Our world is a beautiful place, full of stunning landscapes. Finding the perfect location is part of the adventure, and creating that magical shot can take you to some remove and majestic places. Landscape photography is often a budding photographers first step towards mastering the art of capturing images. Many of the tips below are well known, but once you know them you can also start to push the rules in the name of creativity.
LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY
DEPTH OF FIELD
Create a sense of depth to an image by selecting a small aperture of f/16-f/22. When using such a small aperture you should also use a tripod to ensure a crisp image with minimal light hitting the sensor.
Wide-angle lenses are also vital to enhancing the depth of field and allowing you to capture more of the beautiful scene before you. Experiment with composing your image so that you have something of interest in the foreground, middle ground and background – a person in the distance, a true in the foreground etc. Walk around the location in search of more than just a postcard angle.
LIGHTING AND FILTERS
If you have the luxury, photograph the scene in different light – morning, noon and night. Picturesque landscape images are often captured during the ‘golden hour’ – early morning or late afternoon – when the sun is lower resulting in displays of brighter colour and contrast. Contrast can be hard to work with but there are few techniques to help you work around potential issues.
A graduated neutral density (ND) filter is probably the most useful landscape photography tool, even with the advent of digital technology and editing software. The reason is this. At the golden hour if you use a ND filter you can expose for the ambient light and use the filter to keep the detail in the sky because the filter is coloured grey in one half and clear the other. If you don’t use a ND filter you will end up with either a perfectly exposed foreground or a superb sky, but not both.
The meter reading should always be taken before the filter is put into place, otherwise the camera will just think the scene got darker. The size of the aperture also affects the suddenness of the change in colour. A wide aperture (f/4) give a softer gradation than a smaller aperture (f/16).
The polarising filter cuts out reflections and glare from a scene and increases saturation. They enrich weak blue skies, , but not all skies benefit from polariser use. Cloudy or hazy skies are unaffected. The way I usually tell if I need to use a polarising filter or not is whether I need to use sunglasses myself. This is because a polarising filter acts like ‘sunglasses’ for your camera.
EXPOSURE
Make sure you get the exposure right by using the camera’s histogram. The advantage of the histogram is that you can tell at a glance whether the camera has been able to capture the brightness range for the scene. Simply put, as long as there isn’t a significant bunch-up of the graph to the right – where the high-light values are displayed – you will have something you can work with in the editing room. The left side of the histogram displays the shadows, and though not idea, if your image is underexposed, digital actually has a remarkable ability to extract detail from the shadows so it is less of an issue than overexposure. But, with a histogram visible seconds after you’ve captured the image there’s no need to settle for anything less than perfect exposure.