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.
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