Hello my excellent friends! It’s Josh Cripps here. Now I like many of you use the Adobe Suite to edit my photos. And in particular, I spend a lot of time in Lightroom. And today I want to share with you four fantastic features that I love about the program that I think you should be using. So let’s go ahead and dive right in. 

Keywords

One of the reasons that I like Lightroom so much is not just because it’s a powerful, raw editor, but also because it has fantastic organizational capabilities. And one of the best parts of those organizational capabilities is wording. So if you’re not utilizing keywording, you’re missing out on an amazing way to keep track of your images and find them quickly when you need to. Now, most of the time I do my keywording when I import photos, I tend to import in small batches. So it’s really easy to apply the same keywords to a bunch of photos at once, but you can always do keywording at any time, simply by clicking on a photo or a batch of photos, and then putting in the keywords that you want over here in this keyword area. Now, me personally, the way that I like to do my keywording is I try to include where the photo was taken what’s in the photo, and then anything unique about the photo.

Like if it’s an abstract photo or a long exposure, something like that. So you can see that this photo here from the Alabama Hills I’ve, keyworded it not only with where it is, it’s in California, the Sierra Nevada, and the Alabama Hills, but also what’s in the photo. There’s a lenticular cloud, a specific kind called a Sierra wave cloud and it’s happening at sunset. And so those are the types of things that I typically include in my keywords. You’ll notice that I didn’t put rocks or Rocky formations or pinnacles because in my mind, the Alabama Hills is synonymous with that stuff. And so I, if I’m ever going to be looking for a photo of rocks in the Alabama Hills, it’s kind of a given that searching for Alabama Hills is going to lead to these kinds of photos. Now, if I was shooting, say a big arch, I would put arch in the keywords as well.

Okay. So how does this help me other than being an extraordinarily tedious process and trust me, I know what it is because if you’re out shooting for a long time and you’ve got two weeks of photos to imports and you’ve got to write separate keyword sets for 2000 individual images, it is a pain in the. I realize that, but it’s well worth doing. And the reason is in the future, it makes it so much easier to find any photo that you could ever want to find. So if you’re trying to illustrate something for YouTube, like I do, or if a client asks you for a photo, or if you’re just scratching your head one day going, whatever happened to that time, I shot the Wanaka tree at sunrise and did long exposures there. Well guess what, if you have a robust keywording system, you can really easily find those kinds of photos.

So let me show you an example of exactly how that would work. I’m putting together a video right now about four tips for shooting the full moon. And so I want to gather up as many different kinds of full moon photos as I can. Well, one of the really cool things that you can do with keywording is build out what are called smart collections. And you can see, I actually have a collection here called moon photos. And if you log into it here, you could see that this collection it’s automatically going to pull all the photos from my Lightroom catalog that matched these conditions. So anytime I’ve labeled it with moon and any time I’ve shot a moon photo with my D eight 50. So those it has to match those two things and it’s going to show those particular photos. So in other words, this folder is only going to show me moon photos that I’ve shot with my most current best camera.

And I could adjust this to show me all the moon photos I’ve ever taken. I could adjust it to show me just the full moon photos I’ve ever taken. And to be totally honest with you, this probably needs to be updated. I preach the gospel of the keyword, but I still need to work on it myself. Now, smart collections are great. They get you one step closer to the photos that you want to find. You can see. I have a bunch of them here, like my photos from Columbia and death Valley and photos of my cats, photos from Patagonia, things like that. But what I really love to do with keywording is simply find photos quickly. So say for this video about the full moon that I wanted a demonstration photo from that time that I photograph the full moon rising over mono Lake. Now I could sit here and look through my calendar and try to figure out when the heck I went out there and shot that photo.

Honestly, I don’t remember, or I could do a couple of things. I could simply scroll down here to my Sierra Nevada smart collection. And yes, I keep my mono Lake photos in my Sierra Nevada collection Sue me. So every time I’ve labeled any photo with Sierra boom, it shows up in this catalog from there, you have a lot of other really cool options. And if your keywording is good, you can do a text search within this smart collection. And so I might search for something like a full moon mono Lake and boom. It pulls up all the photos that have that keyword in there. And then I can further refine this search. If I just look for photos that I have edited using this little toggle slider up here, I can find the two photos that I photographed over mono Lake when the full moon is rising over the Lake. So I can really quickly find these photos and then do something with them in my catalog. And that leads me to fantastic feature number two.

Export Presets

And you want to use them in a couple of different ways. Maybe you want to export them for video, or maybe you want to send them to Instagram or Facebook, or you may be want to make a print out of them. And all of those different use cases are going to require different kinds of settings, right? For your website or for a presentation. You might want to do a more compressed version of the photo that doesn’t take up that much space, but for print, you might want to export it to a full 16 bit TIF with no compression for the maximum image quality. And when you go to export and you can get to the export dialogue box, a couple of different ways, you can go up here to file export. You can right click on the photo and then scroll down to export.

Or you can do what I like to do is use keyboard shortcuts. In this case for windows it’s control shift E for Mac, that would be command shifty. And it brings up this dialog box. Let me scrunch this down so you can actually see it. And over here on the right, you have all kinds of different options from where you want to store these exported files, how you want to rename them. If you want to adjust the file compression, if it’s, if you want it to be a JPEG or a PSD or a TIF, what kind of color space, the size of the image and on and on all the way down through watermarking here. Now, if you have four different use cases that you’re going to put this same image into you, don’t want to have to re input those settings differently every single time.

So you can make these export presets and the way you do it. Oh gosh. It is so simple. You basically plug in the settings that you want. Like for Instagram, I know that Instagram likes photos that are 10 80 pixels wide. It doesn’t need to be a hundred percent quality. It could be like 80 something percent quality. That’s fine. So I like to put this in my, my pictures folder and I’ll put it in a sub folder called Instagram. There we go. And I don’t need to rename it. You could always add a suffix like Instagram to the file name if you want it to, uh, the compression settings there. Okay. That’s okay. I’m going to sharpen a little bit for the screen. And I also want to add a watermark. Now you can go in here and you can create custom watermarks. And there’s, I have a video about how to do that on this channel.

I’ll link it up there. Uh, and I just have this basic watermark with my logo in it. And after export, we can go ahead and in this case, we’ll have it, show it in explore. So it’s just going to open the folder for us. And so if I do all of this work, and then I changed these export settings, I’ve lost this preset. So what I can do with all of these things set here before I hit export is I can go ahead and over here on this button, click add, and that’s going to bring up this dialog box and I can call it something Instagram and click create. It’s going to save it under my user presets. I already have an Instagram preset, but I just wanted to make another one for you guys for the purposes of this video. So now I can even cancel out of this or I can change the settings completely.

Uh, like let me take a quick look at the settings that I use. When I export for YouTube. I put it in my videos folder under a sub folder called 2020, export it at 25 60 pixels. And I don’t put a watermark on there. So let’s go ahead and say that I export this photo it’s working right now. We’re actually exporting both because I had them both selected. Okay. And there it’s done. And you can see that it has gone ahead and export of that photo of both of those photos right here, where I wanted them using the settings that I wanted. That’s great. Now I want to export these and upload them to Instagram. Well, I don’t want to have to go back in here and change all of these settings back, but the cool thing is I really don’t have to, I can just click right here on that Instagram preset and it, boom, it smacks everything back where it needs to go.

And sure enough, as I export it, you’re going to see boom. There it is. It brings it up in that pictures folder that I wanted under Instagram. It put the watermark on there, put my logo on there with the right dimensions and compression that I wanted for that image. So you can create all of these presets for all of the different uses that you use for your image for. You can see I’ve got one for Facebook, Instagram, when I’m doing presentations, when I’m making prints, the ones I put on my website, the ones that I do for YouTube, or when I’m putting a really big image on YouTube. So I’ve got all these presets and you can actually have Lightroom export all of these things simultaneously. You can just click the boxes that you want hit batch export. It brings up this little guy asking you, if you want to save all the images in the same folder, I don’t check this. I just leave it as is. And I hit export. And it does all of that stuff for me automatically. The images are exactly where I expect them with the dimensions and the quality and the watermark and the sharpening and all that stuff that I’ve plugged in there. So that’s why I love export presets because I do these things so many times. It’s really great to have these one click and done solutions.

The Targeted Adjustment Tool

Talk about a couple of the features that I use for my actual editing. And one of my favorite tools within all of Lightroom is something called the targeted adjustment tool. I recently posted a video about how I took this photo in one of the questions I got in the comments was how do I know where to place these control points within the curve to get the look that I want? And the truth is, I don’t know exactly. Let me get rid of these and I’ll show you how I do it. Now you can make some educated guesses because it does show you the histogram here. So I can guess that this is probably where the highlights are on the curve, and this is probably where the shadows are. And if I adjust from that point, I can make a pretty good curve that I want to see, but there’s an easier way to do it, which is to come up here to this little circle and click on that.

This is the targeted adjustment tool. And any time you hover this over the image, you’re going to see I’ll put my mouse over here. So you guys can see both things at once. When I hover it over the lighter parts, it draws a control point on the curve. And if I move it down towards the darker points, it shows you where that point lies on the curve. So if I know that I want the highlights in this image, brighter in the shadows, a little bit darker. All I have to do is click and drag on the image itself, where I want to place a control point on the curve and the targeted adjustment tool does that automatically. So if I want the highlights brighter, I click and drag on the highlights on the image. I’m going to click and drag up just like that. And you can see it’s automatically placing a control point and moving the curve up.

Now I just move over to the shadows. I click and drag down and it automatically places that control point there, and you can place as many control points using the targeted adjustment tool as you want. So if you think this part of the photo is getting a little bit too dark, we’ll just click and drag up a tiny bit there. And you see it’s going to place that third control point and pull those shadows slightly back up. So you can do this on any image. It’s such an easy way to adjust the contrast and dynamic range within the photo, simply by clicking on the parts that you want, brighter dragging them up and clicking on the parts that you want darker and dragging them down. Now the targeted adjustment tool has another use case, which is adjusting color. So just below the tone curve is the HSL panel.

And for this one, I’m going to need a more colorful image. So let’s do the magic of video editing. Cool. Now we’ve got here an image that has pretty much every different color in the spectrum within the photo. Now say you want to make it a little bit more colorful, but only in the magenta. So if you go up here to that basic tab and you just increase the saturation, everything is going to become more saturated and maybe the Magento’s look good, but God, these yellows right here look like puke. And those blues are looking way too funky. So how do we adjust just the magenta? Well, hopefully you guys know that you can use something called this HSL panel, which allows you to make adjustments within each color range. So you can change the hue itself. If you want the oranges to be more red, that’s fine.

You can just slide this slide or this way, if you want the blues to be more purple-y, you can slide this slider this way. If you want the, say the greens to be brighter, you can play with the luminance of each channel right here as well. Now, the tricky thing with color is that what you see with your eye, isn’t always where the color lies on the color wheel. And this is very common with yellows and greens. You think something is obviously green, uh, but it turns out it actually lies in the yellow channel. So how do you know where to make these adjustments? We’ll again, you can use the targeted adjustment tool. So you click on this little circular dot dude and then whatever color you want to be more saturated. Say, I did want those blues to be more saturated. I could click and drag up on them.

Lightroom automatically selects the appropriate color range, where you select and makes the adjustment that you want without affecting any of the other color ranges. So if I wanted the blues a little more saturated, great, I’ve got it. Say, I want these yellows to be a little bit more de-saturated now to me, they look like yellow, but you can see that light room over here on the right is putting them in the orange channel. So I’m actually, de-saturated the oranges and that’s fine. I just want to work visually. I’ll let Lightroom do all the math and crazy calculations it needs to do. I’m just going to use the targeted adjustment tool to make the colors that I want more saturated by clicking and dragging up and de saturating the ones I don’t want as much by clicking and dragging down. So you can use the tat the tap, the targeted adjustment tool to make these really easy, intuitive adjustments. So I hope that’s something that you can bring in yeah.

Virtual Copies

And the final thing that I wanted to talk about in this video that I think you should be using in your editing is virtual copies. Say you got a photo like this, and you liked the way that you’ve processed it, but you come back a couple of weeks later, you look at it again and you go, I wonder if that would look better in black and white, or I wonder if it would look better if I processed it really dark and moody and dramatic will you certainly could bring the image into the develop module and you could undo all of the adjustments that you’ve made and said, okay, let’s change this and make it black and white. And let’s readjust the exposure to get something that looks good. And now we’re going to have to readjust the clarity and detail settings we’re going to have to make completely different tone curve adjustments.

All right. Let’s see. Uh, okay. Do I like this? Do I remember what the color copy even looked like? How can I compare the two? Well, one really easy way to do that is by creating virtual copies. So let me back up here. Boom. And I’m going to go ahead and right click on the photo and scroll down to create virtual copy and what this does. If I go back to my grid view here is it simply makes an identical copy of the photo and you can make adjustments to that second copy without altering anything of the first copy. So now that I have this virtual copy here, I can go ahead and develop this one to my heart’s content. Let’s say we want to do a dark dramatic kind of processing here. So I’m going to pull my whites up, pull my highlights up.

Uh, I mean, uh, those are the highlights. That’s what those are called. And I think we’re getting a little bit oversaturated with those colors. So I’ll drop that down a little bit. Maybe I want to add a little grad filter action down here on the bottom to bring some of that detail back in. Hey, that’s kinda cool. That’s looking okay. And if I go back to my grid view, now you can see I’ve got these two different copies of the image that I can bring up. I can compare side by side to see which one I like or I can even export both of these using an export preset to put in a video very much like this one, where I can make before and afters really, really simply. You can also use virtual copies to create raw before and afters. For example, this photo right here.

If I create a virtual copy, I can simply right click on this virtual copy, scroll down here to develop settings and click reset. And it’s going to show me the raw file. So now if I ever want to, for a video do a before and after comparison, I can export the virtual copy and the developed copy. And I don’t have to worry about the adjustments from one accidentally affecting the other, another really useful application for virtual copies is cropping. If you’re like me, you like to shoot a lot of vertical photos, but you probably aware that full two by three vertical aspect ratio doesn’t play well with Instagram. So what you can do rather than cropping your original image and kind of forgetting what it looks like as a whole is you can make a virtual copy and then you can apply a crop just to that virtual copy.

I’ll do a four by five, which is the Instagram crop. And I can just this crop until I think it looks good. Boom. Now I have an Instagram ready version that I can export using my Instagram preset and it hasn’t affected my original version. So I still have both of these photos. I can export the full version for say prints or for my website. And I can export this crop version for Instagram or Facebook. And you can do this for video. You can crop into a 16 by nine, whatever the case may be. And because you’re not actually duplicating the image file, you’re just creating this virtual copy. It doesn’t really take any more storage space. So you can make as many of these as you want for all the different ways that you can think about using an image. So I love virtual copies and I hope that you guys can use them as well. That’s going to wrap up this video for fantastic features in Lightroom that I think you should be using to improve your workflow. If you found any of these features helpful, let me know down in the comments, which one you liked most and how you think you’re going to use it going forward. Thank you guys so much for watching these videos. I really do appreciate the support and I love the interaction in the community here on YouTube. I’ll see you soon in another video until next time have fun and happy shooting.

If I could recommend one thing to you that would make the biggest difference in your landscape photography. It wouldn’t be to buy a new camera or get a spiffy lens or learn the latest Photoshop techniques. It would simply be this, get outside more.

Excellent friends, Josh Cripps here, you know, I have been seeing more and more ads online from photographers promising to help you make prettier pictures. And while I have no doubt that the tutorials they sell can help you develop your post-processing skills, which is great for aesthetics. I don’t think I’ve seen a single one yet that shows you how to do one of the fundamentally most important things that is required to be a good photographer. And that is scouting. Scouting is one of these unsexy things that is really boring to talk about. But over time it yields insanely sexy results. It’s like eating a nutritious diet and doing sit-ups every day. Nobody cares that you’re doing all of this grunt work behind the scenes. That is until you rip your shirt off at the beach and even your abs have abs. So in this video, I’d like to talk about two big ways that scouting helps you become a successful photographer, as well as a few of my personal favorite ways that I try to find awesome places to shoot.

Think of scouting like romance. You’re getting to know something and building a relationship with it. In this case, it happens to be a place instead of a person, but no matter what, the deeper that relationship gets, the better that you will be able to anticipate that places, moods, and know how it’s going to react and look under certain conditions. When I lived in Santa Cruz, I spent countless hours walking up and down the cliffs and beaches North of town. And I would do this in the middle of the day when the light was harsh and the photography was no good. And I would do this in the early mornings and the late evenings, I would do it when the tide was high and when the tide was low and most often I’d even do it without a tripod or without filters. Just a camera just to take snapshots.

So why would I do this? It was so that I knew every corner and every nook. I knew every Rocky shelf, every wave induced waterfall, every rock and every sea stack. I knew the directions that they faced and the compositional possibilities they created so that no matter what the conditions were when I went out to shoot for real, I knew exactly where to go, Oh, the clouds are looking nice to the Southeast and there’s a moderately high swell. Well, I think that that little hidden shelf with the waterfall is probably going to work pretty well. Oh, there’s a break in the clouds near half moon Bay and it hasn’t rained in a few weeks. I bet it’ll be possible to get across the Creek to the beach at San Gregorio. Oh, there’s a nice sky to the Northwest with a medium tide. It’s going to be a great day to shoot that cool secret bridge I found.

And this is the main superpower that scouting gives you, you know, exactly where to go given any conditions. And there’s no way around it. This just takes a lot of time. So I highly recommend that you get out there and do that legwork and explore which honestly you should like doing anyway. Cause that’s kind of the fun part of photography and it’s well worth doing because I’m not sure that there’s anything worse than the opposite situation showing up to a location that you’ve never been to before, while the light is blowing up. And you have no idea where you might find a good composition. So you freak out, you start running around like a kid who’s eaten too many fruit loops and you end up settling with some lackluster composition because you just have to shoot something. Not that that has ever happened to me.

Of course. Now, the other way that scouting helps you is that simply by being outside bar, you end up seeing more cool stuff and you get more opportunities for photography. I have been on so many excursions where I left home in the middle of the day, thinking I’m just going to go take a quick look and then I’ll come right back. And I end up having so much fun, an absolute blast, exploring a new area and coming home with some great shots to boot. A couple of years ago, I was hanging out at a Lake Tiana in New Zealand and it had been raining all morning. And then I looked outside, the rain had stopped and I thought I’m going to go for a drive and see what I can find. Well, the first thing that happened was a gigantic rainbow parked out over the Lake.

And that was cool enough, but I started driving up towards Fiordland national park just to look for some interesting scenes that I could come back and shoot later. But all of that fresh rainfall on the landscape was now evaporating creating these massive billowing clouds of moisture piling up into the atmosphere. And the sun was bursting down through the clouds above. So there was this insane combination of beams and steam coming up out of the landscape. It was utterly breathtaking and I wouldn’t have been there if I hadn’t just been out scouting looking around. Okay. So hopefully I’ve impressed upon you, how beneficial scouting is, but how do you actually do it? How do you find awesome places to shoot? Well, here are two of my favorite ways of finding unique locations to photograph

The easiest way, start finding your own awesome locations is simply to explore further a field in a known photo hotspot. So for example, Yosemite, it’s a world-class scenic destination, and I’m guessing you guys can probably name at least five classic photo locations off the top of your head tunnel view Valley view Olmstead point, that thedral peak glacier point, but because 95% of photographers will only ever visit those iconic spots. If you are willing to walk maybe a mile further down the trail or follow a cascade deeper into the forest or find out what the view is like from the top of a dome, I can pretty much guarantee that you’re going to find jaw dropping, but totally unique vantage points that you can use for your own photography. For example, all of these photos that I’m showing you right now were taken within Yosemite national park, but to get to these unique views, it only took a little bit of effort to get off the beaten path. So in short, if you go somewhere that you know already is beautiful and you’re willing to explore just a little bit, you’re going to find some cool stuff.

I’m a map nerd, uh, mapa file or TOPA file or whatever it’s called. I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter because whenever I’m out hiking, doing that, exploring that I was just talking about. I love to sit there with a map in my hands to figure out, Hey, what’s that peak over there? Or what’s that Lake? Or what’s behind that Ridge over there. It really gets my blood pumping and it gets the excitement popping, but even knowing what all that stuff is, you can’t always actually then physically go to every single one of those interesting looking places yourself to see what they’re like. So this is where I turn to technology. I get out my computer, have you guys heard of these things? They’re, they’re pretty cool. And I turn on my 9,600 baud modem and I point Netscape navigator to Google image search. And I type in whatever feature I saw on the map.

And it does not matter how remote an area is some Hardy hiker or fishermen or herdsman has been there and has taken some snapshots that you can use from these photos. You can get a huge amount of pre scouting information such as what the terrain is like, what are the main features of the area? You can figure out possible compositions or even the direction of the light at a certain time of day. But most importantly, you can decide if you actually want to go there to shoot. And that’s the real fun, getting your butt out there in person to see what’s what, a few years ago, I was camping on an overnight trip in Kings Canyon park in a place called the Kearsarge lakes. And during the afternoon of my trip, I decided to scamper up to the top of this cute little guy to see what I could see and standing there from the top of this pinnacle, looking off into this massive roadless wilderness, into all of the canyons and valleys and basins and peaks.

I was just floored by how much stuff there was out there. So I busted out the map and I started looking at all up, Oh, that’s Caltech peak. Oh, that’s Forester pass. Oh, that’s the North guard. And one of these places, way, way, way off to the North that caught my attention was called Mount gardener. So as soon as I got home from that trip, I got on Google images and I typed in Mount Gardner and what I saw blew my mind, my eyes popped out of their sockets, like two little Prairie dogs. And I knew that I had to make a trip to that place. So the next summer strapped on my pack and I hooked it in to Gardner basin. It’s a remote basin. It’s not easy to get to you guys, but it is utterly spectacular. It’s one of the most sensational places that I’ve ever seen on the planet.

And it’s in my top, you absolutely must visit if you’re a backpacker locations in the Sierra and I’ve spent some of my happiest days on the planet and as a photographer in the Gardiner basin, enjoying this mesmerizing place and shooting some really satisfying photos, all banks to looking at a map and then doing a little bit of Googling to see if it seemed like a good place to go. Now, I would caution you though, because looking at snapshots to get a sense of what the terrain and the place is like, well, that’s one thing, but I would advise against looking at too many high quality landscape photographs of an area that you’ve never been to because it is way too easy for those photos to get inside your mind and take over your thought process. And then when you actually get to that place in person, all you can think about are those compositions that you’ve seen online, that somebody else has already shot.

And this happened to me, I’ve talked about this more in my doozy basin video, and you can click a link up there to check that out. So there you have it, two reasons that scouting is vitally important to your photography. And two ways that I like to scout personally, to find those cool places to shoot. So what about you? Are you an active scouter or do you wish it was something you were better at? Let me know down in the comments. All right. That’s going to do it for this one. You guys saw catch you soon in another video until then have fun and happy shooting.

Greetings my excellent friends. It’s Josh Cripps here. I’m going to be starting a new series here on the channel where I talk about the behind the scenes of some of my favourite or most well-known or signature photos. And I’m going to talk you through exactly what the shot is, how I got it. Some of the challenges I faced and exactly what went into the making of the photo and to kick things off. I want to start with this photo from New Zealand. This is an image of Sterling falls, which sits in Milford sound one of the most spectacularly, beautiful places on the planet. And this is the very base of the false note Sterling. It’s a pretty big falls. It’s about 500 feet tall, and it only looks small in photos because it’s dwarfed by the mile high mountains next to it. But this is the very bottom of the falls.

And one of the things that makes Sterling so unique is that it plunges 500 feet to land directly on the ocean’s surface. So that’s what we’re looking at here. You’re looking at the falls where the water plunging from the sky impacts the ocean and it creates these radiating patterns of waves and wind coming out from the base of the false. Nope. This is a photo that I did not come up with. The concept of, I’d actually seen photos like this before on the internet and in various galleries around New Zealand. But it’s one of those places that when you get there and you see this, you are compelled to shoot this. It’s like a slap you in the face kind of thing. And you just got to capture it in your camera. Now I’ve been to this falls blue probably 10 times, and you don’t always get to see these exact patterns.

It depends on the wind. It depends on how much water is coming down. It depends on all kinds of stuff, all kinds of conditions, the day of, but on this particular trip, I got really lucky and we have the most perfect symmetric patterns you can imagine. And as we came up around the edge of the falls on the boat, I was absolutely mesmerized by that radiating symmetry. So I knew I wanted that to be the cornerstone of my composition. And that’s why this photo is very symmetric. It’s split almost exactly 50 50 with that rock in the dead center, both vertically and horizontally, the horizontal symmetry is pretty obvious, but the reason that I chose vertical symmetry for this composition is that I wanted to show an equal impact between the water falling and the consequence of that water, which were those radiating patterns. And that’s what I endeavored to capture in this image.

Now, as the boat came around the corner, I did shoot quite a few of shots of a similar composition. This just happened to be the one in the end that I liked the best. So let’s take a really quick look at the settings here and exactly why I chose these values. Okay, so this was taken with a Nikon D eight 10 using the ni core 24 to one 20 lens. And I was using that lens because it allows you to really quickly move between fairly wide shots and kind of mid range telephoto shots. And that’s one of the most fun and exciting things to do at Sterling falls is to shoot all these different kinds of compositions from wide to intimate. Now, possibly I could have really quickly tried to change lenses as we came up to the falls, but I was lining up some test compositions and I really liked the way 24 millimeters looked.

So I just stuck with it because it’s a pretty frantic thing when you’re there at Sterling. And I’ll talk about that in a second. Next, you’ll see that it’s at F eight and given that the base of the falls is probably a good 70 feet away from where I was shooting. I deemed that sufficient to get me depth of field throughout the entire frame. Now the front corners of the image are actually a tiny little bit soft, but I’m not going to worry about it because it’s water and it’s moving anyway. So it’s not really a distraction or even noticeable. The most important settings though that I want to talk about for this image is the shutter speed. And, uh, the ISO, which is sort of a supporting character. I shot this at a 60th of a second. And given the fact that I was already set at F eight, I chose the ISO to be two 50 so that I could get a good exposure because I really wanted my shutter speed to be a 60th of a second.

And I wanted that shutter speeds very specifically, because it was a great compromise between motion and static water. In other words, a 60th of a second was slow enough to show the movement of the water falling from the sky, but fast enough to capture the details of the waves and rivulets and patterns radiating out from the bottom of the falls. If I had chosen a long shutter speed that you would typically do to shoot a waterfall like one second, this would all just be a big blur. And if I had gone really fast, the other side say like two thousands of a second, then everything would be too frozen, too static. There wouldn’t be any dynamicism within the photograph. Now creating this photo came with a huge suite of challenges. So let’s get into what those were. The first big challenge in shooting Sterling falls is that you have almost no time at the location, the only way to get there, because this is a falls again, that falls directly into the ocean is on a boat.

All right. And perhaps you could charter a boat to take you out there and spend a little bit more time. But the easiest way is simply to book onto one of the commercial Milford sound cruises, which is a wonderful experience in its own, right? But because these cruises have such a strict timeline, they only give you about three to five minutes at Sterling falls, which is not a lot of time. And so you need to be ready to shoot when you get there. And so the way that I like to solve that challenge of not having very much time is to be prepared, be prepared, be prepared, be prepared, be prepared, be prepared. Okay. So what does that, what does being prepared look like in this particular situation? Like I mentioned, I’ve been to Sterling falls quite a few times and I’ve known just from experience.

What kinds of shutter speeds look best with the way that the water moves in this particular waterfall? And so I basically had my camera preset to those settings, and I also knew that we would be in full shade just because of the geometry of the sound and the time of day. So I was able to prep my exposure in advance. Then as the boat was coming up around the corner towards the falls, I started rattling off test exposures just to make sure all my settings would actually work. So in the moment I wouldn’t have to worry about, Oh, notably have enough depth of field or as listener speed, the wrong size. I know shutter speeds. Aren’t sizes, just deal with it. And unfortunately, that’s something that has just come with experience. My first few times out at Sterling falls, I didn’t get that great of photos because I didn’t know what to do with my camera settings, but after repeating the process over and over and over, it got me to a point where I could simply shortcut to the end and get the results that I wanted to arguably the bigger challenge when you’re shooting at Sterling falls is that you’re on a moving boat.

So the boat comes in and it gets up as close as it can to the falls. But it’s also swaying and rocking and moving back and forth. So you can’t use a tripod, even if you wanted to do a nice long exposure, your camera would do this. And the photo would look like that. So you can’t use a tripod. You have to be nimble. You have to be able to move around quickly as the boat is pivoting. One of the things that I found actually, that works pretty well is to use your tripod like a monopod, just stick one leg out. Now that gives you some extra stability, but you can also pivot off the ball ahead. If you keep it loose, to allow you to quickly adjust, adjust your compositions and go with the flow of the boat. And it’s also really important that you use vibration reduction or image stabilization, that’s going to help a ton for locking in the details of the rocks while the water is falling in front of them.

And again, this is one of the other big reasons that I need a 60th of a second shutter is so that I can maintain some detail in the static elements of frame. So that’s how you kind of solve the moving boat problem. There it’s Sterling. And the final big challenge you have to face is spray. This is a big falls. It generates a lot of wind and a lot of outflow when the water hits the ground. And this is a pretty easy one. You just gotta have wipes wipes, everywhere, stick wipes in your pocket, put them in your camera bag, tuck one behind your ear, right? And just have that wipe ready, take a couple of shots, white, couple of shots, wipe it. And the wipes that I like to use go digging back in the Crips cave. There are these ones you can see this box has gotten a lot of use are called Kim wipes.

They’re paper wipes are used for like laser experiments and other cool sciency stuff. But I love them for photography because they’re very absorbent and they’ll just pull water right off the front of your lens. You don’t need any lens cleaner or anything like that. Just give it up and you’re good to go for more shooting. So that was the process of coming up to envisioning, seeing the conditions, knowing the kind of composition I want, knowing the settings that I needed in order to capture the photo, then just focusing, shooting, checking, wiping, focusing, shooting, checking, wiping to ensure that I got a photo that I was happy with. So all of that, all of those times on those cruises, all of those visits to Sterling falls resulted in this photo, which I’m extraordinarily happy with, but it started off as a raw file, of course. And so I want to talk a little bit about the processing that I used to get it to the final form compositionally.

The raw file is essentially identical to the final image. I just did a tiny little bit of cropping on the right hand side to make that rock dead center in the middle. Then honestly, it was a matter of adding contrast and doing some dodging and burning to bring out the details and patterns in the waves, and to add a little bit of a kind of darker, mysterious, moody vibe to the whole photo. So the processing was not extreme or complex. It was simply effective to bring out the things that I wanted to bring out to result in this final photograph. 

And that’s going to do it for this kickoff episode of how I got the shot or how I took the photo or how, however, I figure out what I’m going to title this series. I hope this was interesting and educational and helpful for you and gave you a little bit of insight into my own thought process when I’m out in the field shooting, be sure to stick around for another episode of these coming up soon. In the meantime, this is Josh scripts signing off until next time have fun and happy shooting.