Landscape photography is probably one of the driving forces that gave birth to the art of photography: the urge in man to record the world around him. We live in a world of beauty: shapes, colours, tones and textures; just waiting for someone to capture and preserve it in anything from a fraction of a second to several hours. A landscape might be one of the easiest photo opportunities we have, but also one the most difficult to get right.
Requirements
So, what are the main ingredients of a good landscape photo? Number one, off course … a Landscape - a beautiful one. (It sometimes help to go to those exotic out of the way places few have ever been before) This can mean anything from a totally natural wilderness photo to a cityscape. Like all photography, a landscape is mostly about light and the quality thereof. Thirdly, there is attitude and approach by the photographer – this aspect might seem unimportant, but will ultimately determine your composition and final rendition on paper of what you are seeing in front of you. Then lastly (but not least) is equipment: get the best equipment (especially lenses) you can afford.
So, let’s summarize a few requirements:
* A beautiful landscape
* Quality light
* Planning:
o Scout areas before you even take a camera there if possible.
o Think about light ( Sunrise, sunset, shadows) and how to best use it.
o Think about composition and plan it beforehand.
o Preconceive – it helps to have your lens selection right – good light often disappears surprisingly fast!
* Get the best equipment you can afford and Learn to use it (When was the last time you tried to change aperture, f-stop ISO or shooting modes with your eyes closed?).
* When the light happens, shoot, bracket, reframe, shoot (until the last drop of good light disappears and some more…)
Basic Technique
1. Stop down for greater Depth of Field (Beware of upper aperture limits: diffraction problems)
2. Bracket
3. Use a steady tripod with a cable release on the camera.
Basics: General Equipment
1. Camera/Film:
+ Film: As fine grained as possible
For example Fuji Velvia 50 or 100. Purists will swear by larger format cameras with huge film sizes like 4 x10 inch or even bigger. However, for the rest of us, film (and now, digital) has progressed to acceptable levels of quality.
+ Digital: As many Megapixels as possible
6 is Ok, 8 is better, 11 or more is very good. And, very important: Shoot RAW!. RAW format is like having a digital equivalent of a negative which you can ‘develop’ using ‘chemicals’ like Adobe Raw Capture, Capture One or Breezebrowser.
+ Remote Cable Release
This is an absolute necessity for tripod work. Preferably get one that has a ‘Lock’ facility for those ‘B’ shots lasting several minutes or even hours.
+ DOF Preview
Most will call this a requirement, but I will classify this as more a ‘nice to have’, since Depth of Field is very hard to judge on a darkened viewfinder when working at small aperture values and more so on modern ‘crop-mode’ digital cameras where the viewfinder is already less bright to start with. Rather use DOF calculators and learn to use the DOF scale on your lens if it has one. Some cameras have a DOF focus mode, which is incredibly handy – you just focus on the near point, far point and then the camera automatically picks the focus point and aperture for the correct DOF. Remember that your point of focus should be about one third into the extent of your depth of field. Digital camera owners can use their preview screen to roughly check DOF, but only if it has a zoom-in facility – the screens are way too small to do accurate focus checks.
+ Mirror Lockup
Although not a necessity, MLU is very useful in cases where your shutter speeds are in the region of 1/10 th to about 1/30 th of a second. TRUE mirror lockup is where the mirror locks up on the first press of the shutter button and the shutter opens on the second press. Some variants have this facility locked to a fixed timer, which is good enough in most cases.
+ Auto-Bracketing
Yes, bracketing can be manually done, but it is less cumbersome with automatic camera which can be set to shoot three frames in rapid succession with anything from 1/3 to 3 stops increments. I have found that 1 stop is mostly adequate when I’m slightly unsure of exposure. In digital cameras, bracketed shots have the added benefit of providing you with highlight-detail (overexposure) and shadow detail (underexposure) shots in close proximity. These two exposures can then later be combined for some super dynamic range scenes. (The lazy man’s Neutral Density Gradient filter!)
+ Viewfinder shutter/block
Normally our head will ‘shade’ a camera’s viewfinder from bright light shining into it, especially direct sunlight. However, when doing tripod based photography, using a cable release, it can easily happen that light shines into the viewfinder from the back. This will influence your meter reading in the camera and therefore the viewfinder should be covered in some way. Professional cameras have a handy viewfinder ‘shutter’ and most other cameras have a plastic insert on their straps that can slide over the viewfinder to cover it. However, a hat or other shade will do the trick.
+ Camera Manual
Good reading material in those hot lazy afternoons between photo sessions. Even if you feel you know your camera, modern cameras are complex computerized instruments – there’s always something you might have forgotten or never seen hidden somewhere. There is nothing strange about that, since some cameras nowadays some with 400 page manuals and comprehensive software packages!
2. Lens
+ Buy the best quality you can afford – especially for landscapes. Landscapes involve capturing great amounts of detail and needs the best lenses and image capturing characteristics available.
+ Zoom lenses are not always the best quality, but most companies make very good wide angle zooms in the region of 24-80mm.
+ A very handy single focal length for landscape work would be a fixed 24mm. Off course in small format digital this would be about a 15-16mm lens.
+ Try and use lenses in their optimum aperture range – usually 2 stops above wide open to about f22 (f16 for most digital)
+ There are specialized landscape lenses like Tilt and Shift or Perspective Control which can help with depth of field or perspective. Off course digital has somewhat negated some of the usefulness of these gems.
+ Use any lens that will do the job: don’t be afraid to use longer lenses for perspective compression or to isolate certain aspects from a landscape.
3. Support
+ Use a steady tripod. Look out for the following characteristics:
# Weight specification of the head and legs way more than your camera and lens combination.
# Legs that can adjust all the way out for those worm’s eye view landscapes.
# Removable center column with a hook to attach a weight (like a camera bag or a beanbag in a plastic bag) in case of windy conditions.
Quality of Light
1. Light, and the quality thereof is what separates good landscapes from ordinary ones. Composition is a technical tool to bind a landscape together, but good light is what provides the impact. Look at most outstanding landscapes and you’ll notice in the all but the smallest minority the single factor that stands out is the way that quality light of an early morning or late afternoon was utilized to provide impact.
2. Use the ‘Golden hour’ in the morning and afternoon effectively by planning beforehand. You make it very difficult on your self to still be looking for a spot to photograph from after sunrise – it’s mostly too late then – you certainly don’t want to leave it to luck to stumble upon the right vantage point, have your camera ready in time and perfect light all at the same time.
3. Be ready an hour before sunrise, and stay till an hour after sunset. Some of the most beautiful light sometimes occurs at these times.
Composition
Composition is a subject for a book on its own, but here are some basic ‘rules’ and guidelines:
1. THINK about the composition. Traditionally a landscape has an identifiable foreground, middle-ground and background. Identify where the impact is and concentrate on that. Other elements in the photograph should support the main subject.
2. Use the rule of thirds. The foreground and background of a traditional landscape can easily be positioned on the bottom and top third line respectively, with a focal point on one of the third intersection points.
3. Get a strong focal point.
4. Use Natural frames: Try and find a group of trees or a rock formation to add a ‘frame’ in the foreground Just make sure your depth of field is deep enough to include the frame.
5. Use the camera height to control the width and size of the middle-ground. Sometimes you can achieve more impact by having only a foreground/background with a weak or no middle ground.
6. Use Lead-ins – lines or patterns that lead towards an identifiable part of your landscape. A road or rows of clouds are some examples. Preferable use natural or ‘s’ shapes rather than straight lines.
7. Check the edges of the frame. Yes, it is easy to crop unwanted elements out later, but rather do it now when it has no quality degrading effect.
8. Use strong saturated colours. This is where film choice or post processed saturation adjustment is very important.
9. Simplify – don’t try and include too much in your landscape. Rather zoom in to isolate the best part, or go wider and closer to lessen the background size.
10. Try horizontals AS WELL AS verticals. Landscapes should not always be horizontal. Sometimes the most impact could be had by shooting vertical, especially when you have subjects like tall trees you want to accentuate.
o Notice all attributes of the objects in a scene and their inter-relationship:
+ Shape
+ Size
+ Curvature
+ Texture
+ Colour
1. Use people or animals to provide a sense of scale. Often using wildlife accentuated in their environment can make a very nice landscape as well as provide scale and a sense of an animal’s environment and behaviour.
Vary your methodology
1. After sunset or before sunrise
2. Low angles
Sometimes getting dirty might give you another angle that nobody else has seen before!
3. Extreme conditions (Be Ready!)
Protect your equipment, but don’t pamper it. If it is cold, rainy or misty, take adequate care to keep your equipment safe, but don’t necessarily pack it away. Adverse weather conditions often give way to magnificent spells of good light: a colorful rainbow, shafts of sunlight breaking through the cloud or a dark, brooding background with bright warm sunlight in front. Putting your camera in a simple transparent plastic bag with a hole for the lens can be a good shield for light rain. Keep the lens hood on and fasten the plastic bag around the lens hood with a rubber band.
4. Use reflections
Reflections is mostly used in symmetry with the main subject, but can sometimes be used as a subject in its own right. When shooting reflections, make sure you balance the exposure of subject and reflection (with the use of Neutral Density Gradient filters)
Photographing after dark can be a real problem because of issues like noise or reciprocity failure in film, but with good technique and planning wonderful images can be created
Other tools to help you capture what you see
1. Polarizer
Enhance your colours like blue skies or even a rainbow immensely with the aid of a polarizer. Remember, though, when using high saturation film like Fuji Velvia, the usage of a polarizer can lead to ‘over’ blue (almost black) skies which can look quite unnatural. Furthermore, a polarizer works optimally when used 90 degrees from the sun and should be removed when shooting into or away from the sun. In these cases, it has no real effect and only serves as another glass surface that can provide image degradation and flare.
2. Neutral Density filters
These are often useful when slow shutter speeds are required like in moving water or seascapes. ND filters should be chosen with care as many are in fact grey, rather than true Neutral in colour (some Cokins are quite infamous for this)
3. Blue/Yellow Polarizers and colour intensifiers.
Blue/yellow polarizers provide an interesting effect whereby an image can be ‘warmed-up’ or ‘cooled down’ by a simple twist of a polarizer. Again, these effects are best observed at 90 degrees from the sun. Also when using ultra wide angles, apart from the obvious corner vignetting danger from the polarizer mount, the effect can often vary across the sky as it covers a wide angle through 90 degrees from the sun.
4. Graduated Neutral Density filters.
These are arguably the most useful filters in the serious landscape photographer’s bag, and even in the digital age, I find myself reaching for my ND’s quite often in a landscape shoot. The idea is to balance the exposure in a scene where the sky for example is much brighter than the foreground. The ND grad is mounted in a Cokin type filter holder and then moved up or down to selectively cover the bright areas and thus ‘darkening’ it to match the foreground. There are different gradations of ‘darkening’ as well as different transitions like soft and hard. The most common I have used are the 1 stop and 2 stop ‘hard-edge’ ND grads and a 2 stop ‘soft-edge’. Again, as in the case of ND’s these filters vary in quality and can easily add unwanted colour casts if cheaper types are used. Some of the best ones are by Sing Ray (‘Galen Rowell’) or Lee.
Be objective about the image.
Try and visualize the photograph as an independent viewer would perceive it. This is often difficult as our other senses of smell, feeling and hearing often contribute to a feeling of amazement at a scene. Try and keep in mind that all of these sensoric inputs will be gone when we show our landscape to our friends, family or art critics. It is up to your skill as photographer to try and re-create something of that sense of amazement in your viewer by using all the composition and cropping skills as well as all tools and techniques at your disposal.
