Photo Adventure Transcript

Download the winning photo here.

Hey guys and welcome to the first episode of macro photography where I take you with me to discover and capture small, beautiful photos, that most people would walk past without a thought. At the end of this video don't forget to cast your vote by leaving a comment below on the shot you like most from today's adventure. I'm your host Jay and let's get started...

Today we are taking a trip to a normal, everyday local park. Anybody can go to a park. Here you can see some clips of what the park looks like. You probably even have a park like this around your area. So you see there isn't much here to offer other than some really nice looking trees and there's lake in the distance but not many flowers around, mostly green grass and brown trees. but that's ok because with macro photography you can always find something and hopefully this video will give you some ideas and inspiration on what to look for so don't give up at first glance. You can see it's a windy day today and that will not work in our favor for some of this video. I shoot on a f stop of 2.8 so you're going to see video a little later that moves in and out of focus as the wind blows everything around but this is just to give you an idea of what we are working with and later we will actually go into the photos. Alright, start the music and let's go see what we can find...

Well there you have it. You see that we didn't do too bad. The wind was blowing a little bit more than I wanted. You could tell at the flower with the and inside of it that was really nice shot. We'll see what the photos look like.

But for video it was just a little bit too hard. I had another video of a close up of that part but it was just way too blurry I couldn't even put it in the video it just look like a mess. but basically what we'll do now is start going through the photos. Pick out the ones that we want and see what we walk away with at this photo shoot. So here you can see that I have a structure here. I have a folder called choice and I have a folder called photos. And so I went ahead and put all of my photos into the photos folder and here we can see that I have about 298 photos. So I had my view on extra large icon so that I can kind of see what the photos look like without having to click on each individual one and here I'm just going to kind of quickly skim it. Pic selected few that I think would be my choice preferred out of those sets and then we'll actually go into Photoshop and just kind of color corrected just little bit not too crazy a lot of people go in depth with color correction. I don't do too much.

So here we're going to pick out a couple things We're looking for photos that we think that it's in focus. I'm going to select a few here. Make sure to remember to hold your control key while your selecting or your going to lose all of your selections before. These photos I really like when I was taking this photo I knew immediately that I was going to like these. I'm going to select a couple of them there so I can have a couple to choose. We'll select some of those. Basically anything with insects you want to try to make sure that the eyes are in focus. It makes your photo look a lot better. We're going to choose, since I can't really tell in this view I'm just going to choose a little bit more than normal that I would choose. And then we'll go into Photoshop and zoom in to see really what's going on there. The same thing with the flowers. So this is because the wind was blowing, it really screwed me up. So we're going to select a bunch of these flowers because I can't tell with this view if the ants are in focused or not. I mean some of them look like it some of them definitely don't look like it but. Alright, this tree. I really like this tree. The white and the dark it would be really good for a black and white photo I think. I have a friend who his whole wall is black and white photos and so this could actually be a really good gift for him. So I kind of like, actually I'll go with that one. Alright this photo. So I kind of knew I was going to like this photo to when I was taking it.

I like the beam of light kind of sparkling through. And then there's this moth. So I was walking out to the exit just happen to look through, look at a plant. I saw this moth hanging out there. Now, it was really hard to get this guy. The wind was blowing super hard on this one. A lot of it is going to be out of focus. So basically, I'm going to have to grab a bunch of them again and in Photoshop kind of like to look through them See if we can capture one.

Alright, So I've selected all of them and bring them all the way down to Photoshop. Open them up in there. Okay so there's a couple things that I do first off. First I'm going to do the auto leveling and auto contrast. We'll see how Photoshop does with this photo with that because sometimes it hits it where I like it enough and I'll just go with that is quick and easy and I don't have to spend much time on the photo. So what I start out with is control shift alt L and that'll do the auto contrast. And then I'm going to do control shift L and that's going to be the auto levels. And so here we can see that it did all right. We'll go back to the history and we can switch between the two so there you can see it kind of popped it, it pops it a little bit more.

Alright I'm going to keep this one. So I'm going to go ahead and save it. Go to "save as", see the folders, I move up to that choice folder. Click on it. Click save. I usually do it at the highest and there we go so now we have our first choice photo out of that set.

Go ahead and close and go to the next ones. again we start out with the control shift alt L. And then control shift L. Now I'm not sure if I like this too much. It makes it a little bit more pink. So what I do next if I don't like it, I go back to the, in the history, go back to the open layer. And then I'm going to go ahead and do some layer adjustments. So go up to layer, new layer, new adjustment layer, go to levels, click OK. And I'm going to kind of slide this around a little bit and then hit OK and then I'm going to go to the contrast and I'll just bump it up just a little bit like 5.

All right so, I'm going to go with this one. I'm going to go ahead and save it. Alright so we're just going to keep doing this and I'll probably speed up the video so basically just keep in mind that first I do the control shift alt L, control shift L, see what the Photoshop does. If I like it or not. And if I don't then I messed with it a little bit more manual by doing layer adjustments.

So we ended up with about 17 photos out of the 200 something. These photos are the ones that would really like. The cream of the crop of our whole adventure right here. So what I'm going to do, we're going to go ahead and look at them and then I'm going to pick my top three that I favor out of the most and I want you guys to vote. Leave a comment on the videos. Let me know which one you like the best okay? I want to know, out of these three photos, which one you like and so I can already tell that some of my favorites. One is definitely going to be the ants one.

So I just got to pick which one of these do I like the most. Do I like this one? This one was showing more of the flower. This one, a little bit more close up of the ant. Or that one so you know I'm going to go with this one that shows a little more of the flower and you can see the ant right here. You know what this is a pretty good one. So I'm going to pick this one is one of my favorites. The next thing, definitely this one. Couldn't wait for it. So this is another one. Option 2. And option 3 is definitely going to be the sun sparkling through the leaves. So alright guys, so let's go ahead and go through all of them. There's this photo. I like this one, it's alright. This one, this one I could almost do without but I wanted to keep it. This isn't too bad. I like this one because of the curve right here. This one, this is one of my favorites. Iif I was a black and white photo person I would definitely dig this one. And then there's that moth. It was alright. We got, we found one that was pretty good. Yeah this is alright.

Alright there you have it, here are my 3 favorite photos from this adventure and I want to hear from you on which one is your absolute favorite if you had to choose one of these three. Cast your vote by leaving a comment below to let me know and I'm going to go ahead and give you guys my favorite pick out of these three I'm going to leave it in the comments below as a download so you can do whatever you want with the it. Put it as a desktop wallpaper. I always like to do that. Or you know, put it on a mug. Put it on a pillow. Put it on a postcard. Do whatever you want. Enjoy guys and don't forget to like and subscribe to my channel for upcoming macro photo adventures. Each video will have my favorite picture for you to download for free. Alright guys happy photo hunting! See you next time!