Now sports mode most likely, when you flip to it, it's going to basically do a few different things. Number one, you're telling the camera that you can be shooting fast action subjects. So the cameras going to try and keep the shutter speed up high enough to freeze the action. So it's going to use a combination of basically the aperture and your ISO to get to the proper exposure while keeping the shutter speed a bit higher. In addition, you're telling the camera that the subject is going to be moving and so it's going to try and use different focus techniques to get the subject to be actually well in focus. First of all, let's talk about the light and the setup here.

Now what we have is we're shooting basically in this direction we'd be going against the sun, or basically our scene is going to be backlit. in this direction right here, we're going to be shooting with the sun. I'm going to show you what it's going to look like and what the differences are and why we're going to shoot against the sun. Okay, so let me go ahead and just take a portrait real quick. Eventually we can you guys just stand right here for one quick second. Now notice how we have the sun coming directly in right now.

And well, we get a beautiful directional light to this to the scene, but it's still going to end up looking rather flat in addition It's a little bit spotty, but depending on how they're running, if they're running through this area, these tree leaves basically be casting spotty light all over them, the backgrounds not going to be kind of full of light, you're gonna have dark areas and kind of some light areas. And really, frankly, with it being flat lit like this flat lit is when the lights coming directly in the direction that you're shooting, we're going to lack a lot of real contrast and kind of that dynamic lighting that's going to really make the scene pop and give us an extra dimension. So let's go ahead and flip them around now. So I'm gonna have you guys down on this side. I'm going to try not to shoot directly in a sense, I'm actually going to get low so I can use one of them to block the sun just so that we have this for illustration, actually, you know, what we'll do is just turn to the side a little bit that's a little better.

Okay, so what you can see here is once their backs are to the light, we have this beautiful hair light on the back of it Okay, so that we have this nice dimension in the scene. You can see all the other objects in the scene are kind of being backlit, the leaves, the trees, everything has a great look to it. Even the asphalt itself has extra texture and dimension when we're shooting against the light like this. Hey guys, here's one quick little tip. Shooting with or against the light isn't right or wrong Either way, it's simply going to give you a different look. Now in general, when you're shooting with the direction of the sun, you're gonna have a scene that has higher contrast and a flatter overall look, and it just isn't going to have as much dynamic range.

Now shooting against the direction of the light, that means your scene will be backlit, it'll be creating Edge Lighting on your objects and the sky will be brighter and blown out. Unless of course, you're adding additional light into the shadows. And contrast will be lower if you've got light, hitting your lens or flaring into your lens. Now again, neither of these options shooting with a light or against it, neither of them were incorrect. They're just different. And it'll it'll yield a different look.

All you do is understand the difference. If you do you'll be able to choose the best angle and direction of light that fits the look that you're aiming for for your particular image for the scene, PI's choices against the light to add a little more texture dimension in interest. Which, honestly, I actually agree with. And it's better I think for this scene, the only problem is dealing with the deep shadows, which we'll see in just a moment. So that's what we're gonna be doing. So let's go ahead and we're gonna have you guys set up right now my my 50 millimeter lens, I'll probably switch that in just one moment.

But what I want you guys to do is just go right to the middle of the road and just start running towards me together and just one second. Okay, so what we're gonna do is, I'm just gonna take this shot as they're running, I'm not going to really consider my composition or anything. So girls just start running towards me. Now, one of the things sports action mode is doing is it's actually shooting in burst mode so I can get several shots at once. Okay, that's perfect. Girls, you were awesome.

Come back over here. Okay, so when I can see here is that well, my compositions aren't really great. I basically shot Bull's eyes the entire time. Also, the cameras having a little bit of a hard time I see because what's happened is that the sun has come over the mountain and it's basically casting a very bright light onto the road. Let's step out off the road so we don't get hit. So the problem with this is that it becomes extremely bright.

And with this brightness, it's going to be difficult for the camera to get the right exposure because, well, the cameras trying to balance the entire scene and we have these very strong highlights on the ground. So what I probably going to do for my final scene, well, what we're definitely gonna do is shoot in manual mode to get the exact exposure that we need to make sure that our subjects are correctly exposed. But first of all, we kind of need to get a better composition. So let's do that. First. Let's actually think about what we're going for now what I want here and what you can see is we have this beautiful road, that's kind of just going straight and then bending to the right.

We have these great columns here and all these columns that kind of just dot light right along the sides of the road, and it creates a beautiful line, we can use this kind of stuff in our compositions. So if I were to use it, what I would want to do is basically have Well, maybe the road kind of bending from the outside of the frame and then coming in and we have basically this wood piece kind of end towards the right of the frame. Now what I'm doing is I'm just tilting the camera a slight bit just to get this last little wood column right here in my frame. Okay, so in the corner of the frame, so kind of just end the composition a little bit. Also the tilt is gonna be really nice. This is called Dutch angle by the way and Dutch angle works really well in certain cases, but you want to be careful not to overuse a Dutch angle, when you twist the camera too much ends up looking like a world falling over.

Generally, when we twist, we want to really just twist to emphasize a line or to emphasize a particular moment. But if you have kind of strong horizon lines in the scene, it really doesn't work that well, but we don't in this thing, we want to just use it to kind of exaggerate the line the road and that's what we're gonna be doing. Okay, so girls, perfect. All right, go ahead, start running. Beautiful, that's perfect. We have a much stronger image now.

Okay, so we've still let the camera handle everything. We just decided what we're going to do for our lighting for our composition. Obviously, if they're running, it'd be really difficult to do anything for lighting unless I were to have an assistant actually run run along this side of them with like a reflector or something like that. Which we don't have. And we're not going to set up flash and stuff because this is photography, one on one. All right, but what I want to do now is that I can use the dynamic range of this camera, this is the DVD 200, we have a huge dynamic range of the sensor can capture.

So what we're going to do is we're shooting in raw, of course, RAW plus JPEG, what I'm going to do is shoot in manual and we're going to get the exact exposure so we can get as much of the highlights and the shadow detail as possible. So girls will have you do just go stand over in that area where you're approximately be running, I'll tell you where to stop right there, and then turn perfect. We're going to have them in position and base, I'm just gonna use them to kind of get my overall metering settings. So what I'm gonna do right now is the cool thing about Nikon cameras, or at least this d 5200 is that we don't have a live view that allows us to preview the exposure of the image, okay, so we have to use the in camera metering system, but that's okay, because we can still read the histogram.

We can see our highlights after the fact. So I'm just going to use the camera histogram and this is what I'm going to do. Let's go for focus mode on to place it on, let's go single servo that's going to be that single shot focus mode. And then for the AF area mode, we're going to go single point, we're not going to use an area or anything like that it's one on one single point over them. For metering, well, let's use center weighted, it's not really going to matter because we're going to gauge it anyway in the same. Okay, and then I think everything else is good.

Okay, let's go ahead and look through here. Actually, I do want to set my ISO, my ISO is right now at 400. I'm going to leave it at 100 and see if I can get to the right exposure. Because you know, if I can get the right exposure, ISO 100, we have a broader dynamic range. And that's what we need. That's what we're going for here.

We're getting this beautiful light that's coming directly on me now. And I can maybe use part of that as a little bit of composition, getting a nice little flare coming through the trees. I think it will look really great. And also I'm going to switch on to probably my 85 in just one second my on the 50 right now still. Yeah, one thing I wanted to mention to you guys, is that the 85 is a beautiful lens for well for scenes like this because it really allows us to compress the background right now. 50 I might use it for more of a tall shot, but then I can use the 85 to really get this nice row of columns very much exaggerated, it pulls the background up closer with that additional focal length and so forth.

Okay, let's go ahead and get a little meter on the scene. And right now it shows that I'm way overexposed because I'm at one 50th of a second. So I'm going to go ahead and drop this all the way down to around one 800 of a second. Okay, so let's discuss for a moment that changes in PI's setting from auto to manual and how it's going to affect the image. The first biggest change is in the do F or depth of field. Pi opened his aperture to F two and what that's going to do is create more separation from the subject and the background as the background falls into blur quicker.

The only trick here is that since the subjects are moving that shallow aperture me that you need to shoot extra, because there's gonna be autofocus shots as they're moving towards the camera. Now, I mentioned that he was dropping the ISO to 100. He did this to preserve dynamic range and color. With a camera at ISO 100, we're able to pull up more shadows and reveal better color in post production. Now lastly, the shutter was adjusted to one eight hundredths of a second to adjust for overall exposure making sure that the shadows weren't clipped and that the highlights weren't too bright. Again, we see that by looking at the histogram from the shot as the shadows are pushed all the way against the left and highlights are pushed against the right with the maximum amount of detail preserved.

So already that manual shot looks quite a bit stronger. Now take a look at the manual shot before and after post processing and look at how much we were able to push and reveal inside of that photo. Again, this is where we can truly bring out the best in our images. Bye shooting in manual mode. And this is what we mean when we tell you shoot with your final vision of the image in mind. It's a wrap girls we got our shot looks really awesome guys feel like you got a good workout.

I was like a mile two miles. It's only like 50 feet we ran it a few times. Alright so great job of the girls we got some really nice shots and hopefully y'all have a good understanding of how the sports action mode works. Essentially the sports action mode is keeping the shutter speed up so that we can freeze our motion freeze our action, it's keeping the aperture and the ISO in a setting to get the proper exposure. Now it seems like this again, you're always better off going to manual because we can perfectly set in the shutter speed that we need the aperture that we need the ISO that we need to maximize not only welds are freezing our subjects, but also to maximize the scene detail to make sure that we have all of our highlights. We haven't blown out any highlights.

We haven't clipped too much dark shadows. So that's it for this tutorial. Now what I want you guys to do is go out and use the sports action mode to shoot anything sports or Alright, so make sure you get out there, shoot a skateboard or shoot a surfer shoot running girls, so long as you have their permission, just go out and start shooting. Now when you do start looking at what this mode is actually doing and look at where it kind of falls short, basically in certain scenes where you want to get certain effects or maybe where you're not getting the right exposure because, well, you're using a unique composition that the camera can essentially kind of well figure out once you've played around a little bit, switch over to manual and get the same shot and notice how you have a little more control over your exposure, the exact shutter speed and everything and notice how everything's going to be more consistent.

Once you guys get a cool sports reaction shot that you want to show off, post it to SRO, lounge comm tell us all about it, how you shot it, what you decided to do for your composition and your lighting and so forth. All right, we'll see you on the next video.