Landscape photography

Landscape photography is, simply speaking, photography of wide vistas it is a great field of photography, especially if you love nature and you love to travel, it is not about a specific place, but about seeing the significance of the natural world that is around you every day. Composition of a landscape image should be taken with a great deal of care. Photographic teacher Amy Renfrey includes some great techniques for shooting landscapes in her superb training publication.

Here are a few tips to help with composition. Lead the viewer into your image with lines. Lines will draw the viewer into the picture, and they don’t have to be straight. Lines, such as tracks, riverbanks or fences, may work successfully. A row of trees or posts may also work. In this image of a sunset the hedge acts as a line to draw the viewers eye into the picture. Also notice that the horizon is set low in this image as the sky is the main part of the image.

Typically, people and animals are not shown in a landscape, unless they are either relatively small in the image or have been included in the composition to show scale. Giving the viewer a sense of size and depth is an important composition requirement when producing landscape photos, this will give your images far more impact than if you just capture an image of wide empty view. The easiest way to show scale and depth in an image is to use strong foreground details. In the photo above the hedge in the foreground is not a strong feature, but the hedge then leads in to the distance helping to give the picture depth, which would be missing if the photo was just a horizon and sunset.

In this photo having the people in the foreground helps to show the scale of what is beyond. Also pay attention to the horizon, it is set in the upper third of the image so that as much of the land as possible is in the photo, helping to add depth and a sensation of just how far you would need to travel to get to the sea.

It is important to use the rule of thirds in landscape photography. When trying to give the impression of distance across land then the horizon should be at the top third. If the focus of the photo is a sunset, then the horizon should be at the bottom third of the photo. By doing this you will give the focus of the photo the lions share in the image.

Camera Settings for landscape Photography

The main consideration when it comes to camera settings is how to get everything in focus when all of the elements in the photo are so far apart. To overcome this use the aperture priority mode on your camera and set it to a high number value. If the camera is a DSLR then f22 or higher will give you a large depth of field, or for those of you using a compact style camera that is not capable of such f numbers, then set it to the highest setting, for most compact cameras this will be approximately f8. With the depth of field taken care of now think about the focus point.

All of the image that is close to the camera has more visible detail which falls away as we look at points further in to the image, so the focus needs to be set at a point nearer the camera, rather than halfway or in the distance which would leave the foreground out of focus and blurry. In the picture above the focus was set at the furthest clump of grass but just in front of the stack of chairs. Even in a photo at this smaller size it is still possible to see that the foreground is sharp but so are the clouds in the distance.

The information on this page gives a good overview of what is required to capture stunning landscape photos with any type of digital camera. Photography writer and teacher Amy Renfrey has included landscape photography as one of the many topics covered in her excellent jargon free digital photography learning package. Click Here for Details