Can someone please help me with video and landscape shots ? a6000

bargainfishing · Apr 5, 2015

Hi , I'm using the a6000 , sel 35, kit lens , sony remote , sony VCT r640 pan type tripod, and a sirui ballhead tripod.

I'm taking a picture of the city, around 7000 - 9000 meters away from where I'm taking the shot. And the length of this overlooking area is like 1 hectare in width. I also need to take pictures or videos of the area.

The area is 11 hectares, but will focus on the 1 hectare overlooking area.

I took some good shots of the city earlier, this is 1 of them and I probably might want to go there another day that the sky is more blue and you can see the island from beyond.

For video >

1. What are some techniques I should do so that each area of the land can be covered, or try taking videos in angles?

2. If I use the pan type tripod and move it from point A to point B in a 180 degree angle, and use it on most shots, would it be repetitive ? Do you use image stabilization on even with a tripod ?

3. How about a zooming in or zoom out effect ?

4. Riding a car and taking a video of the road with the area ?

5. Walking and taking a video? Tried this but my hands are shaky even with stabilization on.

Any help is appreciated.

For pictures >

1. I tried f8 f11 settings to check if it would make the foreground and background sharper, dont care much on corners since they might be cropped during post processing. What do you consider as the best aperture value for both

sel 35

1650

to make the foreground, some of the grass below, or even if its not included. But the city and sky to be sharp?

2.) I did some adjustments to bring make the sky bluer, or played with the highlight settings etc. Can a polarizing filter make the sky blue?

3.) Any ideas to make the pictures better? How about an ND filter ?

I'll post here the unedited pictures from the two above.

4.) I'm getting better with manual mode, but with using AF, would it be ideal or just use manual to make everything sharper? Thoughts?

uzman1243 · Apr 5, 2015

Ok. First let's start with pictures. I don't know your experience level but I suggest you master photography before moving to videography. I'm assuming that you are just passed the beginning stage. If there is any part you don't understand, tell me and I'll expand.

bargainfishing said:
For pictures >

1. I tried f8 f11 settings to check if it would make the foreground and background sharper, dont care much on corners since they might be cropped during post processing. What do you consider as the best aperture value for both

sel 35

1650

to make the foreground, some of the grass below, or even if its not included. But the city and sky to be sharp?

Let's start with basic settings. Use apperture priority mode and move to around f/8. Focus on the buildings. You can usually do this with auto but if that doesnt work use manual focus with peaking to check where you're focusing.

Pro method: Calculate Hyperfocal distance. I haven't got around to learning this yet.

bargainfishing said:
2.) I did some adjustments to bring make the sky bluer, or played with the highlight settings etc. Can a polarizing filter make the sky blue?

Yes a polarizer can bring out saturation but the 1650 kit has a 40.5mm filter thread so it's a poor investment to buy a CPL by HOYA (for example) which costs about $50 and you cant use it on any other lenses as most good glass have a higher filter diameter. I made this mistake once

Ok now to correctly expose the sky. First shoot RAW of course! Second, if you have an interesting sky (usually during the twilight times) then under expose your shot by going negative on the exposure compensation. This way your highlights are not blown out and it's easier to PP.

During PP, bring up the shadows and drop the highlights a bit. Increase the vibrance and not the saturation to bring out the colors. Also, tick lens correction to get rid of distortions.

bargainfishing said:
3.) Any ideas to make the pictures better? How about an ND filter ?

Nd filter should be used with care. You don't want to buy cheap ones as the will hurt then help your image. Expensive ND doesn't make sense because you have lenses that has a 40.5mm filter thread and 49mm. Unless you are certain that you wont be getting lenses and stuff in the future, I highly recommend not buying an ND filter.

Also, ND filter doesn't make sense for the 16-50 because it's optically poor and adding more glass in front of it just hurts it. You don't want to get an ND filter for the 35mm (around 50mm FOV relative to full frame) because the focal length is usually used for street. Thus, do not invest in ND filters unless you alot of experience in shooting.

bargainfishing said:
4.) I'm getting better with manual mode, but with using AF, would it be ideal or just use manual to make everything sharper? Thoughts?

Manual mode doesn't mean better images. Manual should be used when you don't trust your light meter on the camera and you know how to expose the image.

I, and many others, almost always use Apperture priority. This, coupled with multi segment metering for landscapes should suffice. You can then use Exposure compensation to make changes.

Manual focus doesn't make everything sharper. AF will give you spot on focusing on a defined subject unlike manual where you can't always be sure.

You may also want to change your composition. The second picture has better composition than the first one. The first one has just empty sky.

______________________________________________________________________

I highly recommend not jumping to video right now unless you are pro. But i'll post a response to it anyways if you want to try things out.

________________________________________________________________________

bargainfishing said:
For video >

1. What are some techniques I should do so that each area of the land can be covered, or try taking videos in angles?

Read below

bargainfishing said:
2. If I use the pan type tripod and move it from point A to point B in a 180 degree angle, and use it on most shots, would it be repetitive ? Do you use image stabilization on even with a tripod ?

What are you trying to convey? for instance, Chaos or stability? If you want to convey calm, quite and slow then a tripod with slow panning makes sense. If you want to show chaos, then I'd recommend using the camera hand held with stabilization. Slight movement caused by your hands when holding the camera can show some sort of unstability and hence chaos.

Take this music video I found:

There's a reason that the directors didn't use a tripod for each shot. Forward to 1:27 and you can see that even for a landscape shot the directors used a camera with stabilization (glidecam) to convey that sense of excitement.

Also, using OSS on video during tripod wouldn't matter as much as it does in photo.

bargainfishing said:
3. How about a zooming in or zoom out effect ?

You have a prime lens so how are you going to zoom in and out? Even if you have a zoom lens, make sure it has a fixed aperture (ie 70-200 f/4) otherwise, your aperture (and thus depth of field) will change as you zoom.

bargainfishing said:
4. Riding a car and taking a video of the road with the area ?

It's good technique provided you can keep it stable. Also, you have to think of audio. If you are using a soundtrack on top then audio doesn't matter. If not, unless you have some sound design experience, the noise from wind can be annoying. But you can use that creatively too.

Here's a technique I particularly like:

a) shoot from a distant of the whole landscape on a tripod and camera quite still (hopefully during sunrise) for like 5 seconds. Audio should be complete silence apart from from birds and light wind.

b) Suddenly the video changes to you videoing from a car moving and you can use that noise from wind to enhance that sudden change. Remember this part has to be quite short like 2 seconds.

c) Back to stability in a distant.

The contrast between stability and unstability coupled with carefully selected audio is very appealing.

Watch the first 10 seconds of this video and you'll know what I mean:

FYI, one of my favorite videos. He has done some amazing techniques on that.

bargainfishing said:
5. Walking and taking a video? Tried this but my hands are shaky even with stabilization on.

The best for this is a glidecam HD 2000. It's around 500$ but a worthy investment if you shoot alot of video. You could try stabilsation in post. Ie: Use warp stabilizer on primiere pro. but this causes some sort of distortion.

bargainfishing · Apr 6, 2015

uzman1243 said:
Ok. First let's start with pictures. I don't know your experience level but I suggest you master photography before moving to videography. I'm assuming that you are just passed the beginning stage. If there is any part you don't understand, tell me and I'll expand.

Started photography last July 2014 , I mostly take portrait shots and rarely landscape shots or even using manual mode. So yes this is the first time I get to spend a lot of time taking landscape shots of the area. So far this week the experience has taught me well, about the light of the area or the right time to go there so there won't be much "haze" or "smog", since people burn stuff there around 4pm.

uzman1243 said:
uzman1243 said:

For pictures >

1. I tried f8 f11 settings to check if it would make the foreground and background sharper, dont care much on corners since they might be cropped during post processing. What do you consider as the best aperture value for both

sel 35

1650

to make the foreground, some of the grass below, or even if its not included. But the city and sky to be sharp?

Click to expand...

Let's start with basic settings. Use apperture priority mode and move to around f/8. Focus on the buildings. You can usually do this with auto but if that doesnt work use manual focus with peaking to check where you're focusing.

>> I do manual most of the time but I will give aperture priority mode a try. And yes auto focus doesn't work that well especially on the city area.

>> Do you consider using f/11 or even f/16 on the kit lens ? I'm aware the corners will have some issues with sharpening though. Any thoughts on this? Someone from facebook considering bracketing and stacking images together in photoshop ( I can do this but if there is a better way I'll try ).

>> As for the hyperfocal distance ( I will try to use google maps or something that can calculate the distance of the center of the city with that gold building and where I'm at. I'm mostly interested in using "front center focus". Since the closes area near me are just a bunch of burned wild grass and cut plants.

uzman1243 said:
Pro method: Calculate Hyperfocal distance. I haven't got around to learning this yet.

uzman1243 said:

2.) I did some adjustments to bring make the sky bluer, or played with the highlight settings etc. Can a polarizing filter make the sky blue?

Click to expand...

Yes a polarizer can bring out saturation but the 1650 kit has a 40.5mm filter thread so it's a poor investment to buy a CPL by HOYA (for example) which costs about $50 and you cant use it on any other lenses as most good glass have a higher filter diameter. I made this mistake once

Ok now to correctly expose the sky. First shoot RAW of course! Second, if you have an interesting sky (usually during the twilight times) then under expose your shot by going negative on the exposure compensation. This way your highlights are not blown out and it's easier to PP.

uzman1243 said:
During PP, bring up the shadows and drop the highlights a bit. Increase the vibrance and not the saturation to bring out the colors. Also, tick lens correction to get rid of distortions.

I was thinking of buying a polarizer for the sel 35 since there's a local store selling a 49mm filter. The sel 35 get's closer to the city and it still brings the best part. And yes I shoot RAW and edit the files in capture one.

> Interesting skies happen around 5-6pm. The light looks dramatic but the smog / haze gets worst since people start burning stuff. I will try the negative exposure.

uzman1243 said:
uzman1243 said:

3.) Any ideas to make the pictures better? How about an ND filter ?

Click to expand...

Nd filter should be used with care. You don't want to buy cheap ones as the will hurt then help your image. Expensive ND doesn't make sense because you have lenses that has a 40.5mm filter thread and 49mm. Unless you are certain that you wont be getting lenses and stuff in the future, I highly recommend not buying an ND filter.

Also, ND filter doesn't make sense for the 16-50 because it's optically poor and adding more glass in front of it just hurts it. You don't want to get an ND filter for the 35mm (around 50mm FOV relative to full frame) because the focal length is usually used for street. Thus, do not invest in ND filters unless you alot of experience in shooting.

uzman1243 said:
uzman1243 said:

4.) I'm getting better with manual mode, but with using AF, would it be ideal or just use manual to make everything sharper? Thoughts?

Click to expand...

Manual mode doesn't mean better images. Manual should be used when you don't trust your light meter on the camera and you know how to expose the image.

I, and many others, almost always use Apperture priority. This, coupled with multi segment metering for landscapes should suffice. You can then use Exposure compensation to make changes.

Manual focus doesn't make everything sharper. AF will give you spot on focusing on a defined subject unlike manual where you can't always be sure.

You may also want to change your composition. The second picture has better composition than the first one. The first one has just empty sky.

>

Isee will try aperture mode since I barely even use this and the other modes. What "focus area" do you recommend? Spot focusing ?

As for the image I have several other images where the sky is not the focus, and more city is shown, I can't use shoot the terrain where I'm at because it's has burnt grass. So basically I have other pictures in different angles, and different times.

This time on Sunday I will be back there around 6am, and the other part will be for 4pm. For video tried the pan type tripod moving stuff from left to right on a 180 degree angle. It requires a lot of control though.

uzman1243 said:
________________________

I highly recommend not jumping to video right now unless you are pro. But i'll post a response to it anyways if you want to try things out.

________________________________________________________________________

uzman1243 said:

For video >

1. What are some techniques I should do so that each area of the land can be covered, or try taking videos in angles?

Click to expand...

Read below

uzman1243 said:

2. If I use the pan type tripod and move it from point A to point B in a 180 degree angle, and use it on most shots, would it be repetitive ? Do you use image stabilization on even with a tripod ?

Click to expand...

What are you trying to convey? for instance, Chaos or stability? If you want to convey calm, quite and slow then a tripod with slow panning makes sense. If you want to show chaos, then I'd recommend using the camera hand held with stabilization. Slight movement caused by your hands when holding the camera can show some sort of unstability and hence chaos.

Take this music video I found:

There's a reason that the directors didn't use a tripod for each shot. Forward to 1:27 and you can see that even for a landscape shot the directors used a camera with stabilization (glidecam) to convey that sense of excitement.

Also, using OSS on video during tripod wouldn't matter as much as it does in photo.

uzman1243 said:

3. How about a zooming in or zoom out effect ?

Click to expand...

You have a prime lens so how are you going to zoom in and out? Even if you have a zoom lens, make sure it has a fixed aperture (ie 70-200 f/4) otherwise, your aperture (and thus depth of field) will change as you zoom.

uzman1243 said:

4. Riding a car and taking a video of the road with the area ?

Click to expand...

It's good technique provided you can keep it stable. Also, you have to think of audio. If you are using a soundtrack on top then audio doesn't matter. If not, unless you have some sound design experience, the noise from wind can be annoying. But you can use that creatively too.

Here's a technique I particularly like:

a) shoot from a distant of the whole landscape on a tripod and camera quite still (hopefully during sunrise) for like 5 seconds. Audio should be complete silence apart from from birds and light wind.

b) Suddenly the video changes to you videoing from a car moving and you can use that noise from wind to enhance that sudden change. Remember this part has to be quite short like 2 seconds.

c) Back to stability in a distant.

The contrast between stability and unstability coupled with carefully selected audio is very appealing.

Watch the first 10 seconds of this video and you'll know what I mean:

FYI, one of my favorite videos. He has done some amazing techniques on that.

uzman1243 said:

5. Walking and taking a video? Tried this but my hands are shaky even with stabilization on.

Click to expand...

The best for this is a glidecam HD 2000. It's around 500$ but a worthy investment if you shoot alot of video. You could try stabilsation in post. Ie: Use warp stabilizer on primiere pro. but this causes some sort of distortion.

osv · Apr 6, 2015

bargainfishing said:
1. I tried f8 f11 settings to check if it would make the foreground and background sharper, dont care much on corners since they might be cropped during post processing. What do you consider as the best aperture value for both

crop sensor cameras create diffraction artifacts at f/8, so that should be the smallest aperture that you shoot with, if you want the highest resolution.

the reasons why people shoot f/11 on crop are 1)trying to get foreground objects in focus, 2)the sides/corners of the lens are blurry due to field curvature, which tends to clean up as the lens is stopped down.

stopping a lens down hides a lot of lens defects, and design deficiencies.

wrt landscape shooting on crop sensor cameras, if the lens isn't clean all the way across the frame by f/8, it's probably a good idea to find another lens design.

the problem with the photos that you posted isn't so much related to the color or the processing, the truth is that they just aren't interesting.

you were using the rule of thirds, which is good, but there aren't any foreground objects, or any objects that give the picture a sense of scale... there isn't anything in those compositions that creates tension, or tells a story.

people do strange things with landscape shots, like use a piece of dead wood as a foreground object, or slow the shutter way down so that flowing water looks mushy and unrealistic... but those are worn-out gimmicks, that seldom make for a truly great shot.

so the real struggle with all aspects of photography is with composition... you need to be able to identify an interesting shot before you hit the shutter button.

--
dan

bargainfishing · Apr 6, 2015

Using the foreground is out of the question , since the grass right now is black and I don't know if using that as a foreground will entice buyers / investors to the place. My goal here is to be as accurate as possible on the place , taking pictures of the area in different angles. I could try the artistic approach, like using a group of people or a person etc, but will try to consider it if gives more value to the final outcome ( with the poster design , typography stuff etc ).

Like I said there are other angles to this shot of the city , have made variations and different f settings as well. So I have like 10 - 20 images to choose from. I just wanted this version to put in a poster so a white text can be placed on the big sky above. Not sure if that is a good idea.

This picture below shows the location of the 1 hectare wide area , only the left most part has no obstructions , the middle part has 2 big mango trees , 2 coconut trees but they will be cleared this Sunday hopefully or some parts of it.

If you have ideas for a foreground , like a table with a basket of fruits? Or something like that.

Tristimulus · Apr 6, 2015

One extremely helpful tip:

Classical landscapes are divided into foreground (for framing the image and for creating percieved visual depth), middle ground (usually - but not always - the most interesting part of the image) and background (to give added percieved depth to the image).

Look at great landscape images and try to figure out and practice, practice, practice...

Getting brilliant landscapes was and have never been easy but the persistent ones succeed. Just like learning to play the piano - takes some time and effort. Good luck exploring landscapes!

Got this brilliant advice along my first camera - the old ones where not at all idiots!

osv · Apr 6, 2015

bargainfishing said:
Using the foreground is out of the question , since the grass right now is black and I don't know if using that as a foreground will entice buyers / investors to the place.

ah, so it's not an artistic endeavor.

that last shot... how about moving to the left, to the top edge of the hill, then shooting wide from up on a ladder... just put a small portion of the burned-out section in the right-side of the frame, while the left side is highlighting the view, which is what you are selling here.

shooting off of a tall pole or a drone is popular for real estate shots of houses, but like you said, it's just raw property.

perhaps there are tree groves or something similar elsewhere on the hill, that wouldn't show brown grass in a wide angle shot?

bargainfishing · Apr 6, 2015

Stability , since the goal here is to sell the land / look for investors or in short real estate. Thanks for the videolinks, will look at them. I don't want a stabilizer or a glide cam since this is just a 1 time thing helping the family.

bargainfishing said:
bargainfishing said:

What are you trying to convey? for instance, Chaos or stability? If you want to convey calm, quite and slow then a tripod with slow panning makes sense. If you want to show chaos, then I'd recommend using the camera hand held with stabilization. Slight movement caused by your hands when holding the camera can show some sort of unstability and hence chaos.

Take this music video I found:

There's a reason that the directors didn't use a tripod for each shot. Forward to 1:27 and you can see that even for a landscape shot the directors used a camera with stabilization (glidecam) to convey that sense of excitement.

Also, using OSS on video during tripod wouldn't matter as much as it does in photo.

bargainfishing said:

3. How about a zooming in or zoom out effect ?

Click to expand...

You have a prime lens so how are you going to zoom in and out? Even if you have a zoom lens, make sure it has a fixed aperture (ie 70-200 f/4) otherwise, your aperture (and thus depth of field) will change as you zoom.

bargainfishing said:

4. Riding a car and taking a video of the road with the area ?

Click to expand...

It's good technique provided you can keep it stable. Also, you have to think of audio. If you are using a soundtrack on top then audio doesn't matter. If not, unless you have some sound design experience, the noise from wind can be annoying. But you can use that creatively too.

Here's a technique I particularly like:

a) shoot from a distant of the whole landscape on a tripod and camera quite still (hopefully during sunrise) for like 5 seconds. Audio should be complete silence apart from from birds and light wind.

b) Suddenly the video changes to you videoing from a car moving and you can use that noise from wind to enhance that sudden change. Remember this part has to be quite short like 2 seconds.

c) Back to stability in a distant.

The contrast between stability and unstability coupled with carefully selected audio is very appealing.

Watch the first 10 seconds of this video and you'll know what I mean:

FYI, one of my favorite videos. He has done some amazing techniques on that.

bargainfishing said:

5. Walking and taking a video? Tried this but my hands are shaky even with stabilization on.

Click to expand...

The best for this is a glidecam HD 2000. It's around 500$ but a worthy investment if you shoot alot of video. You could try stabilsation in post. Ie: Use warp stabilizer on primiere pro. but this causes some sort of distortion.

Click to expand...

Glenn · Apr 6, 2015

I agree. I would go a different route with what you are doing. If you are trying to sell something you have to provide the buyers with something they can imagine they would want the thing for. So far your are showing an empty piece of land with no features. I think this is why real estate places and builders rely so heavily on artist renditions. They show the hill with a home on it kids playing and a car in the driveway and maybe neighbors homes too. Props and models could do you some good here maybe, wildlife?. A tall ladder might help you if a drone pilot isn't handy. you can get tall a-frame ladders, maybe even a rental that can give an interesting perspective.

Your job is to provide something to start a buyers imagination, more so than getting the photograph technically correct. <----- This is photography

--

bargainfishing · Apr 6, 2015

Glenn said:
I agree. I would go a different route with what you are doing. If you are trying to sell something you have to provide the buyers with something they can imagine they would want the thing for. So far your are showing an empty piece of land with no features. I think this is why real estate places and builders rely so heavily on artist renditions. They show the hill with a home on it kids playing and a car in the driveway and maybe neighbors homes too. Props and models could do you some good here maybe, wildlife?. A tall ladder might help you if a drone pilot isn't handy. you can get tall a-frame ladders, maybe even a rental that can give an interesting perspective.

Your job is to provide something to start a buyers imagination, more so than getting the photograph technically correct. <----- This is photography

--

uzman1243 · Apr 6, 2015

bargainfishing said:
>> I do manual most of the time but I will give aperture priority mode a try. And yes auto focus doesn't work that well especially on the city area.

>> Do you consider using f/11 or even f/16 on the kit lens ? I'm aware the corners will have some issues with sharpening though. Any thoughts on this? Someone from facebook considering bracketing and stacking images together in photoshop ( I can do this but if there is a better way I'll try ).

I recommend not going beyond f/8 on the kit because it gets real ugly real fast.

Yes you could try a multiple exposure blend. But it's only worth doing when you have an interesting composition and a nice background and foreground.

bargainfishing said:
I was thinking of buying a polarizer for the sel 35 since there's a local store selling a 49mm filter. The sel 35 get's closer to the city and it still brings the best part. And yes I shoot RAW and edit the files in capture one.

I don't think a polarizer is worth investing in if this is a one time thing and your goal is to bring out the colors. A polarizer is mostly used to cut out reflections from ,for example, a river or glare from wet grass. An added benefit of a polarizer is increased saturation.

But you can achieve that in PP by simply moving up the vibrance / saturation. I personally wouldn't play too much with saturation as it makes the image look unrealistic. I'd go with taking up the vibrance.

bargainfishing said:
> Interesting skies happen around 5-6pm. The light looks dramatic but the smog / haze gets worst since people start burning stuff. I will try the negative exposure.

Try the twilight. An hour BEFORE sunrise when the weather forecast suggests a clear/low cloud day.

bargainfishing said:
bargainfishing said:

bargainfishing said:

ure has better composition than the first one. The first one has just empty sky.

Click to expand...

Click to expand...

>

Isee will try aperture mode since I barely even use this and the other modes. What "focus area" do you recommend? Spot focusing ?

Wide-focus would work best. But since you said you find it hard to auto-focus on the buildings, try manual focus with focus peaking.

bargainfishing said:
As for the image I have several other images where the sky is not the focus, and more city is shown, I can't use shoot the terrain where I'm at because it's has burnt grass. So basically I have other pictures in different angles, and different times.

You don't really need the sky in focus. An unsharpened and clear sky is very appealing as it gives a soft effect.

You can achieve this in PP. Take your image. then Increase sharpness followed by masking.

watch this video from 4:17

Glenn · Apr 6, 2015

bargainfishing said:
I'm in charge of not only the photo/video but also the graphic design , social media or marketing the area visually.

You should get the largest corner lot for the work of 15 people.

Search

Can someone please help me with video and landscape shots ? a6000

bargainfishing

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Tristimulus

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