The TRICK to AMAZING DAYTIME Photography!

Morning everybody, fantastic to see you all again. So this is the last day with Mass and James. It's been pretty epic hasn't it? Absolutely. Yeah, Mass brings all the amazing light, so we've had some pretty good light. Today we are walking up this hill behind me which is the smallest wainwright in the Lake District called Castle Crag and the light's really sort of changeable. So even though it is 9 20 and we're way past sunrise because we got up a little bit late because it was raining, it's going to be pretty good and hopefully we'll be able to find some great shots in pretty much what is the middle of the day. Best shot of the day, we can go home. So one of the reasons to go out when it's the middle of the day is if it's rainy then you can get rainbows and I need to go back and It doesn't get any better than this. Yes, and as Mass will just do with his little dance here. This is a great memory of the day with Mass and James but I don't think it really works. The composition doesn't quite work because obviously whenever you have a rainbow the sun is behind you and I could have just done with a little bit more transient light and cloud cover over some of the background hills. Nevertheless, it still reminds me of what an amazing morning this was. One of the things you've got to look out for when you're out in the middle of the day is you want these really changeable conditions. You want a bit of wind, you want some low cloud and if it's raining and patchy rain that's really good and you can see that the light's just changing over here. You'll be able to shoot into the wind, you'll be able to shoot the areas where that light is appearing on the landscape and things will be really transient and that's what's exciting about shooting through the day. When you've got a landscape like this you can't really go wrong. So I've just been doing a little time lapse of the tree here and you can see, I didn't take a photo, but you can see how the conditions just change the scene so as the light comes over and you can probably see it on me now, it just either makes something stand out or recedes it. So if you've got a tree that you want to shoot or you've got a background mountain and you want the tree to be a silhouette then just waiting for the light to change on a day like this when there's a little bit of wind is so good. So make sure you go out, you know, if the conditions don't look great you can still go out whatever time of day and get amazing photos. Right I need to catch these two up. So you can see in these three images here just how much of a difference a few seconds make as the light goes over the landscape and just look out for that little tree, that little green tree at the top of the image because later on I talk about it in a bit more detail. So this scene here is an example of a shot that I think is quite difficult to shoot in these conditions. Ideally we've got the side light which is good so that's spot on. It's dappled, the clouds are quite nice, there's some reveal in the background of the mountain up there through the valley which is quite nice but there's quite a lot going on in the sort of the distance from the trees to the mountain and it makes it a little bit more difficult for your eye to connect between the two elements and there's an argument whether you should keep this walling as well. So sometimes in a scene like this it's better just zooming in a bit and just getting a bit tighter in the elements and then you've obviously as we're talking in the video is the transient light is so important so just thinking where the light's landing and where you want it to land. The light up there on the clouds is amazing at the moment. I'm always talking in the video when it's the best light. So these two images here don't quite work I don't think. There's a lot of interesting light on the landscape but the landscape has got patches that are quite complicated and you don't really know where your eyes should go especially this top area and this green patch on the left hand side in the first image but by going a little bit longer and picking out that little tree that I spoke about earlier I managed to get this which I was really pleased with. So as the light comes through you can see that sometimes you get that amazing light as you can see above in this video on the clouds and I always look at the clouds and think about is there a dark bit of cloud at the top of the frame because you don't want a light bit of cloud at the top of the frame you want a dark bit and here this is pretty good it's changing quite rapidly but also these trees are just catching the light but the background isn't catching the light and so that means that the trees become the focus and you can get rid of some of the distractions in the background. Now as I talk all that's changing it's very very changeable with the wind that little tree that we're talking about down there has got the sun at the moment and yeah it looks pretty good now you can see the tree's just coming into light now and that looks amazing at just now. The little detail on this photo that's a bit of a shame is on this right hand tree that you can see and there's another tree behind it and that's not good because it doesn't separate it that much but still great fun still amazing things to photograph and just being out is the best in the world. So I just walked up here and Mass took a fantastic photo he found this composition with this path and then the background and the walls and again it's all about this transient light the light just catching me shooting into the light is really important in this scene because you can see as the light hits me now that it just I just stand out while I've got a nice rim lighting and it's just so amazing. It's often good in light like this as well to think about what's happening to the background so here this is a really nice background but in the sun when you when it's sunlit and I'm sunlit we sort of merge in to each other but if you can get that background to go into shade and then where I'm stood is in sun then you can get all the grasses lit up really nicely and I actually did use that a little bit down there there was a tree that was just catching the light and the background was just out of the light and it looked really really nice but think about this think about these grasses the grasses down here look really nice as well because they're catching the light and then there's something in shade so if I just show you here and it's not a photo but you just see these grasses are catching the light right onward right or it looks like we have raining coming which could be good or it could be game over for all the sun so that may be the end of what I'm talking about in terms of the transient light but what it does bring is so much atmosphere it's just going to look so good already there's a nice little shot here with the wall the other wall and then the beautiful clouds it's easier as well because there's not so many distractions and quite a complex landscape that can make a big difference but we just a little bit of light would be good is that too much light or not enough light we're never happy as photographers so you probably just saw there on that bit of b-roll that the rain just came through and it just changed the scene so much the light is more diffuse you can see the side of the trees here and the texture it had i just had mass and james just silhouetted in the scene and it just simplified everything really and created a more soft effect um wow it happened so quickly though first we're getting soaked we're like oh this isn't great and then suddenly we want to take the photo amazing here comes the rain again so don't put your camera away is the moral of the story they're waterproof so we're at the top well we're nearly at the top but we're at the bit that looks good on camera with all the slate so this used to be a slate quarry um most of the houses in the lake district are made of slate and if they're not then they've got to be rendered white so there's lots of places like this and just before i just got a shot where the light was coming through in the background there was some rays what's nice though with conditions like this is how the light interacts with other things so how it's interacting with the wet slates the river in the foreground which is reflecting the light and that can create a strong leading line even though everything else around looks dark um whereas if the sun was on all this then the river might not stand out quite as much so it's always useful to look at what the light is hitting and reflecting off as well as um just the landscape and the things that you're photographing i think we're gonna get more rain now great the light really was changing so quickly at this point but although i didn't quite get that wide shot we didn't get rays of light onto this amazing sort of open area in the middle here i did get this long lens shot which was super pleased about in where the light was just sort of casting amazing rays in this bowl as the rain was coming through i was really pleased and probably this was my favorite image of the day oh the weather's so horrible now this tree is so sad that this tree's fallen down it is such an old tree and i think we had some winds earlier in the year and i think it might have gone down then but i always get a bit sad when a tree like this falls down it's crazy i wonder if it's still going to grow it's still got some roots but i'll show you it is so beautiful so this was later in the day and i wanted to show you this because it was probably the most amazing and crazy conditions that i've ever photographed in it was fairly windy but not too bad and all of a sudden this amazing gust came and i think we were in the eye of a storm and we were just coming out of it and the wind as you can see here was crazy it broke my lens in two stupidly i left my tripod unattended and also that meant i couldn't take any photos from a big camera i know that mass and james will have got some amazing photos from this evening so check out their channels but wow what crazy wind this was that's not good is it oh that was so much fun um that morning was fantastic it was great to again with james and mass and just photographing transient light like that is is just so rewarding because you can get so much out of it in the day and you're probably not rushing as much because you're not going for a sunrise or a sunset so i've just been finishing a blog um because i didn't do a video so i've decided to write a blog um about some images about three days before in wales that me and mass explored this new area and we had that transient light as well so i'll put a link down below to the blog that i've just finished here so i'm building this blog in squarespace it's super easy to do it allows me to just drag and drop my images in this probably took me about five minutes to do this blog you can also do things like galleries so here i've put in a gallery of some images i'll put a link down to the blog below but this is done with squarespace and squarespace make it super easy to create a blog create a website to create an online store as you know i use it all the time and um yeah if you're looking to set up a blog or to share your photos then i recommend using squarespace you can go to squarespace.com forward slash nigel and you can get 10% off the links in the description along with the actual blog of this amazing light that i got in wales now i want to talk a bit more about these photos so you can see here this was a good start this was pretty amazing light um i took a photo of mass again this is using this transient light so you can see here that i've got mass lit up by the light coming from the side and then in the background the mountains aren't illuminated and that's good because that sort of light and dark helps to make so much difference in your photos and your compositions um there's a really good example which is this one here this is a really great shot i really like this shot of the sheep and and the the trees these and furs on the top of this hill here but this is made by the fact that there's light on these trees and then we've got you know no light on this mountain here a little bit of light on the top of the mountain no light on the back of the mountain and that's changing lights really important and what i wanted to show this particular photo is if i go to the next photo um you can see that this is the same scene just a little bit wider and i've used these same trees but this time they're in silhouette with the mountain in the background in light and i actually spent quite a lot of time in this location mass was recording a video and i was waiting for him it made me think just how important it is just to stand maybe with an apple and look at that changing scene in front of you yeah so take a look at the blog below and hopefully you'll find some images there that inspire you it's such an amazing place wales and the lakes and castle crag was amazing too in that transient light before you go i just want to say that i'm nearly there so these are the boxes for my prints you can see here i've got this amazing sort of embossed logo these have been handmade by a really small company i found in the uk so i'm really excited to be able share the prints that are going to go in here there's going to be a choice of a number of different prints and hopefully i'm going to make it as cost effective as possible also i want to say that i've still got some calendars left not many now but if you do want a calendar then there's some amazing images in here you can also use these images and frame them if you want if you want this probably the cheapest way to get some of my my images and yeah it's my images from the last 12 months and finally before you go there are a few seascapes left as well i know that everybody's asked about reprints of my vistas and woodlands book i'm not planning to do that so if you do want a seascapes book they are still available but when they are all sold they will be all sold they are limited edition books okay thanks ever so much for watching until next sunday bye