"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis video is brought to you by Squarespace from websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics Squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business today was one of those days so today is Monday and I spent most of the weekend kind of plotting through what I was going to be doing for my video today our current photo assignment right now since we're all inside was working with available light and I assigned to you guys to pick a window in your house your apartment and what you're going to do is photograph that area or throughout the day and so what you can do is look back on that and just get a feel for what the light is doing at least right now this time of the year so my plan was that I was going to do this with you guys today talk through it in a video and explain some of the things what you want to think about what you want to be looking for and I woke up this morning and this is what we got completely overcast I looked at weather underground it was not going to clear up today so it is what it is my first inclination was well that didn't go according to plan I mean there's nothing wrong with overcast weather you're gonna get a really nice window light either way so there's something that I could still do here but that's not what I assigned to you guys so where do I go with this well you just got to deal with what you're dealt fact I would even argue that unless you have a studio set up where all the lighting is completely controlled as a photographer you are going to just be dealing with the situation that you have and a good photographer should be able to do that right wrong this was kind of a disaster today because I don't know when you're making videos and you're doing photo assignments there is sort of a pressure on me as the teacher in that when I produce work and show it to you I need to show you how to do good work and today was one of those days where just everything I was doing was seriously lame in the assignment video we talked extensively about Joseph Sudak and so this was kind of in my mind and what I wanted to play off of if you haven't seen that video I will put a playlist in the show description you should check it out it was soo deck is amazing he's one of my big influences and I thought okay well what does he do when it's overcast surely there's something in here course there is so overcast with condensation on the windows kind of a cool abstract approach overcast in the rain could been shot through a window but these were the images that I was talking about in that last video were you able to play with light you're able to play with contrast you're able to play with reflection and objects this is what I had on my mind and the problem with having something preconceived in your mind especially when you're looking to kind of go in a direction and don't want to use the word copy the style of but I guess that's what was in my mind and what I was thinking is that you're going to fail at it because all of a sudden I'm dealt to curveball and I'm kind of trying to work with it anyway there's another artist that showed you guys Tom Burrell gorgeous still life photos of flowers hairs this is evenly lit this could have been done with an overcast day with minimal nice diffuse lighting so I pull some plants down some more lieve than others I do have this nice air plant that's actually very difficult to photograph and I'm not taking it from this approach I'm just kind of sticking the lens in there and shooting plants and flowers and trying to make something interesting and it just looks like a mess of weird macro stuff that no thought went into when you look at Tom Burrell's work like an amazing amount of thought and even selection he didn't just grab pears I'm sure he picked him out even same with the flowers these are all very deliberate and that is not what I was doing I was just kind of improvising in a situation that I was just dealt I don't like feeling frustrated and that's certainly the mood that this all put me in and I thought well you know what I'm doing this video for other photographers and there isn't anyone alive that hasn't felt this way at some point but I think from an intellectual standpoint I think it's important especially for me to pull back right now and start to say okay what are you doing what do you expect to get out of this today and what can you do to learn from it moving forward and that is the most important part because we all have days like this and they're actually pretty valuable if you can kind of pull back a little bit and learn something from it so the turning point for me actually came when I turned around and went back to doing bad ripoffs of sue decks work and so I wanted to set up a little still life so I grabbed a glass that I thought was fairly interesting and thought well it's fill it up with water and I guess somehow I thought well I'm rendering these in black and white so there's a lot I can do with contrast probably in post-production so I don't know I expected to put this in the windowsill I used a different window and I thought even though it's soft a few slight that this magic would happen then it didn't these are really flat images they're not very interesting they're just weird compositional studies it's like bad Sudak so one thing that dawned on me when I'm trying to do something interesting with a glass of water is that when you look at sue decks pictures his water is never flat like that there's always bubbles on the side of the glass and I thought wait a minute sue deck is probably using mineral water of some kind so I grabbed a topo Chico filled it up of course the side of the glass frosted over because it was cold the temperature wasn't right and I thought okay wait a minute there's another layer and I realized that that is a very minimal thing but my point is is that I'm not looking at sue decks work however I am just at a glance trying to create something that's an extension using that is the baseline and I don't really understand the baseline I think there's a lot more study that needs to go into this and that needs to happen for I can expect to do something even halfway interesting no matter what kind of like that I have coming in from the outside failure moment today well I didn't get any images that I'm particularly fond of in fact I think they're really pretty mediocre however the day isn't wasted if there's something that you can learn from all this and what I realized is that the next part of this assignment and yes I'm sort of making some of this up as I go because I'm actually putting it into practice and doing it with you guys but we need to have a step where we can really learn from the source material we're looking at and so I'm going to throw another wrench into the assignment this week and I think you guys are really gonna like it and it also like to address a couple comments and questions that people had but first I want to give a quick shout-out to our sponsor today who are the awesome folks over at squarespace.com present your photography using squarespace's modern professional portfolios the layouts are completely customizable and you can use squarespace's drag-and-drop based back-end system which is really easy to use to present your work the way that you want it seen Squarespace is an all-in-one platform for building beautiful websites easily claiming your domain or URL and creating a custom site that brings your ideas to life Squarespace is host to a number of other tools including ecommerce appointment scheduling and analytics so that you can grow your brand and your following so head over to Squarespace calm for a free trial and when you're ready to launch you can go to Squarespace calm slash AOP to save an additional 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain once again that is Squarespace com / AOP and I want to thank the folks at Squarespace for sponsoring another episode of the art of photography so first let's talk about the part that I'm going to add into this and this is a very important part of this photo assignment I know these are way more involved in the last time we did photo assignments and we're still working towards an end of where we have a concept like taking available light understanding what that lights doing and then executing an image the whole point is to make you better though right and this is a part that I neglected to put into this and I think it's something that we're really gonna learn from so what I want you to do is I want you to find one of sue decks images that you like that's something that speaks to you for whatever reason that is you don't even need to know just something that you dig and so we're going to take that and we're going to try and copy it as closely as possible now these images are all black and white was shot in the 50s but I think you can probably get a lot of this look on any equipment today probably arguably including a phone if that's what you're shooting on if you don't have the book or you don't want to buy the book or you don't have the money or whatever I would just look on the internet there is plenty of Sudak images available if you google Joseph sudoc still-life they're going to come up what I would do though is I would pick something there's a wide range of images that he's done some of them involve the outdoors and the indoors and obviously unless you're in that location it's going to be hard to get that exactly right so what I would do is pick something that has still life objects that are fairly readily available so things like the bread the glasses the eggs the flowers so on and so forth I would pick something that you know you can do and we're really gonna nail this in and see if we can copy it exactly now I'm not asking you to copy because I want you to clone a style well I do right now but it's bigger than that one thing that I say a lot and well by a lot I've been saying this for 12 years of making these videos but I think one thing that's kind of key to understanding art and understanding what your voice is and who you are what you're gonna say is understanding what's come before you understanding what's been done what's not been done where is your place in this whole line and so I think an exercise like this which I haven't done in a long time I've actually trying to copy something the point is is we're not trying to copy it and then pass it off or even post it on social media I want you to copy because I want you to learn from it and I want you to look for all these little details I'm gonna do this with you so like things like I mentioned earlier singing the bubbles in the water and all of a sudden we'll wait a minute that's a detail that yeah I saw it there but I didn't even think about it I just assumed that my water would do that - well it didn't so we're gonna have to dig a little bit deeper and there's a baseline that we're gonna be able to establish understanding these things that's going to give us more power moving forward when all of a sudden we're trying to add our own voice into this get what I'm saying so that is the first part so those of you who have left me comments saying well wait a minute it's overcast weather here well I got a taste of that today too so I know exactly where you're coming from I still want you to be able to understand what light is doing and if you live in a part of the world where it's just gonna be cloudy for the next month and that's all there is to it then that's what you're dealing with I wouldn't go to the trouble to photograph what the light is doing every hour of the day coming through a window I've also seen people leave comments saying that they started to do this and it really doesn't change dramatically hour by hour that's fine now you know that this is what I want you to do is this is an exercise of discoveries what it is we're not really making art yet we're just discovering what things are doing I would also because people have asked you know do you want to capture from different angles do you want to get in close with objects and do a mix of things I would have a camera that's just shooting the window and the environment so you know what it's doing overall and maybe you go in once an hour once every two hours with a second camera or pull that one off the tripod and just try some things with still life in contrast and see what shadows do and see what it is there that you could possibly work with or things that you don't want to work with because once we get an idea in mind and we're trying to build off of that baseline understanding what light is gonna do is gonna save you a lot of time you're not gonna just go set up and say why isn't this working you're gonna say well I want to do something dramatic with shadows so I need to do it at this time of day or I want to do something that is more diffused so I can't do it midday I need to wait till the evening hours when the sun's starting to go down it was so and so forth so I know this is a lot somebody also actually not somebody several people asked do I just do one exposure no expose for the scene you don't want to come back with blown out images and you can't tell what's going on you know that it's bright so you're gonna adjust your exposure as you go you're gonna look at the differences in what that light is doing because it will do different things you want it exposed correctly in order to do that so I hope that helps another thing that is particularly important especially for those of you that are using a smartphone to do these assignments is being able to understand how to control your exposure and typically this is easily done by using something called exposure compensation so for instance if you're on an iPhone there is no manual mode of getting an image so you're going to have to use something like exposure compensation so on the iPhone it's pretty easy if you just happen the picture for a selective focus point it's going to have this little thing on the side a little slider and you simply tap and slide that up or down depending on whether you want a brighter exposure or a darker exposure this is something that is very handy because what will happen especially on a phone is that the phone is just analyzing the scene right and so it's looking for the darkest areas of the picture and the brightest areas of the picture and it's doing some fancy algorithm work to average those together and what it's going to do is just present what it is going to be the best exposure and it's not always correct I've noticed in particular when I had that air plant that I was shooting that it has a little bit of a sheen to it and it tends to blow out and overexpose it's just something that happens so being able to compensate for that is really important if you're not using an iPhone if you're using Android all the phones are gonna be slightly different but you need to figure out what how it's gonna work with yours most phones will work in the same way when you touch a selection point in the picture it will give you a little slider and so you can slide that up and down some of them give you stop readings of how much it's exposing or under or over it just depends on the phone that you're using so for instance on a Google pixel 3 which is a little bit older it's pretty straightforward and how it does this however the new Samsung S 20 altra is a little strange and how it does it so what it does in this case is you tap a once and it becomes a focused tracking and gives you a little box for that if you tap and hold that's when you're gonna get your exposure compensation so you need to understand how to do that I'm constantly doing that particularly on samsung phones I think that Samsung will give you a really good picture in the end however it does tend to over expose things a second thing I would do if you were on an Android device is turn off any HDR components or any scene optimization that might be in there so going to your camera settings and turn all that off you don't want it and just to show you the difference window light can be really cool when you're trying to create a moody portrait so I did this with the rear facing camera just in selfie mode here what the camera wants to do on its own is kind of do this HDR thing that doesn't do skin tones right and it's just kind of weird looking however if you use exposure compensation and all I did was tap on my face and then drag that little slider down to make it darker you can do something that's much more moody and much more interesting and the same goes for those of you who are using a proper camera I shot this on a Sony a9 and it way overexposed and part of the deal is my cat has really white fur this is judy and so with this image even after taking it into black and white it's still and dot the mood that I wanted to get so what I did is I used and I actually use manual mode but you could use the exposure compensation doubt to bring this down about a stop and a third stop in two thirds somewhere in there and you get a much more mood image to work with so this is something that's very key if your exposures not right it's going to become more difficult as you go but you're gonna be very surprised and I'm going to do some phone images in all this - you're gonna be surprised of what you can actually accomplish just using a phone so did I completely fail with this attempt today well I didn't get what I was after but I also wouldn't call it a failure because as long as you're learning from and at least giving your audience way more work to do with another monkey wrench in the assignment then you've probably succeeded on some level so if you have any questions drop them in the comments below we're gonna continue to work on this I'm gonna come back with some stuff this week I'll catch you guys in the next video until then laterthis video is brought to you by Squarespace from websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics Squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business today was one of those days so today is Monday and I spent most of the weekend kind of plotting through what I was going to be doing for my video today our current photo assignment right now since we're all inside was working with available light and I assigned to you guys to pick a window in your house your apartment and what you're going to do is photograph that area or throughout the day and so what you can do is look back on that and just get a feel for what the light is doing at least right now this time of the year so my plan was that I was going to do this with you guys today talk through it in a video and explain some of the things what you want to think about what you want to be looking for and I woke up this morning and this is what we got completely overcast I looked at weather underground it was not going to clear up today so it is what it is my first inclination was well that didn't go according to plan I mean there's nothing wrong with overcast weather you're gonna get a really nice window light either way so there's something that I could still do here but that's not what I assigned to you guys so where do I go with this well you just got to deal with what you're dealt fact I would even argue that unless you have a studio set up where all the lighting is completely controlled as a photographer you are going to just be dealing with the situation that you have and a good photographer should be able to do that right wrong this was kind of a disaster today because I don't know when you're making videos and you're doing photo assignments there is sort of a pressure on me as the teacher in that when I produce work and show it to you I need to show you how to do good work and today was one of those days where just everything I was doing was seriously lame in the assignment video we talked extensively about Joseph Sudak and so this was kind of in my mind and what I wanted to play off of if you haven't seen that video I will put a playlist in the show description you should check it out it was soo deck is amazing he's one of my big influences and I thought okay well what does he do when it's overcast surely there's something in here course there is so overcast with condensation on the windows kind of a cool abstract approach overcast in the rain could been shot through a window but these were the images that I was talking about in that last video were you able to play with light you're able to play with contrast you're able to play with reflection and objects this is what I had on my mind and the problem with having something preconceived in your mind especially when you're looking to kind of go in a direction and don't want to use the word copy the style of but I guess that's what was in my mind and what I was thinking is that you're going to fail at it because all of a sudden I'm dealt to curveball and I'm kind of trying to work with it anyway there's another artist that showed you guys Tom Burrell gorgeous still life photos of flowers hairs this is evenly lit this could have been done with an overcast day with minimal nice diffuse lighting so I pull some plants down some more lieve than others I do have this nice air plant that's actually very difficult to photograph and I'm not taking it from this approach I'm just kind of sticking the lens in there and shooting plants and flowers and trying to make something interesting and it just looks like a mess of weird macro stuff that no thought went into when you look at Tom Burrell's work like an amazing amount of thought and even selection he didn't just grab pears I'm sure he picked him out even same with the flowers these are all very deliberate and that is not what I was doing I was just kind of improvising in a situation that I was just dealt I don't like feeling frustrated and that's certainly the mood that this all put me in and I thought well you know what I'm doing this video for other photographers and there isn't anyone alive that hasn't felt this way at some point but I think from an intellectual standpoint I think it's important especially for me to pull back right now and start to say okay what are you doing what do you expect to get out of this today and what can you do to learn from it moving forward and that is the most important part because we all have days like this and they're actually pretty valuable if you can kind of pull back a little bit and learn something from it so the turning point for me actually came when I turned around and went back to doing bad ripoffs of sue decks work and so I wanted to set up a little still life so I grabbed a glass that I thought was fairly interesting and thought well it's fill it up with water and I guess somehow I thought well I'm rendering these in black and white so there's a lot I can do with contrast probably in post-production so I don't know I expected to put this in the windowsill I used a different window and I thought even though it's soft a few slight that this magic would happen then it didn't these are really flat images they're not very interesting they're just weird compositional studies it's like bad Sudak so one thing that dawned on me when I'm trying to do something interesting with a glass of water is that when you look at sue decks pictures his water is never flat like that there's always bubbles on the side of the glass and I thought wait a minute sue deck is probably using mineral water of some kind so I grabbed a topo Chico filled it up of course the side of the glass frosted over because it was cold the temperature wasn't right and I thought okay wait a minute there's another layer and I realized that that is a very minimal thing but my point is is that I'm not looking at sue decks work however I am just at a glance trying to create something that's an extension using that is the baseline and I don't really understand the baseline I think there's a lot more study that needs to go into this and that needs to happen for I can expect to do something even halfway interesting no matter what kind of like that I have coming in from the outside failure moment today well I didn't get any images that I'm particularly fond of in fact I think they're really pretty mediocre however the day isn't wasted if there's something that you can learn from all this and what I realized is that the next part of this assignment and yes I'm sort of making some of this up as I go because I'm actually putting it into practice and doing it with you guys but we need to have a step where we can really learn from the source material we're looking at and so I'm going to throw another wrench into the assignment this week and I think you guys are really gonna like it and it also like to address a couple comments and questions that people had but first I want to give a quick shout-out to our sponsor today who are the awesome folks over at squarespace.com present your photography using squarespace's modern professional portfolios the layouts are completely customizable and you can use squarespace's drag-and-drop based back-end system which is really easy to use to present your work the way that you want it seen Squarespace is an all-in-one platform for building beautiful websites easily claiming your domain or URL and creating a custom site that brings your ideas to life Squarespace is host to a number of other tools including ecommerce appointment scheduling and analytics so that you can grow your brand and your following so head over to Squarespace calm for a free trial and when you're ready to launch you can go to Squarespace calm slash AOP to save an additional 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain once again that is Squarespace com / AOP and I want to thank the folks at Squarespace for sponsoring another episode of the art of photography so first let's talk about the part that I'm going to add into this and this is a very important part of this photo assignment I know these are way more involved in the last time we did photo assignments and we're still working towards an end of where we have a concept like taking available light understanding what that lights doing and then executing an image the whole point is to make you better though right and this is a part that I neglected to put into this and I think it's something that we're really gonna learn from so what I want you to do is I want you to find one of sue decks images that you like that's something that speaks to you for whatever reason that is you don't even need to know just something that you dig and so we're going to take that and we're going to try and copy it as closely as possible now these images are all black and white was shot in the 50s but I think you can probably get a lot of this look on any equipment today probably arguably including a phone if that's what you're shooting on if you don't have the book or you don't want to buy the book or you don't have the money or whatever I would just look on the internet there is plenty of Sudak images available if you google Joseph sudoc still-life they're going to come up what I would do though is I would pick something there's a wide range of images that he's done some of them involve the outdoors and the indoors and obviously unless you're in that location it's going to be hard to get that exactly right so what I would do is pick something that has still life objects that are fairly readily available so things like the bread the glasses the eggs the flowers so on and so forth I would pick something that you know you can do and we're really gonna nail this in and see if we can copy it exactly now I'm not asking you to copy because I want you to clone a style well I do right now but it's bigger than that one thing that I say a lot and well by a lot I've been saying this for 12 years of making these videos but I think one thing that's kind of key to understanding art and understanding what your voice is and who you are what you're gonna say is understanding what's come before you understanding what's been done what's not been done where is your place in this whole line and so I think an exercise like this which I haven't done in a long time I've actually trying to copy something the point is is we're not trying to copy it and then pass it off or even post it on social media I want you to copy because I want you to learn from it and I want you to look for all these little details I'm gonna do this with you so like things like I mentioned earlier singing the bubbles in the water and all of a sudden we'll wait a minute that's a detail that yeah I saw it there but I didn't even think about it I just assumed that my water would do that - well it didn't so we're gonna have to dig a little bit deeper and there's a baseline that we're gonna be able to establish understanding these things that's going to give us more power moving forward when all of a sudden we're trying to add our own voice into this get what I'm saying so that is the first part so those of you who have left me comments saying well wait a minute it's overcast weather here well I got a taste of that today too so I know exactly where you're coming from I still want you to be able to understand what light is doing and if you live in a part of the world where it's just gonna be cloudy for the next month and that's all there is to it then that's what you're dealing with I wouldn't go to the trouble to photograph what the light is doing every hour of the day coming through a window I've also seen people leave comments saying that they started to do this and it really doesn't change dramatically hour by hour that's fine now you know that this is what I want you to do is this is an exercise of discoveries what it is we're not really making art yet we're just discovering what things are doing I would also because people have asked you know do you want to capture from different angles do you want to get in close with objects and do a mix of things I would have a camera that's just shooting the window and the environment so you know what it's doing overall and maybe you go in once an hour once every two hours with a second camera or pull that one off the tripod and just try some things with still life in contrast and see what shadows do and see what it is there that you could possibly work with or things that you don't want to work with because once we get an idea in mind and we're trying to build off of that baseline understanding what light is gonna do is gonna save you a lot of time you're not gonna just go set up and say why isn't this working you're gonna say well I want to do something dramatic with shadows so I need to do it at this time of day or I want to do something that is more diffused so I can't do it midday I need to wait till the evening hours when the sun's starting to go down it was so and so forth so I know this is a lot somebody also actually not somebody several people asked do I just do one exposure no expose for the scene you don't want to come back with blown out images and you can't tell what's going on you know that it's bright so you're gonna adjust your exposure as you go you're gonna look at the differences in what that light is doing because it will do different things you want it exposed correctly in order to do that so I hope that helps another thing that is particularly important especially for those of you that are using a smartphone to do these assignments is being able to understand how to control your exposure and typically this is easily done by using something called exposure compensation so for instance if you're on an iPhone there is no manual mode of getting an image so you're going to have to use something like exposure compensation so on the iPhone it's pretty easy if you just happen the picture for a selective focus point it's going to have this little thing on the side a little slider and you simply tap and slide that up or down depending on whether you want a brighter exposure or a darker exposure this is something that is very handy because what will happen especially on a phone is that the phone is just analyzing the scene right and so it's looking for the darkest areas of the picture and the brightest areas of the picture and it's doing some fancy algorithm work to average those together and what it's going to do is just present what it is going to be the best exposure and it's not always correct I've noticed in particular when I had that air plant that I was shooting that it has a little bit of a sheen to it and it tends to blow out and overexpose it's just something that happens so being able to compensate for that is really important if you're not using an iPhone if you're using Android all the phones are gonna be slightly different but you need to figure out what how it's gonna work with yours most phones will work in the same way when you touch a selection point in the picture it will give you a little slider and so you can slide that up and down some of them give you stop readings of how much it's exposing or under or over it just depends on the phone that you're using so for instance on a Google pixel 3 which is a little bit older it's pretty straightforward and how it does this however the new Samsung S 20 altra is a little strange and how it does it so what it does in this case is you tap a once and it becomes a focused tracking and gives you a little box for that if you tap and hold that's when you're gonna get your exposure compensation so you need to understand how to do that I'm constantly doing that particularly on samsung phones I think that Samsung will give you a really good picture in the end however it does tend to over expose things a second thing I would do if you were on an Android device is turn off any HDR components or any scene optimization that might be in there so going to your camera settings and turn all that off you don't want it and just to show you the difference window light can be really cool when you're trying to create a moody portrait so I did this with the rear facing camera just in selfie mode here what the camera wants to do on its own is kind of do this HDR thing that doesn't do skin tones right and it's just kind of weird looking however if you use exposure compensation and all I did was tap on my face and then drag that little slider down to make it darker you can do something that's much more moody and much more interesting and the same goes for those of you who are using a proper camera I shot this on a Sony a9 and it way overexposed and part of the deal is my cat has really white fur this is judy and so with this image even after taking it into black and white it's still and dot the mood that I wanted to get so what I did is I used and I actually use manual mode but you could use the exposure compensation doubt to bring this down about a stop and a third stop in two thirds somewhere in there and you get a much more mood image to work with so this is something that's very key if your exposures not right it's going to become more difficult as you go but you're gonna be very surprised and I'm going to do some phone images in all this - you're gonna be surprised of what you can actually accomplish just using a phone so did I completely fail with this attempt today well I didn't get what I was after but I also wouldn't call it a failure because as long as you're learning from and at least giving your audience way more work to do with another monkey wrench in the assignment then you've probably succeeded on some level so if you have any questions drop them in the comments below we're gonna continue to work on this I'm gonna come back with some stuff this week I'll catch you guys in the next video until then later\n"