Essential Travel and Landscape Photography Skills
Now, we’ve moved out to the riverbank and I’m just going to see where we can go. I found a nice little spot here looking between these two barges across the river with a little bit reflected light of the water. And we’ve got some colored clouds with the sunrise coming up behind the Eiffel Tower there, so I’ve just gone this time with a wide angle not the super wide angle lens. I’ve got graduated filter on the top half of the shot to darken down the sky and to polarize it to saturate the colors a little bit. And I'm just going to experiment with the few shots of the wide angle, and see what results I can get. And then, I’m might actually switch over to the telephoto lens and concentrate on some detailed shots of the metalwork on the tower and then the sun shining through that. But, we’ll have to wait and see. So, I’m just going to try this set up first.
Down here is quite dark in the foreground, in front of these barges, especially this one, this barge here is in black paint so a it’s a lot darker, so by having a graduated filter on, on bringing the level of the sky down to match my foreground area. And we can see the sun just breaking through the metalwork of the Eiffel Tower there. And once this is lifted up above that bank of cloud, this could make for quite dramatic shot. And that’s the great thing when you’re wondering around in the city on the streets, just looking around on your feet, moving about on the city and trying to find good shots.
Now, when you’re moving around in the city, what you really need to do is make sure you’ve got a mobile equipment setup and that’s exactly what I’ve got here. What I'm working with is a lightweight Manfrotto Neotech tripod, which just got the quick collapsible legs. These are fantastic. These legs, where you’ve got a single push button here, and then the legs are just fold up like so, nice and easy, nice and quick, and then I’ve got a small, pelican case with the basic equipment that I need. And this case locks up like so, and it’s got wheels on it, and an extendable arm. And this makes it fantastic in moving around in the city. Not so great on these couple bits here, but fantastic when you’re on a normal pavements, on normal streets.
And my basic kit that I take out with me for the city shooting is the main camera, the super wide angle lens, and then I’ve got an 85-mil lens for portraiture. I’ve got fish–eye lens for some extreme wide angle. My 70 to 200 lens which is a fantastic, good, all around sort of telephoto short telephoto lens, flash gun, filter set and a few accessories, and that’s pretty much all I need. One of the things that I also take out with me is a compass and that compass is used for just for checking directions and it’s a nice compact case, it keeps everything locked together, nicely secured and protected, plus bonus with the wheels which means it’s easy to move around the city.
[Demonstration]
I'm going to move position over there now. I’ve got a couple of really nice shots here. There’s another spot just further up there that I’ve just looked up. I think it’s like it might work, so I’m going to go up to the front end to the other barge and see if I can find something a little bit different.
I’ve just find another great shot looking back the other way. We’ve got this yellow-green barge in the foregrounds and we’ve got the trams, the metro-trains running over the bridge capturing sunlight. So I'm just going to stick the graduated filter. I’ve switched to a standard lens to concentrate in that view, and I'm just going to use a slot shutter speed of maybe about a tenth or fifteenth of a second, just to get a little bit of a motion blur on the train as it goes over the track there and those buildings that lit up. So it’s a little bit more of an arty city shot, a little bit different, so I’m going to see what I could come up with.
If you’re not familiar with using your camera in full manual to control the shutter speeds and the aperture, then I recommend you view our introduction to photography program, which is our foundation level for learning to use your camera in full manual mode.
That’s thirteenth of a second, just giving us enough motion blur. We’ve got some nice reflections in the water. That’s good, cool, excellent. Right, time for a coffee I think and breakfast.
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