8 Tips to Improve Your Landscape Photographs

Looking back on my early photos, they were all missing some key ingredients, like stronger compositions, better lighting, and more interesting conditions. Based on the lessons I have learned in honing my own technical skills and creativity, I share eight tips to help you improve your landscape photography below.  Tips 1. Explore Beyond the Obvious Spot A photo-sharing service I use occasionally publishes a mosaic of photos taken at some popular spots. Nearly all of them are taken from one or two common points of view, and aside from weather and light, all look mostly the same. While the obvious view is often a good one, it is important to move beyond the point where everyone else stops to look for a view that is more unique to you. When I visit iconic locations, I almost always snap a photo of the common view and then spend the rest of my time looking for other perspectives. Exploring beyond the obvious spot will help you and your view of the world come through your photos, often making them more compelling, interesting, and personal. Tips 2. Learn How Lighting Affects Your Scene Next time you are out in nature, spend some time observing how light can dramatically change a scene. Take a sunrise for example. When night starts to fade, your camera will pick up the blue tones of twilight and the light will fall evenly across a scene. After twilight on a clear day, pink and blue bands of colour will fill the sky in the opposite direction of the rising sun. As the sun gets closer to the horizon, red light will start appearing on the tallest features of a landscape, like mountains. This red glow, called alpenglow, usually only lasts for a moment, fading to golden light and then harsher direct light as the sun gets higher in the sky. With the sun higher in the sky, shadows and highlights become more pronounced and the contrast in a scene becomes more intense. When photographing a landscape through these phases, the resulting photographs will be quite different because the quality of the light is so different, even if the other elements of your photograph, like your composition and framing, stay exactly the same. As you learn more about how light affects a landscape, you can apply your knowledge to decide under what conditions a landscape might looks its best given your aesthetic preferences.  The photo above demonstrates the concept of seeing abstractly. Repeating triangles in the corn lilies are a key compositional element here. The more that you practice to see abstract compositions within nature, the easier it will become. Tips 3. Go Beyond the Grand Landscape While grand scenes, including both the landscape and the sky, are excellent subjects for landscape photography, smaller vignettes isolating nature’s details also offer interesting subjects. Next time you are out photographing, take out your telephoto lens and spend some time zooming in on smaller scenes. Look for abstract patterns or interesting arrangements of natural subjects and work to isolate them from the larger scene. Doing so will help add depth and variety to your portfolio of work and can help strengthen your observational skills.  In the image above, the lines in the sand help to lead the viewer’s eye back to the sunstar and stormy clouds. This creates a sense of depth which would not otherwise have been achieved in the flat landscape. Tips 4. Build Your Compositional Skills Compared to many other types of photography, landscape photographers have little control over the subjects we photograph. We, however, can use compositional skills and techniques to arrange natural elements in our photographs for greater impact. Thus, composition, or how a photographer chooses to arrange elements within the frame, is an essential skill to develop.  While entire books have been written on composition, some simple practices can help elevate your photographic compositions. For example, start thinking deliberately about how elements within your frame interact with one another. For wide angle landscapes, think about what you are including as foreground, mid-ground, and background elements and how those elements can interact together in interesting, pleasing, or compelling ways. Start identifying elements of your composition as abstract features and then use those features to strengthen a photograph. For example, does your scene have lines that lead a viewer’s eyes from the foreground to background or does your scene have pleasing layers that unify the scene? Thinking through and applying these concepts can help elevate your compositions and improve the resulting photographs. [READ MORE](emon.eu.org)