Following are the different types of photography ******
Following are the different types of photography which you can categorize captured images in II
- Landscape Photography. ...
- Wildlife Photography. ...
- Aerial photography. ...
- Sports / Action Photography. ...
- Portrait Photography. ..
- Architectural Photography. ...
- Wedding Photography
- /Event Photography. ...
- Fashion Photography.
So in this lecture, we're going to look at lighting now I
know that sounds like a fairly broad topic but at least being able to
understand the different types of lighting and the different directions of
lighting and how that affects your photos and flash and things like that
that'll put you a lot further forward in what you can get out of your photos
and just a reminder that the in the course notes booklet as well there's the
same lighting section that matches up and with the little summary clip cards as
a section there that tells you about you know the directions of lighting which the way that puts your shadows and so on so that's pretty handy but in many ways
lighting is probably the most important part of photography really you know you
can do as much as you want with your aperture and shutter speed and blah blah
blah but if the lighting is terrible there's almost nothing you can do to get a
good photo let's just look at the various types of lighting you get in your the average day starting with lovely golden morning lighting now as you know
morning lighting is beautiful for photography.
You know there's some is low in the sky so it's nice and soft you don't have that contrast problem the shadows are not too dark and it has that nice warm glow to it as well it's a really beautiful time for taking photos while you can certainly take beautiful photos before the sun comes up as well you've got about an hour afterward that's what they call the golden hour when the lighting is just perfect after that pretty rapidly the Sun starts to climb higher and get stronger and you end up with harsh lighting when the Sun gets too strong then you end up with contrast problems so the bit in the Sun is a million times brighter than the bit in the shade next to it so the shadow just becomes jet-black or you end up blowing out your highlights they become too bright it's just not a good time for taking photos also the middle of the day the Sun is quite high so you end up with top lighting which means to get shadows in the eye sockets of people and you know photographs of animals and things they kind of become very bright on the top and very dark underneath it's not a very nice direction of light either not a good time for taking photos if you have to take photos in the middle of the day in the Sun you're better off going and finding some shade literally going in standing behind a building or something where it's just total shade lighting because the light that gets into the shade is actually really beautiful you don't have any contrast problems because you're already in the shade so there's not going to be any shaded side of your subject it's just nice and even it's the same with cloud lightning you know if you wake up and it's just a blanket cloud cover day you might think what a boring day for taking photos sure your landscape photos might look a little drab if there are too many clouds but photographs of things like people and animals fantastic cloud lighting are beautiful it's just such a soft light and the light has bounced off from everywhere so it's coming from every direction at once.
So it fills every little nook and cranny evenly it's a very flattering kind of light for portraits wrinkles and things don't really show up it's a great time for taking photos and it means you can shoot all day long because there's never any harsh the sunlight here's a good little tip if you're photographing an animal that's sitting in the Sun like a little crab or a lizard or something yeah if you could actually shade it with your body sort of move yourself between the Sun and your subject cast your shadow over it then you've got it in a nice soft shade lighting and it'll look beautiful all the colors will look nicer and it won't be so contrasting anymore moving on then you get to evening lighting much like morning lighting I guess the Sun is low in the sky and you get that nice warm orange glow again and the contrast problems not there anymore you can see in this photo you can see the shadows but they're not too dark at all they just provide a bit of interest it makes it look a little bit more 3d you can still see into the deep crevices in the rock and obviously, this photo is taken with a large f-number you can tell from the large depth of field so everything is in focus but also the Sun has done that starburst which remembers in the aperture the lecture you get that with the large f-number and finally moving on to low lighting now low lighting is tricky to deal with just because there's not much the light around and it's going to take the camera quite a long time to collect enough of it to give you an image.
So you're going to have to expect to have quite long slow shutter speeds so you're gonna have to hold the camera really steady or put it on a tripod or turn your ISO up or a few other things there's a little trickier to deal with but it's worth persevering because you can get really beautiful results don't always let your flash pop up you know it's worth knowing that in all the camera modes we've been using on this course so the program mode and everything better than that the flash will never pop up on its own if you actually want to use the flash you have to press the little flash release the button next to the flash and then it'll pop up but if you leave it down then you're forcing the camera to use that natural ambient light and you can get such beautiful results all of these sort of photos would have just been ruined in auto mode, the flash would have popped up BAM and you'd lose all that delicate lighting of the fire or the head torch whatever it is so persevere so the other important factor of the lighting is not only the quality of the light but the direction that it's coming from because that affects the shadows as you'll see so let's start with platting that's where your subject is lit from the same direction that you're looking at it so there's some pretty telltale signs of front lighting your subject ends up being completely illuminated so you don't have any shadows on it of course because if you're shining the light on the front of it all the shadows around the back so it's great if you want to be able to see every detail like for a product photo for a catalog or something there's a lot of drawbacks to front lighting if your subject is at all reflective or glossy the light just sort of shines straight back into the camera and you get that nasty glare same on the skin of people or if they're wearing glasses or if you're trying to shoot through the glass it just bounces back at you so it's not that nice and the worst thing about front lighting is it tends to make.
Your photos quite flat and 2-dimensional you can't really see the shape of things you need some shadows for that and that's where side lighting comes in so side lighting reveals shape and texture through the shadows so side lighting is good for portraits or anything where you just want to make it look a little bit more 3d now backlighting when you're starting out in photography people often try and avoid it because you end up with dark silhouettes and things like you saw in the exposure lecture when you accidentally have the girl in front of the window or if you get the Sun in the background of your shot and your subject just comes out as this really dark figure but in that exposure the lecture we learn how to fix those kinds of problems using exposure compensation so you could just go plus to brighten the photo back up and then great so after you've learned how to deal with the problems of backlighting it can give you some really beautiful results it can give you a nice glow or halo around the edges of things, rim lighting can give you really nice silhouettes and for people it gives you nice highlights in the hair so backlighting can be a really beautiful light to use.
You might just find you need to overexpose the shot sometimes and you've also got to look out for lens flare you've probably seen these little splashes of light that come across your photo from time to time that's caused by direct sunlight coming into the front of your lens and reflecting off every bit of glass inside your lens now getting direct sunlight in your lens is a problem for several reasons not only do you get lens flares but you also lose some of the saturation of your colors now if you have little bits of dust or something on the lens they tend to show up more autofocus can struggle you know getting sunlight in your lens is not a good thing now if the Sun is actually in your the photo then you're gonna get sunlight on the front of your lens clearly there's not much you can do about that so you probably have lens flares and all the other problems but often the Sun is not in your shot maybe it's up here somewhere you wouldn't have even really thought about it maybe you wouldn't think it's backlit at all but in fact, the Sun can still see directly into the lens so we're getting direct sunlight spilling across the front of the lens and we're still getting all those problems.
So that's what these things are for lens hood the whole point in life is just to shade the front of the lens so you don't have lens flares so you get to keep your nice rich colors and so on now most lenses come with lens hoods and oftentimes people just tend to forget about them or they just you know leave them on backward all the time which is a bit silly that makes it smaller so you can put it into your camera bag but every time you're photographing you really should get in the habit of getting it out and putting it on it's almost never a problem you know people think oh it's cutting out light and you might need that in low-light or something it's not true it's only ever cutting out light that you don't need to photograph it's just cutting out stray light coming in from the edge the only times you might ever want to take it off is if you're doing really close-up flash work and you popped your little flash up and it couldn't quite see past the lens hood so you end up with what's called a hood shadow on the bottom of your photo or if you're trying to get that much closer to a window or something then sure then you can take it off but in every other situation it's never doing you harm and you should get in the habit of using it so it's worth taking just a couple of seconds to think about lighting before you start taking photos you know if someone asks you to take their photo in the Sun realize that they're gonna be really harsh shadows go and find somewhere in the shade well maybe if there's no shade lookup in the sky and you might find that the only reason it's harsh sunlight just now is that there's a hole in the clouds but it looks like if you wait about two minutes there's gonna be a big bank of clouds roll in front of the Sun and then you'll be with nice cloud lighting totally worth waiting for two minutes for some nice cloud lighting before you photograph someone or at least think about the direction of the light as well rather than having the Sun over there and getting lens flares and things maybe bring it around here and shoot from that way then you get some side lighting it looks more 3d it doesn't take long to think about these things but it can make a really big difference in how your photos look at this example of a little beetle on a leaf you can see that's just fairly boring top lighting but instead, if you turn the leaf up to the light and have the light coming through it then you get beautiful colors coming through the leaf and there's a real silhouette of the beetle and it looks fantastic okay let's take a look at flash definitely not just for nighttime use, in fact,
I use my flash a lot more during the day than I ever do at night because if you use it during the day you can fill in those harsh shadows are caused by strong sunlight this example is crying out for some fill flash look at those harsh shadows under the Hat and it just also contrasts II but if we just pop the flash uptake the same photo again that looks much better and the great thing is it doesn't even look flash does it looks quite natural if you take a flash photo at night normally it looks pretty flashed but during the day you can just slip some light into the shadows there when you're doing that it's a technique called fill flash and all of your cameras can do this even your compact cameras even your smartphone cameras you can normally force your flash on now you could just try and lift up the overall exposure until your subject was nice and bright but by then the background would be completely blown out so you're better off just popping your flash up throwing some light in there and filling in those shadows to being the same brightness as the background and then it all looks great you can also use your flash to add a little glint or a sparkle into the eyes of people or animals it's called a catch light makes a big difference just brings them to life a bit more it doesn't have to be a flash you just need to be able to see the reflection of something quite bright in their eyes it could just be a window or something like that but a flash is an easy way to try it so maybe in the last of a batch of photos you've taken pop your flash up just see the effect you get okay we'd better have a look as to why don't know if you'd buy.
one of these giant external flashes if you already have a little inbuilt or pop-up flash in your camera most people just assume it's because these are obviously bigger more powerful you can penetrate the dark further that's true but that's actually not the main reason you'd buy one of these it's because of the amazing creative lighting options this kind of things open up to you because with a pop-up flash or an inbuilt flash all you've ever been able to do is just harsh front lighting and we saw before there's nothing nice about harsh front lighting you know you get reflections and glare and it makes your photos look very flat and 2-dimensional that's all you've ever been now to do before but if you put one of these on instead then instead of harsh front lighting you can turn to the side and get bounce flash you bounce it off a wall and it drifts back and then you've got soft side lighting, of course, you do need a wall or something to be able to reflect the flashlight off no much good being outside and turning the flash to the side and hope you need to get some light back in those situations you just take the flash off the camera you know you connected via a hot shoe extension cable or a lot of flashes and Wireless now and that just lets you get the flash to the side a little bit to give you some side lighting so your photos look more three-dimensional of course it would be fairly harsh because you've got a flashgun pointing straight at your subject but what you can do in those situations than just pull out a little flash diffuser or in fact a lot of flashes, you can buy big external plastic diffusers and they just make the light comes from a softer more gradual kind of area and you just end up with more three-dimensional photos using flashes these days is just so easy it used to be quite complicated you have to learn about things like inverse square laws and guide ratios and that kind of stuff but these days it just does it all for you modern ETTL flashes in fact when you take a picture the flash actually sets off a little pre-flash first and the camera looks at how bright that's made your subject and then adjust the power of the flash for the real photo so you end up with exactly whatever brightness you've asked for on your flash exposure compensation it's just so easy to bounce flash you know you just turn the camera to the side and take the photo again and you'll still end up with the correct amount of light look at this example so this is classically front flashed looks like it's done rabbit and looks a bit two-dimensional but now just turn the flash to the side bounce it off the wall and you get nice soft side lighting it just looks so much nicer and more 3d let's look at white balance white balance is about making your colors come out correctly making things that are supposed to be wife making them come out looking white not a slightly blue or slightly orange it's quite a tricky thing that your camera has got to do for you actually, because you're never photographing under pure white light with the entire spectrum in there you know most indoor lighting is a little bit orange shade lighting is a little bit blue and if you use the wrong white balance setting your colors just come out a little bit off now thankfully all of our cameras have auto white balance AWB and honestly, that's the one you want to leave it set on almost all the time not only does it do a really good job at working out what kind of frequencies are lighter out there and adjusting it properly but the main thing is it will remember to check it every single time you know you see people running around trying to set their own white balance and most of the time they just forget and you end up with photos with weird colors but the reason you need to know about white balance is because eventually, your photos might start looking like one of these if you ever find yourself thinking do something weird in the color Department color is a white balance problem so go and check your white balance setting you probably find you've just accidentally slipped off auto white balance and you're on shade or tungsten or something like that put it back on auto it'll probably fix it right back up if it doesn't if you literally on auto white balance and the colors are still weird it's a pretty unusual situation maybe the camera got tricked because there are two types of life around or something then and only then would you bother going into your white balance setting and actually choosing one of those values tungsten daylight fluorescent flash cloudy shade and if none of them are right there's even a custom white balance in a lot of cameras where you can just photograph something white and tell the camera to make that come out white and then it'll correct it for that but I've never even really had to use that you can tweak your color later on in post-production as well and if you're shooting a raw file it really doesn't matter white balance is entirely an afterthought you can choose it from the drop-down list later on so don't worry about it just leave it in auto white balance most of the time and that'll keep you out of trouble ok let's take a look at filters now starting with polarizing filters like this one now polarizing filters just like polarizing Sony's they help to cut out glare and reflections and things like that can make this guy look a darker richer blue clouds look better leaves and things leaves are quite waxy and if you can get rid of the glare you end up with deeper rich and green leaves in your landscapes really cool bit of kit to have particularly for your wide-angle lens you've got to realize how they work a lot of people buy them and just screw them onto the end of the lens and then forget about them there are so many things wrong with leaving a polarizer on the end of your lens it's not even funny firstly you got to screw it on but you'll find the actual polarizing filter then keep spinning and you've got to set that every time you're taking the picture because as you twist that you'll find all the reflections disappear and then they come back again and you've got to choose it because the lighting is different in every situation and the other reason why you shouldn't leave it on is because it does make the world quite dark out there and your cameras forever going Jeeves quite darker after the shutter will have to stay open longer to collect more light so you end up with longer shutter speeds more camera shake or you have to turn your ISO up more and also every bit of glass you put in front of your lens you're potentially reducing the quality of your lens so you get what you pay for particularly with polar the filters if you buy a really cheap one take a photo zoom right in you might find your lenses it's not sharp anymore so only put it on.
When you actually want to use it but you can get really beautiful results have a look at this one so here's a photo taken with and without the polarizer when I say without it is on there I've just twisted it so there's not much effect happening so you can still see all the reflection of the sky onto the water so it's hard to see into the water there's a bit of that white haze in the sky but if we turn the polarizer so the effect is more visible now have a look all the reflection disappears on the water so you can see straight in there and you're left with a darker richer blue sky which looks great really cool bit of kit to have but as I said only put it on when you actually want to use it as opposed to these filters they're clear UV filters these ones should be on your camera all the time now a UV filter not surprisingly filters out UV light but actually, all of your digital cameras have a UV filter built into the sensor these days so the fact that this is filtering out UV light - gives a completely useless bonus but the real reason why should still, all have one of these on is just cuz they protect the front of your lens you know the front of your lens is actually really delicate it's got very fine anti-reflective coatings on them that are very easily scratched and if you put your fingerprint on there it's quite hard to clean the front surface of the lens but if you put one of these things on there not only they're very easy to clean but they're pretty well bulletproof it's actually quite hard to damage a UV filter and if you do check it out buy another one they're replaceable they're much cheaper than the front of your lens but again you get what you pay for with these things so if you've spent a lot of money for a really nice sharp lens spend a bit of extra money and get a good quality UV filter otherwise you're just gonna lose all that clarity again so that's it for lighting next the lecture is all about lenses good idea to have a bit of a handle on how you classify these things you know what that what you're paying for what the different features are what they do and so on so thanks very much for watching I hope you enjoy the next one as well.
You know there's some is low in the sky so it's nice and soft you don't have that contrast problem the shadows are not too dark and it has that nice warm glow to it as well it's a really beautiful time for taking photos while you can certainly take beautiful photos before the sun comes up as well you've got about an hour afterward that's what they call the golden hour when the lighting is just perfect after that pretty rapidly the Sun starts to climb higher and get stronger and you end up with harsh lighting when the Sun gets too strong then you end up with contrast problems so the bit in the Sun is a million times brighter than the bit in the shade next to it so the shadow just becomes jet-black or you end up blowing out your highlights they become too bright it's just not a good time for taking photos also the middle of the day the Sun is quite high so you end up with top lighting which means to get shadows in the eye sockets of people and you know photographs of animals and things they kind of become very bright on the top and very dark underneath it's not a very nice direction of light either not a good time for taking photos if you have to take photos in the middle of the day in the Sun you're better off going and finding some shade literally going in standing behind a building or something where it's just total shade lighting because the light that gets into the shade is actually really beautiful you don't have any contrast problems because you're already in the shade so there's not going to be any shaded side of your subject it's just nice and even it's the same with cloud lightning you know if you wake up and it's just a blanket cloud cover day you might think what a boring day for taking photos sure your landscape photos might look a little drab if there are too many clouds but photographs of things like people and animals fantastic cloud lighting are beautiful it's just such a soft light and the light has bounced off from everywhere so it's coming from every direction at once.
So it fills every little nook and cranny evenly it's a very flattering kind of light for portraits wrinkles and things don't really show up it's a great time for taking photos and it means you can shoot all day long because there's never any harsh the sunlight here's a good little tip if you're photographing an animal that's sitting in the Sun like a little crab or a lizard or something yeah if you could actually shade it with your body sort of move yourself between the Sun and your subject cast your shadow over it then you've got it in a nice soft shade lighting and it'll look beautiful all the colors will look nicer and it won't be so contrasting anymore moving on then you get to evening lighting much like morning lighting I guess the Sun is low in the sky and you get that nice warm orange glow again and the contrast problems not there anymore you can see in this photo you can see the shadows but they're not too dark at all they just provide a bit of interest it makes it look a little bit more 3d you can still see into the deep crevices in the rock and obviously, this photo is taken with a large f-number you can tell from the large depth of field so everything is in focus but also the Sun has done that starburst which remembers in the aperture the lecture you get that with the large f-number and finally moving on to low lighting now low lighting is tricky to deal with just because there's not much the light around and it's going to take the camera quite a long time to collect enough of it to give you an image.
So you're going to have to expect to have quite long slow shutter speeds so you're gonna have to hold the camera really steady or put it on a tripod or turn your ISO up or a few other things there's a little trickier to deal with but it's worth persevering because you can get really beautiful results don't always let your flash pop up you know it's worth knowing that in all the camera modes we've been using on this course so the program mode and everything better than that the flash will never pop up on its own if you actually want to use the flash you have to press the little flash release the button next to the flash and then it'll pop up but if you leave it down then you're forcing the camera to use that natural ambient light and you can get such beautiful results all of these sort of photos would have just been ruined in auto mode, the flash would have popped up BAM and you'd lose all that delicate lighting of the fire or the head torch whatever it is so persevere so the other important factor of the lighting is not only the quality of the light but the direction that it's coming from because that affects the shadows as you'll see so let's start with platting that's where your subject is lit from the same direction that you're looking at it so there's some pretty telltale signs of front lighting your subject ends up being completely illuminated so you don't have any shadows on it of course because if you're shining the light on the front of it all the shadows around the back so it's great if you want to be able to see every detail like for a product photo for a catalog or something there's a lot of drawbacks to front lighting if your subject is at all reflective or glossy the light just sort of shines straight back into the camera and you get that nasty glare same on the skin of people or if they're wearing glasses or if you're trying to shoot through the glass it just bounces back at you so it's not that nice and the worst thing about front lighting is it tends to make.
Your photos quite flat and 2-dimensional you can't really see the shape of things you need some shadows for that and that's where side lighting comes in so side lighting reveals shape and texture through the shadows so side lighting is good for portraits or anything where you just want to make it look a little bit more 3d now backlighting when you're starting out in photography people often try and avoid it because you end up with dark silhouettes and things like you saw in the exposure lecture when you accidentally have the girl in front of the window or if you get the Sun in the background of your shot and your subject just comes out as this really dark figure but in that exposure the lecture we learn how to fix those kinds of problems using exposure compensation so you could just go plus to brighten the photo back up and then great so after you've learned how to deal with the problems of backlighting it can give you some really beautiful results it can give you a nice glow or halo around the edges of things, rim lighting can give you really nice silhouettes and for people it gives you nice highlights in the hair so backlighting can be a really beautiful light to use.
You might just find you need to overexpose the shot sometimes and you've also got to look out for lens flare you've probably seen these little splashes of light that come across your photo from time to time that's caused by direct sunlight coming into the front of your lens and reflecting off every bit of glass inside your lens now getting direct sunlight in your lens is a problem for several reasons not only do you get lens flares but you also lose some of the saturation of your colors now if you have little bits of dust or something on the lens they tend to show up more autofocus can struggle you know getting sunlight in your lens is not a good thing now if the Sun is actually in your the photo then you're gonna get sunlight on the front of your lens clearly there's not much you can do about that so you probably have lens flares and all the other problems but often the Sun is not in your shot maybe it's up here somewhere you wouldn't have even really thought about it maybe you wouldn't think it's backlit at all but in fact, the Sun can still see directly into the lens so we're getting direct sunlight spilling across the front of the lens and we're still getting all those problems.
So that's what these things are for lens hood the whole point in life is just to shade the front of the lens so you don't have lens flares so you get to keep your nice rich colors and so on now most lenses come with lens hoods and oftentimes people just tend to forget about them or they just you know leave them on backward all the time which is a bit silly that makes it smaller so you can put it into your camera bag but every time you're photographing you really should get in the habit of getting it out and putting it on it's almost never a problem you know people think oh it's cutting out light and you might need that in low-light or something it's not true it's only ever cutting out light that you don't need to photograph it's just cutting out stray light coming in from the edge the only times you might ever want to take it off is if you're doing really close-up flash work and you popped your little flash up and it couldn't quite see past the lens hood so you end up with what's called a hood shadow on the bottom of your photo or if you're trying to get that much closer to a window or something then sure then you can take it off but in every other situation it's never doing you harm and you should get in the habit of using it so it's worth taking just a couple of seconds to think about lighting before you start taking photos you know if someone asks you to take their photo in the Sun realize that they're gonna be really harsh shadows go and find somewhere in the shade well maybe if there's no shade lookup in the sky and you might find that the only reason it's harsh sunlight just now is that there's a hole in the clouds but it looks like if you wait about two minutes there's gonna be a big bank of clouds roll in front of the Sun and then you'll be with nice cloud lighting totally worth waiting for two minutes for some nice cloud lighting before you photograph someone or at least think about the direction of the light as well rather than having the Sun over there and getting lens flares and things maybe bring it around here and shoot from that way then you get some side lighting it looks more 3d it doesn't take long to think about these things but it can make a really big difference in how your photos look at this example of a little beetle on a leaf you can see that's just fairly boring top lighting but instead, if you turn the leaf up to the light and have the light coming through it then you get beautiful colors coming through the leaf and there's a real silhouette of the beetle and it looks fantastic okay let's take a look at flash definitely not just for nighttime use, in fact,
I use my flash a lot more during the day than I ever do at night because if you use it during the day you can fill in those harsh shadows are caused by strong sunlight this example is crying out for some fill flash look at those harsh shadows under the Hat and it just also contrasts II but if we just pop the flash uptake the same photo again that looks much better and the great thing is it doesn't even look flash does it looks quite natural if you take a flash photo at night normally it looks pretty flashed but during the day you can just slip some light into the shadows there when you're doing that it's a technique called fill flash and all of your cameras can do this even your compact cameras even your smartphone cameras you can normally force your flash on now you could just try and lift up the overall exposure until your subject was nice and bright but by then the background would be completely blown out so you're better off just popping your flash up throwing some light in there and filling in those shadows to being the same brightness as the background and then it all looks great you can also use your flash to add a little glint or a sparkle into the eyes of people or animals it's called a catch light makes a big difference just brings them to life a bit more it doesn't have to be a flash you just need to be able to see the reflection of something quite bright in their eyes it could just be a window or something like that but a flash is an easy way to try it so maybe in the last of a batch of photos you've taken pop your flash up just see the effect you get okay we'd better have a look as to why don't know if you'd buy.
one of these giant external flashes if you already have a little inbuilt or pop-up flash in your camera most people just assume it's because these are obviously bigger more powerful you can penetrate the dark further that's true but that's actually not the main reason you'd buy one of these it's because of the amazing creative lighting options this kind of things open up to you because with a pop-up flash or an inbuilt flash all you've ever been able to do is just harsh front lighting and we saw before there's nothing nice about harsh front lighting you know you get reflections and glare and it makes your photos look very flat and 2-dimensional that's all you've ever been now to do before but if you put one of these on instead then instead of harsh front lighting you can turn to the side and get bounce flash you bounce it off a wall and it drifts back and then you've got soft side lighting, of course, you do need a wall or something to be able to reflect the flashlight off no much good being outside and turning the flash to the side and hope you need to get some light back in those situations you just take the flash off the camera you know you connected via a hot shoe extension cable or a lot of flashes and Wireless now and that just lets you get the flash to the side a little bit to give you some side lighting so your photos look more three-dimensional of course it would be fairly harsh because you've got a flashgun pointing straight at your subject but what you can do in those situations than just pull out a little flash diffuser or in fact a lot of flashes, you can buy big external plastic diffusers and they just make the light comes from a softer more gradual kind of area and you just end up with more three-dimensional photos using flashes these days is just so easy it used to be quite complicated you have to learn about things like inverse square laws and guide ratios and that kind of stuff but these days it just does it all for you modern ETTL flashes in fact when you take a picture the flash actually sets off a little pre-flash first and the camera looks at how bright that's made your subject and then adjust the power of the flash for the real photo so you end up with exactly whatever brightness you've asked for on your flash exposure compensation it's just so easy to bounce flash you know you just turn the camera to the side and take the photo again and you'll still end up with the correct amount of light look at this example so this is classically front flashed looks like it's done rabbit and looks a bit two-dimensional but now just turn the flash to the side bounce it off the wall and you get nice soft side lighting it just looks so much nicer and more 3d let's look at white balance white balance is about making your colors come out correctly making things that are supposed to be wife making them come out looking white not a slightly blue or slightly orange it's quite a tricky thing that your camera has got to do for you actually, because you're never photographing under pure white light with the entire spectrum in there you know most indoor lighting is a little bit orange shade lighting is a little bit blue and if you use the wrong white balance setting your colors just come out a little bit off now thankfully all of our cameras have auto white balance AWB and honestly, that's the one you want to leave it set on almost all the time not only does it do a really good job at working out what kind of frequencies are lighter out there and adjusting it properly but the main thing is it will remember to check it every single time you know you see people running around trying to set their own white balance and most of the time they just forget and you end up with photos with weird colors but the reason you need to know about white balance is because eventually, your photos might start looking like one of these if you ever find yourself thinking do something weird in the color Department color is a white balance problem so go and check your white balance setting you probably find you've just accidentally slipped off auto white balance and you're on shade or tungsten or something like that put it back on auto it'll probably fix it right back up if it doesn't if you literally on auto white balance and the colors are still weird it's a pretty unusual situation maybe the camera got tricked because there are two types of life around or something then and only then would you bother going into your white balance setting and actually choosing one of those values tungsten daylight fluorescent flash cloudy shade and if none of them are right there's even a custom white balance in a lot of cameras where you can just photograph something white and tell the camera to make that come out white and then it'll correct it for that but I've never even really had to use that you can tweak your color later on in post-production as well and if you're shooting a raw file it really doesn't matter white balance is entirely an afterthought you can choose it from the drop-down list later on so don't worry about it just leave it in auto white balance most of the time and that'll keep you out of trouble ok let's take a look at filters now starting with polarizing filters like this one now polarizing filters just like polarizing Sony's they help to cut out glare and reflections and things like that can make this guy look a darker richer blue clouds look better leaves and things leaves are quite waxy and if you can get rid of the glare you end up with deeper rich and green leaves in your landscapes really cool bit of kit to have particularly for your wide-angle lens you've got to realize how they work a lot of people buy them and just screw them onto the end of the lens and then forget about them there are so many things wrong with leaving a polarizer on the end of your lens it's not even funny firstly you got to screw it on but you'll find the actual polarizing filter then keep spinning and you've got to set that every time you're taking the picture because as you twist that you'll find all the reflections disappear and then they come back again and you've got to choose it because the lighting is different in every situation and the other reason why you shouldn't leave it on is because it does make the world quite dark out there and your cameras forever going Jeeves quite darker after the shutter will have to stay open longer to collect more light so you end up with longer shutter speeds more camera shake or you have to turn your ISO up more and also every bit of glass you put in front of your lens you're potentially reducing the quality of your lens so you get what you pay for particularly with polar the filters if you buy a really cheap one take a photo zoom right in you might find your lenses it's not sharp anymore so only put it on.
When you actually want to use it but you can get really beautiful results have a look at this one so here's a photo taken with and without the polarizer when I say without it is on there I've just twisted it so there's not much effect happening so you can still see all the reflection of the sky onto the water so it's hard to see into the water there's a bit of that white haze in the sky but if we turn the polarizer so the effect is more visible now have a look all the reflection disappears on the water so you can see straight in there and you're left with a darker richer blue sky which looks great really cool bit of kit to have but as I said only put it on when you actually want to use it as opposed to these filters they're clear UV filters these ones should be on your camera all the time now a UV filter not surprisingly filters out UV light but actually, all of your digital cameras have a UV filter built into the sensor these days so the fact that this is filtering out UV light - gives a completely useless bonus but the real reason why should still, all have one of these on is just cuz they protect the front of your lens you know the front of your lens is actually really delicate it's got very fine anti-reflective coatings on them that are very easily scratched and if you put your fingerprint on there it's quite hard to clean the front surface of the lens but if you put one of these things on there not only they're very easy to clean but they're pretty well bulletproof it's actually quite hard to damage a UV filter and if you do check it out buy another one they're replaceable they're much cheaper than the front of your lens but again you get what you pay for with these things so if you've spent a lot of money for a really nice sharp lens spend a bit of extra money and get a good quality UV filter otherwise you're just gonna lose all that clarity again so that's it for lighting next the lecture is all about lenses good idea to have a bit of a handle on how you classify these things you know what that what you're paying for what the different features are what they do and so on so thanks very much for watching I hope you enjoy the next one as well.
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