Landscape photography - Naturephotography.eu fotografie van en informatie over de natuur.

Landscape photography:

Personaly:

Landscape photography is often associated with foto's taken with either a setting sun or at sunset or at sunrise. These photo's often stand out because of their warm, saturated (mostly red) colours and contrasts and the soft light that makes the contours more obvious. But as far as I'm concerned landscape photography is more than yust a sunset scene. This is partly because of the kind of trips I make, where there is not always the right kind of light at the right moment, partly because the above mentioned photo's are overabundantly present and lastly because there's much more to landscape photography then a sunset with a silhouet.

Technique:

Landscapes are the subjects with the most photographic elements in them: perspective, exposure, composition, colourarrangement, placement of the subjects, out of place elements. It makes landscape photography broader, a sparrow is a sparrow wether you photograph it in France or in the Netherlands, the landscape makes the difference. If your not provided with the beauty of evening light, you have to look for things like composition (foreground, subject, background), perspective (lead the eye through the landscape), colour, etc. Avoid chaotic photo's, but also photo's with large uninteresting spaces like a big piece of cloudless sky. Days with scattered clouds (preferebly more clouds than blue sky) can result in nice pictures in wich the light paints its way through the landscape. Even bad weather can be exploited by displaying it as a subject of it's own. Especially for landscapes there is the digital panorama format (or wide angle format) often refered to as the 16:9 format. This format is especially adapted to the human eye (eye-range of 90 degrees). Another novelty is HDR which is also very suitable for landscapes. It's a technique in which several photographs, usually 5 of which 2 are underexposed 1 is rightly exposed and 2 are overexposed, are taken with the aid of bracketing, which are then stacked with the aid of an imaging program thus creating a higher dynamic range (more tonal values) resulting in photographs in which both the highlights and lowlights are wel defined. Another technique which is especially usable for photographing landscapes is black and white photography. One can choose this setting in the camera itself or apply it afterwards to a colour photograph with an image editing program. Another thing that can be worthwhile trying is to create a retro look by using sepia, that is if your camera wil support this.

Where:

Many a landscape photograph of mine was taken in mountainous regions because I love this kind of landscape and its challenges and because of the fact that there's a lot of opertunities to work with perspectives and contrasts. Some problems that one can encounter in the mountains are: The fact that you want to travel light (so you don't want to take a lot of materials with you, like tripods and stuff), the high amount of ultraviolet light creating a kind of colourless mist (to circumvent this you need a special UV-filter). Another problem lies in the fact that you get to see the nicest views in the middle of the day, when lighting conditions are far from ideal (to harsh), because, especially on daytrips, you are trying to get to where the views are, or you're on your way back when lighting conditions are at their most favorable.
In actual fact one can photograph landscapes (almost) anywhere, one area is better suited for it then another but in general there is always something interesting to photograph in one way or another.