Photo Walk in Napa Valley | National Geographic

Hi everybody! I'm Ashley Kalina. Thanks for joining us again. We're here in beautiful Napa Valley for Get Outdoors Day, and we are here with National Geographic and our friends at Nature Valley. I'm joined by Ben Horton, the wonderful photographer. He's going to show you guys some tips and tricks to take better photos in your own world.

Thanks for joining us, Ben!

I'm super excited to be here and just kind of show people my process on how I try to get great photos when I'm out in beautiful places like this. I think we have a really great day for it today.

We do! The light keeps changing, which is cool because it gives us different options. Sometimes it's a little overcast like this, which, you know, there's less big shadows and bright spots, and then sometimes we're going to have that beautiful backlight. Nature's unpredictable; you kind of just have to...

That's exactly the point! So guys, if you have any questions for Ben, please comment below, and he will answer any questions that you guys have.

So, do you want to just show what you think is going to be the best...?

You know, even while we were just standing right here, I saw something behind us I thought looked pretty cool. You see this kind of tunnel going through the trees with the trail and the beautiful redwoods around it?

Yeah, I see some really tall redwoods and some Douglas-fir trees. These are beautiful right there! There's this strip of light that's just starting to come through the clouds right now, and I think it'd be a really cool shot that would have a little bit of story in it because I'm going to have you walk through it.

Wonderful! Well, direct away!

All right, yeah, you know best!

All right, so I'm going to stay right here, and what I want you to do is just to walk up through there and kind of pause in that light. Then you can take a few more steps to the top of that ridge and then just come back. And if you want, I can put the iPad in here.

That would be great; that's so helpful. So you want me to be facing this way and then facing back?

Yeah, just walk up and then walk back, and I'll shoot as you go.

Great! Is this pace good?

That pace is perfect!

So the idea here is just to get a little bit of story in the photo. Right now, when she's walking in that light, she gets a little bit of a halo around her. Let me know; she's kind of backlit by that light.

Now you can come back. Great! Really pretty!

Yeah, I love taking photos that tell a story. That's, you know, hard to do sometimes in pure landscape photos, but when we're out here together like this, it's a perfect opportunity. And I think, you know, what better place to tell a story than when you're surrounded by these beautiful redwoods and this wonderful foliage?

And there's your iPad!

Well, I appreciate that! Yeah, you know, with all this green and all the leaves and everything around us, sometimes it can be really confusing. There's just so many things going on that it's hard to focus in on one thing. One of the things that we talk about in photography a lot of the time is trying to decide what to keep out of a picture rather than what to put in. You know, if you just went wide and tried to photograph this whole scene, you'd get lost in the image.

But there's so much going on!

Yeah, there's just so much going on, but there are so many details that we can get close to. You know, and using light we can make things like silhouettes. It just opens up the creative world to us.

Sure! So that's tip number one for me is teaching people how to decide what to leave out.

Okay, so what's the next opportunity that you see around here?

I see a lot of really small plants! Yeah, you know, I want to get into some macro photography. I think I saw something further up the trail, but, you know, I just kind of want to walk through and see what we see because the light's changed since I was here last.

You know, taking a look at all of it with fresh perspectives... Is there something like a big takeaway that you can just give to our fans that they should look out for maybe when they're in a landscape that would be really good for them?

Yeah, I mean, maybe this is a little bit more complex than what you're looking for, but my biggest tip to people with photography is to show people how you see the world, and that'll always be a unique perspective for them.

Well, that's a great story to tell!

Yeah, so like, you know, when I'm walking through here, I'm seeing like the pathway, the story of somebody moving through the forest and then, you know, these ancient trees around it and all these patterns. So I’m taking pictures of things that I think I'm noticing that other people might walk right by.

And as a photographer, I'm looking for light a lot of the time.

And like right here, this is really beautiful. This is a beautiful scene right here!

Yeah, so I'll tell you what I'm seeing here. You know, first of all it's just a really cool situation where this log has fallen over the creek, but there's also... it's layered here. There's a lot of perspective for us.

When it's just flat, our eye really has nothing to dive into, but when you have, you know, this foreground, middle ground, background situation, then it's more interesting for us. A personal look into the picture a little bit.

You know, probably a good shot of just you right on the edge of this log here, and that'll give us our foreground element, and then we'll get, you know, the creek tells the story of where you are and what you're doing, and then we have the background element of that big beautiful log in the background.

You want to try it?

So you're making me take a little bit... I'm not getting an adventure!

I'm not going to make you walk into the middle!

Okay, but just right here on the edge. You know, and what we're doing is I'm actually using you to give somebody that vicarious experience to live through. So, like, when they see you looking off into this view, what they're doing is they're putting themselves in that position. You're making them part of this world that you experience as well.

No, if I was taking just like a portrait of you, that's a picture of you, and nobody really lives vicariously through that. But you looking off into the distance, that'll give somebody something to think about. And I think even that speaks so much to Get Outdoors Day today too!

This is perfect for getting outdoors!

It's perfect!

Yeah, so I will get right on over there. I'm going to trade this off with you again.

Well, I have a nice spot for it.

Wonderful! So I will get up here, just let me know.

Well, you just go to where you're comfortable, and I don't need you to go far at all. You don't have to go over the edge, and that probably is better if you don't.

Yeah, I don't think I really want to go over the edge because that wouldn't be good for anybody.

No, right! That's great!

Okay, so what I'm going to have you do is actually turn to look out that way.

Great!

Now I'm keeping the ground here at this side of the log out of the photo you've been taking.

Yeah, I think that would be really cool for our audience to see!

So this here, this is the one where it shows kind of the foreground. You see the ground, and it's not quite as interesting to me as when you cut it out, and now you see this pathway that you're walking along, right? You have that background element, the big redwoods off to the right.

Do you want me to get back up there?

No, no, I think we got it.

Okay, that's great! And I might just take a couple here of the tree.

But absolutely! I will go over here while you do your thing!

One of the things that I've learned photographing in the woods is that if you get the sky in the picture, sometimes it's a little bit too bright.

It's really dark down here, but up there it's really bright. Even on an overcast day like this, the camera just can't handle it like our eye can.

So the trick is when you're photographing redwoods like this is just crop the sky out. Sometimes you can try to include it, but you know in this last photo, the sky still just comes out as pure white.

Pure white's not really that good because, excuse me, it's not really that good because that's the first thing that our eye is going to go to in the image. If something's so bright like that, it just it draws you away from what I'm trying to get the person to focus on.

Up into that sky.

Great! I'm going to steal this iPad to see if there's any questions.

Questions are always good!

Questions are always good! They help me think about what I'm doing! You know, sometimes it's so much just kind of instinctual process after shooting for this long.

So we have a question that says, "What kind of lens do you use when you're in a nature setting like this?"

From Nearest Law, my favorite lenses are usually fixed; they're prime lenses. But the lens that I end up using the most is actually, it's a 24 to 70.

It goes a little bit wide, it goes a little bit telephoto, and just through the years having been in so many scenarios where I'm trying to shoot with this lens or that lens, that's the lens that ends up on my camera the most. It works really great for photos of people in it as well.

Now a prime lens is always a better lens, and what I like about a prime lens is you can't just zoom in. What you do is you walk in, and it changes your perspective. It makes you look for a better shot rather than just say, "Oh, I'm not close enough! Let me zoom in!"

Right, so they kind of are those are like two good lenses that you would recommend for people to use if they're trying to take good pictures.

Yeah, you know a good landscape lens can be really wide depending on what you're shooting, but the kind of middle ground good for a lot of things lens is 24 to 70 millimeters in my opinion.

Okay, do you have like certain types of things out here in nature that you do like photographing more?

You know, like I said, I really like anything with story, and a lot of times that has people in it.

I like adventure!

Yeah! You know, getting out and seeing something that other people may not really have the opportunity to see on their own.

You know right here is a perfect example of how you can kind of declutter a scene.

You know, part of me wants to just photograph everything that's here, but really what might end up being interesting is a macro shot of one of these ferns. You know, ferns have so much detail in them.

So, yeah. And what really stands out to me a lot of the time is patterns.

So, and this goes back to our question about lenses is what lens would I choose for this?

I'll try it first with the 24 to 70, but I also have a macro lens.

Okay, and this is a lot of poison oak around here, so I'm going to be really careful.

So what I like about this is that the leaf is in the sun, but there's a shadow behind it, so that's going to make the leaf stand out, and I'm going to underexpose just a little bit to make those shadows really drop down.

Excuse me!

You know, and the end of this one looks pretty cool too. I'm going to try it with a 100-millimeter macro lens, so that allows me to get a lot closer and really bring up those fine details.

Full pattern... I've always liked looking for patterns in nature. You can find them in something as small as this or, you know, up in the way that the leaves are crossing the redwoods and creating these kinds of layers.

There's just there's so much small stuff that you can look into, and one of the tricks I've found for doing that... Sorry, I've got something in my throat.

One of the things that I found for doing that is you can start wide and then just slowly work your way in until you've found a really cool detail.

For me, I think that these ferns are the detail that is most interesting to me around here, and trying to get those different perspectives without getting in the poison oak. Something that'll be unique and stand out, it's really hard to get them in focus though with macro.

That's why tripods are usually better.

That's kind of cool!

Now what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to open and close my aperture down to 4.5 or maybe 5.0, so I can try to get more of it in focus.

Thank you!

Cool! I'll switch back to that 24 to 70.

Now, if anybody has any questions about how I'm doing this or what I'm doing or what I'm thinking, just post it on the Facebook page, and I'll try to answer them.

Great! Those photos look absolutely beautiful.

Thanks! You know, I haven't really gotten to photograph the details on a fern like this in a while, and it's something I used to do a long time ago when I was living in New Zealand, so it's been probably 10 years since I've tried that photo.

Well, it's beautiful!

Thank you! And I have a present for you too.

Thank you!

As we go into this beautiful circle of redwoods, do you want to see what's in here?

Absolutely!

I think you know—we have the little fairy circle is what it's called—the redwoods in here.

Foreign wants to know how you would define a great picture.

Oh, well that's very subjective. But, you know...

It's in your opinion, right?

In my opinion, a great picture, it really depends on the light. You can have an interesting subject and terrible light, you'll get an okay picture. You can have a kind of boring subject, great light, and you're going to get a great picture.

And, you know, a great picture is going to tell a little bit of story. It's not something you just look at. That's why even when I'm shooting landscapes, I like to have one little person in there; something that just makes you think about what it would be like to stand there yourself.

It really puts you in that story and makes you part of that scene.

Yeah, I mean when you look at a lot of the pictures in National Geographic...

There's what happened?

All right, so we're going to continue to just go back into the redwoods here, and just what do you see in here that's speaking to you?

I see a few things!

So, you know, see how dark these redwood trees are?

Yes, and how bright the background is.

So, I mean, it's kind of—it's really contrasty, and it lends itself to silhouettes.

So we could try something there, or what we could do is we could expose for the background, which is brighter, and, you know, try to get some elements of story in there.

These trees are so big, it's hard to tell their story without putting somebody in it, right?

So I might have you in this photo as well!

Okay, wonderful!

You just direct me, and I will follow your wonderful guidance!

All right, well, you know, I'm probably going to walk around a little bit and just look through the lens. You know, I think that's one of the problems that people run into is they try to be a little too stationary. You just... you have to get a feeling for the scene!

I'll be over here!

All right, let's see.

It's really nice sometimes getting those flares of light coming from the background. It's hard to expose for both, so I have to pick one or the other.

This is nice; it's really dark in here though!

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to raise my ISO up to about 800 or a thousand.

ISO is the sensitivity of the camera, so it allows me to work with less light. If I don't increase it and I just shoot at, say, 100 to 200 ISO, what's going to end up happening is my shutter speed is going to be a lot slower.

And when it's slowed down like that, I can't hold the camera still long enough to get the photo that I'm trying to get.

So right now my shutter speed is an 80th of a second, which depending on what you're shooting could be considered slow.

See here, I'm going to try working my way around this way and looking at the trees from another angle.

So our sun is up there, and it's coming this way. Let's see... now if I get right in the middle of them and I shoot straight up, it kind of looks like they're all coming to a point above me.

It's a really interesting pattern to work with.

It's the shot I've seen done a few times, but it's definitely worth taking! And you know what? I'm getting that sun in the photo so it could give us an interesting little sun flare.

I think that one's pretty cool!

I like working with sun flares. I think it's, you know, it can be an advantage sometimes, but sometimes it can distract from the elements of the picture that you're actually trying to focus on.

So I'm going to take a few without it as well!

One of the reasons I don't usually shoot straight up on trees is because we're taking something that's three-dimensional, and then we're making it two-dimensional. When we do that, you don't actually get a sense of how high the tree is in the actual image itself.

So I'm thinking of this more as a pattern than as, "Hey, look at how big these trees are!"

Actually, let's get you in here for a couple shots!

Great!

I'm spy!

Now, if this was photojournalism, I would probably find a scene like this, and I'd just wait. You know, I'd set up the camera, wait for somebody to come through, and then I'd shoot.

If I'm creating an image like I'm doing now, I'm thinking about how I can get you to tell the story that I want told.

So I want to talk about how big the trees are. Now, if I got down, I shot up at you, it would be a terrible angle that would not... nobody likes that angle!

It is not flattering for anything!

So to get a good photo of you, I'm going to step back a little bit.

Right, but I want to still have that sense of how big the trees are, so I'm going to have you just kind of looking up.

Okay!

Okay, not strained, difficult, but just like I'm not here!

Okay!

Foreign!

Let me know where you want me to stand!

I want you to actually just wander around a little bit just in that front area, and it looks really good with that color up against the tree behind you.

So this is actually an interesting shot, and I think that there's a lot to learn here in, you know, if you were wearing something that was the same color as the trees, you might get lost in there, but this stands out.

Great! Did you get the shot you needed?

Okay, I'm just going to have you walk out to this side over here, going a little bit...

Great, great! Wonderful, good job!

Well, I had great guidance!

Yeah, so I mean you're pretty small in the picture, but see how you stand out against this kind of silhouetted tree, right?

I think it works pretty well!

That's absolutely beautiful! You can see how tall the trees are; it really puts everything in perspective!

Right, without distorting you in the image.

Exactly! It's wonderful!

Yeah, I think, you know, this would be a great opportunity here to talk a little bit about things like polarizers and maybe even if we can get some darker light on the water, we could get some motion blurs.

Yeah, we do have this beautiful stream right behind us!

So I'm going to throw the polarizer on the camera, and I know this might be a great opportunity to answer a couple questions for people as well!

Sure!

Is there a way to focus on a subject that has a lens flare in the background?

Alex is asking, "Is there a way to focus on a subject that has a lens flare?"

Okay, um, you know what? A lens flare is when the sun is hitting the glass on the lens; it's not being shaded.

That sunlight is coming through, and it's getting kind of broken up by all the different lens elements.

So if the question is how to find the lens flare, shoot towards the light. If the question is if there's a lens flare and you're having trouble focusing, what I do is I cover that lens flare up with my hand, get my focus, and then when I take my hand away, it's already in focus. I can just take a picture.

Well, that makes a lot of sense!

I hope so!

No one wants to know what camera you are using right now.

Right now, I'm using a 5D Mark IV. It's one of my favorites. I also have the 5D RS for night photos in here.

And are those the usual bodies that you shoot on?

These are almost all the time! I used to have one of the 1DS, which is a very big, very professional camera, and I love it.

But I did a trip for National Geographic where I dog sledded across the Arctic, and 1400 miles later, I'm carrying this, you know, huge camera, and I got back and I bought the 5D because it's small.

It's technically considered prosumer, but it shoots as well as any professional camera, and a lot of professionals have moved on to smaller cameras now.

Well, that's great for outdoor stuff like this!

Yeah, you know, it easily goes in a backpack.

So for anybody just joining us right now, we are currently live in Napa Valley with Ben Horton, photographer, and we are here with National Geographic and our friends Nature Valley, and Ben is here to answer all of your photography questions.

So make sure you keep commenting below; we want to get to as many questions as possible, so please keep firing away!

Keep them coming!

Yeah, they've been really great so far, guys!

All right! This is a good little opportunity here to show how a polarizer works.

Well, I'm going to go let you do your thing over here!

All right! Because this looks beautiful!

So what a polarizer does is it helps get rid of reflections, and it does that by limiting the kinds of wavelengths that can come into an image.

It screws right onto the front of the lens right here, so what you do to change the polarization of the light is you just twist the polarizer, right?

And I'm going to take a before and after image.

I don't know if they're going to be great shots, but they're going to show you the difference between the two!

So here is with all of the reflection taken away, and then I turn it, and we have reflections.

So you can use that to your advantage when you want the reflection of trees in a creek or, you know, something in a pool; but you can also use it when you want to see through the water to see what's underneath it like these rocks.

I'm going to step out here and get a photo downstream of these redwoods, and I'm going to see if the polarizer can kind of change the shot around and if one way is going to work better than another.

So let's try it first with no reflection.

That was no reflection; let's try it now with reflection.

And then we're going to take it away.

And actually, it's really cool because you get to see all those colors that are coming through from the wet rocks.

I don't know if you've ever seen how if you give a seashell, and when it's dry, it looks boring, you pop it in the water, it looks really pretty.

It's kind of what's happening here with the rocks. We're getting more colors from the ones that are underwater than from the ones that are above.

And I think I'm going to grab my tripod, and what I'm going to do here is I'm going to try to get a little bit of motion in the water, and what that's going to do is it's going to, I feel like it almost adds time to a photo.

I'm going to come down here and hand this off to you.

All right, thank you for holding that!

Yep, I'm going to set it up right here.

Actually, while you're getting set up, we have a question that's pretty relevant for right here.

Okay, yeah!

From Gnome, what's the best method to take pictures of waterfalls?

The best method? Well, you know, if you're trying to get that blur, there's a few different ways, and that's what I'm going to go into next, which is the perfect side motion blur, right?

Which is by increasing the amount of time that the shutter's open.

Now maybe it's really bright out, and you can't do that. There's something called a neutral density filter, which just darkens the scene and allows you to have the shutter open longer.

But sometimes I like to shoot in the dark sometimes, honestly, because you can leave that shutter open for so long it gives you a different feel.

Yeah, yeah!

All right, I'm going to pop back down here and try not to slip!

Got a nice stable base here to work off of.

What this allows me to do is I'm going to drop my ISO back down, the opposite of what I did before.

And with it this low, it's going to allow me to have a longer shutter speed.

So right now, I actually have a shutter speed of two and a half seconds!

Two and a half seconds with the shutter open, I'm going to record all of the motion that's happening here in this photo.

Level it out a little bit.

Let's see, I actually think just a little bit of reflection with the polarizer helps.

And there's really only one way to see if it works.

Now we're at a 3.2-second exposure!

Let's give it a go!

The water just starts kind of looking like a fog, and to me, that's really fun!

It feels more like I'm being creative in art!

I'm going to try a couple others and going to add more reflection to the scene, see what that does.

It's kind of cool!

Let's try a detail shot; sometimes a detail shot of something in here can be really cool—like, you know, I remember seeing a picture once of a leaf that was in the water on a rock!

I don't see anything around here!

But maybe I can find something that'll give the same effect.

What I do is, you know, as the water runs over whatever it is that I'm shooting, it just becomes blurry, but then what's underneath...

Uh, here's one right here!

What's underneath stays in focus!

The rocks are moving around underneath me here!

All right, so I have a little—I don't know if it's a maple leaf or something like that!

Let's try it!

All right, the leaf looks a little bit blurry, and I think the reason is it's moving with the water a little bit.

So I might speed up the shutter speed to reduce some of that motion.

All right, an eighth of a second!

It's kind of cool!

Keep looking around and see what else we can find with it.

Actually, this is really pretty too—this moss on this log is an interesting color.

This is what I'm talking about, about kind of diving into a scene. You know, you start wide, and then you start finding all these really cool little details that you just get absorbed in them!

And I could stay, and I could just shoot these details for hours!

Let's make it a four-second exposure!

You can't even tell it's water underneath it!

So I think that exposure is too long; I’d speed it up just a little bit!

Cool! Do we have any other questions coming in?

Yeah, so first of all, Brenda says you're awesome! She wants to take classes with you!

Do you offer anything?

I do do classes sometimes! I teach a lot of night photography workshops on how to photograph the Milky Way and things like that!

Well, that's pretty inspiring!

It's fun too! It's one of my favorite things to shoot!

Me too!

And it's really cool because the camera picks up so many things that our eyes don't, especially when you're photographing something like the stars!

Right, do you want to keep going on this journey here and see what else we see on the trail?

Yeah, you know, I've been looking down so much for the last few minutes; I kind of want to look up!

I also don't want to forget my bag!

That's, you know, that's probably a good idea!

Foreign!

So I had another question from Debbie Judy, who was saying, "He always shoots in raw but raw takes up so much space!"

Right?

Do you always shoot in raw or do you change up what you shoot in?

I always shoot in raw. You know, the cards I use usually are 64 gigabytes, something like that, and they can hold a lot of photos!

I mean, a lot!

Yeah, that's a lot!

But I always have four or five cards, and sometimes I'll switch them out even before it's full so that if I lose one, I don't lose everything!

I'm seeing a really cool fern over here!

Yep, be a pretty shot!

Why don't you go over there and take a look at it?

But what I'm actually doing right now is I have two cards in here; one of them is recording JPEG and one's recording raw.

And the reason I do that is I can have a JPEG card that I just leave, and it can hold hundreds of thousands of photos because it's so big.

So even if I lose all of my raw pictures from the last two shoots, I've got the JPEG in there.

Makes sense!

You probably would always like to have a backup so you don't lose that thing that you were taking a picture of all day—that beauty that you were seeing!

Yeah, backing up is really important!

You know, everything right now, I haven't lost anything in years because the technology is so good!

But I feel like when you do, you lose a little piece of yourself when it happens!

Or even if you just lose a card—that's why I don't shoot cards that are too big!

Because if I lose, you know, 128 gigabytes of photos rather than 64, it's a big deal!

Space!

Yeah, I'm going to take a picture back here!

Great!

What I like about this, it really is, it's just so green! It's another pattern, and you've got this super mossy log kind of working away in the background.

I think the worst way to shoot this would be to just go right up here and shoot straight at the log where it's directly across in front of me.

But from this angle here, I see it going away from me, and that adds to that perspective that we were talking about!

Huh!

Let's change a few settings here; we're still set up for the creek!

Interesting!

You know what? They're not all winners!

Like, I think that this is really pretty to my eye!

I look at this and I think, you know, this is some place I'd like to set up a hammock and just chill out for a while!

But I look at it through the camera, and it's just not quite working the way that I imagine it does!

And I think really that's one of the biggest things in photography is learning how to see something through the camera before you actually pull that camera up!

And it just gets really complicated sometimes because you're looking at something that's going to be two-dimensional!

We're looking at it with emotion too! You know, right now the air temperature is perfect, I like being out here, I'm having a great day in nature!

I might see this a different way than I will see it when I look at a picture of it later on.

So I'm going to keep moving up the trail.

So we have another question for you, if you're if you're up for it!

I'm up for it!

Yeah, Andrew wants to know if you edit all of your photos.

Um, especially if you're shooting raw, you have to edit.

The best way to really explain it—because there's this dirty feeling around the word "editing"—right?

Imagine you're still shooting film, and I got my start shooting film!

Um, you have to process the image!

You know, so a raw image, what it is, this is actually a series of grayscale images, and um, the computer uses those grayscale images to decide how much color goes where—there's a red version, a blue version, a green version!

Um, so it comes out really flat and gray.

So once you put it into the computer, you have the capability to add contrast, take contrast away.

We're going on a little bit of an adventure right now, going bushwhacking!

And you get to add that saturation to it!

I think people can take it really too far!

Um, my goal is to show people how I saw it like we were talking about earlier!

Um, to me, there's just so much green out here, and it's so saturated!

I'll probably bump up the saturation on my pictures a little bit, but if it gets to that point where the colors just don't look natural, then I back it off!

A lot of it is experimenting, you know, if you're using Lightroom or Photoshop, it's pushing it up until you're like, "Okay, that's too far."

You pull it back; "Oh, that's a little too far."

Somewhere right in the middle is where you want to be!

That makes sense!

So I see like a lot of moss, and a lot of it's down. Is that something that you like? Like a lot of these woodpecker holes in logs?

Um, so this goes back to, you know the woodpecker holes, for instance. This goes back to what we were talking about earlier about your personal connection to an image.

You know what that is, but if you take a picture of it, are people going to know what that is?

Right? That's true!

Right? It's going to look just like a hole in a log!

So without the story of the woodpecker there, you're not going to be able to translate that idea, you're not going to know what it is!

Right!

Let's see, I really want to find something where I get to kind of just get a big mass of green with the branches silhouetted in front of it.

Um, so with branches being silhouetted, this actually maybe would be a good question—Amanda wants to know, "Is it okay to use Auto white balance?"

Um, I always shoot Auto white balance, but I'm also shooting raw.

Right!

So with raw, you can change all that!

Um, you know, there's no perfect white balance. It's always a little bit different, and depending on what brand camera you're using, it's going to tell you, "Oh, you know, this is perfect," or "Oh, that's perfect!"

So if you shoot on Auto, and you're shooting raw, you make those adjustments after the fact!

So you really just tell in the moment, I guess, like what you're seeing, what's best for you!

Yeah! And you know, if you're under a tungsten light or a fluorescent light, Auto's not going to work.

So there are presets for that on your camera, and they can be great, but sometimes you have to just do it manually and just go through each little setting, change it little bit by little bit until it looks right to you!

Because it's really your perspective that's meant to, you know, you're the deciding factor of what you think is right with how you remember it!

That's generally what's right!

All right, well do you have any last little tips that you want to give to any of the photographers that are out there?

You know what? I think the most important thing is just to get out, take as many photos as you can.

As you grow throughout being a photographer, you're going to look back. You know, I look back on pictures from when I was 18 years old, and I was living in New Zealand. There are pictures from that time period that I loved!

I look at them now; I don't like them so much!

But there's other pictures from that time period that I never showed anybody!

I didn't think were good at all, but now I look at them like, "Oh, this has a lot of potential!"

Like, I can do this, or I could use it for that!

And my eye has grown just because I've taken hundreds of thousands of pictures throughout my life!

Well, that makes sense! You grow as you take more photos!

Well, I want to thank you for joining us out here today!

This has been really helpful, and I'm sure a lot of people have learned how to take better photos just by watching you!

You know, if for no other reason just understanding how I think about taking a picture!

And you know, not every picture I took out here today was good; I took some really bad pictures!

Sometimes I tell people the only difference between a professional and an amateur is I take more bad pictures than you!

And really what that is is me practicing, me taking risks, and out of that, sometimes you get an amazing image!

And I encourage everybody out there to take their own pictures and actually share them with National Geographic using #BackyardWarrior because we want to see all of your Backyard Warrior photos and see what you're doing out in the world!

So thank you so much again for joining us, and thanks to Nature Valley for being out here with us today, and National Geographic for just letting us be out in the wilderness!

And make sure if you want to see more live wilderness and nature, you watch Earth Live July 9th, and you will see beautiful nature!

Thank you very much!

Thank you!

Thank you!