Learning to See the Coast Differently: Landscape Photography

Well, hello, hello. I'm back out on the coast and shooting some abstract patterns right now. There's incredible textures all around me. And so I've got the 28 to 200 mil on here. I also have a CPL just to cut out some reflections or, you know, depending on what I wanna do, I could just pop the CPL off so I get the reflections. But let me show you how incredible some of these patterns are. There's some waves out there. The light is shining through. Just an awesome day to be out taking pictures. You may have seen these in some of my other videos, but I love the kind of honeycomb sort of look to these ones. And then if we kinda go over here, you can see that some of these patterns have these little pebbles inside that you can photograph. Just different colored rocks, different pebbled sections. There's no real, like, right or wrong way to photograph it. It just comes down to your creativity. I find that for myself, simplicity is key. So taking some of these more complex shapes and textures and kinda simplifying them. And, you know, a lot of the work that goes into these photographs that I'm taking, it's more stuff like this. It's more me walking around and just observing what I'm seeing without the camera. The taking the picture part is the easy part. It's the finding the composition part that's tricky. All right, so I think I found a really cool section of these formations to focus on with some different colors and textures. So check this out. So what I love in here is how you have the little kinda honeycomb shapes, and then you have a mixture of warm tones and these kinda bluish tones that shine through as well. I'm gonna try F11 to see if that works to flatten the plane of focus. If I need more focus, I can always switch it over to F16 or do a focus stack, very simple focus stack. Just kinda, you know, taking a few images for the edges of the frame in the middle. I'm not too close to my subject. So I'm thinking F11 should do the trick here. All right, so here are my first test shots of those beautiful Tafani patterns. And I love the almost prehistoric textures that you get here. For these ones, it was all about zooming in to find the right shape to focus on. As mentioned, I was standing far away enough to where I could do F11 and not have to do that focus stack. After this, I decided to wander around and look for more of those patterns with the pebbles. And here's what I shot. This is so cool. So as usual, I'm a little bit off track. I kind of, you know, I was focused on all those rock textures, and then all of a sudden I found this really cool piece of driftwood to focus on. And so let me show you guys what this looks like because I'm super excited about this one. All right, so here it is. And look at these swirl formations. They're so cool. As usual, I can kind of zoom in to focus on different sections of the swirl here. There's beaches where these are just everywhere. It's a super challenging to find a cool pattern in here. Usually it's just like little strips of bark, but I mean, just look at all these swirls right now. A lot of different ways to compose this. I'm gonna try and keep the plane of focus pretty flat. I am gonna focus stack this because if you remember my Olympic video that I did, I ended up focus stacking all of those images. And even though my plane of focus was flat, I needed every single focus stack. I think I'll probably do like F11 here. I got ISO 500 just to give myself some breathing room so I don't need to do a long exposure. And it's starting to rain right now. So I gotta be quick about this. No time to do the ideal settings because the raindrops are gonna hit my textures here. Uh-oh. So I gotta get these shots fast. The raindrops are gonna end up kind of ruining this or maybe it'll make it look cool. I don't know, but I'm just doing my focus stacking technique. I'm shooting an image for the middle and then I'm shooting an image for each of the sides. So one, two, three, four on the sides as well. I always find it amazing when you can take simple objects like wood or rocks and transform it into something completely different with a little bit of creativity. And that's why this style of photography is so much fun. For these ones, as mentioned, the focus stacking was completely necessary and to stack them all, I used a program called Helicon, but you can also use Photoshop as well. Now, even though I have the composition I want, I'm gonna pull that back. I know I'm gonna wanna do a slight crop here. And also when you end up focus stacking an image, you end up getting focus breathing and then you don't get the composition you had before. You have to zoom into it a little bit. It's interesting. The little spots on there. I wonder if I can compose something with the rain spots. So this is interesting. I was pretty worried about those rain spots, but to be honest with you, I kind of liked the way this turned out. Those blotches ended up adding a nice pattern to the scene, but now I'd love to hear from you. Do you prefer these images with the rain spots or do you feel like they're less distracting without the rain spots? Please let me know in the comments. The next day I wandered to another beach with my friend Ian and we found some of the most spectacular patterns that I've ever seen on the coast. Unfortunately, I had some audio troubles with the vlogs and it was super windy, but I was using pretty much the same techniques that I did previously. I found some amazing colors, some images that almost resembled Picasso paintings and even some faces within the rocks. And here's what I shot. So I really liked the way this image turned out with this really strange ghostly face. It's almost a bit creepy. Now these were just a handful of the images that I captured on this day and I'll share more later on in the video. Just out here on another photo adventure, seeing if we could find some amazing textures and patterns, maybe some seascape photography. And it's just beautiful in here right now. So many cool patterns to focus on. Ooh, look at what I found, you guys. See all these swirls in here? The different colors. There's some reds and oranges. It's kind of a tricky place to photograph because it's sort of in this little cave, but I don't know, this might be worth taking a couple shots of. So I think I'm gonna pull out my camera. Got my Tamron 28-200 here and I'm gonna need a tripod for this one for sure. I'm not sure how to compose this exactly. It's really cool, but it'll be challenging. So check this out. This is kind of what I'm looking at. You can kind of compose up here. There's this circular formation, which I might wanna try, but I think I need to switch my angle to the right side. But then you also have the striations down here and then even down here with some of the mixes of reds and oranges. Wow, that is not bad right there even. And then I am gonna need to do a bit of a focus stack for this one. So because there's a little bit of winds, I'm gonna bump my ISO just to give myself the breathing room so I don't need to do a slight long exposure. I wanna try and avoid making this hard on myself. Also where it looks like the texture's kind of bending inwards, I wanna make sure to hit those with a focus point just in case, because that's more depth that I'm having to cut through here. This is spectacular. And the thing about these beaches is there's textures everywhere. There's so many different things you can compose and play with. And it's really important to just walk around, walk around as much as you can, like walk up and down the beach and look for all the opportunities. This photo was a fun one to shoot. And I think the thing that I really enjoyed about this one is how it almost resembles a slot canyon in the Southwest, but of course on a much smaller scale. And I love how you have the reddish tones that kind of blend into those yellows. This is definitely one of the more simple images that I shot during this video, but I'm really happy with the way it turned out. There are a few things that I enjoy more than this right here. Just being out at the beach, staring at the tides, looking for textures. All right, I found something else that is pretty cool. Just more interesting patterns. I mean, there's only so many ways I can describe these patterns, but rather than talking about it, let me just show you what it looks like. All right, so check this out. I mean, honestly, even this composition, I just kind of plop my camera down. I sort of like this composition, but look at the striations in here. If I kind of zoom on in, and you have these really stark diagonal lines. Now, we could kind of play with that and make them more symmetrical like that, kind of horizontal, or we can kind of lean into the fact that they're going diagonally and sort of make them hit the corners of the composition here. I actually like the way that looks a little bit more than keeping them straight horizontally or vertically. The color contrast of the warmer tones mixed with the blue tones, it's really special. That wind is picking up too. Oh my gosh. I did not expect it to be this windy out here. This is crazy. I'm gonna have to bump my ISO even further. The shots, even at like a 60th of a second are coming out a little blurry. I get to give myself that breathing room for the shutter speed. Now, it's kind of a trend in my videos that I always try and find a dragon in some of my photographs. And for this one, maybe this is a closeup of a dragon's face with the eye being that bright orange spot. But if you have a different interpretation of this photograph, I'd love to hear it. And that pretty much goes for any image in this video. If you have an interpretation of one of the photographs that you saw, please let me know. Never seen this kind of pattern out here. And that's the fun of it, you know? Every beach you go to, everywhere you look, there's a different texture, a different pattern. Nothing's the same. I mean, you get similar colors and textures, but every beach offers something a little different. Makes every experience unique. And now here's just a few more of my favorite abstract images that I captured on this adventure. All right, so you probably already know what I'm gonna say here, but this one totally resembles some kind of skeleton to me. But what's interesting is all the swirly patterns that surround the composition kind of make it look like the figure's melting. All right, and here's my final image. And there's just something I really enjoyed about this one with the subtle pastel tones and the swirly patterns. This style of photography is one of my absolute favorites. And I think the main reason for that is it's much less about chasing conditions as it is being introspective about the composition and the creativity that you're putting into your work. Now, that's not to say I don't love chasing beautiful light and fleeting moments. I mean, that's also one of my favorite things to do. But I love to break up those sessions with ones like this, where they're a lot more chill. I can just go wander around, explore different beaches, and look for strange things to photograph. Especially on days where it's overcast, it becomes less about racing the clock and just about how much time you can spend in the landscape exploring. And with that, I really hope you enjoyed this video. If you did enjoy it, please give it a thumbs up and consider subscribing to the channel for more. And if you wanna learn more from me, you can check out my workshop page over on my website and also subscribe to my workshop newsletter to know about all my new trips that are coming out. As always, I really appreciate you watching and I'll catch you in the next one.