It's time to rock our landscapes. Now I have here my Nikon DVD 200. And I put on here a tokina 11 to 16 wide angle lens. This is designed for crop sensor cameras, and it has a super wide angle which is going to be awesome for scenes like this. It's beautiful quality and it's also very affordable. Jim makes that a great lens for your toolkit if you're looking for a wide angle crop sensor lens.

Now what we're gonna do is flip this over to our mountain setting first and I'm going to go ahead and pop up john, I'm going to show you guys what we all do when we start shooting photography. Alright, so I'm going to go ahead and just kind of frame my little image here and this looks nice. And what I'm doing here is I'm placing my horizon just smack dab in the middle of my frame. I'm not kind of thinking about anything compositionally. I'm not moving around looking at different angles. I'm not trying to frame the shot, how I would like it.

Before I'm shooting anything. What I want you guys to do in your brain in your head is to set up your composition First, it doesn't matter if you're shooting in an automated mode or a manual mode. Help the camera out by choosing your composition. Now I'm going to show you what I'm seeing I have this beautiful sunset in the background. We've timed this perfectly when we shoot landscapes, we generally want to shoot him at two times a day one is either during sunrise which is incredibly difficult to get up at four in the morning to get up for sunrise. One is during sunset, which most of us prefer anyway.

So we're shooting during sunset during these two times a day. We have beautiful colors in the sky, particularly when the sun is right below the horizon at both time of day we get what's known as peak color. So we're going to do is we're going to set up for peak color, we already have the sun kind of peeking through the clouds, we'll get some of those as it drops down and the colors really amplify we're going to get those shots. So let's set this up on our tripod. Now I'm gonna go ahead and dial in and just get my right composition here. So let me go through the viewfinder have this water coming through right along this edge.

It looks really really nice. Now what I'm gonna do is pop this on and it's still in landscape mode. So I'm just gonna take another shot for you guys. And let's see how it turns out. So we're autofocus it's focused on the right area. Let's pop that shot off What's happening here?

At ISO 400, we're reducing dynamic range of the image dynamic ranges that range of detail from our shadows all the way to our highlights. And we want to keep that at the lowest possible native ISO, which is ISO 100. Because anytime we increase, we're losing our image detail, we're losing dynamic range, we're losing color, we're losing sharpness and so forth. So if I were to switch into manual I first want to use ISO 100. Next, I want to use an adapter that will give me a broad depth of field and it did that it actually closed down the aperture knowing that we're in landscape mode, we told the camera well we want a broad depth of field so it used an aperture of F nine or a small if that lens to increase our depth of field to yield a sharper image. Okay, so what about shutter speed.

Now what it's trying to do is keep the shutter speed relatively high, but what I actually want is to slow down the shutter speed, because what I want to do in this scene is I want to slow the shutter speed so we have that wispy kind of effect to water. Alright, so we know how the automated landscape mode approach this shot. Now let's do things our way. I'm going to dial everything in manually based on what I want, you're going to see how much additional control we have in getting an even better image than what we have with the automated mode. Let's go ahead and turn the camera on. And I'm going to flip over to manual mode and then flip our live view on now my battery's very low.

So we're going to try and do this a little bit on the quick side. I'm f7 one here. Now what I want to do is keep my ISO ISO 100, which I'm at, I'm going to slow down my shutter speed until I get to a point where well actually want it to be a little bit lower at 100 of a second, we're not going to be freezing enough of the I'm sorry, we're not gonna be showing enough the motion I want to get down to, let's say, one 10th of a second, or one fifth of a second, or even one second and so forth. Now what are we doing now is playing the landscape photographer waiting game. Now landscape photographers should be very familiar with this because basically all it is is you go to a location, find your beautiful spot setup, and you wait for the perfect light, whether it's during sunrise or sunset.

That's exactly where to do now. So we're going to wait for peak color and then I'm going to show you guys the actual settings that we're using to capture the shot at that point. Remember one thing we're shooting right now in RAW and JPEG. I want to have the JPEG file just so I have something to show Immediately, but I want to have that raw file because I want to yield the maximum dynamic range, the best possible image in this scene. And to do that, I need my raw file so I can post produce later on. Alright, let's wait now for peak color, and then we'll come back and show you what we get.

Alright, so the sun has set now and we're freezing cold, nothing at this point is going right. What happens so far is our Nikon D 5200 did indeed die, the battery's dead, and our rebel is almost dead and we still have another shot that we need to get with it. So I don't want to bring that up onto the tripod because it might die to also the sunset and we didn't get peak light because we have this super dense cloud cover right now. So it didn't really let any light shine through for peak light, but that's okay, we're still gonna get an awesome shot. Now for those of you wonderful people that wish to be landscape photographers. What I just encountered is very typical.

Getting those perfect, fine art landscape photos requires not only a lot of work, it also requires actually perfect conditions. Landscape photographers will get up at 2am to hop 10 miles into a location to arrive at sunrise, they will wait for hours for that perfect sunset and they will do whatever it takes to get that shot. Oh, and lastly, they will do it multiple times. We know incredible professional landscape photographers that have shot the same location and during that same physical torment 10 to 15 times just for that one time when the stars aligned and the weather was perfect. What's the point of telling you this? Well, just know because we want you to know that it takes what it takes to get truly amazing landscape images and we want you to keep on trying when Mother Nature doesn't cooperate.

Use your weather reports, scout your locations, try and try again until you get that perfect shot. When you do be sure to share it with everybody on SLR lounge. What I've done now is popped on a five day Mark three onto the camera but the thing is, we'd probably get a better image out of the DVD 200 simply because it has a broader dynamic range. We have 13 points. Seven stops on a DVD 200. And we only have around 12.5 inch on the five D three.

So don't get caught up in the camera because this camera I don't know for this scene, it'll give us a really great image but still a decent 200 dP 200 would probably be what I would prefer. Now I'm freezing cold. And that's why I'm having a hard time talking to you. All right, now, let's go ahead and hit live viewers check out the settings right now we're running around a two second exposure. And again, check out the histogram, we have quite a bit pushed this left side so I might even slow down the shutter speed a little bit more. I'm shooting a manual and you can see that we're pushing the right side, the highlights just right over to the edge without trying to blow out any of these bright cloud areas.

So I'm going to maybe go around 333 point two seconds out. And we're at F 11 ISO 100. Again, ISO 100 to maximize dynamic range f 11, because that's going to give us a super sharp image with a good depth of field that we're at that optimal image sharpness for our aperture. Okay, so let's go ahead and take a shot here. That looks really nice, I might brighten it up even a little bit more. Maybe I'll drop this down to FA and then keep my exposure on two seconds.

So that's it. What I want you all to do is to go out and play with landscape mode. Try it out in your camera, this whole thing was about landscape mode to see how it works and automated mode and your camera. And then after you guys get your compositions After you create your shot and after you see what landscape mode does by stopping down the aperture by keeping the shutter speed high enough by changing the ISO go ahead and dial in your settings manually. See if you can get a better image by download settings custom to essentially what you want the scene gauge what you want your shutter speed to be at what you want your after to be out based on your depth of field based on the sharpness of the lens, shutter speed based on if you're trying to freeze action or if you're trying to show the motion in the shot and keep the ISO as low as possible so you get the best dynamic range in the shot.

Afterwards. Once you Get an image that you're happy with posted to SLR lounge calm and tell everyone about it. We'll see you on the next video.