From the course: Landscape Photography: Tropical Scenes

Taking a shot of a grove of palm trees

From the course: Landscape Photography: Tropical Scenes

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Taking a shot of a grove of palm trees

- We've established the key to tropical landscapes in Hawaii for me is the emotion of paradise, and in order to achieve that, I really want palms trees, and so I've been searching the island, looking for a pairing of the trees and the beach and the ocean, everything that comes together and really gives that feeling of paradise, and we've come across this wonderful grouping of dense palm trees, and we've got some man-made elements, we've got benches, some torches, and these elements really can take the viewer as if, wow, I want to sit there, I want to be in that place and that's what I'm after. Now this is a little bit different than a typical seascape. I didn't put water shoes on, I'm not worried about turning my back to the ocean, I'm not playing with shutter speeds on water, this is very, very different. In fact, I'm hand-holding the camera. It's so bright out and typically always bright in Hawaii, during the day, that I've got it on f11, ISO 200, getting a very fast shutter speed, and I'm walking around and just finding different compositions. I'm also really playing with the light. I've got partly cloudy skies, which enables me to take some photographs with sunlit on the sand, and I've also got shade, which is a little bit more diffuse in softer light, and if I shoot in both situations, I'll have options in post, so I'm going to continue to kind of walk around this area and just get as many different unique comps as I can. That was so much fun, just walking around these beautiful palm trees and working different compositions. Now, as a traditional landscape shooter trained on landscapes, a tripod is just so natural to me. 99% of the time I have it with me, my camera on it, mounted with a remote shutter, but I got to tell you, the more I do this, the more I realize there are plenty of opportunities and reasons why you might want to ditch the tripod and go hand-held, and this is a classic example. It's so liberating just to walk around, and when you're using a wide-angle lens, if I move a little bit low, a little bit high, right, left, I can switch to vertical very quickly, and doing all that, checking my shutter speeds, I'm everywhere from 250th of a second to 400th of a second, and what that means is, these are all sharp images. Now, I still want you to check, I still want you to take the time, review, zoom in, and make sure, so the point here is sometimes, that tripod away, you can really explore and have a good time as a result. A couple of things I noticed as I was photographing. The dynamic range is pretty great between the bright white clouds out there and the deep shadows here in the sand, and fortunately, with the Sony A7R Mark II, I'm able to get all the dynamic range in one shot. If you're struggling with your particular camera, yes, it does make sense to get the tripod out and definitely bracket so that you have all the information. Fortunately, and the main reason I have this camera, is that I'm able to get it in one shot, which is really, really nice, so what we're going to do is go back, I'm going to take a look at these and pick my favorites to edit.

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