As described in Chapter 2, “Composition,”
standard composition techniques, especially the rule of thirds and symmetry, work well for landscape photography. In addition to those techniques, the best landscape photos show depth by including three elements:
To watch a video with landscape tips, scan the QR code or visit:
sdp.io/LandscapeTips
Figure 9-1: Show a foreground, middleground, and background (24mm, f/22, 0.7 sec, ISO 100).
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■ Season. Every spot changes throughout the ■ year. Flowers bloom in the spring. Summer heat gives a hazy sky. In the fall, leaves become warm shades of orange and red (for a week or two). In the winter, leaves are sparse, but a pure white snow can highlight every branch, freeze lakes, and cover mountainsides.
Landscape photography doesn’t happen in a studio where you can control everything;
with landscape photography, nature controls everything, and you simply pick a spot and wait for the right moment. Because of this, your best landscape photos may be near your house. Grabbing an award-winning landscape shot while on vacation requires a great deal of luck—but it’s still worth a shot. Find locations by looking at other people’s pictures and using Google Earth (earth.google.com). Get there before sunrise or sunset, and plan to hang out for a couple of hours. Watch the weather during your trip, and plan your visit to the spot when the weather happens to cooperate.
There’s no flash big enough to light a landscape photo, but you still have a great deal of control over lighting. Unfortunately, it requires a lot of patience, because you have to wait for Mother Nature to give you the right lighting.
As discussed earlier, use the golden hours—the hour after sunrise and the hour before sunset. It depends on your location and which compass direction you’re shooting the landscape from, but sunrise and sunset can provide completely different lighting effects.
Pack your gear ahead of time, get there early (plan to arrive a full hour before your ideal light), setup your tripod, and wait. Don’t just take one photo—take a picture at least every few minutes. Even though the lighting might change too slowly for you to notice, when you look at the pictures later, you’ll see how dramatically the light changes during the golden hours.
While direct overhead light and the haziness of the afternoon are rarely flattering, you can still steeple form the foreground, the distant town
in the wooded hills forms the middleground, and the snow-capped Alps and sky are the background.
Still, it might be tough to make a simple landscape interesting. To make your landscape more interesting, use trees, rivers, roads, or bridges to create lines that draw the eye through the landscape. Whenever possible, incorporate an additional subject to provide scale and a focal point, such as a person, a bird, or the moon.
Tip: Don’t let a dull afternoon sky ruin your picture. If you can’t come back in the morning or evening or when the weather is nicer, you can always delete the sky in Photoshop and replace it with something nicer. When you do have a nice sky, take pictures of it for later use!
When you combine multiple images, it’s called a comp. Comp is short for composition or composite.
Planning
Great landscape photos are made over the course of weeks, months, and years. Regardless of your skills and equipment, you can’t just plan a trip to Yosemite and get an Ansel Adams shot. Great landscape photos require:
■ Location. Finding the right spot is the ■ first challenge. Often, though, the best viewpoints require hours or days of hiking.
■ Lighting. You’re at the mercy of the sun, ■ moon, and clouds for your lighting. As described in Chapter 3, “Lighting and Flash,” pick your time of day (usually within the golden hours) to get the right lighting. Stay after the sun sets and take a night shot, as described in Chapter 11,
“HDR.”
■ Weather. Landscapes typically include ■ the sky. While a clear blue sky with puffy white clouds is the traditional ideal, many of the greatest landscapes feature thunderclouds. At night, clear skies and no moon can fill your picture with stars.
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get great shots outside of the golden hours. To determine exactly where the sun will be at any point during the day, and hence know which side of the mountain, lake, or waterfall you want to be on to keep the sun at your back, use the Photographer’s Ephemeris (a free download from sdp.io/tpe).
As if waiting for sunrise or sunset wasn’t enough, you also need to plan around the weather and the season. If you know the spot you want to photograph, you can’t just show up before sunrise and snap a few shots and know you got the best picture. You need to plan to show up several days in a row, because the sky, haze, and fog will be a little different every day.
Then, come back in the winter, spring, summer, and fall. To get the most amazing shots, you might even need multiple visits within each season. Figure 9-2 shows the same section of a pond in three different seasons. As you can see, a landscape will look very different just after a snowfall, and fall colors are only at their peak for a couple of days.
Tip: Get out your parka and snowshoes— the colder it is, the clearer your picture will be, and the bluer the sky will be.
Adapting
In the introduction, I mentioned that great landscape photography requires both planning and persistence. The reason it requires both is that no matter how carefully you plan a shot, it can still go awry.
For example, I planned a trip to Vermont in October to photograph the brightly-colored foliage. I carefully researched the days of the peak colors, and selected days when the forecast called for clear skies. I selected locations that would be nicely illuminated by the rising or setting sun during the golden hours.
Despite my planning, none of my shots turned out. Days before the trip, a heavy wind storm blew the most brightly colored leaves from
the trees. Despite a weather forecast of clear skies, the sun almost never peeked through the clouds.
You can, however, adapt your photos to the conditions:
■ Use HDR techniques to maximize contrast, ■ color, and detail.
To watch a video on fall, scan the QR code or visit:
sdp.io/FallColors
Figure 9-2: Landscapes change dramatically between seasons.
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best colors. Search for your location and
“foliage report” to find the best spots.
Once you get to your location, it can be hard to get the right perspective. There might be buildings, people, or other obstructions in the way. Getting the best landscape shot often requires you to change your location horizontally (by walking or driving to a
different spot) or vertically (by finding a nearby rooftop, driving to a nearby hill, or even taking flight in a helicopter or hot-air balloon).