Using LONG EXPOSURE Photography to EXPLOIT Bad Light

[Music] [Applause] [Music] we're pushing into Northern Ireland but coming to England and Wales it's a fine start the day some patchy areas of cloud around but generally speaking it will be a dry start and the cloud will tend to melt away I think through the evening so more in the way of sunshine right I'm off a sofa I've got a plan let's go [Music] hello and welcome to another day of landscape photography and I'm here in the oxy days at a place called SEMA water it's a big of one of the only two natural lakes here in the oxr dales and it's pretty grey today but it's good it's fine and it's probably one of the coolest car parks I have ever seen use park right on the lakeshore and it's just absolutely absolutely stunning it's gonna be an interesting day photography wise I think we've got some pretty changeable weather again and yes I am wearing a hat in the middle of the summer but this is the British summer so on days like today it can get quite cold I am already shooting my first shot because one of the things I mentioned on the video last week was when you're dealing with dual conditions like this and the light isn't working for you the color isn't working for you one of the things you can do is to use those things to your advantage and do some long exposure because by smoothing out the water and smoothing out the clouds that have behind me here it's gonna create a really interesting ethereal feel to the image and I also have we sort of lean out over the water a bit these pretty cool rocks that are going to act as a juxtaposition against that smoothness or the movement in the water and the clouds rather by having that rock solid in the foreground that's just gonna really add some interest to the image they're also really quite an interesting shape so I think I'm quite happy with the composition I have had to put the tripod into the water and kind of leaned across to get my camera into position and there is also a rock start of hiding in the water just behind this bush that's gonna lead you in from the bottom corner as well really nice image I think I am however going for an extreme long exposure the exposure I have here is 5 minutes and 41 seconds long and there's not much wind today so those clouds are moving fairly slowly and we're just gonna get loads of that movement in there over that sort of nearly 6 minutes explosion I think it's gonna be really nice to get the day started the way I've done it is just by taking a test exposure first then popping the format high-tech fire 'christ 16 stop filter onto the front I'm about 24 meters I'm at f/8 and then I've have to up the ISO just a little bit to about 320 in order to make that could bring that down in fact to a five minutes and forty seconds exposure so I love it I absolutely love doing these extreme long exposures in my landscape photography because they just create something a little bit more different they're harder because they take a lot of time if it's not right you've spent six minutes waiting for the shot so there's a lot riding on it it's nice to get it right but when they work they come just be so beautiful and then you can edit these subtle colors these subtle tones really nicely sometimes black and white there's a very good chance at this there will be a black and white because the cause are particularly dull so we'll see how it goes haven't really totally decided yet but there's a very good chance of it so yeah good start of the day I'm then going to walk up this hill here and see what we can see from further up the hill books I think the cameras just finished exposing let's lean over over the water a little bit and have a look at that oh-ho yes that looks really nice it's well exposed and I'm pretty happy with that for the first shot [Music] [Music] right second shots and just walking up this hill I'm really just today trying to make the best of these conditions it's unlikely in this situation that you're gonna come away with a winning shot the way I use these kind of days is just to get a bit of exercise still enjoy the outdoors because it's not that cold but also to scout out shots for the future so there are a few a few breaks in the cloud and as I've been walking up these reeds here just caught my attention because there was a strand of sunlight coming through the clouds and it lit up the reeds in the foreground that I have here I'm then looking out over the valley which has some beautiful deep greens in it and then going up into a very dingy gray hilltop and sky above that and it's just creating layers in the scene here I haven't composed yet but it's just creating these really nice layers that I think will work really well looking for long exposure this time I'm just going to do it as a a straight up shot because I don't want to get any movement in these reeds and I want to freeze them the light has gone at the moment but I'm hoping that we'll come back and just turn these reeds that beautiful yellowy orange color so I've got layers of color as well as layers of different interest in the layers as well so it's all gonna add to the image I'm not sure it's gonna work if I'm totally honest but it was just that light hit it it did really strike me so I'm just gonna compose and I think it's going to be a vertical shot so I don't use an L bracket or anything like that so I'm just going to turn it and get my composition I'm gonna go in a bit closer so I'm filling the foreground with the reeds and I also want to get up to my eye level so I'm just gonna raise the center column here and now I've got that sort of it same level that my eyes are at and that's the composition that I want looking down the hill a little bit on those reeds that's refilling the foreground so someone commented on me using the center column right up high like this the other day on the big district video and just said you shouldn't do it basically it was the gist of what he was saying I couldn't disagree more because is it perfect no it is not are you going to get more movements with it up here yes of course you are but some times I want the camera on the tripod and I need to get it up higher it's the composition it's the perspective that I want that's more important and not pure I don't know why wouldn't you I just need that higher perspective I can up the shutter speed to freeze any of that movement out to any way up the ISO a little bit I could haven't hold it I suppose but I don't want to I want to compose using the tripod I'm putting the reeds the mid-ground and the background all in the real third so we've got those three sections of this shot and I think that's gonna work quite nicely focusing about a third of the way into the shot there's a little brick wall there that I'm focusing on and Settings wise am I gonna do f-16 I think because these Reed's are quite close to me I want to try and get everything in focus with one shot I am gonna be at 125th of a second that's good for one 200th of a second actually to try and freeze those reeds as it is quite windy so I'll need all I need is Oh 400 pretty much for that let's just take a test that exposure yeah that's looking pretty good now it's just a case of waiting for the sunlight to strike those reeds again it is very gray I'm not sure whether it's going to happen it's going from sunny to cloudy to rain another very changeable day I'm not even sure the shots gonna work either so it's because it's gonna take a bit quite a bit of post-processing I think to get this one right and to turn it into something interesting try and control the color a little bit and I need the sunlight to light up this foreground as well so I'm gonna wait and see and try and capture this shot [Music] you [Music] some on the top of the hill I don't even know what it's called but I do have 360 views Oh Oh quite steep climbs walls in there I'm days I today when the weather isn't great it's gray is windy you can be guaranteed that there's not going to be many people around even at the height of summer like it is at the moment I find days like this are in equal parts brilliantly exhilarating but also a little bit terrifying because it is bleak up here bleak and it feels very lonely when the wind is rushing past your head you're getting wet and the clouds are coming in and it feels quite lonely but exhilarating at the same time I wouldn't really want to be anywhere else right now however I don't think whoever is going to improve at all today so what I'm gonna do is go back and show you the Edit of that first picture done don't think we're going to do much better than that today and I really want to show you Silver Efex Pro and what you can do with your black-and-white conversions using that software so I'm gonna rush back down the hill because the weather is getting worse and I'll see you when I'm warm and dry okay's I'm back and I'm warm and dry and I've printed out the picture as well and I'm really happy with how it turned out so I just want to show you a few things I'm not gonna go through the whole edits at all but I want to show you what Silver Efex Pro can do to really make your black and white images pop so let's get into the computer right when I am editing a picture using the Nik collection and silver flex Pro I'm always starting in Adobe Lightroom anyway and I'm doing a few slight adjustments to get me started in Lightroom and all that is really is with this one I've put a quick grad at the top and the bottom just to bring the X get the exposure right across the image very straightforward and then I come down to the bit of noise reduction in just for that long exposure and then just do my lens Corrections here I've also cropped to make it a square crop I had that in mind at the time when I was composing and then we're pretty much set to import it into silver effects probe so there are two ways to do this the better way is to go down to open as smart objects in Photoshop so I'm going to click that and it will open it up as a smart object obviously in Photoshop will then let us do it in in a non-destructive way and if we want to change it in the future then we can go back and do that so I've got my smart objects and I just need to go up to filter and then go down to the Nik collection and click on silver effects Pro so into this Silver Efex Pro window here I'm not going to go through the whole idea I want to show you a few of the tools are available but you can use a number of presets that are built-in to silver effects Pro here on the left hand side you can just scroll down click them and it will do the edit for you change the image I mean that looks pretty good doesn't it on its own without me even doing anything full dynamic range they all look pretty good but I want to do it myself today one of the things I really like about silver effects Pro is these dynamic brightness and you can see what that does as I slide it I'm gonna go up on the dynamic brightness a little bit I think and the soft contrast as well as we come down to contrast here that makes some really interesting changes I'm just going the wrong way for me there though let's go back up add some contrast in and that's getting closer to where I want to be there's other things like the structure here which is really good for long exposures I'm not gonna go through that but I do want to show you these selective points here and this is what gives silver effects Pro that really good control so we just click that and you start to affect specific areas and tones of the image so I'm coming down here because I want to just affect this rock a little bit and then you have the full set of changes that you can make here like brightness I can increase the brightness on that rock a little bit I'm gonna put lots more contrast into it I want to amplify the whites a little bit and then amplify the blacks it's a little bit like dodging and burning but you just do this specifically with these contrast controls and the full set of white and black and sharpness controls as well so that fine-structure because it's on this rock I want to increase that feeling and that juxtaposition so I'm gonna put that fine structure right up and the same as well just up that bring that sharpeners bring that clarity up with those adjustments and that rock now looks really nice you can then just duplicate that control point and then just drag it across to the other rock that's slightly bigger so I'm just gonna make that a little bit bigger and it applies those same adjustments to that second part of your image I'm actually going to duplicate that a third time and drag it down to this rock down here onto the black part of the rock and then just have it encompassing that whole rock I also want to darken this bottom area of the image here a little bit so I'm just gonna create another control point click down here make it nice and big to fill that kind of area at the bottom and then just drag that brightness down just to darken that area of the image as well and just add that really moody smooth nice feeling sweetie but I also want to increase the contrast just to pull a little bit of the detail out from underneath the water there and you can see that's starting to happen down here and that is looking pretty good that's close to what the final image was but the big thing that I really love about Silver Efex Pro is if we come down here to these toners here and we've got a full set of old-school dark room and told us here that we can add in in Silver Efex Pro here so if you just have a look at them copper tone there that's quite nice sepia classic sort of sepia look to your image coffee but my favourites are these blue the MA blue ones their sanity the blue toners and the selenium just really nice subtle changes I think this one I'm gonna use probably the cyanotype yeah something like that looks really good nice and subtle number 10 I'm just gonna click that and then it will save that image do you didn't just click on OK and it will save that image and put it back into that smart filter in Photoshop once you back into Photoshop you can then open it up again back into Silver Efex Pro and all your changes will be there that you've made there is just one thing I want to do I've already done with the original image and that is just to remove this rock stack there that somebody's made I haven't actually got a problem with removing that I don't think it's deceiving the viewer in any way because it is not natural part of that landscape someone's made that if I could have gotten to the water I would have not that over removed it from the image I didn't want to get my feet wet my wellies so I'll just removed it in post using a clothing bush there so cloning and heal and that's just removed that from the final image and there we have it just Silver Efex Pro beautiful thing to use you do after you get a 30 day free trial there is then a small cost after that everything if you do black and white photography it is most definitely worth okay so stick around to the end for the info blast and please do leave a comment down below and let me know what you think also if you are interested in coming on my workshops I only have a few left now so please do head over to the website and check them out also subscribe if you enjoyed the video or you like this content hit that notification belt hit like button do whatever you need to do and I'll see you want another one very very soon I'm Adam this its first man photography you [Music]

Channel: First Man Photography

Views: 80,260

Keywords: landscape photography, long exposure photography, photography, landscape photography tutorial, photography tutorial, landscape photography vlog, landscape photography tips, long exposure, how to do long exposure photography, long exposure tutorial, long exposure photography tutorial, black and white photography, silver efex pro 2 tutorial, fine art photography, black and white, black and white photography techniques, photography for beginners, landscape, lightroom, tutorial

Id: MXDeo3lFljw

Length: 17min 3sec (1023 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 19 2018