Composing And Capturing Sunrise And Sunset Scenes

All right guys this morning just heading down to a familiar location in the valley here have a look at this light beautiful sunrise and the atmosphere got two different peaks we can look at this direction and also this direction and we're going to head down to the water utilize some of the flow in the river for the wide angle lens a 10 millimeter lens we're going to try to pick up this beautiful cloud the peaks the whole scene big grand landscape today let's see what we can do there's a nice cascade just here when you're photographing a river you really want to look for those interesting falls and cascades maybe avoiding too much glare and static water you don't want too much cascades either so i'm always analyzing the river you don't have to worry about the mountain background that's not going anywhere but every step you take now it's the plants and the river which is going to change quite a lot i've got the 10 millimeter lens on the prime been using this a fair bit lately it is a new lens i've never been able to shoot this wide so it's opened up some different possibilities in places like this this is where this lens is perfect because it's going to allow me to you know when you're this close to the mountains this is why i need such a wide lens so depending on where you live it might be complete overkill but living here in these steep valleys and photographing these valleys it's definitely a great lens to have so i'm just plugging in some settings i want a little bit of a slow shutter on my water one third one quarter that's exactly where i like to be one fifth and ISO at the moment 100 f-stop f8 9 10 11 when you're really wide on the lens you don't need the f-stop as high if you're shooting with a cropped or just a smaller sensor than a full frame you also don't need the f-stop as high so typically i'll be f11 f16 at 10 mil definitely don't need to be that high generally depends how close we are to the foreground just get a few test frames off i've got the waders on as usual this is all snow melt coming down so cold water even though it's summertime here fire up a few casts night walk around there's a nice little cascade in the front here man it is slippery on these rocks today some days you really notice it i really like to lead the eye to light got that light back there so that's the sunrise direction so we have a nice backlit scene this is just a very first test shot to give you an indication of composition where i'm going with this frame one thing i definitely do is i get direct feedback from the camera i like to shoot and then review in real time so what i did there i took three frames and then i'm just pushing play and reviewing oh man that's lighting up now got some nice colors coming through but that light is just looking unreal so it's time to get serious sometimes you got to straddle these rocks it's lighting up there's a nice swirl in the river we're going to go down and get towards that i'm going to switch things up now and face up here towards this peak so that's where the good light is the color at the moment and atmosphere and we've completely lost the atmosphere on the mountain we started with so you got to let the conditions dictate which way you face little potholes between these rocks keep you humble when we're composing the landscape it's just all about the big dominant shapes this morning it was using these peaks that's the main subject that mountain range or when we look back this direction that was our main subject then it was utilizing rocks in the river to create a sense of depth and balance and then of course the river itself with the uh the cascades rolling through that soft texture and then complementary subjects the trees that we're getting in the distance but it all starts with the aligning of those big obvious shapes got to get the balance right with that otherwise the composition just won't work okay i thought we'd have a quick look at these raw files we'll talk about composition and the processing you know one key thing to consider and what can frustrate a lot of people is when you're looking straight towards a sunrise or sunset what you're seeing with the eye is generally going to be a lot better than what you're getting on the back of the camera and what you're capturing on the back of the camera is generally a lot better than the raw file which you'll see right here this is without any processing applied it's quite dramatic and like i said a lot different to the back of the camera a lot different to what the eye saw so it's really important to understand how to process these types of files now i've done a very quick process on these which we'll talk about in a minute first of all uh look the settings what i'm doing 99 of the time i'm exposing for the highlights and in this case that the predominant highlights are here where the sun was rising we'll just reset this so i'm exposing and watching my histogram when i'm shooting making sure that i can click the highlights a little as you can see in my histogram here and then all these dark tones that's fine i let those clip because with my camera these modern cameras we're all shooting with anything generally with 13 or more stops of dynamic range you should be able to lift those darker details and reveal all that so see the histogram now i've recovered a lot of those dark tones having those highlights clip is somewhat vital to maintaining a natural looking dynamic range if we recover them all the way it just doesn't quite look right so it's quite nice to actually have some highlights it's generally nice to have some shadows as well have those darker tones within the frame so just something to keep in mind if we want to try to avoid uh looking like a cartoon you don't want to reveal all the details too much so letting it clip shooting for the highlights and then we just recover those details in the post now the processing i've done here has been very quick basically if we just reset this one it was a matter of generally i apply a landscape profile bring up the exposure so everything's coming up evenly do some highlight recovery shadow recovery this one's really warm it's just got a lot of warmth throughout so i'll jump into the color tab cool things down that's really getting it looking a lot more natural um as far as the colors are concerned probably leave the tint somewhere around there and then this is where i typically use a brush and start to build out my local adjustments so anything further away i want to see those darker details that helps just push it off where there's more atmosphere in the background foreground typically i'm having darker tones bigger tonal range so more contrast in the front which is naturally happening in this scene anyway and then for our sky where all that wonderful color is i want to recover that so with my brush now i start to recover that leaving the horizon bright because that's where the sun's rising so that's why i'm not doing a sky selection here i'm just darkening down that top area and then typically what i'll do is to start to build out the color that we've captured jump into the grading and warm up those highlights i might even cool the mid-tones a little so we're getting some nice color contrast of cool and warm throughout the frame and you can see how quickly we can go from that to that now this is a big water droplet here i'd have to get you know think about that later how we get rid of that i'm not going to bore you guys with those details now one thing i typically will do when i have a series of images which are similar i will do an edit on one and then i'll hit select sync settings generally i'm syncing everything so i just check all push okay and bang it applies that edit across all of them this is in adobe camera raw if you're using lightroom it's basically the same type of thing so don't be discouraged in the field if uh you know the back of the camera is not looking how the eye's seeing things and again when you get back here what i like to say is we're collecting data in the field and then we're just revealing it here in post now what i've just quickly done to these is probably 90 of the work what i need to do now is save it and let it marinate it can come back with fresh eyes and with the fresh eyes i'll see things like maybe it's too warm maybe it's too cool maybe i want more light and i use whites to introduce a bit more light maybe i want more light in these areas like this so we'll turn that on and off see how it just lifts some of those tones there so it's just making these smaller incremental changes particularly when it comes to creating the depth with the tonality like i said heavier contrast in the front progressively getting lighter as we travel off into the distance and that's why i can do a rough edit in five minutes and then i like to just come back multiple times and revisit the file in order to get the most realistic and effective result but hopefully that gives you an idea anyway of what we're capturing out there how the raw file looks and then how we start to build it out now let's talk about composition i've got a few varieties here with the comps it was all about balancing shapes as i said so facing this particular direction the main shape the main focal point is here i put it left of center now the rock in the foreground is right of center so i'm trying to create a balance you know yin and yang balancing the eye either side i don't want the big shapes on the same side of the frame because there'll be an imbalance so i just like to think of a seesaw almost and in this particular case we've got a great diminishing perspective a linear perspective converging lines getting smaller and think of the seesaw now we've got a big shape this side big shape that side to counterbalance and hopefully just effectively lead the eye lots of diminishing perspective happening because we've got plants running down the riverbank getting smaller same on this side tapering down and then the river as well so there's even this stone wide to narrow lots here to hopefully showcase depth and that's why the wide angle is really effective and why i use it a lot in these types of frames this composition is similar except i've really tried to accentuate more this flow that we've got down here i just really like that movement we've got the rock converging in again we've got the river edge there converging down hopefully everything leading us to the light to the main subject and then the last little adjustment was getting rid of this foreground rock moving into the creek here and now instead of having the rock there i'm just kind of working with the wonderful light and then we've got that same type of theory going on the main drawcard for going to this particular section was this little whirlpool that i noticed in the river which is probably i probably had to get right in there with the wide angle but this little whipping action through there so i like to often if i can make an opening for the eye to travel through so whenever i have rocks in my frame or whatever it may be i like to just try and make sure the eye has a clear pathway to make it through now looking at this one i think that's a little bright so i'm just going to dial that back to about there again definitely not finished you can see all of these are quite different with the processing but you get the idea hopefully that makes sense let's continue on summertime here sunrise is about 5 50 in the morning so if you want to be on location prior to sunrise it's early start so i definitely i'm not doing as much photography in the summer not for sunrise anyway the sunsets are getting close to 10 pm so these are big days i'm generally not doing as much photography definitely not running workshops this time of year it's kind of my off time more family time but i miss the photography so that's why this morning the alarm went off at four and here we are it's good to get out but it's a commitment and you you kind of know that you're gonna need a nap at some point during the day no idea if we've got anything there worth keeping it was fleeting uh moments there but i'm not sure if we did it justice it's too hard when it's this early in the morning can't think a quick look at these raw files to finish up here's our balancing act again compositionally the challenge we're facing this direction and this is more or less where i want to leave the eye the challenge is that i have to get this right hand ridge line in it's just really hard to avoid that and what i've done is purposely include this foreground rock to balance things out so now like i mentioned earlier i've got a predominant shape in the lower left balanced by something on the top right and now hopefully the eye will naturally just want to gravitate towards that area now i shot a frame without the rock on the lower left which is this one here and i do feel hopefully you guys agree that it's just imbalanced off this to me feels like it's just distracting now because we have so much weight here and here all around there and then this area becomes a bit of a void and because it's imbalanced and basically a void i feel like it gets attention i want to look there whereas when the rock's there i don't really want to look there as much and now the eye effectively wants to rest in between i have cropped that one in in slightly i'd almost go a little tighter so i had the 10 prime on ideally for this particular shot maybe slightly tighter around 20 mil something like that i think would have done it justice i also included a vertical frame here similar composition but i think the balance is a little harder to achieve in the vertical it's one of the reasons why i typically shoot horizontal and someone's asked me that recently why do i shoot horizontal so much i just think it gives you more opportunity and chance to build out the comp and create depth and get the layering so hopefully that makes sense to you the processing for this very similar to our previous frame although the dynamic range is a lot simpler here we're not looking straight at the sunrise so it shouldn't be as hard to recover the details we want to recover and build out that depth so this is the general direction you would take this one i often darken the upper part of the sky the sky will always be darker up the top and lighter towards the horizon so i just simply do that with the brush there i'd like to reveal some of the darker tones in the background to press that further away and get some depth and separation so we'll do that like this and then as i've said before foreground will have more contrast and greater tonal range so these are some of the ways you can do that contrast blacks whites you name it you can kind of pick your poison in this case we might just crank the contrast even more and the image is lacking bright tones we can see that in the histogram and i can just see by looking at it so i'd like to add some light around this distant area that's where it would be the brightest anyway and now that's just giving the image some luminosity and with this brush i'll just bring up some whites and highlights and now just hit that similar area just being cautious now because i'll overexpose the sky if we go up there too much maybe some slight warming in the highlights which will help the horizon sky and the mountain and the clouds cool down the mids partially for the water and you know what now we have lost our highlight or we partially clipped the highlights i'm looking at the histogram i'll just darken down just like that even down into there and last brush a touch warmer we collect the data in the field you reveal the details in post not overly concerned about white balance in the field i'll leave it on auto i adjust everything here so we can go from this to this and disclaimer it's not finished so please don't look at this and say oh shouldn't it be this shouldn't it be that i'm not saying this is finished but it just pushes it in that right direction i let it marinate come back with those fresh eyes adjust slightly so on and so forth but that gives you the idea anyway i hope that maybe made some sense giving you some food for thought and some inspiration for your photography thank you for joining me i'll take my time on some of these frames from this video and decide if i actually keep any or not but it definitely has all the ingredients there of the things that i really enjoy capturing and experiencing out in nature please leave any comments or questions below thumbs up and sharing the video really helps and i look forward to seeing you in a new video soon