Lessons

Lesson Info

The Beach: Sunset & Sunrise

(camera shutter clicking) So, in this chapter I take you with me on a shoot at the beach to show you how I approach one of my favorite times of day, sunset. I told you I'll give you my basics, so here you're going to learn what my favorite camera settings are for sunset, how to read a histogram, and how to take photos of your friends, girlfriends, wife, just not professional models. But before we begin, let me talk to you about something super important in photography which is flexibility. I'm hoping for a perfect sunset with glowing clouds. That don't always happen and that's what makes them special. It's easy to get frustrated when things don't go your way, so, the best way I found to deal with it is having backup plans. (upbeat music) (sea waves rumbling) So, we're sitting in Mexico at the beach. The Sun is setting in about one hour, and today we've scouted a few spots. So, I have Andrea here with me. Thank you. She's not a professional model or anything. And I'm doing this, so yo...

u, when you travel this summer, can do the same thing. You can use your friends, your girlfriend, your wife. It's easier to work with people you know. For sunset, I actually like having a silhouette, because it gives more context to the image. Usually, the person is back lit anyways or front lit. It's just a shadow, but it gives context and it brings a viewer in. Let's get shooting. (peaceful music) There we go. Hey, it's me, Alex. This is my voiceover voice. It sounds a lot nicer than when we're on the field, because there's no wind, or waves, or anything like that. And I'm gonna use this to share more value and knowledge as we go through the workshop. Let's get into it. So, actually there's a massive surfboard right there. It's orange so I'm using this tree to cover it. (peaceful music) So, these are my settings for sunset I have 2.8 bokeh behind Andrea, fast shutter speed to go with it. It's still pretty bright out. Bring your hand forward and then bring the hammock, yeah. Yeah, that's good. Okay, stay like that. The 5D broke. Trouble in paradise, the 5D is broken. It did? No, it froze, so in this case, battery out, battery in, and it's back running. Good old 5D. So, here I'm making it seem like Andrea took the photo herself. It makes you, the viewer, feel like you were there. It's immersive, get creative with it. I think we're done with this hammock, can we try the other hammock? Can you turn to the left? (camera shutter clicking) Yeah, not yet. Just record the other to get. (camera shutter clicking) That's good. Yeah again, once more. (gentle music) When I'm shooting for sunset, especially with big apertures, like 2.8, 1.4, I'm always checking for focus. It's easy to miss it and sometimes I don't mind it, but at least I try to get it right. Sometimes my favorite photo is the one that's out of focus, but I try to keep checking it at least. I move my clusters to be on the right spot so I don't have to move the camera around. So, the audio focus clusters have to be on the right section of the image and I just move them about. Here I wanted a shot that shows motion and carefreeness. So I ask Andrea to fool around and use the hammock like a swing. So, I let her try things and keep her encouraging, and steering her towards the photo I had in my mind. (peaceful piano music) We're moving down to the beach to shoot some more minimalistic portraits with only the ocean in the background. Yeah, it's not about getting the most epic photos of the beach. It's just about having a collection of photos of the beach. I know what my iconic shot's gonna be. It's gonna be a DA frame I've seen before. So, I'm just getting a collection so we can finish with that big one. It's like more of a story. I was shooting Andrew's feet, and I'm just making some portraits, and there's a rope swing. So, just like that we have a set that makes sense that tells a sunset in Tulum. Eye contact, a lot of people avoid it. So, be different and don't shy away from having your subject looking at the lens. It brings the viewer in. So, histogram is all the data of a photo on a graphic. In a property exposed photo, your histogram looks kind of like little valleys, It's balanced there's no like big, big peaks. This is a tough one to expose, because it's dark in here and bright outside. I just need to check a couple times and I also want to fast shutter speed because Andrea's gonna run towards me. 320, 2.8, 400 ISO. Sea first. Just like we talked before, the histogram looks like I can save the dark of the shadows and this is not bad on a raw. And my highlights are manageable. The middle there's not much, but this I can save. I'd rather get underexposed than overexposed. I'd always rather underexposed. You can always save the shadows when you're shooting RAW, but the highlights can never be saved. (camera shutter clicking) Yes, nice, this is the air frame. That's the yoga room. Yeah, that's the yoga room, yeah, air frames. Andrea's messing around, but she's a good yogi, actually. (Alex chuckles) I think she's happy here. Two things that are important here. First one is that, this whole coastline is facing east which means sunsets are a bit odd, because you don't get to see the silhouette of the Sun, you're only getting the light up in the sky. So, you need some clouds like tonight, Tonight, it's good, because there's big clouds in the sky and they should catch the light from the sunset and say they should. And the second thing is this place, so it helps having this location, right? I mean it's a big air frame with grass on the sides of it. It's cool. So, I found it randomly today I was just walking around whenever I have some free time at the hotel. I like to go walk around randomly, left, right. And I try to go fast so I can scout a lot of things, but you don't have to do a bunch. Just keep in mind that extra five minutes you can spend looking for something. Then I found this and I was like, perfect for sunset. For this whole sunset chapter, I've been using the 16-35, and here it's coming in really handy, because this wide at 16, this looks immense. You can still use an 18-55 kit lens on this, it's still gonna be this effect. But try to keep in mind what gear you use for what location. 16, there's a lot of deformation, 18, too, so it makes things taller, looks great here. (peaceful piano music) (camera shutter clicking) So, one thing I've noticed here is that even with my exposure dialed, it's still pretty dark up here, it's very silhouetty. So, sometimes I do like a handheld, triple-exposure HDR photo. It's not really an HDR, but I stitch him into Lightroom after and I'm gonna have to do that here. What I do here is start with an underexposed photo with all my information in the sky. Then, I do a normal photo, kind of average just like you do in HDR and then I do overexposed photo. So, with a slower shadow speed, more ISO. So, I get all my details in here and when you go to edit you got to be pretty tasteful, because it's pretty easy to make it look completely surreal, that's not the goal. I just want it to feel have more information in the hut, because it's cool. And I want to get this wood, and see the sky outside be blue and hopefully it gets red. Try to use that. If you've never heard of an HDR just look it up and look how you do it in Lightroom. It's important that your model doesn't move, because if model moves, Lightroom freaks out. It's fine if you shake a little bit, that's fine. It can correct it, but if your subject moves, no good. All right, don't move. (camera shutter clicking) So, I start with this with my sky outside correctly. Then, I go with my overexposed. So we see all the information inside the huts here and then I just take a normal one. Good, get a little closer. (peaceful music) (ocean waves crashing) (peaceful music) So, I'm getting lower, because I want Andrea's silhouette. She's completely silhouetted by now and that's fine. You just have to own it. She's silhouetted and I want her to be against the water instead of against the sand. (peaceful music) One other thing I like to do here when I'm shooting a portrait for somebody close, I actually don't focus on the subject, but focus on the background. so Andrea's blurry and the background is sharp. It gives it this cool feel (peaceful music) When you're working with natural environments, you can't control everything. Tonight we hoped for a sunset, it didn't really happen. The clouds haven't light up yet and I don't think they will. We're gonna have to do a second session I think and come back here for sunrise, facing east, be great so always adapt. You know things happen, you plan for it, but it doesn't work. We got some solid shots, but I still think we can do better and if you have the time, look out for sunrise. That's what we're gonna do. (peaceful music) It's 6:00 a.m. in the tropics and after a short night we're headed to a rooftop pool to catch first light. (peaceful music) All right, so where's the Sun gonna rise exactly. If we're using sun seeker, we'll reset the compass. All right, that's today. It's right there. It's just gonna get above us at seven so we can probably do the drone earlier, which will be higher up. I like to have my stuff ready to go. Let me use the time, all right. (drone humming) With the drone, I'm always underexposing, I feel, easy to get it overexposed. Nice size to 100, sharp speeds 500, aperture is 2.8. I'm looking for whatever I think is interesting and I think here the blue pools are pretty cool in the jungle, just like little pods of water and I'm gonna do a panorama. One, pan up at two, then pan up at three. And we're still waiting for the light before she goes into the water, I think. (peaceful music) (camera shutter clicking) I'm doing panoramas one, two, three photos. Then we're gonna stitch them into Photoshop, just get more quality out of one photo, especially if you plan to do it portrait. I always like to get some video footage as well. (drone humming) So, now I switch to the camera in terms of settings have 13-20, F four, 200 A. (camera shutter clicking) (inspiring music) So, that's it for how to shoot sunset and in the end I'm happy, sunset didn't really happen. We could talk about plan Bs. Remember to always be flexible with your photos, It's about having fun and enjoying. Photography brings me a lot of joy and I hope it does that for you too. Don't get bugged down or discouraged, because things don't work the way you want. You can't win them all. Be ready for things to not work out and have a backup plan, anyways. On the next chapter, I'll head down on a solo kayak mission to this historical river called Casa Cenote. (gentle music)