The Worst Thing a Landscape Photographer Could Do

in this episode there's a new vlogger invading our turf you're in our shop could you uh could you just leave just look at these lovely spirals do you know who i am another english vlogger this is my patch oh there's a guy though what a tosser we're gonna go for a beer tonight just hold it by the tip but i'm gonna have to crank that iso so let's take it up to 2500 which is a lot more than i would like to use that's perfect now just hold that position so that is how you quickly and very easily blend an element oh that definitely needs a milky way in that river you can't put your ads in my video why not you didn't get me a muffin i didn't get your muffin there is nothing worse than getting all excited about going on a shoot with the walking fossil only to discover there's somebody in your shot yeah you're in our shop could you uh could you just leave i've been here two hours yeah just just go down this river about 500 meters so we can't see it yeah we'll be good yeah thanks your name isn't on the rooks do you know who i am that's adam gibbs oh yeah he's in your videos isn't he well sometimes you know he used to be quite often not that much these days but so yeah if you could just go down river that'd be great thanks all right then but i've got some for you yeah now that really is no way to treat a man of uncle grumpy's advanced years is he vlogging is he a blogger another english vlogger this is my patch what what is our patch yeah well what i was thinking was i'd show you this spot here on the oyster river i've never been here before but a friend of mine warren he got a really cool shot at this spot back a couple of years ago so what's the shot well the shot is so in the background here we've got these gorgeous potholes which i'm gonna take a guess i'm gonna say it's cast topography it's that rock that cast produces i think but what i love is these lovely green hues that you can see coming over these rocks and then these pop holes this island is absolutely gorgeous it's really beautiful to the naked eye but to get shots to get picturesque images it's really difficult it's not it's not easy and that's part of the fun it's like a challenge right because i think i had actually someone say to me they commented do you ever photograph anything but trees or waterfalls i was like well that's what's here trees and waterfalls i think we have a bit of coast but it's not it's it's pretty but it's not dramatic is it no you work with what you got right when i was in the mountains it was all mountains and lakes but now that you're on the island it's rivers forests waterfalls beaches maybe some bears i just think you should strip off your clothes and just dive in you know and not diving in anywhere you're just getting in the water and i think i think that people would love to see that no you have got those nice legs i think they'd rather see your mind i'd rather see you in amanda's bikini that i would pay money for no that's not going to happen you draw the line yeah all right well should we see what we can do then i was really drawn to these hypnotic paisley patterns of bubbles swirling down the river so i wanted to find a composition that would feature those but after scouting around the area it became obvious that the best shots were over by that obnoxious vlogger so i found this lovely composition just are you with us now it's that guy from earlier what do you think of that oh that's good in it good to meet you you know it's uh there's a guy though what a tosser we're gonna go for a beer tonight yeah everything clear that with me [Applause] i thought you said you'd ask me okay so i've found what i think is a lovely composition so what i'm looking at is these beautiful rock formations over here and the way that these bubbles kind of spiral in and you can see they come in waves so i've got like one group of uh bubbles spiraling in and to create these whirlpools so what i have is these temporary spirals in the foreground and then just behind that you've got these beautiful rock formations under this green water so i found the comp that i like but technically it's really difficult because i haven't got anything to focus on all i've got is bubbles and some rocks that are underneath the water so how do you focus on that so i'm going to show you a little trick that's going to hopefully get me around that problem and give me perfect focus and what i'm gonna use is this tripod so yeah you might you might enjoy this trick adam it's pretty it's pretty cool [Music] now you've probably heard the old saying if you can't beat them join them so i decided to befriend this brian character and thus enlist his help in achieving perfect focus and to my delight he agreed to help by navigating these slippery rocks with a skill that quite frankly i thought was amazing for somebody at his current level of inebriation right so you're in position yeah there was an easier way to get in there but you're here now the length is there if you just grab the tripod and just as i explained just hold it into the water get it in the white stuff and i should be able to get perfect focus so if you could just get really close to that edge there bry and then just hold my pole aloft into the white fluid and then i can i've got a focus point just light stuff here yes yeah i mean if you just if you just put the little sticky if you put all three legs together like a pull then you can it's you know it'd be longer you can hold it where i need it to be that's in the way yeah so but i need it over there so if you just kind of hold it by the head just hold it by the tip and then just extend the length as far as possible into the white stuff that's perfect now just hold that position right i just need you to hold that position hang on a second brian's skill and stance was the best i've ever seen and in spite of the language barrier we got there in the end that's perfect you've got really good form there bry yeah solid so we're done there now so you can you can finish off and get back up here i'll just shake it yeah just give it a good good dangle thanks bro so now that bry the geordie has helped you know geordi are you bro why are you man i don't i don't know what do you speak english i suggest jordy so now that bride of geordi has helped me to focus on this shot now i'm getting some really tasty composition so hopefully you can see from there that lovely white foamy spirally water is just drifting in and out just in front of these rock formations and that's all that my composition is in fact i'll show you the back of the camera and you'll see exactly what i'm talking about so what i've got with this composition i'll just brighten it up a little bit so that you can actually see what's going on just look at these lovely spirals that just come in so that's basically the bottom half of the frame and periodically you get these shapes that come in and really complement these rock formations and that kind of makes sense because this water has carved these shapes out of this rock so it kind of makes sense that these spirals would emulate those shapes and so i've got this kind of echo of this movement being echoed by this lovely rock formation so you've got a sense of permanence against this fleeting moment that just comes through the scene occasionally you'll get this leaf you get a nice lovely maple leaf that kind of just wanders into the scene but even then with the the shutter speeds that i'm shooting at it's not perfectly sharp i'm just managing to get like a leaf or a collection of bubbles frozen but they're not super super sharp because i'm having to crank the iso up and shoot probably around about f 6.3 i think was the last one but we'll see and then what i'm going to do i'm going to try anyway we'll see if it works i'm taking these really fast shots so i'll actually show you the actual shutter speeds that i'm using so let's go to maybe what we'll shoot at f 5.6 but i'm gonna have to crank that iso so let's take it up to 2500 which is a lot more than i would like to use but that's giving me a shutter speed of 125th of a second so i can get that perfect timing and that's all i'm doing is i'm just riding that shutter it would have been perfect if i'd had a remote shutter release because then i wouldn't get the the shock from my finger hitting that that shutter but like i said it's not perfectly sharp anyway there is some element of blur and i'm just basically waiting for those perfect moments as you can see it's coming in and then it drifts out so it's just a waiting game really so i've used a circular polarizer on this camera and as you can see just there there's just a little bit of a reflection of the trees that's as good as i can get it but before that i put the polarizer on it was really quite bad so it's always a compromise isn't it you're getting some of what you need but not all of what you need oh look at that that's oh it's kind of hypnotic in it adam so i'm going to try and notch down that iso a little bit i'll shoot wide open now at 2.8 and look at that it still managed to get me that 125th of a second but i've been able to turn the iso down so i'm just going to play with those numbers and see what gives me the best combination ideally you don't want to have that iso as high as that because it's just noisy but it's quite dim now earlier it was much brighter and i was able to get much faster shutter speeds without such a high iso but this is what i've got right now but i think we'll just camp out here for a little bit trade some stories and wait for the better light to come and i hear that bry is something of an alcoholic so he might have a few cans of guinness in his bag i'm wondering yeah he's not that bad after all [Music] so you've no doubt noticed that in the end i opted for a long exposure instead of the fast frozen motion shots that i spent so long talking about and the reason is i just loved that the long exposure showed you more of what was under the surface but how did i get that maple leaf frozen in place well let me show you how so this is obviously adobe photoshop and i want you to just look down here on the bottom right to the layers panel so what i've got is my long exposure which is what you're seeing right now and i'll switch on the leaf exposure so this is the much faster exposure that freezes all of the motion and i really preferred i'll switch that off i really just prefer the the look of this exposure just seemed a little bit more magical but i wanted that sharp leaf so how do i combine that with that well what i'm going to do is i'm going to click on this leaf exposure layer here and i'm just going to use the marquee tool here to just draw a box so i just click and drag just draws a box around that leaf because that's all i want from that particular layer on my keyboard i'm going to press ctrl c which copies those pixels onto my clipboard and then i'm going to press ctrl v which pastes them onto a new layer so you won't you really can't see it there because it's just a tiny amount of pixels but if i switch this layer off there you'll see that pasted square so obviously i don't want all of this uh turbulent water around the leaf i just want the leaf and this is where one of photoshop's new tools is just absolutely brilliant so with this leaf layer selected i'll just call this leaf because that's all that there is i'm going to go up to select and i'm going to go to subject so select subject so all that photoshop is going to do is just select just the leaf it's basically detecting a shape amidst all of this chaos so i'm hoping you can see if i just zoom in you should be able to see the marching ants around that leaf now it's not a perfect selection but that's okay at this stage because i can refine that so what i'm going to do now is go to select select and mask and this will bring up the select and mask tool and i'm not going to make any adjustments to this in here the only thing i want to do is just select the output 2 and switch that to new layer with layer mask select that and click ok so now what that does is it creates a layer mask on a new layer and i can play with that layer mask to refine the mask so if we zoom in you'll see the edge the very tip of the leaf is is kind of fading out a little bit and there's a kind of a cutoff point between the stem and the leaf so i just want to use a small white brush so i'll click on my brush tool make sure that it's white and i'll get a very small brush so i'm going to use my left bracket key to bring that down here very tiny i'm just going to brush that in there we go let's fix that i'm just going to brush that into there and that's fixed that that little cut where the stem was and that's it that's all i needed to do so if i zoom out now i've got that perfect leaf on its own layer if i switch that off you see there it is and then i'll confess what i actually did is i moved it ever so slightly so i'm going to set the select the move tool and then what i did is i just moved it just to about there because it just sat in that little space of darkness a little bit more and it just made it pop a little bit more so that is how you quickly and very easily blend an element from a fast exposure into a long exposure and i really like the end result now if that cool trick doesn't deserve a like and a subscribe well i don't know what does oh and while you're at it just tickle my bell so that you get notifications when i post new videos now let's check in with gandalf the moth eaton are you getting a decent shot i think i think this might be actually quite good yeah your eyesight is better than mine well i mean i'm like 25 years younger than you that's a nice shot i think i think that might work out i'm gonna have to uh burn that in though but you don't you don't touch your images up in post though they're straight out of camera right of course yeah i thought so yeah jpeg none of this luminar ai ship oh yeah bollocks i'll slip in the sky into there put a couple of rainbows in there yeah how about a milky way oh that definitely needs a milky way in that river yeah luminar can do that for you can it you can with a click of a button yeah oh by the way yeah this video is sponsored by squarespace oh that's like squarespace you can't put your ads in my video why not that's just rude unless you want to give me like some money have you got squarespace website yeah no i would have done that wordpress stuff you do you know that coding with the work with the squarespace website it's very easy just look you're not getting paid to be in my video the noise i hear you're looking for a fuji uh gfx 50 ah well i'm looking for a gfx 100 we've got one going i've got a 50r have you i'll send it to you good price i don't think your patron will appreciate you uh profiting off his generosity well it's going towards a you know another fuji my arm's getting really heavy now you want to squeeze in just one more sponsorship mention um no that's it yeah there's no one else you've sold your soul to oh um well the colorado tripod company okay that's enough of that i'm going what a brilliant day of landscape photography shenanigans we'd had i even made a new friend and although i couldn't understand a word he said i honestly couldn't have got that crap shot without his help so did you get that muffin than i got yet that's mine it's not gavin's no you didn't get me a muffin i didn't give you a muffin i'm not a bastard that's what he said about you when he was eating it good to meet you you know it's uh oh there's a guy though what a tosser we're gonna go for a beer tonight [Laughter] this is going to be difficult and here i've got some and then i'll go away but can you say that in english we can't understand jordy all right i've got something for you oh what do you got there that's all right i'll give you a swirl it's a chocolate [Laughter] swirl [Laughter] [Music] well i'll have to take it first and then you can i'll let you study it all right maybe just watch my videos just hit that subscriber button [Laughter] and uh watch all the ads too just you know let them play out for a bit i've tried skipping through them but if i just skip to a different part of the video it plays two ads all at once did you get that squarespace uh website yet it's not squarespace it's an all-in-one platform where you know you're not putting express expressways in my in my videos your cheeky soft spot that will be 122 please it's just drag and drop it's very easy susan's this thing in the background oh that's my muffin did you not get gavin one no oh what a bastard that's what he said about you there's a tool man it's a tool there's a tool holding the osmo look at that don't deal with that behind his back what i think you should go like shave the sides and have like a mohawk type thing yeah yeah you get a lot of attention yeah because i do like the ladies we're doing a thumbnail for brian for his video because he's a vlogger right of course he is and uh who is it who isn't a vlogger and uh he's a bit demanding he wants all kinds of stuff like all angles yeah more angles are better licky lips all that kind of stuff weird oh hold up that's my head oh i got a tripod man yeah i've got the bottom fit your leg so you put your leg over that ear i need to pull this you all that yeah here we go it's dead simple really easy really that wasn't too bad was it bye

Channel: fototripper

Views: 49,405

Keywords: landscape, photography, vancouver island, adam gibbs, fototripper, long exposure, river, oyster, tripod, bri barnham, photoshop tutorial, exposure blending, layer masks, circular polarizer, composition

Id: TTs0M3NNjO8

Length: 22min 34sec (1354 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 10 2021