Landscape Photography Picture Perfect iPhone Photography with Jack Hollingsworth

HI, I'm Jack Hollingsworth. In this
Picture Perfect episode we're going to be sharing with you tips on shooting
landscape photography with your iPhone No.1 - Because I so often shoot at both dawn
and dusk, I'm almost always shooting with a tripod No.2 - Because of the relative size of the lens to the sensor that fixed f2.2 Is
like shooting at f22. No.3 - The iPhone has a built-in reflective light
meter in can be fooled when shooting directly in to your light sources number
for almost all iPhone files can be No.4 - Almost all iPhone files can be improved by
adding brightness, contrast, saturation and sharpness. No.5 - By far my favorite time of day of
shooting is either early morning or late afternoon No.6 - The timelapse feature of the
iPhone 6s camera rocks.

No.7 - Did you know that you can take up to a 63 MP when you shoot a full panorama with your iPhone. No. 8 - The iPhone 6S has built in optical image stabilization perfect for shooting video with your iPhone No.9 - The editing tools that come bundled with the phone will be more than sufficient for the bulk of your editing needs No.10 -  I sparingly used attachment lenses with my iPhone camera when I do it's usually a wide or a super wide angle Thanks for joining me on AdoramaTV
and don't forget to subscribe to AdoramaTV. By clicking the link below.

Let us
know what you think, like, comment, and share this video and
don't forget to visit the Adorama Learning Center to learn more great tips
and tricks on photography great-looking Prince of low-cost be sure
to visit our easy to use online printing service at around the pics as
professionals to treat your images with the utmost care that you can count on
your clit turnaround on photos cards or albums use a drama picks dot com.

How to Pose Friends Who Aren't Models (Portrait Photography)

- Today we have a special treat for you. Where did I put that? (Squeaking) You guys asked us for a tutorial on how to pose solo portraits, so today my sister Megan
is gonna help us show you how to pose clients and friends who aren't necessarily models. We're gonna draw on a lot of tips that we've show you in previous tutorials to show you how you can apply these to almost any genre of photography. Let's get started.

(Funky space indie rock music) (rattling) (squeaking) Remember when we told
you that straight lines provoke feelings of
brashness and masculinity and S-curves provoke feelings
of softness and femininity? Well, that applies to
posing people as well. Depending on the mood and look you want, have your subject keep his or her limbs and torso straight and
jagged or bent and curved. Two, direct instead of pose. If you remember from our
tutorial on shooting couples, we would recommend directing over posing.

So after you've chatted with your subject about the shape of her limbs and torso, don't give her any more direction on where to place her
hands or chin, et cetera. Instead, give her a role to
play or an emotion to act out. Here, I've told Megan to imagine that I've just given her
access to any of the clothes in my childhood bedroom closet. It's funny to her, because
I would never do that.

Here, I've told her that my
parents had her on accident. Before you start shooting,
figure out the story you want to portray in your image. Determine the emotion that
will help convey that message, and help your subject feel
and act out that emotion. This will give your photos a more lifelike and interesting quality.

A great way to naturally
capture a candid moment is to give your subject
(camera snapping) an action to portray that
creates motion in your photo. This could be as simple
as having your subject shake out her hair or
repeat a stride in place. Capturing the photo mid-action can bring life and interest to the shot. Recap.

1, Use straight lines & S-curves. 2, Direct your subject
instead of posing him or her. 3, Utilize motion to add interest. - We hope you guys enjoyed that tutorial.

This week, when you post your portraits, use the hashtag
#mangostreetportraits on Instagram so we can check out your work. And as always, please like and subscribe if you haven't already,
and I'll see you next week.  We the stars we the stars  We all stars we all stars.

How to convert film negatives to digital photos using a DSLR

Hi Makers, Builders, Do-It-Yourselfers and
Photographers. Harley here with another House of Hacks video. I know this one is supposed
to be part two of making soft jaws for the vise but I'm currently in the process of working
on that, as evidenced by my red fingers. And last night I was talking with my Dad about
scanning some negatives to convert them to digital and that kind of inspired me to do
this video where I go over some of the details that I've done in the past for this project.
So this video is going to be about converting negatives into digital pictures.

I got this idea a couple years ago online
from somewhere. I thought it was DIYPhotography.Net but when I went to look for it, I couldn't
find the original article. I did find two other interesting articles though on that
sight about how to do the same task using a different manner, so I'll put a link down
in the description if you're interested in some alternatives, go check them out. DIYPhotography.Net
is a great resource for do-it-yourself photography ideas.

Anyway, this is one I put together
a couple years ago and that's what I'm going to be showing today. Ok, we have a pretty simple setup here. We
just have a cardboard box with holes cut out on both ends and a camera pointing into it
with a means of holding the negative. In this case I have my camera here setup with a radio
trigger on top and I'm using a holder for an enlarger to hold the negative.

You could
just as easily use a piece of cardboard cut out with a hole in it. On the other side of
this box there is the flash with the other end of the radio remote. And inside the box
there's a piece of paper. Get some light inside there.

So you can see it's just taped to the
top of the box, about halfway back, and that acts as a diffuser so we don't have a hotspot
coming from the flash. To get the best image possible, you want the
negative to be as large as possible in your image, on your sensor. To do this, typically
you need to zoom in as close as possible and get the lens as close as it'll focus in order
to maximize that image. In my particular case I have four lenses and
two bodies that I can choose from.

One of the lenses won't fit on one of the bodies.
That reduces me down to seven possibilities, or potential lens / body combinations that
I can use in order to try to maximize the number of pixels horizontal and vertical for
the final image. So I took some test shots just to see which
combination would give me the largest final image. First of all I checked my full frame
5D and I couldn't fit the 18-55 lens that only fits on my crop factor sensor camera.
But I tried the nifty 50, and I tried the 75-300, and I tried the 24-105. In testing
the 24-105 I noticed that the auto-focus would only go down to a certain range.

That lens
also has another focus range called "macro" but you have to manually move it into there
and focus it. I actually took two test images with the 24-105 and you can see the difference
between the regular that the auto-focus goes to and the macro mode, which isn't really
a true macro. My other body is an XTi crop factor, and so
I tried that with the 18-55 and also the 50, the 75-300 and the 24-105. And out of these
seven combinations, surprisingly, the one that gave me the largest image on the negative,
the largest image of the negative was the 18-55 on the XTi.

So that's the one I used. If you have access to a true macro lens, that's
actually better because a true macro will give you a one to one recording of whatever
your subject is onto your sensor. And so if you have a 35 mm film and you have a full
frame camera then a one to one is going to be a perfect match for the film size to the
image sensor. If you have a crop factor, then you don't necessarily need to go all the way
to one to one but the macro lenses are design to focus very, very close to the lens.

So
you really can maximize the image usage with the macro lens. You can rent those if you
don't have them, they're not terribly expensive to rent. Now that we have the box made and we've chosen
the camera and lens setup, the next thing is to actually physically set it up to start
taking pictures. The first part is to make sure that you have
the distance correct to make the image as large as possible on your image and still
be able to be in focus.

That's going to be controlled by which camera and lens setup
you have. Once you have things setup and in focus, the next thing is to make sure things
are plumb and level. You want to be able to get the film plane on your camera to be plumb
and parallel to the negative that you're taking the image of, this way you eliminate parallax
errors in your images. The way I did this on mine was to use the
bubble level on my tripod to get my camera plumb and level and then I just assume the
floor and everything up from there is close enough for the purposes I have here.

If you
really wanted to dial it in, you could put another bubble level on top and use shims
to get everything exactly right. Next is to make it parallel this way. And
to do that, I put a straight edge across the back and measured with a tape measure to each
side of the box and got that so it was exactly the same. That should get things dialed in
pretty well.

The last thing is to make sure the image is
centered as close as possible in the viewfinder. That way you don't have distortion from the
edges of your lens. Next you need some sort of remote for the
flash. I'm using cheap Cactus radio triggers.

You can get them on eBay for about thirty
bucks. You can also use more expensive ones. Use whatever you have. Also, a corded, where
you have something that fits on the hot shoe with a cord going around, as long as it's
long enough, that would work too.

You just need to be able to trigger your flash from
your camera remotely. And finally, it's not required, but it makes
things much easier is if you have a trigger for your shutter release remote for your camera. That's it for the physical side. Next to setup
your camera.

First thing you want to make sure you're shooting
in raw mode at your highest resolution. You want to be able to have full control of color
balance and exposure and your highest bit depth possible for post processing. The only
way to do that is with raw. JPEG just won't cut it.

You lose too much information when
things are saved to JPEG. Next is the exposure. For the flash that I
have, I have quite a bit of flexibility on controlling the intensity of the flash and
so I just set my f-stop to be in the middle of the range for the lens to eliminate the
most defraction from either wide open or shut down. Then I adjusted the exposure on the
flash itself.

If you have a cheaper flash that only might have two power levels, like
my other flash, then you'd have to adjust your f-stop accordingly to kind of dial things
in. Shutter speed has to be below your sync speed.
I just use 125, it makes it easy. And ISO, I just use 100 as a standard rule. That's it for the physical setup.

That's it
for the camera setup. At this point you're ready to just start taking pictures. Ok. At this point I assume you have taken
all your photos you want to take of your negatives and you're ready to do some post processing.
This is all going to be in Photoshop and Bridge because that's what I have.

The concepts are
transferrable to other applications if you have them. You just need to figure out which
commands they are to do the same types of things I'm doing here. The first thing is to rotate and crop the
image. This is going to open it up in Bridge where up here at the top we'll have our straighten
tool.

I'm just going to drag this across the top here, like so. And then we can crop this
down. I like to give it a little bit of extra head room on the outside so I can do final
crop in Photoshop. This is just a first pass to make the file sizes manageable.

You can
see here I didn't get the negative quite square in the holder when I took this particular
image. That's pretty much all I need to do here in Camera Raw. I'm going to do everything
else in Photoshop where I can put things on layers and that kind of thing. This base cropping is going to be the same
for all you images so you can actually apply this, in Bridge anyway, you can apply this
once and then tell it to do it to all the files that have the same setup.

So it makes
it easy. These first several steps, they're going to
be the same for all the images in a given shoot, for a given set of negatives so you
can actually make actions out of these to repeat, so you don't have to sit there and
continually go through clicking on all these different things repetitively. So we've got it rotated, we've got it cropped.
The next step is to go up to Image, and go to adjustments, and under Adjustments you
have Invert. That will convert this from a negative image into a positive image.

And you can see our color balance is a little
whacked out so that's going to be the next thing we tackle. I like using curves because
it's a one button adjustment. I just use this middle eye dropper tool which sets a grey
point. So I can click on that and then click on something that should be a neutral white
/ grey color.

I'll use my brother's pajamas here and our colors get pretty nice. It's
a little whacked out but not too bad. Much better than it was before. One thing I notice is these images are always
really soft.

To fix that I like to use a high pass sharpen. So I duplicate the background
layer with a control J. And then I go up to Filter and choose Other and then High Pass.
The radius you use is going to depend on the size of your image. Smaller images you want
a smaller radius.

Larger images you want a larger radius. Use just what works well. For
images of this size, I like 4, that works fairly well. Then we go into our blending
mode and change it from Normal to Overlay.

And we have a sharper image. It's still not
super sharp, but it's better than it was. This is what it was out of camera. And this
is what it is now with an overlay, a high pass overlay.

It's quite noticeable. That's
before and that's after. That's pretty much what you'd do to every
photo in a given set. Anything after this is probably going to be done on a per photo
basis rather than across the whole batch.

The next thing I'm going to do, I noticed
on my histogram that it's kind of dark. There's a lot of area over here that we can bump up.
So I'm going to go in here and add another layer. This time I'm going to use the Levels.
And I'm going to just drop this white point down to where we're just starting to clip
some of the bright highlights. Like so.

And that kind of brightens that up. Before it's
darker and now it's much, much brighter, a nicer exposure. Now with that being brighter, it's more noticeable
that this couch is kind of blue. I remember that couch.

That was originally a black leather
couch that my parents purchased long ago. I'm going to use the hue/saturation, this
is just going to be a quick change. I'm going to go in here, since there really aren't any
other blues in the image, I'm just going to select the blues and desaturate them. That
fixes up that couch pretty nicely.

It's still a little on the blue side but not too bad.
I guess I could go into the cyans and play around with more, but, for this it's good.
I did lose some of the blues in my brother's pajamas so I'm going to go in on the layer
mask and paint in some black to bring those back in, kinda like so. And then I'd do a final crop on this particular
image. Something sort of like this. Get rid of all this yucky stuff on the outside edges.
About like so.

And you end up with a final image. Actually I think I missed something
there at the bottom. Let me do that crop again. Bring it in here.

I think I took it down too
low before. Trim off the yellow on the top right and the grey on the bottom right. Then
get rid of the yellow on the bottom left. And there we go.

There's the finished image.
Like I said, the first several steps you can put in an action and save yourself a whole
lot of hassle. And then each individual photo is going to need a little bit of touch-up,
like I did on this one. That's pretty much it for post-processing. That wraps up this House of Hacks episode.
If you liked it, hit the thumbs up button.

Next episode we should be back on track with
part two of the soft jaws project. To be notified, you can hit the subscribe button up here. Until next time, go make something. It doesn't
have to be perfect, just have fun..

Low Key Portraits Take and Make Great Photography with Gavin Hoey

In his video I'll be looking at how you
can shoot low-key shots in a small home studio. AdoramaTV presents Take and Make Great Photography with Gavin Hoey Hello I'm Gavin Howy and you're watching
AdoramaTV, brought to you by Adorama the camera store that has everything for us photographers. And this video is all
about low key lighting. Now low key shots are those where there is a large
proportion of really dark tones in the image but don't be fooled into thinking
that means you're under exposing.

You still want to have some highlights in
there as well to show a full range of tones. It's just the vast majority are
going to be at the dark end of the scale. Now shooting low key in a small studio
is a great idea because you can do it with a single softbox or a single
speed light. You can add in more light if you like but simplicity is the key.

A great low key shot will have a dark
black or a grey background and plenty of contrast in the shots too. Small studios
really lend themselves to this style of photography ok let's get a model in set some lights up and take some pictures. So once again I'm joined in the studio by Ferne
who's going be the model for this low-key shoot. Now I set myself up in a
fairly standard position 45 degrees from the model and it's metered out at f8 and Ferne is
stood against a black background.

For low key shots if you want a black or dark
background you can pretty much get away with anything, material, paper or a pop-up
background like this and in a small studio black is a really good choice.
However, if you've got a grey background check out my previous video on the
Adorama Learning Centre where I talk about how to make grey go black.
Ok, let's take a picture like this, see how it comes out, Superb, and that works really well we get some
fantastic low key shots lots of lovely dark black backgrounds. But still detail
in the highlights, however if I want this to be even more low key, there is a simple
trick I can do. Add more shadows to the shot and I can do that by either moving
the light further back and that's not really possible,  cause I would go through the wall.

The simple answer is to ask Ferne to step
a little bit further forward so if you can take a little step forward. So now
the light is in a different angle which means I need to rotate around of course.
Otherwise it would completely miss our model. But if I take a shot like this, watch  watch what
happens to the light went on is looking at the camera. As you can see it doesn't really work
because of course the light is coming almost from behing and end result is not getting any light on the face.

The solution is really simple I. Just asked Ferne to look towards the light, ok Ferne do you want to turn and I do a profile shot. As you can see those pictures look
fantastic with lovely contrasty light There is still highlight detail on the face but also
some shadows and in black and white it still looks amazing. Now if you're wondering where did the
softbox go, because it's really close to Ferne, and yet it's not in the
pictures.

Well there's a little Photoshop trick that I'm going to show you at the
end of this video. So once you've worked out a basic lighting idea why not take
it a stage further, and there are many ways you can do it. One of the simplest is just by
including a prop into the scene. Props come in all sorts of sizes and
shapes, for this one it's going to be a really simple prop, I'm just going to use a
bit of material.

I'm going to talk about props in a later video, in this little
series, but for now just take my advice invest in some material. It really is one
of the most useful things you can have around your studio. I'm going to ask you to
use it as a head piece really so if I. Give you that, I need to take a meter
reading for this cause I move my light to the other side.

Let's get the flash
meter, pop it underneath Ferne's chin, point it back at the light, you're always going to meter
towards the light you want to know the strength of f8, that's perfect let's
take a shot like that and see what we get That's a really simple prop, but boy does it make a
massive difference to the look and the feel of the shot and a little bit of red
is always a good thing. With low key lighting you don't necessarily need
expensive equipment you can use a single bare Speedlite. Now normally bare Speedlites
are going to give harsh shadows. But in low key lighting, well, harsh shadows can
often work really well.

So that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to finish with a simple Speedlite on its own, and just take a shot of Ferne sat down against my
little textured wall here. So let's get this over to the side, if I want the lighting
to come in at an angle to rake the light across the background and to hit Ferne in the
face with some nice contrasty light. Now that means I have to figure out
where this is going to go so I'll stop there but I may find a have to move my
light around as we take some test shots.

Now, as always if you move the light, you  need to
meter the light, so let's get the flash meter underneath Ferns chin again,
pointing the little dome back at the flash you want to meter. Now that I am getting f9,
now I want to keep shooting at f8, so I'm just going to drop the power ever so
slightly and I'm back to f8. Ok so, let's turn and take some pictures of Ferne looking off to the side. So those work well, but the direction of light is quite general.

Now at the moment this flash is set on it's 24mm wide angle zoom. Now if I was to zoom the flash in I would get a tighter beam of light with dark top and bottom. If I really want to exaggerate
that to its maximum I'm gonna use a snoot. Now this is the little MagMod rubber
snoot.

I'm actually going to use it closed all the way down, which gives about a 40 degree
angle of light and that just pops onto the front of the Speedlite, like that. Ok, now
I need to put my meter in the light itself. I'm getting f4.5 So it's
taking away quite a lot of light fortunately I can increase the light
here and get back to f8. Ok, let's take some shots like that.

So there you go, by having these Speedlite and very directional angle to the light we got some really great and dramatic low key shots. Ok let's get
one of the pictures into Photoshop and a little bit of fine-tuning there and we are going to do
that right now. Shooting with a small softbox means that
if you want soft lighting. You've got to get it nice and close that makes it relatively
bigger and therefore softer.

That means it's more likely to be in
your shot, add to the the fact you're  shooting in RAW means that sometimes your blacks
aren't quite as black as you thought they would be and I've got 2 problems to
solve here in Adobe Camera Raw. Fortunately, they're nice and simple and use a very similar method. So, first of all let's deal with the blacks, and come to the
little arrow in the top left corner of my histogram, and click on it to turn on
my clipping warning for shadows. Now I'm going to come down to the blacks slider
moving across to the left.

As I go to the left you see I'm getting this warning
area saying, yep this blue area here is actually pure black. And I can see that by
looking at the RGB here as I move my cursor across, 00 means black, anything
else means, well, not black. And you can see that's great until I get here where
I got a little bit of color coming in but then I got this large softbox to
remove and I'm gonna deal with that bit in one go. Now I'm going to use one of the
local adjustments and you could you see the adjustment brush.

I'm going to use the
graduated filter and what I'm going to do is just drag out a graduated filter
over that area. Now once I've dragged  that across I can move my slider's here
because I want to reduce the exposure all the way down to -4. Then I'm
going to reduce the highlights all the way down to whatever they need to be, and
as I do, you can see I've lost all the detail here that means I now have pure
black over this whole area I've completely removed that from my shot. Now
if the soft box was still visible, if there is any other little bits, I can also
remove whites and blacks, that'll get me all the way down and of course I can
put multiple, either brushes or graduated filters until that area is
gone.

But when I go back to my usual view there is no soft-box anymore
it's completely disappeared simply by making it really really dark using the
local adjustment tools. I love shooting low-key images in my studio
it's so simple but so effective. If you want more tips on shooting in a small
studio space, see the rest of the amazing videos from the fantastic
presenters right here on AdoramaTV you know either be doing you've got to be
clicking on that subscribe button. I'm Gavin Hoey thanks for watching..

How to Build a Photography Website with WordPress

Hey guys welcome to WPBeginner and
thanks for watching. In this video I wanna walk you through
how to set up your own photography site using WordPress and we'll walk through it
step by step. So if you're ready let's get started. The first thing we need to
do is we need to set up our hosting plan so I'm gonna go to WPBeginner and I
wanna go to deals we'll go to hosting and all the way down we're gonna use HostGator for this.

WPBeginner has a coupon that we're going to use right here. So if you click on
this it will copy that information and it will open up Hostgator for us so we can get
started. Now from here you just want to enter all the information and you can, if
you already have your domain you can click on that and say you already own it enter
your domain name here. If you don't you can register a new site and see if it's
available and if it's not it will tell you it's unavailable but then it will come
up with some alternatives that you can use.

And we've already chosen our hosting plan.
So now I'm just going to go through, pause the video while I go ahead and set this up
and I'll be right back. Alright so now that we have our hosting
setup we need to go ahead and install WordPress. So I'll scroll down and you're looking for something called like the Quick Install click on that and we're looking for the WordPress Quick
Install and we'll go ahead and say install WordPress for us, pick the site, here they're asking for
a little bit more information and you'll just want to fill that in when you have it all filled out just click install WordPress. Okay, cancel out of that, okay now that we have our WordPress installed let's go ahead and login to the admin portion of our website.

So I'm gonna
go to my site /wp-admin and you'll want to bookmark this because this is how you
can access the admin side, the admin portion of our site any time you need to. Now this is what it
will look like when you first install your WordPress site. So we're going to do a little bit of cleanup first I'm gonna go into plugins and there's some plugins that are already installed and we're just gonna remove them we don't need them I'll show you the ones you'll want. We
will keep Akismet.

You can do a bulk you can bulk deactivate all of those and
hit apply and I wanna select them all, keep Akismet and I want to delete all of those
and that just cleans up your site a little bit. Now even though I'm keeping it I'm gonna
go ahead and deactivate that. What Akismet is, it's a great way to keep spam from hitting your
blog so Akismet is a really good thing and you can go in and set that up. Okay now that we've done a little bit of
cleanup we can just take a look at the site and see what it looks like right
now with WordPress installed.

This is it, it has the default 2015 theme on the site right now
and this is what it looks like with bare bones information but we'll fix that. So the first thing we want to do is
let's go ahead and get a theme that is great for photography so we're
go in and we're going to search the thousands of themes that are available in
the repository and we'll add a new one. So I'm under Appearance themes and while
I'm here these are the three themes that are currently installed on our website this is the one that we see and then these
are the older themes that come with WordPress. But we want to go in and want to
click Add New and now we can search themes in this is pulling from the
WordPress repository of all the themes that they've reviewed and approved and so I'm gonna look for photography themes and you can just go through and see which one you
like and scroll through and see what might suit you.

I know I'm actually going to use a
particular theme called patio for this and this is the one I want to use. What you can do when you see one that you like is you can view the details of it, get an idea of what it looks like, if it
looks good and you like it now this will look a little bit different once we have
more information on our site then you can click Install here and show you a few other things, details of preview you can also install here and that's what I'll do. And what it does is
it downloads the whole theme to your website and unpackages it and we'll go
ahead and activate it here as well. Right, now that we're using this theme Let's
go ahead and add some images so I'm going to go to Media -> Add New and I want to add a few
images to work with so I'm gonna go to my computer and these are the ones that
I've saved I'm gonna select them all and drag it over.

Now what I want to do is
create a few posts and these posts are what will come to the front page once I add them.
So I'm just gonna do some simple posts with the featured image set and I'm gonna do
that a few more times. Alright if we go to All Posts we'll see we have about four and then hello world which is the default post that comes when you first
install so let's go to our site and we'll click Refresh and we'll see what it starts to look like. It's really beautiful, kind of brings it all out and you see hello world would be something different if we had another one there. So it's looking good, the next thing we want to do is
we want to set up some pages so we'll have some menus and these will be somewhat blank
we're not going to add the content we just want to add the pages so I'm going to do Home, About Us, Contact and since this is a photography site, let's go ahead and add a gallery page.

Okay, now if we go back to our site and we click refresh, now you see that our menu has been set up. Now you can change that by going back to
your dashboard, let's go to Appearance > Menus and right now it's just pulling in all
the pages because we haven't set a menu up so lets go ahead and set up a menu.
Create new call it main menu and it's wanting to bring all of these over by default. You can
remove these by clicking on the down arrow and say remove, and I'll do that with this one as well. And these others you can drag and drop them to make it look however you want.

Over here you also can add a custom link here if you have a particular set
of categories say of photography tips you can add that to the menu as well but
we're pretty happy with this so I'm gonna just click Create Menu. Right now that
I've created it I need to give it a location so I wanna go under Manage
locations and for this particular theme I have a primary menu and since thats the only menu I have I'm gonna go ahead and set up my main menu. Now understand that each theme
has its own set of menu locations and many items that you can choose from
so if you're using another theme you may have several here to choose from alright, now we'll just take a quick look and that's what it looks like. Alright so our site is
starting to take shape and what we want to do next is add the gallery to do that
we're actually going to use a great plugin, we haven't talked about plugins yet,
plugins are ways to extend the functionality of your website.

And to do
that we're going to go back to our dashboard and we're going to go down to
Plugins > Add New. We're gonna add a few more but the first one we're doing is the plugin
that we're looking for is the Envira gallery lite plugin so I'm gonna install that now and
like the theme it goes out to the repository, grabs it, unpacks it and we're
gonna go ahead and activate the plugin as well. Alright, once it's activated we have a little Envira Gallery area down here so I'm gonna click on Envira Gallery so you can see currently we don't have any galleries so we're gonna add a new gallery and you can name this
whatever you want. Now you can either upload the images from here or you can insert
from other sources in and since I aldredy have these uploaded, I'm going to pick these and
go through and choose which ones I want to use let's use that one and insert into
gallery and I'm gonna insert, you can see them down here.

While this is open like this
you can also move and change the location of all the images and how
they're going to look. Now that we have all those uploaded we can go and configure it and
from here you can choose how you want the gallery to look. I want to do two columns
the gallery theme since It's the lite we only have the base to choose from, you can, from
here it automatically enables the lightbox popup that's when you click on
an image and it pulls it up into a light box again the base is the only have so far,
and you can also choose between the caption position we're not going to worry about
that, and then there's some miscellaneous items to look at so we'll click Publish. Great, once I click Publish now it's telling
me that I can highlight this which I.

Will and I can copy this shortcode
and I can put that wherever I want so if I want to, which I do, I want to go to my pages
and your remember that gallery that we set up the gallery page, I'm gonna edit my gallery page
and right now there's nothing there. You can do one of two things, you can either
add you can either click the Add gallery from here and choose the photos gallery
that we did or like what I did is I. Copied it so I'm gonna paste the shortcode
there we can click update and now when we go to our site and click on the gallery, you see this beautiful gallery
showing here. Now the photos look great but I do want to add a little bit more
and to do that I wanna show you some of the Pro features that Envira Gallery
offers so let's just take a look at it.

Now the pro version of Envire Gallery has
some pretty great features including you can get some gallery templates if you
notice the one that we have was just base you can also add some social sharing
icons like for Pinterest and whatnot there's also a way to add videos to your
gallery if you want. One of the things I. Like for photographers are the fact that
with the pro version you can add watermarking to the photos you upload
you can also show it in a slideshow if you're working with clients you can do a
proofing addon so that when it's time for them to view the images that you've
taken the photographs that you've taken then there's a proofing process that goes on there
there are a ton of other things one of my favorites is the Instagram addon. So
if you're taking a lot of pictures I'm sure you're adding images to Instagram and in
this add-on allows you to automatically import all those into its own gallery so
instead of just talking to you about these I'm actually going to upgrade to the
envira gallery pro so I'm gonna pause this video, you can go in and as well and upgrade and
when I'm done I'll show you how it all looks.

Alright, once
you've gone in and purchased your Envira Gallery plugin you want to go to
the download section and you'll just want to download the main Envira Gallery and save it
somewhere on your desktop. And now we're going to go back to our website and
install the pro version so I'm going to go to my Plugins > Add New and this will be a little
bit different than what we've done before because we actually have the
plugin installed locally so instead of searching here we're gonna upload the
plugin here and you can choose the file. Since I have it down here I can just left
click and drag it up there and it will automatically bring it in and it's ready
for me to install. I also want to activate the plugin and you'll see that we want to add the license information so I'm gonna go back to Envira Gallery, grab my license key, come back
here and add it and verify.

Okay, now that we have that all done we're good to go. So let's add a few of the add-ons I was
just talking about. We'll go into add-ons let's go ahead and refresh them make sure that all the ones that we want to deal with are in here and we're going to add, you want the
gallery themes addon, that gives different themes to choose from and I'm gonna install and then I'll click activate.
Let's scroll down, I also want to install the Instagram addon and show you what that looks like and we want to do the Pinterest addon that lets you show a pin it button and sice we're gonna... We'll do a proofing addon and we'll activate that.

Alright, so I've added a few add-ons, addons just extend
the functionality again so I'll go back to the Envira Gallery work with the gallery that
were on and if you notice we have a few more tabs to work with and under
config so for the gallery theme I'm gonna choose sleep see what that looks like, click
update, and refresh and this is actually what it looks like when I click on it this
is the light box that pops up and you see it' scrolling through so I updated the
gallery theme since we updated the gallery addon we also have different
light box themes to choose from so I'm gonna just try showcase and see what that
looks like cick refresh, and when I click on it you see now the border is more prominent. So that's changing some of the themes now under
Pinterest you can enable the pin-it button on the images and choose where you want
them to go I'll say to the top right. And we want to go ahead and have it as the gray and we'll
update that and for proofing you want to enable proofing and we can leave the Save
button and things like that as they are and this will be the message
that they get you can even allow the user to specify how many of an image, the
quantity of the images that they want so we'll do that and also specify the size
options. So with size options say you're allowing an
eight-by-ten or a five-by-seven you can specify them here and then when they're
going through and looking at them they can choose which ones they want.

So I've set
up a couple of things for proofing. I'm gonna update that once we've done all that let's go ahead and update our Envira Gallery and we'll take a look at a few things that we've
just set up I'm gonna go back to my gallery page and click Refresh and you'll notice
a few things. First off you now have these check marks that's further proving
if you're wanting to allow the clients to proof and select which ones they want
this is the proofing in action. Say I want an eight-by-ten on that and two five-by-sevens and then you can submit as the end user and see how it says that they'll be in touch also when I click in it you noticed that we now have a Pin It button and when I pin it go out and get pinned.

The next thing I want to
show you is the Instagram addon, in order to set that up we need to go to Settings
click on the Instagram addon and just remember this is showing here because we
were under addons earlier and I. Activated it here. So let's go to Instagram and we need to
authenticate with it. If you're logged in it will automatically authenticate for
you if not you'll need to log in and add that as well.

So let's create a new Envira
Gallery and we'll use Instagram as Envira Gallery type, feed type. You can
choose from my Instagram photos and that just brings all of them and you can
choose to do the ones that you've liked or a particular tag say if since you're a
photography site you can do tag of photography this gives you less control but it will
dynamically pull in all of those items and the number of photos to show, it will just
show the top, let's show the top 10 we'll do the standard resolution and you can link to
that location if you want and I'll click publish. I'm gonna copy the shortcode there, we'll go to post and add new we'll call it Instagram and I'll add the shortcode here and publish and if you
remember I added I said bring me in all the photos with tag of photograph so you can
see it can be a little random to have a little bit more control over that just go back
into the Envira Gallery, go to Instagram and maybe change that to photos that I like
that way I have more control over it and it will bring in the photos I have physically gone
into Instagram and liked and see that you have a little bit more control. So that's
the Instagram addon which I love.

Now as we've been going in and setting these up you've
probably noticed that I kept going in to the each gallery and I kept clicking on
config and I kept having to change it to sleek because sleek is the I like I kept trying
to change the columns and stuff. Well there's a, an addon that you can go in
if you use every gallery a certain way you can go into the addon section and you want add what's called the defaultd addon. When we install that and activate it now I can
go to Envira Gallery go into Envira default settings and let's edit that. What this is going to do is any new
gallery that I set up this, these default settings will be applied so under config
I wanted to be base three.

I like the sleek gallery theme  so I want that going
down I don't think there's anything else I want from there under the light box
again I like the sleek and for me that's all. I can also choose to have the enable
it to come up enable the Pin It button to come up on
all new ones proofing and whatever other add-ons I
have so I'm going to click update and now when I go in and add a new gallery, you see it says default and if I look under config normally by default this is one for me by
default this is base now I've set that up to where most of the settings that I
like they're already there and so all I. Have to do is add the images. And when I hit
publish I have a new gallery set up with those default settings.

Now maybe you've
noticed that everytime I create an Envira Gallery then I go in to post
you can also do that to page but I go in to post every time and add a new post and
then add the gallery well you can add the add-on standalone addon and when you
activate that now when we go into our galleries. When I go into photos now I
have a view so I can view the gallery straight from there it doesn't have to
be added to any poster page this is the gallery URL and this is the gallery
itself on a stand-alone so no more adding to a post or page you can share
that directly. Alright now that we have set your galleries we're going to cover a
couple of other plugins the next plugin we're going to deal with is the Yoast SEO plugin so I'll go to plugins Add New and go to use SEO we'll install it and then
we'll activate it as well and this helps with improving your search engine
rankings with Google and as well as some of the other search engines by showing
you best practices and things like that. So now you see that we've activated it and if
you want you can start the tour we'll close this out as we'll right now.

So we
have a new area over here under SEO. And we'll click on that and under general is just
the general settings you can also restore to all default settings if you
want. Let's go under your info and enter your
info this is your business name or your website name you can enter that
information here and what this does is when you do a search on Google it'll
come up with this as your name of the company or the person so that's why you
wanna fill this information out, same thing with company or person it's just
telling them how to show your website on Google search results. Under webmaster tools you can add any of your webmaster information and when we're finished with everything we'll click Save Changes Now's now let's go to titles and meta
and this is how Yoast will set up your titles on your page we'll leave it as,
well leave it like that and it shows up here so that's how it pulls that information in.
We're happy with that we're happy with the others as well.

Under
social you can set up all these social network profiles that you have and this
will help pull in all of your identities online and under Facebook you can also set
this up to where you show a default image as well as a default title and description. You
can set up the Twitter and Pinterest as well along with the Google+ under the
XML sitemaps, the XML sitemap that tells Google and any of the other search engines your
pages and what to look for on your website and you can set that up.
We like the default they have a pretty good setup there we want to leave
everything like that. Advanced, some of the powerful items for
using Yoast SEO, it comes on the Posts Page. Yoast will go
through and qualify your keywords if you're looking to say rank for
photography tips this would be a great indication of how well you are doing once you enter the information and then down here is the Yoast SEO area.

This is what it will look like when you search in Google shows your page up in the rankings. You can
enter a focus key word here and based on what you put in here. Then Yoast goes
through and gives you kind of a rating and things to work on. Obviously we have
no content right now so that's red but if you wanted to do this as a keyword
topic you go through and you add the content with this keyword in mind and all of these
reds and oranges should turn to green.

So that's the powerful overview of how to
deal with Yoast SEO and that would also help you with ranking in Google. Alright the next
plugin that we want to install is something that deals with our website
speed. You can test the speed of your website by. You can test the speed of
your website by going to pingdom and doing a test and this is a real-time test to
show just how fast it takes for somebody to access your site.

It will also
return basically a test results it will through and test your site and it will give you a performance and right now this is at 75. It's likely because we have some images
on there whatnot so that's the importance of adding the plugin called W
three total cash and we'll install that now so I'm gonna go back to my plugins, add new and I'm looking for W3 total cache and you'll see it right here, it's the one we want so we'll install now and we'll activate it as well. Alright, once you have that we
have this performance tab over here we'll want to go to the General Settings
there are two main things that we want to work on one is the page cache and, cat,
page caching is just a way to reduce the response time from your site to the
server. Basically you have images in other media that's on your site that
rarely ever change so you'll want to cache those to make it faster for people so do
that one and then the other one we're looking for is the browser, browser cache
the browser cache is enabled and basically what that does is when a
person goes to the website for the first time their browser will download all the
needed files all the scripting files and whatnot they'll, the browser downloads it that way
when it goes to the next page all that information is already in the
browser and it doesn't take any time.

So we're going to save that, so we're gonna
save that and I want to go to the browser cache area and you basically want to
click on and you, and you want to have all of these selected, all except for the 404 error. When you're finished with that we'll just click Save Changes. Save all settings, and what we can do now is we had a 75 so
let's test it again and we'll see what comes with the next
time. And so now you've increased your performance.

Alright so now we have gone through the whole process of creating a website, adding your
hosting, setting up WordPress, installing a new photography site, adding a gallery
for the site, and now all you need to do is go ahead and add your own content,
your own information, and your site is ready to go to be a full photography
site. If you like this video click on the like button and go ahead and leave us a comment there, we'd love to hear from you. And subscribe to our YouTube channel to get the latest videos..

Better Night Photos Exploring Photography with Mark Wallace

In this episode learn a simple technique
that will help you take great scenic shots at night Adorama TV presents;
Exploring Photography with Mark Wallace Hi everybody welcome to another episode of Exploring Photography right here on Adorama TV. I'm Mark Wallace here in very cold Prague it was actually snowing a couple of seconds ago but I'm gonna take
a picture of this beautiful river and the bridge and this sort of scene of
Prague here now what I could do because it's sort of a low light in the day the
sun is already behind the horizon what I could do is try to get as much light as
possible by opening up my aperture this is at f/3.4 I'm shooting an aperture priority mode kicking my ISO up to 800 and then shooting. So I'm going to focus on infinity and take a shot here and when I look at that shot its - at best, it's ok, not very good. There are few things that we can do to really make this shot amazing so let me show you a couple of tools I'm going to use the
first thing I'm going to do and it might be a little bit counter intuitive, but I'm
going to take my aperture and instead of shooting at f/3.4 I'm going to close my
aperture all the way down to f/16 It is going to make a really small aperture value.

What that is going to do is, that's going
to give me a maximum depth of field and it is also going to help all the little points
of light back here when the sun goes down to really look nice and sharp and
give me some starburst shapes instead of certain blobs back there and also it's
going to make my shutter slow down considerably and that slow shutter is going to smooth out the clouds and the water and all of that stuff that's going to be
much more effective. The other thing I want to do is to reduce the noise in this
image. So I'm going to go in here and take my ISO. 800 All the way down to 200.

That is the
base, the lowest ISO that my camera can use and because of those things now
my cameras taking a longer exposure I. Need to add a tripod. Now normally I'd
use a big tripod but here we've got this really nice solid base and so I can just
pop these little teeny tripod This is a Cullmann tripod on the bottom of my camera that's going to keep that from moving and now my long exposure is going to be
really nice and solid. Now the other thing I want to do I don't want to touch my
camera that's going to shake it so what I'll do is I'm going to use a remote cable
release.

This is a really old school one from my Leica but you can get these for
any camera brand now that is going to allow you to take a picture without
touching the camera so it's not going to shake it nice steady shot and the last tool that
we're going to use and it's going make a huge difference and this is sort of
counter intuitive because we're shooting at night. I'm going to add a 6 stop neutral density filter that I just happen to have in my pocket here now at this guy does is it blocks
the light, sort of like sunglasses for your camera and so it's really, really dark
and what that will do it'll even force a longer exposure so now we're going to get up into the 1,2 and 3 minute exposure times that's really going to make this look glassy now here's a trick once you put this on your camera the lens is going to be so dark that you're not going to be able to see through the
lens and so what you'll have to do is set your camera to manual focus you have to manually focus that
lens, now if you have a lens like this it has a depth of field guide I suggest
that you focus at hyper focal we've talked about that past episodes if you don't
just focus on infinity because you have that really long
extended depth of field you get a lot of stuff in focus. Now the other thing I
didn't mention I'm shooting with a wide angle lens. I got a 21mm lens I think that's imperative for a scene like that so once
we have that all set I'm going to put my neutral density filter on here, if you don't have manual focus, you just need to lock your focus you can focus by looking through the
eye piece lock that down and then put your neutral density filter on so we'll
put that on I've got a depth of field gauge.

So I'm going to set my focus at
hyperfocal. This is a B+W 6 stop neutral density filter alright! So that's
on my camera, so I got my neutral density filter, shooting at f/16 aperture
priority mode ISO 200 and then lets frame this up and take a picture and then
we'll compare the before and after shot. Alright so let's take this shot here Alright so that was about a 1 second shot and that's okay but what we really need to do is one last thing and that is wait for the sun
to get lower in the sky because I really want about a 60 second shot. Right now we are about 30 minutes from the Sun going all the way down to give us that.

So I need to wait about a half an hour I'll take this picture again and then we'll
compare our first shot that I did hand-held, wide open, at high ISO, this shot that I shot for about a second with a neutral density filter and then we'll compare that to our last shot, shot after the sun goes down
and we have a very long exposure Alright well there you have it, and I'll think you'll agree that the shots we took after sundown obviously I did those after we shot this video because it was at night, but you'll agree that those shots are
much better than the original shots where the sun was up and I used a wide
open aperture and it's really simple and inexpensive tripod, an inexpensive cable
release, an inexpensive neutral density filter all told you're talking about
$100 of add ons to get a much, much better scenic photo and this works for
all scenic photos so you can shoot these at daylight and sunset, and cityscapes. It's
really amazing. Thanks so much for joining me and don't forget to check out
the Adorama Learning Center because we've got tons of stuff about shooting scenic
photos and hyper focal focusing and all that kind of stuff and don't forget to subscribe to Adorama TV, it is absolutely free, and that way you won't miss a single thing. Thanks again for joining me and I'll see you again next time Do you want great looks pics at low cost?  Be sure to use our easy to use online printing service.

AdoramaPix has professionals who treat your images with the utmost care that you can count on. For a quick turnaround on photos, cards or albums use adoramapix.Com.

How To Clean DSLR Camera Lens and SensorAltura Photo Cleaning KitHow-To Tutorial Video

Izzy again at Digital Goja showrooms. Cleaning kits, very important, you need to keep your equipment clean for your best imaging. Whether it's video or stills you want to make sure that you get a kit that works for your equipment and Altura Photo is the best in the business when it comes to cleaning kits. They literally have any kit for any type of cleaning situation.

They even now carry the ones to be able to clean the sensors, they have the full frame and they have the APS-C sized sensor cleaning kit. Notice that some of them even come with an Alter Photo carrying case so you can take everything with you everywhere you go. Honestly, if you keep your equipment clean you'll notice a big difference in the image quality and we'll go over the different kids to show you the different versions, what they come with and what they will do for your equipment whether it's photographic video or even electronics. As always, if this video helped you out please hit me up with a Like button underneath and subscribe to the channel for future tutorials and sessions such as this and to share with videographers and photographers.

And don't forget, when in Miami come by and visit Digital Goja showrooms. I'm going to go over the different tools that come with the various Altura Photo cleaning kits and how they're going to help you out in maintaining your camera or whatever imaging unit you use to be able to work properly for many years to come. We have the smaller 7 x 6 version and then we have the big brother, the 16 x 16. They're available in the gray or silver, and the black.

Now, I love the smaller one, pocketable, easy to carry with you. Notice how this has a special sawtooth pattern that will not fray and it also is reusable and long-lasting. This reduces use of paper towel and tissue so it's eco-friendly has no dyes or chemicals. You can use it on all your popular imaging equipment, so you can use it on your multi-coated lenses, you can use it on your LCD screens.

It works even on electronics, so you can use it on standard tablets, on phones or laptops and of course if you have the big brother this guy comes in very handy for TV sets because when you have 16 by 16 inches you have a lot more area to cover. I also carry, this believe it or not, for my full frame cameras because this is a lot easier to work and cover a larger area and very simple clean. If you notice you'll check out a video that I did. All you have to do is use warm water, you don't have to use any solvents and it's, douse it in warm water for a little bit and stretch it out, rinse it out, twist it out and let it drip-dry.

Don't throw this into a dryer because that can actually damage the micropores that it has in here that allow you to capture the dirt. So if you're in the market you will notice this is available in many of the Altura Photo kits. It comes in different versions where you get multiple of these, you can even buy these in multiple quantities by themselves. Also, now we come to the Altura Photo sprays.

We have the empty spray bottle, which people like, well why is that included in the kit? What is it for? Well, they did a lot of research and they came to the conclusion that there are some do-it-yourselfers and they prefer the smaller size which is 20 ml and they want to create their own solution and there's many different formulas out there. I showed one in a YouTube video explaining how to work with a distilled white vinegar and distilled water. 20 Ml more economical because it's empty you do all the work. Now the next step is the Altura Photo optical spray, this one's been on the market for a while, very popular.

It's still alcohol-free, ammonia-free, it has no odor or color, it's going to guarantee to work on lens glass and screen cleaner. It comes in a 16 ml size and of course with the spray, so, very simple work with. And now we come to their newest version, this is the Altura Photo all-natural, this guy is guaranteed, one hundred percent safe, it also has no ammonia, no alcohol, no odor, no color, it is the safest solution on the market to be able to clean your sensor and your multi-coated lenses. It's guaranteed not to scratch your delicate DSLR or ilc sensor, so, also comes in 60 milliliters and it is proven to be the leader in the industry when it comes to cleaning sensors and multi-coated optics.

And it is also by the way manufactured in the U.S. So there you have it, the three sprays that are included in the various kits from Altura Photo, you again can make a decision of which one is going to work best for you, whether you want to do it yourself and just want to standard optical or you want to get the premium 100-percent all-natural Altura spray. Alright so now we come to the altar photo lens tissue paper comes with 50 sheets you can put it in your pocket or in your favorite backpack or carrying case for your photo gear it's lint-free so it's not going to give you any kind of residue when you're working with it and it's meant to be delicate on all glass surfaces that means going to work on your lenses your filters LCD screens safe for multi-coated lenses as you want to work on your tablet and your smartphones and everything else that has a screen on it very simple to work with you just tear one sheet out and then you use some of the outdoor photo here i'm using the all natural spray that's my favorite one spray pump and then gently in a circular motion put it across your lens there i'm going to get rid of all the nasty smudges that I had on there right I always put that aside so I can throw it away I don't like to litter and I. Don't want to mess up the environment now I Tehran another dry piece and in the same whirling motion I'm going to get rid of any excess fluid that I might have had on the lens and there is nice and clean and this guy is really popular for cleaning your viewfinder a lot of times people like how do i get into that to really small area well again we're going to take out a sheet fold it up a bit because you only need a small portion spray pump there and gently just brush it up on the inside to make sure that you get any kind of oil or residue that gets in there now with the dry one again clean it out and make sure that you don't have any excess moisture on there from the spray there you have it nice and easy to work with compact and great for all your glass surfaces the altar photo lens tissue paper so most of the kids will include both of these brushes and people are always asking why are there two brushes why do i need two brushes so they're similar but yet they're really are very different this is the standard brush this guy is used and i always recommend it to get rid of any excess grit and sand and dust anything that is harmful to your equipment and you don't want to scratch it by trying to clean it with a microfiber or a lens tissue so this guys doing all the heavy duty work so I'm here going around this camera went to the beach and it's got a lot of sand and grit and this guy is going to make sure that none of this is going to end up harming or damaging any of my glass part whether it's the LCD or the viewfinder or the front topic so that's this guy's purpose its to get rid of excess grit and dirt now we're going to take a look at how to work with the altar of photo lens cleaning pen notice this has happened to you you have to admit all the Sun you picked up the camera and you notice that your front element is incredibly filthy its all full of fingerprints so this is where this product comes in i'm going to show you how easy it is to remove this situation on right so what you first want to do with the lens pen is you want to use the brush portion and you want to make sure that you brush off any excess sand or grit that's on here because now when we go to clean it we don't want to rub that across the front element that will damage your length now we're going to remove the cap portion and notice how you have the circular area which is a bit concave so it works perfectly for our front element lenses and you're going to with gentle pressure rub this across usually in a circular fashion that works better with a lens so that you can pick up all the oils that are on there with the special carbon tip and notice how its rubberized and it literally moves to the circular circumference of your optic and now to make sure that it's perfectly clean usually get a little bit of condensation on there so you can look for fingerprints so blow on it and if you see any more fingerprints again go right over it and there you have it now the added bonus of this pen is you have a second tip notice how this moves around and now i have a smaller triangular tip with corners which is great for guess what else we got dirty nowadays are LCD.

Screens we're going to make sure that there are no pieces of grit or sand on there to scratch it even though most of these are either with a screen protector or a lot of us try to maintain it great free but better safe than sorry and then turn it around and now use this portion i'm going to go up and down and straight across so i can make sure that I pick up every single fingerprint that i have on there and again if you want to be doubly sure get some compensation on there and any other struggling fingerprints you can use the compound over it to make sure you pick it up and there you have it now it's very important to always put the cap on so that you don't get this on any other surfers remember it might stain because of the carbon nature of it but this is the easiest way to get rid of excess fingerprints on both your LCD and your optics with the ultra photo lens cleaning pen now we have yet another tool attend all the altar of photo cleaning kits the blower this guy is made out of durable rubber and plastic has a red tip and it compresses the year notice how you have an intake here and this is the part that you use to actually get rid of any those particles that are on your camera very important this is something that you should always have with you because the cameras tend to get stuff stuck on it notice everything that is on this lens i can now go ahead and with the horse air we remove any excess and read for dust that's on there before i go ahead and clean it with my tissue or with my magic fiber and all territorial spray so this is a very vital portion of a cleaning kit way back in the day we used to have the compressed air but finally got smart to the fact that has a propellant that can literally damage your multi-coated lenses and your sensor so now that's where the blower aziz have become known comes into play it's come to become and very important tool in the world of cleaning and maintaining all your electronics now we come to the newest member of the alt or photo cleaning kit family the altar photo EV a carrying case this is made out of a special foam that is hard shell but yet it maintains all your equipment safely in here so that means all your cleaning tools will fit in here perfect so here i have the sensor swabs i'm going to put the sensor swabs here i'm going to take my lens cleaning pen and my brush and place that in there also i have my art or photo all natural spray that fits perfectly in the mesh area and then i can put my blower my lens tissue and my magic fiber and now we're going to take a look at the altar photo DSLR. Sensor cleaning bundle for aps-c sized sensors now the importance of this bundle is that it is including six of the aps-c 16-millimeter these guys are 23.6 By 15.6 Aps-c sensor cleaning swaps notice how they're individually wrapped these guys are very Kim sealed and they're made of a soft lint-free stereo fabric i'm going to show you right now show you the difference because this is meant for crop sensor cameras like the rebel that I have sitting here on the side and there you have it this is the aps-c sized sensor swab is going to remove stubborn stains on your aps-c sensor and it's not going to have any friction or static build-up now the important thing is that when you're going to do this you're going to have a fully charged battery you don't want the battery died in the middle of the cleaning that could be fatal and you want to be in a relatively sterile environment you don't want to be doing this out on the street or on the open where you're going to run the risk of getting more grit or dust on to your sensor and the important thing is that you're going to use as i show you hear the altar of photo all-natural 100-percent sensor cleaning spray this guy is made exclusively for sensor cleaning you're going to use one pumps and you're going to gently rub across the sensor in one direction flip it and go on the opposite and then you're going to dispose of this you do not want to reuse these guys whatever grit or oils you pick up on here you don't want to adhere back onto your sensor if you try to do a secondary cleaning and now we're going to take a look at the DSLR full-frame sensor cleaning bundle biol to a photo this one comes with everything you need to be able to clean your full frame sensor DSLR now this sensor cleaning bundle from altura incorporates six of the specifically made sensor cleaning swabs for full frame cameras i'm going to open one of these guys up to show you and the reason that these are meant for full frames like the big boy that i have sitting here is that it's a 24 x 36 millimeter now these are one-time use it's not recommended to store these after you use them to reuse them because you're going to pick up a lot of dirt on here and you don't want to add that back onto your sensor so this is again the outdoor photo sensor cleaning swabs for full frame cameras 24 x 36 millimeter happy shooting.

Lighting Tutorial Soft Light vs Hard Light, Diffusers, and Reflectors for Photography

Hi, I'm Tony Northrup and for Chapter
3 of my book, Stunning Digital Photography, I'd like to talk to you about the qualities of
light and shadow. And I'm in the studio today with my
mannequin friend. No chelsea today because I
really want to be able to study the light and be able to poke at her face and with light, if you turn your head
even just a little bit it completely changes the quality of the light. I needed somebody who could stand still like only
a mannequin could do.

So as we look at a close-up a the
mannequin's base we'll see that is pretty dark, that's just
ambient light. We have just the room lights on so that you can see me but I will go ahead and turn on this
light here just the modeling light. This is a strobe but
it has a light that goes continuously and this will illuminate the model's face. This is a big softbox or
called an octobox, and as you can see it has a
huge light surface here and this creates a nice, soft, even light because you have light coming
from inside where the bulb itself is and it's hitting this corner and this light is bouncing in that direction and bouncing
in this direction and there's light over there bouncing in this direction.

If you stand in front of it it's really bathing you in light from all different
directions and the light isn't traveling in a straight line, it's travelling in every direction. So I'll spin it around to our very patient
model and what you'll see is the quality is a soft
light and it's actually really nice. Now, the
light is over here on the right side of her face so it's coming in from here and its leaving this very gentle shadow
along the far side of her face and you can see a nice gentle shadow
underneath her chin here. So that's what I.

Want you to pay attention to is the
difference between the highlights and the shadows and how they move
between the brightest areas and the darkest
areas. This is what we call soft light; when the highlights in the
shadows aren't that much different and the
differences between them are nice and smooth. I'll turn this off and go to a hard light source, a bear bulb. As I turn this light on, what we're going to
see is hard light, and this is the harshest type of light.

With the hard light you see very harsh
transition from highlights to shadows. The shadows here are much
much deeper and the highlights, you can see, specular
highlights here which are the super bright highlights that gleam. It's those specular highlights
that will make the face look kind of oily and gross and everybody gets them, especially when you
use hard light and these are the properties of hard light. Soft light has smooth
transitions from highlights the shadows and the deepness of the shadows isn't
that deep.

They're almost as bright as the highlights. Soft light has very smooth gradual
transitions and nice mid tones and a nice light fall-off, and
the difference between the shadows and highlights isn't usually as
much. Now for portraiture, I think it's obvious the soft light
looks better right? The soft light looks great! But if you're trying to show the texture
or something the hard light is often better. In fact, for things like birds
and wildlife, pets, I really like hard light.

Even on an
individual you want soft light on the face, but I
really like hard light on the hair. So understanding the
difference between soft light and hard light, shadows and highlights, is really key. Now let's try modifying that light a
little bit by adding in a diffuser. I have a diffuser here, so let me move this light back a little bit so I can put the diffuser between her.

So take note of that
shadow on her face before but the diffuser up and as
I put it up look how the shadow on her nose changes. Without the diffuser and with the
diffuser. And that's the difference between hard
and soft light. Now I'm gonna do something else, I'm gonna move it closer
to her because remember, one other properties of
light is not just the size of the light source, this is making a
small light source much larger.

By how close it is to the subject. So
even at just a couple feet you can see a really distinct shadow on her nose. But as I move it closer and closer; see
how that shadow changes? How hard or soft a light source is is defined by the
size of the light source and how close the light source is to the
subject. So you can take a hard light source like this
and move it much closer and the light in fact will be softer.

If I
get farther away it gets harder and harder. If you need
more evidence just think about the sun the sun is a huge light source but if
you go out in the middle a day when there are no clouds in the sky it's going to be extremely hard light.
It's the biggest light source in our solar system but it's so far away
that it becomes a little pinpoint of light. If it's an overcast day, well it's really the same light source, right? But those clouds, they're gathering all the light and they're
reflecting it in every different direction. So the clouds become a massive light source and
suddenly we have a much softer form of light.

Another factor that can
make light seem softer, even if it really is hard
light, is how much fill light you have. So, right
now we have a little bit of ambient light but most of the
light is coming right from this bulb here. What I will do is bounce some
light in from the other side and see how it changes the light on the subject I'm gonna grab a reflector and a reflector, it's pretty much, the name
describes it right? It's like a big thing that reflects light. So I'm gonna put this on the other side
of our patient model.

So as I slide it into place, look how those shadows change. Without the reflector and with the
reflector. No reflector, with the reflector. Still one light
source but the reflector is bouncing the light back and filling all the shadows.

It's still a
hard light and you can tell, just look at the line
in the shadows, the line in the shadow's still hard, right? The transition here is still harsh, but
there's more light in the shadows. It's a hard light source with fill. We talk about fill ratios sometimes in
photography, and that's the ratio the light in the
shadows verses your main light. So I'd like to show
you one more thing and that's the combination of the reflector and
diffusers.

So I'll grab this diffuser again and I will put the reflector up next to our patient model, and then I'll
put that diffuser in there too. And as we can see here, we see very even
light without the diffuser it gets harder with the diffuser it gets softer. Without the
reflector we have deep shadows, and with the reflector we have much more even lighting and softer shadows that aren't nearly as dark. In other words,
brighter shadows.

Now I want you to do the same practice
all the time! Whenever you're out, whether indoors or
outdoors, I want you to be studying the light. If you're outdoors on
a completely sunny day you'll have one main light, that sun will be
super bright. But I bet the shadows on the faces won't be pitch black. No, there'll be some light
in the shadows, you'll be able to go under a tree where there's not sunlight
and still be able to see, right? That's because the world around you is
creating fill.

The grass is reflecting light up, the
atmosphere itself has little water molecules in it that diffuse light. It's all pretty amazing stuff and its
complex. And there's no way I can teach it all to you because you just need to be
aware of it and then start absorbing it as you go from place to place. When you're indoors, I want you to take a look at
the lighting in the room and see how many different
light sources are there are and how they're effecting the shadows on
people's faces or coffee cups or objects around you.

Notice those shadows and which light sources are filling in
those shadows, or maybe there's only one light source and they really are pitch black. Which light sources are
genuinely soft and which are completely hard. When are
you seeing soft gradual transitions from highlights to shadows and when are you seeing harsh transitions. When are you seeing specular highlights that are just super bright and kind of giving you a sense
for the shiny and smooth texture of a surface and
when are you seeing very smooth highlights that kind of make you feel like
it's a little softer and not quite so silky smooth.

If you like this video and you want to see more free videos go to my page and click subscribe. I also hope that
you click like for this video this is part of my book
Stunning Digital Photography. So if you like this you'll probably like the book it has more than seven hours of video in it, as well as a whole book, right? If you think books are lame, if you'd rather just learn by watching videos, we'll you're not gonna learn great by just
browsing random youtube videos, you'll never get a comprehensive education. But I do have a DVD series out there,
over seven hours of video that walks you from start to finish
through all the basics and intermediate level stuff of photography including lighting lessons like this
one.

So I hope you'll check it out. You can go to sdp.Io/store or just search for Tony Northrup at
Amazon. Thanks so much..

Beer Photography With Rob Grimm

Aaron Nace: A couple of weeks ago, we headed
down to St. Louis, Missouri to shoot with the Shakespeare of beers, St. Louis own,
Rob Grimm. Today, were bringing you an exclusive Phlearn tutorial on just how we
did it.

Rob Grimm: Hey, gang. Welcome. Were going
to be doing a new shot today. Its a portfolio shoot with beer.

Were going to be concentrating
on a really cool product from Boulevard Beer Brewing out of Kansas City, and that is their
Tank 7 Farmhouse Ale. Theyve got a couple different bottles,
and were going to use the small one, which is just your regular size bottle. Were
going to be using a large bottle, which looks more like a champagne bottle, cork and all,
with the twisty. Were going to be putting an actual beer pour in a snifter glass.
This is kind of a different beer.

Its a higher percent alcohol, and is tending to
be served in a little smaller glass, in a little smaller bottle rather, and then poured
into a small snifter glass. Thats what were going to do.
Since its their farmhouse ale, were going to do it in kind of a rustic setting.
You can see the background behind me. That is some barn wood that we snagged from an
old saw mill in Middle Missouri, brought it back here, we put it together for our background,
and weve got a surface made out of old barn wood as well. Were really going to
give it that kind of rustic, barn wood feel.

Lets get to it.
All right, gang. Lets talk a little bit about this set and how it came together. Again,
Im using the Hasselblad with the 120-macro. My set is over here.

I brought the camera
angle up a little bit from what I had originally intended to do. I was going to try to make
it pretty heroic and give those bottles a good, big, rich heroic feel. I wanted to see
more of the surface. Plus, I actually wanted to catch a little bit of this front edge and
really give this wood that farmhouse feel, because this is Tank 7 Farmhouse Ale.

I want
to bring my camera up a little bit, and Im looking almost dead in the neck of the bottle,
so right there is my camera perspective. Once again, Ive always got a few lights
on set. One of my main lights, right here, is this pan head. One of the things to note
about this particular pan head is that Ive got a layer of polarizing gel on the light
itself.

Ive got a polarizer on the lens. I set the polarizer on the lens to be perfect
for the scene. It killed the glare coming around from the bottles that I didnt want.
The polarizer is set for the scene. Then I.

Rotate the polarizer on the light to get rid
of the highlight that would appear on the front of the bottle.
If I didnt rotate that polarizer, Id have a big, oblong-shaped highlight right
on the front of these bottles, and it would be gross. By spinning that, in tandem with
the polarizer thats on the lens, I completely get rid of it.
Ive got this little guy. This is a Visatec. Its a Monobloc with an Infraspot attachment
on the front of it.

This is one of my all-time favorite little lights. I use these things
with great regularity in shooting beverage because I need to get light just on the label.
I want to really sculpt the light around the bottle, and coming through the bottle, and
in doing that, that often makes the label really dark. If I go with an Infraspot like
this, I can concentrate it just on that label, and give it the kick that it needs so that
it pops out without overpowering or over-lighting the rest of the bottle.
Back here, weve got a diffusion panel, and behind it is a reflector. Weve used
this in a couple of different ways.

Were using it now, with the diffusion panel, so
that the light is coming across. Its hitting that gold card that you saw us hold in, and
its giving a good, even reflection going across the entire piece. When we had this
removed, we also had a grid insert on the inside of that reflector head, and that was
coming through and in the final image. Youll see light thats raking through at the base,
and its giving those bottles real depth as it looks like the light is coming forward.
We modified that light two different ways in order to get the two different looks.
You can see an Impaspot back there as well.

We wound up killing that, but our initial
intent was to try to get some light into the bottom of these bottles. The bottles tend
to go dark and one of the reasons why is because theyre cupped. Theyre made like wine
bottles so the base is really curved. When youre looking at it, that tends to throw
the light and make it really dark, so we were trying to get a little light in there.

Its
kind of a difficult thing to do, so were going to wind up imposed, making some adjustments
to get that cup to come up a little bit.I. Have got one other light in the background.
Thats a pan head with a grid inside of that. Its a big 20-inch grid. Ive used
that to give a light washing across my background, but I gridded it down so its giving just
a little more of a concentrated feel to the light.
Theres a light behind this diffusion panel.

Its the Broncolor strip light. That light
is giving me a nice highlight on the outside edge of these two bottles. Theres going
to be a really clean, white line thats coming down. Its diffused so its not
super, super sharp, but its still very, very defined.

It really makes that edge jump
out. Thats our lighting schematic. A couple of tricks that Im going to focus
on. One, visually, the height of the liquid that Im bringing up is going to be different
from how it looks when the head is actually stirred up.

The way to make a beer look good
is to stir it. You do it with a chopstick because theres an enzyme in wood that brings
out the carbonation and makes it explode, but it makes it explode in a very controlled
way. This is something Ive been doing for a lot of years. Its all just trial and
error.

I want to get a really good heroic glass of
beer. The way to do that is to actually pour beer, stir it, and let the head rise. Once
the beer is dead, I suck it all out and do it again. Repeat.

Repeat. Repeat. Repeat until
I know Ive got the perfect beer. This is a beer pump.

Its going to pull
the beer out of the glass for me without moving the glass, so I can keep it in the same spot
and keep rolling. All right, gang. Thanks for joining us. We
just wrapped up two great days of shooting portfolio pieces.

It wouldnt have been
possible without all of our Broncolor gear. It gives that light that extra bit of pop,
as well as our Hasselblad camera which sees every detail in the world.
Thanks for joining us. We look forward to next time. Dont forget to check out our
website which is www.Robgrimmphoto.Com..

Architecture Photography Tips

No question, buying a camera and learning
how to use it has been one of the best investments I think I've ever made. Photography is one of the meta skills I think
every creative person has to cultivate, you know, it teaches you about light, and composition,
contrast, color; all these things that are linked to our experience of, not only architecture,
but the world. I think it's helped me see the world more
objectively, you know viewing it through the lens of a camera, it's just a really valuable
skill set to have in your toolkit. So, I'm not a professional architectural photographer
but I've learned a few things having shot a lot of architecture over my professional
career.

So I wanted to share with you some of the
mistakes that I made when I was first starting out so you don't have to make them to. One of the underlying style elements of architectural
photography is maintaining parallel lines in your image and especially parallel vertical
lines. So to achieve this you have to keep the focal
plane which is basically your camera sensor in here perpendicular to the ground plane. Now, once you tilt the camera you start to
introduce a forced perspective in your image which creates converging lines rather than
parallel lines and it also tends to make the building look as though it's falling backward,
which can admittedly be a good thing if it's exaggerated or that's the effect that you're
going for, but if it's just subtly off it's sort of a tell that you're an amateur.

So the pros use tilt shift lenses for perspective
control which allows them to physically move the lens by tilting and shifting it. Now this corrects the distortion right in
the camera it bakes it into the image. But those types of lenses come at a really
steep price. You can also correct for this in programs
like Lightroom Photoshop or even Snapseed on your phone.

Once you get used to correcting for it you'll
probably start to notice it everywhere. Now correcting this in Lightroom is really
simple and I'll show you how. Okay here we are in Lightroom I have this
photo of this church in Quebec City and I'm just going to show you how to correct the
verticals. We're in the develop module I'm not going
to go through any of - all of - these settings at this point I'm just going to keep those
as they are.

And I'll go to the transform panel here and
you'll see I'm off level and also my verticals are converging. So there's a couple of ways to do this: the
first way is just to choose auto and that's gonna make its best guess and you can see
here it's corrected our verticals. If we come over here to the grid our verticals
look pretty good there still converging just a little bit and then our horizontals, it's
pretty close again. The other way you can do this is you can choose
purely vertical.

So here it looks like it corrected our verticals
a little better, you can also choose level which doesn't look like it did a very good
job. The vertical looks good but the horizontals
here look a little tweaked. Now the other possible way that you can do
is guided and so we'll choose a couple of verticals here - you pick your vertical lines
in the image - and you can be as precise as you want to be here I'm just getting it roughly
close. And then we'll choose our horizontals like
this, you can see it gives you a zoom box so that really pops it into place.

And if you had more horizontal lines - I don't
have a lot of horizontal lines here that I. Can work with - but if you had more you could
adjust this with more granularity. One last thing I want to mention and this
is sort of a compromise solution because when you're doing this it's modifying the pixels
so it is destructive in some sense. That is the compromise when you use a tool
like Lightroom or even Snapseeds tool it will distort the image and the pixels in it.

So you'll want to plan for this because you're
gonna have to crop the image in crop it in like this. You're losing a bunch of information on the
sides which is fine actually because I think it actually just focuses on the subject of
the photo even more. White balance has a big influence on the feel
of your image whether that's warm or cool and it can be tricky to get right if you're
mixing light between inside and outside. Now this is another thing that once you start
correcting for it in your images you'll start to notice when people don't white balance
their images.

So you've probably seen the classic white
balance mistake where an interior has a really orange or yellow or green cast to it. So daylight, incandescent light, and LED lighting
they all have different color temperatures and they each introduce a different color
cast into your image. So changing the white balance allows you to
correct for this and it allows you to choose which one represents the scene most accurately. So I sort of view it as an artistic decision
in my workflow as I'm editing the image in post.

Shooting your images in a RAW format will
give you the most flexibility to change things in post but you can modify white balance even
if you're not shooting RAW. If you're shooting on your phone just hop
into an app like Snapseed and give it check what the auto white balance feature does for
your image you might be surprised how much more polished it starts to look. Using a tripod rather than hand-holding your
shots allows you to push your camera's manual settings exactly where you need them, say
that's a long exposure for a low-light environment, or to focus stack, or to blend multiple exposures
of a scene to capture a higher dynamic range. Let's say you're shooting an interior room
which has a window with lots of exterior light coming in.

If you were to expose for the interior the
window area would be just way overexposed overblown. And if you were to expose for the exterior
- for the window - the interior would just be way under exposed. So professionals will usually expose for the
window and bring the light level up inside to compensate with supplemental lighting like
strobes. But if you're lacking that kind of professional
gear - and you probably are since you're watching this - you can simply lock off your camera
on a tripod and take a series of multiple exposures.

You're going to bracket the same scene and
then combine those bracketed images in Lightroom or Photoshop to capture a broader dynamic
range for that scene and a more accurate rendition of how the eye actually experiences the architecture;
that's what you're after. Now I mentioned tilt-shift lenses as the standard
go-to for serious architectural photographers but most of us don't have the budget for those
they're in the multiple thousands of dollars. Most commonly you're going to want to use
wider angle lenses for architecture but if you go too wide you'll get lots of distortion
it's just not gonna look right. For interiors and tight spaces I'm usually
using the 16 to 35 which is a zoom lens and that's on a full-frame Canon 6d mark 2 now
if you're using a crop sensor like a 70 or an 80D you can pick up this 10 to 18 zoom
for not a lot of money and for those cameras the crop sensors it covers roughly the same
focal range like 16 to 28 millimeters so still fairly wide.

Now, I also have a 24 to 70 zoom for longer
focal lengths longer focal lengths tend to compress or flatten the image bringing the
foreground and the background closer together. Many phone cameras just have a fixed focal
length I think the iPhone that I have is about a fixed 28 millimeter so not too wide but
it's not too bad either so if its all you have that's what you can use. And there's also a host of sort of lenses
that you can clip onto the top so if you don't have the budget for a DSLR, check out Moment
lenses for some good options. Having a zoom lens for architecture is nice
because much of the time you'll be working with some kind of space constraint, having
the zoom function allows you to reframe and change perspective; a fixed focal length wouldn't
allow you to do that.

Ultra-wide shots can appear unnatural so you
don't want to capture only ultra-wide shots, save those for when you're not able to get
back far enough or you just don't have another option. Use these to help tell the story of the larger
building: materials, intersections, joints, these are all the touch points of architecture
and I like to use the 50 millimeter 1.4 For detail shots. It's fast enough to create some nice background
blur which isolates your subject and it means you can hand hold these detail shots and kind
of move quickly from one thing to the next you know pick up handrail, fittings, fixtures,
materials, connections; capture all the things that lend context, texture, and interest to
your work. The more you shoot the more you'll gain an
intuitive understanding of how light affects your final image.

Backlighting, front lighting, side lighting,
and night lighting, all produce vastly different effects. Now I try to avoid really flat lighting situations
where there's an even amount of light on the subject coming especially from the direction
you're shooting from now this doesn't allow you to capture any shadow or texture because
you're aligning your view with the light source so you're not going to see any of the shadows. You want to move around a space or outside
a building and get a real feel for what light is available and you want to always be aware
of your aspect in relation to it. Position yourself in a way that tells the
true story of how the architecture is influenced by and how it changes in varying light conditions.

Now this is an important one you want to get
rid of everything you possibly can especially in interior spaces and really focus in on
your subject. If your shot is of a workspace there's actually
very few things you need to tell the story of that space: computer, keyboard, chair,
desk; you know that's probably it you want to take out everything else. Now when you take the shot have a peek at
it on a larger screen if possible and you really want to scrutinize it, it's completely
possible you forgot to remove something obvious in the frame, like I've left the lenses on
shelves before or there's been a tripod in the back corner that I missed until I looked
at the image on a separate screen. Now these are just a few tips to get you started
and they'll go a long way to helping your images look more professional especially the
first two, focus on those if you don't know where else to start.

But all of this is in no way a substitute
for working with a professional architectural photographer, they have better equipment,
training, and they have connections to publications which you probably lack. Now having the skill of knowing how to use
a camera and what all the manual settings do is really useful because it can be a long
time between when a project is completed and when you're able to professionally photograph
it and it's nice to have some high quality images you can use in the interim. And often the detailed photos that you take
on your own - as you're on the site, the things are finishing up - leaves flexibility in your
photography budget for the person you hire to capture scenes and perspectives that you're
not able to get because of your equipment limitations. Now links to all the gear are in the description
below and they're linked up in the cards go ahead and smash that like button below and
help me out by sharing this around with someone you know.

Is there someone who's not subscribed to this
channel yet? And tell me in the comments: what kind of
camera are you using? We'll see you again next time, cheers my friends!.