Small Details Matter

This is the final forest in Madera and it's a really really magical place. [music] So, I'm here in Meda and we're doing a workshop here, which is nice for me. It's probably the first time I've led a a landscape photography workshop in in my own country in Portugal for about 10 years. So, it's nice to actually be doing something a little bit closer to home and a little bit more familiar. Now, I've been to this forest quite a few times before, and it's one of those places that you can return to again and again and again and always find something different. It's an ancient forest about 1,000 meters up on the island. And the trees here have these incredible shapes, all kind of twisted and bent. They've got these really nice graphic forms that are really good if you want to make sort of simple minimalist compositions. But what really makes this place special is when there is low cloud and mist in here, which in Madera is relatively reliable. You can't always get it, but this is a warm island in a cold ocean, so it tends to generate a lot of cloud. And that cloud often sits quite low on the island. Because this place is quite high up at about 1,000 mters, it's often sitting in cloud which gives it this really moody atmospheric look. And you can just wander around here seeing these trees emerge from the mist and just finding these really simplistic compositions. Now, at the moment we're here, there's not really any mist. It's quite clear, but we can see the mist rising up the hill. It's probably going to roll over and hopefully later on the mist will settle down and we'll get some really nice conditions to shoot in. So what is it about mist that makes it such a magical such a desirable condition for landscape photography? Well, mist makes it very easy to create simplistic images. What you find is mist will remove all the background and remove a lot of clutter. So in a place like this, which is a forest, if you're shooting it without the mist, you'll find that if you find a particular tree that has a nice interesting shape, the trees behind that, the trees in front of it will kind of get in way get in the way and they will clutter the composition. It makes it very difficult to to find clean forms because the the forms of the trees are overlapping the forms of the trees behind it. And it makes the shapes much more complicated. And what we're seeking often in landscape photography is simplicity. simple form, simple line, very graphic images. When you have an incredibly complex forest, there's just so many shapes there that you get this sort of visual confusion. It's very hard to know for the eye to know where to focus, what the subject is. And even in a place like this, which has these wonderfully shaped trees, when you don't have mist, the trees just get in each other's way and create very complex, very chaotic images. But when the cloud comes down and when you get that mist, everything changes. It makes it much easier to create simple images. Background just disappears. You no longer have a horizon. You can't see the trees behind the ones that you're shooting. They kind of disappear into the fog. Or even if they don't disappear, they become sort of semi-visible, which makes it much easier to separate it. And then you can really focus on the line and the shape of the trees here. And the other thing about mist is it just makes everything feel so clean. you just have this kind of white background which if you expose correctly, if you're careful with your white balance, just feels makes the image feel incredibly clean, which again adds to the simplicity, adds to the minimalism that I kind of look for in a lot of my images. So, when shooting a place like this, so much of what you're going to do in the image is about composition. And it kind of seems deceptively easy when you first arrive. You just find an interesting shape tree and and photograph that. But it's the kind of place that you can really dive down deep into composition. You can really sort of drill down and and and look at what makes composition work. What what are the elements that are that make an image stronger? What are the elements that make an image weaker? So the first thing that you really want to do is to find a tree with an interesting shape and to make that prominent in the image. So a big part of that is removing any distractions. And the distractions that you will usually find here are other trees. So you'll find that you what you often find is that there's a very interesting shape, but in the top corner there'll be the the branches of another tree coming in. So, there's a lot of scanning the edges of the frame here, just trying to make sure that you've not got anything invading the edge of the frame because that's going to really pull your eye away from the main subject of your composition and make the image feel a little bit weaker, make it feel a little bit less confused and less focused. So, what we've been doing is just walking around and identifying trees that have particularly interesting shapes and that also interact well with other trees around them. Because sometimes you can find single trees on their own that work very well, just a single shape. And then in other places, you can find quite interesting groupings of trees where you'll have a line of trees that work really well, particularly if you're going to shoot it as a panorama, or you'll find groupings of trees that work well because the trees together have a particularly interesting shape. So what I found is that there was a lot of sort of wandering around trying to find things that work and then you get into a groove and it gets much easier. You start to see things much more clearly. You you get your eye in uh and it there's a lot of kind of looking around you walking and looking because you might see something from one side but you walk around the other side of the tree. The angle changes completely. The shape of the tree changes completely. The background, what trees it has in front of it, what trees it has behind it, the way that it's interacting with those change completely. So, this is the kind of place that really rewards exploration, getting here very early. We get here 3 hours before sunset and give ourselves plenty of time to walk around and just really explore the trees, get to know the locations, and just find compositions, just find different things that work. So, everything I've been shooting has been with a wide angle lens because I want to get relatively close to the trees to fill the frame with them, and I want to be able to see just a little bit of detail on the trunks because the mist does tend to kill quite a lot of the detail. You have to get quite close before it becomes apparent. But you also need to have quite a bit of breathing space around the tree. I find that if you get the branches too close to the edge of the tree, you make things feel a little bit cramped. So I try to get as much space at the top of the tree and to to the left and right as possible. And when it comes to foreground here, it's just grass. This isn't the kind of place where you need a foreground. Foregrounds should always be elements that support the subject. So you want a foreground that leads your eye towards the tree. Something like that. And that kind of doesn't work really as well with minimalist compositions. Minimalist compositions generally I want to reduce it to as fewer elements as possible. And the foreground is an extra element. So I've been kind of avoiding not really looking for them. Just working with an almost two-dimensional feel. And the depth comes from the contrast from having darker areas and lighter areas from having perhaps some trees in the background that are partially obscured by mist. That's where the depth comes from. >> And you can see another aspect of composition in this shot here. Now, when it's misty, there's no horizon. But when we had the horizon, when the horizon was visible in these sunset shots, for me, it's very important to put the line of the horizon as low down as possible so it goes through the main trunk of the tree and not through the branches because that again will make the image feel more cluttered, more confused. It's just much neater to get a little bit lower with the camera and put the horizon across the middle of the trunk of the tree. Now, when it comes to exposure, that's a little bit more straightforward because the dynamic range here is very very small. There's no bright light. There's no particularly dark shadows. So, you've got a very very limited uh dynamic range. But what I do tend to do is expose to the right. So, I expose with all of the data in the histogram towards the right side of the histogram, towards the brighter, towards the highlights part because I want the mist to be bright. I want it to feel very white. When the mist starts to be around the mid tones, it looks very gray. It starts to look dirty. You want the mist to be clean. You want it to be white. Again, it just [music] adds towards the simplicity and the minimalism of the image. Gray mist starts to blend with the shadows and doesn't really really work as well. Now, if we're really lucky, we'll get some direct light where the the last light of the day shines through the mist. So, you get a kind of diffused glow just illuminating the mist, which gives some nice sidelight on the trees. It picks out the greens. It just gives everything more depth and just really gives it another level, but I don't think that's really going to happen. I got that a few years ago when I was shooting here before, but it's not something that I I really expect is going to happen today. So, it looks like we're starting to get a little bit of mist now. I'm going to go and do some shooting. [music] [music] [music] >> [music] >> And you can see from this image, we did get a little bit of light breaking through. The sun did break through a little bit when we had the mist. And when we were shooting the sunset images at the end of the day, we did get a little bit of mist just come in before the final color went away, which just adds that little bit of mystery, that little bit of extra to the sunset images. And that's it from the finale and from this amazing magical forest. It's always such a pleasure to come here and shoot. And I'm sure we'll be back here again before the end of the trip because this really is the kind of place that you can come to again and again and find different things, find different compositions or find different ways of shooting the same compositions. And of course, it's not the only place that we've been to in Madera. We've been all around the island. We've been shooting from from Picadier, the mountains at the top. We've been shooting coastal watercapes. It really is such an amazing island with so many different things to shoot. And we'll be back here again next year with another workshop in 2026. So that's it for this video. I hope it's been interesting. Let me know if you've got any comments. And if you enjoy the channel, please like, please subscribe because it really does help support the channel. And if you enjoy my photography and you'd like to join me on a workshop like this, as I say, we will be back here in Madera next year, but we've also got workshops in Nepal, in Utah, in Namibia, in Japan. We're planning workshops in the Draensburg, in South Africa. You can find full information on all the tours that I've got coming up on my website. So, please check that out and drop me an email if you've got any questions. And as ever, thanks so much for watching and good luck with all your photography. I'll see you next time. Take care.