Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 6 i Landscape Photography The Complete Manual

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

There will come a time when your widest lens just won’t be wide enough to capture the scale and grandeur of a particular landscape or you may not have a particularly wide angle lens at your disposal. This is where the ability to capture a panoramic sequence of shots and combine them into a much wider or higher resolution image comes in very handy. The process is pretty straightforward and just requires a little bit of thought regarding the approach to the sequence you are about to capture. Essentially you are going to take a number of stills, rotating the camera a few degrees left to right with each shot taken, while allowing enough overlap from image to image so that they can be stitched together. This can be achieved…

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…

Photoshop comes with Adobe Camera Raw (ACR). It is a highly regarded Raw processing application that offers a wide range of processing options that enable you to get the best out of your photographs. It includes exposure adjustment, sharpening, noise reduction, colour correction and automatic correction for lens distortion. It is regularly updated to maintain compatibility with all the latest cameras and lenses. Camera Raw is a very complex piece of software but thanks to a well designed interface that breaks down the processing workflow into easily managed sections, it’s not all that difficult to use. Like the rest of Photoshop, it’s easy to get started but mastering the subtleties of its more advanced options takes time and practice. Let’s take a look at the interface and see what it…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Daytime long exposure The use of a 10-stop neutral density filter during the day can result in some amazing images. Instead of shutter durations of fractions of seconds, you can achieve exposures that are minutes long. This moorland scene was shot with a 10-stop ND, the lowest ISO the camera was capable of and an aperture of f/22. The shutter was open for 240s which gave the clouds plenty of time to pass through the frame of the composition to make what would have been dense fluffy clouds more wispy and conveying a sense of movement. Long exposure sunrise With the aid of a 10-stop neutral density filter, you can slow down your shutter speeds to soften moving elements in your shots such as water and clouds. On a crisp…

The blue hour is a period of time, within civil twilight, where the sun is below the horizon. This period is a prime time for the landscape photographer; neither day or night but something quite ethereal in between the two. The environment is bathed in a soft light and there can be a pinkish orange glow along the horizon, fading into to a deep blue sky. The world is full of promise as the new day begins, or conversely it is about to shut its eyes to drift off to sleep and it is this magical feeling that photographers endeavour to capture. The time of year will dictate how long this period lasts, so it’s a good idea to get to your destination in plenty of time to get yourself…

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…

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…

For many years, if you wanted to indulge in aerial photography, you had no choice but to hire an aircraft of some description to get you, and your expensive camera gear, aloft. Helicopters or fixed-wing aircraft are hideously expensive to hire. Basically aerial photography was strictly off-limits to your average casual photographer. This was a shame, as aerial work provides such a rare view of the landscape. For the rest of us would be aerial photographers, the ability to shoot from this unique perspective presents some obvious problems. However there are some alternatives to hiring a helicopter or aircraft that are well within the ability and price range, of the enthusiastic amateur. Some methods allow you to lift your current camera aloft. Some require additional new equipment. At this point…

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…

Earlier in this bookazine, we covered the procedures for shooting ultra-wide panoramas. This is a sequence of overlapping shots that cover a much wider field of view. They are a great method of capturing much bigger vistas than you could hope to manage with one shot and a wide-angle lens. The resulting images can be very large and contain a huge amount of detail. Some multi-shot panoramic images are known to have been captured that actually ran into file sizes that were measured in many gigabytes! Our panorama is a little more modest. We have a four shot sequence of the coast of Tresco in the Isles Of Scilly. 01 Now that you have carefully shot your raw elements for the panorama, it’s time to stitch them together. For the…

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…

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…

Landscape photography is like playing a musical instrument. It takes an afternoon to learn the rudiments but it can take the rest of your life to really master it. It is a vast and rewarding field, as well as a lifelong hobby. Landscape art is not restricted to photography. People have been drawing and painting the world around them since prehistoric times. A walk around any art gallery or a quick search on Google will demonstrate that the landscape has always been a major source of inspiration to the world’s greatest artists and even a brief study of their work will show that there are as many different approaches to landscape art as there are artists. Studying how different painters have chosen to represent the landscape will also teach you…

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. “There is a certain something that lures us to the sea. It is both benign and unpredictable, powerful and awe inspiring.” A unique environment If you…

Don’t let yourself be put off by a poor weather forecast. If there are storm force winds, lightning and hail stones the size of medicine balls outside then yes, discretion is the better part of valour and staying put is the best choice. At other times though, the unsettled conditions that either precede or follow a storm can yield some amazing lighting and cloud formations. Even a simple grey day that has lots of heavy, grey clouds can be the basis of some superb black and white conversions. Saying that the weather wasn’t good enough and keeping yourself stuck inside can limit your landscape photography options. If you live in the UK, you’ll know that sunshine is a rare commodity, so a little meteorological creativity wouldn’t go amiss. Safety first…

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…

There was a time not that long ago, when image editing meant producing a print in a darkroom under an enlarger; when the image was processed and fixed, breaking out the brush and ink and physically painting on the print to ‘retouch’ it to enhance it or remove blemishes. Things have changed quite a lot since then. One of the great things about digital images is that it’s very easy to improve or alter them using the right computer software. There are dozens of image editing packages available, ranging from simple, easy-to-use programs costing under £20, all the way up to the professional standard Adobe Photoshop. It can be easy to rely too much on image editing to save a badly executed photograph. It is always good practice to get…

We have mentioned HDR images in this bookazine, where you shoot bracketed exposures and combine them using automated software. What happens if you only have one Raw file and no HDR software? Well there is an often used technique where you process a single Raw file a number of times with different exposure settings to get the most out of the various elements in the image, and then layer them in Photoshop and you selectively mask each one to only reveal the best of each exposure for each layer. It is a simple but effective way of producing a final image where all the elements blend together in a much more balanced final image. We take you through the process with a sample image shot on the North coast of…