Photography: Landscapes

Left to right: 1. Pier at Lomma. f/7.1, 1/250 s, ISO 80. 2. Scanian country side. f/7.1, 1/200 s, ISO 80. 3. Handelsbanken, Lomma. f/7.1, 1/640 s, ISO 100. All photos were taken with a Canon Powershot A560. All rights reserved.

Why?

Because you got something amazing to show us! Too many landscape photos are trivial and mundane, this also applies to nature photos as well. How come then? We see a lot of things all the time around us, and what makes you want to see more of the same? Not much, I tell you! For a landscape photo to work you have to capture something unusual, to the very least something pleasing to the eye. Just some piece of nature or a horizon line won't do! If a horizon line give some sort of emotional response for you, make sure to capture the essence that gave you that response. Otherwise have you failed to convey your intentions.

I would say that the hallmark for a great landscape photo is that it first of all has something stunning pictured, because there is so much landscape all around us so we're practically saturated with landscapes. Secondly, it must be full of detail. You ought to be able to count every damn tree in the photo - a smeared out blob of forest won't do! Thirdly, because it's a scenery you're capturing, and the fact that you can change the direction that your camera was pointing after you've taken the photo; you wish to capture as much as possible of each side to give the illusion that the viewer can look around as he/she would do in normal circumstances. I.e. you need to capture a wider angle (zoomed out) than what the human eye normally covers. Just make sure there is something worth looking at on the sides too and that you make use of all that negative space! Fourthly, the colours ought to be strong and clear. Not necessarily, but it helps if you would like to hit your audience between the eyes. You can't always count on great geometrical structures in a landscape to make your point, so the usage of colour becomes much more imperative.

Keep the horizon away from the middle! Which bit are we supposed to be looking at? The upper or lower part? Stop confusing your audience! I can't make myself more clear on this point.

It's my experience is that people do expect landscape photos to be heavily edited to such a degree it'll suck the viewer into the frame by vibrant colours and ineffable divine light. However, when it comes to portraits and peoples photos in general, are we much more picky about editing and demand unconditionally photographic realism.

The Photos

My hard core "fan base" keeps telling me that my landscape photos are the photos that they enjoy the most. I find that a bit odd, since I rarely find any landscapes that excites me - I'm hard to excite! Also, I find it more gratifying to work with people. None of the photos I've showed you are any particular wide-angle, because they were taken with a compact.

1. Strictly speaking, I guess this would be a seascape. You might ask yourself "Why on Earth is that horizon doing in the middle of the frame?!" But here, I'm making a point. The issue here isn't to look at the upper part or the lower part, but at the frame as a whole (Cliché - I know!), or rather the foreground. This is just a photo masquerading itself as a landscape photo. The excitement is the pier, and its lines. The waves hitting it. The delicate relationships between different parts. The photo itself is somewhat moody with the dark sky and that blue cold water. I challenge you to find one so called "happy colour" in this photo. The landscape part of this photo (sky, horizon, sea) is what gives it its character, and is necessary but still just secondary.

2. According to flickr is this my most popular photo - ever! Lo and behold - it's a snapshot! I was walking down the road with two friends and got a gut feeling that a good picture was coming, raised the camera to my eye and pressed the shutter release - while walking. The framing was perfect. What does capture your eye are the fairly dark trees, of which the front tree is utilising the golden ratio. What captures your eyes then is the road leading on towards the horizon, where lines are meeting. The road is also framed by bright contrasty colours, which keeps drawing attention to it, since the road is dull and grey by nature. The viewers attention is finally drawn to the end of the road where everything meet up. Also, there are interesting details in the backgrounds to be noted, such as a house, trees and a forest if your gaze happens to start wandering.

3. This urban landscape makes its entire raison d'etre from the heavy contrast between the dark sky and the very bright and strong colours. The sun lit up the house for a few moments, and I felt obliged to take a photo of all this drama. Unfortunately did some leafs get into the frame - that was rather sloppy done of me, but I was busy getting the traffic light aligned.

Technik

If you got a DSLR, set an aperture at f/8 or f/11 for maximum sharpness of the lens and depth of field, get the focus somewhere not too close, say a few metres away, and everything will be in crisp detail. Don't go below f/11, unless you got very good reasons to, since you probably is just going to contract a lot of diffraction, making your photos soft and lack detail. If you got a compact everything is always in crisp detail no matter what you do, due to the very short focal lengths of the lens. Also, keep your ISO as the base-ISO. For example, on Nikon DSLR's that's ISO 200, on Canon compacts it's ISO 80. Anything above or below (!) will induce electric noise, and that's not good for the detail you're after. In general, a compact isn't really what you would like to use to capture landscape photos, the sensor is too small to capture any finer detail, and their JPEG encoding algorithms are usually too cruel to preserve the details the camera managed to capture. Resolution-wise can you easily make a medium-sized print (40x30 cm), but the lack of detail becomes fairly obvious.

To get those strong and clear colours use the "vivid" option on the camera, or why not use the wrong white balance, like warm fluorescent light? As I've understood it, does the professionals tweak their colour settings in camera, so they don't need to edit the photo afterwards, so they'll maximise the colour range from the start.

If landscape photography is more than just a thing for fun, I do recommend the purchase of a dedicated wide-angle lens. Not only are they good at covering it all, but also allow you to get closer.

If you're passion is landscapes and want to move up to something "serious" - get a medium format camera to start with, why not a used analogue Hasselblad? The dynamic range, colour and detail is going to be superior to anything digital. If your ambition is to one day get your photos published in Arizona Highways then skip anything less than a medium format (which probably is going to be too small for your needs anyway!) Proper landscape photographers shoot large dry plates of film (4 x 5" or 8 x 10" in size). Half of the point as a professional landscape photographer is to produce large prints, say 150x100 cm large, so the grandeur of nature can readily be absorbed.