Lessons

Lesson Info

Day 1 Q&A

so this is from a sam cocks do you use the two second timer or a cable release when you're doing the mirror lock up for the best sharpness well one of the things that I find irritating about nikon cameras and I feel free to pick I pick on any camera I'm just picking on that thing right now is that they have mere lockup in self timer on the same switch so you can't really choose both at the same time with cannon you can do mere lock up and you can do self timer as well and so yes I do that from time to time to be honest with you I really don't use me or lock up very often anymore I just throw the camera and alive you because I like being able to zoom in and ship check sharpness and so I very rarely use mere lock up these days I'm okay expending a little extra battery power um and another question was how does the back button mode work if you're using a remote release if you're using a remote release it depends on the situation but for landscape photography you should probably have your ...

camera in manual focus and for back button focusing with a remote your camera's not going to focus it's just going to take the picture and if you are setting up a remote camera and you just want to shoot pictures you know I would see a situation where someone setting up for a night maybe a nice landscape shot and they're going to kick back and relax in their chair and just shoot from their chair you don't want your camera refocusing on something you want to carefully set that focus up ahead of time now there's different situations where you might have the camera I don't know trying to focus on a person walking down the street you want it to refocus but for landscape photography back button and the remote work great together I got my pad working here so I'm going to come back on our rights this one is from re talk and the question is does micro adjusting on fine tuning on ly effect the camera or the resulting photo when the camera is on auto focus or does it also come toe into play when manual focusing well a little tricky in general the answer is in auto focus but one of the things I'll say something nice about icon now one of things that I really like about nikon is that in the viewfinder down at the bottom they have a focusing dot that comes on cannon has the same thing but nikon has arrows which tell you which way to turn the lens and basically what's happening is the auto focus system is turned off and the focusing system is saying you know letting giving you some guidance but that's it using the same intelligence in the same technology as the auto focusing and so it could meet mrs misdirect you if you don't have your micro just set properly but other than if you just look through the viewfinder and you just focus according to what your eye sees that's it would not have any impact on that okay thank you let's see how about from quel beau sixty four focus stacking do you use rails on your tripod for taking each shot did not talk about that I did not I do not because I I just kind of got started in focus stacking just to play around because I knew people had some interest in that there are rails that you can get to move your camera forward and backward for micro photography there are special geared system so that you could move it like a tenth of a millimeter there are systems that will have motors that will adjust and let you do it like in a hundredth of a millimetre and shoot the camera had the camera shoot move shoot move shoot move shoot move and go through a whole siri's and I've heard of cases of people shooting over one hundred shots to get one shot and these air some amazing shots like like the head of a fly and their whole eyes and their whole head and all the hair and a ten I are exactly and focus and that's how they're doing it and it's because it's very hard with most lenses to really find to an adjustment for landscape work you don't need that type of adjustment it's when you get into the really high magnification of macro work that sounds very cool shot awesome okay from david venter do you ever use an external spot meter for landscape I have never owned an external spot meter I've sold a hot time in the past that their ways that you could you know point the light over and read the light these days it just seems completely unnecessary in my mind because you could just shoot a picture and look at the history ram and you have exact data on how that's going to actually be impacted on your sensor and so it's just not necessary in my opinion with digital cameras I still have a handheld ambient light meter but it's not a spot meter like they were referring to gotcha okay that makes sense thank you uh okay another user says my camera does not have a cable release is there a work around for long exposures they need a new camera I'm trying to just run through my brain off a reasonably good camera bulb well many cameras deal let's not let's not confuse with that on there are there are cameras but they're mostly kind of pointed shoot cameras built in as I don't have a cable release all the sl ours pretty much all the marylise cameras that have interchangeable lenses have either a wired or wireless remote and I kind of threw me off what was the rest of the question the question the question was just for without that cable release is there a work around for long exposures yeah it's going to be limited by your camera which is probably limited to thirty seconds and if your camera doesn't have a cable release it probably doesn't have manual exposure which probably won't allow you to set very long exposure so it's but maybe it's that maybe it's just that simple if found a tripod that two seconds well yes yes so the two seconds of time right misinterpreting if they're trying to do I was thinking they were trying to do like two minute exposure it might be way just don't know but you can't be in our studio if you don't have a cable release and you don't want the vibrations on your camera yes the two second self timer is the answer fantastic let's go for a few more any in the studio okay all right we'll talk about a lot of ground here okay how about chicken with the phones as we like to say you talked about what this one had about seven vote so make sure we had answered which I appreciated but ryan beg lee what part of the image are you focusing on when shooting a large landscape love you that I think we covered it two times the near focusing point right whatever's closest about double into them the only time you have to be concerned is if you got your camera right down in the weeds and you got flowers right in front of your lens you don't want to be focused on a half inch in front of your lands and so this is where you might need just a little bit of work in distance and double the near distance is going to be very close and that's easy to remember and it's easy to mit or to all you need is like a three foot measuring device to measure from the censor to the first object that's three feet okay six feet that's where I'm going to focus on alright so give it a try folks see if it works great I like this question that was asked quite a bit ago but when this is from stuart when doing nature landscape took three do you feel that having cargo pants or shorts and shorts or better than a backpack for carrying all or most of your accessories were going to talk about that tomorrow not really there's there's always a lot of different styles about how people like to travel because get the whole best staying and and you know I've got this is kind of weird to admit I have three vests in my closet that I maybe have not worn in fifteen years they could sell them on I don't I can't quite part with them yet because I stay I don't know I grew up going I'm gonna be that photographer wearing the photography vest and then I was like that I don't like doing it I put most of the stuff in the camera bag when they were talking about shorts and pants my mind started drifting off to mosquitoes and hiking and that's why I love convertible pants so that you know in the morning when it's cool I got the pants on and when it gets warm I can unzip the pants and I was up in rainier and I thought I packed everything in right and I was up there and I get really hot like all right I'm going to take off the bottom of the pants and I went down that more of this wrong pants you know I didn't have the cut off parts I just end up being a lot hotter but as far as carrying here I prefer just to put everything in the back back I'd like to try to stay as comfortable as possible and the only thing that I really take out of the backpack is thie cameron lens that I'm using and that little pack of filters that will often put on either the belt pack of the backpack or on the actual belt on my pants great great tips okay one more techie one from haynes video when hyper focal ing do you can you still use the zoom feature for focusing accurately okay so that's something that you want to be very careful of because many of the lenses in the past had they were a true zoom lands which means you could zoom into two hundred focus and then zoom back to seventy and you knew that you got to focus and that was a way of kind of manually doing that image magnification but now most zoom lenses are not technically zoom lenses they're para focal lenses which means they had just focus when you adjust zoom and so you probably don't want to do it unless you checked your lands to make sure that it's in focus but if you focus on something on the wide and and then you zoom into the telephoto you'll probably notice that focus has changed and that means it's going to change when you focus on the telephoto and so that's a bad technique it's better to set up your angle of you first and then die elin focusing with whatever system you I want to be using a couple more questions for you this is from art by vada who recently moved teo the seattle area and is it's been a local here for a long time so a cz quickly learning about trying to shoot with fast moving clouds and light changing every few seconds okay so we've gone over exposure we've gone over our focus and all these things aperture all these things what do you do when you're actually in the field and she shoots in manual here well I gotta admit that's a pretty rare situation that the clouds air changing that fast that it's in and out uh in that case I'm still shooting in manual exposure and I'm just trying to keep up with the clouds I mean it's it's pretty red that they're changing every ten seconds in and out and so if you wanted teo and you knew this was gonna happen there is a checker ford pattern of clouds coming over and you knew it was going to be in and out in and out in and out you could set your camera up too maybe a five stop bracket siri's shooting one stop on either side and we should go before papa papa papa and you speak it in the hole siri's every time so that's kind of one way to know brackett really make sure but generally I'm just shooting one click here look at the results look at the history graham would go a little bit over to this side and the fact of the matter is is on most raw images ifyou're a stop off you can fix that in post without really any noticeable effects at all in fact I was testing something out on the nikon d eight hundred which has a fantastic dynamic rage and I wanted to see how well it was shooting under certain parameters and I was purposely purposely overexposing by four stops and under exposing by five stops and I could show you a photo five stops under exposed that I fixed in post that you would probably not recognize as being five stops off in reality I think getting the right exposure as faras letting in the correct amount of light is very very easy because we have so much leeway with our sensors these days the focusing which we've just gone through is the one that's absolutely critical because there's just so little we can do to fix that later on and that's the one you really have to be nailing out in the field