Hey, this is Chris Mockwart of Tips from the top floor, the show about all things photography
and here's the fourth episode of the Everest trek.
On a trek like this, where you walk up to altitudes around 18,000 feet, you will run
into all sorts of issues.
One of them is the fact that there is not a lot of atmosphere above you to filter the
visible radiation.
More in short, there is simply too much light.
Too much light?
Yes, at times.
We had that at times?
Yes, at times, but I mean the clouds come in later in the day, so the lighting is really
good right now.
I bring a neutral density filter, I didn't bring one.
Polarizer isn't quite enough, but by bracketing the shot, I'll put that together in an HDR
photo.
Usually what I've been doing is I've just been taking a picture on the auto setting
and having a look at it and see how it turned out and then usually the sky is very bright
and the landscape is very dark and then I would just fiddle with my exposure compensation.
I don't have any filters.
I would just kind of fiddle with things to try to make the shot better or I would use
the zone system that you showed us last week, which seemed to help as well.
Really, today was kind of the first time I encountered a lot of that and I just adjusted
the exposure compensation down a little bit to offset it.
Really, today was kind of the first time I was starting to notice a lot of the highlights
getting blown out.
I'm using exposure compensation, in some cases I'm trying to play around with the Chris
Marquardt modification of the zone method.
I thought the zone system was interesting until Andy broke it.
Until I broke it?
You broke the zone system and no longer were all.
I take the blame.
I think I might have been having trouble working quickly enough on manual so that I wasn't
getting my shots quickly enough and I said, damn the zone system, I can't make it work
because I wasn't twirling things.
I needed to change my aperture and I needed to take the polarizer filter off.
That was the problem.
And most of the time I kept it on two thirds to one f-stop underexposed to try to not blow
out highlights.
That's going to take some processing.
The ones that are all underexposed are going to take some tweaking to get just right.
I did not have a lens hood and so basically I would take my hand and try to just do a
little bit.
And I just tried to shade it if I was pointing into the sun and I noticed a couple of pictures
I got my palm in there but other than that it worked fine.
Almost all the time I had an ND4 filter on it.
On the day I used the ND4 filter to be like in the normal range you're expecting with
exposure times 150 to 200s of a second.
Alright today I want to talk about light and lots of light.
We are still at altitude here in the Himalayas and well actually the light is so strong here
that we have to put on sun protection in the morning and at the noon time of 50 plus.
That is more than I've ever seen actually.
And that is because there is a lot of UV radiation and for the glaciers for the time when we
were up at Gorak Shep right next to the big glacier pretty close to base camp I actually
had special sunglasses that are glacier glasses that block out a lot of the spectrum and make
sure that your eyes don't get hurt.
Now these are kind of normal again we're a bit lower down but still we have a lot of
light.
So let's look at what light does to your camera and to your pictures.
Lots of light means that the camera can do things that it usually can't do that easily
and that is it can stop down really really far which means use a very very small aperture.
The camera can also use very short shutter speeds.
On this camera which is a Canon 5D Mark II it gets down to an 8000th of a second.
This can be very helpful.
Let's look at the aperture first.
If you have a very small aperture you end up having lots in focus.
That's just how it works.
The small aperture makes things in the front and in the back in focus.
So you end up having quite an advantage if you're a landscape photographer for example
if you want to have everything from the front to the back in focus.
So that can be beneficial.
The same thing is true for short shutter speeds.
You can easily take pictures while moving the camera at an 8000th of a second even at
a 4000th of a second it's really hard to get some decent camera shake in and typically
at home we rather fight with not a short enough shutter speed.
So these two things can be beneficial but of course with a very small aperture you cannot
do portraits with the background out of focus for example.
It's just not really going to work.
So you are really limited in a certain way.
The same thing with short shutter speeds.
A few of the participants of the workshop wanted to shoot pictures of a waterfall where
water falls over rocks and they wanted to blur those out but that didn't work because
there was too much light so they couldn't get a long enough shutter speed without getting
any overexposure in it.
So what do you do in that case?
Well, Sonam, one of our Sherpa guides had a brilliant idea.
He's also a participant of the workshop.
We made him a participant.
He used his Sony bridge camera and used his sunglasses.
Just put them in front of the camera and this way tone it down and that's actually very
close to what professionals do.
We use so-called ND filters and ND filter is called neutral density filters.
They come in different strengths, they are neutral grey so they won't change the colors
in your picture and they will just darken down the picture for you.
Videographers use those all the time.
Photographers in the studio use those all the time and out here it's a very common thing.
If you don't have an ND filter what you can use at least is a polarizer.
That's what I've been using up here a lot and the polarizer will not just take away
one or two stops of light from your pictures but it will also help you darken down blue
skies.
It will also help you get more saturation in foliage, in just surfaces that might reflect
light.
So you get more saturation, get crisper pictures with a polarizer.
That's definitely one of those filters that I highly recommend in areas like this.
So I think lots of light, good topic for the day, talk to you again next time, until then,
namaste.
Okay they are actually pouring kerosene into the oven now.
Well and that was it for today, thanks for being tuned in.
And in the next episode we'll have a closer look at some of the track life and as usual
you are invited to come along on the journey.
If you want to get tips from the top floor automatically delivered to you every time
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