Essential Apps and Websites Part 3
Ben Willmore
Lessons
Creating a Compelling Composition
39:38 2Refining The Composition
13:16 3Recomposing for Compelling Composition
29:14 4Lenses
37:01 5Transporting Gear
15:44 6Camera Support
20:00 7Spot Metering and Isolating Brightness
14:57Background Isolation and Depth of Field
29:27 9Lens Distortion
14:22 10Photographing Panoramas and HDR
21:50 11Polishing in Post Part 1
18:48 12Polishing in Post Part 2
27:41 13Polishing in Post Part 3
32:04 14Shooting for the Sharpest Image
18:50 15Photographing the Sun and Filters
19:29 16Photographing Motion
21:17 17Optimizing Your Gear Part 1
32:01 18Optimizing Your Gear Part 2
41:25 19Essential Apps and Websites Part 1
26:28 20Essential Apps and Websites Part 2
16:02 21Essential Apps and Websites Part 3
15:43 22Processing HDR in Adobe Camera Raw
26:51 23Optimizing Panoramas in Photoshop
11:59 24Eliminating the Negatives in ACR
23:57 25Masking Color and Contrast
32:21 26Combining Images in Photoshop
13:20Lesson Info
Essential Apps and Websites Part 3
and then before we were talking about um working with different iphone aps and at the time though I wasn't able to tether on my phone and so I couldn't show you instead of just had screen shots and I wanted to show you a few other aps today find to be useful right now I just launched a nap it's called easy release and I use easy release on occasion when I need to get a model release if you know your photo is going to be used for an advertisement or other commercial purpose it's going to end up on the box for a product or something like that it is best if you have a model release and if it's a picture of ah recognisable building or anything it would be best if you get them to give you permission to use a photo of that so they don't later on take legal action against you to say I didn't want you teo you do that so easy release would allows you to do is of ideas hit the plus button in the upper right I'm going to create a new release either a model release or a property release I'm going ...
to do a property release for instance I shoot vintage gas stations and I shoot vin ish travel trailers that are all decked out and interesting looking and I make sure that I get out eh location release or property release for those because then if I ever used them in a book or in a big poster or something else and they say I don't want you to use that I can say now I get your permission right here so with easy release what I do is this just gives me a bunch of information to fill out in this case a shoot name so I could call this airstream trailer and if there's any kind of a shoot reference like if you have a database of chutes and you put like some sort of order number or project number on it you could put it here to refer to it hit the next but it just keeps asking me a bunch of questions if there's any question I either don't know the answer to or doesn't really relate to this I just leave it empty and I could just keep hitting next year I can choose the date that I shot it I can come in here and described the property and just keep going through put it put in things like addresses um I can take a picture so that I can remember what trailer was sometimes you know you end up you know the name doesn't really help you to remember what it is so you can take a picture and using that one and owner type keep going here owner's name I'm just gonna type in random text here but watch out with auto correct ever seen oh website I think it's called damn you auto correct if you want a laugh really hard out there anyway that's just all sorts of information and in essence you're filling out a pdf right now and I'm just going to skip most of these settings and the end result will just give you kind of a summary here then if you come down near the bottom it's the signatures and this has some read texts a not signed if I tap there now it gives me the actual model or property release so that the person that's going to sign it could read it if they wanted to and I can control what it says and then it says tap here to agree and you're supposed to turn your phone sideways and then that's not my signature but you consign it tap done and if you had any witnesses they consign it as well you also have space for notes in what's nice about this is when you're done with it you can email yourself a pdf and so here I can have a list of my different releases and if I end up tapping a little icon near the upper right of one of them it will generate a pdf it will pop it into a email for me and it's sitting right there it's got a picture of the thing I shot it's got signatures it's got the full release and I find that to be overly useful something so convenient just pull out of my pocket and be able to work with you can uh customise all sorts of studies in there so you're not stuck with the with the uh defaults that are in there that was called I believe easy release I'm sure there are many other absent to model releases but I find it to be overly useful because then if I'm just seen somebody on the street I want to take a photo of them if there's any hint that I might want to sell that photo as a stock photo they only model releases the and if I'm going to use it for any kind of commercial purpose it's going to be needed and it's just good to have in general for any purpose but being able to just pull it out of your pocket and do it that quick is rather nice I fill it out for them and the only when I'm done I just hand him the phone to sign it okay then here's another thing that I find to be overly useful it's called field tools so with field tools there's a couple different things you can do I just chose an option called near plus far in this will tell you how much within your scene will be acceptably sharp meaning it's a depth of field calculator so what I can do in here is tell it the focal length that I'm going to shoot at let's say framed up uh a shot and I ended up having my zoom lines such one hundred thirty millimeters and I happen to have my camera set to f eleven well this tells me the top of my screen if I had these three different variables set up on my camera this is exactly the range of things that would be acceptably sharp within that scene from one hundred twenty six feet to infinity to as far back as I can see in so I can see what would happen if I focused it closer what would happen what I still get infinity all right what I still get infinity and focus or would I not if I change my aperture setting what happens at what point when I start opening up my aperture it is infinity no longer being focus so now it's from three hundred twenty four three hundred sixty two feet in the upper left is where it tells me to a ridiculously far distance twenty eight thousand feet but not the absolute furthers so this is a nice thing if you're not sure what's gonna happen when you change your aperture setting with various lenses and I think it's rather nice the one main setting though that most photographers would use in the field is a choice that the top called hyper with hyper you khun tell it the focal length of the lens that you're going teo shoot with let's say I'm going to use a seventy millimeter and then I could tell it the aperture I'm going to shoot with it tells me that if I focus at this distance the fifty foot distance then everything from that point to infinity should be in focus this tells you where would you need to focus in order to get everything from from that point to infinity meaning to the very back of the scene sharpe so you could come in here and say that I have a focal length of whatever you needed to use let's say a seventy millimeter let's say I was taking a picture of one of those vintage bus is like the gray hound I had the other day and I knew that the front of the greyhound was so many feet away well I could come over here and find out what after setting what I need to use in order to get something is close as the bus to be in focus if I bring up the aperture let's say the bus was twenty five feet from me well I bring this up and I'm just looking at the feet that it's telling me and let me see if I can get it so what's twenty five feet in front of me would be in focus there I'd have to be enough twenty in order to do that so if I'm using is a sixty eight millimeter lands and I need what's twenty five feet in further and behind it in focus I need to set this to have twenty you'd actually get a little bit more than that because you get some space in front of the focus point in focus but it's just really nice to be able to have this in your pocket pull it out at any time and if you want to get a sense for where you would need to focus and you would also be able to calculate exactly what kind of depth you'd be able tio uh keep sharp field tools field tools just say no when it comes to your phone if it's an iphone you khun organize things into folders the way I organize my things and I need to reorganize this since the new operating system came out for the iowa's is if you drag one app on top of another one you just press and hold it until he started giggling if you drag one on top of another that's how you create a folder but you can now have multiple screens of folders so if I end up coming in here in tapping on something like photography I'm not limited to what will fit in one folder I can just swipe left and have mohr our aps in each folder so it makes it so you can really narrow down the topics that are in your folders that used to be and have like photography one photography to photography seven for all my shooting aps and so what I end up doing is I have one folder called camera aps and so those are various absolutely used to actually capture images with I have another folder just called photography which is often has to do with displaying my photos or similar things and then I have another one called photo effects which is this is where I'm going to go in and make the photos look quite different then I also have another folder called locations and this is where if I want to find any locations this is where I'm going ahead so that's where I have ever places that's the one that keep track on my locations in this is where I have that field school because I might use that when I'm on location roadside is what tells me about the interesting like odd america kind of sites there's tied track that tells me about tides moon phase and the one called abandoned he is going to tell me about abandoned things in my general area and I switched through and I get even more so there's my villa clock dark sky all those other kind of things one apple didn't mention previously is one called shoot local it's when I haven't been using all that much yet but it looks somewhat interesting if I simply tap on a choice called nearby it will tell me about nearby locations that other people have been shooting at and so I can then tap on them and see if they look interesting to me and I can also look at them on a map and therefore I can say all right in this area near where I am I'm going to go for a walk and go over this way and what where is that the people have been shooting okay there's some studios there over here is the particular address if I tapped on it I'd see their photo and get an idea for is there any interesting nearby locations that photographers have been into hey ben are you wanna instagram and if so could people follow you do you have a hand I'm no longer on instagram okay I didn't like the way they're messing with their legal agreements and everything it just made it so I wasn't I just wasn't into it as much I used to be though okay yeah thank you so instead if you want to follow me as far as seeing my photography yeah one of the better ways of doing that would be probably be to visit my blawg my blood gets updated once a week and it'll show you what I've been shooting for the week and that kind of stuff in that you can get teo at where is ben dot com and that's one way great yeah um then here's an app called sun seeker sunseeker I find to be overly useful mainly with one particular feature and what that is is in the lower right there's a button called three d view if I tap on three d view what it's doing at the moment is it's activating my camera which I don't know if you want to show the entire studio here or not but it's showing my camera so here's my laptop I get pictures there and you see that yellow little fake son that's sitting there with a narrow it's telling me where the sun is right now and so at the moment I'm inside so I have no idea where the sun is but I can tell you it is right there at the moment so outside the sun would be at that position and so let's say I'm in a particular location and I want to know when the sun comes down is it going to go behind this building that's over here or is it going to go right in the middle of this arch that I want to shoot well I just follow the yellow line that's there and it tells me at three pm it'll be there at four p m it's going to be here and it's going to go down below the horizon right there and I can plan then when I'm standing in a particular location where that son is going to end up heading in there four deciding would it be better for me to come back later when the sun gets into a strategic position and so you can just follow this whole thing could be a little view of the studio here here's where the sun would come up and I can see what time of day because you can see each hour mark there that's pretty darn cool I think in when I get to a particular location especially with architecture er I want to see can I get it when the sun might be right between those two buildings so I get a starburst on it and get something interesting will mask the app that can help me do that and the name again please um sun seeker sunseeker etc yeah for those here that can't or the sun is just take a look um well let's see I think actually were pretty good with the apse then so anyway you got a sense for some of the absolutely used we talked about cell from earlier today and we ended up popping into a little bit more here mainly because I was able to tether to my phone and actually show them I didn't have screenshots of absolutely everything so wanted to make sure there's a few others I could sneak in there
Class Materials
Ratings and Reviews
David gridiron
Ben Willmore's class about Think Like a Photographer is a fantastic class. Ben has the ability that very few people have and that is to keep the students attention and excitement about the topic. I have been a teacher for 38 years and it is a profession that very few people can do well. Ben has nailed this class and I am so excited to take his class. I just hope I will be able to someday meet him and thank him for giving me inspiration to pursue my passion. This is well worth expense and I encourage people to take this class. All the topics are covered from what to look for when taking a photograph, equipment, and processing. Tremendous!!!!!
David gridiron
I am almost finished and this is the most comprehensive photography course I have seen. I have taken some local courses, some other on line courses and hundreds of magazine articles, however Ben Willmore is fantastic. I am a retired teacher of 39 years and Ben has the unique ability that most people do not have to relate all his students. I takes a very special person to be a good teacher and Ben nailed it. I highly recommend this class. Mr. Willmore covers all aspects of photography from the very basic to the advanced. Very well done. My next goal is to try to meet Ben Willmore and personally tell him thanks. Kudos to Creativelive as well.
Ashleigh L
AMAZING CLASS! I caught bits and pieces of the live stream, but even in those bits and pieces of it, I learned so much! He's a great teacher, easy to understand and great visuals. He "walks around" the subject to give us different POV, tells us the negative/positive/neutral of the photo, and tips. Thank you, Ben!
Student Work
Related Classes
Fundamentals