hi I'm Chris Bray I'm an Australian Geographic photographer and I've also had my work bought by the likes of National Geographic and Discovery Channel GoPro and for the last seven years I've been running this photography course all around Australia and I've finally got it together to put it online so thanks for watching these videos before we get started though I thought we'd take a quick look at my background how I got to be kind of standing up here teaching you so I actually grew up sailing around the world with my family on a homemade yacht for five years so I was led to believe that constantly traveling and visiting all these amazing cultures and places I just thought that was normal I thought that was what everyone grew up apparently it's not but life was one endless parade of photo opportunities and I did start taking photos from when I was pretty young that's my first Evert camera and that's a photo of me taking my very first photo it's probably not but I like to pretend that it is but you can see the Dolphins spectacularly leaping out of the water there the problem is I've never actually seen that resultant photograph so I'm pretty sure it didn't work out at all I probably had all the wrong settings probably still had the lens cap on but we didn't even wind the film on so it goes to show you're not born with any kind of great photographic talent at least I certainly wasn't it's more about the more you practice and the more you learn the better you get and hopefully courses like this one that you're watching will put you a whole lot further forward in what you can get out of your camera and just get so much more enjoyment from your passions now I was so used to traveling everywhere that when we got home the novelty of being stuck in the one spot more off pretty quick and I found myself doing a lot of active outdoor you know hiking and things like that this photo is from the Overland track in Tasmania it's a pretty popular summer trail but it's a whole lot more fun in the middle of winter when it basically turns into a poor man's Antarctica but still my high school buddy and I still came across a few other people and there was a little bit of rubbish on the track and we were like ah what is this this is not hiking hiking should be proper wilderness stuff where there's no one so rather innocently we decide it would be a great idea to try and hike from port Davy up just strong now I don't know how well you know your Tazi geography but if you did you'd know that that's a really stupid idea but we didn't know that we decided be great there's just a couple hundred kilometers of world heritage wilderness there's not even any hiking trails they're so strange Geographic gave me just enough money to buy my first real camera it was still film at least it had things in it like a light meter and autofocus and that kind of stuff and that's what inspired me to go away and read up on photography and dream of one day being an Australian Geographic photographer so we got out there and as you can see it was pretty full-on it was just gradually mining our way through an endless ocean of Banksia trees with a machete you know giving it all we had for 10 or 11 hours a day and then spending another hour hacking an area big enough to try and wedge the tent in there climb inside and pull the GPS out and go come on how far have we gone be 800 meters it was pretty soul-destroying kind of stuff but in the end the only way we could actually progress forward was to shimmy along the edges of the cliff face and so that's the southern ocean down there and 30 kilo backpacks and very much not rock climbing shoes but just cuz the scrub on top was so impenetrable there was just no way to get through it amazingly we did actually make it out alive after about 30 days and you can see by then I looked like a suitable candidate for a bit of World Vision sponsorship because you know based on my food intake on all the other hikes that I'd done which were along recognized routes and trails and things like that so it turns out you burn a lot more energy if you've got to cut your own path who'd have thought it but the main thing was when we came back a strange Geographic gave us their young adventurer of the Year medal for that year which then introduces to the whole world of media and photos and selling photos you know my first article was an article in Australian Geographic you know they paid a little bit of money for it not huge money but it was enough to make me make that connection and go gee that's cool you can go and do something fun and then you can get paid for it so that was about the same time I started to win a couple of photography competitions and also the same time I graduated from University with my electrical engineering degree and put that bit of paper safely in the cupboard which is where it stayed because by then I was having far too much fun doing all these cool adventures around the world hauling carts said like wheeled kayak things across islands up in the Arctic I actually wrote a book about the adventure called the thousand hour a day which sold really well and you can still buy it through my website there's also an e-book available and there was an award-winning documentary made called the crossing that even made it into mainstream cinemas around the country so that was cool you can buy that on the website as well but for me the most amazing part of the Arctic really was the photos you could take particularly of wildlife because a lot of the animals up there never even seen humans before and if we were walking along in a an arctic fox spotted us on the horizon it kind of scamper over and stopped right next to us and just stare at us and try and work out what we were you know you can't help but get amazing photos then somewhat more exciting when a bunch of these things walk up to arctic wolves I actually got chased by a pack of nine arctic wolves on that first trip which was pretty exciting having come back from that trip it was quite easy then to get into the whole outdoor magazine industry you know very big feature for a stranger graphic and other magazines not because I had any great photographic talent you know doesn't have to be technically a perfect photo because you know it's a photo of an arctic wolf you know it had that niche interest angle and went with a cool story and that was my way into the industry really not to any formal training it was more through the through the adventures and the photos of sharing those adventures then canon made me their Australian ambassador for about five years Australia's Lowepro ambassador Lowepro of course made cool camera bags including the one in this picture which is thankfully totally waterproof because I'm pretty sure that is the world's dodgiest canoe that was when I was on assignment for a stranger graphic up in Papua New Guinea there was actually the first time they ever sent a photographer overseas on assignment so that was really exciting and I learned a huge amount on that trip I've been able to be the judge of a lot of competitions and that's actually really helped my own photography as well because you've got to learn to be really pedantic about little niggly details like oh it's not pin sharp or there's a little distracting element in the background there they should have taken the photo from around here a little bit and got that out of shot or you know compositions not quite right and I can now apply all those thoughts to my own photography when I'm looking through the viewfinder and kind of correct my own photos before I take them so that's really helped me as well I've been lucky enough to be able to pick and choose different assignments and I went to Borneo for a month to try and find some of the rarest animals in the world and get get photos on them which was great so slowly but surely my list of customers just started to grow and included National Geographic and Discovery Channel low Pro GoPro Canon and so on and then while all this was going on we actually set off on another adventure my back then girlfriend but now wife Jess and I bought a really old wooden sailing boat which is something you should never do but we didn't know that and we spent a couple of months rebuilding it completely ripped out the inside and got it already put in the water and decided to sail it through the Northwest Passage so that's over the top of Canada and Alaska through the Bering Strait and down the other side turns out no one's ever tried to take a boat quite that stupid through the Northwest Passage before so that was quite an amazing adventure perhaps the most amazing thing was that Jess had never even been sailing before she'd never even been on a sailing boat so she obviously had a really steep learning curve that she's amazing as you can see it's not really the easiest place in the world to learn how to sail pretty brutal weather that's the Bering Strait they're that infamous little gap between Russia and Alaska that's where they film that reality TV program The Deadliest Catch completely irresponsible part of the world to take a little wooden sailing boat really but the photos you get do kind of make up for it this is probably my favorite one of the whole trip without little sail boat passing behind a beautifully arched iceberg that we found in Greenland just just amazing and of course the wildlife up there as always is amazing polar bears there was one island where we could count about ten polar bears on this one little sand spit and I rode up as close as I dared to get some cool photos but then I wanted to get some close-up video so I put a little GoPro camera on a float and tied it to my fishing line rowed up close as I could and then put it in the water and let it drift in kind of hope the polar bear might walk past but one actually saw it and came right up to it and went hmm what are we gonna do with this thing hmm maybe we'll just chew it to pieces and I obviously wanted the camera back and I didn't want him to swallow it so I was there trying to get his attention distract him in any way I could you know shouting and clapping my hands and slapping on the water with the dinghy oars but finally he saw me and went oh yes that looks much more tasty out there and but I may actually get the camera back and get away before we got eaten so that was good further on down the coast of Alaska we got into this Bay where it was just full of brown bears catching salmon so many bears they were so engrossed in catching a salmon that you could just safely sit there and they would come right past pouncing on fish sometimes so close he gets splashed and they just couldn't care less about you being there was the most incredible photography experience I've ever had it was actually back in 2008 I was on a cruise ship heading down to Antarctica as their official photographer and I noticed that there were so many guests on board that all had amazing camera gear but almost no idea how to use them you know they were just wasted on auto mode and they'll say that's such a shame these people are spending a fortune and going on a once-in-a-lifetime holiday and they're going to come back with substandard photos so more just out of boredom than anything else on the journey south I decided to make a quick photography course just a quick crash course and I presented it to everyone who wasn't seasick at the time and everyone said this is fantastic you know I love the way you teach it's really simple and practical and they then said when when is the next course when we come back to Australia when can we book into the next one and I was just thinking all well actually I haven't got the dates organized yet but if you'd like to add your email address to the list I'll let you know as soon as as soon as I've got it organized and so when we got home that's what I did I spent the next three months designing what I hope would be the ultimate one-day photography course combining practical elements and theory and holding in beautiful venues like zoos and Botanical Gardens and other function centres and these courses just took off they're really popular so we have a course notes booklet which is like the entire content of the day into one little color booklet that you can keep in your camera bag and it's designed so that you can reread it and it should make total sense you don't need to remember anything that I've said you don't need to see their writing everything down so that's great and we also have these summery clip cards just a little plastic set of cards with although the most important stuff from the day boiled down to these couple of little cards and you might click that on to the next wrap of your camera and then just whenever you need reference to it you can be like oh yeah which way do you scroll you're f-number to do what with your depth of field or why my photos all blurry a little troubleshooting thing lighting it's got it all the really important stuff just in these little durable little cards so you can buy these through my website as well so the business just grew and grew and we now have a whole team of people around Australia working for us and we've just taught this course so many times that I think now is the right time to put it online because we're actually now far too busy running photography tours now the idea behind these tours is that they're basically just a normal holiday to a normal bucket list destination like Alaska or Antarctica Kenya Galapagos but there with a really small group of like-minded people so you're only traveling with about eight people normally and we charter our own planes and helicopters and real small expedition cruise ships that can get into the little places where the bigger boats don't go we take our guests sort of off the beaten path to beautiful little corners of the world often that we've discovered ourselves by maybe sailboat like the place with all the bears we now take tour groups there but importantly you're traveling with professional photographers who are there purely to help you improve your photography and get better photos you know if you're having a problem with the camera how do I make this better or why is it blurry what could I do better that's what we're there to help you out so hopefully after you finished watching this photography course you'll consider joining us on one of our photo tours so that's it for my background before you get stuck into actually learning I thought I'd give you a heads up as to the structure of the course that you're in for so we start with a really easy lecture on basic photography that's just things like you know setting your camera up getting it ready holding the camera really steady holding it properly things like that then we look at composition that's basically just what are you looking for when you look through the viewfinder on your camera how do you organize stuff in your photos so that it just feels more balanced or this more aesthetic then we look at exposure you know sometimes the photos come out a bit too bright or a bit too dark why does that happen how do you fix it up quickly to look at histogram graphs and things like that then we look at aperture and what that does to your depth of field and then shutter speed and how that affects things that are moving in your photos and then we look at ISO what's that all about lighting lighting of course there's so much to learn about lighting in photography but just understanding the basics of it like the different types of lighting and the different directions of lighting that can be an enormous improvement to your photography lenses there's obviously so many different types of lenses in the world good to have a bit of a handle on how you categorize them how you know what they do what you need what you don't and so on and then we'll finish up with a lecture on just practical advice just it bits and pieces I'd hate for someone to be able to do a photography course and not be told everything from a little bit on post-production to keeping your camera clean and where to from here and that sort of thing so thanks very much for watching this lecture series and I hope you enjoy and again hopefully one day we'll see you on a photo tour