Landscape Photography TipsHow do you make your landscape photos look interesting or pleasing to the eye so that your relatives won’t yawn when viewing your vacation photos? Check out my article on this site entitled, “Eye Catching Elements That Improve Your Photos” for some advice on incorporating some elements in your photos that will add interest. I won’t go over those elements in their entirety here. I will cover some more suggestions to help improve your landscape photos and improve the odds for better photos. There is an old photography expression that says, “f/8 and be there!” Good advice, but we can’t always be there when the light is the greatest. Many of you have heard the other depressing quote, “You should have been here yesterday”. We all have to work with what we have when we get there unless we have the time and can afford to hang around or return later. That said, I’ll discuss the optimum moments as well just the same. Lighting Often the best light to shoot landscapes in is the golden light of early morning or late evening. I had a photography professor once who called it National Geographic Lighting or NGL for short. Even a Dipsy-dumpster looks good in golden light. You also get the longest shadows of the day that add appeal to the photo. Shadows also add some definition to things like sand dunes. Late afternoon light makes it harder to distinguish the dune forms, but NGL makes them stand out. Obviously this doesn’t mean you limit your shooting to these hours. Different times of the day can reveal different looks due to light or shadow. You may even find that your best opportunities for a good landscape photo may be on one end of the day as opposed to another. A subject in the morning could be in good light but, be entirely shadowed by mountains from a setting sun in the evening. By the same token the sun could be at your back with respect to your landscape subject at one time of day and then you find yourself fighting lens glare with the same landscape at another time of day. Again don’t limit your shooting due to these “adversities”. Backlighting on your subject may be just what you are looking for. Also, perhaps the shadow on your subject has eliminated harsh lighting. Times of day, changes in weather, or different seasons all produce a unique look. There was a photographer once who produced a book that was entirely images of the Golden Gate Bridge. As I recall he had over 200 images of the bridge in different weather, seasons, and times of day. Perspective and Composition Experiment with your subject using different lenses. Try horizontal compositions as well as vertical. Try incorporating an object or objects in the foreground like flowers, a boulder, or from the top, tree leaves hanging over your scene. Be mindful of depth of field when incorporating these foreground objects due to the extreme difference in distance between them and your background. Decide if you want the sky or the ground to dominate your picture. Are they nice cumulus clouds in the sky that you want to capture? Try getting low to the ground and have the grass or rippling sand dominate the lower part of your picture. Generally it is best not to split the horizon along the middle of your screen so your scene is half sky and half ground/water. Have one or the other dominate your composition. Also use care to keep the horizon straight. Use leading lines like fences, stairs, roads, etc. to draw the viewer’s eye into the scene. When composing watch for unwanted distractions like trash, telephone lines, or stray tree branches. Also when peering through the viewfinder keep in mind how the final picture might look when it is matted and framed. In other words leave enough room at the top and bottom and to the left and right to accommodate a mat and frame without compromising the picture. For instance, you don’t want to have the top of some subject like a lighthouse right on the edge of your mat; leave a little sky between the two. If you can, walk around your subject for a different point of view. Shoot from different perspectives as well…high, low, from above, close up, far away, etc. Compositionally, if your subject, like an aircraft, kayak, moose, is moving from left to right, or in the case of a stationary subject, is facing from left to right, leave more space to the right of the subject than to the left. The opposite applies if the direction is reversed. It is visually more appealing. The subject appears to be walking into the scene rather than out of it. Filters Incorporate the use of a polarizing filter to reduce or eliminate glare and reflections. Be wary when using a polarizer however, for some scenes you may want to highlight the reflection off water for instance rather than reduce or eliminate it. By the same token a polarizer will permit you to reduce or eliminate that reflection off water to view a fish below the surface. I generally like to limit my use of filters so that the final picture only renders what I saw when looking at the scene. In other words, no green sunsets or purple mountain majesty’s where they didn’t exist. It is the purist in me. Unlike our eyes that can adjust for light as we scan a given landscape(spelled pupils, rods, and cones here) often the contrast in a scene can be more than our camera can handle due to the limited latitude of film and digital sensors. Graduated filters to the rescue. Basically they are filters with a shade of color in one half of the filter that bleeds gradually(hence the term graduated)into another color or often clear glass in the second half of the filter. The filter can be rotated so that any portion of graduated coloring can be placed over the lens where you desire. They come in different colors and have various f-stop ratings. I use a gray graduated filter occasionally to darken a sky if my subject is in the shade and sky light is overbearing, generally by around two stops or more. Otherwise the sky would appear washed out(excessively bright) in the resulting photo if I exposed for the shade with no filter to compensate. If the contrast were greater than two stops I would need a darker filter with a higher f-stop rating to pull off the same effect. Graduated filters are best used with even and uncluttered horizons. So, “f/8 and be there, if possible with the best light!” authored by Lon Britton
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