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Hello. Welcome. Everybody to one hour photo. My name is John Gringo, and on this episode I'm gonna be interviewing Scot Robert Lim. He's a great portrait and wedding photographer who specializes in on location portrait's. He's brought in a collection of some great work. We're going to sit down, talk together, talk about his work and his career, and it's teaching and everything else that he does. And after that, well, we're gonna do is both of us are going to sit down and look at some of your photos that you've submitted to our classes. And I'll be honest with you. What I've done is I've Connick onto his classes where he has a lot of people doing portrait work, and we're gonna be taking a look at those images and reviewing them. We're gonna be doing this in light room and see if we like him. We don't like him and what sort of improvements and suggestions we have for all of you. But before we do any of that, I always like to answer some questions from all of you. So let's go ahead and ge...

t started with some of your questions. All right, let's get to our first question here. I want to get serious about taking close up flower pictures. What kind of camera should I buy to get good? Okay. And detailed creative shots. I'll be posting online only. And I'm a big hiker. So lightweight is important. Well, thank you, Allie, For that question, I think we have a lot of people who are in that category. Now, you could be shooting this with your phone, but if you do want to get really creative and you want that soft out of focus background, nice Brok, you're gonna need a camera with some sort of interchangeable lenses and a larger size sensor. And so I've gone through my class actually did a class here very recently on helping you choose your best camera. It's, ah, free class that you can get on revealing different cameras and let me show you a few of my favorite cameras for doing this type of work. 1st 1 is thief Fuji X T 20. This is a moralist camera that uses a 1.5 crop sensor. So it's a medium size sensor in my mind, and it's a very small, very lightweight camera. And Fuji has a couple of different macro lenses. This is they're less expensive, smaller, lighter weight lands. And this is going to allow you to shoot with some pretty shallow depth of field, allow you full manual control or full automatic. Either way, you can work with it as you wish, and this would be a really nice system. Another good system from Sony is the A 65. This is a real powerhouse of a little camera, a lot of different features on there. They have a very simple, basic macro lens. The 30 millimeter. I think they have another higher and one as well. But this is the small lightweight version, and then one more recommendation here is theologian pus and the the very long name Om D E M 10 mark three Great little camera. They have a couple of macro lenses. 30 is the smallest here, and so if you're doing a lot of general hiking and you want to do some general landscape shots as well, you'll probably want to bring a more general purpose wide angle to short telephoto zoom as well, along with this, so you might have a two or even a three lens system. But you could do so in a relatively small bag that should fit in the packed with everything else you have. And so there are many other good choices. But these are, I think, are three of the best that I can think of right now. All right, Next question. I don't always have my camera with me, and I don't like keeping batteries always on charge. So are there times there? So there are times when I miss out on unexpected photos due to flat batteries. What tips can you give for maintaining a charge battery for those unexpected moments? Thanks, Rob. All right, Rob. Good question here. A lot of us have become very aware of this. Back in the days of film, I used to like to shoot a Nikon FM two because it would still work without batteries. And in the days of digital, you have to have a charge battery or you are completely out of the water. And so you do have to kind of keep up on where your batteries air charged. If you don't use your camera's on a regular basis, that can be a little bit of an issue. So one of the first things that I recommended most all of my camera classes is always having a spare battery, and so that way you have that battery charge and then you kind of cycle through them. In fact, here's what I Here's what I have today. I brought my Little Fuji camera with me because I not expecting to take photos. But I just want a small camera, and what I do is I have a small little pack that I bring with me wherever I take a camera, and inside this pack is the absolute essentials. When you're shooting, Number one is a charged spare battery. When the battery in the camera wears out, I have this one. I also carry a memory card because not that I'm likely to run out of pictures while I'm out shooting. But there may be a communication problem with my camera, and the simplest thing is to take out that memory card. Put in a new memory card, perhaps format it, and that way you can consist in you to shoot photos. Now, if I shoot too many photos, it's a nice thing to have, And the third and final thing I'll keep in this just very tiny little bag is a little tiny lens cleaning cloth. If you have a battery, a memory card in a cleaning cloth, you can handle just about any situation. Slings. You have your camera there with you, but what I do is I usually have to batteries, and then I just cycle through those next up. When I placed my camera down on a flat surface, the lenses tilted down, putting pressure on the lens. Does this place pressure on the lens or the lens mount that may cause damage? Can the lens be left with the zoom extended without causing damage? And that's from Michelle. Thank you, Michelle. Well, cameras are kind of unusual electronic devices. They're not like TVs and microwaves and stereo components that are designed just to sit there on the shelf. Camera manufacturers know that cameras are going to be taken out into the real world and used in a variety of different places. And so the lens mount from the body to the lens is generally a very, very strong mounting system, with one possible little exception that I would talk about is that a number of low in lenses have plastic mounts, and they're not going to be quite a strong. And if they get bumped really hard, they're more likely to just break and snap off on a higher and camera. It's not likely to move it all now. I have seen some cases on the sidelines of football games where a football player has crashed into a photographer and they're 600 millimeter lens in their professional body have become separated and damaged beyond repair, most likely. And so, with a normal case of taking a normal lens and setting it down, it's perfectly fine. One of the things I would caution for anyone that has a rather big lands is setting in the lands straight down. So the lenses straight up in the cameras on the top because that tends to be a very tall device that can fall over. The other thing I would mention not directly addressed in this question is be careful with camera straps and tables or counters if you put your camera on a table or counter and you have this strap hanging down off the side. If somebody comes brushing by that, they may hit the strap and pull the camera off the table. So you do have to be careful when you're not using your cameras, Where you where you were putting them. And so I'm often trying to put them well out of the way so that people aren't going to trip over them or I'm not going to step on them and keeping them out of the way. But as far as generally setting your camera down, no, I think that's going to something that all the cameras are built well, toe handle. Next question. I'm going to Antarctica on Antarctica Cruise. What lens do you recommend for the Nikon D 7100 and D 500? That's from Tom Bailey. Thank you. All right, we're going to Antarctica is got to be one of the best trips that anyone of us could take. I've been lucky enough to go a couple of times, and there is a lot of shooting that you can do from the boats because you do spend ah lot of time on the boats. I know getting from the southern tip of South American Antarctica is a several day. It's like a three day cruise where you're on the water totally for three days. And as you get closer to Antarctica, there's gonna be lots of icebergs, land potentially penguins, whales and other animals that you'll be able to photograph out there. You're gonna need a fairly long lens when you're shooting from the deck of the ship I have found. It's rather rare that you get to use any sort of wide angle to normal lens. And so something in that 301 100 to 400 range is gonna be a great lens, because there's gonna be a lot of details that are fairly far off now the D 7100 and the D 500 our crop frame cameras. And so I think a 300 millimeter lens would be good enough. In most cases, if you have a 400 I imagine that you'll be able to make use of that as well. If you're going down to Antarctica, they see the animals and they let you onshore and you get on shore. That's when you're gonna also want your normal too short telephoto. Zoom your 24 to seventies to 105 Those could be really handy. The ultra wides will not be as useful. It depends on the location that you go to. But if you're gonna be getting close to the penguins in South Georgia, yet you can get down there with an ultra wide lens and get right up close to the penguins. But from the ship itself, I think heading up on deck with a 72 300 or 100 or is where you're gonna be doing most your shooting. Alright, what lens do you recommend for use for street shooting in the night time? So street photography has a number of characteristics on what's best for that. Now, of course, all of this is filtered by what you want to do in the style that you like to shoot him. But let me let me give you a little slight here on some of the best lenses that I think for this type of work. And so when you talk about night time, we're talking about it being dark, and so you need a lens that lets in a fair bit of light. And so all of these lenses are relatively fast lenses. Now, in many cases there are options for even faster lenses. But the problem is, is that street photographers don't wanna have. They don't want a big a big fuss of themselves. In most cases, they want a small, discreet camera with a small, basic lands that doesn't draw a lot of attention. So, for instance, with Cannon, they make the 35 14 That's an excellent Lands, but most street photographers would it be shooting at 1.4? That's a very shallow depth of field, and you would really have to be careful about getting focus right. A number of street photographers prefer just shooting at F eight and Zone, focusing on something that's about 8 to 12 feet away. And then they would just compose and shoot, and in that case, you don't need a superfast lands. But if you are shooting at night, you might be shooting at two or 28 And these were all some good choices for some of the more popular systems out there that are small lightweight. They let in a fair bit of light. You can manually focus or auto focus all of these, and so this is what I would choose if I was going to be going out doing some street photography at night,