This will change your landscape photography forever.

hi everyone and welcome back to express photography i'm alistair ben now it's been a few weeks since i've spoken with you and pretty much the reason for that i explained in the last video i posted which is i'm trying to basically find my creativity again i'm trying to re-establish my relationship with landscape photography that i've always had which has been it's something i've had to do and as i explained in my last video i felt this pressure to create for the channel every time i went out with the camera it was about making a product making a video having something profound to say and ultimately i got to the point where i was no longer enjoying it and therefore it was time to stop now i've been playing an awful lot of guitar over the last couple of weeks a couple of months in fact [Music] um because that's been my creativity and if you want to read more about where i'm at just now and more behind the making of this video and some more of the kind of thoughts and profound feelings i've been having check the link below and head over to our blog and there's an article there waiting for you to read and of course it's very useful for us if you leave your comments and all that type of thing now a week or so ago i actually went out very early one morning with my camera and it was the first time in weeks and weeks that i'd been out and what i noticed was that i got there very very early it was well before the sun came up and i left uh the car park and was walking up the glen there and everything was very subdued very low contrast it was misty a bit ethereal a bit foggy but there was no really heavy contrast particularly in the forested mountains that i was kind of there to engage with and there to enjoy and if we dive straight into lightroom here you'll see some of these raw files these are the first shots i took and it was very early in the morning there's no light on them this is just an exposure and if we go into the um the develop module here you'll see in the histogram it's really middle of the road really mid-contrast mid-tone low contrast as soon as we you know so this is the native contrast that exists in the scene and you'll see the next one is quite similar it's a little bit darker and then this one's very atmospheric but if we stick with this first image first i've been to this place when it's been sidelit and it's really contrasty and what happened here was i was in a very subdued mood i was in a quiet mood and i recognized that the relationship between the contrast and the brightness of the scene was directly mirroring my mood so i was accepting that these low contrast sort of slightly desaturated photographs or or scenes or raw files were were really good i mean i really liked the fact that when luminosity and contrast aren't so dominant the subtle lines forms shapes and colour palette somehow has a more profound voice if i start to just increase the contrast and then maybe darken the fraction to get it a bit more saturated and we'll just muck about with the color palette there as soon as we introduce contrast and if i drag up the yellows a bit to make them a bit more luminous as soon as we introduce contrast and brightness you can see there the histogram has been widened which means there's more contrast there as soon as we introduce that everything gets louder the image has more impact it doesn't have that soft delicate feel to it anymore and this is very much something that social media demands is impact it's very difficult to get people to like your photographs or comment on your photographs if they're low impact some people can they build up big followings of people who appreciate quiet work for most people getting anybody to notice quiet work is very very difficult and what that basically means is you have to make them for yourself you know if if we everything we do becomes uh about external validation then it becomes a pretty lonely existence because we're not self-actualizing we're not self um just being self-satisfied so why what i really got into this morning was just this very quiet feel now of course i waited the river in my trekking shoes because i'd forgotten my gum boots my rubber boots so i had soaking wet feet and was freezing cold but i was very much drawn to these quiet colors and you'll see if we crank up the contrast and make it louder of course it has more impact but it loses some of its native quality that that sort of quieter voice and i think it's important from a creative point of view to allow some of the stuff to be valid in its own right in that we don't have to push everything and make everything louder the whole time so one of the things i really wanted to talk about during this video is a lot of you know that i've produced a couple of e-books over the last two years one is called luminosity and contrast and the other is called the colour of meaning those two ebooks are a complete guide to how to see the world in an emotional way and compose by feel and to understand that every single composition is the arrangement of feel so they might not be very exciting in terms of their title but the content of them as the testimonials from people who bought them will testify is that the way we see the world and the way we feel the world is of the most profound importance it's more important than buying a new lens or investing in any other piece of equipment it's an investment in ourselves because creativity comes from within now if if you give yourself permission to make photographs for yourselves you can experiment and try all sorts of different things to try and interest your mind i suppose i've got a pretty busy mind i think a lot i tend to be chewing over business issues or self-development issues or health issues there's all sorts of things we have in our minds all the time of course how kovid has affected our business has been heavily on my mind and what i was experimenting here was was just everything out of focus there's nothing in this photograph that's actually focused and i like the way that we can introduce feel by cooling the image down a little bit maybe taking the hue and exploring and seeing well i can make those greens a little bit less green and a little bit more yellow and then we can introduce a color palette that's very soft and and i like the fact that when i'm processing especially if i'm talking to you folks simultaneously is i'm switching off my brain i'm just i'm just feeling my way around the content to produce something that's really uh it's very calm and a little bit mysterious now we can add a little bit of clarity and texture back into these photographs just to give them a little bit of bite but then pull back the dehaze also and that keeps that atmospheric fuel going on so this is a photograph that's just about atmosphere the color palette is so subtle that it has some impacts on our psychology and our emotions but it's a calm gentle photograph now as the the first three photographs they were taken when it was um the the sun hadn't risen above the surrounding hills yet so everything was in shadow and then when the sun did come up and i was walking down the trail i looked behind me and saw the way the the sunlight was filtering through the trees here and again this is a definitely a photograph about atmosphere however it's a photograph that has much higher contrast natively and this is the point of the luminosity and contrast ebook is that contrast luminosity and geometry have a massive impact on how we engage with the world this has higher contrast warm colors and high luminosity and that has a joyful feel associated with it even though i can make this i could turn this into creepy woods you know quite quickly we can by reducing the luminosity we have made it no longer joyful we have made it sinister and oppressive and mysterious and slightly creepy by cooling the color palette you kind of start to mirror what it's more like under a moonlit night it becomes a much colder space darker space less bright space super contrasty space and therefore it has impact and mystery and intrigue and is slightly creepy now if i reignite the joy with a brighter color palette we can have dark colorful or dark and joyful images and this has a very different feel to it but it's not as joyful as when we have a brighter color palette or a brighter image this is the direct relationship between luminosity contrast the atmosphere the color and the geometry we've seen change the color change the feel and this is something that i dig into in hundreds of pages of ebook so please do yourself a favor click on the link below go to the education section of the expressive photography website and do yourself a favor and buy an ebook i've even put a 15 discount code down there for you as well just to give you a little bit of a an incentive to do so so this for me isn't about processing images this is just about demonstrating the impact of all of these choices that we have now as soon as the sun came up over the horizon it started to skim it's more or less in the north now so this is skimming in a sort of southwest direction across this hillside and i was really fascinated by the way this tree was just catching the light and you can see we've got most of the this dark area is a shadow and but we do have some highlights now as soon as i exaggerate that contrast we have an image that just comes alive and because there's native contrast to the scene we had darker shadows to start off with and i can pull those shadows down a bit pull the blacks down a little bit because i already had contrast natively in the raw file exaggerating it stretching it making it more contrasty is is believable and enhances and sort of it it magnifies the same message we're not changing the message particularly because there was already contrast there we're just exaggerating it making it more powerful this is a tree that can shout because the background is so subdued i'm going to quickly come in just with a radial filter here and i think i'll cool the outside a fraction but i'm going to add some texture because i really want to try and just allow those trees in the background there and i'll do the same with uh so what i'll do is i'll crank up the contrast so that i can see the background trees a little better and then i'll use the luminance mask here to take the highlights off so that you can see that gradient now is only impacting the shadowy background and not the foreground and this is an image that i could really like i mean it i posted something similar on insta i think last week and i really liked it and i'll just do one final example here which was this scene here now this is a a piece of them the hillside that i know really well and i've photographed it many times in different seasons and i love the way that the the foliage or the lack of foliage and the light change the feel every single time i go there and again this is an image that can take quite a lot i mean i'll show you how much contrast you can create in these files now doing a five minus five stop um adjustment to your exposure might seem a little extreme but this just shows how much contrast that you can pile into these frames but i am going to take off some of that vibrance and again we can change the feel of this massively by every adjustment we make something i'm a big advocate of and something i cover quite a lot in the color of meaning is how drastically we can change the feel of an image by making uh very subtle adjustments every single slider in this um in lightroom or any other software that we choose to play with every single slider is an emotional slider there's an emotional consequence associated with that so really what i wanted to to demonstrate today is that where we have luminosity natively in our scene you know so luminosity and contrast atmosphere color and geometry where we have those elements present in the scene we have a feeling associated with those and i cover this quite a lot in the blog post and i i talk about the quality of our life as being such an important thing for us yet we obsess over the quality of light and i think what i wanted to demonstrate with these images is that this one which was taken in very flat low contrast light i had thoughts while i was making this photograph about acceptance and about my own personality traits and about maybe some of the darker sides to the thinking that comes into my mind occasionally and thinking about that being okay you know accepting that and i think the problem with social media driven photography these days is that we only think that certain things are acceptable and other things are not acceptable and i want us to embrace all aspects of our creativity if i want to make quiet introspective images about non-judgment and acceptance and peace and tranquility and just being in the moment i want to be able to do that without guilt equally if i want to make big bold brash volume written statements about how confident and happy i am that's fine too all of these things exist on the spectrum my emotional spectrum and i really would encourage you to explore this aspect of your own creativity because i can guarantee this is where you will find your gold not in following the mantras or repetitious behaviors associated with other photographers find your own inner landscape in the landscape and this is where you will get the most joy thank you very much for watching it's been a pleasure to be back um i really want to make videos that um are more passionate you'll notice that i don't have any b-roll in this video at all i didn't record any of myself in the field and what that allowed me to do was to naturally photograph to just photograph what i wanted to and at the pace that i wanted to without having to talk to the camera without having to ruin the moment for myself there's no point in me running this channel to make content that's good for you if it's not good for me you'll get the most out of me by me being me and having the freedom to create how i want to create please consider any of the links below the blog post or any of the ebooks or video series that we have on offer of course we're still in a situation where we're not running any workshops and this is the only income we have is from selling our products so you can really support us by and obviously really we do believe that you will grow as a photographer and as a person from the ebooks that we have to offer you so please consider dropping in and having a look at those do the old bell notification as well we're going to be producing less content so if you want to know when we're posting a video the best way to do is to subscribe hit the bell notification button and you won't miss a single video that we produce coming up in a week or so i'm talking to bruce percy again bruce has got a new book coming out uh from his time in hokkaido and japan an incredible project i've got a copy coming very very soon so i'm gonna have bruce parisi on the show in a few weeks time so i'm really looking forward to chatting to bruce about this incredible art project that he's brought together again but for now thank you very much for watching and the next thing i would like you to do is click on one of those links below and i will speak to you again very very soon but for now i hope you're safe and well wherever you are in the world and take care we'll speak again soon [Music] you

Channel: Expressive Photography

Views: 11,561

Rating: 4.9312716 out of 5

Keywords: Lightroom, Photography, Alister Benn, Landscape photography, how to, tutorials, composition, educate, expressive photography, barriers, vision, experience, tutorial, lesson, be better, happy, motivation, inspiration, inspire, Luminosity, Processing, Understanding light, Light, engagement, better photographs, landscape, mountains, process, meaning, emotion, personal development, contrast, Transitions, Adobe, creativity, abstraction, local, development, growth, get better, creative living, dodge and burn, masterclass

Id: rQyVR4eg1c4

Length: 20min 5sec (1205 seconds)

Published: Sat May 22 2021