Ai and welcome to this section on gorgeous photography and videography. So the very first section that I wanted to sort of just quickly go over is just general basic photo composition. So I'm not sure where you're at in terms of photography or digital photography and the acronyms behind it knowing about ISO and balance and composition and all that sort of stuff of images, all that sort of stuff with photography also applies to drone photography and videography. So I just wanted to cover the very sort of low level basics, just to make sure all aware or at least relatively on the same page together. So that's what this quick first part is about. later on.

We'll get into more specific stuff to drones and sort of apply that This stuff that we're talking about now to drones and taking videos and photos with your drone. So to begin with, I just wanted to talk about resolution. So, if you don't know about resolution, it's the 720 P or the full HD or 4k all those sorts of terms that you hear thrown around. A lot of people think that that's the be all and end all of you know photography and videos and that the higher the resolution, the better. And generally speaking, all things else being equal, something that's filmed in 4k will be much nicer to look at and something filled in even 720 p Even though 720 P is quantifying resolution. You have 720 P which has 720 pixels in the vertical section 1080 P which obviously has 10 81,080 pixels and then you have 4k or the general term 4k which is our truth.

Times the resolution of 10 ADP and has 2160 pixels in the vertical. This the viewing right now is filmed in 10 ADP or full HD is generally known now, you may be watching watching it in 723, or a low resolution, but it was filmed in 10 ad payment uploaded into ADP. And obviously, the higher the resolution, the better the more crisp it's going to be, the more detail you're going to see in it. And it has its effect. If you're watching on YouTube, it'll get you know, crushed and compressed just like a JPEG is a compressed image. YouTube compresses the video to make it not take up as much bandwidth from you downloading it.

And there's many many different factors to it. But generally speaking, the higher resolution the better, but you do have to have all the other things like you know, good light, proper exposure and all these other things that do also contribute to the quality of the image or the quality of the video. Now, the Mavic Pro and the Phantom four both shoot in full, or shoot up to 4k at 30 frames per second, the Phantom four pro can actually shoot at 4k at 60 frames per second. So that's 60 frames per second. So each time it takes an image, it'll take usually 30 images to make one second video footage, the 30 frames per second for the Mavic Pro is obviously 30 images per second to create the video. With the Phantom four pro you're taking 60 images per second so you get a much smoother looking video.

And if you want to actually have the speed of it, you can slow it down and get that sort of super slow mo effect and 60 frames per second isn't really going to give you a huge, least slow thing that will obviously the heart speed of what you're used to seeing at 30 frames per second. But when you get into the hundred and 20 frames per second, and 240 frames per second, that's when you get that really cool looking super slow mo you see water droplets, you know, falling through the air in, you know, very, very super slow mo. So, that sort of stuff you can't do with these in 4k is too high resolution for them to be recording at such a high frame rate. But if you bump the resolution down like two tier dp recording with the Mavic or the Phantom four Pro, you can obviously get higher frame rates.

The DJI spark because it's not as expensive and doesn't have as good camera equipment on it, obviously because they're trying to make it cheaper, currently recording 10 and up so again, what you're possibly doing now is typically it's quite fun to recorder but if you've got the Phantom or the medic I highly suggest recording. 4k resolution sets us a quick overview of actual Resolution. And now I want to get into more sort of compositional things in terms of photography, which is to begin with a very simple rule of thirds. So the rule of thirds is the century of bestest, it's best described with visual imagery. So I'll put up a few things, as I'm speaking here to try and help guide you. But essentially, it breaks the frame up into thirds.

So usually two lines through the photo. And there's grids that you can enable on drones and photos, and all that sort of stuff to help you with this. But there'll be two lines through the actual photo or video that splits the image up into sort of thirds. And the idea is that you want to place your subjects and for instance, if you're taking a photo of me and on your subject, rather than placing the dead center to make things a little more interesting and sort of creates a bit of visual disturbance, which is why it makes it interesting sort of looked at a bit longer ago and that's different. Print sort of thing. But you placed the image to the side now maybe the left side or maybe the right side by you place it on one of those two actual grid lines to make it in one of the overlapping to the third of the actual camera.

And I can look okay, if you have blank surfaces and stuff, but generally it won't be a very well balanced thing like that. So it's often good if you have something else here to help balance the photo, and I'll talk about that more in a second. But generally, the rule of thirds, it's a very good trick to just really starting from scratch. If you don't know anything about photography, and you're taking a photo of a person or a penguin or car, whatever it might be, instead of taking it in the direct center to sort of shifted off to that one third by the side and just see how it creates a bit more of an interesting photo or video that you're taking. So that's the idea behind rules. Third, as I said, it plays into balance as well.

And what balance is, is trying to essentially, visually balance your photo. So obviously, what you're looking at now is very balanced because I'm in the center, everything should be nice and symmetrical. Hopefully my faces and everything looks nice and neat sort of thing. If I was to just sort of sit like this and start talking to you like this, and all my videos of me talking to you like this, it kind of, I don't know about you, but it doesn't really look the best, you know, I'm not in the center. Things aren't symmetrical things on balance to kind of Berkey you know, if you're doing it as part of the rule of thirds of crew can create a bit of interest. But if you're doing it continuously, and it's part of the video just kind of looks off and bad.

And people just prefer to have things centered and symmetrical. It's why when we're looking at faces and judging faces, if your faces highly symmetrical A lot of people will judge you as being very pretty and beautiful with your faces, you know, not symmetrical when us does this or something like that. Unfortunately, people will probably judge you as being not as pretty or possibly even ugly. It's just how the brain works. And we enjoy symmetry and things being nice and balanced sort of thing. So that's where the balance comes from.

And you don't just create balance by making things symmetrical, you can make things balanced by balancing one image or one object with another. So if I was to put this in front of me here, again, it's not balanced because everything's symmetrical, the device to step to the side, this is obviously not well balanced, because all the objects and the weight of the visual weight of the photo is on this side. Whereas if I put hold this up like this, and sort of stand a bit more slightly centered, the weight of the photo was actually balanced on better because you've got this object here, me as an object here that balances the photo more or less, it's difficult to describe. But I'll show a number of examples of what I mean in terms of a balanced photo. So this is a photo that's not particularly well nodes.

As you can see, it kind of shifts and, you know, is weighed to one side. Whereas this example is actually a good example of a photo being balanced. And you'll notice that the objects are not symmetrical or anything like that. But the general picture just feels even feels balanced. It looks pleasant, it's interesting and a good photo. And that's kind of what I mean behind balance.

So when you're taking a photo of a mountain or the ocean Raven of a person or whatever it is, when you're doing it with a camera with your phone, taking a selfie or something like that, or with your drums in the air. You want to make sure you have Have them balanced and it doesn't have to be symmetrical. That's very formal, very formal form of balance, and also the unformed version, which is what I'm describing here, we have two objects, and they're not identical objects are not symmetrical or anything, but they balance each other out with weight. And it might be a very dark object and very light object might be a very big object and lots of little tiny objects. There's many different ways to do it. As it's best, given examples of photos, I'll show a few more.

But that is balance. And, again, it's a very simple thing that you can do as you're lining up your photo lining up your drone to take that photo or video. You want to make sure that you're, you know, seeing your composition, the composition of your photo or video is not enough. And it's just something that will make your photos kind of stand out a little more, no one will be able to tell you why. They're particularly nice and must've Done photography courses and not all that bad. But if you just show a general person and say, you know which one of these two photos do you prefer?

They'll pick the one that's nice and evenly balanced. Bingo. Yeah, that one looks nicer. They won't be able to tell you why. But I prefer that one. So that's balanced.

And it's a very important part of photography. videography. Another important part is exposure. So this is the exposure of light so when you're taking a photo or video, you have many different controls to you know, you've got the exposure compensation, you've got the ISO, you've got the aperture, all these sorts of things, but one of the main things that they do is control how much light is coming into the lens and how exposed or underexposed overexposed things are. So over exposure is where everything's too bright. You know, perhaps as the sun behind you and you can't see anything.

It's like you're being blinded or everything's just blown out is what everybody Where you can't see any detail, it just looks horrible sort of thing. I'll show you here, this is overexposure then you've got the opposite side of it which is under exposure and that's when there's not enough light so perhaps you know you're taking a photo of a band in a dark nightclub or you know maybe you just add not taking photos so that thing and there's not enough lotsa you can't see the detail of people's faces or whatever it is that you're photographing or taking a video of. It's all underexposed, and everything's just too dark to see. And both of these cases are very important in photography and videography, but they're even more important with drones and I'll go into its own special section in the next video because drones often fly out in the sun and nearly have as much control over the light with drones as you would with another camera.

Here I have full control over the lighting in here. Make sure that it's not overexposed or underexposed. So, it's a bit harder with drones. And I'll cover that in the next section. So that's just a brief sort of overview of a few, you know, quick, handy tips that you can do for both your normal photography with the camera or your phone or something like that. But also for drones.

The next one is to do with your background. So you'll probably notice that I'm basically the only point of focus here, my background is very plain white, it's simple. All you can focus on is me, makes a nice image. If this was a background of, you know, 100 different things or, you know, cars whizzing by or you know, 100 different things happening, that wouldn't make it as nice again, you wouldn't sort of be comfortable with it. You'd always be distracted by the background and the things that are happening there. And it's the same for photos as well.

You want to make sure that your background is generally speaking complicated, perhaps it's complicated and blurred out, you see that effect quite a lot with cameras. So you'll have lots of different things in the background, but it'll just be blurred out. So it makes it less complicated, less noisy, all that sort of stuff on the thing that you're wanting to focus on the subject is nice and clear and crisp, new focus, everything else is out of focus. The other ways you can just have a beam focus background, but very simple. As I said, perhaps if you're taking a photo of a boat, for instance, rather than taking a photo of the boat, you know, directly on and you see the boat and you've got all this mountains and other people and other boats and complicated things in the background that distract you from the sort of the focal point of the photo the boat, perhaps try taking it from overhead.

So you can send this photo here as an example. It's just a simple boat, because all the water around it is one color, very flat. It's very simple. That makes that focal point of the boat stand out a lot more whole photo just gets better because of it because there's no complicating things in the background. Now moving on from the background, if you're not sort of in photography and too much about it, you probably won't be aware of the whole foreground, middle ground and background ideas. I'm not going to go into this too much.

But generally speaking, when people fly drones, they mostly if they're not too expert, they mostly focus on background. So you know, your mountains, your oceans as they go off into the distance, all those sorts of things because you're so high up in a drone, usually, all you want to take a photo of is that you know, pretty mountain in the background or a pretty Castle in the background or waterfall or whatever it might be. And that's fine background photo background. Only photos can be very pretty and very nice. But if that's all you take photos and video goes on can quickly get quite boring. So you want to mix it up with taking photos with things in the foreground, which might be, for instance, myself here for random, very close to the camera.

And, you know, by any subject sort of thing. The middle ground is obviously anything between the foreground and the background sound might be, you might have a person standing here in the foreground, a house in the back in the middle ground, and then mountains in the background. So they are three foreground, middle road and backgrounds. And you want to also move between them. So you might move from your foreground, and then pan away into the middle ground or something. And we'll cover that again, in different sections.

But that's just something to keep in mind that you do have these three separate things you need to keep mixing it up to make sure that your photos are interesting. Now, speaking of making sure that your photos and videos are interesting, another fantastic trick is obviously to have a subject in your photo and video, as I said, many people take photos of backgrounds and that's perfectly fine mountains or volcanoes or whatever it might be. But generally, if you're creating a big slideshow or a big, you know, movie montage, something like that, you want to have different foreground different background middle round, and you want to have subjects you want to have something that the viewer can actually focus on, that can keep their interest you know, if you have a picture of a beach might look very nice. If you have a picture of that same beach with someone, you know, paddling out into the ocean on the surfboard, that just makes it more interesting, this and liveliness to it gives it more depth and visitor about photos and videos, obviously.

And while you're doing it, you want to make sure that not only have a subject in the photo, but they're actually preferably doing something perhaps it's a car that's, you know, going in and out of the center. You might have an overview of it. road or something like that in a car comes driving through, it makes a lot more interesting than just an overhead video of a road. Not doing anything, just the maze will be a photo sort of thing. So, again, we'll cover these sorts of examples, a bit more in a section later on. But this is just to sort of get you thinking about certain different ideas and things that you don't want to just take videos and photos of roads, you're just taking videos and photos of buildings or you know, mountains and that sort of stuff to really get good, nice photos that they get the reaction and people go, you know, that's a really good, further, good work sort of thing.

You've got to add multiple things. You've got to add foreground, you've got to add points of interest, you've got to have subjects moving through to create an interest in sort of, you know, keep people entertained, basically, because it is a form of entertainment. So make sure that you have a subject proper were subjected to Moving doing something to keep it interesting when you're doing a video or photo Now, that's not none of these are absolute 100% rules you can learn them and break them obviously but it's about knowing all the different points that keep people interested and mixing them in with each other main as I said, photo of, you know, Neptunes can be beautiful and look fantastic that won't have any, you know, moving cars or any of that sort of garbage in it, but it was still beautiful, but at the same time you can't show 100 photos of 100 different mountains it's gonna get boring no matter how fantastic their shots look, you have to mix the media creating a video and mix them in when you're creating a slideshow or something like that.

So don't take what I'm saying with 100% seriousness. Try and mix it in with that so stuff have you know, symmetrical photos have slightly off balance photos, mix it in with cars driving through mobile and a mobile soft subject. your photos and videos. And one other final thing I just want to say that really sort of makes things extra where a lot of the time, you'll see, you know, really award winning photos. And what I've noticed is that those sorts of photos, you can sort of, you know, you can go into a place like maybe Antarctica and get a fantastic shot like this where it's a really unique place. You know, when we went to talk to her, it was fantastic.

You essentially couldn't take a bad photo, you could, you know, take a photo with the phone, and he had a window over the actual ship and that looks fantastic. It was jaw dropping, because the scenery was just so gorgeous and so beautiful everywhere you went. But at the same time, as I said, it can get boring after a while but at the same time, the absolute best photos that are out there, sort of combined two things you have on one hand, scenery or thing or a place that's just unique. It's you know, amazing Looking and not many people get a photo of it, you know, many people go to Antarctica or maybe it's, you know, a solar eclipse or something like that something that's actually special a place or a photo of something that's very unique and special. But what makes the photo go from, oh, that's a really nice photo, right up to kind of like, wow, that's, that's an amazing photo is combining that unique special location with doing something else unique inside of it.

So perhaps you might be, you know, doing an awesome 360 snowboarding trick or something. Whilst, you know, the International Space Station trades, it's through the sun or something like that, you know, combining these two things that are completely fantastic in their own right, you know, a picture of someone doing an awesome ski jump or solving a picture of the International Space Station, transiting through the sun or both separately. Great shots to do and they look great. Just separately. When you combine Together, you elevate that photo right up into an amazing shot. And you can do this too.

And maybe you don't do it on that, such a high level. But you can go from a really good shot to an absolutely fantastic shot. If you get something that you know you've got a drone, or you'll be getting a drone soon, you can get some very, very unique perspectives and videos and some amazing shots on these interviews. Combine that with someone, perhaps on the ground or a boat or something, doing something amazing at the same time, you know, maybe they're doing jet skiing, and they going over awesome, Jonathan year, while you've got a unique perspective, from the journal itself, it can take it from you just videoing someone having fun on a jetski to an amazing video of, you know, great proportions. So that's something that I've noticed over time doing photography, doing video and drone photography that when you combine those two things together, try and look out for those things you'll know when You're in a really unique spot, you know, you kind of know when you're in Antarctica or something like that it's not always possible.

You're you're allowed to take drones to Antarctica anymore, unfortunately. But that being said, there's other places that you can and try and look out for those locations that gives you that fantastic opportunity to have a fantastic shot of someone or something doing something fantastic in a fantastic location. So that's just a general tip that you can keep in the back your mind and look out for while you're doing all your photography and videography. And I'd highly recommend reading up more on just general photography. There's lots of videos and other stuff online about drone photography, but it's certainly nowhere near the amount that's upon digital photography. So and they both apply to each other.

So you want to get good at taking photos with your drone or taking videos with your drone. Go and research just plain old photography of playing videography because they've been around for decades, but some fantastic and very free resources out there, I recommend taking them up. And a big part of it is also what you can do in Photoshop, and Lightroom or Final Cut Pro or all those sorts of tools as well. So that can, again, take a shot from being beautiful, right up to next level sort of thing. So have a read through any of that online stuff if you're still interested. But in the next section, we'll be covering light and how it applies to drones in specific so i'll talk to you then