Landscape Photography 3

Full of Frets

Dec 26

Above: photo taken with Nikon Z6 showing Mamiya RB67 on tripod. Clee Hill Shropshire.

This post is the first in a short series of articles.

I thought I would make this post a little different to what I usually write. Generally, I write the text as a Word document and then I post it to WP and add some photos as necessary. However, I thought I would write this one more as an article and I want to talk a little about taking landscape images and some of the things that I find that I have to think about when taking, and later processing, the images.

I want to clear one thing up before we go further: processing the images is as much a part of the creative process as taking the image. I have seen people say, "You should get it right in the camera". Well, yes if the underlying image is not good, no amount of post processing will rescue it. But to make that statement shows a lack of awareness of photography and how it has developed.

The great photographers of the past were masters of the darkroom and huge effort went into processing prints to get what they were looking for. Ansel Adams wrote books and many articles on how to go about this. The digital domain is no different. The differences are mostly quantitative: for example, digital has an inherently higher dynamic range than film, which makes getting the levels of highlight and shadow areas where you want them in camera easier to achieve. It is also much easier to take a range if shots of a scene and work out which one is best. Film photographers, especially those using large format, do not have that luxury.

However, digital also has its limitations. The real-world dynamic range exceeds the capability of any camera. Digital is more prone to diffraction effects than film due to the nature of the medium, which leads to softening of detail at narrow apertures. This makes using apertures beyond f/16 unrealistic in most cases.

Tip #1 Take Photos

You have to take photographs… this may seem obvious, but you need to take photographs and lots of them. Why? You need to learn how your camera works, how it handles different scenes, you need to familiarise yourself with it. It's no good rocking up to a shoot, pointing the camera somewhere, snapping a photo and thinking and hoping that it's 'done'.

Snapping the odd photo rarely works. If you're capturing a 'moment' then that's all you've got, but if you have the time, you need to think about it and take lots of photos.

Shooting off 500 images doesn't necessarily work either, but adjust the point of view, adjust where the light is coming from, try different depth of field by changing the aperture, each will change the image in some way.

For some types of shot, you may have to plan your visit – time of day, where the sun is, tides, etc. You may have to make multiple trips if the weather or conditions don't co-operate.

Tip #2 Light

Think about the light. There are various aspects to light: there's how much light, where's it coming from, and what's its colour. I'm limiting myself to outdoor landscape for this discussion.

The amount and quality of daylight is constantly changing. Once you are used to working outdoors, or if you are active outdoors, you soon realise how variable daylight is.

Generally as photographers we want to avoid harsh light and hard shadows, which makes full sunlight in the middle of summer a tough ask – ask anyone who's photographed a summer wedding.

Soft and diffuse light in most cases is usually aesthetically more pleasing. This tends to mean photographing in the 'golden hour' which is the time around sunrise and sunset. Phone apps like The Photographer's Ephemeris (TPE) provide that information. There is also the 'blue hour' before sunrise and after sunset – but it tends to be only about 10- or 15-minutes duration, not an hour. Again, TPE provides this information for your location.

Very close to sunset, so light is illuminating underneath of some of the clouds and adding colour

The colour temperature of daylight changes. When the sun is low down, the shorter wavelengths of light, such as blue, are refracted out and scattered making the light much 'warmer' in tone and more yellow/orange. This gets more extreme the nearer the horizon the sun is with orange and red predominating. The light is much bluer when the sun is higher in the sky.

The other advantage of the sun being lower is that the longer shadows provide better 'modelling' of the landscape – the highs, lows, and shape of the land become more obvious.

Late afternoon - the sun is low giving long shadows and warm colours

Colours can change very quickly around sunrise/sunset, so allow yourself the time to watch and be ready as sometimes you only have 30 seconds to catch a shot.

Tip #3 Aspect Ratio

For historical reasons, most cameras use a 3:2 aspect ratio for their sensors. For a 'full-frame' camera this is nominally 36mm x 24mm, the same as film for a 35mm camera (don't ask!).

Standard 3:2 aspect ratio image

It's an awkward size. Modern metric paper sizes are based on a 1:SQRT2 aspect ratio, which at about 1:1.4 is not quite 2:3. This means that an 'as shot' image will not fully fit an A paper size when it comes to printing. You can enlarge it to fill the page, but you will get some overflow of the image on the narrow side.

Don't be afraid of trying different crops. Cropping to 1:1 (square) can work for some scenes, as can 5:4.

Square 1:1 image crop

For something more panoramic, or to suit a wide screen, then 16:9 is a reasonable option. Although it's a bit 'narrow' for a real panorama which is more elongated – it's worth experimenting with custom croppings to see what works for you.