Lessons

Lesson Info

Aerial Composition

(gentle music) So I wanted to go over just a couple images that I've shot in the past. Maybe some of my more well known aerial photographs and really just dive quickly into the composition, what I was looking for, how it was shot, I guess dispel or breakdown the mystery of some of these images. This first one is of the Maelifell Field Volcano in Iceland. And this is a super iconic spot. And the reason I start with this one is because it was actually from a shoot that I did that I shared a little bit earlier where it was a totally unsuccessful trip. I went there with the hopes of seeing these beautiful glacial rivers, right? Gorgeous patterns, full of color, flowing after the ocean. But I was there about three, four months too early, which means it was late spring. And the whole interior of the country was covered in snow. I should not have been there searching for that, but I was. And I think the whole point here is that obviously you turn lemons in a lemonade, right? This is a situa...

tion where I didn't quite go there for what I hoped, but I created something different when I saw the Maelifell Volcano, which is this perfectly cylindrical volcano that comes up outta nowhere. During a normal summertime, it's really, really green, surrounded by black. It's beautiful. But in the winter, it's just this pure white cone. And because the sun was out, it made this incredible almost sundial effect where it cast this beautiful shadow that was coming to a perfect point. And I saw this feature and I was circling around a couple times. One of the things I really love with aerial photography that I find when it comes to composition is, if I have a subject in mind, I always like being able to see what's just over their head. What's just beyond them. Meaning that the point here is that you're showing and you're leaning into the fact that this is an aerial perspective. So to be able to see above that subject. So in this case, yes, I'm a couple 1,000 feet above the ground and I decided to go a little bit higher, maybe 3,000 to 4,000 feet so I could see beyond the volcano, which shows me the glacier. And I think that that perspective being a little closer, aiming slightly down, it tends to give the image a little more depth as opposed to the lower you go, it stacks up your subject, right? So instead of seeing subject, subject, I'm a little bit above it and it's allowing me to peer over. And I know that's a little complicated to understand, but the goal here is I want to create three dimensional images. You do that by separating your subject from the background. You separate your subject from the background by giving space between those two objects. When you're in a plane, you can do that really easily. That's the secret here, is that planes or aerial photography or drones, they allow you to have no limit to the space in which you can operate and you can raise your camera and position it anywhere. With this image, I tried to focus on two things. I really like shooting into the sun. It makes for more drama, right? The sun creates more of a silhouette. If you want to hear more about all this, tune in some of my other workshops that talk more about that composition. But for here, I'm really trying to create more of a timeless aesthetic. I love the shadow that's coming off that. I love the sparkle in the river. So the river's coming into the right side of the frame. And basically that's leading in and fanning out. And it's a leading line that takes you from one edge of the frame up, and it brings you to the volcano. So your eye naturally is pulled from the river to the volcano. And the volcano has this really beautiful shadow that it's showing you. So this is my shot. It's lemons to lemonade. Again, I found this perspective and I really worked it. I usually circle around my subject three to four times. Usually what I do and it's a new place is I'll be like, "Hey, can we go around this at a couple different heights?" Let's go around at 500, 1,000, 2,000 feet and allow me to take a couple images, right? And so as I did this, usually I'm circling a little further, a little further, a little further each time. So not only am I elevating myself 500, 1,000, 2,000, I'm also giving more space, 500, 1,000 to this direction. So I'm taking larger circles. And that's just giving me a greater perspective. Sometimes you'll find with aerial photographs that's so challenging because you often have this idea that this is the angle, this is the perspective. And as you fly away, you look back and you're like, "Dang it, that's the one." This next image is of a biplane, same exact biplane that's behind me. And what I mean by that is not the same exact one, but the same style, everything just so you know most, if not, all biplanes are yellow. Planes are often yellow for one reason and one reason only. And it's not because they look cool. It's because they are seen easily, right? If you have a brown plane or a black plane, I would be concerned 'cause it's gonna be really hard to find in that landscape. So this is in Kauai. I remember I already shared this experience, but I was there on a family trip. I went up in the air with a really cool little mom-and-pop fixed swing outfit. And they took me around and they showed me some beautiful stuff. And I basically was like just the first trip, I just said, "Just show me everything. Show me whatever." And I had my camera, I shot a little bit, but most of the time I was just trying to digest what I was seeing. And the next day I was like, "Okay, that was beautiful. I want to go back to the Na Pali Coast. I wanna take this biplane you guys have. How much would it cost me rent the biplane, rent one of your planes and do a flight seeing tour, do some air to air." And they give me a price. And I was like, "Cool, let's go for it." So this is the by-product of that shoot. Basically, I had scouted this area. I looked for the spot in the Na Pall Coast where I felt like the fins were the most dramatic. And what I found by that was being closer to them, slightly over them, gave them more of this really, really pinned out shape that was really interesting, right? If I compressed in from far away, they just felt flat. So again, this is a situation where I'm shooting with the 16 to 35. I'm slightly over my plane, my subject, meaning, I'm seeing what's beyond them. There's also clouds wrapping in. So this is one of those moments right before the plane went into these clouds that's surrounding these mountains. And it creates a bit of a surreal esoteric look. I really love this image. There's some side light coming in here. Again, the main perspective that I think makes this interesting besides the plane being in the shot is the fact that I have this landscape that I'm pretty close to. And it almost makes you guess, whoa, where did you shoot this from? Because it's such a wide angle shot. And this was shot I believe in the summertime. Again, I wasn't really choosing a season. I was just picking the time that made sense to go. This image is back in Iceland, and this is flying over a pseudo crater. A pseudo crater are these really cool almost pimples that come outta the earth where they actually look like they're miniature volcanoes, but in fact, they're pseudo craters. Meaning there was a crater with steam vent and that steam vent collapsed and it made a tiny little volcano-looking thing. And I was flying with a bunch of Bush pilots who were flying in Piper Cubs. Again, the pretty much the native color of a Piper Cub is usually bright yellow so you can see it. This Bush pilot who's flying right here is super experienced. And I saw these pseudo craters when we were flying around them. And again, I was like, "Oh man, I wanna document these." And we called 'em on the radio. And we were all pretty proficient shooting air-to-air. And I'm like, "Can you fly right through the center of these?" And then our goal was to spin around him at the right angle so that as he flew through the center, we were banking and coming through. Now, it's really challenging to do. And this is why I'm so proud of this image because shot perfect time of year, really bright, really vibrant, right? All the moss is growing on this thing. The plane's going through straight through the center. I love it because I am, again, slightly over it. I'm looking into the volcano. So I compose this, first and foremost, to really show this pseudo crater, this volcano-looking thing, right? That's the goal. And then if the plane can in some way enhance that vision, or in this case, give you scale, then it's gonna be a successful image. That's my rule of thumb with any landscape. Don't put a subject in there just arbitrarily for no reason. Put a subject in there because it's going to enhance the landscape. It's going to, in some way, allow the viewer to feel like they're getting a sense of scale. They're getting a sense of where you are, of why. They're getting a sense of how big it is, right? And this is what this brings to the table here. This was shot with a 24 to 70. Again, almost all the time when I'm shooting here, I'm shooting at typically during the day as fast of a shutter speed as I can. I don't really care about the F-stop. Why? Because I'm shooting subjects that are so far away. It's oftentimes at infinity, right? This plane is maybe a couple of 1,000 feet away from me. And I'm really just shooting this whole scene at infinity, meaning that it could be at F/2.8, could be at F/5, six doesn't matter. I really care mostly about my shutter speed being as high as possible so there's no blur affecting that shot. This is in a photograph of Iceland's glacial rivers, one of my actually highest selling prints. So a photograph that I've licensed a lot and used a ton of times. What makes it so significant? It's the very first flow of the river in spring. You can see the color, which is just native right from the glacier. It's like the glacier is literally right outta frame here. And it's this beautiful Aquamarine green color that's flowing through this white landscape. You can see that spring or spring summers creeping in with little brown hits here and there. It's a really interesting image because a couple days prior to this, this landscape was frozen over, right? The water was not flowing, but the moment it started to flow, this color came down. It was just so vibrant and beautiful. This was shot on the east side of the Hofsjökull Glacier in Iceland. This is a spot that I had scouted prior and a spot I'd also seen on Google Earth. I knew that there were some really colorful pools there and that those pools had the chance of, on a hot day, pouring out, emptying out into these glacial river beds and basically flowing towards the ocean. So this is something I sought out. Again, when I'm shooting these glacial rivers and I'm trying to really capture the color that's in them, oftentimes you wanna be flying directly above them and banking really hard so you're shooting straight down. The more directly straight down you're shooting, the greater chance that polarizer has on your lens to cut the reflection and see that true, real color that's right inside. And this is what makes I think a lot of these glacial river images so powerful. Oftentimes you'll notice that you're not really shooting this three quarters view. You're trying to shoot straight down because that's where you get the most color. The other perspectives can be really powerful, but this is one situation from an aerial perspective where I do wanna shoot straight down. I don't really wanna look above my subject. This image here is shot in Greenland. This is with the drone. Now, why am I shooting with the drone? Because it's near impossible to get a flight scene tour in this part of Greenland. We're in the Sermilik Fjord. I said that terribly. Sermilik, something like that, fjord. It's in East Greenland. We literally spent eight days just exploring this one Fjord. That's how deep it was. And this photograph I love because you have obviously the boat there, the Aurora Arktika. You have beyond that, you have a little kayaker cruising around just somebody who was on a workshop with me there. And then behind it is this massive rad chunk of ice that just broke off from the glacier. You can see the glacier in the background, and then rocks and then sky. So again, this is a great example of where a drone perfectly makes sense, right? It's a situation where we're launching it off the boat. There's no way to get any type of craft out there. The weather's changing so frequently that you can never time it right with anything else. Plus, it was just one of those places where it just made sense. You're legal to fly drones there. You're not bothering anybody. You're not bothering any animals. You're with a group of people who totally knows what you're doing. And this image gives perfect example of that idea of creating a three-dimensional image where you're putting each one of your subjects in a three-dimensional space. And what I mean by that is, think about the rule of thirds, right? Now, throw it out the window. Let's think about rule of 10s, of 20s. If there's 20 lines of subject matter, I want them all legible. I want my ice, my boat, my kayaker, my chunk of ice, my land, my glacier. And when you look at this image, you'll see it, the sky, the clouds, I want them all separated so that they can be seen from the ice, so you can scan the image top to bottom. And what I'm usually doing is I'm picking my distance. Again, and I'm going up taking a photo, 100 feet up taking a photo, 100 feet up taking a photo. I shot this with the zoom drone so that I could zoom in a little bit. It allows me to compress my subject a little more if I wanted to as well or shoot wider. That's one of the beauties of that drone. So I could get really, really, really far away compress in, bring everything to the forefront while still having separation, or shooting super, super wide and getting closer. Again, using a polarizer here, but in this case, because there's so much reflection on the water, it's not cutting through any of that reflection. Also, this water's not clear at all. So I'm usually using a polarizer in this case here to contrast the clouds in the sky, which is one of the other advantages of a polarizer. One of my other favorite images here. This is an aerial landscape of the Navajo land in Utah. And I remember flying in ultralight craft. This is a trike many, many years ago. I believe this area is definitely off limits to flying drones unless you have a permit. It can be I think on limits to flying commercial craft if you have a permit. But this was shot in a ultralight trike a long, long time ago. Maybe one of the first aerial flights I did over the Southwest. And I think my goal here was to showcase this landscape, again, from a new perspective. It's always the goal here. I'm shooting very, very wide, 16 to 35. And just as a disclaimer, on any area that is native land, Navajo land flying over some of these really beautiful monuments of theirs is considered unsacred. So you never wanna fly directly over the top 'cause it's like flying directly over the top of their God. So yeah, we're flying around this really wide perspective, 16 and 35, trying to show each one of the features here, the mittens, and the sun in the background. And this was sunrise. I just love the way that the whole frame seems to come towards you and converge in the space. You have subject matter, subject matter. And then this final mitten here, sun in the background. And again, I think it's a good example of how when you separate those things and you allow them to be on different plane, you really bring them to life, right? This is probably one of my favorite images to print large. Again, probably one of those photos where if you were to shoot it with a drone, it wouldn't work because the quality would fall apart. The dynamic range is not there to be shooting into the sun and capture the shadows and capture the highlights. This is where a camera, specifically, a 60 megapixel, or a high-end camera can really bring the image to life, right? There's a lot going on. There's a lot of shadows, a lot of depth. Again, 16 to 35, I think shot with a a7R the first one or something like that. Colorado Great Sand Dunes National Park. This is a photograph, and I believe the next one here, this is a photograph that I shot with a 7200. And I put this in here because I wanna show you where and how a 7200 can really make something interesting. In this case, we had a permit. We were shooting for a project for Sony, and we had the ability to fly over the sand dunes, but we had limitations. You have to fly a certain height over the sand dunes to make it legal. In this case, I remember I really wanted to compress these trike pilots, right? Or basically they look like some sort of a pair of glider with a motorcycle attached to the bottom. These two trike pilots, my good friends, I wanted to compress them into the landscape, right? And one of the beautiful things about these dunes is the fact there's these crazy shapes or star dunes, right? It's a three-dimensional dune that has actually three distinct sides from three distinct wind patterns. The only other place you can find those is actually in the Empty Quarter in the Middle East. So this is a really significant place. It's in the American Southwest. It's in the Four Corners area. And it actually has the largest, highest dunes, sorry, in North America, which is right around like 900 feet or 600 feet. Anyway, I'm flying in a plane in this scenario and I'm flying above this height restriction, but I wanted to compress them into the landscape. So I shot with actually a doubler on my and I compress them down. So it looks like they're flying just like 50 feet above the ground, but they're actually 1,000 feet or more, or 1,500 feet or something like that above the dunes. And I'm just compressing them into that landscape. Now, this was a hard shot to get because again, it's late, it's sunset. The more you're compressing and the bigger the lens, the greater the sense of vibration, right? So I had to shoot a higher ISO. I had to shoot a higher shutter speed and I shot a slightly higher F-stop here. Another shot from Greenland shot with the drone. Again, this is just more of that elevated-looking straight down perspective. You can see that in this case, I've gone against my thought process of showing the horizon and in the last image too. Sometimes it can be really powerful to show the horizon. Sometimes I like to not show the horizon. I think not showing the horizon gives you a sense of mystery. Where are they? Where does this land end? Where does it... If you're showing chunks of ice and you can't see where it ends, you leave the viewer wondering and thinking, "Well, does it ever end? And so there's a sense of mystery created there. And you're trying to tell a story. And in this case, the story is, how does this boat navigate through this ice? This looks crazy. This looks impossible. But we did, right? And it's such a cool image because in this case, the polarizer unlike the other shot where we were very close to the glacial mouth, where all that silty water's pouring out, the water here is crystal clear, and you can see way down to the bottom of these icebergs, right? So that's what makes this image really cool. Very different image. This photograph is more about the icebergs, less about the boat. More about telling that story of us weaving through. One thing you'll see and if you've, again, taken part in some other workshops, you'll know that I'm trying to not center my frame with the subject, meaning the boat is off to the side, left or right so that I can leave room for a spread, or something to go right in the gutter there. 'Cause if this photo was to be printed, I don't think it's very nice to bullseye your subject or to have it right in the center. So with these images, I really want to just go through some of my compositional tips. Again, you'll see, sometimes you're breaking the rules. Sometimes you're going against what you say. The whole point here is that each image in some capacity needs to tell a story, whether you're utilizing a subject, in this case, a boat, a paraglider, a trike pilot, or a plane, or you're shooting just a pure landscape, a river, or a beautiful volcano casting a shadow, the goal here is, you want to find that unique perspective. If you're going out and you're trying to really just recreate what you've seen somebody else do, I don't think there's gonna be a deep connection to that image. I don't think there's gonna be an intimacy created. So, my hope and goal here is that all of these images should play a part in a larger story. You should play a part in giving the viewer a larger sense of what it was like to be there. And I think that is the greatest compositional tip that I could offer.