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Shooting Outside

Lesson 10 from: Art Photography: Capture Beautiful Artwork

Sean Dalton

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Lesson Info

10. Shooting Outside

Next Lesson: Chapter 3: Quiz

Lesson Info

Shooting Outside

Alright guys, So at the end of the last lesson, I did say that I was gonna go edit, but actually I want to take a few minutes to show you how you can shoot outside and how you can capture some really good photos outside. So you might be thinking Shawn, why are you standing in the middle of a random street? I'm standing in the middle of the street because I was driving down this road and I found this plant and I thought it was perfect. I absolutely love the color of this plant and I think it complements charlie's work really well, charlie has two of these small illustrations, the pink ones that were shooting earlier and the colors really just go well with the screen. So we're gonna capture a few shots of those here real quick. And my friend Eileen is here to help me, I'm just gonna have Noeleen hold the artwork up in front of these plants and I'm just gonna capture a few photos. But before we do that, I do want to talk about the lighting and when you're shooting outside, the most import...

ant thing is to have once again, even lighting, if you're shooting in the middle of the day, it's gonna be very hard to get this, even lighting, you're gonna have a lot of shadows, you're gonna have a lot of bright areas and it's just not gonna look very good. But if you're shooting in the afternoon, like for example right now it's about 4:30 p.m. The sun is starting to set, The light is really nice. So it's actually a really nice time to shoot. And if you can look behind me you can see the lighting is very flat. It's very simple and that's because we're shooting in 100% shade. So if you are going to shoot in the middle of the day, make sure you're either shooting in full shade or in full sunlight. So then you don't have a bunch of crazy shadows and everything is just gonna be nice and evenly lit. But I definitely recommend shooting either early in the morning or in the afternoon. And it's even better if you can shoot on an overcast day because an overcast day means the light from the sun is going to be very nicely diffused. And if the light is still a little bit harsh, well you can use the diffusers that we talked about earlier on in this course to help soften that light. So the lighting we have here is really nice and I'm super excited about how these photos are gonna come out. So nailing is gonna help over here. We're gonna capture a few shots and I can't wait to show you guys these. So in terms of camera settings I'm shooting with a millimeter lens. F 1.4 the same lens I was shooting with before but instead of stopping down my aperture to like F four F 5.6 to get more sharpness to the frame. We're shooting wide open at F 1.4. And I'm doing that because I want this to be nice and blurry and the artwork to be nice and focused and it gives it that really cool artistic look. Nice. One thing I really love about aliens nails is her nails really match the color of the artwork and when you're holding up artwork in front of a plant or wherever you're holding it in front of you could be holding it in front of a forest or something like that, whatever is on your arms or your hands can really add to that scene. So I really like that aliens nails are the shade of blue. It really complements charlie's work well and I think it looks really cool and we can capture these with the iphone as well. So I'm gonna do that and I'm gonna use portrait mode to help blur the background a little bit. And once again, if you don't have portrait mode on your phone or if you don't have a newer phone that has a third lens that's gonna blow the background, you can use one of those apps. We talked about earlier focus for the iphone and after focus for android phones, that's gonna give you a really cool artistic look behind your image. And I highly recommend trying those out. But now that we've captured these straight up shots with the photos in front of this really cool plant. We're just gonna head across the street here and capture a few Flatley photos with the photos straight on the ground. So let's go do that now. So we cross the street here because there's some grass, we're in like a really random area and I think that's something to take away from this lesson is you can find cool places to shoot your artwork outside, literally anywhere like you could be in the middle of a desert and there might be a single bush, but as long as you kind of crop everything out, it can look like your photos in a jungle, you know, So we're just gonna capture a few flat layers of charlie's work here on this grass. I like this grass because it's like wild grass, it's very thick and it has a lot going on. And then there's also some leaves here and they kind of add some nice color. So I'm just gonna take our basic flat lay here like we were doing before and capture it like this. Just kind of move things around a little bit and we do have a few more pieces of art here that we can just put down and just kind of shoot them all together. And I'm just kind of styling it with things that we have available to us, which in this situation is leaves nice. I really like these photos here. I think the colors are looking really nice and because this grass is pretty dark green, it's really allowing these lighter colors in charlie's illustrations to really pop and really come out. And I think that looks really nice. And once again, we'll capture a few with the iphone here. So for this, I'm just going to use the normal iphone camera here and get close awesome. You can just arrange these however you want. You know, there's there's no right or wrong here and but that's about it for shooting outside. Guys, I just wanted to show you some of the techniques that you can follow for shooting outside, where to find good lighting, Where to find even lighting as well as just give you some general inspiration on where you might want to shoot when you're outside. So I hope this lesson was helpful for you. But now it's finally time to edit. So we're gonna head back to the studio, we're gonna sit down on the computer and we're gonna edit a bunch of photos from today. So let's go do that now.

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