In this episode we interview B-man cause we can....
In this episode I interview pro-photography & teacher Darlene Hildebrandt. She shares a very funny story about RV'ing across America with 1 new husband & 2 cats for 6 months. She also inspires us with an amazing image with New Orleans Mule Kiss. Then she teaches us how to overcome your fear of photographing complete strangers.
We also talked about giving to those in need and how it makes you a better person and a better photographer.
Share - RV'ing cross country with 1 new husband & 2 cats for 6 months.
Inspire - New Orleans Mule Kiss
Create - How to overcome your fear of photographing complete strangers.
Enjoy! Brent & Johny
I want to
make
money from
my
photography
I want to
learn to take
stunning
Portrait
image
I want to
learn to take
amazing
Landscape
pictures
Episode Highlights:
Introduction
Johny: Hey guys what’s up? Its Johny here and welcome to another episode of the SIC show and as always I’m super pumped to be here. I’m here with my main man B. How are you my brother?
Brent: Good, I’m feeling great because I’m going to be interviewed today.
Johny: This week on the show we’re gonna do something a little bit different. We’re gonna interview B man here. And he’s gonna share a story about something you might not know about
him.
Brent: I’m gonna inspire you with one of my best image as I’ve ever taken and in the create section we’re gonna share one of our brand new lessons.
Johny: Yeah man, let’s get into it.
Brent: Enjoy.
**SHARE**
Johny: So buddy you have a little story for us you’re gonna share with us.
Brent: Alright guys so I don’t know if you know I love to travel. I love to go around the world and see all these places but there’s one big problem.
Johny: It involves airplanes.
Brent: I’ve got a fear of flying. I don’t know how it came about. Before I was a kid I was fine with flying. I flew all over the world and I even have that delta pass when I was travel where I could fly anywhere for 30 days and I just jumped on the plane and fly all over America when I was in the States. But I don’t know man like after having kids and a fear on the incidence.
Johny: The thing is you don’t have any other anxiety of anything else like it’s not part is.
Brent: No.
Johny: It’s not what I think of Brent Mail when I think of anxiety.
Brent: No.
Johny: You’re pretty chilled and relaxed man.
Brent: And Johny realized that I had that fear of flying when we actually flew in New Zealand to Queenstown and we had to aborted landing because of the wind shear coming through the mountains. The plane’s like this and I’m like “ahh”.
Johny: But it was a funny experience. I was like thinking “man we miss to land this thing already? I wanna get off”.
Brent: I don’t think that help making sturdy.
Johny: It wouldn’t have.
Brent: So here’s the picture.
Johny: This is the image that I took. Actually we took this a little around the Fuji’s didn’t we?
Brent: Yeah Fuji exit too.
Brent: From Fuji, Australia. And yeah I snapped it here and I think I transferred it into my phone by the WIFI and did a little bit of blue toning and post it on Facebook. That was after we landed.
Brent: So that’s me on the plane. My hands are sweating. And I’m like I don’t know how I’m praying.
Johny: Just praying and looking at me. I love that shot man. It’s really cool.
Brent: So there you go guys. There it is.
Johny: Something you don’t know about B. You’re interesting man. Thanks for sharing.
Bbrent: Always, yeah cool.
Johny: Share the love.
**INSPIRE**
Johny: Alright Brent man inspire us with one of your amazing images.
Brent: Alright guys I’ve chosen this image. It’s of my daughter Brooke. And it was taken 5 years ago. So she’s 10 now, she was 5 at that time. And the reason I love it is it was just a naturally beautiful image. I took it up Northern New South Wales about 8 hours’ drive north of where we actually lived now. And it’s in the Orchard so my parents lived on a farm; an avocado farm. And this is one of the Orchards nearby. And I wanna get the trees going off into the background. Little blurred and have some kind of leading lines. I don’t know if I did it there but my daughter she had a new dress. And it was Christmas. So this is like a couple of days after Christmas. So the 29th of December I think.
Johny: Oh wow.
Brent: And she got this dress. It was a Christmas dress. And she wanted to dance for me. Do some ballet coz she loves dancing and she loves performing in the Orchards. So we put the dress on. Went out to the Orchards and we found a spot where the light was actually coming through the trees so I love these places. It’s kind of a dark in between the trees. And I went back a couple of rows. Ride in with my 200 millimeter lens.
Johny: Ahh that’s how you got the blurred.
Brent: Photographed her wide open. I just got her to dance and spin around and look up in the light and all sorts of things. This is the image I love because it’s such an innocent, beautiful, natural.
Johny: yeah, it’s like her little moment just walking alone. She doesn’t matter of what’s going on the world. She’s just focused on what’s in front of her and just having fun.
Brent: Yeah.
Johny: It’s such a fun image man. And I love that natural line. Actually if you hadn’t told me, you use some artificial light in there. It would have gone yeah. That’s definitely amazing man.
Brent: Yeah it’s all natural. And I love the way her dress is flaring out like spinning around. She’s spinning and so the dress flares. And then you know she’s looking for the light and got that beautiful hair like it’s kind of a little frizzy and unkept you know.
Johny: Just a free spirited. That’s awesome bro.
Brent: So there’s another story about this image. So this is the image that actually started me teaching photography online on YouTube and everything. This image was actually used for the first eBook for my first product. My Essential Photography Skills, the basics of photography. We use that image as the cover for that eBook. And that eBook led into me creating my first course which is Essential Skills Photography. And then I chose this image as the cover for my kid’s course.
Johny: Wow that’s amazing.
Brent: Which is one of my best selling course ever. And I’ve sold thousands of copies. And it’s how I actually photographed kids. So basically I went through all my steps of what I do to photograph kids. With the little tricks and secrets and things that I thin k about and that’s it. That’s the image. That’s the cover of that course. I’ll actually put that up right now.
Johny: Hey you know something? Remember actually it was last episode I think before when we talked about that you printed your image at the bottom of the surf board. You got to see it every day. It was inspiration. Man I love the fact that you’ve taken a picture of your daughter and you’ve used it across away of your products. And man it’s led to your success you know.
Brent: Yeah.
Johny: Using your photography and using your own different products and seeing it everywhere. That’s just awesome. I love that.
Brent: And I think I had a bit if a biased when it came to which image to actually put on the cover. I just love that image.
Johny: Hey it’s your product and you’re inspired by it I mean this training package that’s creating as well. It’s something you’ve created and giving back to the world. And even if you use one of your image and then the one image of your daughter that’s awesome mate. It’s awesome.
Brent: And you know what guys, I’ll have that image forever. I’ll always remember Brooke at the age of 5 just wanting to perform and you know. She still performs now and she loves it. But she is you know obviously as kids get a bit older they get a little bit of back chat and you know like that and do things as easily as 5.
Johny: Honestly man I didn’t even recognized that it was her. I mean I’ve looked or I must have seen that image about a thousand times now. And for some reason it just didn’t click that was Brooke. That was so many years ago. That’s awesome man. Great story bro and I love the fact that you’ve used natural light and the back of the Orchards is dark. I mean there’s no problem in seeing what the focus of this image. It’s absolutely Brooke.
Brent: So a couple of things guys when I took this photo I run through some of the technical things. I really low down so I could get the grass and foreground to be blurred.
Johny: I love that blur.
Brent: And I can actually below her eye level. So when you’re photographing kids always try to get below their eye level.
Johny: Right.
Brent: So get on low. I photographed it on F4 so wide open on that lens. And I’ve got the 70-200 F4 lens and I photographed it at a thousandth of a second; pretty fast shutter speed.
Johny: Hey there’s a good tip. I mean you just mentioned that you have the 70-200 F4 and that’s a bit half the price.
Brent: Of the F2.8 yup.
Johny: Of the 70-200 F2.8 and man I’ve seen some amazing images that you’ve taken with that lens and you used that in your portrait sessions all the time.
Brent: All the time. I used to own a 2.8 and sold it. And I got the F4 because it’s light. So basically it’s the weight for me coz when you’re carrying a beast around twice as heavy and cost twice as much it is difficult.
Johny: You don’t want it. You don’t want to get it out. I know I’ve got this I mean 200 actually worked mate and at 2.8 and I don’t like it. It’s too heavy. It’s heavy on my pack. It’s heavy to move around. Actually for my landscapes stuff I even got a more cheaper lens than the F4 that you’re on. I’ve got like the 28-300 this massive range lens and its fine. You know I run that thing at F8, F16 it’s a fine for pulling out details in my landscapes. It’s a really good tip man. I mean you don’t have to buy the best stuff out there. You can still create with stuff that’s you know just below that and half the price man.
Brent: I’ve run my whole business for the last 5 or 6 years just with that lens basically. That lens and one camera and one flash. That’s all you really need and you know we obviously turned out quite a lot of money in this business.
Johny: Yeah you’ve done very successful portraits. That’s awesome.
Brent: So there you go guys. A thousandth of a second and a really fast shutter speed. Wide open F4 on a full frame camera. I think it was a Canon 5D Mark II at that time. So that’s basically it. You don’t have to think about it. You just flick the F4 or whatever and you just have the person you’re photographing perform for you. And that’s how I like to photograph. When I’m out there I don’t have to think about the settings too much. I wanna think about the subject that I’m photographing and put all my energy into them so that they’ll perform for me and then you get those amazing images.
Johny: Yeah, keep it natural. Photographing kids naturally man.
Brent: Totally, that’s what the course is all about.
**CREATE**
Johny: Alright guys in this section we got something special for you. Actually we’re gonna show you this little one minute clip to our course just about to finish. It’s gonna be out very soon. All about shutter speeds so check this out now.
***
Brent: In this part of the shutter speed course, I’m gonna be dragging the shutter. So it’s not dragging a window shutter. It’s a concept that’s really cool. You can get really creative here guys. So basically what happens is we’ve got ambient light around us. So we set up the camera with a very slow shutter speed. And I’m gonna get Daniella over here. She’s my model. She’s gonna be dancing for me with this flurry material. And I’m gonna do 1/6th of a second coz we’ve tested it out and it seems to be the optimum shutter speed. So there’s gonna be movement in the photo because it’s a slow shutter speed but I’m gonna have my strove over here. The strove light will freeze part of Daniella’s movement and then my camera because it has a slow shutter speed will capture the rest of the movement as blurred movement. So let’s get into it.
***
Johny: Alright Brent man tell us all about what’s going on there. Explain what you are doing there.
Brent: Okay, so this is the create section of the Share Inspire Create show. So I thought we popped in this video that we’ve created recently. But there’s a little bit of a back story to that. Okay so I think one of my best creations or our creations is the Share Inspire Create Lounge. The community we’re in every day. And the reason we’ve done it is you know we wanna hang with other photographers and we wanna teach others photographers to master their photography basically. So we’ve created this community and within the community we’re actually creating for the community. So meaning that the, so we’ve got this course called Mastering Shutter Speed that we’ve created. We’re putting one lesson at a time. And then we get feedback from the members in the community to tell us are we on the right track, are we doing what they want, and we changed the next lesson according to the feedback. So basically it’s a two-way street. We get feedback; we create the next lesson according to what people actually want. So this whole course is being a bit of an experiment for us. It’s our first one doing it this way. We also try making it a little bit more entertaining.
Johny: have fun.
Brent: Yeah have fun. So in this lesson that you’ve just watched, we’ve got Daniella in the studio here. Johny was here and my editor guy Andy.
Johny: Hang around ‘till the end of this section there are some images of me trying to do this technique.
Brent: So we’re dragging the shutter. So basically as part of the Shutter Speed course and yeah I love it because creating something within something we created already.
Johny: It’s awesome.
Brent: There we go.
Johny: It’s really good man and I’m super pumped about this course coming out. Maybe you should explain the technique a little bit.
Brent: Dragging the shutter.
Johny: Like how do you get the cloth to move like that?
Brent: So here’s the technique. As I’ve explained in the video you’re using a slower shutter speed and you’re using a flash. So the flash has a very short duration period. So the flash freezes part of the action and the slow shutter speed blurs part of the action. So you’re combining two you know shutter speeds really in one image. And that’s what you call dragging the shutter. So it’s basically the shutter is open let’s say the shutter is open for this long if it’s the time value and then the flash goes off right over here and it’s open for a little bit longer. So you got blurred part of Daniella’s dress and her face and you got sharp, super sharp part where the flash actually went off.
Johny: So the bits that aren’t moving so much gets frozen by the flash.
Brent: No.
Johny: Okay. Well I couldn’t understand it.
Brent: The bits are actually closer to the flash.
Johny: Closer to the flash. That’s how you work out frozen.
Brent: It’s frozen, yeah and then the other blur is the ambient light. The ambient light which is a video lighting actually captures the rest of the image.
Johny: In the motion.
Brent: We’ve also done it by the way, we also done it outdoors. We did at the skate train which is another video that we’re putting into the Mastering Shutter Speed course where I’ve actually got to skate and jumping over a ramp and I’m photographing at a relatively slow shutter speed. I think it was 30th of a second if I remembered it right. Then we popped in a flash at the same time. So part of his body is frozen, blurred and the parts. The closest part to the flash is actually frozen.
Johny: It’s really an interesting technique. It gives you the real unique look and I really love it. It’s awesome bro.
Brent: Yeah I really love it too coz it’s creative. And you’re getting it all in one image. You don’t have to do any Photoshop or Lightroom editing afterwards.
Johny: It’s awesome man.
Brent: It’s right there.
Johny: Really good, awesome buddy. Thanks for that. It’s been good having you on the show.
Brent: Well thanks for having me on the show man. I feel honored.
Johny: We’ll see you on the next show.
Brent: Actually on the next show we’re gonna interview Johny. He’s gonna share something with us and inspire us.
Johny: I’m so nervous man. I’ve never done an interview.
Brent: So guys just so you know we’ve got a little like special for you on my kids’ course. We’re talking about with my daughter Brooke on the front cover so click below, above, somewhere there’s a special for you. And by the way, that course is in the SIC lounge. It’s in the Share Inspire Create lounge, the community for photographers. It’s really there. So if you wanna join us in the community, the course is already there for you.
Johny: We have a special for you. It was all just check out the show note. If you wanna pick up a course you can or if you wanna jump in the lounge and get this course and many more check out the other deal that we have man.
Brent: Awesome guys.
Johny: It’s been a great show as always. Hope you enjoyed it. Stay tune for more interview. By the way, stay tune after the closing credit because we often put bloopers wouldn’t we mate?
Brent: Our video editor Russel put some in.
Johny: So if you wanna some behind the scenes funny stuff then stick around. And I’m gonna be dropping a couple of images in I talked about earlier too. It looks so graceful.
Brent: yeah totally. There you go.
Johny: Alright guys have a great week. Hope you enjoy the show. We’ll see you next time.
Brent: See you next week.