fototripper, Adam gibbs

Id: OqWD5cPD0Jw

Length: 17min 8sec (1028 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 07 2021