Taking Photographs of Landscapes

Landscapes are another of the most popular subjects for photos; in fact if a broad definition of ‘landscapes’ is taken they are perhaps the second-most popular subject after people. In contrast to portrait photography, landscape photography is 100% about technique. In order to translate a beautiful scene that you see with your eyes into a beautiful photo you need to observe some rules that are not immediately obvious; just ‘point and shooting’ will almost never work.

Landscape photo almost always look better when they are sharp from front to back, and this means using a small aperture. They also look best when they have low or no digital noise, and this means using the lowest ISO possible, usually ISO 100. Unless the scene is very bright, the combination of small aperture and low ISO will require a shutter speed too slow for hand-holding, so most landscape photographers carry and use a tripod. When your camera is mounted on a tripod, no shutter speed is too slow.

Unless you are careful in how a landscape photo is composed, the result can easily be very featureless and boring, with all of the interesting elements tiny in the frame and large section of uninteresting foreground and sky. To combat this, one trick is to include ‘foreground interest’. This means composing the photo so that there is something interesting at the bottom of the photo, which could be a fence, a boulder, some flowers – whatever will give the eye something to focus on.

The biggest problem encountered in landscape photography is the range of tones in the scene. Often the sky will be bright and the land significantly darker – this is particularly a problem late in the day. A camera cannot capture such a wide range of tones, and so the result will be a photo in which either the land or the sky is not properly exposed. The bright sky / dark land problem is one that photographers have been grappling with for decades. There are a number of solutions, one of which is to use a ‘graduated neutral density filter’ over the front of the lens. This is a piece of glass that is clear at the bottom and darker towards the top. When positioned, it has the effect of balancing the sky and the land so that both can be correctly exposed in the same photo.