The Architectural Inspiration and Practice Run

I had this architectural thing in mind and I promised to come back and create a behind-the-scenes video when I actually get it done, but today the weather did not happen as planned. I had skies like this, and I really needed them for my project, so if you're gonna do the time stretch thing with a long exposure, you need enough clouds that are gonna give you that kind of texture. But instead of going downtown and trying to set everything up, I decided to do a little practice run here, and since I was going to record this anyway, I thought I'd just do that for you guys.

The first image is one I took before I put any filters on the camera, using it as a point of reference. As you can see, it looks decent, but as soon as I put the circular polarizer on and dialed it in, I got this, and this is much different. It's much more vibrant, with better contrast, and that's what I'm going for. What's interesting here is how many of those little reflections and details we don't notice because they're actually just changing the color of what we see, not that the scene itself has changed.

I've been working on this project, and it's really interesting to see how different the same scene can look with a circular polarizer. The trees in front of me are actually more vibrant than I expected, even though one of them is dying. This is kind of where we start with the image, and it's fascinating to see how much detail and texture can come out when using the right filter.

Next, I put a neutral density filter on, figuring out how I could get about 30 seconds of motion so that I could capture some vibrancy in the sky. This was a bit tricky because the clouds are really high up, and they're not moving fast enough to create a lot of movement. But I wanted to experiment with different times and see what I got. Typically, when shooting long exposures, you want to find the right balance between motion and stillness to get that perfect shot.

I played around with the exposure time, trying different things until I found something that worked for me. Across the board, I used a similar technique, experimenting with different settings to capture the vibrancy in the sky. Sometimes, patience is key when shooting long exposures; you have to be willing to wait and adjust as needed.

One of the other techniques I wanted to show off was how to enhance colors and get bold tones. By adding more contrast, I can bring out specific elements in the image, like the oranges and blues in this scene. This is particularly useful when shooting black and white; by adjusting the tone levels, you can create a really dramatic look that pops.

I have to give a shoutout to my friend Rod, who makes those circular polarizers. He doesn't sponsor me or anything – I just use them because they're high-quality and work well for what I need. If you want one of his filters, you can check out the link below. There's an offer code "AOP" that'll give you 15% off any purchase in the store.

That's all for today's video – I should have known better than to try to plan a shoot around a specific weather forecast. But we will get there eventually, and I promise to create a follow-up video once the skies are ready. If you guys have any questions about filters or shooting techniques, please drop me a comment below.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: ensome days shots were not meant to be and I've had this shot that I've had in mind for a long time and involves some architecture stuff with some moving clouds that are blurring out and I was going to do behind the scenes that was my video plan for today and it didn't work I thought it was going to have cloud cover we had tremendous cloud cover this morning and I thought it would be really workable once it started to break up and it just kind of evaporated all at once it's a little wispy now so unfortunately that was not meant to be but I thought I would take him home and at least show you some of the setup this is another loaner camera that I've got this is the nikon z7 which is the higher megapixel sister to the z6 and i'm using the wine country camera system on here and i've talked about this before when I've talked about neutral density filters circular polarizer so on and so forth I'm going to show you the workflow that goes around this system and how I have it set up right now you're seeing the first filter that's on there which is a circular polarizer on the back you're going to see there is a little knob here and I can rotate that and it's going to turn the filter and what this does is this changes the angle of light that it's filtering out so you can get this exactly how you want it and so what I'm gonna do here is I'm going to go ahead and turn on the 4k video in the camera here so you can see and as I go through and I turn this you're going to see that the sky gets darker the colors start to come out in these leaves in this dead tree that we've got it is fall and that's one of the things that you're probably going to notice the most is the saturation increases and what's really interesting and a lot of people don't realize that they're seeing this if I take a shot on this camera without the circular polarizer and I didn't want a second ago it looks like this and the camera does a pretty good job of rendering color but those leaves are reflecting some light so when you use the circular polarizer you're able to filter that out and you're also going to see some effect in the sky as it gets darker where the Sun is hitting water particles that are in the air anyway the whole point is that you get a really nice contrast you look now I like to tell this in visually to taste because it doesn't always look good if you take it too far and that's one thing that can happen because things can start to look a little too unrealistic so you really need to dial this in visually so that is the circular polarizer that it's the first part the second part I'm going to do is I'm going to use a neutral density filter because I want to use a very slow exposure I want my clouds to move I want to create some texture in the sky and so I'm going to use a 10 stop neutral density filter which looks like this and this is going to go into the back slot on the wine country system and it lines up with this notch here and this is actually very essential because once we build filters into this if you need to recheck your focus or even refocus what you can do is just pull up that neutral density filter and drop it back into place I'll show you that in a second so the neutral density filter doesn't have any visual impact necessarily other than knocking back light which is going to allow me to use a slower shutter speed and here's the other thing basically anything that moves is going to blur and so because I have a tree in frame here you're going to see that blur these are just test shots for the example here but this is why I want to do architecture to get my clouds and not trees because if wind is blowing things will move second thing I'm going to add here actually it's the third filter we've got the circular polarizer the neutral density now I'm going to add a graduated filter which basically is a graduated neutral density filter this is a six nd soft filter and basically what this is going to do is it's going to give us a gradient to our sky and it's really cool because I'm gonna drop this into the next slot on the wine country system and this is really difficult to do with one hand but you're gonna see as I put in the graduated filter there is a lock down here and there's also a catch to keep it from falling through if you accidentally do that so if I release the lock it's going to go in and basically what I'm going to do is adjust this to taste and I'll show you what this looks like and basically I don't want this effect to be too strong there are hard edged graduated filters too if you are working with a really dark horizon where like you know you have a bright sky and then the landscape below is really dark I'm not doing that in this situation I just want a soft graduation you can certainly do this in post but again it's something I like to do in camera and get it right like I want it to look the first time but that's essentially what we're going to do with the graduated filter once we have that into place we're really good to go but if for some reason I want to recheck my focus in there number reasons why it can be really dark depending on how many neutral density filters you have stacked on here so if I want to pull that out I can just grab here pull up the neutral density filter filter recheck my focus and then put it back down and I'm ready to go so we're gonna get some test shots and take those into Lightroom in a second but the other thing that I want to show you that is really cool is this 8k internal time lapse feature that you have on the z7 if we go into the menus here you're going to see an option down here for laughs movies sorry about the reflection I know it's weird I'm gonna go ahead and select that and it allows me to select an interval of shooting and what's really cool is as I do this it tells me what my final clip is going to be and unfortunately it's a little bit limited in here you would have to do multiple Clips I'll show you if you go back here interval shooting is going to be three seconds and then my shooting time I've set to an hour of shooting time I'm going to do this in a little bit but anyway this gives me 19 seconds of video it is a cool feature that is built into this camera and this one does 8k time lapses it's the z7 it has the megapixels to do it the c6 does time lapses as well but they are limited to 4k and the reason why is it just doesn't have enough megapixels it loses some on the edges so it would have to upscale slightly but I'm gonna do an 8k time-lapse which is completely ridiculous I really wanted to get that shot today so next time I have the perfect clouds will make that video there is one thing that is absolutely essential to landscape photography and that is patience that 8k time-lapse an 8k time-lapse not that that's a great one it's just like 20 seconds of footage of some skies that wasn't really wild about to begin with but I've made those and you can make them too you just shoot a bunch of RAW files as long as you have a way of doing either an inflammatory or internally on the camera but basically you record a bunch of these than you have to go into After Effects and you build a movie like that this just does it all on the fly and it's pretty amazing the other cool thing is it just shuts the camera down except for the basic function of taking the picture at my interval of three seconds and it didn't even eat that much of the battery it's pretty impressive anyway I'm gonna to play with that a little more but let's look at the images that was talking about in Lightroom so you can see what we were working with this is actually what I was going for today is this kind of a dramatic sky and I have this architectural thing in mind and I promise I'll come back and I'll do a behind-the-scenes video when I actually get it it's just did the weather did not happen today I had skies like this and I really needed skies like this so if you're gonna do the time stretch thing with a long exposure you need enough clouds that are gonna give you that kind of texture but you can experiment and that's kind of what I decided to do today rather than to go downtown and try and set everything up just decide to do little practice run here and then I thought well I was going to record this anyway so I'll just do that for you guys this first image is I've one I took before I put any filters on the camera and use this as a point of reference and as you can see it looks decent but as soon as I put the circular polarizer on and I dial it in you get this and this is much different it's much more vibrant the contrast is way better and this is what I'm going for and this is kind of where we start with the image and it's really interesting how many of those little reflections and stuff we don't notice because it's actually just changing the color of what it is that we're seeing not that this is a great scene but there is color in those trees even though one of them is dying but I digress this is what we're going for and then you know basically what I'm doing is I'm putting a neutral density filter on there and I figured out how I could get about 30 seconds of motions so we're gonna get some vibrancy in the sky you could do a couple things you can be patient with this you can try some different times these clouds are really high and they're not moving that fast and so that's why this was a little bit difficult and I really wanted to just play with a little bit to see what I got but that's kind of what I did across the board here and I want to show you one other - when you can really bring out that vibrancy and get some really bold colors this will actually help when you go to black and white if that's what you want to do in the image and so this is kind of straight up but it has kind of a high contrast almost infrared kind of look to it typically infrared you're shooting green trees and infrared you're seeing light that is transferred from heat off of objects so for instance tree leaves because they're living object will go white because they just they will admit a different kind of light and this is not an infrared camera obviously but you can get that look and basically what I've done here because I have such a strong orange and those trees and I have a such a strong blue in the sky is I can go over to my black and white mix over here and I can just bring the sky down or bring the Blues down and bring the oranges up and you can get a really dramatic look with this so a circular polarizer is a very handy thing to have it will help you immensely outdoors if you're looking for just clarity and contrast with various colors I think they're very highly recommended for something like that I use them all the time you know you don't have to have a big filter system like this necessarily you can use just a small one on your lens but the circular polarizer type is my preference because I can really dial it in but anyway super quick video today I just wanted to talk a little bit through the process of how I use filters and the filter system that I've got which is the wine country by the way rod is a really good friend of mine he makes those he doesn't sponsor these I just use them and I give him shoutouts cuz he's a nice guy if you want one you can check out the link below and there's a code if you use offer code AOP it'll save you 15% on anything in the store so use it and use it as much as you want and thanks to rod for making that available to people who watch this channel so that's all I've got guys I should have known better than to try to plan doing a video around a very specific shoot that I wanted to get that takes place outdoors because you don't know what your weather's gonna do or your lights gonna do or your cloud cover and I just didn't have a align right today I've been watching the weather website been on Weather Underground and I've been checking it out I thought it was gonna be here anyway we will get it eventually I will have my right clouds and I will promise to able do a video when we get to that if you guys have any questions about filters or shooting or anything we've talked about please drop me a comment below I will see you guys in the next video until then latersome days shots were not meant to be and I've had this shot that I've had in mind for a long time and involves some architecture stuff with some moving clouds that are blurring out and I was going to do behind the scenes that was my video plan for today and it didn't work I thought it was going to have cloud cover we had tremendous cloud cover this morning and I thought it would be really workable once it started to break up and it just kind of evaporated all at once it's a little wispy now so unfortunately that was not meant to be but I thought I would take him home and at least show you some of the setup this is another loaner camera that I've got this is the nikon z7 which is the higher megapixel sister to the z6 and i'm using the wine country camera system on here and i've talked about this before when I've talked about neutral density filters circular polarizer so on and so forth I'm going to show you the workflow that goes around this system and how I have it set up right now you're seeing the first filter that's on there which is a circular polarizer on the back you're going to see there is a little knob here and I can rotate that and it's going to turn the filter and what this does is this changes the angle of light that it's filtering out so you can get this exactly how you want it and so what I'm gonna do here is I'm going to go ahead and turn on the 4k video in the camera here so you can see and as I go through and I turn this you're going to see that the sky gets darker the colors start to come out in these leaves in this dead tree that we've got it is fall and that's one of the things that you're probably going to notice the most is the saturation increases and what's really interesting and a lot of people don't realize that they're seeing this if I take a shot on this camera without the circular polarizer and I didn't want a second ago it looks like this and the camera does a pretty good job of rendering color but those leaves are reflecting some light so when you use the circular polarizer you're able to filter that out and you're also going to see some effect in the sky as it gets darker where the Sun is hitting water particles that are in the air anyway the whole point is that you get a really nice contrast you look now I like to tell this in visually to taste because it doesn't always look good if you take it too far and that's one thing that can happen because things can start to look a little too unrealistic so you really need to dial this in visually so that is the circular polarizer that it's the first part the second part I'm going to do is I'm going to use a neutral density filter because I want to use a very slow exposure I want my clouds to move I want to create some texture in the sky and so I'm going to use a 10 stop neutral density filter which looks like this and this is going to go into the back slot on the wine country system and it lines up with this notch here and this is actually very essential because once we build filters into this if you need to recheck your focus or even refocus what you can do is just pull up that neutral density filter and drop it back into place I'll show you that in a second so the neutral density filter doesn't have any visual impact necessarily other than knocking back light which is going to allow me to use a slower shutter speed and here's the other thing basically anything that moves is going to blur and so because I have a tree in frame here you're going to see that blur these are just test shots for the example here but this is why I want to do architecture to get my clouds and not trees because if wind is blowing things will move second thing I'm going to add here actually it's the third filter we've got the circular polarizer the neutral density now I'm going to add a graduated filter which basically is a graduated neutral density filter this is a six nd soft filter and basically what this is going to do is it's going to give us a gradient to our sky and it's really cool because I'm gonna drop this into the next slot on the wine country system and this is really difficult to do with one hand but you're gonna see as I put in the graduated filter there is a lock down here and there's also a catch to keep it from falling through if you accidentally do that so if I release the lock it's going to go in and basically what I'm going to do is adjust this to taste and I'll show you what this looks like and basically I don't want this effect to be too strong there are hard edged graduated filters too if you are working with a really dark horizon where like you know you have a bright sky and then the landscape below is really dark I'm not doing that in this situation I just want a soft graduation you can certainly do this in post but again it's something I like to do in camera and get it right like I want it to look the first time but that's essentially what we're going to do with the graduated filter once we have that into place we're really good to go but if for some reason I want to recheck my focus in there number reasons why it can be really dark depending on how many neutral density filters you have stacked on here so if I want to pull that out I can just grab here pull up the neutral density filter filter recheck my focus and then put it back down and I'm ready to go so we're gonna get some test shots and take those into Lightroom in a second but the other thing that I want to show you that is really cool is this 8k internal time lapse feature that you have on the z7 if we go into the menus here you're going to see an option down here for laughs movies sorry about the reflection I know it's weird I'm gonna go ahead and select that and it allows me to select an interval of shooting and what's really cool is as I do this it tells me what my final clip is going to be and unfortunately it's a little bit limited in here you would have to do multiple Clips I'll show you if you go back here interval shooting is going to be three seconds and then my shooting time I've set to an hour of shooting time I'm going to do this in a little bit but anyway this gives me 19 seconds of video it is a cool feature that is built into this camera and this one does 8k time lapses it's the z7 it has the megapixels to do it the c6 does time lapses as well but they are limited to 4k and the reason why is it just doesn't have enough megapixels it loses some on the edges so it would have to upscale slightly but I'm gonna do an 8k time-lapse which is completely ridiculous I really wanted to get that shot today so next time I have the perfect clouds will make that video there is one thing that is absolutely essential to landscape photography and that is patience that 8k time-lapse an 8k time-lapse not that that's a great one it's just like 20 seconds of footage of some skies that wasn't really wild about to begin with but I've made those and you can make them too you just shoot a bunch of RAW files as long as you have a way of doing either an inflammatory or internally on the camera but basically you record a bunch of these than you have to go into After Effects and you build a movie like that this just does it all on the fly and it's pretty amazing the other cool thing is it just shuts the camera down except for the basic function of taking the picture at my interval of three seconds and it didn't even eat that much of the battery it's pretty impressive anyway I'm gonna to play with that a little more but let's look at the images that was talking about in Lightroom so you can see what we were working with this is actually what I was going for today is this kind of a dramatic sky and I have this architectural thing in mind and I promise I'll come back and I'll do a behind-the-scenes video when I actually get it it's just did the weather did not happen today I had skies like this and I really needed skies like this so if you're gonna do the time stretch thing with a long exposure you need enough clouds that are gonna give you that kind of texture but you can experiment and that's kind of what I decided to do today rather than to go downtown and try and set everything up just decide to do little practice run here and then I thought well I was going to record this anyway so I'll just do that for you guys this first image is I've one I took before I put any filters on the camera and use this as a point of reference and as you can see it looks decent but as soon as I put the circular polarizer on and I dial it in you get this and this is much different it's much more vibrant the contrast is way better and this is what I'm going for and this is kind of where we start with the image and it's really interesting how many of those little reflections and stuff we don't notice because it's actually just changing the color of what it is that we're seeing not that this is a great scene but there is color in those trees even though one of them is dying but I digress this is what we're going for and then you know basically what I'm doing is I'm putting a neutral density filter on there and I figured out how I could get about 30 seconds of motions so we're gonna get some vibrancy in the sky you could do a couple things you can be patient with this you can try some different times these clouds are really high and they're not moving that fast and so that's why this was a little bit difficult and I really wanted to just play with a little bit to see what I got but that's kind of what I did across the board here and I want to show you one other - when you can really bring out that vibrancy and get some really bold colors this will actually help when you go to black and white if that's what you want to do in the image and so this is kind of straight up but it has kind of a high contrast almost infrared kind of look to it typically infrared you're shooting green trees and infrared you're seeing light that is transferred from heat off of objects so for instance tree leaves because they're living object will go white because they just they will admit a different kind of light and this is not an infrared camera obviously but you can get that look and basically what I've done here because I have such a strong orange and those trees and I have a such a strong blue in the sky is I can go over to my black and white mix over here and I can just bring the sky down or bring the Blues down and bring the oranges up and you can get a really dramatic look with this so a circular polarizer is a very handy thing to have it will help you immensely outdoors if you're looking for just clarity and contrast with various colors I think they're very highly recommended for something like that I use them all the time you know you don't have to have a big filter system like this necessarily you can use just a small one on your lens but the circular polarizer type is my preference because I can really dial it in but anyway super quick video today I just wanted to talk a little bit through the process of how I use filters and the filter system that I've got which is the wine country by the way rod is a really good friend of mine he makes those he doesn't sponsor these I just use them and I give him shoutouts cuz he's a nice guy if you want one you can check out the link below and there's a code if you use offer code AOP it'll save you 15% on anything in the store so use it and use it as much as you want and thanks to rod for making that available to people who watch this channel so that's all I've got guys I should have known better than to try to plan doing a video around a very specific shoot that I wanted to get that takes place outdoors because you don't know what your weather's gonna do or your lights gonna do or your cloud cover and I just didn't have a align right today I've been watching the weather website been on Weather Underground and I've been checking it out I thought it was gonna be here anyway we will get it eventually I will have my right clouds and I will promise to able do a video when we get to that if you guys have any questions about filters or shooting or anything we've talked about please drop me a comment below I will see you guys in the next video until then later\n"