The Reality Of Being A Landscape Photography Vlogger

in this episode i show you how to make vlogs in my office tour i'd like to see how you approach editing i like to time it to the beat of the music the volume dips just before the voiceover kicks in even on channels that have 10 million subscribers they're not doing this i'm sorry that's just the way it is like you're not doing much in photoshop with that speed are you bloody hell have just enough space to get your gob in there i'll just wait for him to finish washing himself that really is blinding do not let the background music override your voice but then halfway through the vlog there's an opportunity every now and then you'll see a youtube content creator so desperate for content that they'll post a what's in my bag video or even worse an office tour you're gonna do an office tour aren't you that's exactly what i'm gonna do [Music] [Music] actually i'm not i'm not desperate for content i've got a pile of vlogs still from the summer that i haven't got around to editing yet but the reason that i wanted to do this office tour is because i've just completed my once yearly tidy up of the office so it's never going to be this tidy ever again i'm sorry that's just the way it is so i figured this is the time i'll take full advantage of how tidy my office is because it usually looks like a camera bag exploded and do a little office tour for you so let's start at the beginning so basically you might be wondering what is this thing why am i stood on this plinth it's a good word plinth i do like plinth basically what it is is a walking pad and the reason why i got this walking pad is because it's just not good for your health to sit in a chair all day every day and do long work sessions like i do which could be 12 or 16 hours long because editing these vlogs takes a lot of time so i had back problems i had hip problems i was getting fat still got a bit to go but basically i wanted to lose weight and get my blood pressure down because doctor's orders were gavin sort out your blood pressure so i got rid of the chair it's still over there but i never use it but basically all of the time that i spend editing videos is spent stood on this walking path so you just keep it at a real slow speed and just stroll just stroll all day long and the reason why i keep it at a slow speed is because you've got to be able to function with a mouse and a keyboard and get your work done it does go quite a lot faster but let's see how fast it goes six kilometers an hour okay let's do some photoshop like you're not doing much in photoshop with that speed are you bloody hell anyway if if you decide it's too fast and you've had enough just come off the the rails and just stand on the side and it'll detect that there's no motion it'll just switch itself off and then the next time you switch it back on it'll just start at the 2.5 kilometers per hour so that's what this thing is i've totally forgotten the name and the brand and the model but i'll put a link in the description below absolutely out of breath so obviously because we're going to try and walk backwards oh god that's not good so basically this is it this is the full photo tripper headquarters experience so i have my shitty laptop which is an msi and i have to carry this keyboard around because after six months of use this very expensive laptop decided that the letters q a and e would no longer work on the keyboard so i couldn't even reply to emails it was painful so basically i have to carry this around so uh can't recommend msi sorry msi that i basically just use for when i'm on on the road and i just need to download and organize files and check emails that kind of stuff i don't really use it for editing or anything like that when i'm on the road i wait till i get back to the office before i start doing proper work i just had a little break because that's the most exercise i've had in two weeks so this this monitor is a benq monitor i forget the actual model number and name but i'll i'll put a link in the description below so you can see exactly which one it is but i've had that about a year and i absolutely love it my images look great the videos look good and i trust the colors and the contrast on this screen it also flips vertically so that you can edit vertical images comfortably but i've never honestly used that function i'm sure nerds love it onto the audio side of things so some of you may know that i come from an audio background i was a music producer for 20 years so i used to have loads of gear i used to have racks of gear and really posh mixing desks all of that these days for what i do will be total overkill pretty much useless so my my entire audio rig consists of coming up look at this love consists of this really cheap presonus audio box i1 usb audio interface and so into that i plug in my microphone which is this microphone i'll show you this in a second and every four years my guitar because i've not played guitar in four years literally and that just does everything that i need for for the quality of vlogging you know it's not it's not broadcast quality if i was making a an imax movie i don't think i would use that but for what i do for vlogs that just does the job because pretty much all i'm ever recording is one mic at a time so i highly recommend that very affordable budget audio interface and that just goes into this computer via usb and i just record my voice into that uh for monitoring i use these alesis monitor one mark iis i love these speakers i used to use the monitor one mac ones and they were brilliant now anybody who knows anything about audio and mixing will know that this is a stupid arrangement to have these this low down when my head is up here so really what i need to do since i changed this system and i'm now standing all the time really what i need to do is get these on some speaker stands and have them at ear level but for now that's what i'm putting up with i do have also a sub woofer down on the floor there and i highly recommend if you're doing any kind of audio production especially vlogs things like that where you've recorded audio that's got lots of wind rumble which is a problem that i have all the time you probably can't hear anything over this wind it is mental if you can't hear that wind rumble in your mixing environment how can you correct it and if you don't correct it because you can't hear it that means that somebody somewhere is watching that on a tv that has a giant subwoofer and they're thinking my god there's a lot of rumble these guys didn't know what they were doing so i always highly recommend that you mix with a subwoofer even if it's just to monitor those frequencies that you'd like to filter out that's that's its main purpose but then of course if you've got music that's really bassy and there's some nice sub bass and nice effects in that music it's nice to be able to hear that accurately so you can mix your levels when i'm recording my voiceover i just use these sennheiser hd 202s pretty good sturdy headphones they're not they're not headphones for listening pleasure the headphones for getting the job done and getting some work done and if you stand on them they just kind of pop out of this frame and you can put them back in and they're they're kind of indestructible so i do love my seniors that's a nice little little family picture there do you remember that love that was before armageddon hey yeah back when we were happy we all went to we're still happy yeah over on this table here i've got my old computer which i basically just used to access old image files because they're they're on hard drives that you know sometimes i need to transport across eventually that i'll be getting rid of that and that's my camera bag i'm not going to show you what's in my bag because that's another video of when i'm really really desperate so for now i'll just show you that that is that is just where it lives that's all my camera gear i i'm a minimalist i don't want tons and tons of gear because i can't i can't use half of it so i keep my gear to a bare minimum if it don't fit in a bag it's time to sell some stuff this is my acoustic paneling i think that came from a company in vancouver called prime acoustic many many years ago i highly recommend that if you're doing any kind of audio recording that you have some acoustic paneling and even with this this this room is very there's lots of echo you can hear a lot of um a lot of reverb a lot of slap back from this room but without it it would be ten times worse so i'd highly recommend some of that that's blinded the lights that i use are these that really is blinding are these cheap knee were uh if you can see the logo up there knee were led video light panels and they were they were quite cheap i think i paid about 150 for three of them [Music] and they came with these pretty pretty cool tripod stands and they do a decent job these are what i use when i'm filming my tutorials but i'll be honest i i really don't know anything about lighting that you know people photography i'm just clueless i'm just kind of making it up as i go along i just experiment put them in different positions and then if it looks good that'll do for me but anyone who's watching this who does know how to light people is probably cringing at where i've placed these lights right now but anyway they do a good job again i'll put a link in the description i get a lot of questions about what microphone i use for my voice overs and this is a relatively cheap but i believe it's now obsolete it's an se electronics z3300a and i bought this at least 10 years ago for about hundred dollars and i consider that very cheap for a high quality vocal mic which is what this is so when i bought this what i did was i went to my local music store which is long and mcquaid and i rented about eight of their most expensive condenser mics including a neumann and all kinds of really really posh one of them was like four grand and i lined them all up in a row and recorded my voice into all eight of them all at the same time and i was i was singing at the time as well so it wasn't really for voiceover it was for singing and i could then compare the differences in quality between this 700 mic and the 4 000 neumann mic and out of all of those mics that i tried this was by far the best so i took the rest back and i bought this one so i think this is now obsolete but i'll find out what the the modern version of this is and i'll put that in a link in the description below i'll show you how i record my voiceovers with my uh poor man's vocal booth you'll absolutely love this it's a really good trick hang on right so i use um davinci resolve to edit all of my videos and record voiceover so let's boot that up and i'll show you how i do it another question that i got asked repeatedly was how do i handle my files how do i handle backups that kind of thing so i'll show you this these are ssd drives solid state drives that's a one terabyte that's a two terabyte and basically they just connect up to your computer by usbc and these days that i wouldn't say they're cheap but they're relatively affordable and basically i just fill those up and then when they're full i back them up onto a cheaper sata drive and the starter drive goes to the bank and stays in a safe deposit box for backup and then once this is full these portable ssd drives i'll just keep them here in a box i don't move files around i just fill that drive and then leave it alone and just buy another one and it never ends it basically continues the only thing that changes is the price of the ssd drives here's how i record those lovely silky rich toned voice overs that some of you comment on so it all goes through this mic and i'll use this pop shield so that when you go like that when you hit the the mic with plosives it doesn't hit it too hard it cuts down some of that wind power and doesn't give you that awful sound what i'm going to do is record this voiceover and then you'll hear a bit of the room echoing inside the track because i'm going to compress it heavily so well hello this is phototripper headquarters showing you how to do a lame voice over right so that's that was terrible so now let me do this again with the poor man's vocal booth you're gonna love this right so this is this is the poor man's vocal booth basically is this a snuggie what is it just a blanket it's just a blanket it's a thick thick blanket so what you do is you wrap it around the microphone like that and you've got to try and cover the front the back and the sides and from underneath as well and you just kind of peel that back and just have just enough space to get your gob in there and talk into the mic you could even if you really wanted to be really good about it you just kind of do this in fact let's do that okay i'll do that so i'll just hit record and then in i go to the to the poor man's vocal booth i want one of those red lights that goes on just to let people know you're recording right here we go hello hello this is photo tripper headquarters recording an extremely lame voice over okay there you go that's how you do it let's play that back for you and hopefully you can hear in the background especially if you listen to this with headphones that there is far less room noise slapping back into the microphone here we go hello hello this is photo tripper headquarters recording an extremely lame voiceover that sounded pretty good so that's it that's my my poor man's vocal booth so if you want to save a thousand dollars in building a soundproof booth with really posh uh acoustic panels and all that business all you need is a thick blanket jobs are good if you really want to go crazy get two or get a super thick blanket when you see my tutorial videos you'll see this microphone in the shot the truth is i'm not actually recording through that i'm recording through the lav mic i just use that as a focus point get my face in line with it and then i know my face will be in focus so that is a cheat that i do but when you watch a vlog and you hear a voiceover it's going through that microphone there do you want to read some questions out from some of the viewers question here from photo sophia uh i was always wondering how much editing you do on your photographs they look so epic and at the same time very natural i struggle quite a bit with editing about this topic all right so one of the things that you can do to really tweak your images a lot but still make them look realistic so that they're not totally over the top so i i feel like this image here i really like the edit that i did on that because to me that's kind of what she's explaining there where it's a very natural looking it's not completely over saturated it's not too contrasty it looks like you know it hasn't been overcooked yet it's still you know i think it's an epic shot well i mean it was an epic place so it's easy to get an epic shot when there's conditions like that but when you do have an epic shot that you just know it's a great shot the light was good the composition was good those are two things that you can always just tone down so that is contrast don't crank that contrast too much especially with the shadows don't make the shadows too dark if they're too dark and you've lost every amount of detail it's just going to look overcooked and then the other thing is the saturation the color saturation just turn that saturation slider down i never ever increase that saturation or that vibrant slider these days it's a few years since i've ever touched those sliders if i do use them it'll be to turn it down i'll be putting it into the minus numbers so if you go to like -12-13 on the saturation slider your image will look a lot more natural because it doesn't have those retina shredding colors actually harsh would love to know how you plan your videos and skits and possibly edit them so this is a question that i i saw quite a lot what was the recent skit that we did okay this one right ads click on them though there's two types of skits one is scripted and those are fun because we get lots of bloopers and then the other type of skit is where it's a spontaneous thing where we just invent it at the time and then hit record and then i just edit it in such a way that it kind of looks like it was planned that you're eating what's chocolate you want some yeah i'd love some chocolate um [Music] why don't you why don't you come and join us over here at the table oh that's nice man thanks yeah just come and sit next to amanda what about social distancing uh [Applause] uh well i'll tell you what why don't you just wear this this coffee filter there's a mask just put it on your face yeah put this put it on your face put it on your face okay put it on your face [Applause] but what you will often see is a standard vlog like this one here so this was the one that we did at mount kid in alberta ah the canadian rockies during autumn the magical land of wilderness kebabs and of course you've got those gorgeous fall colors so it's a standard format vlog so basically off we go there's no planning that there's literally this is where i want to go and shoot let's see if there's some good light off you go with zero planning and you just film yourself doing the vlog but then halfway through the vlog there's an opportunity to slot in a skit and that skit might be recorded two months later because all of my videos were recorded everything that you see was recorded two months ago so with this video we we basically had a scene where we'd been out all day long vlogging went back to the camper went back to the campsite and now it was down time and that's a perfect opportunity to drop in a skit like this i look forward to are you hungry love oh yeah i'm starving do you want a hot dog well i don't eat meat you know that i've got you a flake dog i know how much you love chocolate that's just a flake in a bath it is so that whole skit there was recorded two months later it might have even been three months i think and we just dropped it in at the perfect point because it filled that space that went from day one to day two in fact the very first time that we did that was the uh 50 40 video where amanda was my stalker and she dragged all of this stuff up the mountain to put into the tent which she enveigled her way into so where was that one i could work but i i'll warn you now i am extremely flatulent so am i that might be okay all right let's get stuck in then where am i going i don't know [Music] thanks for letting me spend the night with you in here just getting a little worried are you worried yeah not sure why because there's a there's a 10 bedroom uh hut 10 feet away so for the for the eagle-eared or the bat-eared for people who've got amazing hearing when you listen to that once we're in the tent if you listen very carefully you should be able to hear the room sound of the spare bedroom upstairs where we filmed this we got it looking the way we wanted it but the sound was awful you basically could hear the room echoing with our voices so there was no way anyone was going to believe we were on a mountaintop so what i did is i put a duvet over the top of the tent to to dead in our voices and that wasn't enough so then i got a couple of acoustic panels which i brought from my my office and that wasn't enough so then i put another dual bear over the top of that which i'm holding up with another tripod and i think i might have nailed the sound now so that you guys are convinced that we're up on a mountain once we put a few frogs on there maybe even some crickets depending on if we're still trying to pass it off as late spring i think it'll be fairly believable edit it in such a way that you can't see the exterior of the tent so you believe that it was actually shot up on that mountain i mean i even have comments from people that say i can't believe she dragged that stuff all the way up there you know well we didn't you know what i really brought don't tell them about that you know in answer to the question how much planning goes in really not that much some sometimes there is planning that's done after the initial vlog was filmed so that we can add content into it to enhance it but when i go out on a vlog there's really zero planning it's just okay let's go let's go and have fun and it's pretty much spontaneous scott pdx asked about uh a nice view of your home gym setup this is it that's all there is okay from john drummond uh i'm an editing newbie also using davinci resolve so yes i'd like to see how you approach editing yeah so i had it in davinci resolve so if we're going to resolve here i'll show you a basic timeline of of one of my videos so i pretty much just drop the clips into the timeline in the order that they were filmed except for like you know auxiliary content like a skit that was filmed two months later but the actual vlog i'll just drag the file from let's say um my hard drive and i'll just drop it onto the timeline like that and then i'll watch it and then i'll just cut the boring bits out put it into the main track and i'll just synchronize it to music and i do that manually so here's some clips that i put into the timeline next to my theme tune and what i always like to do is i like to synchronize each cut each little piece of footage i like to time it to the beat of the music so if there's a two bar section i'll cut the video to fit those two bars so if you watch like this all right so each clip that you see each clip follows the music now it doesn't necessarily work if you've got very soft ambient music that doesn't follow a straight time but whenever i have a beat to the music i like to keep it tight and that's where my audio background comes in i like everything in its perfect place if you look at these keyframes here the volume dips just before the voiceover kicks in and typically i'll drop the volume by about minus 18 decibels so if i switch off the voice you'll hear the music dip so [Music] but it's still there right so when i put the voice over in after a full 10 hours of driving what i like to have is the the music should just be audible underneath the voice over and i see this as a mistake in a lot of beginner vloggers is when you're mixing your audio you need to really pay attention to the levels and if i can't hear your voice because the music is too loud that's a problem so you need to fix that you need to make sure that that volume dips now the amount that you make it dip is relative to how loud that music is because sometimes you'll get a piece of music that's been really heavily compressed and maximized and it's very very loud even though it's underneath that zero decibel line it just sounds very very loud you might have to drop that 22 decibels but if you've got a piece of soft piano music and you put that in your timeline you might only have to drop that minus 12 or minus 15 decibels but those are some sort of ballpark numbers that you want to look at every time you drop in a voiceover that's really important so if you're doing voiceover or if you're doing talking heads to the camera do not let the background music override your voice because that's going to disconnect the audience immediately it'll irritate them and that might be some of the reasons why you get thumbs down i just have thumbs down because people don't like fart jokes miserable another thing that's really helpful is when you're going through your footage what i need to do is separate the good parts the good takes from the bloopers because the good takes will end up in the finished skit during the vlog and then the bloopers will end up at the end so what i do is i color code the cuts so i'll show you what i mean by that so for example this scene that i did with wayne what i do when i'm looking at the main clip i'll color code the usable clips bright green or in this case lime green and in resolve you just right click and you go to clip color and you choose the color so i just choose lime so these clips here i think tomorrow morning you take me for a sunrise shoot and teach me some photography lessons god i can't be giving like freak so those were the good ones that i knew i'd be able to use and now if i show you the end of the timeline here you'll see these pink ones so the ones that end up as bloopers which i can't use in the actual clip the actual skit but i can use them in the end as bloopers they get color-coded pink so that's what they end up looking like in the timeline did you bring the money it's like frankenstein's front door so that really helps in the editing process when i'm looking for clips because you end up with all of these tiny little cuts if you zoom out of that timeline like this how am i gonna find it's like a needle in a haystack so by color coding the clips i will know where are they gonna end up in the main timeline okay one final thing that i'll show you and this is something that i i really i can't understand why people aren't using these basic audio production tools to make your vlogs or your your shows or whatever it is that you do like even on channels that have 10 million subscribers they're not doing this so this is something that i think everybody should be doing and that is adding eq and compression right so if you look at this eq this equalizer on this track what you're basically looking at is a cut of the very very low end bass rumble and the reason why i cut that is because i don't want that plosive that to make that awful rumbly sound so i've cut it there but here i've boosted the base in my voice to make it sound more rich and here you can really see how i've boosted the the high end to give it a lot more presence and make it brighter so basically if you just think of it in like uh basic terms bass middle and treble like you used to see on your granddad's stereo that's what you're doing right so you can really boost the presence of your voice you can make it sound richer and stronger and brighter by having some eq so what i'll do is i'll switch that off and i'll play the the the audio hello hello this is photo tripper headquarters now go back and do that again with the eq on hello hello this is photo tripper headquarters it's so much more punchy it's so much brighter and clearer and that's something that pretty much every video editing package has a premiere has a kind of a similar thing but it's not as good that's one of the reasons why i love resolve because it has way better eq and compression on all of the audio tracks and it's pretty much real time you can switch it on and off you can tweak it you can listen to the audio as you're shaping those frequencies just like any door or digital audio workstation and then the second thing that you can do which is even more important and more powerful is compression so if i go back to this and i'd put my compression on you'll see here that this has a fairly aggressive compressor set to it so again i'll switch this off and i'll play this for you hello hello this is photo tripper headquarters recording an extremely lame voiceove so it sounds really bad on the sibilance but when i put this compressor on what that does is it kind of puts a limit on how loud those loud parts of the waveform are allowed to get and it will also push up the quieter parts of the waveform so it evens out the signal and generally makes it sound more punchy and more in your face and much clearer so now i'll put this back on hello hello this is phototripper headquarters and again i'll just give you one more time with that off hello hello this is photo tripper headquarters and of course for that to work really well you need to have a good signal in the first place if your audio is really quiet you're gonna need to boost that first so that as it's going through the compressor the compressor triggers and squeezes down those high points those transients in that waveform so having a compressor and an eq doing a bit of research go on youtube and look for some free tutorials on how to tweak those settings just those two things on your voiceovers on the audio when you're doing a talking head out in the field it's really going to make your production sound a lot more professional and it's something that i i just couldn't do without [Music] this is uh this is leo um he's decided that he's he's going on the treadmill now the walking pad so we'll we'll just wait i'll just wait for him to finish washing himself [Music] don't interrupt oh he's done there we go okay back to the tour so john drummond also asked about color grading so i'll just show you a quick demo of that but in all honesty i really don't have a clue what i'm doing when it comes to video color grading and resolve but what i do like about resolve is these color wheels so basically you can just select a clip and just play with these color wheels you can play with the gain the gamma gamma seems to really boost the the mid tones and bring up the shadows and then you've got this lift which is also the shadows but it basically just makes the the dark darks just less dark doesn't really boost the shadow detail so i just pretty much use the gamma and the gain but you can you can do so much more you can let's just say you wanted to make the shadows cooler so you could click on this area here pull those towards the blues just undo that so you've got your primary wheels then you've got your log wheels so you could bring down the highlights just pull that over there or you could decide you want the highlights warmer so you'd pick that point and push that up to there but in like i said in all honesty i'm a total novice when it comes to color grading in davinci resolve i sometimes see comments people saying oh you've got the best life ever you know your lifestyle is fantastic and you you might think that because what you get to see is me climbing up a mountain having some epic adventure and then getting some lovely pictures and that's what you get to see but the reality is that that epic adventure yes they do happen but they are probably about four percent of the time you know four percent of my life is spent doing these epic adventures the other 96 of my life is spent studying on this bloody walking pad editing these videos because it takes forever to put these together i would say on average a minimum of two days and probably a maximum of four days once i may have spent five days editing just one episode and then there's the time that i spend editing the images as well so i might spend two hours editing one image which i then drop into the video and then the rest of it is all video editing and that's because of all of those little cuts and those little bits of comedy timing and then you know just i could spend four hours trying to find a piece of music to fit into the video so yes i have a great lifestyle it's full of adventure four percent of the time the rest of it is drudgery and hard work but i enjoy it you know i i enjoy putting the story together i spend a lot of time laughing at this console because of the stupid shenanigans you know so yeah it's hard work it's very time consuming but i wouldn't have it any other way oh that brings me on to another question a lot of people ask about the music so my music i would say it's about 50 my own music which comes from my music production background when i used to produce stock music for for my own stock libraries and then the rest of the music comes from epidemic sound and they've got some fantastic stuff on there to be quite honest i would probably use more of my own music if my own music wasn't just this hard drive full of random songs instead of you know going to epidemic sound where i can go to all of these different genres and categories and moods i can even search by bpm it's often quicker for me to just go there pick somebody else's music than it is for me to rifle through my hard drive listening to hundreds and hundreds of songs to try and find the perfect match to the footage some of the more you know notable tracks that you hear like my theme tune at the beginning and at the end and whenever you see a comedy skate that's my own music that i've composed and produced oh we've got to get this one in right i've got a message from my stalker low light mike i'm a nanaimo guy so i'd like to see a few quick obscure glances out the window so that i can drive myself crazy trying to place the landmarks in the background is that a real one yeah that's a real one yeah yeah well sorry uh stalker mike but uh you know i've closed the window there i've closed the blinds and i'm not even gonna tell you what's behind that door there so and we have recently moved don't tell him that why well he don't even he thinks we're still in nanaimo yeah uh keep guessing right i think that is pretty much all i've got time for so yeah that's it in it i think i have one more question what um when do you think you're gonna get married that's that's not on here so what we'll do now is we'll go and introduce you to sterling the other cat let's go let's go and do that oh uh just just a quickie about the guitar the reason why i picked this cheap old squire to do a few licks on is simply because it's the only one that was even remotely in tune and hadn't had a few snap strings like i said i haven't played in years so this was quite painful for me i've lost all my calluses but one day i'll start playing again and get into it and maybe even do a little bit of singing for you guys so that's my cheapo mexican squire strat i think this is sterling and he likes to do this thing where he sticks his tongue out which i knew he wasn't gonna do he's just bloody cute though all right then three grappling matches happen every hour on the hour and leo always wins basically you can't walk past him you can't leave without stepping over him and he'll stay there until he gets fed so that's sterling that's what he does what a brat you

Channel: fototripper

Views: 51,030

Keywords: landscape, photography, how to vlog, voice over, photoshop, microphone, walking pad, background music, epidemic sound, youtube content creator, office tour, vlogs, bts, behind the scenes, camera bag, editing, davinci resolve, how to record, fototripper, benq monitor, audio, music producer, interface, presonus, audiobox ione, mic, alesis speakers, mixing, subwoofer, production, sennheiser, recording, acoustic panels, primacoustic, neewer video lights, tutorials, se electronics, condenser mics

Id: k3ggDFsi4N4

Length: 38min 28sec (2308 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 06 2020