The Photography Skill nobody likes to hear…

Hello everybody, welcome back to the Faroe Islands and to a video sponsored by Lumix. This video is going to be a little bit different from my others as I’m going to get straight to the point, which I’ve never done before. So here it goes…

The Start of My Photography Journey

Testing testing testing testing testing testing hello everybody welcome back to the Faroe Islands and to a video sponsored by lumix this video is going to be a little bit different to my others in that I’m gonna try and get straight to the point which I’ve never Done before so here it goes so this video is all about a skill that I’ve learned that’s changed my photography more than any other and it’s a bit of a long story so bear with me my photography journey started out when I went on a big traveling trip with Emily Best part of 10 years ago before that I’d taken no interest in photography whatsoever on this trip I had a lumix camera oddly enough and they have manual controls I enjoyed getting scripts to that over the three or four months that we were travelling and I loved it so Much that when we got back we moved to London and I would spend my weekends walking around trying to get unique photo but the problem was and you’ll have heard all this if you’ve been to one of my talks about kind of videos and photos and stuff the problem was that I’d set up my tripod I used a tripod back in those days before I developed a disdain for them but set up my tripod get all my settings sorted and then I’d look up and there’d be two or three other photographers around and I’d know that given my own experience the chances Are that they would end up with better photos than me and I’d find that hugely dispiriting because in a city of 10 million people I found it really really tricky to get unique photos and that’s what I wanted from photography I wanted it to be a creative outlet I didn’t just Want to copy what other people were doing I felt like a creative person without creative just you can’t draw I can’t sing I can’t write and I’ve said all that on this channel before but I wanted photography to be a a creative this you long story short I eventually Found composite photography which was a huge kind of liberating experience for me really because then what I could create became about my imagination and not just the place I was in because I could mix and match photos but that experience learning to put those photos together was all about two things Patience and curious…

The Importance of Patience and Curiosity

ity for example one of my most well known shots that got me quite a lot of press in quite a few jobs when I was starting out was a photo called zone 334 I basically put a tube in the middle of nowhere in Wales and to Get that tube station shot took weeks of planning and thinking to to work out which tube station I wanted what time of day that would need to be what time a year that would need to be how I was going about doing it in the end I Decided that the only way to do it where I wouldn’t get harsh shadows and there wouldn’t be any people milling around was right in the middle of summer at 4:00 in the morning on a Sunday that was the only time I could I could go and get That photo for that end product and even when I was there it was tricky took a couple of hours I saw some sights that morning but all in all that process took weeks and you can multiply those weeks across all the images that created during that time the point of this story Is that I learnt very quickly that any of your favorite photographers who you watch and learn from if you see them at a location like this for example it’s not just as easy as getting out the car and taking a photo everybody every photographer who is in any way Successful I think has a huge amount of patience and a huge amount of curiosity to be able to wander around the scene and not feel the need to just snap away immediately in order to get the best photos and if you don’t have patience and curiosity and you get to a place Like this you’ll always just want to snap straight away and well that is not going to yield the best results So I’m curiosity and patience what the hell am I talking about what does that mean in practical terms well this place whatever it’s called is is a terrible example because everywhere I look here is a potential photo but some places are not quite that good in those places what I like to do when I arrive at them he’s put the telephoto lens on zoom into a hundred or 200 millimeter full-frame equivalent and just take some detail shots 360 all the way around me and what that enables me to do is a sometimes get really good detail shots which might be Much better than any other wide shots I get that day but be it enables me to work out what the subjects might be because looking around here as I say everything is a photo and if you get some shots kind of a cloud detail or whatever the details might be waves down There for example you could end up with a really good result on its own and if you don’t it can help you work out whether or not it’s of interest to include in another photo that wider focal length later but what that process demands is a curiosity because you need To take lots and lots of detail photo for it to to be worthwhile on patience because you can’t just rock up somewhere like this and expect to get exactly the shot you’re looking for straight away you need to work to to figure out what that shot might look like what it might include So yeah that’s what I do having said that as I said place like this everything’s a photo how long would you say is typically between getting out of your car and getting your perfect shot i well difficult difficult question but at least a couple of hours i usually arrive At a scene and then and then just source i actually sit and take it in a little bit and just sort usually have an apple and just take the scene in and that helps me because i feel like i get to understand that sort of feel of the Place a little bit and whilst I’m doing that I’m maybe looking for a few compositions but yeah it takes a bit if you try and rush it and you just think I guess you get someone just got to get a shot it looks amazing yeah then you just sort of get that Picture postcard shot I suppose and yeah else it’s a two hours and an apple minimum may…

The Benefits of Detail Shots

one of the other benefits of taking detail shots first particularly if you have any desire to be a commercial photographer is that quite often detail shots form at Least part of the brief so if you can nail those early and if you’re shooting for a magazine or something then you’ll have already got kind of a third of the shots that you need before you’ve even got the shot there’s going to be like the main head of the story the hero Image as it were although on a scene like this again it’s um it’s quite an obvious shot really as the mount in the water the sky and a road which hopefully some cars will drive along for scale in the Nazis future and that’ll be the image here I’m not Sure I’m doing a great job of exemplifying patients tend to have less of it when it’s raining I find well the car also speaking with Nigel this morning we both employ a similar technique when dealing with things like this…