I usually take photos of birds. There are some simple goals with that, like, try and fill the frame with bird, catch them doing something interesting, crop following Rule of Threes, etc.
Landscapes… elude me. I had a short trip to Humboldt County this week, and it was SO beautiful, and I didn’t see all that many birds, so I started trying to capture something of the landscape. The results are here, dumped straight off my camera: https://goo.gl/photos/HPwGs4SHMMyUbUbQ7
Now what?! I kind of like some of the shots, but I… can’t think how to take the next step. Even deciding which photos have any merit, I can’t make a decision.
I’ve appreciated Doper feedback on my animal photos before, as well as tips to improve it. Any chance you guys have some of the same magic for these?
There are things you could do to improve these pictures. Breaker and rocks is flat - you could fix this by punching up the contrast. You should also straighten the horizon and crop off the little bit of white spray on the left edge. You might also want to punch up the color saturation, and darken the rock that’s standing by itself to make it stand out more.
With Beach, breaker and rocks I would crop some off the left, somewhere between the big breaker and the little breakers to its left. I would also increase the contrast and color saturation in the middle third of the picture. That area is a little obscured by mist, which makes it look flat. I would also darken the rock.
Golden light is an unusual picture. It has a strong color cast and low contrast. These can sometimes be flaws in a picture, but not in this case. It looks more like a painting than a photograph. You might want to darken the brighter area in the upper right, and reduce the color saturation there a tad (the brighness tends to draw the eye toward that corner). You might also want to crop off the dark area at the bottom.
There are some pictures in this set that don’t work because of visual clutter. The fern pictures, for instance, have too much stuff in the background - the ferns aren’t isolated. The same thing is true of the pictures of tree trunks (are they aspens?) - the pictures are too busy. With more experience you can learn to frame your pictures to isolate your subjects.
The “Golden Light” photo Jeff mentioned above is by far the best of the bunch.
Why? - Because it’s magical. None of the other photos are particularly engaging, although some are quite nice. The fog photos at the beginning are pretty, but they don’t hold my eye. The beach photos are pretty bog-standard; try a very slow shutter speed next time.
Thanks Jeff Lichtman and beowulff. I agree, the “Golden Light” shot is nice, that was taken right at sunset, with the diffused light coming up the valley. I’ll attempt some of the edits you suggest. I think they tree trunks pictured are red alders, it was right by the banks of the Mattole river, which is typical coastal alder habitat.
I had a great time on my trip, and the landscape was just so beautiful - it’s very frustrating to me that I can’t seem to capture much of it. The big-leaf maple in fall foliage, for example, was in a clearing of a redwood grove, right at the base where a massive redwood fell, a hundred years ago. The morning light was slicing through the canopy, and the leaves were just so brightly yellow, against the background of the trunks and redwood foliage… then I look at the photos I took there, (e.g., this) and it’s just… blah.
When it comes to landscapes, the things that make something beautiful in person are not the things that make a landscape beautiful in a photo. In person, scope and light are enough to make a place feel amazing. But a camera has limited ability to capture either on of these. Likewise, our eyes have a habit of tuning out the details of leaves and the like, while on camera these details can be distracting and confusing.
So when capturing a landscape with a camera, you need to find a way to convey the sense of scale and light, via something that the camera is good at. You can’t capture everything that you are seeing, so you need to focus on something that shows the essence of what you are seeing- much like a portrait doesn’t show a whole person, but hints at their essence.
Based on your photos, I’d think about focal points. You do a bit of just pointing your camera the direction of something pretty, which doesn’t give the eye anything to really rest on. I would try to have stronger subjects. I would also think hard about clutter. Greenery is notoriously difficult to capture, because it just looks like an undifferentiated mess on film. You have to find ways to work around that.
Finally, don’t be to hard on yourself. IMHO, landscape photography is the most equipment dependent. The people taking all those stunning landscape shots are able to do so because they spend enormous sums of money.
To expand on what even_sven said: the camera flattens things. When you look at something directly, you can focus on one thing at a time. When you take a picture, everything in the frame ends up being more-or-less equal. Part of becoming a photographer is learning to see a scene not as your eye sees it in person, but as the camera will show it once the picture is taken.
The fact that the camera flattens everything means you need to isolate your subjects. Try to frame the picture so that there isn’t a lot of extraneous stuff in the picture. Move around and see what things look like from different angles and distances. Sometimes it works to kneel down and shoot from a low angle.
It also helps to change your mindset. Rather than taking a picture every time you see something you like, you can look for things that would make good photos. For instance, if you’re in an area with a lot of pretty ferns, you could try to find a fern that stands out from the background, like one that’s on top of a mound with sky in the background.
You can also use depth of field to isolate subjects. A large aperture (i.e. low f-number) will reduce depth of field, which will blur things that aren’t in the plane of focus. I’d suggest experimenting with this until you get comfortable with it.
As a photographer, I would say quite differently. The areas of photography that really require lots of money are sports, wildlife, etc., anything that requires fast shutter bodies and ultra long lenses. Landscapes take patience, waiting for the right lighting, and a good sense of composition. You really don’t need great equipment for landscapes at all. I’ve seen lots of very good to great landscape and nature photography with just an iPhone (one of my friends has even published one, called “That Tree”. It’s light and composition that make a landscape sing, not equipment, and I would say landscapes are one of the least equipment dependent niches of photography, unless you really want to get into large-format photography.
No doubt you are right. But there is some secret to people who can capture those massive, sweeping landscapes, no?
I’m not a bad utterly amateur photographer, but I take pictures when I travel and I don’t travel with more than a (decent) point and shoot. When I’ve traveled with people who carry somewhat better equipment, they are able to capture scale in a way that I can’t.
I like the picture of the backlit birds (starlings?). Sadly, the background is distracting. For that one, I’d try cropping in closer so that you can see that they are birds, rather than leaves (which is what it looks like at first glance).
With the caveat that I, personally, am terrible at landscapes, I think you have a handle on what makes good landscape photography. Your best shots capture unique lighting conditions and moods. The problem is, you can’t always get that kind of condition when you’re just passing through. The landscape photographers I know will stake out a landscape like you’d stake out a bird – when the right lighting happens in the right season, they’re there to catch it. And that’s the difference between an awesome photograph and a vacation snapshot. (It’s also one reason why I suck at landscapes – I’m resistant to the notion of getting up at 0-dark-thirty in the morning on the off chance that, for example, the sea smoke will choose that day to wash picturesquely up against the marina at dawn.)
Even Sven is right about having something in the photo to focus on. Most advice I’ve seen on landscape photography suggested have something in the foreground to frame the shot or give it some perspective. Changing the focal length can be helpful – either go in nice and tight or go really wide or panoramic. We’re used to seeing the world at about a 50mm equivalent, so this is one way of adding interest to the scene.
For the big leaf maples – I really struggle with foliage shots. It always looks better in real life than it does on film. Generally, I think it works better to go up close (maybe with a wide lens) so that at least some leaves have a high level of detail. You might also want to use a polarizing lens to make the sky bluer and more distinct from the leaves.
I know that it’s currently trendy, but for all that, I quite like the effect that HDR techniques have on landscape photos. All that’s needed is the ability to bracket the exposure, and some easily-available software, if the camera itself can’t do it.
I agree with those that mentioned having one thing to focus on. Like a solo flower in the foreground, or one really interesting rock. Then the rest of the vista becomes a surrounding for that solo object of pseudo interest. Sort of a visual McGuffin.
Also, you might want to broaden your aspect ratio. Your photos look to be about 4:3. I think landscapes work better at 16:9 or more.
Are you me? I see the light shining through large golden maple leaves, and it’s astonishingly beautiful. I take a zillion pictures, and none of them are what I’ve seen.
Oh, well. At least I was out there in the woods to see it in person! But capturing light… man, that takes practise and work.
You should be fine with any modern digital camera and a wide angle lens, but any lens will work, depending on the landscape and how you are framing it. Typically, something in the 24mm-35mm range is my favorite for full frame cameras. (Which would be something like 16mm-24mm for crop sensor lenses.) Pretty much any modern dSLR is capable of taking nice landscapes. Hell, like I said, even an iPhone or other camera phone can do a good job in the hands of the right photographer.
In the OP’s examples, better equipment would not have improved the photos. From a technical standpoint, in terms of resolution and the ability for the sensor to capture the tonal values, they look fine. What is missing from the photos is focal interest and a sense of composition. Many of the photos don’t look thought out to me–they look like snapshots. And the time of day many of these photos were taken are not conducive to good landscape photography. But a few do show promise and thought, and I’ll get to that:
Let’s go with an easy one and see what we can do to improve the photo. The sunset photos. Good colors, good cloud cover that gives variety and shapes to the colors. There’s something there you can work with. The problem is, the foreground of the trees/hill is essentially just empty space that is not adding to the photo. The silhouette of the treeline against the sky is not strong enough to make an engaging photo. What would I look for? Anything that can add interest: the simplest would be to see if I can find a lone pine or a group of pines with strong shapes that could stand in relief against the sunset. If you could find a body of water–it could be a lake or pond or even a river–to reflect some of the sky color, that’s another great idea. I’d be thinking about images like this one, although I think it could be done much better. Or if you can find that body of water something like this, except I’d go horizontal. I think the sky the OP has is interesting enough for a photo, it’s a matter of just finding the right foreground to play against it. I don’t know what exactly the options were where the OP was, but those are the kinds of things I’d be thinking about.
I can see the OP does think about these things. This photo shows that idea in action. That’s good thinking. It doesn’t quite work, because the subject isn’t visually interesting enough. The shapes don’t really work for me and don’t form a strong silhouette. I would continue experimenting with this type of composition, but looking for more visually compelling shapes.
This image for me has potential. The warm backlighting is very nice. There is a nugget of an idea there, but the composition feels haphazard to me. Actually, now looking at it the next photo is better. What I want to know is what is left of the frame there. I’d probably compose this as a group of three trees, then the one, and crop out the two at the right. Or maybe something wider. There looks to me to be a photo to made there somewhere. The lighting is interesting and moody, there are some strong lines in the forms of the tree trunks and branches: they just need to be visually organized better. Maybe even just concentrating on the three trees on the left and shooting it as a vertical. That looks interesting enough to me, as you have the warm lighting, the soft backdrop of trees in the background, the three strong lines of the trees, plus interest on the bottom of the frame with the backlit grass. I think it would work. But, mostly, the pictures need more visual organization and composition.
I generally take a lot of photos and later go through them with a critical eye - deleting any which aren’t interesting - and then process the ones which could turn out well. I’ll go through them a few more times until I can’t delete any more.
Also I’ll stitch some together, I’ll take a bunch with the idea I can put them together back at home, which gives me more flexibility in what the focal point and general ‘feel’ of the shot can be. When I’m out I experiment with different settings on the same shot, if I feel that shot’s going to be one I won’t delete later. I don’t have any expensive camera gear or processing software (yet), so I think most people could reproduce these, Araminty.
Many of the shots suffer from haze, either from the air conditions or from shooting at far distances. Old-school filters (polarizing most useful for digital) combined with post-processing (bump up the blue/green and contrast) can really liven up forest/woods shots especially (without having to go whole-hog HDR). Misty shots are especially hard to get a high-contrast result that captures the in-person dramatic feel.
In general, I think the shots are composed too tightly, losing the transitions and variations of landscape that make landscape interesting. Break out of the single-subject thinking and pull your viewpoint back. Think in more wide-angle or cinema-scope letterboxing composition.
