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Hi, my name is Luke Ballard, I’m the owner and founder of Remember Forever. I’ve been a photographer for over 20 years, it’s always something I’ve wanted to be, it’s always something I’ve enjoyed doing, and the fact that it’s my career makes me probably one of the luckiest people in the world. I’ve always been passionate about photography and that’s something I try to pass on to everyone I encounter. In some ways, that’s the mission statement for Remember Forever, how we can pass on our passion for photography with you.

Remember Forever offers a series of workshops, both here in the United States, in Australia, and growing around the world. This year, we’re actually taking the show on the road and visiting over 40 cities in the United States, so who knows, we might be coming to a city near you very soon. If you’re interested in learning more about photography, please visit our website, www.rememberforever.co.

I hope this how-cast series inspires you to pick up a camera and take photos. They may not be great initially, but hopefully they get better. At the end of the day, as long as you’re taking photos, you’re on the right track.

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Greenscreen photography can be a really technical, complex procedure. Having said that, it can also be quite simple. Firstly, it doesn’t need to be green. Any solid color with contrast will allow you to select the subjects in your photograph to transport them to something else. It’s also really important to try and pick good backgrounds. Something that’s going to suit. This was taken from ComicCon, where a lot of cosplayers are running around, having a fantastic time, as were we, taking their photographs. So, with something like that, I wanted a, a psychotic background to put it on, as you can see. What you’ve got to be careful of, when you’re working with greenscreen, is that you are getting every element using, you can use the magic wand tool in PhotoShop, you can use the quick selecter tool. I like quick selecter.

And that let’s you pick just what you need, and remove what you don’t need, from the photograph. Like I said, it doesn’t need to be green. Any color that’s contrasting against your subject will allow you to select it. Once it’s selected, it’s quite simply a matter of copying it on to a new layer, and ammending any of the lighting that you need, or the exposure that you need, so that it blends nicely in with your background. At the end of the day, you want the background and the foreground to appear fairly seamless. But it is a lot of fun. You can take photos of yourself and put them in Egypt, or put them in Paris. Have a bit of fun with greenscreen, have a bit of fun with Photoshop layers.

A final thing to keep in mind, when you’re shooting with greenscreen, is to keep your subjects evenly and well lit. Keep it as uniform as possible. Any shadows that you have appearing on your greenscreen are going to make it a little bit harder for you to select that part of the image. If there is a little bit of shadow at the feet, it’s okay to leave that in because, at the end of the day, we want a level of three dimensionality in our photograph.

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When buying a camera, keep one thing very firmly in your mind. Cameras are like a girlfriend; they’re replaceable. You’ll spend some money on them for awhile, but eventually a better one’s going to come along. It’s your lenses that you commit to. Your lenses are your wife. They’re where you spend a lot of money, and they’re the things you don’t want to replace. 

When buying a camera, make sure that you’re buying a camera that you can grow into. So when you’re spending money on your lenses, the lenses are interchangeable with the camera that you buy. Some people are Canon fans. Some people are Nikon fans. I’m a Canon fan. To me the brand isn’t as important as how you feel you interact with it.

At the end of the day, buy a camera not for the brand or not for all the features; buy the camera for your budget. Buy the camera that has the features you want to use. For example, you might not need to use an SLR. If all you want to do is take the occasional photo of a child at a soccer game or your family at Christmas, then what you can get away with with a point-and-click these days or a hybrid is just as good. But for the serious photographer that wants to take amazing photos all the time–that really wants to get involved with not just the art of photography, but the science–an SLR is the way to go. Remember, your lenses are more important. Pick your camera based on the lenses that you want to buy.

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One of the biggest questions I often get from the students is what one lens can I buy that does everything. You’ve got to keep in mind that no lens is designed to be efficient and wonderful at absolutely every stall of photography. Different lenses have different uses. The way I like to explain it is lenses are like doctors. So a lens that can do everything the you know eighteen to two hundred and fifty or eighteen to three hundred lens that is good for travelling, good for portraits isn’t going to be great at any one of those things. It’s the GP. It’s the doctor you go for a check-up or a flu shot.

But let’s say that doctor finds something wrong and they want to send you to a specialist. That’s where the different lenses come in. For example a one 180 mm micro lens. This lens does one thing. It does microphotography and it does it without zooming in. It’s the specialist micro lens. As a result even though that 18-300 consume a distance much, the quality of this lens is going to be so much better. The lesser lens can do the more it does any one thing well. As a result i generally carry 4 lenses in my kit. I have my 16-35 landscape lens. This lens is designed for landscapes.

With a landscape lens you want it to be as wide as possible 10-22, 16-35. With a portrait lens it generally wants something around that 50 mm range. 50 mm lenses are amongst the best lenses for portrait photography. And the reason for that is the human eye is actually a 50 mm lens. If you take a photo of 50 mm and compare it with what exactly is in front of you. You will notice the perspective is exactly the same. Other lenses that I use for portrait are something like 70-200 mm lens which a which allows me to zoom in from further away and get nice scanned photographs. A 100-400 lens is good for wildlife. But at the end of the day the lens are used to be right for what I am photographing in order to get an absolutely fantastic shot for that I am happy to hang on my wall or sell to my customers.

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One of the greatest functions on your camera is the continuous shoot. By switching it to continuous shoot rather than thinking about every image, you can hold down your shutter and take multiple exposures.

Doing this sometimes allows us to create a bit of a story in our photos. You’ve all seen it, just that moment when someone slips over, someone falls over, something happens. By staying on continuous shoot, you’re actually getting more photos that you can actually work in to be one complete story. If we have a look at this event here, this was taken in Brazil two years ago at Carnivale. I happened to be walking by just as the float threw a bucket of water onto these two young ladies.

I caught the water just hitting. You can see the actual water droplets just as they’re starting to connect with the girls, followed by the shriek when they decided that, yeah, it was a bit cold. Now let’s try and turn away from the water. And finally the, “Hey, we’re still in Brazil, and we’re still pretty,” photograph at the end of the series.

By using continuous mode, that can happen with your son scoring a goal in a soccer game, or your daughter executing a ballet move in the school concert. Creating that series and having that continuous shoot mode is going to give you a lot more memories to remember forever.

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Live photography on its own is probably my favorite style. It’s almost impossible to leave a photo shoot at night and not have a good photograph. Those long exposures, that slow shutter speed creating the mirror and reflective effect on our river and it gives us an immaculate photo to start with. If slowing down your shutter speed isn’t enough, bring out a SpeedLite, or alternatively, just a normal flashlight. Have someone with you. Have them flash you with the SpeedLite, or shine the flashlight on you repeatedly. What you’re going to start getting then is that beautiful background and a beautiful crisp photo of you in it. The other thing you can actually start doing with night photography which is a lot of fun is light painting. One of the things I try to do every time I run a workshop is challenge every student in our workshops to paint their name backwards using light. So if you want to achieve this wonderful light painting fun when you’re shooting at night, all you need is the flashlight on your phone. Have a slow shutter speed with your camera on a tripod aiming where you want the photo to be, and just walk in front of the camera and write your name backwards. As long as you keep moving, you’ll vanish from the photograph but light that travels a lot slower will remain. Anything with light is going to stay in that slow shutter speed and if you can write your name backwards, you’ll have a fantastic time shooting at night.

Animal photography and pet photography is actually one of the more fun styles. i know a lot of people that all they do these days is take photos of their pet. Let’s talk a bit about how to go about it.

The first thing I like to keep in mind is that pets are like people. They’re a member of our family, so we want to try and be at eye level with them if possible. We want to have that relationship with them, and we want to pass that relationship on to the person looking at the photograph. Another thing to keep in mind is that your pet doesn’t get embarrassed like your wife. They’re not going to be worried about how their hair looks or do they look fat in this coat. Animals have absolutely no sense of inhibition. You can take photos of your pet yawning, sleeping, stretching, eating, and you can definitely get some great photos from any different angle.

Other things to keep in mind, and this is one of my favorite activities when photographing pets, is to call them. Wait till they’re feeling docile. Wait till they’re lying down, and then call their name or give a whistle and watch their ears perk up, watch the head turn, almost like they’re on the hunt. You get some remarkable photos of your animal in action mode as soon as you get to that. Most of these tips can apply to wildlife as well, with the exception of calling them and getting their attention.

If you’re somewhere like the Serengeti or anywhere in Africa and an animal is there, the last thing you want to do is call it to come over to you. But maintaining that eye level, looking for them in their native habitat, having a bit of fun, and you will get great animal photographs

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One of the things that happens a lot when I’m photographing families is I’ll send the kids out to run around a little bit to get better photos. In my right ear, I suddenly hear mum and dad screaming “Hey, get back here; Don’t do that; Stop doing that.” The problem with this is that as soon as kids feel that their imagination is stifled, the fun stops and the photos don’t turn out as well. When you’re photographing kids, say yes to everything. Let them run amok.

Give them a 1-hour-free pass. Here in this photo, we had a brother that wanted to put his little sisters upside-down. Mum was initially, “No, they’ll get hurt,” and I was, “Hey, we’re insured.” At the end of the day, the more fun the kids have, the better the photos will turn out. Say yes to everything. The other thing to keep in mind when photographing kids at play is to let their imaginations run rampant. Sometimes, it’s not enough to say yes.

You have to foster it. Ask questions. Get them thinking. Get them exploring. The more activities the kids are involved with while they are being photographed, the more stories are going to come out. Whenever families bring their kids into me to be photographed; before I even pull out the camera, I’m playing with Barbie dolls, I’m playing with cars and trucks. I’m having tea parties and mud pies for a good 20 minutes. What we want to do is foster that imagination. We want to say yes to everything the kid wants to do and we want to create that relationship with them so it comes out in the photographs.

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One of the most powerful relationships in the world is that of a mother and newborn child, and every father with a camera, is going to be spending thousands of dollars on camera equipment, to get better photos. So let’s talk about how to do that.

Step one: Remember it’s a relationship, let’s photograph it like a relationship. When you’re having a conversation with someone, you build a relationship by having eye contact with them. Likewise, when you are photographing anyone, especially newborns, you’ll notice with this photo here, I’m at eye level of the child.

Secondly, I’m trying to capture that essence of affection, that love between mother and child, so any closeness, and any contact you have with the parents of the child, and the child in the photograph, is going to make it a more powerful photograph. I like shooting newborns in black and white, the main reason, besides black and white being cool, is that infants and newborns quite often have skin discoloration and eczema.

Shooting in black and white removes a lot of that discoloration from the image. Other things to keep in mind is that anything in a baby can be a subject, they’ve got tiny little hands, and tiny little feet, so let’s spend some time focusing right in on the detail. Treat it like macro, if you have a macro lens, get in nice and tight. It’s really cool as well to contrast these tiny hands with the big ones of the father. But whatever you do, you are going to be taking thousands of photos of your newborn and your infant, so please, keep it in focus, keep it at eye level, and keep it affectionate.

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Portrait photography isn’t just taking a photo of a person, it’s trying to tell a story, whether it be in the emotion or the pose of the person in the image. You can see, for example, in this image here in Africa, little girl is a bit scared. You can also see the little stuffed koala that I give every child when I travel.

You can see the mother comforting her, and you can see the grandmother in the background, hands on hips, because they’re meant to be out working. Expression is a major story-telling device when taking a portrait photograph, the other one is pose. Just by crossing an arms, we can make someone look angry, by leaning back we can make them look relaxed. And we can tell a story in multiple ways. Another thing to keep in mind and, looking at the Africa photo again, is that the background is extremely important.

The background, the context, everything is part of the story. We have here multiple things happening to tell the story. We have the expression on the face, we have the positioning of the arms and the posing of the subjects, even though it was completely natural, especially with the grandmother in the background, hands on hips. But the entire environment is part of the story telling process. Remember, as a photographer, we are a story teller. A picture paints a thousand words. It doesn’t mean that we can be lazier than a writer, it just means that we need to be a little bit more efficient.

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These days, you don’t need to have to have an SLR with you everywhere in order to take a photograph. In our pockets, we have phones and the phone quality has improved so much that the cameras in your phone often rival those of a point and click camera. Three things to keep in mind though when you’re using your phone as a camera. Firstly, composition is more important then ever.

Understand what the rule of thirds is. Look and learn about the world of composition. There is a grid that you can turn on on most camera’s display on your phone. Secondly, invest in an app. The software that comes with the camera in your phone is going to be very basic, it’s not going to give you a lot to work with. Spending between $2 and $5 in either the Play Store or the App Store is going to give you software that do a lot more with your photograph. Thirdly, remember that you cannot control exposure from you phone. You cannot control your shutter speed for those long waterfall shots or those beautiful night photos and you can’t control your aperture to increase or decrease your depth of field.

As a rule, your camera is going to function on its ISO. That is, it’s going to make the photo grainier in low light. So think about it when you’re using it and secondly that shallow and not so shallow depth of field you have no control over. Fill your frame with subject because the background is going to be extremely noticeable. But remember the best camera you have is the one that you have with you right now. As long as you can take a photo, you’ll never lose out on that opportunity for a fantastic shot. sss

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Selfies, unfortunately, have become a fact of life. Everywhere you go now you will see people standing in front of every icon in the world holding out a camera or a phone and taking their own photograph. I would prefer not to, however my wife is a huge, huge, huge fan. First rule for taking a selfie is, and I cannot say this with enough emphasis, no duck lips. Duck lips are an absolute no-no. Be yourself, be natural because at the end of the day the photograph will turn out better. The person in the photograph with the longest arms needs to be the one holding the camera.

If you’re using a phone, make sure you know the phone’s operation pretty well so you can take a photo extremely quickly. Secondly, look at the head positions. My head is almost straight on at the camera, whereas my wife Nicole, her head is leaning towards me and a little bit down. That way we’re not seeing any horrible double chins or anything like that on a female. We always want the head sort of just down, just a touch. But generally for the men, eye-level. None of these up high things.

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Someone once told me that filters are cheating. Filters in photography are not cheating; they’re just a tool like your camera to hep take better photographs. There are three filters I want to talk about today. The first one, probably the most common, in the circular polarizing filter. The circular polarizing filter screws onto the front of your lens and allows you to change the polarity of light. When asked what the polarizing filter does, most people would answer “It makes the sky darker.” It does, but it also makes the ground darker as well. It’s not the reason you use it.

The polarizing filter is used to change the polarity of light. It can make surfaces more reflective or see-through. For example, a window can be either using a polarizing filter. Blues become more vibrant, the water can become more reflective or see-through, and skies and grass also becomes much better for landscape photography. The second filter I want to talk about is the variable ND filter. Like the circular polarizer, it screws on the front of the lens, and by switching it, it allows me to change how much light is entering my camera at any time of day. That allows me to pick what shutter speed I want to shoot with, rather than the shutter speed being determined by the brightness of the light. The filter I use the most is the graduated ND filter. this filter starts off dark at the top and works its way to clear at the bottom.

By placing it in front of the camera, I can even the exposure of the sky to the ground, which means I get a more effective landscape. You don’t have to hold the graduated filter in front for the entire time; you can screw on a bracket, slide the bracket in and this filter will sit there comfortably in front of your camera so you are always getting that nicely-exposed sky. I prefer not to use the bracket myself, as it does tend to create a bit of a tunnel and therefore a vignette in the photograph. To see how well one of these works, have a look at the screen and we’re going to put a digital graduated filter on a landscape so we can see how it effects the photograph. So what I’m doing now is drawing a graduated ND filter in front of my photograph and using that to control exactly what’s going on just from where the filter lands.

So you can see from having absolutely bright sky and an even foreground, I can measure my sky to the foreground and have a nice easy exposure. So these three filters – the circular polarizer, the variable ND and the graduated ND filter – are the three filters I never leave home without.

Your camera has a feature called automatic white balance. For the most part, it’s pretty good, it can tell the difference between different sorts of light. What white balance is, is color determined in degrees Kelvin. The higher the white balance, the warmer the photograph. For example, this photograph here. The white balance was set for an outdoor or natural light, so what we ended up getting, was a very yellow image. Every now and then, you might have found a yellow image on your camera, and thought, “Hey, it didn’t look that yellow.” Or, conversely, you might have found a blue image. A blue image happens when we’re outside, using an indoor white balance setting.

On your camera, your white balance settings are generally automatic white balance: sunny, shady, cloudy, uh, tungsten or incandescent, depending on your type of camera, and fluorescent lighting as well. You can also customize your white balance, either from an [inaudible 00:56], or from changing the degrees Kelvin. But let’s keep it simple. If your photo is yellow, you need to move it to an indoor white balance, like tungsten, incandescent, or fluorescent lighting.

If your photo is extremely blue, you need to move it to an outdoor white balance, like, for example, sunny, shady, or cloudy. This photo indoors with an outdoor white balance, needs to change to an indoor white balance setting, so let’s move it over to the tungsten setting on the camera, and we see that the color changes dramatically. Changing our white balance just a little bit can completely alter the feel of a photograph, and get the color correct.

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Everyone seems to think when you say “Macrophotography” that it means flowers, or leaves or petals, but that’s not entirely true. There is a theory that everything in the world has already been photographed.

So I like to work on the theory “let’s push that”. Macro, as far as photography is concerned, would have to be the new frontier. If everything in the world has already been photographed, the question is: how can we photograph it differently?

Everyone has taken a photo of someone’s eyes, in fact, we actually say in photography “miss the eyes, miss the shot”. But what happens if we come in really, really close? The human eye, fruit, macrophotography subjects are absolutely everywhere. If you’re looking for something to do on the weekend and you want to get better at macrophotography, practice makes perfect. One of the assignment I routinely send our students is a scavenger hunt.

Start with the letter A, then move to B. Work your way through the alphabet and the next week challenge yourself to find something with different letters of the alphabet. Watch how quickly and amazingly your portfolio of macrophotography grows.

So remember, macrophotography doesn’t need to be limited just to flowers. Everything can be your subject.

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It always amazes me when I go to a restaurant now, how many phones I see coming out and snapping above a plate of the food they’re eating. That’s not to say I don’t do it. I take photos of almost everything I eat, but just certain tips and certain techniques allow me to get a better photograph, which is quite often what I’m doing for restaurants anyway.

Rule Number 1, is come down to eye level of the food. When we have a conversation with someone, we make eye contact. It’s kind of like doing the same thing. We’re building a relationship between the thing on our plate an f the person looking at the photograph. We want them to think it’s appetizing.

So come down to eye level. Secondly, I’m using my flash, it doesn’t matter if I’m using the flash on my camera, or the flash on my phone, but being in nice and tight at eye level with the food and using my flash is creating that beautiful vibrancy and color and light coming in on the plate. The third thing is, play with the food. I’m a big fan of playing with food. I’ve been doing it since I was 4. What I’ve done here is have repositioned the spoon with the beans to be in the front with the green of the garnish there. I’ve got the tortilla chips and the mints, they’re on the third level of the rice just hiding in the back.

Anytime you have something on the plate that’s the same color as the late, for example, white rice on a white plate, tend to move it out of the focus of the shot. It’s generally not going to show up. If you do want the rice to show up, perhaps drizzle some sauce over the top of it, just to define the edges of the rice. But with simple techniques like that, it’s much easier to go to a restaurant and take much more appetizing photos to put on Facebook and Instagram.

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So we all know that we can use our shutter speed really fast to freeze motion and action, to capture that moment in time, and generally we know that when we’re shooting at nighttime, we can use a slow shutter speed to let in more light and get these beautiful reflections coming down here under the Sydney Harbour Bridge – my hometown. Every time we use a slow shutter speed, whatever’s not moving really really fast is going to become beautifully reflective, going to become like a mirror, and it’s going to bring all this light down from the buildings, including this crisscross pattern from the bridge, down onto our water source. Probably the biggest secret with slow shutter speed is it can be done during the day.

There is a fantastic filter called a variable ND and by rotating the filter slightly, I can make it completely see-through or completely dark, controlling how much light is entering my camera at whatever time of day I want. This is really fantastic for things like waterfalls. When we have water that’s running, rather than becoming a reflective, mirror-like surface, it’s going to become misty and almost cloud-like. By using a variable ND filer during the day, we can control our shutter speed to the point where that water is doing fantastic things in what would typically be a nighttime environment. One of the greatest, greatest uses for the ND filter, and using it during the day, is to eliminate tourists from our photographs.

Everyone’s been to a national landmark like Machu Picchu or the Eiffel Tower or the Statue of Liberty with thousands of tourists crowding the photograph. It’s probably the most annoying thing about being on vacation. Using a slow shutter speed through the variable ND filter, I can eliminate hundreds of tourists from the photograph. The biggest secret is anything moving faster than your shutter speed is going to ghost or eventually vanish from the photograph. By having that slow shutter speed during the day, we can’t see any of the hundreds of tourists that were there at the same time as I was. So the slower the shutter speed, generally the better your landscape photograph.

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One of the coolest things about sports in action photography is that sense of blur that you can get from anything that isn’t moving. It can be the crowd, it can be the street int he situation of this streetcar, unfortunately no named to desire in New Orleans. I took that photo screaming “Stella!” at the top of my voice, just kidding. It’s one of the easiest things to do in photography, but one of the hardest things to get right and that’s that sense of panning.

It’s really important to have a relatively medium shutter speed, 1/6 of a second, 1/8 of a second, 1/10 of a second, or thereabouts, and track your subject perfectly.

As you’re tracking your subject, and if you’re steady, and keeping it straight, and working at the same speed, your subject will remain in focus, and the street will disappear. It’s a lot easier with things like sports, where perhaps your subject is not moving as quick, but when you can get it right with something like a streetcar, or a car, or a plane, even better. So, blurring in sports and action, really easy to do, but it takes a little bit of practice to get there. In sports however, you might want that action frozen, and that’s really going to come down to a very fast shutter speed. The faster the shutter speed, the faster you can freeze absolutely any moment in time.

You’ll notice here on this photograph that we’ve made it so fast, that the ball is just visible, frozen in all it’s glory, and keep in mind, in those pictures, they throw that ball pretty fast, 90 miles an hour, definitely, you don’t want to get caught driving that fast. So, it’s very easy to create life in a photograph, through panning, and freeze motion, and avoid blur, by having that really nice shutter speed.

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Picking an aperture for sports and action photography really comes down to several different details. One, how important is the crowd and the ambiance in the photograph? And two, what sort of environment are you shooting in? For example, Here at Madison Square Garden, shooting the Harlem Globe Trotters, the crowd weren’t too important. It wasn’t bad to have that nice shallow aperture to create that little bit of a blur.

The other benefit of doing so, was that it allowed me to have a faster shutter speed. Remembering that your aperture works in balance with your shutter speed, and your ISO to create the exposure, allows me to think, a shallow aperture, faster shutter speed. When photographing sports its really about that shutter speed, and the shallower aperture allowed me to shoot faster. You’ll also get other aspects coming out of that, and you’ll notice other players on the court, perhaps a little bit blurrier, as they’re in that, outside of that shallow depth of field.

That’s okay, when shooting sports, as long as our balls in focus, and the player we’re photographing right at that minute is in focus, unless they’re going for something a little bit different, that’s the end result, and a shallow aperture allows us to do that.

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There’s nothing worse than when you’re looking at one of your fantastic landscapes later on and finding a tourist just walking through, or a bit of garbage, or even a garbage bin–anything that doesn’t belong in the beautiful landscape. Three things I like to do when I’m taking a landscape photo to try to ensure it is distraction-less. The first is, I’ll use a variable-ending filter. This allows me to slow down my shutter speed so that everything moving faster than the shutter speed–traffic, people, you know, things blowing in the wind–disappear from the photograph. The second thing I like to do is really evaluate my angle. Depending on where I am, I might be seeing a garbage bin, but if I move a little bit around the corner, that garbage bin might be hidden by a tree.

By thinking about where you’re placing everything in your photograph, you’re starting to take a more impactful or a much better landscape photograph.

The third thing I like to do is re-evaluate my photograph and take it as many times that I need to. I look at everything that I take, so I don’t go home and think, wow, when I was in Peru, I wish I had taken that photograph. Having a distraction in your photograph is kind of like Leonardo da Vinci having painted a construction crane in the back of the Mona Lisa. Sure, it might look a bit interesting, ’cause it’s 400 years before the invention of the construction crane, but it doesn’t belong. And anything that doesn’t belong in your landscape doesn’t need to be there when you’re processing at home.

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When taking a landscape, people seem to think that it’s the backdrop, that it’s the thing at the back of the view, kind of like those old Renaissance paintings that are hanging up in your grandmother’s living room. In truth, the landscape starts from where the lens ends. Everything from the lens to infinity is your landscape photograph, and the more vibrant, the more explosive, and the more part of the story that your foreground is, the more effective your landscape. There are three things I do to really try and emphasize my landscape.

The first thing is I pick a focal point generally towards the front. In this case I didn’t. I used the ruins there in my mid-ground, but I’ve still got a very impacting foreground, which is still part of my focus, and that is the llamas. The second thing I do is I raise my horizon. I make sure that my horizon is up on the two-third line, on the top horizontal part of my rule of thirds. The third thing that I like to do is shoot it from a lower angle. Most photographs you see of Macchu Pichu in Peru are shot from above. You’re seeing the entire ruins, and you’re seeing the mountain.

But using that less is more philosophy, coming from lower and shooting up towards Macchu Pichu, I’m perhaps creating a little bit more impact and a little bit more power in my photograph than perhaps if I’ve shot it from above. So when I’m shooting a landscape, I try to shoot from below. I try to shoot up towards my landscape rather than from above to create a much more powerful and impacting photograph with a lot more focus on my foreground and definitely more of a story.

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Using reflection in your landscape photography can dramatically improve the outcome of your photograph. This photograph here at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington D.C. was taken from across the tidal basin and shot through at sunset. As a result of using that slow shutter speed and just that beautiful lighting that was coming in the sky, I managed to get the beautiful light coming through in the vibrancy and the saturation hitting the water, and also the Jefferson Memorial as well. I like to work on the philosophy that any time I can use a reflection, do so.

It’s going to dramatically improve the photograph, exponentially. I also work on the philosophy that if I’m reflecting an image, I don’t necessarily need the complete landmark in the photograph to highlight it. Let’s have a look at this next photograph. So as you can see, here we are at the U.S. Capitol building there in Washington D.C.

The Capitol building, one of my favorite pieces of architecture in the world, didn’t need to be there in all of its glory to have the photograph work, as it does. Any time you see rain, any time it storms, any time there’s a puddle, try and see what’s around it and how you can use that to take a better photograph. Reflections, they make your landscape photographs better. What can I say?

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When taking a landscape photograph and incorporating people, you’ve got to keep in mind one thing. It needs to follow with part of the story. For the love of God, a tourist in a photograph does not a beautiful travel landscape make. 

Notice here on this photograph, we have this lovely Peruvian woman who is making those sweaters that all the tourist buy. I bought four. They are very, very comfortable, but she is part of that story. She is part of that landscape. This was in the Colca Canyon region just outside Arequipa in Peru. If that was, say, a tourist or a bus driver or someone who didn’t fit with that landscape, the photo would have a lot less impact and be a lot less powerful.

People in a landscape photograph can’t be a punctuation mark. They need to be either the subject of the story or interacting with the story itself. That’s how you use people in a landscape photograph.

Transcript

When taking landscape photographs and discussing aperture, there’s an old expression that comes to mind, ‘F8, and be there’. Being Australian, we’ve put our version, which is, ‘F8 is your mate’. F8 gives us that nice in between aperture, it’s not too shallow, or the number’s not to small, the lens isn’t too wide, that we’re not getting that blurry background.

Everyone seems to assume that if we don’t want the blurry background, take our aperture up as far as it can go, F22 or F32, and make it nice and tight. The problem with that is that we get something called diffraction, that is when all these blades in the lens close as the aperture closes. Light starts diffracting, or seeping through the cracks, and we start getting a softer image, it’s not as sharp. With aperture of 8 you’ll notice that even though my focal point is at the front of a photograph, I’m still getting detail all the way in at the back. So F8 and be there, and it’s still going to be your mate.