Of all the focal lengths, I personally think wide-angle lenses might take the most getting used to when it comes to creating compelling imagery that takes advantage of their unique properties and avoids their pitfalls. This helpful video will give you some great tips for taking better shots with them.
Coming to you from Nigel Danson, this helpful video examines the use of wide-angle lenses and how to create better photos with them. Wide-angle lenses are probably my favorite, but there's more to them than simply capturing more of a scene. Personally, I think the most commonly overlooked quirk is that they often require a strong foreground element to make a compelling shot (though not always), lest there's a tendency for the resultant image to look a bit vast and flat. When you find such an element, however, you'll often be rewarded with an image that has a natural, multi-layered composition with pleasing nuance that naturally leads the eye to the grander background elements (if, for example, you use a rock in the foreground of a mountain shot). Once you get used to the way they tend to behave, they're one of the most powerful tools you can have in your bag.
Twenty-nine seconds of useful information. Fifteen minutes of annoying music, rambling dialogue and boring walking and cliché drone video. You have to sift through a lot of dirt and sand to find a pebble of gold. <sigh>
That's why I dislike the increasing use of video in place of a written article - as one's forced not only to watch in reel-time, but to endure the foibles of the presenter. A written article can be speed-read to sift out any useful nuggets - and is less prone to tedious flowery narcissism.
Ansel. Yes, yes and yes. The video craze is driving me crazy.
There are some blogs out there that are pretty good about summarizing the video in the article (especially great when the video is a list and they actually list out every item), but unfortunately it feels like Fstoppers only briefly describes the contents of the video. I'm sure there are good reasons for doing it this way, but yeah, I don't have time to watch five 15-minute videos every day trying to extract the actual useful info.
The reason we don't do that is because I believe that's plagiarism. If you give away the content of the video to the point that it's no longer necessary to watch it, you're robbing the video's creator of the views they earned through the hard work in creating that video and passing off the work as your own. That's why we do our best to help you decide if the video is something you would personally like and should therefore watch but don't transcribe its contents.
Plagiarism is when you try to pass something off as your own. If you precis a piece whilst crediting its owner (of the intellectual copyright), you're okay. Newspapers and TV stations do it every day.
That makes sense, and just in case, my comment was not intended as a criticism of Fstoppers' content; my own personal browsing habits simply aren't well-suited to a lot of video content. But I am relieved to know that there's a deliberate decision behind the format :)
Where are those 30 seconds located? If you can tell me which quarter of the video has it, it will be much appreciated!
In the first half but I would have to watch it again to be more precise and I'm not going to. :-(
we start having an overdose of these videos on YouTube
The comment section is usually very useful. Now I know not to waste my time on this 15min video for 29 seconds of actual good info.