How to shoot a blockbuster with a mobile phone in Iceland?

When you come to Iceland, you are a photographer. In Iceland, you can shoot movies at will, and Iceland is full of beautiful scenery ... Many people must have heard that with their yearning for Iceland, many people go to Iceland not far from Wan Li. But photography always brings heavy equipment, which is really inconvenient. Bian Xiao will tell you that in fact, in Iceland, mobile phones can also shoot movies.

Patience, patience, patience again.

It is important to say it three times. Patience is the most indispensable thing to take photos in Iceland, especially in the face of uncertain Iceland.

When I went to shoot in the Feather Canyon (Fjaerárgljúfur), I deeply realized this.

As we all know, the unpredictable weather in Iceland makes people believe the weather forecast, and I never make a shooting plan according to the weather forecast. At that time, I was also very headstrong and went there.

Can you imagine? In just four hours, I experienced a clear sky, overcast clouds, pouring rain and sunny weather after the rain in Wan Li. I have to say that the weather in Iceland is much more capricious than me. After arriving at the destination, it's a pity that the weather is not beautiful, the sun is too bright, the contrast between light and dark parts is too big, and there are too many shadows. In short, it is not suitable for shooting, so I can only go somewhere else first and come back the next day.

Fundamentals of mobile phone shooting method 1: exposure control Iceland

The sky is fantastic, and I always want to include the shape of clouds in the sky in the picture when taking pictures, but this brings a problem. The brightness of the sky is often much greater than the ground landscape. How can we balance this contrast when taking pictures?

The most intuitive solution is to use the "add and subtract light" function in the mobile phone photo App.

Take the camera App of OnePlus3T as an example, drag the small sun icon outside the focus circle, turn up the light clockwise and turn down the light counterclockwise:

Another solution is "spot metering".

In manual photo mode, after clicking the focus ring at any position on the screen, try to drag the focus ring to separate the focus from the metering point, so that you can focus on the main body while metering. As follows:

Foundation 2: Take photos in RAW format.

The advantage of the format is that it greatly facilitates post-processing, for example, it will not damage the image quality when adjusting the white balance in the later stage. The opening method is as follows: First, select the "Manual" mode in the shooting mode list, and then click the "Settings" button to save.

The RAW format photo switch is turned on.

Foundation 3: Manual White Balance Although the photos are taken in RAW format, we can adjust the white balance freely in the later stage, but we still suggest that you specify the white balance manually as much as possible in the early stage.

The purpose of doing this is nothing more than finding the late style you want as soon as possible when shooting. Especially for Iceland.

Personally, I think this kind of scenery scene is very suitable for the later period of cool color, so I might as well adjust it directly to cool color when shooting in the early stage and look for inspiration at any time.

Photography Experience: Landscape Photography —— Establishment of Iceland's Sense of Space

When taking pictures, a big pain point for many people is that when they look at the scenery with their own eyes, they can feel an extremely broad field of vision, but they can't convey this magnificent feeling after taking pictures. So the following three tips are to solve this problem from several different aspects.

Tip 1: Draw a horizontal line of sight and establish a sense of space.

This set of pictures is cropped at the picture scale of 16: 5. The original intention of doing this is to restore the way people watch in real scenes through such composition.

In Iceland, the natural landscape with a wide field of vision has few obstructions within sight. At the same time, the amount of information in the horizontal direction is much greater than that in the vertical direction, as shown in the following figure:

The uncut original size picture is 4:3.

Most of the information in the picture appears in the horizontal central area. When watching with your own eyes, most people's eyes will move back and forth near the horizon, and it is precisely the left and right movement of the line of sight that forms the "open feeling" of the field of vision.

In contrast, neither the large sky at the top of the screen nor the snowflakes at the bottom of the screen can provide enough effective help for broadening the horizons.

Crop to 16:5

As shown in the above picture, Iceland only keeps the central area along the horizon, and attracts the audience's line of sight to move horizontally with the help of the horizon, so as to simulate the line of sight movement in the real scene and achieve the effect of establishing a sense of openness.

At an appropriate time, we might as well consider forgetting the "three links composition". Composition should be from the viewer's point of view, how to use composition skills to guide the audience's line of sight, rather than how to save yourself some time when shooting.

To borrow the words of photographer Edward Weston, "Composition is the strongest way to watch", which is what I mean.

The picture introduces a sense of depth, so it is difficult to reconstruct the distance. The so-called sense of depth is the distance from the photographer's position when taking pictures, and the distance from near to far along the viewing direction.

In the process of taking photos, we will compress the three-dimensional space into two-dimensional plane photos, and the lack of depth direction information will directly affect our judgment on the spatial distribution of photos when we look at them.

The solution to the problem is to use longitudinally extending elements to reproduce the depth of the scene.

For example, the extension of the highway:

Extension of natural terrain:

After introducing the sense of depth in the early shooting, we can continue to adjust the light and shade in the post-processing to further highlight the elements of the sense of depth.

Taking the above picture as an example, we brighten the depth element-the canyon and darken the surrounding snow, thus achieving the dual effects of "reconstructing the distance with depth" and "highlighting the visual center".

Compared with the size, it is difficult to establish a sense of volume. After establishing a sense of space and depth, what we want to reproduce next is the sense of volume of the landscape. Due to the limitation of two-dimensional pictures, the most effective way to reproduce the sense of volume is volume comparison.

Simply put, it is to find a distant villain as a reference to highlight the huge volume of the landscape.

Like this:

Like this:

Summarize the above three tips can be used separately or at the same time. In short, our goal is to make the photos look as atmospheric as the real scene!

Photography Experience 3: Post-thinking-the establishment of a sense of space This part is an extension of the previous part, trying to find a way to establish a sense of space through post-thinking.

Later thinking: the sky, the only light source that strengthens the lateral direction, is difficult to achieve.

Because this time we drove all the way.

Travel, passing by most of the scenery is during the day, so the shooting time is mainly during the day, not at sunrise and sunset. A big problem in daytime shooting is that the color of the sky is relatively average and the whole sky is relatively dull, so the first point in the later period is to strengthen the only light source in the direction of the sun.

The solution is to use the rectangular gradient tool in the computer version of Lightroom to dim the air conditioner on the left. Note that for natural transition, the direction of the rectangular gradient is intentionally inclined by 45.

The second thought in the later period: the ground, texture and texture are difficult to achieve.

My first impression of Iceland's Black Sand Beach is the "exquisite" and "sexy" material.

Then the second idea came later: to reproduce the texture of the ground in the photo, to highlight the graininess of the gravel, and to make the picture show a high sense. The later effects of the beach part are as follows:

There are two important points here: 1. The beach is getting dark, but it is not "dead black". We should keep the details in the dark and even strengthen the details;

2. The beach is not completely darkened, but shows a transition between light and dark.

The solution is that in the computer version of Lightroom,

In the middle, use the rectangular gradient tool to darken the beach in a light and dark gradient way, and add "clarity" in the same rectangular gradient area to enhance the details, as shown in the following figure:

The third idea in the later period: the shadow of the cloud, to strengthen the difficulty of realizing the sense of volume.

The purpose of this late thinking is to strengthen the sense of volume.

As we said before, we can shoot people in the distance, see the big from the small, and establish a sense of volume through size comparison. In fact, in addition to comparing people, there is also a very common reference, which is "cloud".

But here we are not talking about how to shoot clouds directly into the picture. On the contrary, we try to strengthen the "shadow" of the cloud through the later methods, so that when the audience sees the "shadow", they can "brain" the volume and direction of the cloud outside the screen. See the big with the big, so as to realize the reconstruction of the sense of space.

The effect is as follows:

Under the action of sunlight, clouds will cast shadows on the peaks. Through the area of the shadow, the audience can naturally imagine the volume and distance of the cloud, so as to reconstruct the huge volume of the mountain peak with the cloud as the reference. Therefore, from the perspective of later thinking, we only need to strengthen the light and shadow effect of clouds falling on the peaks, thus further strengthening the sense of space and volume.

The specific operation is as follows:

First, in Lightroom, enhance the contrast and highlight the shadows of the clouds:

Use the brush tool to further deepen local shadows (especially the cloud shadow on the surface of the upper right peak):

Use the rectangular gradient tool to darken the upper left part of the cloud, so that the cloud above the screen can be further distinguished from the bright area on the mountain surface:

To sum up, these three late ideas can be used in one photo at the same time. In addition, the later ideas are also early shooting ideas in a sense, such as

After understanding "After Thinking 3", you will naturally consciously capture the shadow of the cloud in the early stage of shooting, so as to strengthen it in the later stage.