Post on my blog dealing with landscape photography or travel photography are more popular than my posts on sports photography or Motorsports photography and I wonder if landscape and travel photography’s popularity is because you don’t need fast glass or fancy camera equipment to capture good landscape images. If you want to photograph sporting events you need access and often times you also need special lenses and expensive gear, which may be the reason it is not as popular as landscape or travel photography.
Landscape photography seems simple enough, and with the technology available in today’s modern digital cameras I can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t find capturing stunning landscape images easy as pie, and yet a quick search on Google for landscape photography will yield literally millions of examples of poorly composed and incorrectly exposed “so-called” landscape photographs.
I will admit that I am still learning things about landscape photography as well as all other types of photography every time I pick up my camera, but some of the landscape photography examples I have seen out there on the internet just baffles me at how bad it is.
I would say one of the first lessons a landscape photographer should study and learn is “how to see the light” and by that I mean going some place and just sitting and watching the sun set. Don’t take your camera, just sit there and watch the light change as the sun goes down and how that makes the world around you appear. Face the sun and watch the colors of the sky change, see how the setting sun reacts with the clouds if there are any and take note of how the light changes. Take some time to face away from the sun and watch as the colors and shadows move across the scene in front of you. You should do the same thing for sunrises as well, but that can require a larger investment in time to get up before the sun rises. Once you can get a sense of how the light changes and what is possible then it’s time to break out the camera and try to make some photographs.
There is a moment in time as the sun is going down where the sky and any clouds in the sky turns all pink and everything around gets this great pink-ish glow, that is when the shutter should be clicking.
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Doug James | Photo Productions 