MASTER your TELEPHOTO lens photography and IMPROVE FAST

A big thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this week's video. Good morning and great to see you all again. Wow I've just got back from a fantastic lakes workshop. We were up there for four days on an autumn workshop. It was, we had a fantastic time and we got some amazing weather. We had warm cloud inversion which was stunning and I got back and looked at my photos. I did a video of the cloud inversion which is coming in about probably 30 or But when I looked at my photos I realised I'd taken more shots with my telephoto lens than I took with my wide angle lens and I got some really good shots and it made me think, and it's something I've been meaning to do for a while really, is to make a video specifically about telephoto photography and the benefits of it really. And I'm going to speak a little bit more after this video where I show you the amazing cloud inversion and just the photos I got from that. Obviously some of them were telephoto in fact, just give you a sneak peek, this was one of them. So I'll show that video now and then we'll come back and we'll talk a little bit more about a telephoto lens and some top tips for using them and I'll show you some of the photos as well from the trip and from other trips as well. So over to me in the lakes, just about to climb up to watch sunrise in the gorgeous Langdale Valley. Day two of the workshop and we've got a cloud inversion which looks absolutely spectacular. You won't be able to pick it out behind me because it's still pretty much pitch black, but climbing up Loughrigg Fell which is a great spot to be able to look down and pick out some detail as the trees, the autumn trees emerge from the beautiful clouds and hopefully the lovely morning sun. It's totally clear so it's definitely going to be one for picking out detail in the landscape, but wow it looks so spectacular. So we all made it to the top and just look behind me, it's absolutely spectacular. We've got a cloud inversion which is so lucky and we're just waiting for the sun to rise from obviously the east, that's where it rises from and just look at this. So what we're going to try and do is pick out the detail in the landscape, put long lenses on and try and pick out detail on the landscape because there's no clouds but just before sunrise there's an amazing sort of pink hue in the sky. So we'll get a little bit of a bigger vista and also try and look for some compositions in the landscape, look at some of the rocks and see what we can get when the sun eventually rises. But it is really amazing and I feel so lucky to be here this morning. Right, time to get going. So I just wanted to give you a wider view of the scene behind me. It's so amazing, the sun's still just creating this fantastic light through the valley here and it's so easy to teach a workshop when you've got conditions like this because there's so many compositions it really is about just picking out these details I just said before. The important thing is that you you don't try and get the whole scene in with something like this because it's about it's about getting close and getting those close details because you still want to simplify the scene. So by going in a bit closer and getting a little bit tighter then it makes a really really big difference. Right I'm gonna fly down there and see what we've got. Okay hopefully you can just see the composition down there behind me which is a road that goes through to some trees and there's so many compositions to pick out but this is an obvious one and as the sun's just crept up over here and it's just casting light on the top of the trees it looks so so spectacular. It's really easy, we've got our 70 to 200 lenses on to pick out this detail and it's just a question of just finding compositions and pressing the shutter button. It's a little bit later in the morning now and we've got all the really close-ups of the great light coming in over the trees and what we're trying to do now is just get some wide angle shots and use the light coming and just get a shot of the light hitting the grasses. So this is where it's a good idea to use sort of light and dark so we've got some shadow areas that you can see here and the light coming over and this creates like a line that you can use in the composition, a diagonal line to sort of lead your way up and then just to add a little bit more interest to the shot, luckily we've got very useful workshop Derek has stood at the end of the little place where we were taking the close-up shots from and that adds a little bit of scale and a little bit of interest to the shot as well so your eye sort of goes down here, leads around and you can see the person there on the end and then I've not added too much sky into the shot because it's really really blue and we don't want to have the sky in the shot it's getting a little bit too harsh now the light but we've managed to get some great shots today it's been such a fantastic morning we've been really lucky and I think it's about time for a coffee. So it's pretty spectacular, sometimes everything just comes together and I'm so glad we went high to shoot down on that fog it just works so well and there was so many little compositions sort of opening themselves up as the cloud went in and out and I was really pleased this was probably my favorite shot that I took, I think it's so so simple and that that telephoto lens allowed me to get it I also enjoyed this version of it as well I think that you know this this showed if I just show you here this showed a little bit more on on this side here and I think the fog is probably just a little bit better here where I've just opened up a little bit more of the trees compared to this one I have to admit I do blow hot and cold about them because I like them both a lot so I was really pleased with those two images that I got with my 70-200mm lens on my Nikon Z7 so I was shooting primarily with almost all with my Nikon with the adapter and the 70-200mm lens on which is a really sharp fantastic lens so there were two other images that I took with my telephoto lens on this trip in the Lake District which made me think I really need to do this video one of which was this one where we had this squall coming over and I quickly switched to my 70-200mm and zoomed right in and the rain coming over and the lake in the background which I've shown before in a previous image from Helm Crag and it's just really dramatic and it allows me to close in and really simplify the image and then there was another one as well which were three trees where I just picked them out it was quite a complicated scene it's usually quite a good place to go and shoot autumn colours but the trees had lost most of the leaves so we just had to pick out these three trees so I had to zoom I think this might have been about 180mm and again it's simplified the scene and I've got sort of four things I want to talk to you about with a 70-200mm lens and any telephoto lens pass probably 70mm full frame which I think makes a really big difference so the first one is just simplifying the scene so if I just show you this example here this was in Iceland me and Master Peter Iverson had stopped to take a picture of these mountains because they look fantastic and the first one I took was on a wide angle lens and it just looked a bit fairly rubbish really and then I thought well actually what I need to do is zoom in and just get these really strong triangular mountains and again it just simplified the scene and if we look at the lakes again which was early in the year I was walking there with pebbles actually on rigal water in the lake district and this image here was again one that I took my wide angle lens and I thought it's just not working it looks okay but as soon as I zoomed in then it was it was a really interesting image and actually this is an image that as you look at it you find more and more from the image that there's a cormorant on on the little island at the front there that's just drying its wings and yeah it worked it worked really well as a simplified telephoto lens shot so the first thing is just simplifying the image the second thing is is compressing the perspective well effectively you don't compress the perspective but it's a it it gives that illusion of compressed perspective when you use the telephoto lens if you look at this image here what it's allowed me to do is get these trees that are almost look like they're in the foreground um they're obviously in the mid-ground I've got a long lens on here I think it's a 200 millimeter yeah 200 millimeter lens and I've got all the graduations going back of the hills in the mist and it just allows me to compress that perspective really well again this one of this tree in the winter allows me to compress the perspective between this tree and the background lake in the wide angle shot everything just looks very sort of vast and wide apart but this allows me to compress all this together so using a long lens like this and this this is actually my 50 to 140 from my Fuji or a 70 to 200 which is the one I use on my Nikon then it allows you to just I find come up with compositions much easier so it's a simpler way to find compositions finding a composition with a wider lens is is more difficult you've got to think about the foreground the mid ground you've got to think about how everything interacts together but as soon as you try and pick out a little detail in the landscape with a longer lens it just makes things easier and it also allows you to cut out foreground and sky so if we take a look at this image here this was a long time ago and I stopped by the side of the road in fact I think all three of these images are going to show you I stopped by the side of the road there was no foreground and in one of the cases there was no foreground or sky so this first one there was no foreground it was just frosty and I just wanted to get the sun and this tree and the amazing sky and it just worked so well I could pick it out put it on my tripod and it worked brilliantly the other one was that I just wanted a church when I was in Iceland with Mass earlier in the year and we stopped where he knew there was a church we stopped in a car park actually and this was a 200mm lens zooming in on the church allowed me to get something okay it's not the most spectacular image but it allowed me to get something that was simple and ticked the box of getting an Icelandic church and the final one was in the Faroe Islands where again we stopped at the side of the road because we wanted to get this little red hut here I actually was just a little bit unlucky the light coming down didn't quite go onto the hut it just disappeared what I was waiting for is that light just to drop onto the hut but what it did allow me to do is have the hut at the bottom of this little waterfall here and the sky was boring the foreground was rubbish and it just allowed me to get this really powerful composition the other thing the fourth thing is is focusing on changes in light so often you get changes in light on the landscape but they often don't happen where you want them to happen or they happen in an area that you need to zoom in on and get closer to it was the same with this mountain image here where the light it was just the end of the really amazing light when I was in Iceland and it just caught this this cloud here so I thought well what I'll do is rather than going wide which looked fairly boring I zoomed in on the mountain but it creates a quite a powerful image the final thing is just using depth of field to your advantage I tend to use that more when I'm shooting people or pebbles where you can shoot through things and have not only the background out of focus from the subject to bring the subject into focus but you can also create out of focus foreground to frame the image like I've done here of Derek and Steve on the workshop that we ran in the Lake District last week so yeah the telephoto lenses is an amazing landscape lens in terms of using it make sure you put it on a tripod with the with the tripod mount and make sure if you've got it on a timer that your timer is set maybe for maybe six or seven seconds rather than two or three seconds because you'll get more vibration after you click the shutter button because obviously you've got a longer focal length and also with the longer focal length just think about depth of field most of the shots I showed you there I'm shooting a long way away and it doesn't really matter so I shoot on around about f8 which is the optimum for the lens but if you're a little bit closer or you're shooting woodland you've got to be a little bit careful because you're obviously got a narrower depth of field with a longer focal length so either get photo pills out and check your depth of field tables or bracket your depth of field and focus stack okay before I finish just want to mention a workshop that's that's coming up it's really really exciting and before I do that I just want to say thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this video Squarespace are what I build my website on and it just makes it really easy to just build a fantastic looking website so I use the Bedford template in Squarespace which I think looks really clean and all you do is just drag your images into the placeholders like I say it is super super simple so if you're thinking about building a website then give Squarespace a go and for 10% off you can use squarespace.com forward slash Nigel or the offer code Nigel and like I say that'll give you 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain so back to the workshop yes I've got a really exciting workshop with Jonas Perel who's a fantastic photographer and mountain leader and he's the founder of Vagabond Expeditions and he does lots of expeditions that are self-propelled so either on skis or walking or canoeing and we're going together to Lofoten to photograph the midnight sun it's going to be fun exciting and we're sure to get some amazing photographs so that is there's a link to that down in my description which is on his site and there are eight places I believe six to eight places I'm sure they'll go fairly quickly so if you are interested I know that in my last workshop I've had a lot of messages from people that have tried to get on the workshops and haven't so please go and have a look at it if you are interested then there'll be some places but they won't last very long yeah and thanks ever so much for watching today I really hope you've you've enjoyed it I really do love showing my prints and talking about telephoto lenses I got really excited about it when I got back I thought this is a really good topic so I hope it's been enjoyable if you've liked it give it a thumbs up I'd really like to hear your comments below what you know what top tips you've got for a telephoto lens so you know please comment below it massively helps the video as well and if you're not 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