One of the cool things about making a blog is you can start it whenever you want. Today’s actually day two of this track. And yesterday day one, to be honest with you, it got off to a little bit of a Rocky start. First, we were stuck in road construction traffic for about two hours dropping off a car at our Southern trail head. And then we got stuck in thunder and hail and rainstorms on the way up to place called Paiute pass. So it took us a hot minute to actually get the trip going, but a new day is done and we were both incredibly stoked to be here because the trip that we’re doing, it’s one of the more famous multi-day treks here in the Sierra, partly because it passes through three incredibly beautiful high country basins, the Humphreys basin evolution basin, and Dusy basin. And I can’t wait to check them out at today’s starting off on a pretty bright note already. I walked out about a mile from camp to some wonderful Meadows and waterfalls that are overlooking the glacial divide. And even though there weren’t any clouds in the sky at all this morning, I still was able to get a couple of nice shots and I’ll show them to you here.

And by the time we arrived at our camp last night, it was basically already sunset, which meant we had just enough time to do a little bit of quick photography before slamming some food into our faces, jumping into our tents and going to sleep, which makes today the first full day of the Trek. And it’s going to be a long one. I think we have 20 or 22 miles to go to make it all the way up to evolution base. And so it’s still early. It’s only about six 45, which means it’s time to head back to camp, grab some breakfast, start getting some trail miles under our feet.

Well, the morning started off beautifully. We were having a lovely descent down from our campsite at Tomahawk Lake. When all of a sudden in the middle of the forest tragedy struck. So what, what happened uh, first morning? So first morning we’d get up early. She’d sent rise. Supersite to be out, pack up. Our camps are heading downhill and we’re doing this not very steep cross country, route down, kind of stick for foresty area with a lot of little pine cones. And I’m walking down like this and all of a sudden my feet about, and I’m on my poles. They bolt snap. It will you survive without any poles I would today, I would not have survived on the polls. Steep going up steep, going down my old man body. Well looking pretty solid chinks to be solid.

Well, all I got to say is I’m glad I’m wearing wicking underpants because the swag is definitely starting to form this marks, the end of our descent for the day, we’ve just come down about four hours of walking nine miles through pie Canyon. And we started in the high Alpine zone, the Sierra Tundra almost. And as we dropped lower scenery kept changing. We kept coming by the Creek, which grew larger and larger and larger. And the vegetation changed from Alpine conifers to aspens, to Manzanita, to Cedars, Jeffrey Pines, and the weather just kept getting hotter and hotter and hotter. Now it’s lunchtime, but after lunch, we cross this bridge and we start our climb back up to evolution Valley evolution basin about another 10 miles to go yet today in that direction, a couple of cruisy miles later, and we find ourselves here and what’s special about this place is that, that Valley up there, those gigantic Bluffs of rock in between them lies the entrance to one of the most fable, the most hallowed valleys in all of hiker dub a place.

So wondrous it’s rumored to be the most beautiful Valley on the John Muir trail. It’s the evolution Valley. Will it live up to the hype? I don’t know, but we’re about to climb up there and find out, well, we just passed our seven of actual hiking time today coming up on 14 miles, I have to admit I’m feeling a little fatigued, a little fatigued. We still haven’t even done half the track. We’ve only got two days left. So we really need to keep pushing and try to crank out another five, six miles, three hours of hiking today. 

We came to conquer, but we go for kind of defeated. So here’s what happened. We climbed up into the evolution Valley. It was a long, hot sloggy climb. Although we did pass some beautiful waterfalls and wonderful creeks and really is just a beautiful area, but we got to a place called McLaren meadow. We looked at each other and we realized that we were both wrecked done for the day. There’s no way we could carry on another five, six, seven miles up into upper evolution basin. So we basically did a 16 mile day today, plus whatever we hike this morning while doing photography. And that puts us approximately 25 miles into the walk, which means we still have 30 miles to go. So that’s a 15 mile day tomorrow and a 15 mile day, the next day and the way I’m feeling right now, I don’t think we’re really up for it. So what we’re going to do instead is take a little bit of a shortcut through the high country. We’re going to go up past a place called Darwin bench overload, Mark Cole, and back down to North Lake. It should shave about 20 miles off the trip, although we’ll still be out the same amount of days. And even though it means we won’t be able to get into upper evolution based on this trip, the nice thing is it means we can call it a day here in McClair meadow with incredible views in every direction.

Well, just about sunset time, add insult to injury, kind of bloody nose. I think the first time ever in the back country, who knows what that’s all about. Anyway, the conditions out here right now are really lovely. There’s almost no cloud in the sky, unfortunately, but there’s an incredible reflection here in the river. And there’s just the SURPI warm light, bathing all the mountains, looking up the Valley here. So here you can see the composition that I’ve got to set up. I got this little grassy guy breaking up the reflection over here. So there’s not just a pure reflection shot. And the continuity, the reflection over on this side to give the connection to the background and you can see how these two mountains are relatively balanced in the frame in terms of where the peaks are. So that’s something that I like to do a lot when I’m composing is just use a little bit of horizontal symmetry there. And in terms of settings, I’m shooting at about 26 millimeters and a barely far away from that little bank. So I think F 11 should be sufficient to give me enough depth of field there ISO 64 and a shutter speed of a 10th of a second.

Greetings my excellent friends with Josh Cripps here. And in this video, I want to share with you five of my favorite, little quick camera tips and tricks that can help improve your landscape photography. We don’t get any time to waste, so let’s get into it. Let’s go!

We don’t have time for the intro. We’re going to do this thing as fast as possible. So I’m going to start the timer right now. We’re going to try to get through this in five minutes. No cuts, no edits, just frantic landscape photography, camera tricks, my favorites to help you improve your photography.

1)Exposure Delay Mode

So the first one I’m going to talk about is exposure, delay mode. And this is kind of like mirror up mode, except you don’t need a remote to do it. The camera does it automatically. It’s available on Nikons. I’m not actually sure about other camera brands. This is just a good reason for everybody to switch to an icon. Anyway, what it works is like this. So with the mirror delay mode or Mira boat, you hit a shutter button. Once the mirror comes up and that lets the vibrations from the camera die off and then you hit the button again and then it takes the picture.

So it removes any like hand pushing shake from your camera. What exposure delay mode is, is it takes out that second push. So you set a delay like up to three seconds. When you press the shutter button, the camera snaps the shutter up, it waits for three seconds. Then it takes a picture. So this is great. If you’re too lazy to carry a remote like me, or if you just don’t have one with you, but you still want the effects of that mirror up mode. So exposure delay use it. Don’t abuse it it’s awesome.

2)Back Button Focus

Okay, next one. We’re going to get into his back button focus. If you guys aren’t using back button focus, I 100% recommend setting it up. And this one, I know every single camera manufacturer does it. You’ll have to check how to do it with your brand, but you basically set it up so that this button back here is your focus and not your shutter button.

And this is incredibly important because a lot of times you want to be using, say like the central focal points in your, your camera. They’re the most accurate, they’re the fastest. But if you’re setting up a composition and you focus and then you re compose like this, and then you press the shutter button and that’s still where your focus is, your camera might change. Focus. If you’re set up a composition, you focused on a tree like this, and then you move a little bit and you focus in the middle of them inadvertently by pressing the shutter button. You don’t want that, right? You want your camera to focus once and to stick with that focus until you actively change it again. So by back button focusing, you can set that up. You focus on your subject. You can recomposed as much as you want. When you press the shutter button, the camera will not re focus. It’s fantastic for not screwing up your shots.

3)Live Preview Histogram

Okay? The next one I want to talk about is the exposure preview histogram. Almost every modern camera has this. Now it’s this little guy you can see right down here into display. And what that does is it shows you your exposure. Before you take a picture, it almost makes metering obsolete, because you can see exactly what your histogram, at least what the camera thinks the histogram is going to look like. And you always have to go back. And after you take the picture review the actual histogram, the playback histogram, but that live preview histogram is going to get you so close to a perfect exposure before you ever even tripped the shutter button. It’s incredible. Now I think this works best when you use it in tandem with the blinkies.

3a) The Blinkies (Highlight Warning)

So you want to go to your playback display options and turn on the highlight warning or whatever it’s called into your camera. The technical term definitely is the blinkies and that will just show any blown-out parts of your photograph. So, you know, whether your exposure is too bright in, on some cameras, you can also turn on a shadow clipping so that, you know, if your exposure is too dark. Now, here’s a really good question for you though. How do you know that this histogram is accurate? How do you know that it’s representing what the actual raw data is?

4) Neutral / Flat Picture Control

Well, the way that you do that is through what are called picture controls or picture style. Yeah. And for these, I highly recommend that you use the, the most neutral, the most flat one that you’ve got. So that’s going to be something like neutral or flat. Imagine that. Image that! Woah somehow little accents started to sneak in there to my voice. Anyway, what those picture controls do? So your camera records all this raw data, right?

And then depending on the picture control that you’ve applied, like landscape, vivid, portrait, et cetera, it’s going to add contrast saturation, sharpening to that image. And then it’s going to show you that transformed image that has those adjustments. That’s the image that you see when you press play on your camera. That’s also the histogram that the camera shows you. So how can you say that your rod or your histogram is accurate? If you’re actually looking at a modified version of the raw data, right? You’ve taken the raw data, you’ve added saturation contrast sharpening, and then it shows you the histogram for that. But what happens if you, if your photo is almost blown out, the raw data is almost blown out and then you have something like a landscape picture control that adds evan more contrast. It might stretch the histogram out. So the fact to the point that the highlights that the histogram is showing you are blown out, but they might not be blown out in the raw data.

It’s just that transformation. It’s just that adjustment that’s happening in the camera. So if we use the neutral or the flat picture control actually gives you the best idea of what the raw data actually is. And that’s fine because in the field, we’re not trying to actually take the best or the should say, we’re not trying to create the prettiest possible picture in the camera. What we’re trying to do is capture the best possible data and using that flat or neutral picture control gives you a more accurate idea of what that raw data is. Shoot.

5)Clean Your Image Sensor

Okay. Now the last one that I want to talk about is incredibly important to you guys. Don’t be a dummy like me and do things like before you go on some gigantic important photography trip, forget to clean your sensor, please. You guys clean your sensors, especially if you’re a mirrorless camera shooter, clean that thing all the time.

Every two weeks, every month at an absolute minimum, don’t be an idiot. Like I am and forget the cleanup for like six months at a time anyway. And if you’ve never done this yourself before, I know it’s intimidating, but it’s actually not that bad. It’s not that scary. Once you get into it, you just need a couple of tools. I recommend, you know, like this and a drill and you can’t forget the staple gun and no, I’m just kidding. Don’t need any of that stuff. What you need is a rocket blower. You need some swabs like this. You can order these on Amazon. I’ll put a link down below and he needs some sensor cleaning food. Like this stuff. You just put a couple of drops on this, not too much now, just the right amount. And then you put it at a 60-degree angle across your sensor.

I’m not gonna do it right now because I just cleaned it. And you just go swipe once, swipe back. That’s it. You’re done. Sensor is clean. It’s easy. It’s not that scary the scariest time, because the first time, but trust me, you guys clean your camera sensor, going to make your life so much better anyway, who were done? How do we do a six minutes? Crap. I didn’t make an under five, but I hope that you guys got a lot out of that. Anyway, those are five of my best, not five that’s 10. Those are five of my favorite camera, tips and tricks to improve your landscape photography. The guide enjoyed this video. I would love it. If you could subscribe to the channel like it, share with your friends, all that good stuff. It really helps me out a lot. And until next time have fun and happy shooting.