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One Hour Photo - Rocco Ancora

Lesson 117 from: Fundamentals of Photography 2016

John Greengo

One Hour Photo - Rocco Ancora

Lesson 117 from: Fundamentals of Photography 2016

John Greengo

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Lesson Info

117. One Hour Photo - Rocco Ancora

Lessons

Class Trailer
1

Class Introduction

17:26
2

Welcome to Photography

13:08
3

Camera Types Overview

02:00
4

Viewing Systems

28:43
5

Viewing Systems Q&A

08:45
6

Lens Systems

32:06
7

Shutter Systems

13:17
8

Shutter Speeds

10:47
9

Choosing a Shutter Speed

31:30
10

Shutter Speeds for Handholding

08:36
11

Shutter Speed Pop Quiz

09:06
12

Camera Settings

25:35
13

General Camera Q&A

14:38
14

Sensor Sizes: The Basics

15:33
15

Sensor Sizes: Compared

19:10
16

Pixels

20:13
17

ISO

21:13
18

Sensor Q&A

13:34
19

Focal Length: Overview

11:09
20

Focal Length: Angle of View

15:09
21

Wide Angle Lenses

08:48
22

Telephoto Lenses

25:23
23

Angle of View Q&A

09:29
24

Fish Eye Lenses

10:39
25

Tilt & Shift Lenses

23:42
26

Subject Zone

17:19
27

Lens Speed

09:56
28

Aperture Basics

08:46
29

Depth of Field

21:49
30

Aperture Pop Quiz

13:23
31

Lens Quality

18:30
32

Photo Equipment Life Cycle

03:57
33

Light Meter Basics

09:25
34

Histogram

15:25
35

Histogram Pop Quiz and Q&A

10:58
36

Dynamic Range

06:03
37

Exposure Modes

15:58
38

Manual Exposure

09:38
39

Sunny 16 Rule

05:54
40

Exposure Bracketing

10:18
41

Exposure Values

27:21
42

Exposure Pop Quiz

26:43
43

Focus Overview

16:15
44

Focusing Systems

05:15
45

Autofocus Controls

11:56
46

Focus Points

07:35
47

Autofocusing on Subjects

20:19
48

Manual Focus

07:52
49

Digital Focusing Assistance

03:40
50

Focus Options: DSLR and Mirrorless

04:58
51

Shutter Speeds for Sharpness and DoF

05:20
52

Depth of Field Pop Quiz

12:14
53

Depth of Field Camera Features

04:54
54

Lens Sharpness

09:58
55

Camera Movement

05:20
56

Handheld and Tripod Focusing

04:32
57

Advanced Techniques

07:12
58

Hyperfocal Distance

06:50
59

Hyperfocal Quiz and Focusing Formula

04:36
60

Micro adjust and AF Fine Tune

05:34
61

Focus Stacking and Post Sharpening

06:00
62

Focus Problem Pop Quiz

18:07
63

The Gadget Bag: Camera Accessories

25:30
64

The Gadget Bag: Lens Accessories

12:46
65

The Gadget Bag: Neutral Density Filter

20:43
66

The Gadget Bag: Lens Hood and Teleconverters

08:55
67

The Gadget Bag: Lens Adapters

05:43
68

The Gadget Bag: Lens Cleaning Supplies

04:34
69

The Gadget Bag: Macro Lenses and Accessories

15:57
70

The Gadget Bag: Flash and Lighting

05:08
71

The Gadget Bag: Tripods and Accessories

18:50
72

The Gadget Bag: Custom Cases

11:20
73

10 Thoughts on Being a Photographer

07:37
74

Direct Sunlight

25:04
75

Indirect Sunlight

18:49
76

Sunrise and Sunset

18:39
77

Cloud Light

14:48
78

Golden Hour

09:50
79

Light Pop Quiz

07:53
80

Light Management

14:00
81

Artificial Light

13:56
82

Speedlights

16:02
83

Off-Camera Flash

27:38
84

Advanced Flash Techniques

09:49
85

Editing Overview

08:24
86

Editing Set-up

08:06
87

Importing Images

16:45
88

Best Use of Files and Folders

20:54
89

Culling

20:56
90

Develop: Fixing in Lightroom

18:13
91

Develop: Treating Your Images

10:53
92

Develop: Optimizing in Lightroom

14:51
93

Art of Editing Q&A

06:01
94

Composition Overview

06:53
95

Photographic Intrusions

10:10
96

Mystery and Working the Scene

16:18
97

Point of View

09:11
98

Better Backgrounds

16:02
99

Unique Perspective

11:02
100

Angle of View

15:06
101

Subject Placement

41:14
102

Subject Placement Q&A

05:18
103

Panorama

07:39
104

Multishot Techniques

13:57
105

Timelapse

16:13
106

Human Vision vs The Camera

20:07
107

Visual Perception

08:35
108

Visual Balance Test

22:56
109

Visual Drama

12:25
110

Elements of Design

28:57
111

The Photographic Process

12:28
112

Working the Shot

27:38
113

The Moment

04:42
114

One Hour Photo - Colby Brown

1:04:32
115

One Hour Photo - John Keatley

1:03:05
116

One Hour Photo - Art Wolfe

59:01
117

One Hour Photo - Rocco Ancora

1:01:20
118

One Hour Photo - Mike Hagen

1:01:20
119

One Hour Photo - Lisa Carney

1:00:52
120

One Hour Photo - Ian Shive

1:08:00
121

One Hour Photo - Sandra Coan

1:10:29
122

One Hour Photo - Daniel Gregory

1:06:07
123

One Hour Photo - Scott Robert Lim

1:05:41

Lesson Info

One Hour Photo - Rocco Ancora

Hello, welcome everybody to another episode of One Hour Photo. We have a great hour in store for you. I'm gonna start off with some of your questions. We'll go through and see if I can help you figure out some of your photographic needs. Secondly, we have a great, great guest in the studio today, Rocco Ancora, who is a fantastic wedding photographer from Australia, brought some photos along as well so we're gonna talk for a little bit and see what we can pull out of his photographic brain and then finally we're gonna look at some of your photos in our image critique section and we're gonna be seeing what we like, what we don't like, what might make your photos a little bit better so let's go ahead and get started. We're gonna be starting with your questions. Now if you do wanna ask these questions we are pulling these questions from our Facebook group and so you can go to Facebook, look up CreativeLive: Creative Photography Challenge Group and people are posting photos and they're chat...

ting with each other but feel free to go ahead and just ask a question, hey John, and then ask a question in there and I'm gonna go through there on a regular basis and pull out ones that I think you aren't the only person asking that question on. So let's go ahead and get started with our first question which is from Milos Otic. In a culture where the clients turn-around time and patience to compose and produce is diminishing, where do you see the future heading with camera equipment? Obviously what comes to mind is the changing business structure but when it comes to the camera equipment itself pretty much every camera now over the last two years now has Wi-Fi in it so that you can transfer images from your phone, from your camera to your phone instantly and so I see that just being done more and more easily. I remember about 10 years ago Nikon introduced their first Wi-Fi camera and a local Nikon tech rep came out to show a bunch of us what it could do and they couldn't even get it to work because it was so complicated and in my mind they still have some ways to go to make things even easier and faster. I think Nikon is trying really hard. They have this new thing called SnapBridge where it automatically transfers to the phone and its got a few bugs in it, isn't totally working smooth, but the idea is that you'll be able to pull photos from your phone or your laptop or any other device just as immediately as you need them so I think we're gonna see more and more of this and I think you'll be able to set up your camera so that you can shoot, just indicate a photo is to go up to your phone and up to your website or any place that you want very quickly and so more integration and hopefully it's gonna be easier for all of us to do this as well. Alright, next question. What's the best way to compress a close object and a distant background into one image, wide depth of field, example, a person standing in Battery Park next to the statue of liberty a mile away. Alright, so this one's a little bit difficult 'cause I'm not totally sure where you're going with this but I think know and the problem here is that you need a wide angle lens in most cases to capture the person who's right there in front of you and if you wanna see what's in back of them, if you use a wide angle lens it's gonna be very, very far away and so ideally when you're talking about compressing a subject, you're gonna need a telephoto lens and you're gonna need to get back further and so if you're shooting something with a phone that doesn't have a zoom lens for instance, it's just a wide angle lens, well, you can try to frame it up the best you can and it kind of looks like a typical selfie with a person standing in front of a small background but if you want that background to be bigger and more noticeable, you're gonna need a telephoto lens and so for a full frame camera at least or maybe a 200 millimeter lens and then you're gonna need to back up in order to compress it. It's kind of a separate thing getting it in focus and that's gonna be stopping your aperture down of course but to compress them together you need that telephoto lens. Thanks, Chris. Alright, next up from Kristina Trowbridge. Is there now or will there soon be any smaller and lighter equipment almost as good as my big DSLR, Nikon D800, and the three Nikkor dream lenses that go with it? So when you say the three Nikkor dream lenses I imagine you're talking about what we often call the holy trinity of glasses which is also known in Japan as I think the big dragons of glass, so the three two-way zooms, the 14 and 24, 24 to 70, and 70 to 200. Now the lynch pin of your whole question comes down to where is it, almost as good, and it really depends on what your definition of almost as good is because there are some people who if it's just a little bit off they don't want it. They actually want the exact same quality and the D800 has a full frame sensor and so you're not gonna get anything as good that has anything less than a full frame sensor at least at this point. I'm a pretty big fan of Fuji and I think like a Fuji X-T2 with their 2.8 lenses is gonna be a smaller package and it's gonna be very good and is in my opinion almost as good. I think Sony is also making some really good things that have smaller lenses but they don't have quite as many of those two-way lenses so I think the best system to go with would be the Fuji system if you wanted something on the next smaller size and as far as is it almost as good? Well you're gonna have to test it yourself to see how it meets your needs but I think it's getting very, very close to that. Next question from Mario Gabriel. How do I know when to clean my sensor? Would it be safer to leave it to a professional or can I do it myself without hurting anything? Well, keeping your sensor clean is very important for everybody who shoots digital and when dust gets on your sensor you will know it because there's gonna be little black spots often times in the sky where you have white areas in a photograph and so you can check this yourself. The easiest way that I can do it is put your camera in aperture priority, set your exposure compensation to about plus one or plus two, and then photograph a pure white wall or a blank piece of paper and you can be really close, it can be out of focus, in fact, it actually helps for it to be out of focus. That way, anything that is a sharp black spot is gonna be very, very clear to you and this something I like to do before I go on like a big trip to Africa or something because getting your camera cleaned on location is really, really challenging and so to clean it yourself there's maybe three different steps that you can take. One is you can get a little rocket air blower and it's a little rubber bulb that you squeeze and it blows air on to your sensor and so put your camera in the sensor cleaning mode if it's an SLR, if it's a mirrorless you can just take the lens or body cap off, hold it upside down so that any dust you hit falls out and then you kind of just blow in there hopefully knocking off the dust. Everyone is qualified to do that in my mind. The tip of the blower doesn't need to come that close to the sensor, you can keep it two, three inches away, just right outside where the lens would be and that's safe and easy to do. Second step would be a dry cleaning and third step would be a wet cleaning and so there are devices that you can get. It kind of looks like a pin but it's got a flat little, kind of like felt on the end and you can reach in there and you can kinda sweep off any dust that is on there and I think anybody who's reasonably careful can handle that. Then there is the wet cleaning where you get a swab and you put a couple drops of alcohol on there and you swipe it across and I think anyone who has a steady hand that feels comfortable working with small equipment can probably do that but there's some people who just don't wanna go into the steps of actually sweeping it clean and that's why you can send it in and that's basically what the professional will do so it's a little bit up to you but I think the air bulb is a good first step and I think the little dry cleaning pens might be a good step for a lot of other people as well. Next up, this is from David Good John. Not sure if your name is Good John or you were sending me a compliment, that I was good at what I was doing and your name is simply David but I'll assume it's David Good John. I have gone to a MIV from a 60D and now my mind is messed up about lens length going from a crop sensor to a full frame. How do I make the adjustments, if any? Alright, I'm be honest with you, I'm not totally sure what you mean by MIV. I'm thinking you mean a mirrorless camera with a smaller sensor. It's possible that you could mean like a Mark IV Canon Camera which is a full frame which is different than your 60D and so if you saw my class on the fundamentals of photography, you probably remember this slide that had the different cameras and the different sensor sizes and I think the names that we have for our sensor sizes like APS and full frame and four thirds just doesn't make things easy on new photographers because they don't mean a lot and if you measure the sensor from corner to corner you're gonna get the diagonal and when you do that you actually get the number that is the normal lens for your camera so your old 60D was a Canon APS-C sensor which means it has a 27 millimeter sensor. The normal lens for you is a and that's all you need to remember is 27 is middle of the road for you. Anything smaller than that is wide angle. Anything with a bigger number is a telephoto and if you take your sensor size and you divide it by two, that's gonna make for a pretty nice landscape wide angle lens. If you have a full frame camera that's a 43 millimeter sensor. Divide that by two, that's about a 21 millimeter lens. That's pretty right in the middle of where a lot of landscape photographers like shooting with a wide angle lens. You wanna find a great portrait lens, double the diagonal of your sensor. With a full frame, 43, that comes up to 86. One of the favorites for most portrait photographers is gonna be about an 85 millimeter lens. If you are using a four thirds camera which is a 22 millimeter sensor, you wanna get about a 25 millimeter lens for doing portrait photography. Multiply that by four it ends up being a good sports lens and if you wanna multiply it by eight, that's probably gonna make a good wildlife lens and so whatever system that you have, if you can just figure out what your normal lens is, just remember that's in the middle of the game and everything smaller's gonna be wide angle and everything bigger is gonna be a telephoto lens. Next one is from Todd Hobert. I'm using TTL on a Nikon. He's talking about a flash system here. I'm taking a picture of the same subject on the same background but the exposure is wandering. Any ideas of why this is happening? I flipped to manual by the way. Using a flash on your camera in its TTL which stands for through the lens technology, it's metering system, it should be consistent so if you are frustrated by this I can understand it because in theory it should be the same but your camera is constantly adjusting the light meter reading and the flash output according to exactly what you point in the frame so if it's a little bit darker on one side and a little bit lighter on the other side the flash is gonna change its power and so anybody who shoots a series of photos with flash in a relatively controlled environment is probably gonna wanna turn their flash on to a manual setting so that you have consistent results. You'll shoot a few tests to make sure that you're one the right page and then once you get that dialed in then you're set for life. The TTL system, I think, is fantastic when you're in a banquet hall doing event photography and every lighting situation is different. There's more lights here, less over here, there's windows over here and you need the camera to constantly adjust for all your changes and so in that environment I would prefer to take the camera out of TTL. Even if I think it may do okay for consistency reasons, and this is true with almost everything in manual, when you have a number of photos that you're gonna take over a period of time it's best to rule out any sort of change that the camera might wanna go in there and make for you but I really don't have a good reason as to why it does that. It happens on a lot of other system, it's not just a fault with the Nikon system, it's that the cameras are just constantly looking for new information to have a different exposure. Alright, next up from Lucia Ccv, Hi John, I just tried to set up the camera for a night sky photo and still can't do it. I have a Nikon D5100 and a lens 20 millimeter F 1.8 to work with. I think my problem is the shutter speed. Okay, so you got a decent camera to do this with So I think you're doing okay in the camera department. Your lens is fantastic. That is a great lens for doing night time especially if you want like star point photography. It's great to have a lens that gets down to 2.8. Yours goes all the way down to 1. so you're in good shape there. You can open it all the way to 1. or maybe you wanna stop it down just a little bit for greater sharpness especially around the edges. Maybe you just go to F2, or maybe you gotta go down to 2.4 or 2. and so shutter speed is a critical thing when doing night sky photography and so with a 20 millimeter lens there is a rule of, and I think there's two different rules depending on how strict you wanna get on it, there's the 500 rule and the 600 rule and I'm trying to remember if you divide, you take that 500 number, you divide 20 into it and then you'll get the total length of time in seconds that you can keep your shutter open before you start seeing lens movement or before you see star movement, excuse me. Right now, from what I recall, shooting with a 24 millimeter lens, I can safely shoot 15 second exposures, 30 seconds can or can not be acceptable, depends on the exact situation. I think what you wanna do is you wanna get your shutter speed in the 15 to 30 second range, your lens at F 1.8 to 2.8, your ISO is probably gonna have to be in the ISO 1600 to 3200 range depending on some of those variables. Play with some of those numbers. It will depend on how clear the sky is but that should get you pretty close to the mark. Alright, next one from James Smith. Do UV filters negatively impact image quality? Are they a waste of money in today's digital market world? Well, first off, do they negatively impact image quality? Well, I certainly can't say that they help. UV lenses at one point were filtering out UV light and that's not really that important with today's digital sensors and so UV filters are often just on the front of the camera for protection and this is a personal choice. It's kind of like buying insurance for the front of your lens. It is helpful on some lenses for helping protect from the weather elements, some lenses are more weather sealed once you put a filter on them and so some people do it. If you were shooting say Motocross and you got dirt kicking around and you know a chip on your lens is gonna cost you a lot of money and camera repairs are very expensive these days, that would be a great thing to have. There are some people who maybe work under a more controlled environment. They're in a studio, they're not going outside, it's all very controlled and they don't wanna have any other piece of glass on the front of their lens and so that makes perfect sense and so they're not a waste of money, it just depends on how you wanna use them and I am totally not talking about all the other filters that actually do something significant like polarizers and split neutral density filters and a variety of other filters out there that are actually changing the way the light is entering your camera and so it's a hot topic and so at your next photo gathering grab a group of people and start talking about whether they use UV filters and you'll see some people become very animated and steadfast about their belief and the way that they do things is correct and so a little bit of an opinion on that one as well. Alright, from Pedro Pereira. How do you know the type of lens you need for a specific shoot? Is there any way to know which focal length to use according to the subject distance and or size? Well a lot of this is gonna depend on what you were shooting and what the environment is. This is about getting as much information about what you're gonna be doing and where you're gonna be going and so if you're gonna be photographing someone's car is it stuck in their crowded garage? You gonna have a nice field to shoot it at? Is it gonna be in a parking lot? Is there other cars in the parking lot and so it's knowing as much about the situation as possible and so the more room you have the more opportunities you have for using a variety of lenses and so it's just knowing also what type of story you're trying to tell and this really can cover a lot of different types of photography here and so with wider lenses we're usually telling a bigger story. Lot of times we'll use them for environmental portraits where we show a person or an object in its natural environment. If you're using telephoto lenses you're going in more for details and isolating a subject and so you've gotta know more about what you're doing and what you're getting into and so if somebody's hiring you or you're being sent some place to shoot something you wanna try to ask as many questions, what type of room is it, what type of lighting is it, how long is that room and then you're gonna be thinking about what you need in order to get that shot. Thanks for that question. Alright, from Brad Chymist. What is involved in advanced composition? The rule of thirds, golden ratio, and Fibonacci spiral are great but they only go so far. Alright, well actually I just taught a composition class this last weekend and it's kind of hard to define what advanced composition is. For me it would probably involve a fairly complex photograph where there's a number of subjects and a number of relationships going on. If you can imagine a ball in the middle of the frame and there's just a white background, there is really no way to take that one simple object and do some sort of advanced composition with it. If you were to include three or four other objects and they kind of have leading lines, one leading to the other or something, I suppose that could be advanced but I think a lot of this is just, comes down to what we think looks good and some basic rules about not cropping off important subjects and so I'm always keen to find new ideas in the world of composition because there's a lot of basic ideas like the rule of thirds and the golden ratio and that does only take you so far and if you're not familiar with those it basically is talking about getting the subject out of the middle of the frame and where things get advanced and more complicated is when you have a number of subjects in the frame and so that's something I'll have to look at for the next issue of my fundamentals class to see if I have a section on advanced composition and for the most part the composition classes are really, I think they're fun, they're easy to teach, they're easy to watch because it's mostly just ideas and as many ideas as you can come up with as to hey, this makes a good element in a photograph. Alright, so yeah, that's a tough one to answer but thank you for sending that in. Alright so if you wanna ask your questions, once again you can do that at the Facebook CreativeLive: Creative Photography Challenge Group. I'm also checking my own Facebook site which is John Greengo Photography and feel free to post your questions there. I'll jump on there about once a month, scour around and figure out what looks good and we should share with everybody else. Thanks a lot for sending those questions in. Keep sending them in 'cause I have more of these that I would like to answer in the future. Alright, it is time to bring on board our guest. Rocco Ancora is a photographer from Australia. He has won more prizes than you could shake a stick at. Rocco, come on out. Thanks a lot for joining us here. Great to have you here. Thank you John, thanks for having me. Sit down, you brought some photos along. Yes I did, yes. And so you are in the midst of getting ready for a new class here at CreativeLive and which class is this? This is From Capture to Print. And so talk real briefly about what you're gonna be doing in this one. One of the biggest dilemma today for a lot of photographers is understanding the relationship between what we capture and what we print. Printing is pretty much something that's forgotten and in the film days we had no choice because negatives had to be printed but the lasting quality of a print was something that we cherished and we still cherish today. That culture has kind of disappeared so we're trying to bring it back by taking the process, from capture to print, understanding the camera, understanding the post-production aspect of a file, and then printing it and the envelope that pretty much covers all of that is a thing that most photographers hate but it's one of those topics that you need to learn if you're serious about your digital photography and that's color management. That's something that just scared off half the audience right there. (laughing) We're gonna make it simple, real simple. That's good, yeah, 'cause it is something that not a lot of people are doing and it's something, for anyone who's into this as a business, can really separate you from somebody else who says well, I'll just give you a thumb drive. Absolutely, yeah. Now you've been a photographer for a long time. You've got some history in printing. Talk a little bit about that. When did you start printing and how did you do that? My career actually began in the dark room and I was running a lab back in the mid 90's. Black and whites, color, C41 processing, E6, I got to learn what to do with negatives and from that I actually became a photographer, learning the printing side before the actual photography side but it had sort of helped my photography because I knew how much meat I needed on a negative to get a really good print. So you started on the backend. I did start on the backend. That's interesting, how did you first get into that printing gig without being a photographer? Well photography was something I loved and I wanted originally a job as a photographer, as a photographer's assistant, but there was a lab slash very, very busy portrait wedding studio in Melbourne back in the day and they were after, and they had their own C41 lab and black and white and all that, and they were running, they were looking for someone to work in that lab. I thought well, if I do this then it's a foot for me in the door to perhaps become a photographer and it was because I started learning the art of printing back then and then from then I actually got my first photographic gig as an assistant for that studio. I then became their number six photographer and then worked my way up the ranks and actually ended up owning the studio and the lab that I started working for which is kind of a romance story. Talk about climbing the ladder. Number six on the list and so this is a company that specializes in shooting weddings. Weddings and portraits, yeah. Okay, and then they have a bunch of photographers that are accredited or they checked out and so forth and how long did it take you to go from your first assistant to you're the main shooter. Years, years, because put it this way, by the time I went out and shot my first wedding I felt like I'd been to a wedding a million times and I had as an assistant which was a good thing but the problem is with what's happening today is that we buy a camera today and we wanna be a professional photographer tomorrow but nothing really substitutes that very important thing called time, time and experience, to be able to gauge different conditions and with weddings there's so many things that can happen in a millisecond. You've got rain, you've got wind, you've got people personality that you have to manage and yeah, these were the things I learned before I actually went out and shot my first frame for myself and for the studio. Now if you rose ultimately to the level of owning the business, now a lot of people could go in the direction of well I'm gonna stop shooting, I'm just gonna do the business stuff. Did you stay shooting then and how did you manage that? I did, I stayed shooting and we had, there was two partners, myself and another guy, and we employed another four photographers. Just to give you an idea of the volume of work we used to do, we used to shoot roughly around 300 weddings a year. Wow. So you would have a whole series of them every weekend coming up. We would, we would probably shoot maybe six weddings a week and it's funny because when you speak to a lot of photographers a day they probably shoot 20 weddings a year which is probably an average. We used to do six a week and about 20 a month. It was pretty amazing. That sort of volume was very hard to manage but we had really good photographers, photographers that really cared about the art of photography and wanted to produce beautiful results and that kind of made it easy but the business side wasn't easy. Managing that was a bit of a nightmare but yeah, it's an essential skill. So now you're running your own personal business. Do you have any photographers under you? No, I let that business go so my partner then took it over and I concentrated more on being a one on one, more of a boutique-y style business. I kind of needed that just to slow my life down a little bit but at the same time now I've also started a post-production and fine art printing company which is what I love. We deal with post-production for a lot of photographers, we do their fine art printing, we do their competition printing which is really cool and that keeps me in touch with that part of the technology which is changing but it's getting better all the time. Are you printing all digital? Are you doing any kind with chemicals any more? We're printing, no more chemicals, no more ferricyanide, and the like, no. We're printing all digitally and we're printing on big Epson printers and we're printing archival so we specialize in archival printing, so if any we do is on beautiful cotton rag papers and yeah, it's a lot of fun. So I got started a long time ago and I was developing in the dark room and stuff and I printed digitally and to be honest with you I really haven't kept up with the differences. How archival are the new digital prints compared to the traditional archival chemistry prints? I think they're pretty much on par if not better but it all depends, when we start talking archival we start to talk about there are a couple of different elements that need to come together for it to be archival. One of the biggest ones is of course the paper, making sure that the paper is a natural cotton fiber, that it doesn't have any optical brightening agents and the likes, then you have to marry that up with archival inks like the Epson K3 pigment inks. A lot of people think dye inks are archival but dye inks aren't. You gotta get it from pigment inks and then of course after that is the way you store the print. Obviously any print that you're gonna put in full sunlight isn't gonna last 10 minutes but behind glass and framing it and taking care of your prints you're gonna get over 200 years with the right combination which is great. When we talk about archival also and we talk about these magic numbers of 200 years, 150 years, it doesn't mean that after 200 years your print disappears. It just means that after 200 years there's gonna be some sort of noticeable visual difference that the print is degrading but if you're selling your artwork that is something that's important to you because no one wants to buy or invest in art that's gonna fade after 10 minutes. And these prints, they fade in a way that you don't notice it from week to week but you could have someone come over to your house like wow, that photo's got a little faded there after a year or so. You still shoot weddings. Absolutely, yeah. How many weddings a year do you shoot? Now, probably about 10 to 15. More manageable number. Manageable number and so I'm very selective about what I shoot but most of my time now goes into the post-production and finite printing side of business which is great. I love to be able to consult with photographers, especially photographers that are doing exhibitions and bring their vision to life on massive 60 by 40 inch fine art prints and that's a real buzz for me. I love doing that. So 60 by 40 inch prints. There's some serious printing. Unless you know how you shoot and understand your fundamentals of photography to print a 60 by 40 inch print it takes some real skill because any flaws you will see. Any flaws in lighting, any flaws in focusing. That's all part of it. Okay, so I've worked with other photographers who print large and one of the things, you don't wanna waste a lot of paper and so you wanna get everything shot right, you wanna get it fixed in Photoshop or whatever program you're using. You wanna make sure all your monitors are set. After all of that, you still sometimes have to print multiple prints don't you? Or do you get it right on the first try? Color management, it comes down to color management and getting to the point where what we see on the screen is what we print. Now we're using very, very high end wide gamma screens. The Eizo monitors, I'm sure you've heard of Eizo. Not a lot of people have because they're very expensive monitors but we do a thing called, we do obviously soft proof the image but we also do hardware soft proofing which means we monitor, our monitor is actually calibrated to a viewing condition so pretty much we can spot on ascertain what color that image is gonna be on that particular substrate. Custom profiling of papers is another very, very important thing so my printer is custom profiled for a specific paper, for a specific condition. What you see is what you're gonna get. Now plus or minus always. If I'm gonna a 60 by 40 inch print I will do a test first. I will print an eight by 10 to make sure the turns are where they need to be and then of course from there we go into hyperspace with a massive print. Nice, alright, well let's get to your images. Let's go ahead and take a look at what we got here and so what do you wanna say about this? Lovely image. Yes it is, this was shot in Japan. It was a kimono shoot that we did and this is a real husband and wife and I've always wanted to do a kimono shoot. This was shot on a 105 mil lens and I shot this wide open at 1.4. This is on a 105 mil. This is why you get that nice, beautiful boker in the background, it's just a gorgeous lens and it's a very, very sharp lens and when you look at Japanese wedding photography there is a certain element of tradition that you have to follow and you have to stick to and I wanted to kind of break that. I wanted to actually get a Japanese couple looking as romantic as they possibly could and this was wonderful and this beautiful touch by the man in the picture where he holds her hand and she's looking across and it gives you the sense of connection and the sense of romance and this sense of him worshiping her which is what the image is all about. Was this a portrait shoot that you were doing? This was a portrait shoot we did for them, yeah. This is available light too, also. That's great light. Now when you shoot something like this do you have a crew with you or is it just you? It was myself and my partner Tanya who comes with me, she's a photographer as well but I like to keep things very, very simple when I'm out on location. Available light is king for me. I pick the light, I pick the location and that's where I'll shoot and if things get a little bit worse for wear with light then very simple lighting even just with speed lights. I don't take a lot of equipment. I don't have a big crew. As a wedding photographer you wanna be as unobtrusive as possible. You wanna just sort of blend with the crowd. Any big equipment kind of gets in the way. Also allows you to be more mobile and go with the flow as you see changes and stuff. Now one of the really challenging things in this type of photography is these are not professional models I am assuming and so how do you deal with giving them direction versus posing them and move your hand here? I think when we start talking about posing, posing in the wedding world has become such a dirty word because photographers say I don't pose, I'm not a poser, and clients now, clients are very educated, I don't want you to pose me, I wanna be very, very natural. We take that word and we change it. We don't call it posing anymore. We call it the art of directing someone which is kind of the same, it is and it isn't. When we think about posing in the literal sense it's about telling someone to stand a particular way and shaping and moving you pretty much like a mannequin. When we start talking about direction it is about creating a scene first and foremost in their minds of what you're trying to capture because like in here exactly what I described earlier about the shot is the brief I gave the groom before he held her hand. I said I want you to hold her hand like she's the only thing in your world and she certainly was and I just want you to show me that and he did that. He walked up to her, he held her hand and that was it and that was pretty much the extent of the posing I do even on the wedding day. It's about creating scenarios in the mind that the body believes and if the body believes it the body shows it, in the mind, it's all connected but it's about making images look real as opposed to posed or structured. Look very natural in that regard. Alright, I love this image. This is just fantastic. I love clean, open space and so one of the concepts I like to ask people is when did you know you were gonna get this shot? Was this something you scouted well before it took place or is this like oh, I'm just scurrying downstairs and I happen to notice that there's an opening? Yes, what happened was this was shot at the groom's house, this is during the groom's preparation. In the morning when I walked in through that door, it was a beautiful house, absolutely gorgeous house, so I walked in through that front door and I saw light coming from above and I looked up and I saw that there actually was an opening to the master bedroom upstairs that looked down into the foyer of this beautiful house. White walls, very simple, very clean cut. We did the shoot as we would normally do. We did the family, we did everything else, and then the video guy wanted to construct a leaving shot for the bridal party. I went upstairs and I thought this is gonna be my opportunity because having that kind of scenario and having just a groom stare right back at the camera, it's kind of a nothing moment. You have great compositional lines but really the shot is just a shot, it's a record shot. I wanted to include the environment but make it dynamic and by making it dynamic we had this environment with the beautiful lines that you see coming into where the groomsmen are but they're actually literally all walking out and this wasn't posed by me or set up in any way, shape, or form. In that wall there just in the background there there's a videographer standing there with a video camera and he's directing them, telling them how to walk and I'm just shooting this from upstairs, I asked permission first, if it was okay to go up there and the mother of the groom was all very excited because anything for her son, of course, and that's what we did and I shot it with a 14 to 24 mil lens, 14 mil. The aperture was about 5.6 to give me a little bit more depth of field and sharpness which is what I wanted and that was the result but it was very, once again, available light. In Photoshop what we did was very little. We made the white walls even whiter and that's it. A bit of sharpening, a bit of color toning, but there's nothing added and we took a couple of the light switches out that were on the wall which were very annoying but there was nothing added. A lot of people think, oh, you created this in Photoshop, did you stitch it together? Single capture, nice and simple. It's about the art of observation I guess. And it's great that that's a sign for all of you at home, that's a sign of a great photographer, somebody who can just walk in, look up, and know up there looking back down is gonna make a good shot 'cause sometimes you gotta be there to see it yourself but when you see the possibility around you, say wait a minute and probably comes with experience too, you've been in places and you learn these sorts of things and this is another great image here and I have really, I've just realized this in the last couple of years, that I've really developed a love for staircases. It's a big three dimensional, it's got patterns, it's got lines, it's just a great place for getting photographs here so whereabouts is this? This is a place called Werribee Mansion and it's a wedding venue in Melbourne, Australia but it's also a very historical building. The couple usually that are getting married there will either have a ceremony just on that staircase but in this case here they had the ceremony outside 'cause it was in summer, it was a beautiful garden wedding and then we chose to go inside the mansion itself and they give you normally about 20 minutes in there and you're not allowed to use flash because it interrupts the paintings that are on the walls and you know, you heard the story but I wanted to get a shot where you got that feeling of the grandeur of this place that obviously they bought for their wedding and they wanted their wedding to be there but also that instance of scale between them and the grandeur of the place. The wide angle lens helped us to do that with a wider angle lens at 14 mil once again we're able to capture a lot of the environment but also giving us a lot of depth as well. The very shallow depth of field is not something that you wanna do with a shot like this, you wanna have sharpness in foreground, middle ground, to background to get all that beautiful detail. This is in print looks absolutely magical because you can see every little bit of detail on the wrought iron work on the staircase through the tile work on the ground right through to that back door and then the beautiful detail on the bride's dress but it's great, this shot now hangs in their home as a canvas and it's a 30 by 40 canvas beautifully framed and it's just absolutely gorgeous. Something different as a wedding picture I think. Oh yeah, now I've noticed your style's little different. We do have a lot of wide angles and this is really just taking advantage of the environment that you're working in. They're not getting married at the county commissioner. You do have these places and when you have them especially free from other people there you take advantage of them so that is great. Moving on, next one here. Alright, so this one a little, this one, this one, I was like are you sure you got me the right images here from the right collection? Yeah it is. Besides obviously shooting weddings I love obviously street photography as well but I love landscape photography and this, in a recent trip to Japan, we went down and saw Mount Fuji. The weather being quite gloomy and quite eerie. This situation presented itself and we have these birds on this tree. It reminded me of the Alfred Hitchcock movie The Birds with these birds just hanging and that's kind of the vibe I wanted to go for with this particular image. Once again, shot this with the and I shot this really wide open at 1. just to get the birds really, really sharp and we got this beautiful milkiness about the image right through to the background of Mount Fuji, the telephoto lens or the telephoto perspective of the 105 gave us a little bit of compression with the mountain and the trees and this beautiful just using blacks and turns of blacks and whites just to give us the contrast and to give us the mood and feel of what I was trying to convey in the image itself. Well it definitely has that Japanese aesthetic to it and kind of as we saw that one and well actually this one I had a kind of different question. I wanna talk about your treatment of photos because this is not straight raw image, this is not a straight jpeg image. You've developed a certain style and look to your photos. Talk about that. It is, so basically we shoot raw and we shoot the highest bit rate possible in raw which is, on the Nikon D5 it's 14 bit uncompressed giving you that beautiful turn of quality from shadows through to extreme highlights and when you think about the dynamic range of this shot, we've got sunlight kind of peering through the clouds making them extremely bright. The bride and groom is lit by a little bit of sun that's coming across and we can see that by the shadows and then of course in the distance you have trees which are virtually in shadows. What I like to do (mumbling) camera raw is I like to work with smart objects and we pull basically two exposures of the same file, one exposing for extreme highlights, one exposing for your extreme shadow areas and sometimes I'll do a third for mid turns and then I use a technique called luminosity masks where we blend the three. We have this extended dynamic range. Now it's on HDR because in the true sense of the word HDR means shooting multiple exposures and using other sort of nasty filters that give high leveling and all that but it's just about extending the dynamic range of what the camera actually captured just with one frame and it works a treat because we've got so much depth in this image you can look at, in information right through down to right to the back of that building, inside those arches. It's about losing yourself in the image once you see it and once you print an image like this and you print it quite large, you have a very different relationship with it than you would just by looking at that on the screen. I know you're blown away by this size here but once you see this in print it just takes you to a totally different place and it's about getting lost in it. It's about looking at the leading lines. Compositionally we have this tree. I'm actually standing on the tree with a 14 mil lens once again photographing the environment. These trees kind of act as leading lines where your eye really wants you to go. It's about just thinking about composition a little bit differently, not following any rules I might say, this is not your classic rule of third, it's not your classic, maybe it's a little bit of a golden spiral because if you round the spiral you'll find yourself finishing up roughly to around where the bride and groom is but sometimes it's just a notion or a gut feeling of what looks good. So one quick question 'cause my mind wanders on these things, was this the day of their wedding? Yeah, this was the day of the wedding. In fact, this is the same couple from the staircase, so that staircase is inside that building. You know why I'm asking that? Because that's like I assume you're dressed up quite nice and you're climbing a tree to get a photograph and so I'm looking at you in a tux standing on these branches photographing. Yeah, nice pants, nice shirt, vest. It was quite hilarious. You'll do anything for the shot. Anything for the shot but safety always comes first I guess. Now I notice you do have a lot of black and white. Beautiful black and white and I'm guessing that has to come from your printing days. You're pulling that, bringing that forward, and so is black and white still relevant? Is that just a Photoshop trick? It's not a Photoshop trick. Black and white does things. It does things because in an image once you take the color away, all you have is shades of white, gray, and black. Now what that means is that sometimes color information is distracting. If you take the color information away it gets you to the message and the core of what the image is about far quicker than you would with a color image and that's really what black and white photography is about and also I just love the feel and look and the richness of a black and white print and this had to be a black and white print. It couldn't be anything else, you know. I shot this, this was during a bridal shoot and it was a curved wall leading into a reception venue. I had my assistant just with a speed light on the other side of the wall just where the bride is just creating a nice, crisp shadow on that beautiful white wall and the ceiling was distracting so what we did is we darkened it right there and actually filled it with black because I just wanted the shot to have nothing more but blacks and whites, little mid turns and the only mid turns you'll see around the back of her and that beautiful curvature and the gradation of the wall but black and white for me is about, it's far more emotive sometimes than a color picture and I've always loved black and white. And it's so easy to do these days 'cause you just shoot in raw and you have color version, you got a black and white version, way you go. Same again, black and white. This was during an engagement shoot in Melbourne and I have a look in the city and this is a stairway at the back of an old school and it was great just to get a moment with the couple that wasn't once again cliche. Not even the pose is cliche. They're actually looking in opposite directions, opposite direction, holding hands. I kind of wanted to show they still connected but they have their own personality which is what we're trying to show with this shot here and we wanted to make it a little bit different, a little bit more graphic in content as far as just once again the blacks and the whites and the beautiful composition of lines that lead you to this couple on top of the staircase. I think it's a really nice framing. Your process, did you scout this out ahead of time or were you working with them and you kinda worked into this and found it at the time? I actually found it at the time. Yeah, we were shooting, just below there's a (mumbling) and we were doing some shots. Then we walked around and actually we were going back to the car and I saw this staircase sort of leading up at the back of the old school and I go well, it's open. There was a gate down below which wasn't locked. That immediately says inviting and no security issues so we climbed up there and I shot this section with a 7200. A 200 mil because I wanted that compression, that cityscape is actually quite far away and I'm really far away from them so at fully a 200, I think the aperture on this would have been something around a fourish, something like that just to get a little bit of that city, not quite so sharp because I wanted to make them the center of the shot by being sharp, by being you know. Well their silhouettes stand out so easily it's a fun photo. Another one, another black and white. You picked all my black and whites. I'm assuming this is like a setup shot. This looks like it's a setup shot. Now do you have a studio that you work with? No, this was actually at the reception venue. How this shot happened is very, very simple. What you're seeing there is a frosted glass that was part of the getting ready room for the bride and groom, frosted glass, so I got the bride and groom to walk outside with the bridal party and rather than have drinks inside the room let's have drinks outside and I got my assistant on the other side of them, I'm shooting from inside the building with triggers of course, remote flash, so we fire the flash, it creates a shadow onto the glass and then really a double shadow because the light's reflecting back on to them and then spilling back on to the glass so we're getting these silhouettes that kind of have masks on them and it's quite interesting and the flowers were just inside, the flowers were placed there by the bridesmaids and the bride and I kind of left them there because I didn't want to alter that 'cause that's the reality part. That part was real and then this part of them, it's still real, them being outside but I set that up and I wanted the image to look quite different. Once again, a different bridal party shot just with a different perspective. But it's beautiful to have something that's so unique and different than your regular shots and that's just creative thinking and coming up with something great. Well thank you very much for sharing those and I think we're gonna bring up a little page here. If you're interested in Rocco's other classes, you have one already on the books called Capturing the Story. Give us the brief 30 seconds on that class. Capturing the Story, I'm presenting alongside another Australian, great photographer and WPPI Grand Master, that's Ryan Schembri and we take you through the process of capturing the story on a wedding day. We look at one of the most important aspects of photography which is light and how we work with light very quickly and very easily on location on the standing that light really is the key to emotion and when you're talking about wedding photography we do wanna create some pretty dynamic and emotive images. We take you through the process of a wedding post-production scenario and we deal with a lot of images in the least amount of time and client relations, how we deal with clients, how we talk to clients, how we get emotion out of people on the wedding day. That is that one and then of course From Capture to Print which we take you through the process from capture through to final print as I said earlier. That's gonna be fun. So if you don't mind sticking around for about 10 or 15 minutes we're gonna take a look at some of the viewers photos and I'm gonna pull this open in Lightroom and we'll work with this in kind of the develop module so that we can make any changes if we feel like we want to right away and so from Harry Bandari, got some tulips here and we've got great tulip fields just north of Seattle that are gonna be blooming here in the next couple of weeks. I'll probably be taking my annual trip up there for one of those trips and so I'm guessing we're looking at a longer telephoto lens, some shallow depth of field, and we've got fantastic color. You've got this repeating pattern of the flower that is just kind of a gimme for great shots. I guess I would like to see a more definitive one flower that you're going for like if you look a little bit behind where the point of focus is there's one flower that's up a little bit higher than the others. Maybe focusing on that one because it's standing out just a little bit more. What do you think, Rocco? Absolutely, I think the idea is there and the execution is very, very good. We just have to make sure, like John said, we have a point of interest. Now also if you notice the foreground there is a chill up there which is really, really standing out. That's kind of screaming to the viewer saying I wanna be the center of attention but I'm out of focus and that's kind of conflicting in your mind so pick something that is gonna be the hero of the shot and then everything else needs to support that. So let me move my cursor. So you think about this one right here? Yeah, that one there, that's the first thing I saw. And so yeah, that one is really the only one that you can see in its entirety and so that would be very interesting to see that. Put that in focus and then this left side with this kind of road there is bothering me just a little bit, I think if we just brought that in a little bit there and if we had that other one in focus, that might be a really interesting shot. That would absolutely make a huge difference but it's about, cropping's so important because it's about accentuating the impact that you wanna portray in the image. Good advice. Alright, next up, and whoops, we jumped one there. Okay, this is from Mojoman44 and I'm gonna be honest. I don't think this is a very good shot. I include it because a couple of reasons. I could see myself taking this photo when I was getting started in photography. Little side note here, I used to break dance and so I love break dancing, I know they call it b-boying, I still can't call it break dancing and so I love watching this, I love watching the guys, huge admiration for them and I know if I started taking photos, I was just happy to have something on film. I was just happy to have it there on film but on this, I wanna see his face, I wanna see a better pose. You know that something interesting's going on. For me here it's about context and it's about the environment and it's about the position that he's in and it's about the story of what he's doing. At the moment I feel that the crop is a little bit tight. We're cutting off shoes, we're cutting off hands. The people in the background are distracting probably because of the choice of the way the image is lit. The light is originating overly from where the camera is. The camera appliance or maybe flash on camera, it's illuminating the subject in the foreground but it's also illuminating the background. Now taking your flash off camera, maybe putting it at 45 degrees creating some really beautiful dynamic light on to that dance floor, step right back and put a little bit more of the environment and you would have had a very, very different picture of the same scenario. Yeah, that's a hard situation 'cause there's very dark places like the dance floor on a wedding and so it's a challenging environment and so you've got the focus, you've got the exposure which are the technical things you need to worry about and now timing of it and the background and the lighting. Timing is everything in this sort of stuff. But it's a good place to go. Thanks for sending it in, keep trying, keep putting it out there. Photography is something that we can all get better at. Alright, next up little bit of a landscape shot here. Some lightning and I've had some great history in shooting lightning, it's a lot of fun, very exciting. (laughing) You gotta be safe. I love the fact that they've got that little guardhouse, you probably know more about that in Australia than I do. The colors are kind of interesting in this and I'm not sure all of what's going on but it's difficult to get, they almost have sunlight and lightning at the same time. Yeah, I think that the shot is interesting and I'm actually enjoying the color palette. The color palette they've chosen is quite beautiful. You've got the yellows and the cyans coming through and the greens and everything becomes very much complimentary which is really, really nice. Now we've gotta remember, though, in a picture any time you present it to someone to view it, the human eye is attracted by two very important things. One of them is brightness and number two is contrast and when I look at this picture my eye goes to the brightest part of the picture which is that beautiful sunlight in the background. That really needs to come down in value a lot more to make I believe the hero of the shot or the cookie if you like is that little guardhouse and those little row of white, what are they, little white? Yeah, that's a fence maybe, perhaps. Look like they might be painted rocks. In the foreground acting as a compositional element taking you to the sunset. The sunset, if that's toned down, then you start to scout again to the brightest point which will take you back through the horizon line back to the guardhouse and that is the only thing I feel this image needs and maybe a little bit of darkening at the top because as your eyes moves up to the lightening it's very interesting and it's very dynamic but we have a very, very bright spot at the top of the frame which kind of leads you out. You wanna sort of come back in by just a little bit of vignetting that off or just bringing it back to what the story is about. Very good, very good advice. Alright, so getting into sports photography. Do you shoot sports very much? No, I don't. I've got friends that do it and I admire them because it's very difficult. I used to shoot a lot of sports and it's challenging 'cause if this is the leader and that's what you wanna get, you've got two seconds to get it and we've got nice facial expression there. I love the fans in the background. Aren't they great? I mean they really help tell the story. Possibly the one guy on the right hand side. His head is a little bit, maybe if we just cropped that out just a tad bit. That's it, the impact there. I'm not sure how much the ethics go into it but I almost feel like adding in, and I don't know if we have time for this, I'm gonna do this real roughly. Just bring it down just a little bit. I may have gone too far here but just darken that side. I'm a big fan of just small vignettes. Yeah, very small. Because your eye goes to the lightest part. That's still a little heavy and it's with a hammer there but just, we used to do this in the newspaper all the time, you go in and you dodge a little area. Just little lighter, bring it on to the face there and we have another motor sports shot here. Great use of shutter speed, I think. It is and it's a great painting shot and the color works really, really well of the cars of course, but once again I think with shots like this the fact that it's been cropped kind of square it kind of feels awkward because you've got a moving subject running from left to right and your eye wants to see motion in that direction, it's very tight. It's probably too tightly cropped. My feeling is when I look at this kind of from my photography knowledge is like there's a bunch of junk that they cropped out and it left them with this square and I kind of, I like squares. I used to shoot with a Hasselblad and I like a wide cinematic look but there's these kind of awkward ones that are somewhere in between that make me feel a little uneasy especially when the area in front of that pink dragster is so small. It's less than the width of a tire. It is, it kind of adds tension but it's not really working for the composition I think. And so it's good capture. It's something you don't have a lot of control in those situations. Getting two of them close like that is nice and so overall very good job. Alright, so Ali Salih, in the library and so these are great leading lines. Unfortunately, we're not getting a big payoff there at the end and so it's a nice shot in the library but wouldn't that be changed with a person down there looking at a book. It needs a cookie, it needs something in there. It needs something that, your eyes going down these beautiful leading lines. It reminds me a lot of those Stanley Kubrick one point perspective kind of cinematic except this is done vertically. You need something down there. Like just one person walking down the hallway so you can see a nice silhouette of somebody. Walking across frame at the very end. Just something even if it was half a foot hanging out or half the leg to give us the notion that there is someone in this library then yeah. I like that term, the cookie. I've been just talking about this extra element but I like photographs that are pretty good, they stand on their own, but then you add this one little extra thing, the cookie, and it suddenly becomes better and so a little bit more of an industrial shot here and so love the sky in this. Yeah, the sky is very dynamic. It's great, I'm not sure, though, about the toning on the right hand side. We have some yellowing coming through. Not sure if that's actually there or if it's been added later but it kind of becomes distracting, becomes like a stain, it becomes quite dirty. Also, I don't know about compositionally if they should be in the center or if this should be a vertical shot. I wanna turn the camera to the left and get those over to the right side of the frame and I probably wanna get, there's like a doorway or something just down at the bottom and maybe if we do something like this it simplifies it quite a bit. Also got rid of a lot of that yellow problem. It's great because then you've got the chimneys and your eye goes up the chimneys and you go up into this beautiful, detailed, textured area of the sky which looks quite beautiful and then your eye starts to scout around. It comes down, it picks up the roof line. Yeah, much better composition. It feels like there's much more connection between the chimneys and that light area right at the top, it feels more direct. Alright, good shot. We were talking in the questions about star photography and here's a case where somebody used a longer shutter speed. I'm gonna guess maybe in the range of one, two, three, four, five minutes and it's this awkward middle ground where you're starting to get star streaks but they're not the full star streaks where you gotta do like, well back in the old days of film you'd do a four hour exposure and now you have to do star stacking on it and so I think either go shorter or do a stacking technique. Have you shot stars much? No, I haven't. And so the other little, bottom right hand corner, that little bright area, you don't wanna include those little bright spots if they're not important to you and so I think squaring that up a little bit helps there and so you might wanna try shorter shutter speeds if you can still get the star points but it's a matter of perspective but that's kind of the standard in the industry you might say. Alright, let's go to the next one here. Alright, so a little meta here. Photographing what we're photographing here and I love behind the scenes shots and I think they're capturing a nice sunset and it's a way to have fun out there. Do you ever do shots like this? I do, normally of guests taking photos of brides and grooms so I like to shoot their perspective of what they're seeing so you get this kind of scenario with someone either holding an iPhone or maybe holding a camera and they're looking at the results and I do it quite unobtrusively but this one's interesting. I think I like where they were going with this image except compositionally, once again, if we were to take maybe half a step to the right and you see how we've got that crevice inside that either a sand dune or a mountain, we either wanna frame that camera within that and just make a statement with that or we don't wanna do that at all and come back and just close it off altogether so we have that continuous tone running across there but that, coming across to the right and just putting it in that little divet. Might have to cut back just a little bit, little bit to the right. You may have to kind of fake it a little bit with the camera, pretend it's looking in the right area. Maybe you're not actually putting your camera in live view. You're playing back an image. There's a number of ways you can get creative with that. This is our last image. We're back down on the beach again and so this kind of fits in with your small character. Small silhouette, our eyes go directly to it and so the line leads to it a little bit. It seems a little bit bright on the right side. It does, there is a lot of brightness and I guess you could say that the brightness is needed to create the silhouette but also at the same time if it's overly bright and the waves behind the surfer are very bright it does become a distraction and then your eye wanders off to the left hand side and you kind of get caught up and you stay there because there is a lot happening in that foreground and there's some beautiful texture in the wave and you're kind of not really worried about what's happening up there so I think maybe the crop, if we cropped from the left hand side maybe a little bit more and just include a little bit more of the surfer to make the surfer the hero of the shot which is what I believe this shot is all about would have had probably (mumbling) impact. Alright, well great. You had some great advice here and I think it's a work in progress for all of us. I'm sure you're still working on your stuff and I'm still working on my stuff so thanks a lot for sending your photos in. Keep sending them in and you do it right here through the CreativeLive website. You go to my Fundamentals of Photography class page and there's a tab called student work and you can post your images there and I'm gonna go there and I'm gonna look for photos that I wanna talk about and review and we'll look at 'em here and we'll have another great photographer like Rocco give you their impression as well and this is bringing this little episode to a wrap so you will be able to catch the next episode when we post it in about a month from now. Thanks a lot for joining us and keep those questions coming in and those photos. Thanks a lot, goodbye.

Class Materials

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Fundamentals of Photography Outline

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Learning Project Videos
Learning Projects PDF
Slides for The Camera Lessons 1-13
Slides for The Sensor Lessons 14-18
Slides for The Lens Lessons 19-31
Slides for The Exposure Lessons 32-42
Slides for Focus Lessons 43-62
Slides for The Gadget Bag Lessons 63-72
Slides for Light Lesson 73-84
Slides for the Art of Edit Lessons 85-93
Slides for Composition Lesson 94-105
Slides for Photographic Vision Lessons 106-113

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

Love love all John Greengo classes! Wish to have had him decades ago with this info, but no internet then!! John is the greatest photography teacher I have seen out there, and I watch a lot of Creative Live classes and folks on YouTube too. John is so detailed and there are a ton of ah ha moments for me and I know lots of others. I think I own 4 John Greengo classes so far and want to add this one and Travel Photography!! I just drop everything to watch John on Creative Live. I wish sometime soon he would teach a Lightroom class and his knowledge on photography post editing.!!! That would probably take a LOT OF TIME but I know John would explain it soooooo good, like he does all his Photography classes!! Thank you Creative Live for having such a wonderful instructor with John Greengo!! Make more classes John, for just love them and soak it up! There is soooo much to learn and sometimes just so overwhelming. Is there anyway you might do a Motivation class!!?? Like do this button for this day, and try this technique for a week, or post this subject for this week, etc. Motivation and inspiration, and playing around with what you teach, needed so much and would be so fun.!! Just saying??? Awaiting gadgets class now, while waiting for lunch break to be over. All the filters and gadgets, oh my. Thank you thank you for all you teach John, You are truly a wonderful wonderful instructor and I would highly recommend folks listening and buying your classes.

Eve
 

I don't think that adjectives like beautiful, fantastic or excellent can describe the course and classes with John Greengo well enough. I've just bought my first camera and I am a total amateur but I fell in love with photography while watching the classes with John. It is fun, clear, understandable, entertaining, informative and and and. He is not only a fabulous photographer but a great teacher as well. Easy to follow, clear explanations and fantastic visuals. The only disadvantage I can list here that he is sooooo good that keeps me from going out to shoot as I am just glued to the screen. :-) Don't miss it and well worth the money invested! Thank you John!

Vlad Chiriacescu
 

Wow! John is THE best teacher I have ever had the pleasure of learning from, and this is the most comprehensive, eloquent and fun course I have ever taken (online or off). If you're even / / interested in photography, take this course as soon as possible! You might find out that taking great photos requires much more work than you're willing to invest, or you might get so excited learning from John that you'll start taking your camera with you EVERYWHERE. At the very least, you'll learn the fundamental inner workings and techniques that WILL help you get a better photo. Worried about the cost? Well, I've taken courses that are twice as expensive that offer less than maybe a tenth of the value. You'll be much better off investing in this course than a new camera or a new lens. I cannot reccomend John and this course enough!

Student Work

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