So now I wanna walk you through one of the key techniques I use on most of my shoots. It's called 50 and stitch. This is not an official name but it's something I've labeled. I call it 50 and stitch because it's shot with a 50 millimeter lens. This lens is my desert island lens. I have it on my camera most of the time, but it's not very wide. what do I do, if I wanna shoot a wide scene? I stitch together a bunch of different images. The nice thing about a telephoto lens, a 50 millimeter or an 85, you can do this technique with an 85 as well. Is it compresses distance? The background of an image comes closer to something in the foreground. If I shoot a scene with a 24 mill lens, it gives me all that space, the wide image, but the background subjects are pushed away from the foreground. What I wanna do is bring everything closer. Connects my foreground to my background. Depth perception is exaggerated with the 24 mill lens, telephoto lenses do the opposite. So we're gonna take my desert ...

island lens and shoot this technique. And I'll walk you through the different processes as I do it. Okay. So I have my focus set on this, this button here back focus. So what I'm doing is framing my subject in the center, focus, half press this shutter button which locks my focus on that vehicle. So then I'll shoot this, adjust the frame, and pick out the rest of the scenes, slight overlap on each one. Look through the view finder when you do this and then to help the edit. When you import all of these images into Lightroom if you're doing a few of these successionally, you can it's hard to tell the difference between one stitch and another. So what I do is I just switch the focus to manual, just put my hand over. Shoot. So then I got a cut. I've got a black frame in my Lightroom film strip just speeds up editing. Another benefit of this technique is it gives you a massive resolution file. By stitching together eight separate images, you're creating a huge working space. So if you wanna shoot a billboard image for a client or something and you can't afford a hassle blade, shoot a 50 and stitch and you get the same resolution or same like cropping factor. So you can really drill down on an image pick out details in post. (melancholy music playing) If you've seen the field day episodes already you may remember me demonstrating a technique called 50 and stitch where I was using 50 millimeter lens to shoot a wide angle scene. I think I talked about a few benefits of the technique but I'll just recap them here. One, you don't have to change your lens from shooting closeups with your 50 mill and then switching to a wide angle scene. Two, you can create huge files which gives you great, a great cropping factor or print resolution. Three, a 50 mil lens will compress distance. So it'll bring background elements closer to the foreground more than a 24 mil might. And also you can play with depth to field with a 50 mill lens. It, it can really throw out the background blurring out and introduce great bouquet into the image and does it more beautifully than the or do it more drastically than the 24 mil lens can. You may also remember me shooting a picture of my hand switching it into manual focus, taking a picture of my hand switching it back to auto focus, locking on my subject, clicking and then stitching the frames around. And then when I'd finished, switching it back into manual focus and taking another picture of my hand you may have been thinking, why is he doing that? Well, let's have a look at light room and I think it'll become pretty clear. So when you import your card, everything's gonna come in sequentially and be ordered according to capture time. So that's one of the, the other straight away. I may have noticed this blank frame here and a hand frame here. So I now know that everything in between these two frames is part of a 50 and stitch. So all I need to do is select them all and hit control M, which tells light room to create a panoramic image from all of those separate frames. Had I not shot these blank frames? I wouldn't know where the stitch started and where it ended. So light room's just done its thing. There are a few projection methods up here. Perspective obviously looks horrendous is really distorting everything. I think perspective's great for landscape scenes where everything's quite flat. But where we've got a focal point, It's not gonna work for me. And so let's try cylindrical. No looks much better. My choice is cylindrical as well for arguments sake. I don't like that. That looks more like a fish eye lens. You can see the distortion in the Landover here. So we'll switch back to cylindrical and we'd hit merge to, to, to instruct light room to merge everything together and create one big file. Rather than doing that again, let's just show you this one which is one I have done earlier. And, You can see I've taken out the dog and taken out the people using the cylindrical tool. But you can see here, I've got a really massive file. 11,324, like 9 0 9 0 5 9. And you can see the depth of field at work here. This background's really thrown out a focus in a more dramatic fashion than a 24 mill lens would give me. Have fun with it. Send me some examples, I'd love to see them. Yeah, that's it.

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Finn Beales

Finn is an award-winning travel, lifestyle and commercial photographer based in the United Kingdom where he lives with his wife and two children.

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topics covered in this class

Documentary Adventure & Sports Post-Processing

Ratings and Reviews

Brent Morris

Fantastic My thoughts on the storytelling workshop. The short is; it’s fantastic. The long is I loved all the details covered, from shot types and the ideas behind them to the call sheets and shot lists, and the whole process. I felt like I had a better understanding of how to schedule a professional shoot and I really felt like I had a much better grasp on many ideas and concepts, and I believe I’ve been able to improve my photography with them, so thank you and Finn. It really is fantastic.

Oswaldo Martinez

A path to better stories Very happy I got this workshop. Finn and Alex do a great job at teaching highly useful methods and specific advice to help you improve your own work, and more importantly, tell better stories that are meaningful to you.

Tommaso Selleri

Simply the best This is simply the best workshop out there on photography and storytelling. Finn is awe inspiring and so real and authentic. A pleasure to watch, a joy to learn from such master. I really hope a volume 2 is coming soon! Thank you for this one!

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Shooting Technique 1: 50 & Stitch

Shooting Technique 1: 50 & Stitch

Lesson Info

23. Shooting Technique 1: 50 & Stitch

Lessons

Series Introduction

Introducing Finn Beales

Q&A Coffee With Finn & Alex

Welcome to the workshop

Gear

What is a story?

Essence: Location

Essence: Character

Essence: Events

Photography as a Medium

Recap

The Importance of Shot Type

Prepare for Success

Asking The Right Questions

Identifying Your Locations

Developing Treatments & Mood Boards

Creating a Call Sheet & Shot List

Meeting Your Subjects

The Board Room

Location Recce

The Roadtrip

Surf Day