[Music]
if you were wondering what I'm doing at a hotel I'm actually staying in Dallas
tonight tomorrow is the final shoot on my freelance gig but we're gonna start
really early and I really didn't want to make that drive in the morning so I've
got a hotel here this is where I'm be staying tonight and we're gonna make
good use of this time and we're gonna talk about photos assignments in just a
second this is the Fairmont Hotel which is an old hotel in downtown Dallas been
here forever it's chain across the US but they're only a few of them
they're probably most famous for the San Francisco location that's where Tony
Bennett I think first sang I left my heart in San Francisco I got upgraded to
this sort of office suite kind of thing so you know conference room in the
middle we're gonna make you'd use out of that in a minute when we do photo
assignments I got two giant beds which is way awesome decent-sized bathroom but
the coolest part of this whole thing and there's a lot of glare going on but
check out this view of downtown Dallas
okay it is Monday and we need to talk about
photo assignments so your assignment for this week is going to be on doing
composite images now in the last video I showed you one technique where you can
shoot a series of digital images in a panorama type fashion and stitch them
together and there's a number of ways you can do this and I'll come back to
that in a second but this is just one approach to how you could do a composite
image doing a bunch of stitching in Lightroom or Photoshop is not going to
be as practical for people who want to shoot film it's going to be very
difficult to control but that is not the only way you can do a composite image in
fact if you're shooting film or particularly instant film I would
recommend you experiment shooting a scene and making a composite image that
ends up being kind of the sum of all of its parts so for instance you can have
frame lines that's okay maybe what you do is you stand in one spot and you do a
landscape of a bunch of Polaroids and you just put them down on a sheet of
paper and then shoot that and then that's your submission it's another way
you could do a composite image and if you really want to be creative about it
I've seen really interesting uses that photographers have made doing portraits
of different types of angles and stuff that all come together to form the final
portrait there's a lot of different things you can do with this and the
sky's the limit it is up to you I do want to mention a few technical issues
because some questions arose in the comments on that last video that I did
on doing a stiched digital composite mainly the thing you want to remember
and the key to getting these to work correctly is the algorithm that
Lightroom or Photoshop sees to stitch these together needs to see as much
consistency as possible with some overlap and so I had questions about
should I shoot manual focus or auto focus absolutely shoot manual focus
because what you don't want to do is have something shift in fact you want to
have the entire camera in manual if you can any kind of focus shift or exposure
shift or even heavy vignette is going to work
against you and its going to make it really difficult
and I've even had it fail where Lightroom just
basically says I don't have enough information to stitch these together so
attention to detail is extremely important on the capturing of things and
then once you get this into Lightroom another trick that I find that really
helps with all this because I mentioned if you're shooting Fuji or if you're
shooting Panasonic you don't have the option of profiles for lenses in
Lightroom but if you are shooting on Sony Cannon or
Nikon what I would do is I would apply the lens profiles I would apply your
color profiles and then go ahead and copy and paste those settings across all
of your images just to make sure you're really getting that consistency now
Lightroom will compose all these into a DNG file so you're good to go after
that but the key to making these work from a technical standpoint is
consistency remember these are all six parts of the same image essentially now
of course if you're shooting film or even digital and you want to go more of
the artistic or the creative side of this there are no rules now I realize
that this topic of just a composite image is a wide-open topic but I think
that's one of the things that's gonna make it really interesting in fact I
would encourage you guys if you've got the time to try different things try
doing a digital stitched composite that all is perfect looking and then try to
do something with a Polaroid or try to do something that's creative with
different focal lengths but the key here is that you're coming up with a
composite image in the end that is made up of a sum of much smaller images all
this talk about making images is making me want to go shoot because I've got
this amazing view there is a pool deck so it's hard to see at night but this
hotel has two large towers there's the North Tower that we're in and there's
the South Tower down there in between the two on the roof of the bottom part
of the hotel there's a swimming pool rooftop pool and the most amazing view
of downtown Dallas I have the sony a7s with me this is an excellent camera for
low-light it which is exactly what we're gonna be dealing with and I'm going to
have to shoot handheld and I'm going to use the Zeiss Loxia f/2 35
millimeter let's go check it out
highlights are not recoverable and apparently autofocus isn't either it's
really bright back there hold on oh hey look at me I brought my own lighting
let's figure this out no professional vlog leaves home without an LED light
okay so like I said before in digital photography you want to expose for the
highlights they are non-recoverable so expose for the highlights the histogram
is your friend you can recover shadows to an extent depending on the camera and
a bunch of other variables but you want to recover your shadows in post remember
that's where noise lives but if once you blow highlights they don't come back if
you're shooting film photography it's the opposite you want to expose for
those shadows and then you can deal with the highlights in post and really this
deals with black and white film but that's the idea this city is gorgeous I
mean it's not New York but it's also not crowded like New York which is kind of
cool I did grow up here in its home it's a funny story about this hotel and the
museum that I worked for for about 7 years is just about a block away and my
friend Jeff and I had offices next to each other we used to walk over here
because it's a Starbucks in the lobby but there's a bellhop who works here
because I've seen him recently his name is Tony Bennett that's right the Tony
Bennett he's awesome maybe we'll see him in the morning he actually met the real
Tony Bennett once when he stayed here which is a pretty cool story I
hope we see him in the morning I'll introduce you over and out
I've got to clean up the vlogging gear and get to bed because we are starting
really early tomorrow morning
okay guys I'm gonna go and do my final shoot
you've got your photo assignment good luck see in the next video until then
later
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