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iPhone Timelapse for Landscape Photography

Lesson 13 from: Photoshop and Lightroom for Landscape Photographers

Matt Kloskowski

iPhone Timelapse for Landscape Photography

Lesson 13 from: Photoshop and Lightroom for Landscape Photographers

Matt Kloskowski

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Lesson Info

13. iPhone Timelapse for Landscape Photography

Lesson Info

iPhone Timelapse for Landscape Photography

Somebody had asked, we were talking at lunch a few of us, and we were just you know, kind of going over the iPhone, I had mentioned it earlier, so everybody here kind of has already kind of seen or talked about this, but I thought it was kind of a neat topic on how these are changing landscape photography. One of the things that I shared was I used to take another camera body or take my camera body out of commission and make it to do time lapse. And so what would happen is you know, I have a Nikon D810, so it's 36 megapixel files, right, and you're taking literally hundreds if not thousands of these things to do these time lapse photos. And then what would happen is I would either not do anything with them because I just didn't feel like half the time or whatever, or I would do something with 'em, create the time lapse, and then most of the time I'd send it to my phone or my iPad or post it online somewhere that nobody's really seen the thing any bigger than 1080P or something like tha...

t. So what I shared was I have one of those, those tripods that just Gorilla Pod makes 'em, anybody makes 'em. Go on Amazon and do a search for iPod tripod and or just walk outside and ask an Amazon employee because like from what I hear the whole area is Amazon. But anyway, so what I do is I either just attach it to my tripod and while I'm shooting I just have the photo app running the time lapse, and so I thought it'd be kind of cool to show you one that I did when I was in Yosemite. I knew I was kind of planted in one place and I had a little, just a little crappy tripod with me, and I just kind of stood it up and attached, attached the tripod, the little phone tripod to it. But check it out, I mean, I just let, let it sit there for like 20 minutes. I mean that's pretty cool for your phone, you know? So anyway, I just thought I'd share that 'cause I know we were talking about it at lunch and it seemed kind of neat, but just some things you can do while you're out there just to kind of change it up a little bit. I always wanted to have the time lapse, but I either didn't wanna bring another camera or I didn't wanna tie up my existing camera 'cause I'm shooting stills with it, so this is, this has proved to be a fun little addition for it. All right. I wanted to, there's one, one little section that I missed on the, the sky, and that was shooting into the sun. So I wanted to show you one last thing on that and then we'll jump into our workflow segment. One of the things that I do is me personally I love to shoot into the sun, that's like when I get to some place and if I can set up in a location where I know I can get the sun going down behind a mountain, behind a tree, whatever it happens to be, to me I love that little, that little burst that you get, you know, the burst gets helped if you shoot it like F16, F22, you get that nice little sun star. And I like to get that, to me it signifies a moment in your photography rather than just being there, it's kind of like that's a specific moment that happened in the day, it only happens once. The problem with that is as you start to do it more and more you start to see like little, little nuances and issues with it. So the problem with it is if you shoot, I always like a tiny little sun star, right? If you stat to shoot right when the, as the sun is going down what happens is is the little sun star starts to, it gets a little bit out of control, all right. It starts to get bigger, it starts to get a lot of flare around it and whatnot. But the nice part about it is it's casting some nice warm light on whatever is in your foreground. Well to me, I like that nice little sun star, and that you get like just as the sun is literally hitting the peak, going down below the peak, it's only for a couple of seconds. The problem is, is by the time that happens all of the stuff that was going on in your foreground, all of that nice warm light is gone. So just, these are just little things that I've picked up over the years that after doing it enough I've noticed the difference of I like part of this better and I like part of this better. So how do you merge the two? Hopefully this is starting to sound like a broken record to you guys by this point and if it is then hopefully I think I've done my job right with because it should just be a lot of repetitive kind of things. We would select both photos, go to Photoshop, Edit In, Open as Layers. And that's gonna do the same thing that it's been doing all day, it's gonna drop two images in Photoshop, two layers on top of each other. So what do we do? You guys could probably recite back to me. Step one, add layer mask. Layer mask is black so we know that we have to, or layer mask is black. The layer mask is white so we know that we have to paint on it with black. So I'll get my brush tool, set the foreground to black, and then what do we, so what do we wanna paint on here? Well I don't wanna hide this part 'cause this is the part that I like, what I wanna hide is the sun start that starts to get a little bit overbearing. So I'm just gonna paint and I'm gonna probably use a lower, lower opacity brush. Just paint over the top. So now I get that nice little sun star. It's not too overbearing, it's not too flared, I don't get all that, that light that you get coming off of it, I get that nice little sun star and I keep some of that nice warm light that we had that was coming down in the, shining down in the foreground here. A little bit of a shadow, a little bit of warm. So to me it's kind of the best of both worlds for it. All right, so that was the last, last in the sky installment. I have to get, here wait, let's show it one more time. (audience laughs) Even if we lower the opacity it'll look more yellow. You know, see, you know what this reminds me of? This reminds me of when we first all got Photoshop, whether it was six months ago for you or whether it was 15 years ago for you, you know you did this. You know at some point you did something that just looked absolutely horrible and part of you said, huh. Honey come here, look at this really quick. So we all did it, come on, admit it, we all have done something horrible in Photoshop and thought it looked good at some point. What I, you know, remember the, remember the HDR craze, like four, five years ago when everybody was talking about and doing something with HDR. The funniest most common thing 'cause you know, working where I did, you know, I was around a lot of photographers, the funniest thing is you'd see a photo and I'd say to the person like, did you kind of juice that up in HDR? No, no, no, just a little. And in the meantime there is not a shadow in the photo, there is not a highlight in the photo and it's radioactive. I'm like, did you, and I think what happens is you just got desensitized to it, you know, it's just like, it was crazy.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Lightroom Presets
CreativeLive Sky Pack

Ratings and Reviews

Barry Walsh
 

Great class Matt! I am about two-thirds the way through the class and have learned a lot about Lightroom and the objective of this course. I must admit I was over-whelmed by the amount of material covered and that was probably due to not having prior knowledge about Lightroom. I have since signed up for the 7 day trial of Adobe Creative Cloud Photography plan and then went through their "beginner's" tutorial. If you are contemplating taking this course, I would highly recommend taking the Adobe Lightroom tutorials first. They cleared up a lot of confusion on my part and I now have a better understanding of the concepts Matt covered. I'm actually going to go back and retake what I viewed to help reinforce both what Matt initially covered and the basic concepts tutorials offered by Adobe. Again, great job Matt and thanks for all the useful information!

a Creativelive Student
 

Matt is the best and he his the same in person. I had the fortunate opportunity to run into Matt on the side of the road at Dallas Divide in Colorado a couple of years ago.... he is the real deal. I have learned almost all my LR post processing from him when he was with Kelby and have continued to follow him over to On1 as he is the best teacher out there when it comes to Post. Great class and bring him back again. Another great CL class ....... bravo!........ Johnny Boyd @ natureimaging.com

Student Work

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