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Intro: Ways of Shooting Part 1

Lesson 2 from: Creative Wow: Shape the Why and How

Jack Davis

Intro: Ways of Shooting Part 1

Lesson 2 from: Creative Wow: Shape the Why and How

Jack Davis

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Lesson Info

2. Intro: Ways of Shooting Part 1

Lesson Info

Intro: Ways of Shooting Part 1

part one of the wow creative photography. Siri's Today's course is creative. Wow, shape the why and how. Jack Davis is one of our most prolific instructors here. It creativelive. He's a master of all things Hawaii. He's a master of all things photography. He does IPhone. Ah, graffiti. He teaches, you know, all over the world for a photo shop expert, light room expert, and really just an all around great guy. So, bra, come on out. So you're looking. You're looking, Doctor, you look dapper. Look at that. That's what I'm really psyched for this course. I mean 10 days and you're gonna company. Yeah, 10 different classes, and you'll cover everything from a dizzy rate. As far as the creative styles of photography. The subtitled with Siri's is a bigger box of photographic crayons, please. So that is the idea. Here is what tools can we bring to the table that will let us, Plame or experiment more and have fun? So if we stick with you all days, are we going to get our permission card the permi...

ssion right at the beginning. A good, good. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, I'm gonna pass it on to you, Jack, And let's get started. Thank you. Great. I have no idea what you just passed along with. This is a clicker to click the running keynote that you may have. And I have no keynote because I don't think we're going to go. All right. Thank you. Yes, we like simple. We, like simple. Well, good morning. How are you guys doing? We got a great group. You guys are all across the field, Which is exactly what we're gonna be talking about here in terms of this class. So I'm very, very happy to be here with you all. And with back with the creative life family. Um, I can't say enough about creative life. I think it's a fantastic way to learn for me. It's fantastic because I get both the interaction with the audience, which I normally haven't done in the past 10 20 years. When I do my own recordings in little Bat Cave, you know, hold up on me and a microphone. So this actually is a great addition to have you guys here in the audience. But also creativelive gets it. They get the entire creative process and all that is involved with it. So for me, I'm very excited to be able to be here, especially with this Siri's. This Siri's is the meat bring up a screen. So we have some pretty pictures on here. Um, this Siri's is especially near and dear to my heart. Um, yes, I had a few more locks of hair at that time. Um, because it's the first time I've ever taught this specific topic in front of a live audience. I've taught little components of it infrared or motion blur, different things like that at different conferences around the world. But the idea of doing entire Siris on creative photography techniques that something that I've never done before I'm not in a recorded session. It's actually based upon two things that I have been doing for a long time. One is an event over in Hawaii called creative photography for the soul that I've been doing with two National Geographic photographers to it. Jones and Ricky Cook for years and years, I'm over on the island of Molokai. This shot over here on our right is a Ninfa red panorama taken with one of our cameras that we'll talk about in a bit over on the island of Molokai in the islands of Hawaii. And, uh so I've been doing that for or more years teaching this this life class where I get a basically do. What we're doing here is have a group of students following me and other photographers around and just playing, um, letting our inner child out sort of speak to run and play. So for me to be able to teach this class live when something that I've been doing in Hawaii is fantastic because most of you probably can't join me over in Molokai, we have a limited number of people, and that's just challenge. So that's it. And also this serious. Once I did that, I also started figuring out whether I could do this as a book project. And I started out doing an outline for the book. Um, and the book was called Passion, Permission and Pixels igniting your creative photography and the others on that We're going to be one of those National Geographic photographers. What? Jones and a young lady, just new to the industry Julianne cost from Adobe and then you haven't heard of her. But you will. She's a great young rising star anyway, smart ass that I am So Julianne and a Duin and I were We worked on the book in an outline for a long time, could not quite get the contract with a publisher set, so that, um, serious never actually saw the light of day. But now it is in this. What I'm doing here and the basis of that book was this concept of before, during and after you shoot. And so that's what we're going to be focusing on today, as well as through the Siri's and the concepts year between Behind them before, during and after you shoot is, um how can you give yourself this this creative permission to play with why you're shooting that before you shoot is the inspiration is the story inside of you is the preparation. So it's not just the technology a lot of you are. Professional shooters have been doing it forever. The technology is completely transparent for you. It's it's like breathing. Some of you is brand new to you and an f stop to an I S O to a shutter. Speed is still something that you're working on understanding some of you may be shooting with your IPhone. You go. I don't even have to learn about that stuff because I can't control it. And God bless you because we're gonna be talking about that as well. Um, but the before really deals with why are you shooting stepping back even further? Why are we making art? Why we artists while you guys here there's a reason why you're here is because you've got a little something not quite right with you, right? Your little not quite. Oh, you know, sandwich short of a picnic kind of think. And that's you probably realized that that you're an artist, that there is something that's different about you, why you're compelled to create. And I think we all kind of have that. It's just it's kind of been beat out of us, usually as a child, right? We started off praying, doing crayons and drawing and doing this stuff, and we had fun and excited and giddy. And then probably some very nice, well meaning person. Oh, isn't that nice, Susie? Too bad you're not a drawer like your brother. Or isn't that or what is that? I could That's a cow you know, we had one little thing that kind of set us off. And for a lot of people that don't have this artistic bent that probably most of you do and those of you out in Internet land, they may have really completely changed their direction in life, even though they were passionate about their box of crayons when they were a kid. And that's really what this series is about in this first part about before, it's giving yourself permission to play that you. Actually, there's nothing stopping anybody on the planet from getting out and having a great time with aesthetics. And that brings us to before during the shoot or the idea of technology what's in your hand when you're shooting. And that's the great thing about the topic specifically about photography. Because, um, the current state of the technology is, and I'll grab over here to get my IPhone because I'm already too far away from it, and that just makes me feel that I get nervous when you're that far away from your phone. Things like this have obviously changed the entire fabric of the creative process. Does every single bloody person on the planet is shooting their head off, right? 24 7 There are more pictures taken in a day than you know, 50 years ago. Then all the photographs in the history of photography, Probably all if you want to take a photograph. And compared to a work of art, probably Mawr art is created in a day than the history of the planet, which is just kind of weird and freaky, but wonderful in the same time. So we're gonna be talking about technology and how it's democratizing the entire creative process. And we'll also be talking about this specifically, both IPhones, pocket cameras point and shoots micro 4/3 big boy DSL, ours, you know, full size answers and that sort of thing. But we'll be talking about the technology with that. One of the things that I like about photography or that specifically gets my creative juices flowing, as you guys were talking about earlier. What do you do to get yourself going? And a lot of what you'll see with my photography and ah, yes, going way back. And yes, those were the days and now that looks like my son. But here's some underwater photography way back in the day. This is actually one of my first photographs back in Bali 74 when I was a near book staff in high school. How many of you got the bug for photography and yearbook staff? I tell you, especially if you were, you know, that was back in the day of dark room, rolling your own film and doing all that. That's where I picked up the bug. Um, one of the things about my photography that I'm so excited about is being able to use the technology to shoot and capture things you can't see with the human eye because it's something that is outside of the realm of the normal experience. As an example, infrared be able to see a portion of the of the invisible spectrum that we normally can't see. Maybe a dog or other animals could see this, but we really can't see this. In other words, the light is interacting with the subject matter based upon the chemical composition of it. The chlorophyll specifically is why the palm trees air glowing. Why the water is goes jet black macro photography. Zooming up on a subject matter is something that we can't. We just don't normally, you know, get up close inside of a flower. Um, underwater photography. Even though we can go in water, most of us don't hang out underwater with their eyes open, just checking out the world. But of course we can with the camera, whether it's a go pro or something like a point and shoot or Big Boy Big girl Cameron A housing. It's something that we can do. Um, Night sky photography. I'm star photography. When we do the class coming up with that, I'm gonna be team teaching that with Brand Forbes, world renowned night sky photographer, helps teach the class over in Hawaii as well. And that's just with a few simple changes to your settings on your DSLR is gonna allow you to not only shoot but see the Milky Way. As an example, you may not realize really what's above our heads, but a simple few changes in a tripod to your camera. We're going allow you to see and shoot things that the human eye again can't see unless you're out in the middle of the desert door. You're in Antarctica or something like that, so the technology will allow us to see things that we haven't before. Things like motion blur me. I'll just go through some or samples here in terms of that, um, general samples. But things like motion blur photography. We can't slow down the world and capture the motion of something crass going by some samples of in a second. We also can't freeze motion. We can't see the world of the thousands of a second. We're continuous. Time is flowing for us. Well, obviously photography. One of the best things about photography is that we can freeze it or we can. When I call floated, we can extend it and actually capture the blur of motion. All of those things are things that we can't see with Human I and for me, that's very exciting. So that's one of the emphasis on these different 10 different Siri's and why I chose these 10 technologies is because they do allow us to go beyond what we normally see. So I'm just gonna go through some samples. These are randomised will go into specific categories later on of my sorts of photography. Speaking about freezing motion. Yes, I do a lot of travel, So you're going to see a lot of pretty places. Basically, I only teach places that have palm trees and waves. So those air, you know, the things that we have here but Tonga Panorama is is another one of the topics that we have here to be able to bring in that peripheral vision that again you normally can't see without doing this, but captured one moment. This is a great example. The image of Molokai here makes it looks like a little teeny Gilligan's Island. But obviously that's because it's 180 degree view in one fell image. I'm looking all the way up the coast 180 degrees all the way down the coast. By definition, that turns whatever you look into, look at into a little island, which is wonderful, great, totally messing with your mind. That's not what it looks like when you're standing there, but it's a story about the place we were in so panoramas over to Tahiti. We're gonna be talking about not only the before the during how you shoot something like this in your camera and your lens choices and things like that having a waterproof camera so you can go out in the water even if you're not gonna shoot underwater, even if you've never have any desire to go into what? You can't even swim having a waterproof cameras, a kick in the pants because it's gonna allow you that permission to be playful around water, which I think again, it's fantastic for a lot of reasons, including things like reflection. Um, but this is a serious done in in TV that I did well over there while ago. And that brings us to the third part of this Siri's before, during and after, because your image isn't done until it's been tweaked. Right? Massaged, um, the nest finalized in our digital darkroom. So that's the third part of all this. Siri's is What do you do after you've taken the image? And for purist purist that maybe well, you know, what I grabbed is done, and it's fine. And processing, especially like I do over processing of images is a little bit of an anathema is just a no no. But I'll bring in a comment that you probably know from State Adams ST Ansel Adams. God bless this whole that as he saw it, the shot the negative was the sheet music to a performance to an operetta, Let's say, But the performance was the print was the digital darkroom was going in there and massaging that original negative into submission in the printing process. And, as you know, he did extensive retouching, extensive dodging and burning, probably one of the most elaborate people to manipulate their final prints into the performance. And that's where the third part comes in. The after tweaking the shaping of it and things like something as simple as a black and white conversion or see Peotone is where we're going to be bringing in a lot of this blast aspect of, um, our creative photography is How are we going to take that image and, uh, presented to the world thes air all the CPS or of this Siri's from Tahiti, in this case, using this after to unify infrared pocket cameras motion blur underwater. Probably a dozen different cameras, but all unified. Using the sepia tone as a technique. This is Brand who's gonna be teaching, helping teaching that night sky photography. He's also going to help out because he was there with me in Tonga for trip to go shoot the humpback whales. So he is an expert on not only sky photography, but also underwater photography, which I do teach and do scuba dive and teach. But he's an expert, so he's also going to be helping out with that class. And, um so these air again mawr disgusting shots. John Corn, Fourth. Another professional photographer was down here on this trip. And yes, it was a religious experience. I'm going down and being with the whales again. I'm just gonna go through some of these water mawr infrared motion blur, Absolutely love motion blur photography. You're going to get a little bit of that today. The class on motion blur is not only motion blur been motion freezing the idea of doing high speed photography so you can capture things that again the human eye normally does not see. We will be talking about one of the most creative ways of shaping a story in the camera and with one of the benefits of using what I lovingly called big boy girl cameras is, of course, this ability to shape it with our f stop are shallow depth of field. That's something that we can't do with our point clicks. So, um, we'll be talking about that with a big boy cameras. And when we talk about the tweaking of our images, yes. Can we cheat and change our depth of field after the fact? When maybe we weren't didn't have the capability to do it in the field. So we'll be talking about that as well. Cheating? Yes. We're gonna be doing a lot of cheating in this class. My daughter were both freezing an infrared photography and again mawr motion freezing wide angle over in Italy. Yes, a GoPro camera. A GoPro cameras. One of the easiest, cheapest things you can get. You have a fish eye camera? Um, wonderful. Um, quality to it. Waterproof to a zillion feet. Stick it on a copter fly through the air World's gonna be talking about a quadcopter photography or drone photography again. Huge. Weaken the pants if you've ever have you working with the drone. Yeah, just ridiculously talk about crack cocaine for photographer. You know, stick a camera and throw it up in the air and wonderful. Okay, we're infrared water panorama as again, a summer scene in Yosemite showing what we can do with infrared different ways of doing Panorama is we have got a panorama class coming up in a couple days here. Or water. We're gonna be talking about creative composition today about different ways that we can shape our scene. So that is going to be one of our fun things. Permission to maybe break some of the rules that you may have been taught in camera club. Any of you members of camera club, you were mentioning that. Okay, so God bless you guys, consider this a 12 step program for being a member of a camera club. Because camera clubs, like some organized religions, have beat people into. It's no longer fun, right? Cause there's so many rules, they're fantastic because the rules give us our parameter. So we know where to go, rather than just being launched out into the world, not knowing anything. But sometimes those rules actually are taking away our crayons, right? It's no, There's actually no bag, you know. Don't do that. I've been in enough camera clubs where it's that Noah, we just don't do that. No, that's just not a viable option in terms of a composition. And so we're gonna be talking about creative composition and maybe some ways had a break of those sorts of rules again. Motion blur. This is over in Italy, this sort of thing where you're able to, um, see things that the human eye can't see for me. Motion blur photography, especially since you can do it every single time you get into a car. A few little parameters on your camera, even on your IPhone are gonna allow you to do things that, um, normally only van Gogh on drugs would be able to do so. The aerial photography, you say I may not have a drone, but probably all of you are in some point or other going in a plane if you're not shooting out of a window out of your jet. If you're not always in a window seat, stop change it. You have heaven outside your window for hours on end again. I'm hoping we may be able to get even. Julianne cost in here in class to be a guest. Lecturers. Well, she's got a new book coming out on motion blur photography, but she also has her window seat book, which is fantastic about shooting out of a jet plane. Window seat looking out. Amazon available. Excellent. Fantastic book. You all have that. There's no reason why you're not shooting the heavens. I'm every time you get onto a jet, okay? And travel down in the Galapagos. Yes, HDR photography or high dynamic range photography is another thing that we're gonna be working on. We did some shots here in Seattle yesterday over in the gasworks park area. Beautiful area for doing hdr. He low Panorama is out of jets. More panorama SPG? Yes, I'm a purposely trench off again. You got clouds here in Seattle? Okay, Um, usually just overcast grey. But sometimes they actually you get that both blue and gray infrared motion blur hdr more. You get the idea of macro photography. Love that freezing motion. This is down in San Diego. Are abstracts of motion blur. Disgustingly pretty Portrait's again with some special effects in our post processing or after you get the general idea. Things like this. This is obviously a motion blur. Slow shutter, but a razor sharp coconut. I don't have a tripod in the water with me. Handheld. Very hard to get a tax sharp image with a long shutter speed. So this is the sort of thing that will be doing in cheating, where you'll take one shot at high speed, another shot. It's slow speed and then manually combine those as if you had a tripod. There's nothing stopping you from getting exactly what you could get with a tripod simply by a little bit of creative Photoshopped techniques. Eso freeing up. You're gonna notice I've got a ton of gear over here, but I'm also gonna be breaking pretty much every rule in terms of how you shoot, How you shoot Panorama is how you shoot slow shutter, getting away with murder so that you don't there's there's no time out in the field where you're gonna go. I can't shoot that. I only I had whiter glass only had a wide angle lens. If I only had, you know something a faster piece of glass with a bigger f stop. If I only had a tripod, if I only had this No, you can shoot anything any time. With pretty much anything. You just may have to cheat a little bit when you get done at the end of the day. And that's why God made Photoshopped so you can see that vision for May? I don't really see it's cheating. If I had a tripod one that I was willing to get wet, then I could have gotten this shot in camera. I didn't. I still got the shot. I told the story that was inside of me what I wanted to do. And I just took advantage of the technology, whether the technologies in camera or the technologist in post, all of this is giving you permission to tell stories. Okay, you get the idea, Macro. One of the great things that we're gonna be talking about when we get to the class on macro is that these point shoot cameras whether something like an IPhone with an olo clip will lens that you can add to it or something like you're going to see one of my favorite point and shoot cameras is an Olympus TG tough guy. Camera has a one centimeter macro with the 28 millimeter wide angle field of view. Those of you who have your SL ours. No, When you shoot macro, you're usually you're on a C type censor you maybe a 50 millimeter that by the time you put it on your sensors. At 75 you have a bit of a telephoto. You can get into the eye of the of the be as it were, but you're not going to get the entire be in flower because you have a telephoto will be getting into this technology. The great thing with point shoots is you have this one centimeter basically pressed the glass up against the flour, and yet it stays wide angle. Now, all of a sudden, you're in a cathedral inside of a flower rather than you just being looking at the pistol in Steinman of a flower. So sometimes the point and shoots are going to allow us to do things that we can't do. But they're big boy slash girl, and for me, that's exciting. Panorama is one of the most exciting things that I think you can dio, and those also are especially fantastic with things like our point and shoot cameras. Because things like the IPhone, because of how it shoots you, can get one continuous movement like a wave across an entire panorama, which you cannot shoot by going click, click, click, click with individual shots on a regular camera just because one the wave will have moved. Click wave will have moved. They won't line up. Motion does not line up things like the IPhone camera should have seen in teeny tiny little slices that built in camera on the IPhone. So as you sweep it, you get one continuous movement, even of things that are moving in frame gets very creative when things are moving like a person on a bicycle. But we'll get into Okay, hdr um, this is a moon said a hdr little pockets Paris, you get the general idea. Um, composition. Here is our little scene to show you the scale of our image over here on the Nepali coast of why there's our our yacht and then using what? That our disposal to tell the scenes.

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Jack Davis - Creative Wow Shape Why And How Notebook.pdf

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