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Visual Drama

Okay, well let's move on to Visual Drama. So there are certain things that visually are just interesting to look at. As we were talking about with the human eye is drawn to. So one of those elements is contrast. Now contrast, if I was to ask you to define what contrast is you would probably all have slightly different definitions of what contrast is and what you might be thinking of. And it can be many different things in a photograph. For instance it can be the contrast of the clouds, a foam of clouds coming from Old Faithful here or the sky in the background. It's a very different environment. The contrast of a lightning bolt against the puffy white clouds. There's a huge contrast in what those elements are and what they might feel like and their texture and the way that they look. This mountain, whoops let's go back to this mountain here real quickly. This mountain that was down in Bolivia. The color of that sky versus the color of the mountains. That's a contrast of colors. A contr...

ast of texture that very very smooth no texture really in the sky versus some texture in the mountain. The contrast versus the sky versus the iceberg. The color contrast of that one pink really popping out. The smoothness of the sky versus the roughness of everything else. Contrast, generally especially in the turban. Eyes really pick up on that. The smoothness in the sky along the top versus the roughness and the texture of the mudflats down below. And to me this one just oozes contrast of this smooth sky with the evening light in it and those roofs and the bricks of the building has an interesting contrast that our eyes kind of go back and forth on. Another way drawing visual drama is through sharpness, we talked a little bit about this before even just today. Our eye is drawn to what is in focus and there lots of different ways to controlling focus on our camera. We can focus on the background. We can focus on the foreground. We can try to set enough depth of field so that everything is in focus. It has a very different look to the images. Even though, the camera doesn't move for these three photos. Foreground, background, everything. Completely different photographs without moving the camera an inch. And obviously our eyes go to what's sharp in the frame. And that's where we want to hang out and look at that particular subject. And so those lenses that have shallow depth of field can offer you that extra little option of getting in there, focusing on that particular subject, and then letting the background just kind of fade out as need be. So the contrast of sharp versus blurriness. Drawing our attention to one particular spot in that photograph. Because it's just really hard to look at any place else in that photograph that is not sharp. It enables us to really get those subjects to stand out using that shallow depth of field. Forcing our viewers eyes into very very small areas of that photograph. There's a number of places that have done eye tracking and it would be really fun. I'll ask my producer about getting eye tracking in here. So we can track all of your eyes as you look at a photograph and we could monitor live on camera. That would be great for future a class. Almost everything in this photo is out of focused. You only need a little area of sharpness. And remember what I said, you want to focus on the eyes because you can look at the eyes. And so we're going to control that sharpness in a number of different ways. Obviously we have our different shutter speeds. If we want to use that as an option for blurring subjects that are moving. So as I said, just look at the world with new eyes. Look at everything that moves and start asking what if the shutter speed or that shutter speed? Using the panning motion to accentuate or add on to that blurriness, can be helpful as well. A lot of fun shots to be experimented with in slow shutter speeds. Cuba's a great place to do it. I'll be leading tours there for the next few years. You might wanna check it out. Got a couple of full tours going this year. This was a challenging one to take. I was working off a large ship and I wanted to do a second exposure while the boat was moving. And I needed to find a place that the boat was keeping a straight direction. And 'cause I wanted the background hills to be relatively not blurred, relatively sharp but I wanted the water to have kind of a mystical feel to it so that you're not seeing actual water here. And so I had to use my neutral density filter. If you remember back to the gadget section that six stop neutral density filter, so that I could get a 30 second exposure during the daytime, which is very very difficult to do because there is just too much light for normally doing that. So I want to dive into a little bit of panning here. A lot of people have questions about how to do panning shots. So there's a whole little set of things that you want to be thinking about when you do panning shots to get that nice smooth shot look for the panning. And so, you need to find a subject that's moving and you're gonna be panning the camera, which means moving the camera to keep that subject in the frame. And as that subject moves past you, generally what you want to shoot is the subject as it's getting a little bit closer to you and then right when you're perpendicular to it. But once it goes beyond that point it's typically not as good because that person is more running away or the car is driving off in the other direction. And you're more shooting the backside then the front side. And so a lot of times the easiest place to get the panning is when you are perpendicular right in front of it. And I usually try to get a couple of shots, in some cases I'm trying to get a couple of shots as it's slowly getting closer to me. But once it's gone past then I'm usually on to the next subject. And so, as an example thousandth of a second is going to stop the motion. We're still panning. Okay, you can still pan at an any shutter speed you want. You're just not going to get the blurry effect until you get to a slow shutter speed. So a 1000th of a second, everything's frozen. Fast human motion, 500th of a second stopping the motion. Notice the chain link fence in the background alright. So 250th, look at the rear foot. Look at the blurriness that we've gotten here at 250th of a second. And now we're gonna start getting into some pretty good panning range. 125th, we're seeing more movement in the foot, a little bit in the hands, not much in the torso because we're trying to keep that as even in the frame as possible. And so now at around a 30th of a second is a really good running panning shutter speed. And each different type of subject, depending on how fast it's moving, and how close you are to it and what lens you're using, and your angle of view is gonna have a slightly different good panning speed. 15th of a second gets us a lot of look. Look at that chain link fence in the background. Gone very very blurry. And so panning at different shutter speeds. 250th of a second, cyclist that are going a little bit faster. Not much panning motion, you see those leaves down in the foreground not much blurriness going on there. We are gonna be needing to get to slower shutter speeds. Panning at 125th. Now look at the sharpness difference between the bike and the road itself. Roads very blurry. And just out of kicks, he's got two go pros on his bike, never noticed that before, one pointing right at the back wheel. Alright panning at one 125th of a second. The Blue Angel's moving very very quickly, that background is very very blurry at 125th. Alright now we're entering what I would call the panning zone. I got a lot of zones, have you noticed that? I got the flare zone and the mirror lock up zone, vibration zone, fere's the panning zone. And so subjects that are moving a 60th of a second. Good place to do a lot of panning. Now in general when it comes to panning, what I generally recommend is start with faster shutter speeds. Try to learn the movement, get those down and as you want to experiment more you start using slower and slower shutter speeds until you are no longer getting good results on a consistent basis. And so 30th of a second, very good for running there. Horse racing, 30th of a second. 15th of a second is probably my go to favorite panning shutter speed. It depends on the subject, it depends on a lot of factors. But that's usually kind of a go to really good in between shutter speed for getting that panning motion. And like I said this is a little like a golf swing, not that I'm a good golfer at all, but swinging from the hips. Nice smooth movements. Starting the movement, continuing the movement through the frame. Good example, keeping the subject smaller in the frame. Remember this back in the previous section about rule of 1/3rds. Direction, space in front of the subject and you'll find most of these are gonna have a little more space in front of that subject. And so, these panning shots at slower shutter speeds and 8th of a second, 1/4 of a second definitely slow shutter speeds are definitely getting much more to what I would call experimental range. And so this can be a whole phase to your photography where I had an experimental phase of photography shooting slow shutter speeds. And the slower you shoot the less likely you're gonna get something really good out of it. But you know, I can identify each one of those people. I can understand enough information that I can pick them out. And so the hit rate down her at a 1/4 second is very small. There's a lot of these that just not gonna be turning out well. But from time to time when you get an element of sharpness, it can look pretty good. One second is really really hard to do it, that camera, the black out on your camera while it's collecting that light is usually gonna end up horrible. This is a typically bad one second. But if you do it right, this is about as good as I can get with a one second exposure. Which to me, kind of looks like a painting in many ways. Now if you want to add an extra little element to it, you can add a little zoom to it as well. And so in this case, this has a couple of things going on. Number one on panning, you can really see the leaves in the upper right hand corner. And notice this portion right in the upper middle of the frame. Light is streaming through the trees and that light streaming is a very small point of light and by panning I've created a streak out of it. And so, one of the situations that I hate in photography is a real spotty bright background. Easy for me to say. But this works really well in a panning shot because this becomes this whole grid wall that we can really see that movement. So I'm panning, I'm zooming, and if you can tell real carefully down here, the reflections on the shoes, I was actually firing flash at the same time. So there's a number of elements going on in that photograph. And so adding a zoom, it's not something that I do very much. It's not something I recommend, it's got a little bit of a cheesy factor to it. But it can kind of simulate more motion than there is actually taking place in that particular photograph. But it can be kind of fun to play around with, just to do something different.