FOCUS and EXPOSURE TIPS for taking GREAT PHOTOS (on location)

Well, morning everybody. I'm running a little bit late but it's spring as you can see by the daffodils and it's just been frosty and I thought I might get a little bit of fog. I'm not sure I'm going to but I've come to my favorite place in the Lake District the River Brathay and even if there's no fog this is an amazing place to photograph so let's get going. I haven't got a lot of time. It's so beautiful here. There is a little bit of mist sometimes the mist forms a bit more so I'm slightly hopeful but I thought today I'd talk just in simple terms about focus and exposure the two things that I get asked about most and where you focus and how you expose the scene so I'm going to talk you through how I do those and also oh the noises are amazing also just enjoy this beautiful place. Right come on so as I just walked down here at the moment I saw a little bit of mist just trying to form but I think I'm going to try and shoot back into the sun and yeah there is some reeds here some grasses and we get a little bit of frost but there's some trees down here that'll be back which I think should be good so see what we can get down here. I put my other microphone on hopefully you can hear the sounds it's just so beautiful with the birds I've heard a woodpecker and yeah just taking it all in it's just so amazing so I think the mist is starting to form a little bit I'm waiting for the sun to come out I think the sun's going to rise sort of over here somewhere probably should check the compass to get it exactly right so it rises somewhere around the east at the moment so probably just check that so it's probably somewhere over there so these trees are going to get back there a little bit it's a question with a wide angle lens of just trying to find some foreground and yeah there's some down here some nice reeds it's quite messy so you've got to be a little bit careful but there's so much to take here you could go closer on a bit of water or a reflection it's like a photography playground and then some snow-capped mountains over there it's great they still go better than this does it okay so I've got this scene behind me here there's some sheep under this tree there's a nice reflection it's just a nice little scene really and I'm shooting at 70 millimeters at ISO 64 so I'm using ISO 64 because there's not a lot of movement in the scene I'm on my tripod so it makes it super easy to shoot at a lower shutter speed and then I've got f9 and the reason I've got f9 is there's not a lot in the foreground even though I'm shooting at 70 millimeters I'm going to focus on the sheep and f9 will bring me close enough to the nearest focused point if I focus on the sheep so if there's something a little bit closer then that might be out of focus but f9 is good enough another thing with f9 is it's the best part of the lens so I'm shooting at f9 and then the shutter speed just takes care of itself really and it's changing all the time but I think it's going to be around about a second something like that now the movement of the water might change that so I might have to up the ISO depending on what the look is like when I've shot that a second so then I can either move the aperture or the ISO to control my shutter speed if I think that this water and the reflection isn't quite working you know it's just maybe just going a bit blurred or something I think it'll be fine the mist is gone although there's a lot more mist over there so I'm thinking I'm going to get this shot and then maybe move over there the sun's just starting to rise now on the mountain in the background unfortunately that tree just sort of protrudes above so I'm just shooting a scene here I'm going a little bit longer probably it's probably about 16 millimeters something like that and I'm just trying to avoid the sky and there's some grasses that just sort of anchor the bottom of the scene and then the mist helps just to separate a few of the elements and then just a little bit of frost just in the background and there's some nice silver birches right in the background that maybe have just caught a bit of the frost as well I think it's really subtle scene but it works really well I think it might help a little bit if we have a little bit of sunlight on them I'm not 100% sure how long it's going to take judging by the top of that hill there I think we're probably another 20 minutes and then this the mist might have gone a little bit so it's going to be a bit tricky but this looks okay so in terms of the settings and the focus I'll just sort of go through those with you go back to my camera because I feel like f11 is just going to draw everything into focus these grasses are around about probably 25 meters away so there's a reasonable depth of field required and what I might do here as well as I might just tap focus on the grasses and the background as well so I'll just show you so this is the this is the scene here I've got f11 actually I need to drop that down just to iso 64 and then I'm just gonna I'm on manual I'm just going to go to half a second actually I don't want to you see that spike on the left hand side of the histogram there is to do with the sky at the top of the image up here yeah so it's at the top of the image there that spike so I'm not bothered about that too much so I want to push to the right hand side of the histogram so about there and then I want to make sure I'm on iso 64 and then I'm going to increase the shutter I don't want it that dark because that will be underexposed so I want it about probably about there so f11 iso 64 and then I'm going to tap focus there take the shot and tap focus there take the shot that's it simple as that so I'm back on this scene here so I like the contrast between the sort of silhouette of the trees and the mountain that's now in full sun behind me and you can see I've just set it up here before and you can see that the histogram is pushing both ends and that's always a tricky situation because you don't really know what to do so in this case what I do is I dial the exposure back as far as possible until I get a gap at the right hand side you can see in this case there's a little bit of a peak which is the sky in the top left which I'm not bothered about and then I just push it to the right as much as possible and I think in this case I'm going to be able to lift the shadows a little bit but I'm not looking to get a lot of detail out of the shadows so as long as I push it far to the right as I can without worrying too much about the shadows and I don't think I need to do multiple exposures on this I've gone to f11 as well just because I just did a quick calculation of how far this grass is in front of me focusing on the sheep and I'm just at the edge of it at f8 and I've gone a little bit tighter so the longer the focal length you have the less depth of field you have as well so just got to remember that what a beautiful beautiful morning this is okay as the sun is coming out now in this amazing scene here don't twist over on my knee it's just a tree that's catching the light there and what I'm doing is trying to just get the reflection of that in a nice bit of the reeds and then I've got just the trees on the left side anchoring it there's a nice set of reeds down just there as well which look pretty good and this is interesting because I've done a landscape shot where I want to get everything in focus I've got f11 and I want to get the grasses there in focus these grasses where I'm still in focus and that'll be fine I think then I've done a portrait version where I've got more of this in the shot but I think I'm going to shoot that at like f5 because I want to try and get this out of focus just sort of lead your eye through the scene into the rest of it and we've got some ducks coming down as well now doesn't get better than this does it wow what a morning okay the light's getting a little bit harsher now so I think I'm going to consider getting my longer lens out and go around there and try and shoot some of the grasses just as they're catching the sun this is so nice somebody walking their dog up there what a morning to walk your dog right yeah I think I've got what I need to get from here so I'm gonna go over there with a longer lens okay so I'm gonna go for something a little bit wider here I've got these amazing grasses here you can see it in landscape but I'm going to shoot a vertical shot so I've got to get these grasses in focus here all the way to the trees in the background and that's obviously a little bit difficult because I'm not at like super wide I'm not like 24 millimeters I think I'm about 30 millimeters so and these are only about two or three meters away so if we look at photo pills now you can see that even at f11 if I focus on the trees there it's only going to bring it back to maybe about four meters away so maybe something like here and this is just going to be a little bit blurred so what I'm going to do is I'm going to focus on these grasses here and I'm going to focus on the trees in the background and it's going to look amazing and it's getting a little bit harsher light now but it's still pretty cool let's give it a go right time for an apple not in a video anyway ah this is great isn't it just take it in sometimes oh found a lovely little scene here with these silver birches and then it's just a little bit of leaves they're just catching the backlit um light or they're backlit by the light and I've got a little bit of the ground here and some of the grass is catching the light as well the key thing here with exposure is just thinking about the leaves and not losing the detail in the leaves because they won't show so much on the histogram because they're only a small part of the image so if you just look at the histogram here you can see that I am just exposing a little bit to the left this time so I'm not pushing it all the way to the right but yeah it's a lovely little woodland scene this and um I didn't expect to get this what a bonus there's the apple that helped oh dear right and that's it I can't wait to get back and look at these photos they're gonna be good what a beautiful morning that was I hope you liked it I hope you like the photos and I hope it was really useful for me to share in a little bit more depth my settings especially around focus and exposure because often it's difficult to get that right and I get a lot of questions about it if you've got any more questions then just ask them in the comments below and I'll try and get down into them and answer as many as I can I got a couple of things to to say um this week first of all thanks to everybody who has entered world landscape photography competition we've had loads of entries um but we still want more because we want to raise as much money as we can for Ukraine there's some amazing prizes as you can see and I also wanted to thank Squarespace who this week's sponsor for allowing me to set up the world landscape photographer website using Squarespace it's allowed me to build this competition using Squarespace and for people to be able to make those payments through Squarespace as simply as possible which helps me in my time if you're looking to set up a website or a domain then head over to squarespace.com forward slash Nigel for 10% off and if you're looking to enter the world landscape photography competition then there's a link in the description as well it's £10 for five entries and yeah as I said the prizes are amazing there's a Nikon camera some tripod bags all sorts of things which are really really cool and I've also got something that I really want to go through that's going to happen next week in my life which is really important and before I do that I just wanted to say that today's the last day of orders for seascapes for pre-orders of seascapes I mean and if you want to get a pre-order in and a pre-order means that you get the shipping at last year's rates because it's going to go up after today and I've kept it at last year's rates which means it's a loss for me but a gain for you so if you want to do that then you can order a pre-order in the link in the description below you also get your name in the book and that's why I have to have a cut off because obviously I've got to print those last pages so thanks for everyone that's ordered so far but if you want to get one then there's a link in the description below okay on to the final bit which is I've got my back operation on Wednesday this week and yeah it's Wednesday the 20th and this has been a long time coming as some of you know I've got real problems with my back I can't sit for very long I can't stand up for very long and yeah I really struggle I'm in a lot of pain most of the time and it's about time that I try to get it fixed they think it's something to do with some cysts in my back there is probably three or four cysts in my back that are the size of my thumb on my nerves so I've got to have an operation it's a fairly simple operation I'm in the operating theatre for about two to three hours I think and I'm having it in London next Wednesday and I think I'm going to be in hospital for about seven days I have recorded a video for next Sunday and the Sunday after so don't worry you're still going to get videos but if I don't recover in time to record any other videos there might be a gap so I might be out for a month I might be out for two months you might not see me for a while after those two videos I just wanted to say thanks for watching and thanks for all your support it really means a lot to me that you watch my videos and I really hope I can get this back sorted as quickly as possible so that I can get back to hiking hills and carrying bags and just doing the videos that I love to do most okay that's it I'll keep you updated on Instagram probably on my operation so if you are interested then make sure you follow me on Instagram thanks ever so much for watching until next Sunday bye