Photo Magic! 2 - 8 essential gadgets for any photographer

Hi, my name's Joe Houghton. I'm a photographer living in Dublin in Ireland, and in this class I'm going to take you through a few of my favorite camera gadgets. Gadgets that I use in my photography Either with the camera or, you know, as useful pieces of kit when I'm taking pictures. So I'm going to share a selection of these, and hopefully they will give you some ideas and inspiration, and maybe you go and pick one or two of them up yourself if they could help your photography. Okay. Let's have a look at my first gadget. The first one I want to take you through is a strap, a camera strap. Now, most people, when I see them with their DSLRs walking around, have the normal camera straps which fix to these 2 straps here and here, and the camera sits on your tummy or your chest just here, and the strap comes up round your neck. And that's okay, but I find that with the heavier bodies that I tend to use— this one's a D750, but I also use a D810 most of the time, and very often I'm using big heavy lenses— the normal strap that comes with the camera puts a lot of pressure on the back of my neck, especially if I'm out shooting for a while. So I've tried a number of different camera straps. Over the years, and fairly recently I came across this type of camera strap. Now lots of different manufacturers make these. I picked this one up on eBay for, you know, $10 I think it was, something like that, for nothing. But it's a slightly different camera strap in that it fixes to the bottom of the camera. So as you can see, the bottom of the strap— if I put the camera down a minute— So the strap goes over your shoulder like this, and you can adjust the length to suit. And then there is a metal carabiner-style connector here which is freely moving on the strap. So that's pretty cool in terms of being able to just leave the camera down at your side, and then when you pick the camera up, you just slide it up and you can take the shot. And then the plate that connects to the camera has a standard fitting screw on it which goes into the bottom of the camera. So if you want to put this on the camera, you turn the camera over, find the tripod strap, and just screw this into the tripod strap. It's got a little rubber plate on the— between the camera and the and the metal plate, so that stops it moving around too much once you've tightened it. And depending on how you want the camera to sit, whether you want it to sit like this or you prefer it to sit, you know, around another way, you can obviously, you know, position the strap where you want it on the base of your camera, and then you just tighten it up. You tighten it nice and tight, and that's not going anywhere now. So the camera just sits there, and when I want to take a shot, I can just pick it up and take a shot. So it's really, really useful, and I've found that this really helps my shoulders on a long day of shooting, and I come back much less tense around my shoulders because the weight is better distributed. The other thing about this particular one, and if you're kind of looking for one yourself, is that it also has a pass-through tripod attachment, so I could, you know, put this on a tripod without having to take the strap off again, which is quite nice. If you do want to take the camera off the strap, you can unscrew the carabiner Which I generally just keep screwed in all the time because I don't want any chance of this falling off, and that can just be taken off if you want to like that, but to be honest I just keep that tied up all the time. There we are. So I use these straps as I say with very big lenses. I walk out quite regularly with A Tamron 150-600mm lens, which is this long. It's a big heavy lens on my D810 body, and it works beautifully with one of these. And of course you could use 2 of them if you have 2 cameras. You could put one on either shoulder. So there's my first gadget for you, the camera strap. My second gadget is the lens that I actually have on this camera, and if you're a photographer, this is probably one of the lenses you should get at some point fairly early on in your photography career, and it's the nifty-fifty. It's the 50mm. This one is the f/1.8 Nikon because I'm shooting Nikon here. So the 50mm f/1.8. There's also a f/1.4 which lets in twice as much light, so that gives you faster shutter speeds in lower light if you can get the f/1.4. Obviously costs a little bit more, but I find that the f/1.8 is a super lens. It approximates the field of view of the human eye, 50mm, on a full-frame camera. And it's quick and it's sharp and it's small. It's brilliant for street photography where you don't want a big lens where, you know, that's going to make your camera stand out and make everybody much more aware of you. So this is my go-to lens many, many times when I'm going out. It's a really good addition to any photographer's arsenal. And as a prime lens, there's no zooming on it. It's 50mm. So, you know, what you see when you put it up to the viewfinder is what you're taking. And if you want to change that, then you use your feet rather than zooming in and out. Wonderfully crisp, wonderfully sharp, a must-have lens. Okay, so gadget number 3 is an L-bracket. An L-bracket is a piece of kit which you apply to the base of your camera in order to help you when you're using your camera on a tripod. So let me demonstrate with the 750. So I'll take off the strap that we had on before. Put that down. So normally when you put the camera on the tripod— So here's a tripod. You would take off the plate, the plate on the tripod, And you'd screw that to the bottom of the camera, and then you'd put the camera on the tripod, and you'd be shooting like this. And if you need— in fact, let me just very quickly do that so that you can see exactly what I'm talking about. Here we are. I'm just going to do it finger tight for this demo, but normally tighten that all the way up. So we put the camera onto the tripod and the tripod is standing with its legs apart as it normally would be and you're taking your shot. And if you want a portrait shot, you're going to generally have to rotate the head and there'll often be a little cutout on the head somewhere and you can put the camera down like this And get a portrait shot. Generally this is okay if you've got a small lens on your camera, but if you've got a bigger lens, this is not an ideal position for the camera to be in because the camera weight, the entire weight of the camera and the lens, is now pulling off the tripod. So the centre of gravity is way to the right of the tripod, so you better be sure your tripod is nice and steady, and you better be sure that the connection between your camera and your tripod head is absolutely rock solid. Otherwise, this camera is going to pull the tripod over, or you might get the camera moving like this on the tripod with the weight of the lens moving through a long exposure. So this is not an ideal scenario for portrait shots on a tripod. This is where the L-bracket comes in. So I'm going to take the tripod off. I'm going to take the plate off the camera, and I'm now going to put the L bracket on. So so the L bracket has a a long length which goes underneath the camera, and you can see there's a screw here, and that's going to go into the tripod socket. And you can see the screw moves along, there's a cutout in there, so pretty much this one's one of these universal ones that fits pretty much any camera. So you just connect it to the right place on the base of your camera, and then you screw the L bracket in, and that's now connected. And then you just bring the left-hand side of the bracket up to the left-hand side of the camera and generally just butt it up against the camera. Now remember, if you need to open any of these doors, if you want, you know, to plug a mic in or an external remote control or whatever, open those doors before you put this in, because generally once it's on, the doors are going to be You know, shut. So connect it, connect it to the side like that, and now tighten up the the bracket. Okay. So here's a tripod with an Arca head connection, and these L brackets most of them I think are Arca. head. The Arca heads all have this V, cutout V, which fits into the jaws of the head, and then you tighten up like that so that that's nice and solid. So that's how you'd normally use the camera on an L bracket, but now if I want to go portrait, Yes, of course, on a tripod like this I can use the cutout as normal, so I can free the ball head at the top and I can put the camera down at an angle and I can take shots like that. But again, same problem as I said before, the centre of gravity is off, we're pulling to the side with the tripod— not a good idea. So rather than doing that, What we can do, and also, you know, if you've taken the time to centre and level your tripod to make sure that your horizon is straight and all the rest of it, then doing this screws that up. So we've got the camera set exactly as we want, we've got all our levels correct, all we need to do now with an L bracket is unscrew the camera Turn it 90 degrees and you see this side of the L-bracket now slots in and we're now in portrait mode. Simple as that. The camera is still directly above the centre of the tripod so all the weight of the camera is straight down, it's not pulling off to one side, so it's a much more stable shooting position, a much safer shooting position, and also if you've got a long lens Then, you know, you— So that's my L-bracket gadget, a really, really useful piece of kit if you're working with a tripod and certainly heavier lenses. The universal L-brackets can be had on eBay for, you know, $10 or $15, something like that. What I would recommend, and I've tried a number of L-brackets, if you're only using small lenses then, and you know they're not very heavy, these are absolutely fine. What I've done is I've spent a little bit more money and I've gone to L-brackets that are specifically made for my camera bodies, and the reason for that is that the universal ones are just horizontal pieces of metal at the base. They're flat, they don't have any flanges, as you can see, it's just completely flat. With a heavy lens you sometimes get a little bit of movement, a little bit of creep when it's on the bottom of the camera, and the ones that are made specifically for a particular camera body tend to have they'll have grips on the side which come up and grip the base of the body of the camera because they're machined specifically for that camera body, and that prevents any movement at all. So I found that it's worth spending a little bit more money and getting one that's made specifically for your camera and has got those little grippy bits that come up at the front and the back of the camera to stop it twisting at all. Okay, my next gadget is a reflector, and again, these can be had on eBay or Amazon or from any of your photographic suppliers for, you know, relatively little money— tens of dollars or euros— and they tend to come in a small flat case like this. This one from Selens has been really, really good. I've had this a couple of years now. So you take it out of the case and it's this big, and then it's one of these expandable pop-up expandable reflectors. Okay, now you can get them— a lot of them are circular, but I would recommend getting one with a handle. This makes it so much easier to use. You can just put it where you like, and it also— the Sellens one, the handle has drill holes in so that you can apply— you can put this on a tripod. So it's absolutely fantastic. You just put a tripod plate on the base of the handle, and then you put the plate onto the tripod. So rather than have an assistant or need an assistant if you need this, As long as you've got a tripod handy, you can use the reflector. You can see this particular reflector at the moment is showing white on one side and gold on the other, but this is a, I think, a 5-in-1 reflector, so you've also got different colours available, and you can just unzip them from the central frame, and then you just— because the frame moves, you can just pop it out. So the centre frame just has the kind of semi-translucent material, which is good for just using to maybe block sunlight, put a model's head and shoulders in shade. Perhaps if you wanted that. And then the, and then the outer has gold, silver, white, and black, so you can use this with any of those combinations depending on what the needs are for your particular shoot that day. So really useful piece of equipment, very cheap, and essential for any serious photographer's kit bag. If I'm going off to the park, for instance, with my wife and children just for the afternoon, then I don't want to take a big heavy rucksack. So I have just a little camera bag, something like this, which I generally take off with me, and that's enough to put in some filters, remote control, a couple of lens cloths, maybe one spare lens, and then typically I will have my camera on my chest strap anyway. So it's small, it's light, and it's just big enough to do the job. So I would suggest that a little camera bag is a really useful accessory It does help you protect your gear, especially if it's, you know, raining or showery outside. Get one with a bit of padding. You want the base as well to be, you know, fairly well padded. Make sure that the connector at the front— because very often if you're carrying the bag, you know, you perhaps don't always use the shoulder strap. So if you're carrying it with the handle, That connector becomes the weakest point of the bag because that's where all the pull is at the time. So if that comes open, then your bag is going to spill and you're going to lose other stuff in it. But apart from that, you know, reasonable padding on the bag, something light that suits what you particularly like. So camera bag is my next gadget. Let's have a look inside the camera bag for my next gadget. My next gadget is, is actually 2 gadgets because I have 2 variants of the same thing. It's a Lee Big Stopper or Super Stopper filter. And for long exposure photography, making the silky waterfall shots or the shots where the sea or the river just goes steely, steely, goes kind of flat and looks like brushed steel, then these filters are absolutely fabulous. So they generally come in a tin. Now these aren't particularly cheap, I mean they're €100 plus each for the Lee ones. Other manufacturers make them as well. As you can see, it's a well-padded tin that the filter comes in, and the filter itself is a black piece of glass or resin, and this one is the Super Stopper. This is the Lee 15-stop filter, so this gives you 15 stops of exposure. So if you were out shooting and you took a test exposure before you put your filter on and the correct exposure is 1/30th of a second, and then you put on a 15-stop filter, then the Super Stopper— well, the Lee Stopper phone app, which is a free download, just look for Lee Filters and download the Stopper app— this tells you how long your exposure would need to be with the 15-stop filter. So we have 1/30th of a second, it would be a 16-minute exposure. So you can dial this in. So if it was 1/125th of a second, then with the 15-stop filter on, it would be a 4-minute exposure. So you can alter your settings or use this and, you know, just, just, just wait the 4 minutes or 16 minutes or whatever, and you can get some beautiful shots of using these filters, and I'll show you some of those behind me as I'm talking about these filters. So that's the 15-stop filter, and the 10-stop filter, the Lee Big Stopper, is just the same. It's just a dark piece of glass, but it lets in slightly more light, so it only has 10 stops. And again, the SuperStopper app So if I just click on 10 stops, that gives me the big stopper. So 1/125th of a second normal exposure would be an 8-second exposure as opposed to a 4-minute exposure with only a 10-stop filter on. And the 1/30th of a second exposure gives you a 30-second exposure. That's quite a sweet spot when you're going out shooting things like waterfalls and stuff because A 30-second exposure you can just dial in on the camera. Anything longer than 30 seconds you need to go into bulb mode, and then you need to be timing and probably using a remote control to start and stop your exposures. But if you want to get into long exposure photography, especially during the day, then a dark filter like the Big Stopper or the Super Stopper is the way to go. My next gadget comes in various flavours, but it's a remote control. It's a remote shutter release to stop you having to physically press the shutter button on your camera. If you, if you think about the mechanics of taking a photograph, when you actually press that button, you generally are going to introduce a little bit of camera shake. Even if you're on a tripod, there's a possibility that, you know, that's just going to move the camera a little bit, which, if you're looking for really, really top quality, top sharp shots, can cause a little bit of motion blur if the camera is moved during the exposure. So if that's an issue, then you need a remote release. So many of the cameras, in fact all the modern DSLR cameras now, can take— here on the front of the Nikon there, and most of them have one on the back. Yes, there's the sensor on the back of the D750. Have these little infrared sensors, and you can buy a little remote control with a penlight battery, and when you press the button, it triggers the, the shot. So very simple. And if all you want to do is just trigger a shot, click, and it's taken, then one of these is fine, and they take up no space in the camera bag. They're great. I tend to find that I do a lot of night photography, I do a lot of landscape photography, so I'm out there for hours and hours and hours, especially if you're doing long exposure stuff. In the cold, batteries wear out very quickly, so I generally use a wired remote, and my favourite manufacturer for the wired remotes is a manufacturer, an Irish company called Harnell. Well, they're based in Ireland, although it sounds like a German name. H A H N E L, and they make kind of this modular remote control, which is which is really good. So, as you can see, we've got the remote control, we have the cable, and the particular end that I have on there would typically go into. On my D810, the remote control fixture is here, and this just clicks into here. I've got the D750, and the remote control connector is a different connector, so I can't use this particular end to use with the D750. But the nice thing about the Harnell system is that the end is connected via this cable and can be separated, so I can take my D810 end off and now I can plug in the correct end for the D750 without having to buy a complete new remote, which is a nice feature. The other thing is I can extend the length of the cable as well So you can get cable extenders, and if for any reason this bit goes dead as well, then you can just replace this and you've still got all your cables. So very good modular system for remote controls, and you've got the button for the remote release, and you've got the push— press and push forward, and now that will keep the shutter open as long as that is pressed forward like that. So if I'm doing a 2, 5, 10-minute exposure, then I can just start it off, have my phone counting down the 10 minutes, and when 10 minutes are up, I just slide that back and then it closes the shutter, and that's the end of the shot. So that's a very simple remote. It doesn't have any built-in timers in, but generally I'm using my phone for that anyway. You can get more complicated models that have built-in timers and intervalometers and all the rest of it, So it's just whatever takes your fancy in terms of how complex you want to get. I find that the less complex kit doesn't go wrong on me, so I have had the fancy ones with the timers built in and, you know, they run out of battery or it's so cold or whatever, or there's a problem, whereas this is just, you know, it's just a mechanical device pretty much, and it's never failed me. This thing has been all over the world with me and is really, really useful. So a good wired remote release is an essential piece of kit. My next gadget is a tiny little piece of equipment which will only cost you a few euros, but which should be in every single camera bag, and I have a number of these floating around. Floating around, so there's always one within reach when I'm, when I'm out shooting. And it's called a lens pen. And the lens pen has, has 2 main functions. The first one is, is a brush. So there's a little slider here, and you can see I can slide that up, and out comes this beautiful, very soft, very fine-bristled brush. Don't be tempted to run your finger over the end of it. A lot of people immediately try and do that. You've got oils and stuff in your skin and they will be transferred onto the brush and that really removes a lot of the usefulness of the brush because it's a completely dry brush. And you use this just to get any particulate matter, any dust, any grit or whatever off your lens or your filter and just make sure you go into the corners. Very often dust and grit collects in the filter threads. So just go around the side and just make sure that's all cleaned off, and then you can bring the brush back into the inside of the pen, and then you can turn the pen over the other way and just pop off the cap, and under the cap is a tiny microfiber pad, and you'll now put the pad onto the surface of your lens or your filter which now has no grit and no dust on it and generally starting in the middle just in concentric circles not pressing too hard just come round and all the way to the outside and then back in again and that'll pick up any oily residues, any finger marks and leave your lens or your filter completely clean. And then put on the cap again and you're good to go. So always have one of these in your camera bag. They're a fantastic piece of kit and very cheap. You pick one of these up for a few euros. So I— and I replace mine once every 6 months or so because it's getting constant use as I'm out shooting. Well, if you've got this far, you've watched through my class, so thank you for sticking with it, and I hope you found it interesting and you've picked up some good ideas about the camera gadgets that you might be able to use. If you have enjoyed the class and you could take a minute to give us a thumbs up, or even better, a short positive review, this really helps drive other people to these classes and make them a bit more successful, so I'd really appreciate it if you did take the time to, to do that. But either way, I hope you enjoyed the class, and I hope you check out some of my other classes as well. Goodbye. Well, thanks for taking this class. If you've made it this far, you've obviously enjoyed it, and I hope that some of the tips help you get really good shots yourself. I'd really appreciate a thumbs up and a short positive review. It really helps us get the word out about these classes and makes them more successful. And if you could post perhaps one of your shots when you've got a really nice one to share as a project, that really also helps us. Thanks for listening, and do check out some of our other classes. We're, we're adding them all the time, but if you've got any ideas for a class or a technique that you'd like me to cover, please do get in touch and I'll do my best to oblige. Enjoy browsing through the ones that we've already got up, and hopefully I'll see you on one of the other classes. Bye.