OPG LIVE: January 2018

Hey everyone, and welcome to "OPG Live," I am Ian Plant and I'm here with Lillia Khelif, from Outdoor Photography Guide. I want to thank you all for joining us here, I know that many of you have been enjoying your holiday season. I hope you had a great holiday season and a wonderful new year. And if you're like me, you're probably currently in the process of breaking your new year's resolutions. I know I promised myself to eat less and exercise more and so far I've done the opposite, I've exercised less and eaten more but that's just the way it goes. But one new year's resolution that I always try to keep every year is to make the current year, my best year for photography ever, so I hope you've all made that same resolution and I'm hoping that I can help you keep that resolution. And today we're gonna talk about some of the exciting photography techniques that I use when I'm making my photos. And we're going to go through some of the photos that I took on a recent trip to Ethiopia. I spent three weeks in Ethiopia and it was a fantastic adventure, it was a really great place to photograph and I hope to be able to go there again sometime soon. So I'm gonna talk about the photos I made there and the techniques that I use but before we get started on that, I wanted to take some time to first of all, thank everyone who participated in our Unseeing Challenge at the end of last year and thank our sponsor Tamron for sponsoring that event. For those of you who didn't participate in the Unseeing Challenge, the challenge was a bit of a preview from my current Unseeing eBook and video course that I just released and the idea of the challenge, the idea of my new course is to shock people into seeing the world in a different way, basically, to train people to unlearn what they've learned, how they perceive the world with their eyes and to get them thinking about their photography in an artistic and abstract way. So the whole idea of the challenge was to get people thinking differently about the way they approached their photography and those of you who participated from the challenge, we saw literally thousands of wonderful submissions during the challenge, people were out there really pushing their creativity, taking photos that were just amazing, so I wanted to thank everyone who participated in the challenge. And I wanted to start off with a short video preview for my new Unseeing Course, which we're gonna load up right now and play really quick for you, so without further ado, Lillia, please roll that wonderful preview footage. Hey there everyone, I'm Ian Plant and for those of you who don't know me already, I'm a professional photographer, and I travel the world looking for the most amazing places, subjects and people to photograph with my camera. And I go to a lot of exotic locations and I do some crazy things to get the photographs that I make, like hiking up to the rim of an active volcano or trekking deep into the rainforest looking for endangered species but I'm gonna let you in on a little secret, you don't have to travel halfway around the world to exotic locations to make great photographs, you can make great photographs anywhere you are, even at home as long as you understand this one basic rule about photography. The only thing you need to make great photos is to learn how to unsee. Unseeing, that's what I'm gonna teach you how to do in this course. I want you to make photographs that are completely different from anything else you've ever imagined doing before and the key to this is unseeing. Of course, I bet you're wondering right now, what is unseeing? All that stuff that you see every day, people, cars, buildings, sidewalks, well, you gotta stop seeing that, instead, you need to learn to see something else, something else entirely. It's kinda like in the movie, "The Matrix," that scene where the main character Neo, stopped seeing the illusion that everyone else sees and instead he sees the source code underneath, whoa! That is what you need to do with your photography, you need to stop seeing the world around you the way everyone else sees it, you need to learn to see the things that no one else is seeing, the way that you're going to excite people, the way that your photographs are gonna stand out, is if you show people something they've never seen before. Your goal with every photograph you make should be to show your creative vision to other people. You should strive to be an artist because if you're not making art, all you're doing is taking pictures, and any monkey with a possible thumb can do just that. You wanna make a statement with your photography and show people your own personal creative vision. Together, we're gonna break down your perceptual framework and build it back up from scratch, recalibrating your senses to more closely attune them to the hidden artistry that lies all around us. I want you to make photos that are dripping with attitude and that stand out from the hoard of copycat photographs we see plastered all over the Internet. I want you to create images that connect with people in a meaningful and visceral and emotional way. I want you to make the best photographs that you've ever taken in your life. So why don't we get started and let's take your photography to places that you've never before imagined. It's time to stand up and be noticed and to start taking the photos you've always dreamed of making, it's time to stop seeing the world the same way everyone else does and to start unseeing instead. Wow, Ian. Super cool vibe you got going on there. Did you do that graffiti in the background yourself? I did, as a matter of fact, it was a graffiti background, yes, I understand that I'm not in any way shape or form cool at all but that's part of the entertainment value, I was trying to keep things fun and I figured the best way to do that was to mock myself mercifully. I think you did a good job. Yeah, well, thank you. You are so mean, my goodness. I'm honest. Well, the two aren't mutually exclusive. That's true. Yeah, okay, well, thank you. I hope that those of you who get a chance to check out my Unseeing Course will have a good time and have a few chuckles at my expense but there's also a lot of really useful information in there. So I do encourage anyone if they're interested to take a look at it. Right now, the eBook is in, there's a supplemental video components of the eBook. It is exclusively available through Infocus Deals, which is a photo educational bundle that is on sale for only $49 until January 8th and we've got a link for you that should be in the comment section, where you can go and check out that bundle. So it's got my Unseeing Course plus it's got some instructional tutorials and eBooks from a bunch of other really great nature photographers, so if you're looking to supercharge your creative vision in the new year, I think this is a really good place to start but this deal it's got almost $500 worth of educational material, it is only available for $49 for just a few more days, it ends on January 8th, so if you wanna check that out I encourage you to check that out soon. So now that we've got the shameless self promotion out of the way, I'm gonna stop here, and Lillia has got a few questions that have been submitted by people who are attending the events, so we're gonna start by answering a few questions, and then we're gonna move on to talking about my photos from Ethiopia. All right, we got two pre-submitted questions here, one from Philippe. When you make these long trips and incredible photos, I can't believe you take along five tons of lighting and photographic equipment plus six assistants, just what lighting equipment do you really take? Oh, well, I absolutely do not take along any assistants or any supplemental lighting except for an on-camera flash, which I have a few accessories that allow me to put the camera off flash but it's just one flash, no assistants and usually I might have two cameras with me and anywhere from three to five lenses depending on my subject matter. So for example, my trip to Ethiopia, I had two cameras, my Canon 5D Mark IV and my Canon 5DSR. I always bring a backup camera just in case something happens to my primary camera and I had a small handful of lenses, I brought my... Let's see my Canon 11-24 with me, my Canon fisheye 8-15 millimeter lens, I had my Sigma 24 millimeter f1.4 lens for low light photography, my Tamron 24-70 millimeter lens and my Canon 70-200 millimeter lens. So I had five lenses with me, two tripods, two cameras and a Canon flash along with me. So if anyone is willing to volunteer to be my assistant- Depends on where you are going. Well, I should warn you, I go to some pretty exciting places but the pay is really bad, the benefits are non-existent and you'll end up carrying a lot of equipment but volunteers are welcome to join me at any time, it'd be nice to actually have some assistance, so thank you Phillipe, that was a great question. What else I would just like to add that Anya in the chat here, in reference to your graffiti videos, says that you are super cool, Ian. There's a little affirmation for you in case you needed some. Well, thank you Anya for lying on my behalf, I appreciate that. As I said, I'm the first person to admit that I am not super cool though but I do try to keep things fun. All right. Speaking of the chat, feel free to keep submitting your questions and they are live, and I will be answering them live, so I'll be monitoring it and just keep throwing them in there, we'll try and answer as many as possible. Our other pre-submitted question is from James, who asks you to compare and contrast HDR to graduated neutral density filters for landscapes views. Oh, fantastic question James. So HDR is High Dynamic Range Imaging which involves taking multiple exposures of the same scene with different exposure values and then blending them together later on the computer, you can either do this using a dedicated HDR program like Photomatix or you can do this manually in Photoshop where you hand blend the layers. And then a graduated neutral density filter, is a filter that is clear on the bottom half and the top half has this graduated darkness, so it goes from light gray to dark gray and the purpose of a graduated neutral density filter is to darken a bright sky to balance the exposure with a darker foreground. So this is very useful in landscape photography and for decades that's how people would balance an exposure where the exposure range was too extreme for the film to handle that used a graduated neutral density filter to bring the value of the sky down and balance it with the foreground. And it's a filter that a lot of photographers still use in the digital age but it's become less and less popular. The advantage of a graduated neutral density filters is that you don't have to rely on doing computer processing later to blend your exposure so it's simplifies your workflow, and it can be very easy and handy. Also, it's useful if you have long exposures where you might have a lot of moving elements, that can make blending very difficult if you have, for example, trees in the background that are swaying in the wind, if you're taking multiple exposures and blending them together later all that movement is gonna make it difficult to bring those exposures together. On the other hand, the downside of using a graduated filter is that as you pull the grad filter down over the sky, you end up also blocking anything that's sticking up in the sky, so if you have trees or mountains sticking up into the sky and you pull the grad filter down, it's gonna darken those elements as well, so you might end up with a shot where, you have your foreground and your sky nicely balanced but the trees and the mountain sticking up into the sky end up going too dark they look black, so it's not a very balanced exposure overall. When you're doing exposure blending, you can be much more precise and you can control the exposure balancing a lot better, so you don't get that darkening of things that are sticking up at the sky. So exposure blending requires more work and there are gonna be some exposure blends that are difficult to bring together but you can end up with a much more realistic look to your final photograph with exposure blending. I use exposure blending a lot. Now, if you're using an HDR program like Photomatix, those programs have this tendency to throw realism out the window, they end up producing what people refer to as this grungy look and often what happens is that, the program will automatically brighten the shadows to a point where the shadows are brighter than the highlights and it doesn't quite look realistic as a result. So if you're going for that grungy unrealistic look, using an HDR program is the way to go but if you're looking for a much more natural blend, then learning how to do manual blending and Photoshop using layers and masks is the best way to approach that. All right. Do we have any more interesting questions that have come up? We some comment in the chat. Okay. But depends on which way you wanna go, you want to go Ethiopia, you want to go to questions? Let's answer one more question and then we'll go to Ethiopia and then we'll go that for a while and then we'll answer some more questions after that. All right. First, have you ever been to Alaska? Yes, I have been to Alaska several times. Okay, so Roy is heading to Alaska in the Summer and he's wondering about the best lenses to take. He says he has the regular kit lenses that came with the Nikon D300, as well as an Nikon 18-200 and Nikon 50 millimeter. Well, Roy it really depends on what you're shooting and if you're going up there to shoot landscapes, you're obviously gonna have different lenses than if you're going up there to shoot wildlife. So I've been to Alaska several times, been there to photograph brown bears in the Summer. I've been there to photograph polar bears in the Winter. I've been there also in the Summer to photograph landscapes. So when your photograph... and it really depends on where you're going, Some of the landscapes are going to be landscapes where you can get really close to your subject in the background, and also interest in foreground features, so having the really great wide angle lens is useful in those situations. A lot of places like if you visit Denali National Park, for example, you're not necessarily gonna be photographing very close to the mountain, you might be further away, so a normal zoom or a short telephoto zoom might be useful in those situations to zoom in on more distant landscape features. So it really depends on what you're shooting and where you're going, that's really gonna determine what sort of lenses you're gonna bring with you. But for me, whenever I'm shooting primarily landscape subjects, I always have a wide angle zoom and a standard mid-range zoom, so I'll have like a 16-35 or even wider if I'm shooting with a full frame camera. And then my next lens might be a 24-70 and then I might bring a short telephoto zoom like a 70-200 and of course the focal lens are different if you're using a crop sensor camera than if you're using a full frame camera. But I always have a wide range, I try not to take too much, because you don't wanna get weighed down but when I'm shooting landscape, I always want to have some wide angle options and some short telephoto options and everything in between. Bring a variety. All right. So without further ado, why don't we skip on over to some of my photos from Ethiopia. I'm gonna talk a bit about the places and the things that I saw and the techniques that I used to bring my subjects to life. Yeah, was the Simien Mountains which are these high elevation mountain area, that the Simien Mountains get as high as about 14 or 15,000 feet high and I spent a week there trekking in the mountains with a travel guide who brought along some camping equipment, a cook and porter, so it was kind of glamorous camping or what they call glamping, but I was in the wilderness the whole time. And the Simien Mountains are really beautiful on their own. The scenery is absolutely spectacular and that alone would be reason to go, but the main reason for me to be there was the wildlife, particular, the gelada monkeys. And these are a terrestrial species of monkeys that there's not a lot of. Most monkeys live in trees but this is a ground dwelling monkey and they're a grass-eating monkey as well, so there's not really a lot of species like this left anymore. As a matter of fact, I think they're the only ground dwelling, grass-eating monkey species left in the world. And they only live now in the highlands of Ethiopia. And then there's really beautiful monkey, the males in particular, have these thick golden manes and they have this really distinctive pattern on their chest, this red marking. And the monkeys are fairly habituated to people, I would often see groups of monkeys that would number in the several hundreds, and they just didn't have any problems with people walking right up to them, so I often was getting fairly close and using a wide angle lens. I was using my Tamron 24-70 millimeter lens for all of these shots that I'm about to show you of the gelada monkeys. And every evening and every morning, they would be going to the cliffs that are at the edge of the escarpment up in Simien Mountains and these cliffs would drop down thousands of feet, it's quite a stunning scenery, as I said. And the monkeys they would spend the night on the cliff, so what they would do is, they would go to the cliffs at night and then they would climb down the cliffs and then just kinda hang there, they find like a little ledge a few hundred feet down and just stay there for the night and this would protect them from any predators, there's Ethiopian wolves that are in the mountains and a few other big predators that might come after them. So it was a really unique way of dealing with the safety issue for these monkeys. And it was quite stunning to see they just jump over these cliffs like there was nothing about it, they don't fall, they've got great dexterity and strengthen in their fingers, so they would just climb down these cliffs and wouldn't even think twice, I was afraid to lean over the edge. They're fearless. And lookdown, yeah, they are fearless, exactly. So my strategy was to be near the cliffs when they would go down in the evening or come up in the morning in the hopes of getting not only interesting wide angle shots of these monkeys but also working in really dramatic lighting, the sunrise and sunset and twilight lighting that I'm attracted to most when I'm photographing landscapes and wildlife subjects. So here's one of the male monkeys, he was standing up and looking around kind of watching over his, I guess his troop of monkeys. He was one of the dominant males, I suspect. And he was just keeping an eye on things, and I was able to get in close with a wide angle lens to take this photograph of him and he was back lit by the rising sun, so what I did is I used some fill flash at low power to balance the exposure and you gently illuminate the front of the monkey to balance it with the strong back lighting that was lighting up the fringe of his fur. And so I got this golden back lighting with the golden fur and a little bit of light on the front of the monkey to balance the exposure. And when you're using flash at low power, especially when there's a lot of ambient light, the animals don't even notice the flash, they don't react to it at all, it's something that doesn't bother them. So I'm always making sure that I'm not bothering my subjects. Even if I get a close approach, I do it so slowly and if my subject doesn't seem comfortable with what I'm doing, I back away but if the subject doesn't seem to really mind my presence, I'll get in a little bit closer and that allows me to get more creative with my compositions in my life. Let's go to the next photo. Question though. Yes. Is this like exposed skin? This monkey looks like it's been on the autopsy table. Yeah, I guess they're a little funny. Fun fact actually, the alternate name for this monkey is, "The bleeding heart monkey." So this is just like a patch of skin, it's not exposed or a wound or anything like that, this is just an interesting display patch, probably something that they display when they're trying to mate and it's just this vibrant, bright red but people would call them bleeding heart monkeys as a result. 'Cause it looks like they've had their chest opened up and yeah, it's kinda weird looking. I think it's beautiful, some people might think it's a little weird. It is interesting. Yeah. The bleeding heart patch gets all the lady monkeys going. All right. And this next photo, is another male gelada. And the sun was rising right behind him, so I took a position where, when he jumped up on this rock so that the sun was behind the monkey and was fringe lighting, rim lighting the hair around the edges of the monkey and I chose the exposure that put the monkey in silhouette and I didn't use any flash, I didn't try to illuminate the monkey, I was going for a more artistic look for this particular photo. And this is possible when you are working in a high contrast scene and the contrast range exceeds your camera's dynamic range, so I love working with subjects in silhouette, it creates a more artistic and mysterious presentation of the subject. So when I had the opportunity to put the sun directly behind my subject, I jumped at it and got the shot. And then finally, this gives you an idea of some of the dramatic scenery that you can see in the Simien Mountains. And this particular gelada monkey was getting ready to go down this cliff on this beautiful scenic gorge for the evening and he paused for a while and he modeled himself, let me take a few shots of him. And this was in the twilight, there were these beautiful stormy clouds in the background and because it was twilight, there was a lot of blue light. So I chose an overall exposure that was a little bit underexposed, to really bring out drama of the landscape and the twilight clouds above it and bring out the colors and then I used just a hint of fill flash, once again at low power so as not to disturb the monkey. I also like working with low power because it gives a softer look and I use a device called a flash grid, which is designed to narrow the beam of light so that I was only selectively illuminating my monkey subject and nothing else really around it. And you can use a grid or a device called a snoot, to selectively illuminate your subject, so just a little bit of fill light against my subject helped it stand out from the dark surroundings and I was able to create this dramatic mix of landscape and wildlife shots. The next place I went after trekking in the Simien mountains for a week, there's all these ancient churches in Ethiopia. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church dates back to the 5th Century or 4th Century AD, it's really ancient and it's got its own unique traditions 'cause it was kind of broken off and separated from the rest of Christianity, especially after Islam spread throughout North Africa. So they've got their own unique traditions and there's these old ancient churches and monastery, they've been around for centuries. They were curved out of the rock, the soft sandstone where they literally curved these churches out of these rocks. And they're in these crazy places, they were all on the tops of mountains, on tops of cliffs, so I had to climb up a rope sometimes, do rock climbing to get to these places. This is the inside of one of the churches and this particular place, they don't allow any women up there for some reason, so it's only guys allowed up there. But you know, it really was quite an experience, it was really beautiful. There was a lot of wonderful things to be seen and here's another example of the interior of one of these rock huge churches, you could see that they literally curved this out of the sandstone rock and they decorate the insides. So the churches themselves were interesting and I thought worthy subjects in and of themselves but I was really more attracted to the priests and the monks that were living and working in these churches. And they were very friendly, a lot of them were interested in posing and so I was able to take a lot of fun photographs of the priests that were working in these churches and it was a really interesting experience. In particular, I was looking for a way to show an artistic representation of my subjects, so I was trying to move past the more literal or journalistic approach and so I was working with the contrast of light that I was finding inside the churches. So these churches didn't really have lights on the inside, it was all natural light coming in from these small doors and windows so the interiors were very dark. And what I did is I sought to juxtapose my subjects against the brighter exteriors. So I would position my subjects in places, for example, here, I had the priest standing at the door leading into the interior of the church with some light that was coming in from the outside. And I worked creatively with that contrast of light to create a more moody and mysterious presentation, a more artistic presentation. So I selected an exposure in this case that prevented the highlights from being overexposed and then I let everything else fall into shadow and one of the advantages of doing this, having all these surroundings fall on the shadow, is it helps focus attention on my main subject in this case, the priest. And there's one church that I had to get up to, it's on the top of this very tall mountain and there were these cliffs that I had to climb up to get there and I get to the top and there's this narrow ledge with 700 foot drops all around it and I'm not exactly the most comfortable person with heights to begin with, so I was freaking out a little bit while I was up there but it was a fantastic shoot and the priest that worked up there was just this great guy, he was really friendly, he spoke English very well, he knew a lot about where I'm from in the United States and was asking all sorts of questions. He had traveled a bit apparently, so he was a really cool guy to hang out with and he was very willing to pose for me and my friend while we were up there taking photographs. And so this is a scene that shows him standing outside of this small cave that's at the top of this cliff, right next to his church which was curved out of another small cave. And this just gives you an idea, I wanted to tell a story about the environment, all the cliffs and the high mountains and the scary precipices that were in the area. And then I started, trying to think a little bit more creatively working with the landscape scene itself, working with the light, the sun was setting in the background, so I selected a position that allowed the sun to peek around just the corner of the sandstone rock so that I created the sunburst effect. I was using a wide angle lens for this particular shot and you can see in the background how the scenery drops off, how much of a vertical difference there is from where I was to the Valley below, at least 700 feet down below me, straight down. And then I started getting a little bit more creative with shooting into the light. I love opportunities to shoot into the light and for this particular shot I was inside the sandstone cave, the priests was on the outside, the sun was setting behind him, so I let the background where the sun was in the sky to overexpose and I exposed instead for the mid-tones in this shot, so there's a little bit of detail on the inside of the cave and there's some detail around the priest himself but the rest it goes progressively darker as you get to the shadows. And this creates this transition from dark to light in the scene, so it's a good idea when you're making photographs to think about a visual transition for your composition, you want stuff at the center and the edge is pushing into the middle of the composition but you should also be thinking of the transition of colors and light. So it's often useful to have dark around the edges and this is something called a vignette and this is a technique that photographers have been using for awhile. And I'm always looking for natural vignettes that are caused by contrast. So I've got darkness at the edges that slowly transitions to light in the center of the composition and this helps pull the eye into the composition and keep it there. And then for the final shot, I had the sun actually right behind the priest's head and I chose a position so the sun was just peeking out a little bit, so that there's a bit of a starburst effect. But once again, I chose to let the sky and the sun and all the highlights in the image completely overexposed, so I got creative with overexposure, I let them go pure white and I exposed instead for the mid-tone areas. And once again, we've got this dark transition, we've got dark at the edges and the corners of the image transitioning to this light in the middle. The reason I chose this exposure, the reason why I approached it this way is I wanted to create this kind of gauzy, mysterious look, give it a bit of ethereal quality. So I'm always looking for a way to bring mood and emotion into my photographs. So one way you can do this is through composition and creative use of exposure. So after our final image was taken inside of a church, it was in the early morning, I'd hiked up to this church before sunrise and all the priests were in there reading from their Bibles using candles, there was no light anywhere. It was completely dark outside, completely dark inside the churches. So I took out my fastest lens which was my Sigma 24 millimeter 1.4 lens and the lens let in a lot of light allowing me to shoot even in these extreme low light conditions and by working in this little light, by shooting directly into the light, I was able to capture this interesting story and this really interesting lighting scheme. So after the churches, I went to a place called the Danakil Depression, which is a low elevation area. So when I was in the Simien Mountains, I was 14, 15,000 feet above sea level, very cold and then I went down to the Danakil which was about 400 or 500 feet below sea level, ridiculously hot. Arguably the hottest place on earth, if you look at average temperatures. It was pretty miserable there during the day. And the Danakil is known for a lot of interesting salt pan formations. There are these rivers that empty into this area but don't exit and they deposit salt over time, so there are these vast plains of salt that are very photogenic, for interesting, kind of like the salt pans in Death Valley, for example, if you've ever been there. They're also known for a lot of interesting cultural things. So the Afar people who live in this region they go into this desert, they live in this desert and they mine the salt by hand, they literally carve these blocks of salt from the ground, load them up on camels, and then they walk with their camels for a week to get to the markets in the city of Mek'ele. And so these are nomadic peoples, who are living in one of the most desolate and dangerous environments on earth. So it was really fascinating having the opportunity to photograph the caravans as they would go by and to tell the story of these amazing people. And so this is a guy leading his caravan through the desert across the salt pans. With wide angle lens I got down low as he was walking by, I chose a position so that the caravan would be rendered as a diagonal line going from the foregrounds to the background, that makes it more dynamic and more interesting composition and it complimented the diagonal lines that were in the foreground already. And in particular, I chose this guy as a subject because he had this bright green scarf on his head and this brilliant red robe that he was wearing, so that color scheme, that Christmas color scheme, I guess you could call it, was something that really jumped out and really helped tell the story. So I'm always looking for interesting ways to tell a story and it's not just based on what the subject is doing, it's based on the composition, the light and the colors, all these things help tell a story. So everywhere I went it, while I was in the Danakil, I was surrounded by armed guards. It's a perfectly safe place to travel but there had been an incursion across the border from Eritrea a few years ago and a tourist I think was kidnapped and killed. So the Ethiopian government over-cracked it and now you can't go into this region without a small army with you. And these guys aren't necessarily, what I would call professional soldiers, their gun discipline is a little lax and for just a little bit of a tip, they'll pose for you, they'll even let you hold the gun and get a picture taken of them. This guy in particular, had a really characteristic look to him he had this great hair and he was always wearing these pair of sunglasses and- He's vivacious. Yeah, so I couldn't help but take a picture of him. This is not really a great picture, I was hoping for something different, it didn't really work out the way I planned but I just wanted to kind of give you a feel for what it was like traveling in Ethiopia. Very interesting change of pace from calming churches. Yeah. I never felt unsafe in Ethiopia some places I'd have a small army with me. And literally when I was in the Danakil area there was always, anywhere from three to six armed guards with me at all times. So they were great guys, really friendly. I felt very, very safe around them but in most places I traveled, I didn't have the armed guards with me just some of the areas near the borders. They border some countries where there's a little bit of political instability. So just be aware if you do travel in Ethiopia that you will have armed security with you. And the best way to arrange traveling to Ethiopia is to work with a tour agency, they will set all that up for you. So the Danakil is also famous for all these beautiful volcanic features and they've got these really colorful sulfur pools and it's kind of Yellowstone on steroids. And it's a really fantastic place. It's difficult to get into photograph when you want to. I want it to be there for sunrise and sunset, but I was told that they needed a critical mass of armed guards there. So they time everyone's arrival so that all the tour groups are going at the same time, so that there's a big group of soldiers at any given time at this place. So I wasn't able just to go there when I want it to. So I had to photograph these features in less than ideal light, but nonetheless, it's a really beautiful area. And it was just a rainbow of colors. So I was looking for creative ways to get close with my wide angle lens and to show the beauty of this area. And I really hope I can go back sometime when the security situation has calmed down a bit and you get more freedom of access. Now, being in the Danakil was hot to begin with but I decided it wasn't hot enough, so I went to what is the centerpiece of the Danakil region, which is the Erta Ale volcano, which is an active volcano with a lava lake. And you can go and you can camp on the rim of the volcano. And I spent two nights camping up there including one very miserable day, just sitting in a small mud hut that they had up there for camping, laying just trying not to sweating the intense heat that was up there. That sounds great right now, it's literally zero degrees where we are. I'll take volcano camping right now. Yeah, well it was a lot of fun. And the volcano is a beautiful site, it's really amazing but it's not quite what it used to be. So the volcano is constantly changing and the lava lake levels dropped in the past year and haven't quite recovered, so it's a little hard to see the lava lake right now and the best way to have seen it would have been with my drone but unfortunately, when I was in the Simien Mountains I flew my drone and it never came back. Oh. Yeah, I flew it out over the valley that was beneath me and there was some communication interference and I couldn't get it to come back and the batteries eventually died and it must've dropped about 8,000 feet before finally hitting the forest beneath. So it was sad to see my drone go but- Interesting find for some monkey down there. Oh my guide got the word out, he was gonna ask the villagers to keep an eye out for it. To find it? Yeah, so I'm still hoping that someone's gonna find it. But the volcano was still an amazing site. Now I've been to a lot of volcanoes in the past year, so I'm a bit jaded. Your jaded by volcanoes? Yeah. On a scale of one to 10, this was maybe a three compared to some of the other places I've been to recently but it was still a really incredible site. And with any luck, the lava lake levels will increase again. And I do plan on going back and bringing my drone this time to get a nice aerial shot of the lava lake. Here's just a close up view of a feature that was revealed by the lava lake levels dropping. They call this, "The Gates of Hell" it's a skylight or a twin skylight. So there's a magma chamber down there that's exposed to the open air. So it looks like a pair of devil eyes or something like that, it's quite quite stunning. I'm gonna wrap this up pretty quickly. The next place I went was a Bale Mountains National Park, which is another beautiful high elevation mountain area. And I went there to photograph the Harenna Forest, which is this forest that looks a lot like the Rainforest in the Pacific Northwest of United States. And it was a beautiful place. I camped there for three nights. And I spent a lot of time wandering through the forest, looking for interesting compositions. It proved to be trickier to photograph than the Rainforest in the Pacific Northwest, I had a tough time. I did manage to make one shot here that I really liked but it was a very challenging place to photograph. Valley Mountains is also very famous for Ethiopian wolves. When I was planning the trip with my friend, we had decided not to try to photograph the wolves when we were in Bale, 'cause we understood that it was very difficult to get close to them but when we arrived there and we were talking with our guide, he was like, "Oh yeah, it's no problem. We can just go up and photograph the wolves, it's a piece of cake." Sure enough the Wolf spottings were quite easily done. We didn't have our wildlife equipment or long lenses with us, so we decided not to really bother with it too much but I would like to go back to Bale to photograph the Ethiopian wolves at some time because I think it could be very productive. And then after Harenna Forest, my final stop was a place called Sof Omar Cave, which was named after an Islamic Holy man who made this cave his home, I believe in the 12th century, Sof Omar. And it's this stunning cave, it's this giant cave with a river running through it. And it's probably one of the biggest, if not the biggest cave system in Africa. If the river is low enough, you can actually walk through the cave from the entrance to the exit. There's actually like 40 or 50 entrances to the cave but the main entrance and the primary exit, I think there's a walk of about 10 or 12 miles you can do underground going from one end to the other. When I was there the water was too high for that. And I would have been interested in photographing the cave once you get into the places where it's completely dark. It takes a lot of specialized lighting equipment to do cave photography when you're in the dark parts of the cave. So I focus my effort on the areas of the cave that were near the entrance, where there was still some light coming in and I started by by photographing the brighter parts of the cave but this was a very literal approach i was taking here photographing this part of the cave. I was looking for something more creative and artistic, so I went deeper into the cave, into the darker parts of the cave where I could shoot aiming out towards the brightest part of the cave, the entrance, where there was still a little bit of faint reflected light coming in. And so for this shot, I waded into the water and selected a small set of rapids as my foreground. And I was using my Cannon fisheye lens, my eight to 15 millimeter fisheye lens to take in as much of the scene as I possibly could with its wide angle of view. And I'll use the fisheye lens in places like cave interiors 'cause you might not have any obvious straight lines. So the fisheye curving effect isn't gonna be obvious to the viewer. So you can take in a wider field of view and you can create some of this fisheye curviness in a way that doesn't scream fisheye lens to the viewer. So for this shot, I took a series of exposures, the longest being 30 seconds long to capture the faint light that was coming in and then I blended the exposure. I used some exposure blending just to reveal some of the extra detail in the darker parts of the scene but when processing the file, I still let most of the scene fall on the shadow. I wanted to create that natural vignette look of darkness on the edges and the corners to help keep the eye focused into the center of the composition which is the brightest part of the composition. So that transition from dark to light, something very important to my photographs. Here's another example of a different part of Sof Omar Cave. There were all these different entrances into the main part of the cave, so there was a lot of photographic opportunities in the sandstone or the limestone inside the cave was very soft and had been sculpted by just years and centuries of flooding and receding waters. So it's smooth and shaft and it's really quite incredible, the textures that you could find in there. So once again, I think the place that was dark, aiming my camera into the brightest part of the scene and then letting the dark areas fall in the shadow that vignette around the corners and the edges. So those are my favorite photos from the Ethiopia trip. We're gonna come back here. Any more questions that have come in? All right. Give me a sec here to go back in the chat. Let's see. Do you ever carry a tripod or go all handheld? You kind of answered this before but do you think there's any instance in which you would like not carry a tripod? Do you find it unnecessary or? Usually I always have a tripod with me. And so for my landscape work, I'm always shooting landscape with a tripod and from our wildlife work it's split, so sometimes I'll be shooting with a tripod or some other support like a bean bag if I'm shooting with a long lenses because long lenses are difficult to handle. If I'm shooting with a wider angle lenses with wildlife and I'm getting close to my subject, like I was doing with the gelada monkeys in the Simien Mountains, I was actually shooting all of that handheld. And by shooting handheld, it gives me more flexibility of movement and allows me to position myself quickly where I need to be to get the composition that I want. So pretty much a 100% of my landscape work is tripod based, maybe 50% of my wildlife work has a tripod or some sort of support. And when it comes to shooting travel or people photography more often than not, I'm working without my tripod and with my tripod. So when you're shooting without a tripod, it just gives you much more flexibility and it's quicker to move around. The advantage of shooting with a tripod and this is particularly useful with landscape, is it allows you to do long exposures and allows you to be very critical with your focus and your depth of field and it also allows you to make sure that there's no movement between exposures if you're doing any sort of exposure blending or focus stacking or if you're stitching together a Panorama where you wanna make sure that if you are moving between shots, that the movement is precise so that you minimize the differences in the shots to when you're bringing them together. So yes, I use a tripod for the vast majority of my work. First, I would like to mention that it seems like Anya, I don't know maybe I'm saying that wrong, Anaya, Anya, she seems offended that you have lost another drone. Have you lost a drone before? Is this a recurring theme with you? I have one drone that's sitting in my closet where the camera got damaged and I haven't got them fixed. And then I had another drone, the drone that I just lost, where I had some damage to the camera that I did get fixed and then I proceeded to lose that. So this is only the second time I've put a drone out of commission. Now that first drone I have, I could fix it at some point. It's just antiquated technology, so I upgraded instead of fixing it. Yeah. So yeah, I'm a little prone to destroying my equipment. I'm usually very careful, actually I don't go through that many lenses. I rarely destroy a camera or a lens but the drones are a little bit trickier to handle. They get sacrificed. Yeah. All right. We have two questions that kind of go together here. Okay. One from Ann, one from Richard. First, what do you meter when shooting into the light? And when you say that you expose for mid-tones, do you spot metering? Ah, okay, these are very good questions. So when I'm shooting into the light what I expose for actually it depends on the ultimate look I want for my photos, my artistic goals. So for example, with some of the shots of the priests where I was shooting into the light, I actually let the highlights overexpose intentionally because I wanted to create this sort of dreamy look to those photos. Whereas when I was shooting into the light in the cave, I was very careful to preserve those highlights to make sure that they didn't overexpose. So I'm not necessarily exposing on a particular part of the scene, but what I am doing is I'm looking at the exposure on my histogram, on my camera and you can preview this, most cameras allow you to preview your histogram and live view or you can take a test shot and take a look. And then I make adjustments to my exposure as needed based on what it is I want to do and what the histogram is showing me. So sometimes I'll be looking at the histogram to make sure there isn't that spike on the very right of the histogram that shows that you have overexposed one of your highlights. So I'm dropping my exposure as necessary to get rid of that spike on the right, that's stage right, sorry for you guys looking at me over there, it'll be yes, you know what I'm talking about. I was up to make the elephant L, to see which one is, I write with my right- I'm pointing on the left side of the screen but this is my right, stage right. So I'm not necessarily exposing on a particular part of the scene, I'm just assessing my overall exposure and I'm usually shooting in a priority mode. So with landscape, I'll be shooting in aperture priority, so I'm using exposure compensation to adjust my exposure up or down. So I usually don't bother with spot metering, I'm just using my camera's general evaluative metering but I am making a decision based on my artistic goals and based on what the histogram is showing me, using exposure compensation to increase or decrease the exposure as necessary. So I typically am not using any spot metering or anything like that. The only time I would think about using spot metering is if I'm shooting wildlife and I need to make sure that I'm exposing for a particular part of the scene to get the exposure right and with wildlife because it's moving around, you can't often do this whole take a look at the histogram and adjust as necessary process, that's useful when you're working with subjects that aren't moving. So I might switch over to a spot metering when I'm working with a moving subject and just keep the spot on my subject and expose around that way. But, as I said these are all decisions you have to make depending on your artistic goals and depending on what the light is giving you and what your histogram is showing you. All right. We had a question about this a little earlier and now a more specific one in reference to your photos in Ethiopia. Do you offer your models, the priests, any monetary compensation or ask them to sign a release? What is your approach for the murky waters of taking photos of people and being able to have the rights to those photos? Okay, well, so when you're photographing people, generally you have the right to use those photos for even for sale as long as there is an artistic or editorial purpose. If you're using those photos, let's say for an ad campaign or something like that, then you typically need written permission, a model release from the people before you can legally use those photos otherwise you might be subject to a lawsuit. So I'm typically not selling my photos for that sort of stuff, so I usually don't ask for model releases when I'm working with subjects, especially when you're traveling abroad and the subject you're working with doesn't speak English, they would have no idea what their signing anyways. And the truth of the matter is, it's highly unlikely that someone from Ethiopia is gonna ever sue me for the use of the photo but I do nonetheless respect their privacy in the law. So when I use these photos, I use them for personal or artistic purposes, I'm not using them to advertise, I'm not selling them to Ford Company to advertise a new truck or something like that because that would be a violation of the law that exists in the U.S, so I'm not typically asking for people to sign model releases because you do actually have pretty broad rights in the United States and most of the countries to use photos of people even without their consent. Now, depending on where you are, sometimes people will ask for money, especially in tourist areas they will ask for money if you take their picture. And I'm perfectly okay with that, I prefer to do candid shots of people 'cause it's more natural but I also respect people's privacy rights. And if they wanna get paid for you taking their photo, that's perfectly okay. And when I was in Ethiopia, the priests, it wasn't required to give them money but they appreciated tipping. So I would tip them some money because that money would go into preserving their ancient churches and I thought these places were really cool, they were worth being preserved. So I was perfectly comfortable with giving these guys a little bit of a tip which I knew was gonna go back into the preservation efforts. So, it depends where you go, I'd never have a problem paying someone if they want it, if I really wanna get the shot of them. And sometimes when you're working with someone who's been paid, it makes everything much more easy and comfortable. I don't like the post aspect of it, I really do prefer getting that candid natural moment when I can. But you just kinda gotta work with what you got. Yeah, I suppose it's hard to pay someone and then be like, "Please act natural for this photo." Well, especially- I have a hard time when people ask me to do that, I don't know how to act natural. I know, so for example, that photo of the priest who was reading by candlelight, when we came in our guide was like, "Well, what do you want them to do?" And I said, "Just keep doing what they're doing. Just pretend I'm not here." Have a natural day. Yeah., so they just went back to reading their Bibles, just the way we found them, it was perfect. It was a great, great shot to get. So, you gotta work with what you have. You gotta just see how your subjects are comfortable. Some places you go, people love getting their shots taken by the tourist, don't want money at all. Some places they hate the tourist and some places have become so overwhelmed with tourists that everyone's trying to make a quick buck. So it is what it is. Depends. In reference to the Ethiopia photos again, especially in the caves, Marsha is asking, how do you get everything so sharp? Even in the corners, everything looks super sharp in the photos, is this because of a wide angle lens you're using or do you have a special sharpness technique? Okay, so part of it is that I'm often working with a wide angle lens. And with a wide angle lens, it's a lot easier to get everything sharp in your photos. It's often said that wide angle lenses have more depth of field than telephoto lenses and while that's not technically true, in effect how it works. So in terms of making sure like with landscape shots in particular, getting sharp focus throughout the image frame relies on a combination of techniques. You can either use hyper-focal distance and depth of field which relies on setting an optimal focus point and then stopping down your aperture to increase the depth of field, the zone a sharpness in your image. And then in our technique you could use, in a technique that I use for some of my landscape work is focused stacking, where you're actually taking different exposures at different focal points and then blending them together. And the advantage of focus stacking is that it allows you to get something that's sharper than you can get using depth of field alone because when you stop down to a smaller aperture, even though it extends your zone of sharpness around your focus point, when you start using smaller apertures, there's an optical effect called diffraction. And diffraction, just very small amount begins to lessen your overall image quality, so even though the sharpness increases, you might actually have a softer image if you're using a small aperture like f/16 or f/22. So focus stacking allows you to shoot at optimal apertures that aren't diffraction limited. And when you put it all together, you can get a much sharper image that prints bigger. And focus stacking is also advantageous, if you get really, really close to your foreground and you have this extreme near far composition, you can get everything sharp in a way that depth of field or hyper-focus distance might not actually allow you to do. Now all of these techniques are really quite confusing and it would take probably like several hours for me to explain how to do all this stuff. Lucky for everyone, I've already explained it all in my course, "Focusing for landscape photography," where I discuss hyper-focal distance, depth of field and focus stacking, I take the mystery out of it. So I recommend if you really wanna learn that, you get that course. All right. Our next question is from Timu, who says greetings from Finland. Ah. Have you ever been to Finland? I have not been to Finland but I would love to go. I have been trying to plan a trip to the Scandinavia Area and I've been to Iceland but I haven't been to Norway or Sweden or Finland. I really wanna go sometime, so soon. All right. I'll look you up Timu asks, do you have any tips for photographing snowy landscapes? Probably especially about getting detail because it's blanketed in all white. How do you make an interesting composition in the snow? Ah, this is a very timely question, at least for half of the world right now, those of us in the Northern hemisphere are in the grip of Winter. Also several people have mentioned they're watching in the middle of a blizzard, so good luck to you. Well, thank you. Thank you for persevering through the bad weather to watch us, appreciate that. So tips for making great Winter photographs, first of all, wait for a nice snowfall. A lot of Winter photography is just so blunt because there isn't snow on the trees or there isn't fresh snow on the landscape. So you wanna have that nice thick, fresh snowfall. So I'm always trying to get out there after a big snowfall, especially when the snow is clinging to the trees, that looks good. Second of all, you really wanna look for contrast, when you've got all that white out there, you're not necessarily gonna have a lot of contrast. So having good lighting conditions, sunrise and sunset, when there's strong light and a lot of color to the light can really bring that Winter landscape to life. So it's a tough combination getting the fresh snow and then also getting really good light to work together can be really challenging. Second of all, be careful of your exposure. A common mistake a lot of people make when they're shooting Winter scenes is, they don't realize how their camera meter works. So your camera meter is trying to make everything kind of neutral, so it takes something that's bright and it will set an exposure that darkens it, if you're shooting in an automatic shooting mode. If you're shooting manually this doesn't really matter as much. So if you've got a bright white scene and you use your automatic mode shooting, your camera meter is gonna try to set an exposure that is gonna make that bright white scene look much darker than it really is. So you're often gonna have to increase your exposure compensation, your exposure value, to get the snow to look the way it's supposed to look. So just be very careful about your exposure. You'll probably notice that, you'll take a picture and everything will look darker than it should you'll know that you've made a mistake and then you can then adjust your exposure. This used to be a real big deal on the day of film and was at the top of everyone's Winter photography tips list, now it's kind of moved down in priority because it's pretty easy to see that you made a mistake. So I'm always looking for good contrast and I'm always looking for interesting ice. Ice is nice and it's great subject for Winter photography. So I'm looking in particular, if there's an area that's got some moisture, like if you're on the coast or near a big lake before freezes over and you've got a lot of wind blowing water around, you might get trees on the edge of that lake building up a rhyme ice around them, turning them into living sculptures and that can be really fantastic. Ice that's forming on streams and rivers and small lakes and ponds, as it's forming, can take on a lot of interesting shapes. I often like to get out when the ice is formed on a lake, I like to get out and use that as an opportunity to explore parts of the lake that I might not otherwise be able to get to during the Summer. Just be very careful when you're working on top of ice to make sure it's thick enough. Here where I live, in Minnesota you can tell that the ice is thick enough because people have set up their ice fishing shacks. Or driven a truck out there. Their trucks are out there. So we always know when the ice is thick enough but when I have any question about the thickness of the ice, I always bring it an ice axe with me like the kind of mountaineers use and I use it to probe the ice in front of me. And you can tell if the ice breaks through when you use the axe you know it's not safe to stand on. If it doesn't break through, chances are, you're in good shape. And, I tend to be very cautious when I'm working on top of ice, I'll often wear a full dry suit that I use when I'm kayaking and I'll have plenty of warm clothing underneath it, so that way, if I do plunge in, I'm not gonna, instantly succumb to shock or hypothermia, so I can get myself out. Now, as long as you're careful and cautious and you probe the ice in front of you, your chances of falling in a pretty slim. So I recommend if you do, do any work with ice, if there's any question about it, stay close to shore or stay on the shore, work safe and just be very, very cautious if you do work on the ice. But the ice does create some fabulous opportunities. Right now, I'm waiting for Lake Superior to sufficiently freeze over, so I can get out to the sandstone sea caves that are on the shore of Lake Superior around the Apostle Islands in Wisconsin and Pictured Rocks in Michigan and take photographs of those sea caves transformed into ice caves. So the only way to get out there and photograph them safely is when the lake freezes over enough. So I've got my fingers crossed, hoping it's going to happen soon. Yeah, it's been really cold so probably... Yeah. Steve asks the question, we talked a lot earlier about unseeing and the concept of unseeing, can you explain how you used the unseeing technique in the first photo of the monkey or in any of your photos in Ethiopia? Oh, yeah, that's a really fantastic question. And if I had been smarter, I would have talked about that a little bit more to help promote the new course. I use unseen for everything I do. So, those first few shots of the monkeys, for example, like the monkeys were back lit. When your eye sees the scene, you don't see it that way, so that one shot that I showed where the sun was right behind the monkey and the monkey was in silhouette, so the monkey itself was black, your eyes don't see it that way. So the only way you get there is because your camera sees the world differently than you do. Your camera sensor can capture the same range from like the dark that your human eyes can see. So unseeing was critical to making that shot happen, to knowing what I needed to do to get that silhouette effect and to capture the shot that I wanted. And it's something that it informs all of my photography. So whenever you put a wide angle lens or an ultra wide angle lens in front of your face, you change the way you see the world. And only through the process of learning how to see the world the way your camera sees it, the way your lenses see it, that's how you train your brain to start recognizing these opportunities when they arise. So I don't need to put a wide angle lens on my face to know what my wide angle seeing might look like ahead of time, I can preview in my brain because I've had enough experience working with my wide angle lens to know what it might look like. So I start looking around at everything I see with that constant preview turned on. So I'm seeing things in terms of color and light and composition differently than the way my eyes typically perceive the world. So, another really great example is with a lot of my shots, I'm using my subjects as a compositional element. So whether it's a gelada monkey or a priest in a church, I'm thinking about the shape that's created by my subject's my pose and posture and position. I'm thinking about the story that's told. So for example, with that photo of the alpha tribesmen, leading his camel caravan, if we could pull that up really quick, actually... Give me a second. Yeah, one sec... Scrolling. We're gonna get there. Okay, there it is. So for example, for this shot, as I mentioned when I was discussing the shot, I was thinking about the composition formed by the position I selected relative to the caravan. So the caravan creates this diagonal line. And we talked also about the colors, the way the colors of his clothing popped out. Even the line of sight created by his downward glance, all of these things create compositional elements, they create a sense of mood and emotion and tell a story. So all of these things I'm paying attention to when I'm making photographs and that's what the whole unseen course is all about. ...camera sees them, trying to get you to think about things in terms of their abstract, artistic relevance and getting you to just see the world in a way that you've never seen it before. So I do encourage everyone to check out unseeing. It's part of this great deal right now, where you can pick up unseeing plus a bunch of other educational material for some really great nature photographers that I work with as part of this Infocus Deals, promotion which only lasts until January 8th. So for $49, you can get almost $500 worth of educational material. So I think it's something that you should check out it'll really help supercharge your vision for the new year. All right. I think we have time for one more question. One more question, all right I can do one. I'm willing to bet you've been to Yellowstone more than once or at least once. Yes, I've been to Yellowstone many times. So Melissa is going to Yellowstone this Summer. Do you have any top tips for gone to Yellowstone? First of all, don't go to Yellowstone in the Summer. Sorry Melissa. There's just way, way too many people but if you've already got a plan and you've got your logic worked out ahead of time, you'll probably be okay. Be prepared to sit in traffic. bear jams everywhere you go. My personal preference is to go to Yellowstone during the shoulder seasons, like in the Spring, when it first opens up or right before it closes. And I love going there in the Winter. I think the Winter is a magical time to be in Yellowstone but Summer, anytime to be there is really great. The geothermal formations are amazing. The advantage of being there in the Summer is that when there is an interesting wildlife spotting it's easy to find, you don't look for the bears, you look for the 200 cars parked in the side of the road. You know that there's a grizzly bear there. There's a bear there. Yeah. So the wildlife sightings are pretty stunning. Yellowstone is just a really beautiful place. And there's so much to photograph there, that you really can't go wrong. But I in particular love walking around some of the primary geyser basins, like the one around Old Faithful, that area there's just miles of trails there. And the geyser basins there are absolutely stunning. And then the midway geyser basin is also my personal favorite, that's where Grand Prismatic Spring is. And there's some really beautiful opportunities there. You can see all these rich colors and the geothermal features and you just can't go wrong there. So have a great trip there in Yellowstone though if you can change your plans, you might wanna consider going there when there's gonna be less people around. And definitely I recommend to everyone right now, if you're thinking about a place to go this Winter, Yellowstone in Winter is really magical. You've got just animals trudging through the snow. You can go and photograph wildlife along the Northern road which they keep open all year round. And you can see bison trudging through several feet of snow and fox mousing in the snow and wolves. It's really fantastic. And then if you can take a snow coach into the interior, stay overnight at the Old Faithful Ski Lodge, The Snow Lodge, I think they call it, I haven't been there in a few years and you can go out to photograph the geyser basin at sunrise and sunset. It's a really beautiful experience in Winter. Well, I think that's all we have time for. So thank you Lillia for your assistance today. No problem. And thank all of you for coming here. This has been a fantastic event. Every time we do one of these episodes we get more and more people coming. We get several hundred people that are are listening. We get dozens and dozens of questions. So the more of you that are here, the more that you interact with us, the better this event is gonna be. And I'm hoping that this year we're gonna have some really incredible events lined up for you going forward. So thank you all and happy new year. Happy new year. Goodbye. See ya.