Shooting skills of urban scenery

Lead: Landscape photography is one of the three major categories of photography. Urban scenery allows us to shoot large films in the familiar cities where we live without hiking. Urban scenery can be a business card, showing the face of the city; It can also be the best image of the urban development record. On the one hand, it records the prosperous beauty of the city, on the other hand, it records the process of urban development and change. Urban landscape photography is a meaningful image record.

Shooting skills of urban scenery

Course introduction: This course describes in detail the work that needs to be prepared before shooting the city breeze, including how to choose a suitable shooting position, judge the weather before shooting, and choose, use and set up the camera equipment. To put it simply, it is to master the weather, be familiar with the geographical location, and equip with sharp weapons to easily shoot large-scale urban scenery.

1。 How to choose a good location to shoot?

In landscape photography, framing and composition are emphasized, so framing is very important. The angle you take determines the imaging of your photos. This problem is also reflected in the actual shooting communication. For example, if you take a beautiful photo, someone will ask you, "Where was your photo taken?" So it is very important to take a good picture of the city.

This photo has the feeling of Manhattan in Guangzhou, with dense buildings and a complete CBD. I loved it then. So I decided to find this seat. Later, I also took this photo of Manhattan, Guangzhou.

I will also mark the shooting location:

2。 Choose the right weather and take good photos.

The so-called time and place must be determined. We have chosen the shooting location, and we still need to choose a good weather. I will pay close attention to the weather changes in my usual shooting, and it is easier to take good photos by choosing an ideal weather to shoot.

I will pay attention to the weather changes in the next few days through the mobile phone weather forecast, and try to choose good weather to shoot.

There are many mobile phone weather forecast apps, and general mobile phones will bring their own weather forecast. I will watch the real-time weather changes on the day of shooting. I shoot more sunrises and sunsets, so I pay special attention to the weather changes in the morning and evening.

3。 Selection and use of equipment

If you want to sharpen your knife in advance, you can see the importance of equipment for shooting. I have been using a Canon camera. I have used many Canon cameras in the past, including the first 40D ten years ago, and then to 50D, 6D, 5D2, 5D3 and 5DS. Every generation of products is being updated and its performance is getting better and better. We all hope that a camera can bring us better colors, better picture quality, and the tolerance of everyone's attention. Another reason why I chose Canon is that it has rich lens group support. I love Canon's fixed-focus lens when taking portraits, and I will use the following three lenses more when taking scenery.

In urban scenery shooting, the lenses we use most are wide-angle lens, telephoto lens and shift lens.

The basic characteristics of a wide-angle lens are its large viewing angle and wide field of vision. The range of scenery observed from a certain viewpoint is much larger than that seen by human eyes at the same viewpoint; The depth of field is long, which can show a fairly clear range; Wide-angle lenses are divided into ordinary wide-angle lenses and ultra-wide-angle lenses. The focal length of a common wide-angle lens is generally 24-38 mm, and the viewing angle is 60-84 degrees. The focal length of the ultra wide-angle lens is 13-20mm, and the viewing angle is 94- 1 18 degrees. Because the wide-angle lens has a short focal length and a large viewing angle, it is more suitable for taking pictures of large scenes, such as architecture, scenery and other themes; Therefore, wide-angle lenses are widely used in large-scale landscape photography.

A wide-angle lens can capture a picture very quickly without focusing on the subject. You can emphasize the prospect and highlight the contrast between far and near. This is another important performance of wide-angle lens. The so-called emphasis on foreground and far-near contrast means that wide-angle lens can emphasize far-near contrast more than other lenses. In other words, the photos taken with wide-angle lens are closer and farther, which makes people feel that the distance has been widened and has a strong perspective effect in the depth direction. Especially when shooting with a super wide-angle lens with short focal length, the effect of being near big and far small is particularly obvious.

The telephoto lens has long focal length, small viewing angle and large imaging. Therefore, at the same distance, you can take larger images than the standard lens. Suitable for shooting close-ups of distant landscape buildings.

The focal length of a long focal length lens is longer than that of a standard lens. Photographic lenses with a focal length of 85mm-300mm are ordinary telephoto lenses, and those with a focal length of more than 300 mm are ultra telephoto lenses. Like most landscape lovers, the telephoto lens is 70-200mm.

In actual shooting, I use EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM the most. I think everyone should know that this lens is commonly known as Ai Xiaobai, and of course there is a Guo Xuwei with the same focal length and aperture of F4.0. In landscape photography, we usually shoot with a small aperture, so even though Guo Xuwei is F4.0, we can get good imaging results.

However, it is worth noting that the imaging magnification of telephoto lens is very large. If the camera shakes slightly, the image blur will increase accordingly, so it is recommended to adopt a higher shutter speed. The shutter speed of telephoto lenses with different focal lengths should be higher than the reciprocal of the focal length of the lens to avoid image blur caused by camera shake. If the focal length of the telephoto lens is 200mm, the shutter speed must be above 1/250s.

Everyone has encountered such a phenomenon when shooting buildings, that is, when we stand on the ground and shoot buildings, in order to shoot the whole picture, the camera should be tilted slightly upward. It will shoot the effect of "big drop and small rise". The lens itself is not deformed, and the reason for this phenomenon is the perspective relationship. Correction: shoot directly at the building. At this time, the lens angle may be insufficient, and a wider lens is needed.

The function of the shift lens is not only to correct the perspective deformation, but also to adjust the focal plane position. Under normal circumstances, when shooting with a large aperture, the scenery in the focal plane is clear and the Jiao Wai is blurred; If the focal plane is adjusted by moving the axis lens, the sharpness can be changed. Obviously, shifting lens is most suitable for architecture, landscape and commercial photography.

Choosing high angle, shifting axis and large aperture drift in actual shooting can produce different effects.

The above three kinds of lenses are widely used in urban landscape photography, which can basically cover the public's urban landscape photography theme. Of course, there is no absolute use of equipment. Some photographers like to shoot with ultra-wide fixed-focus lenses. It depends on each photographer's preference for equipment and lenses. You can take good photos by using the equipment in your hand and giving full play to their strengths.

With the help of tripod and cable release door, the weak vibration of the camera can be effectively prevented and clear photos can be taken. These accessories become particularly important when using a slow shutter and reducing the aperture.

4。 Optimal parameter setting of camera

Select RAW format to shoot

Any serious landscape photographer in the world must shoot in RAW format, so I also suggest that every photographer shoot in RAW format. RAW file refers to the original image file, which contains the original information generated by the sensor in the camera and some "metadata", such as ISO setting, shutter speed, aperture value, etc. RAW is an uncompressed format that has not been decoded. The biggest advantage of RAW format is that it gives users the greatest freedom. When decoding the RAW file, we can change the color temperature at will, and also change the settings such as exposure value, sharpening value and noise reduction in a large range.

Turn off long exposure noise reduction

Almost all SLR cameras have the function of "long exposure noise reduction" in the menu. If this option is turned on, the camera will use "dark field" technology to eliminate noise. Every time the camera takes a photo, the camera will automatically take another all-black shooting process with the same exposure time. During the whole exposure process, the shutter is not opened. Ideally, you should get an all-black temporary photo of the interior, without any content. However, due to the interference of dark current noise and fixed noise, this temporary photo will also have a lot of noise. The firmware of the camera body will automatically use the dark field data to subtract the data of the normal exposure photo just exposed. As you can imagine, because the noise in a fixed position generally appears in two pictures, the result of subtraction is to remove these noises. Obviously, this effect can't be imitated by later software.

Long exposure noise reduction can effectively eliminate the noise in fixed position, but this function has many limitations in practical use. First of all, most of the noise is random noise, which cannot be eliminated by dark field technology. In addition, when the camera automatically shoots the dark field, the whole camera can do nothing else, and the photographer can only wait, and this waiting time is exactly the same as the previous exposure time. If we need to shoot continuously, this waiting process will make us lose more shooting opportunities. If continuous shooting without interval is needed, we usually turn off the long exposure noise reduction function.

But if we want to shoot continuously and achieve the ideal noise reduction effect, there are still some ways. Dark field technology can also be imitated by manual operation. For example, we want to take 10 long exposure photos continuously and reduce noise on average. We can turn off the long exposure noise reduction first, take 10 photos continuously, and finally take a dark field photo alone with the lens cover. Later, dark field photos were used by software to eliminate the fixed noise in each photo. Note that this dark field photo must be taken at that time, not later, because the noise is related to the temperature of the sensor, which is closely related to the shooting environment and the working time of the chip.

Ideal setting of various parameters

Reasonable setting of camera parameters can make us get better photos. We use good equipment and give full play to its best function.

The key to getting a clear image

In order to get a clear and stable image, I have to use some accessories in the actual shooting. Such as sturdy and stable tripods and cable release devices. Avoid camera shift and jitter when shooting.

5。 Take personal style photos.

Shooting at the same position and similar angles has basically the same effect. If everyone takes the same photo, the photo will become unrecognizable. So I hope everyone can add more ideas while shooting and creating, so that their works are different; Style is personal identification, identification and unity. People will think you took the picture when they see it. This is called personal style. As for the establishment of style, it takes a long time to shoot and accumulate works. Think more when shooting, and seek innovation and breakthrough. Because everyone wants to see different photos, only such photos can be remembered and original.

Because I am a portrait photographer, I like to add portraits to the pictures in my creation, so that people can decorate the pictures and make them bright. The contrast between big and small can better express the atmosphere of the building site.