Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 3 i Landscape Photography The Complete Manual

Filter systems Think about investing in some filters. A circular polariser is very useful. It can boost the contrast in blue skies and is very useful for reducing or even eliminating reflections in water; just be aware that polarisers work best when the sun is at 90° to you. If you are shooting a scene where there is a large difference in the tonal values between your land and a bright sky, an ND grad will help stop those skies from burning out. Off in the distance Don’t always assume that your landscape has to be shot with the widest lens you have. Sometimes a longer focal length is great for picking out distant details that a wide angle lens could not. Zoom lenses are also a good choice as…

Is there such a thing as the perfect landscape camera? The answer is going to have to be no. It’s hard to imagine that there is a single camera out there that is perfect for one specific purpose. Certainly some cameras are more suited to landscape photography than others and there are a few key factors that are worth mentioning. Sensor size is not necessarily a prime consideration as you are most likely going to demand as much depth of field as possible in your shots anyway. Megapixel size is also not a major concern unless you are going to be producing enormous prints well in excess of A2 sizes. To be honest the idea of a one shot capture of a landscape is being overshadowed by the use of…

A very important part of photography in general and landscape photography in particular is to ensure that your prime point of interest, your main elements are in sharp focus. Nothing ruins a shot more than the image being fuzzy and blurry when you need it to be tack sharp. The problem however, is that in many cases in landscape photography you have a foreground element as well as a distant object that you want to be in as sharp focus as possible at the same time. Shooting with a wide angle lens and setting a very narrow aperture of f/22 or even f/32 will yield greater depth of field but you will also run into the optical phenomenon know as diffraction, which is a softening of the image due to…

It seems everyone loves those shots of the sea or flowing water in streams that have been taken with a much longer exposure than normal to create the misty water effect. During normal daylight conditions, you would not really be able to get the length of exposure to render the water as that silky fog that is so popular. That’s where a 10-stop neutral density filter comes in. It blocks a large percentage of the available light, driving up exposure times into seconds, or tens of seconds. However, what if you wanted to take shots like that only to discover that you’ve forgotten your filter? What if you don’t actually have that kind of filter and really wanted to have a go at those kinds of shots. Well, over the…

Whether it’s the lure of bright city lights, barren moorland bathed in moonlight or a tumbledown barn in the country under a starry sky, night-time photography is a big draw for many photographers. It can be challenging, it can be very frustrating and time-consuming, but once you get the bug for it and get those first few ‘wow!’ images under your belt, it’s a hard habit to break. There are a lot of photographers who find the whole process very relaxing. As you are normally dealing with much longer exposures than usual and having to carefully compose and focus your shots, it forces you to slow it all down and take a much more considered approach. After all, if you set up a ten-minute exposure and the end result is…

As the sun arcs across the sky in daytime, the light is harsh and creates hard, deep shadows, which is why landscape photographers tend not to shoot during the main part of the day. When the sun starts to approach the horizon however, that is a different matter. The closer the sun is to the horizon, the more atmosphere it has to shine through. This has a softening effect on the quality of the light and reduces overall contrast in the scene. Shadows are long but softer and colours are enriched. The light of a sunrise has quite a cool bluish colour temperature, whilst the light of a sunset, particularly if there is a lot of dust in the atmosphere, can be very warm orange and reds. Sounds like a…

There is often a misconception among budding photographers that landscape photography is something of an easy option when deciding on a subject to capture. Sometimes it only takes a twenty minute drive to transport you from your local town and put you among the marvels and beauty of the natural world. While it is certainly true that the natural world is very accessible, it can be another thing altogether to create memorable landscape images. It isn’t just a case of arriving at a destination, firing up your DSLR and snapping away like a mad thing. The skills you may have that enable you to operate your camera are quite distinct from those that allow you to envision a beautifully composed image within the landscape you currently find yourself. Both are…

These days, with the advent of digital cameras and desktop processing, taking the original photo is just the beginning of a series of techniques that lets you step into your own digital darkroom, process your photos and then manipulate them to your heart’s content. Gone are the days of traditional film camera photography where whatever you captured in camera, was pretty much how it would be when printed using more the traditional darkroom methods. Software such as Photoshop, Camera Raw and Lightroom are now as much part of a photographer’s arsenal as any DSLR or lens. In fact, being able to process your own images allows you to get far more creative than you could do in the days of film. Add to that the ability to take your finished…

Ask any five professional photographers about the process they use to create their pictures, you’ll get five different answers. The amount of processing and adjustment used will vary, depending on the job at handand the type of final image required, as well as the type of camera used to take the photo and the use to which the photo will be put. There are certain operations that will be common to most photos that you’ll want to process, so we’ll take a look at a common general purpose workflow that will be suitable for most types of photo. Our example will be using a sunset photograph taken on a rocky outcrop down on the Devon coast. 01 If you look at the histogram at the top right of the screen…

The Clone Stamp tool (also known as the Clone Brush in some programs) is one of the most useful items in your image editing tool kit. Despite recent developments such as Photoshop’s Spot Healing tool and Content-aware fill, it is still the most precise and reliable way to retouch photographs, allowing you to remove unwanted elements such as dust spots, skin blemishes, lens flare, telephone lines and other intrusive objects from your pictures. Because the process is entirely manual it can be somewhat time-consuming, but the results are often superior to the output of the more modern automatic tools. The Clone Stamp works by copying (“cloning”) pixels from a selected target area and placing them over the unwanted objects. Using the Clone Stamp, it is relatively straightforward to remove even…

Many digital cameras have a feature known as “Panorama Stitching” or “Panorama Assist” mode. It’s there to help with a particular type of photograph, or rather series of photographs, in which successive shots are taken as the camera is panned across a scene. You can also shoot your pan sequence manually, especially if you have a tripod handy to keep the camera level. When it’s done well the results can be breathtaking, but getting a satisfactory result isn’t as easy as it looks. 01 Having downloaded our panorama pictures from the camera into a folder on the PC, it’s time to fire up Photoshop and stitch them together into a panorama. Locate the files on your hard drive and open all of them in Photoshop. If you go to the…

What is landscape photography? This is a more complex question than you might at first assume. There are numerous definitions out there that try to sum up what landscape photography actually is. It can range from such matter-of-fact definitions as: “The dominant use of the term is in reference to photography of naturally occurring scenery in open spaces” to a more simple and broader: “Photographs taken outside”. Many regard a landscape to be a representation of a place that has little or preferably no sign of human activity. It is meant to be an untouched and pure depiction of nature. For others the inclusion of man-made objects that range from walls, fields, gardens and structures is just as valid a landscape image as any other. If presented in a suitably…

Extend your range High Dynamic Range, or HDR, imaging is a technique that has become very popular over the past few years, particularly for landscape photography. It’s actually quite easy to do, and some of the latest cameras will actually do it automatically. You simply shoot three or more copies of the same image at different exposure settings, so that over a series of photos you capture highlight, shadow and mid-tone details. You then combine these shots into one image that compresses the full range of tones so that there are no burned-out highlights or very dark shadows.…

Colours of sunrise Sunrise goes through particular phases, each with its own unique quality of light. Obviously weather is a factor in every shot you take, but pre-dawn is usually cooler in tone, with lower dynamic range and soft shadows. However, the clouds will normally start lighting up before the sun actually gets to the horizon. The minutes before sunrise are generally more orange/yellow in tone and shadows become more obvious. Then, once the sun is a couple of degrees above the horizon, you get long shadows that reveal detail in the landscape, crisp highlights and a marked increase in contrast.…

If you want to take better landscape photographs, the single most useful accessory you can buy is a good quality tripod. By using a tripod you can completely eliminate camera shake, the number one cause of unsatisfactory photos. A tripod is also essential when using long exposures, powerful telephoto lenses or when shooting in low light conditions. There are many different makes and types of tripod, from cheap budget models costing under £15 up to professional grade tripods made of carbon fibre and magnesium alloy which cost hundreds of pounds. They come in all sizes too, from pocket sized mini tripods suitable for small compact cameras, to heavy studio tripods mounted on castors. The type that you should buy depends on how much you want to spend and what sort…

Filters have been an essential part of photography since its very beginnings. Used creatively they can improve a hard-to-capture scene, add an extra artistic element to an image or just provide a bit of fun. Modern digital photo editing has provided an almost too easy method to add filter effects to an image after it has been taken; some effects are better when applied by actual physical filters fitted to the camera when the photo is taken and this is particularly true with black and white photography. Let’s take a look at some of the different types of filter and how they can help to improve your photos. 1. UV filter This screw-on filter was used originally to block UV light from hitting the film in old cameras. Modern digital…

Let’s get some of the mathematical theory out of the way. In photography an f-stop is a unit to quantify ratios of exposure. Each added stop of exposure means a doubling or increase by a factor of two. A subtracted stop is a factor of one half. So in simple terms an f-stop, or one EV (exposure value), is halving or doubling your exposure. As an example of how an f-number is calculated, we need to look at the equation N=f/D. The f-number (N) is calculated by the lens’ focal length (f) divided by the diameter of the lens aperture (D). As an example, if a 100mm lens (f) has a maximum aperture diameter (D) of 50mm, its f-number (N) would be expressed as f/2. The amount of light that…

File format Where your camera allows, always select Raw not Jpeg. Raw is an uncompressed format that gives you much more scope when it comes to the post-processing of your images. You would be surprised how much you can recover a shot that at first glance looks either too overexposed or vice versa. It is fairly common to be able to recover up to 2-stops of exposure information before the image starts to become degraded. Focus It can be all too easy to rely on your camera’s autofocus but try and get yourself into the routine of setting it to manual focus. You may think it is ok to focus on the immediate foreground but that will result in distant objects probably being quite soft. For maximum sharpness with a…

The word panorama means ‘an unbroken view of the whole region surrounding an observer’. In more simple terms, it means a photograph containing a wide view. A vertorama is simply a panorama that is shot in a vertical orientation. It all came about in the 1700s when artists would paint a horizontal image that encircled an entire room. These wide, expansive views are much prized by landscape photographers who strive to capture entire vistas to give the viewer of the final image a sense of the scale of the scene that was visible to them whilst they were there. Conveying all this ‘bigness’ would normally require the use of wide angle lenses. These lenses have short focal lengths of around 14mm to 24mm and can capture an angle of view…

As your photography evolves, you will no doubt be trying out various types of subject matter and getting involved in photo shoots with people, animals, children and the like. You may also be working at larger events, functions, or even weddings, where you are herding people around and generally having to be in charge to get the shots required by your client. Having been in the thick of it, you can be forgiven for occasionally wanting something a little less wearisome. We can’t speak for all photographers, but now and again, we believe it is quite therapeutic to grab your gear, head out and photograph something for yourself, just for the sheer pleasure of it. No moving targets, no groups shots, no shouting to make yourself heard at a function,…

Shooting the night sky is not just the reserve of astronomers and large telescopes. Although you are not going to be imaging deep-sky nebulae and planets in extreme close-up, there is still plenty of scope for any photographer to create memorable and creative images of the night sky. It is a fascinating subject and with care, you can produce some stunning images of the heavens with just a digital camera, a tripod, and perhaps a useful app on your phone. Your options include twilight images, and photos of the sky long after the sun has set. Not only that, you also have some options to capture the stars in creative ways too. Have you ever wondered how you can capture the movement of the stars and turn the night sky…

Your typical landscape image is normally recognisable for what it is. There are an infinite number of beautiful images to be captured out in the world, and that is absolutely fine by all landscape photographers. Now and again though, it is refreshing to see beyond the grand vista, to capture something more than what mother nature has placed in front of us. There is much debate as to whether a photograph can be classed as art. Digital photography does at least enable us to express ourselves and set our imagination free. With that in mind, let’s put the landscape photography rulebook away for a spell and uncover some interesting techniques to elevate your landscape photos to a whole new level of artistry. Why not try the long exposure panning technique…

You are out and about happily taking photographs, with gorgeous sunshine to brighten the experience. It’s your last day before venturing off home and you happen upon a scene that you want to capture. The sun is directly in your eyes but the sun’s position is creating a dramatic lighting effect. What can you do to get the most from the opportunity? The problem is that the dynamic range of the scene before you is very extreme because the sun itself is part of the shot. You have options of course. If you had the time you could wait until the next day when the sun is in a different part of the sky but then you wouldn’t have the drama of the sun low to the horizon. You could…

Coastal and seaside landscapes have always been an extremely popular subject for both artists and photographers. There is a certain something that lures us to the sea. It is both benign and unpredictable, powerful and awe inspiring. Coastal areas have a wealth of interesting features, from large flat expanses of sand, rocky pools and coves, as well as soaring cliffs and sand dunes. There are also the man made influences, ports and towns that spring up around key coastal areas. The photographic potential is vast. The coast and the sea have some of the best image capture potential that you could ever hope for. A unique environment If you are lucky enough to live near the sea, or are within a reasonable distance of it, you will probably be aware…

Landscapes are great, they are often the one thing new photographers will go and shoot first. Landscapes are just so accessible, you usually don’t need to go too far before you find a local beauty spot, there is plenty of ambient light so you don’t need additional lighting, and they are great places to explore camera craft at your leisure. You will normally arrive at your destination and try and shoot the widest angle possible, feeling the need to get everything in shot. Not a bad idea, wide panoramic landscapes are beautiful. How about putting that wide-angle lens away, and for your next journey out, try something a little different. How about trying a deconstructed landscape? “…think about what actually comprises the landscape you are in…” First things first. What…

Aperture Behind the lens of your camera is a movable circular iris which opens and closes to control the amount of light falling on the sensor. This is usually controlled by the camera’s light meter, although some cameras have a manual aperture control. Altering the aperture also changes the depth of field. Aperture priority This is one of the semi-manual exposure options found on some cameras. The user sets the aperture according to the depth of field they require, and the metering system sets the shutter speed to obtain the correct exposure. Artefacts When an image is stored in your camera’s memory it has to be compressed to fit, usually into a JPEG file, and in the process some information is inevitably lost. When the image is uncompressed for viewing,…

Choosing a camera system, lenses or accessories for landscape photography may seem daunting at first because there is so much choice out there. Manufacturers inundate us with features and gadgets that they tell us make their camera so much better than everyone else’s. Beneath all the marketing babble, there is a wealth of choice available for every budget and skill level. With a little research and keeping a budget in mind, there is some great photography gear to be had out there. The following pages will give you a head start on where to begin and what to keep in mind as you search for your gear. It’s worth noting as well that the cost of the camera is secondary to the skill and creativity of the photographer. An expensive…

It is an accepted fact that if there is one lens that is inextricably linked to landscape photography, it is the wide-angle lens. It is often said that the lens influences the shot, not the camera. That is particularly true of the wide-angle lens in landscape photography. As the name implies, a wide-angle lens captures a very wide field of view. This is ideal for capturing the broad expanse of the scene the photographer is in. It also draws in the viewer of the final image in ways that a zoomed narrow angle image does not. Good wide-angle lenses are also sharp and capture great detail. With the advent of digital cameras and their various sensor systems, pinning down what a wide-angle lens is can be tricky. If we stick…

If you are new to photography in general or perhaps you are stepping up from a modest point and shoot camera to a more fully featured DSLR, it can often be intimidating for the beginner when faced with getting to grips with the knowledge and jargon that is required to shoot more creatively. Landscape photography makes it easy to get outside and shoot straight away; it is more challenging however to do it well and consistently. Even though you may be itching to get out and shoot, take the time to explore the settings of your camera. More importantly you need to have an understanding of the relationships between aperture, shutter speed and ISO sensitivity. Things like knowing the different exposure modes available on your camera are essential to grasp…

Although the previous pages deal in the general principles of how ISO, shutter speed and f-stop settings interact with each other. We have another diagram that gives a simple overview of how those individual settings affect the look and quality of your images. We’ve laid out, in a more visual form, the basic effect of wide and narrow apertures, slow or fast shutter speeds and high or low ISO settings. Learning the interplay of these three basic values can appear daunting at first but with practice you will see how one setting affects your image and how the other settings need to work in balanced combination to give you the shots you require. “We’ve laid out, in a more visual form, the basic effect of wide and narrow apertures, slow…

Light up the horizon Never discount an overcast sky as an opportunity to photograph a possible sunrise or sunset. To get the perfect shot, you sometimes have to play a waiting game in order to secure the shot you want. A weather app on your phone can be a very useful tool to help guide your choices when going out in search of a great landscape image. Sometimes the clouds may start to break and reveal a glowing horizon, making a very dramatic image. These moments may be fleeting, but they can create gorgeous colours and contrast against the rest of the clouds in the sky. Remove colour and simplify The use of a neutral density filter at dusk can result in some amazing image as we’ve seen. Instead of…

“Yes, you should never ‘look’ directly into the sun or very bright sources of illumination of course, but why should you not let your camera do it for you?” If you’ve ever been given any photography advice and had some pearls of wisdom passed down to you, chances are that one of the main ones would have been that you should not shoot into your scene’s main light source or the sun. This advice goes on to say that you should always have the sun at your back or at least over one shoulder. While this is one aspect of working with light that works well enough for a variety of situations, it doesn’t always have to be the case. Yes, you should never ‘look’ directly into the sun or…

Finding a new way to capture a landscape or any scene in general is always exciting and quite invigorating. It can be helpful in getting you out of a creative rut and sparking new ideas and thoughts on how to see the world in a fresh way. One such way is crystal ball photography. In case you were wondering, it’s nothing to do with fortune telling but rather the use of a crystal ball as an additional lens in your shots. How you use it in those shots dictates its effect on the final image. Using it very close to the camera so it fills the frame means it almost acts like a fisheye lens, whilst having it further away, it becomes a small globe containing the landscape it is…

Trying to pin down what an urban landscape actually is, might depend on who you ask. There are those that don’t actually count the urban environment as valid landscape material in the first place, opting for landscapes that are untouched by people and the modern world. Fair enough, it’s not for everyone but there are many who find the city full of photographic potential. From dark alleys to towering city skylines, the city has much to offer. It isn’t necessarily a thing of beauty, it isn’t always that clean but it can’t be denied that it has character by the bucket load. It’s this character that many photographers try to capture. Humans are incidental in urban landscapes, the city is the star. What lenses? Budget is always a factor but…

If you have ever shot landscapes to any great degree, you have no doubt encountered the particular exposure challenges that go with them. Scenes with your beautiful foreground interest and far off mountains and dramatic skies are perfect landscape subjects. When you take your shots, you realise that certain factors come into play. The main one being that your camera, no matter how new and expensive, cannot see all the subtle tones and variations in light and dark that the human eye can. A typical daytime landscape of foreground and bright sky has such a large dynamic range from the brightest highlights to the deepest shadows and is far beyond the scope of your camera. You can expose your shot for the sky and have your foreground very underexposed or…

Photoshop comes with Camera Raw as standard. It offers a range of processing options that enable you to get the best out of your photos, including exposure adjustment, sharpening, noise reduction, colour correction and automatic correction for lens distortion. It’s regularly updated so it’s compatible with the latest cameras and lenses. It recently underwent a major update and the layout has been redesigned to match the look of the mobile version of Lightroom. Flimstrip This shows all the files you currently have open in thumbnail format and is displayed on the left side of the screen. You can alter its orientation and display it along the bottom of the screen if preferred. Click the one you want to work on. Image Window The image you are currently working on is…

One of the new features introduced with Photoshop CS6 is called Adaptive Wide Angle; this can warp and bend an image to undo the optical distortion common to all very wide angle lenses. We’ve all seen photographs taken with “fish-eye” lenses. These lenses are called ultra-wide-angle, because the angle of view that they can capture can be as much as 180 degrees. Naturally the ability to squeeze half a room into the same shot comes at a price and that is extreme optical distortion. Straight and parallel lines appear to be bent, perspective is massively shortened and familiar objects take on almost unrecognisable proportions. In the photo opposite, the straight uprights of the window alcoves and bench seats seem to curve inwards, the walls seem to bulge outwards and the…

Photographers use graduated filters placed in front of the camera lens to selectively change the exposure and sometimes the colour of part of a picture, usually to darken the sky to bring out details in the clouds and balance the exposure with the landscape in the foreground. They come in many different shapes, sizes and colours to fit all types of camera system. As with most photographic techniques, it’s possible to duplicate the effect of graduated filters using Adobe Photoshop and as usual there are several ways to accomplish this. For this example we’ll use an image of a sunrise on some exotic coast. Graduated Filter in Camera Raw Since this photo was taken using Raw mode, we can use the Graduated Filter tool in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR). ACR…