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Oops, something went wrong! · Wildlife and Adventure Photography

• 0:17
  > Speaker A>Hello again. So, in this podcast, what I thought I'd do is talk about, some things you can think about if you're not getting the results that you were hoping for. So you've taken a photograph of something or somebody and it's come out and it's really no good.
• 0:35
  > Speaker A>So I'm going to talk about it more from a general point of view because obviously specific issues or, specific outcomes will have specific issues around them. But I thought I'd just talk about five areas where you're.
• 0:50
  > Speaker A>If you've got a problem, if something's gone wrong, it's likely to be in one of these five areas. Now, obviously in the nature of a podcast, I'm not going to go into a lot of detail. So the idea of this one is to tell you where you're likely to be going wrong and not so much about what, how to fix it. Because I think, to be perfectly honest with you, the best thing to do is if you're consistently getting poor results, is to, learn a bit more about photography and do it properly. So, as you know, I have an online photography course and obviously I would recommend that as one option. but I think it is important to do some sort of training from the ground up. So assuming no knowledge and then taking you right through everything. Because the, problem we always have is we don't know what we don't know.
• 1:38
  > Speaker A>And what I've often found with people who are struggling a bit with their photography is they've sort of learned different pieces here and there, but there's just one really important thing they've missed.
• 1:50
  > Speaker A>And so everything that builds on that thing sort of assumes that you already know it. And if you don't know it, you're going ahead, trying to follow instructions, try and follow guidance, but it's just not working. And the reason it's, it isn't working is that there's this little bit of knowledge that you're missing and that whoever is taking you through the next step, whether it's on YouTube or a, podcast or wherever it is, sort of assumes that you know a certain thing. So I do think it's really important that, if you do find that basically you're frustrated with the results you're getting in your photography and it happens regularly, then that to me is basically saying, yep, time to just step back, start again. Because somewhere there is something fundamental that you are missing.
• 2:42
  > Speaker A>And the chances are you won't be able to spot what that is unless you do go back. And if you don't do anything about it.
• 2:51
  > Speaker A>You're likely to continually have the same kind of results, the same frustrations about your photography, and you're going to be really lucky if you find out why, basically.
• 3:02
  > Speaker A>So enough of that, let's dive into. I've really highlighted four areas which hopefully is good news because when, you look at. I know from my own experience, when I was learning photography myself, I would get results where I'd be trying to get a particular result and I just couldn't get there and I couldn't understand what I had done wrong. And initially it feels like there could be any number of things that I was doing wrong. So I thought if I break it down into four areas, that helps a little bit.
• 3:32
  > Speaker A>It's kind of like if you've worked on a car and the engine won't start, that can feel really intimidating if you don't know anything about car engines. But typically it comes down to, well, often one of two things. Is it getting fuel and is it getting a spark if you've got a, you know, traditional petrol engine car? Because just generally where you'd start to, fault find what's gone wrong.
• 3:53
  > Speaker A>So we will fault find your photography if you are having problems with your photography. So the first thing is, I'm going to call it light, but it's essentially exposure. And what I mean by that is, first of all, is your image correctly exposed. And if it isn't, it means it's likely to be overexposed.
• 4:16
  > Speaker A>So it's very, very bright. You sort of burn everything out or it's underexposed, which means basically that everything's very, very dark.
• 4:25
  > Speaker A>So you haven't let enough light in, for the photograph to be properly exposed. Now, one way of it was a couple of ways of doing this, but the key thing is probably the mode. Now, I'm a big believer in using camera modes to work for you, and I've spoken about modes in detail in, other podcasts.
• 4:50
  > Speaker A>But essentially a mode is the way you set the camera up to do things for you automatically. Now, modern cameras are really good, so, they can do an awful lot of the calculations for you.
• 5:04
  > Speaker A>They can actually do everything for you pretty much. And you just point your camera at your subject, press the button and off you go. There's a perfectly exposed photograph. Now, that's when you're in auto mode, but in order to start producing creative images, and what I mean by that is having more control over, let's say, what's in focus, or you want you might want movement in your photograph. If you want to start getting photographs that are more interesting and not just snapshots. What in the good old days we would have called snapshots, where, yeah, you've got a, you know, it's nicely exposed, colors are good, all the rest of it, it's kind of boring. If you want to step beyond that, you need to get out of auto. However, there are other modes that you can choose that might be, the aperture also.
• 5:56
  > Speaker A>Basically aperture, where aperture has priority. Or it might be shutter speed, or it has priority. You've also got fully manual. But if you're having difficulty with getting a, photograph, that's what you want, whether it's correctly exposed to something else. I really wouldn't recommend using manual until you've really mastered, some of the other aspects. And then you can go on to manual. Because with manual you're having to do everything.
• 6:19
  > Speaker A>And if you're not getting the result that you want and you're in manual, there are a lot more things that could be going wrong. And that's the reason why I don't recommend that, you use manual. Now, if you have been using manual and you're having difficulties, the easiest thing to do is just flip to fully auto do a test shot, and then look at what settings the camera has chosen for that particular situation. And that will, that will give you some reference settings and you can then build from there.
• 6:50
  > Speaker A>So that's the first thing to think about. Is the image correctly exposed. If it is, then that's good, you've got that part down.
• 7:01
  > Speaker A>But if it isn't, if it's underexposed or overexposed, you need to look at how you're controlling exposure. And that's primarily, although not always done through the aperture.
• 7:12
  > Speaker A>And so it might be worth going into an aperture priority mode, whatever that might be called on your camera. So that's the first thing. The other thing that typically goes wrong is that the image isn't sharp. And often, although not always, that will be down to your focusing. So what have you focused on? Are you even aware of how focus works on your camera? And then based on the settings you're using, what part of the photograph would you expect to be in focus? And which parts would you expect to be out of focus? Now, I've spoken about this a number of times because the question I think I've been asked most frequently is how do you get a sharp subject but have the background and possibly the foreground out of focus?
• 8:07
  > Speaker A>So that is about Understanding aperture and how that works. So if you're finding that everything's out of focus or your subject is out of focus, there's a couple of things. One issue might have the aperture wrong. More likely you've not actually focused on the point of interest. Something has gone wrong with your focusing. So you need to understand how that's working. If you're using manual focus, then you're not focusing correctly.
• 8:36
  > Speaker A>Ah, so again, depending on the camera, if you go back to old film cameras, they used to have a really good prism setup, most of the cameras I used. So somewhere in there you would have a couple of circles in the middle of the viewfinder and you'd have a split down the middle or across the horizontal. And basically you would, it would if the trick to using it was to focus on a vertical line or horizontal line and you would then change the focus so that it actually ran properly. It was, it was a straight line, not a broken line. So that, that's making any sense. Hopefully that's good. If it's not, don't worry.
• 9:19
  > Speaker A>These days with, digital cameras, cameras which primarily rely on autofocus, you don't tend to have that feature. So you do need to understand how autofocus works on your camera.
• 9:33
  > Speaker A>And typically you will be able to choose which points within the autofocus system you use as the point which is going to focus for you. Or there might be zones which is collection of points, or it might be a very broad focusing setup up where you're just taking a, kind of average in what, whatever's in this zone in the viewfinder. so if that isn't making, making sense, you do need to make that make sense to you. So definitely have a look at what the camera information is about setting up your focus or if you still don't understand it, again get a bit of proper training on understanding autofocus and how it works.
• 10:13
  > Speaker A>So a lot of people don't like to go and get training on things like this, but once you do, if you invest a little bit of time and money in learning this, it will absolutely transform your photography. Not, only in terms of the results you get, but your creativity, your confidence. When you pick up a camera, you'll begin to realize that cameras work pretty much along the same principles. The detail of how they're implemented will vary a little bit from camera to camera, but it will mean that you can, with confidence, pick up pretty much any camera and immediately start shooting. And that's the. That to me is one Sign of somebody who's really learned photography. That to me is a photographer rather than someone who's a bit of a hobbyist, takes snapshots for the family album. And that's the extent of it. Those people to me are not serious photographers. Whereas a serious photographer will have spent the time and put in the effort to really understand how those elements of photography work.
• 11:12
  > Speaker A>So focusing obviously is one of those cornerstones of photography. I've already spoken about light, how light and getting your exposure correct. That's another cornerstone of photography. So you really need to have that down with focus. so that's one aspect of it is what you're focusing on. You also need to understand how the camera is doing its focus. Are you just focusing, taking one focus reading when you press the shutter button halfway down, or is the camera set to continuously refocus while that camera while, that shutter button is halfway down? So I don't know. I don't know how your camera is set up. I know how I use mine. but that's because I understand it. So again, this is something. If you are getting this horrible focusing issue, then you need to understand exactly what the camera is doing. Another question to ask is, would something like back button focus work better for you?
• 12:12
  > Speaker A>So again, if you don't know what that is, you first all need to understand why you might use something like that. I can tell you what it does. It basically means you take, the focus function of the camera away from the shutter button and onto another button, usually on the back of the camera, and then you away from operating the shutter, which will also generally set your, exposure.
• 12:36
  > Speaker A>it means you're not combining that with the, focus. And it means that you can set your focus separately and then recompose. So, this might sound complicated, but again, it can be very useful if you're doing things like a lot of wildlife photography or birds or any or sports photography, where you want to set your focal distance, the distance from the sensor, basically, where you want your focus to be. It could be the goalkeeper.
• 13:04
  > Speaker A>it could be, somebody moving even, but as long as they're not moving towards or away from you, that focal distance won't change.
• 13:13
  > Speaker A>So it means you can recompose the image so that you've got a different look to your photograph. So again, is that for you? I don't know. But you need to be aware. These are options. But fundamentally you need to understand if your image is out of focus, if you are not getting a good, Focus, then you need to think about the aspects.
• 13:33
  > Speaker A>How is your camera? How have you set the camera up to tell it where you want to focus on?
• 13:40
  > Speaker A>Because you do that. And if you've never reset the, focus the autofocus points on your camera, probably a good idea to take a look at them if you are not getting the results you want. Because the chances are by changing one setting on the camera, you'll get a big transformation in your images.
• 13:58
  > Speaker A>Now that also brings me on nicely to the other reason why things, are not in focus and that can be blurring.
• 14:07
  > Speaker A>So that, and what I mean by that is that the subject in your photograph was not still at the point or relative to the camera. It wasn't still when you press the shutter button. That could be because it was moving. You might be focusing, somebody playing sport, they're running. Or you might be, trying to photograph a car that's obviously, that's moving. I say obviously moving, but not necessarily. But it's moving or you've moved, you've been moving while you had the butter. The butter. The shutter. The shutter button pressed. So why might that happen? Well, you'll get movement depending on the shutter speed. Now, I'm going to share just, a guide that I tend to use when I'm, teaching. And that is if you're photographing in thousands of a second, then you are likely, highly likely to freeze everything. So if you want no movement whatsoever in your photograph, you want to be shooting at the fastest possible shutter speed that you can use and still have a good exposure. So I've already mentioned exposure where I m might do that in, my photography is something like a humpback, whale breaching. I will shoot anywhere between 1/1,000th of a second and 1/4,000th of a second because I want to freeze everything. I want to freeze that whale in midair. I want to freeze the water droplets coming off its body.
• 15:45
  > Speaker A>So that's one aspect of getting that result. But the one of, but the reason that I'm going that fast is not only is my subject moving, but the chances are I'm moving as well. Because I'm on the ocean, I'm on a boat. So the boat's moving relative to the whale.
• 16:03
  > Speaker A>I'm probably spinning around to get the camera onto the whale because in most, in most circumstances I was not looking through the viewfinder and watching this whale just come up out of the water. Happened occasionally when I've got it, when I've guessed right where the whale is going to be, but more often it's off to one side or the other. So I'm actually moving myself and obviously the camera to get onto the whale while it's still in the air. So I've got three moving things happening, I've got the whale moving, the boat's moving, my platform that I'm on is moving and also I'm moving. So to kill all of that movement, I need to be shooting as fast as I can. So that's where you would want to shoot in thousandths of a second.
• 16:51
  > Speaker A>Where you're shooting in hundredths of a second, the chances are that you will get some movement in the image, but not necessarily lot. So where I would use hundredths of a second is if I was photographing a moving subject and I'm moving with it, but I want to keep some movement in the picture. So one of the things I used to like doing a lot was photograph ah, piston driven aircraft.
• 17:16
  > Speaker A>So basically aircraft with propellers.
• 17:19
  > Speaker A>And I like to shoot at a relatively low shutter speed, normally 1,125th of a second. And what I would do, I would be doing multiple exposure. So I, as in I'm doing a burst, so I've got the shutter in auto. So I've got just holding my finger down on the shutter button and it's taking picture after picture after picture after picture. And I'm trying to keep focused, keep locked onto one part of the aircraft. So normally it would be the cockpit. And I'm moving as the aircraft moves relative to me, so I'm pivoting. And if I get it right, and particularly if the aircraft is low, I'll have some sort of background that's blurred because of movement and I might even have a blurred propeller.
• 18:08
  > Speaker A>but everything else is nice and sharp. Now the other place I've used this, I've done a tiny bit of motor radiator photography as well. I used to like sitting opposite the pit exit because the vehicles at that point, they're still moving relatively, there's some speed to them, but they're not bombing past, you know, so because I need to pivot with them and I can't do that if something is hammering past me at you know, 200Ks an hour. So I'm getting something that's at a relatively low speed, but using that same technique, just by tracking it and staying dead on my focal point, which might be the driver, I've got a blurred background and the body is sharp of the vehicle, but there's movement in the wheels as well.
• 18:56
  > Speaker A>So they've spun to some degree. So there's that blurring, particularly if there's writing on the tires, you can see that that's blurred into a line or whatever it is.
• 19:04
  > Speaker A>But there's that movement in the picture.
• 19:08
  > Speaker A>So that's how I get that. So that's using shutter speed, a, lower shutter speed, hundredths of a second to build movement into that image. And I like those kind of pictures. I like that sort of blurriness. Whether it's the subject that's blurred, if it's a train going by and I'm just static.
• 19:27
  > Speaker A>So we've got a, you know, a blurry train and a nice sharpening focus platform, or the background's blurred and I've got a nice sharp subject. So that's how you kind of play with movement, in the image. And then as you go lower than that, if you go tenths of a second or even full seconds, that's where you can get these more kind of ethereal looking images of moving water where you've frozen the movement, sorry, you've frozen what's around them.
• 19:57
  > Speaker A>But you kind of got this blurry, as I say, almost sort of ethereal look to the water. And that's simply because as you've exposed, as you got the shutter open, the, where the water, the surface of the water is changing moment to moment relative to the camera. And so you get this aggregate kind of movement or this blur created, using shutter speed.
• 20:20
  > Speaker A>So focus tends to be the one where people have a problem.
• 20:25
  > Speaker A>So again, asking how to get sharp photographs is a question I get, asked quite regularly. So if you're going to use shutter speed, if shutter speed is important to you, you want to use one of the modes. So normally a shutter speed priority mode, whatever that might be called on your camera, and then let the camera work out the rest for you.
• 20:46
  > Speaker A>So as I've said, I'm a big believer in letting the camera do the work because it frees you up to start thinking more creatively about the final photograph. What do you want it to look like? Where do you want things to be? Do you want elements of composition in there?
• 21:01
  > Speaker A>So composition is the final thing I'm just going to talk about because you might be getting results where everything's exposed, you're happy with the shutter speed. You know, things are in focus as you want them, but they're still really boring. And so the thing to think about there are composition techniques. And again, I talked through a few common Ones.
• 21:24
  > Speaker A>So Rule of Thirds is a great one to start with if you've not looked, at composition.
• 21:30
  > Speaker A>And Rule of Thirds is basically where you simply, divide what you're seeing, whether it's through the viewfinder or on the screen at the back of the camera. In fact, on a lot of cameras you can digitally put in the Rule of Thirds grid, just by. If you look at your menu options, for the, display at the back when you're shooting.
• 21:51
  > Speaker A>And basically what you're doing is you're splitting the screen into thirds horizontally by putting two horizontal lines in.
• 22:00
  > Speaker A>Sorry, splitting it vertically. And doing the same with the, horizontal direction by putting two vertical lines in, equally spaced. And what you do to use that, you either use one of the four crossover points as the point where you place your subject, or you just place the subject on one of those four grid lines. And, that will create it. Basically what it does, it stops you plonking your subject right in the center, which is what most people do. And this is where you get these really boring images because it's just, you know, there's. It's just what you expect. But if you put it off to one side, if you put your subject off to one side, what you do is you create space in the image. So if it's off to one side, to the left or right and vertically, whether it's up, or sort of higher in the frame or lower in the frame, what you're doing is you're creating space around your subject. And using the visual storyteller technique, which is something that I've spoken about from time to time.
• 23:01
  > Speaker A>What you're doing there is you're allowing the viewer to, fill that empty space if you haven't done so. So they'll start to create some sort of a story about what they're looking at. It doesn't have to be a long story. Short stories are fine. But it just makes for a much more interesting photograph, a much more interesting portrait. And this is where you can allow yourself to get really creative. Just put your. If it's a portrait, maybe zoom in really close and have the eye that you focused on. Because with the portrait you always want to focus on one of the eyes. Maybe have that really over to one side or another on the image. Crop in really tight.
• 23:42
  > Speaker A>You know, let yourself play with it. Play with. I tend to do that in post. One of the reasons I shoot, really big images.
• 23:51
  > Speaker A>My, RAW files are very large. Is that I can crop in quite Closely and still have a good, resolution to my image so that I can do other things with it if I want to. But I will play around with certain photographs and just try different crops, zoom in in different ways, shift the focal point somewhere completely different, maybe unexpected, and just see what I get. Now, a lot of them don't work.
• 24:14
  > Speaker A>They look pretty awful. But every now and again you'll find something that you think, yeah, that looks pretty good, actually. I like that. We'll run with that. It's just different. And that, to me, is one of the important aspects of photography that if we continue to learn, as we engage with our photography, as we photograph different subjects, as we look at other people's work, as we get new ideas, as we try something new, as we try a different setting, this is where you start to create images that maybe you never thought you could create, maybe you wouldn't have thought of, or maybe you thought beyond you. And I think that this is the important thing of getting back to basics. Because once you understand the basics of the camera and the important relationships, I've spoken about a few of them, there are more.
• 25:03
  > Speaker A>It frees you up to, first of all, really experiment yourself and start producing things that excite you, which is great. You want to be excited by your photography. And secondly, allows you to look at other people's work and you can work out what they've done. You can look at a photograph and you can look at how the photographers use lighting, how they've used the subject in the frame, where they positioned them, how they're making use of depth of field, what they're doing with their shutter speed, Are they using reflections, are they using leading lines? All of these kind of things. Once you become familiar with them yourself, photographs that really inspire you, you can begin to pick apart and realize and work out what that photographer has done to get that result. And then having done that, you can imitate it, see what results you can get. So I'm m going to end this podcast there. I hope that has been useful. If you are struggling with results, maybe not all the time, but maybe occasionally you're really excited, you think you catch something and it's just gone horribly wrong.
• 26:12
  > Speaker A>so just to recap the four areas where most mistakes happen. First, of all, with the use of light, the use of exposure.
• 26:26
  > Speaker A>Secondly, getting the focus correct.
• 26:29
  > Speaker A>Thirdly, understanding how the shutter speed works and, how that will impact a particular photograph. And the final thing is to understand composition. And this is more to step away from the boring and Start stepping into the interesting.
• 26:47
  > Speaker A>Okay, so that's it for now. if you are interested in looking at what's available on the course, there's a link in the podcast description. There's another one on my website, www.gephotography.
• 27:02
  > Speaker A>you can find out more there. Here's some testimonials, all that kind of stuff. And yeah, thanks very much for listening to the podcast. Please share if you know of anybody who might be interested in this as well. Please don't keep me a, ah, big secret. And I'll speak to you in the next podcast. Bye for now.
• 27:21
  > Speaker A>Just before I go, I wanted to remind you that first, of all I have an offer running, with my free download. So if you go onto the website and there's a link at the bottom of the description of this particular podcast, and that will take you to a link, to where you can give me your email, I will send you, a PDF, which is 10 Simple Steps to improve your photography today. So it includes the kind of things that I talk about in the podcast. So it's all there in black and white with some examples. You can see what's going on. And also remember I offer, online photography courses. I do fine art.
• 27:58
  > Speaker A>If you haven't checked out my galleries, please do. The links are, again below the description of the podcast.
• 28:04
  > Speaker A>And don't forget to help me out. So you're welcome to subscribe both to the podcast and you can become a member of my Patreon membership and join me there. So in that membership you get, access to me, and also you get advance m notice of things that are coming up. I'll tell you about other things that are going on that I don't share in my Facebook group or on Instagram or anywhere else really. So it is, just a membership where if you like what I do and you just want to be a part of it, the subscriptions are really low. It's just a couple of a cup of coffee a month. So, how much better could I be than that? So please take a look and I'll speak to you in the next podcast. So bye for now.