Landscape Photography in a Nutshell

Here are some speaking notes that I’ll use as I lead a Landscape Photography overview tonight. I’m going to try to cover the topic in about 2 hours. It’s a classroom session, but we’ll have cameras on hand to ensure that everyone can access the camera features that we discuss. I’ve tried to cover the basics roughly in the order that they come up as you shoot a given image.

Pre-conceptions which affect your results

Photography: for you is it a cold, voiceless recording medium, or one that you use to artistically convey concepts?

That leads us an even broader question… what is “art”? One key test: it’s a result that was intentionally manipulated by a human. Many professional photographers market their images as “just as seen”, but although they may record some beautiful moments and ask a high price for a print, they effectively guarantee that their images are unlikely to be considered art. Not every image needs to be art, and not every photographer needs to pursue artistic images; just don’t avoid editing of digital images just because someone gave you the (mistaken) impression that it is somehow undesirable.

One thing you’ll want to check before you shoot an image is that your camera is storing images in RAW format. Most cameras default to storing files in JPEG format, which produces smaller files, but with less detail and with reduced options for correcting color during editing. Shoot in RAW. Once you’ve saved a few shots from the camera’s poor choice of white balance (color calibration), you’ll never go back to JPEG.

Pre-Visualizing Your Resulting Image

Survey The Scene
If you press the shutter release now, all you’ll have is an aimless snapshot.

Select your subject (and any message or emotion that you want to convey)
If you don’t pick one component of each and every shot to be the subject of that shot, you’re missing the opportunity to make every one of those shots MUCH more compelling.

Select perspective (lens selection or zoom factor)
Compress subject with background (high zoom), or separate (wide angle)?
Emphasize subject (wide angle lens, subject in foreground)?

Select composition: placement of the subject (and supporting features) within the frame
Rule of thirds
Leading lines
Relative placement of other visual components
High or low placement of horizon

Select point of focus
If using autofocus, you must point at your subject, depress the shutter release partway and see confirmation of that focal point, then reframe to get your desired composition before pressing the shutter release the rest of the way to trigger the shutter.

There will be more of your shot behind your point of focus that will be sharp than there will be sharp in front of that point. The general rule of thumb is that you focus 1/3 into the region that you want to be sharp.

Select depth of field (f-stop)
Wide f-stop such as f/2.8 -> low depth of field
Small f-stop such as f/22 -> high depth of field

Note: when using manual focus such as at night, the “infinity” focusing point on your lens will not focus the lens to infinity for all aperture settings. You may have to manually focus on a distant light (moon, star, etc.) then not touch the focus ring (or tape it down once you have focus nailed).

Hyperfocal photography (a key concept for landscape photography)
For a given lens and f-stop there is a point of focus as close as possible to you that yields foreground objects in focus while still preserving the background in focus (to “infinity”). The “hyperfocal distance” is that point where you focus and objects 1/2 that distance to infinity remain in focus. That hyperfocal distance will vary by sensor size, lens zoom factor, f-stop, and desired print size. You can look up calculators for your camera that will assume an 8×10 print size, so you can simply read the hyperfocal distance by zoom and f-stop.

If you have chosen a wide field of view yet allow the camera to focus on the background, your depth of field will be “from infinity to infinity”. In other words, virtually nothing in the foreground will be sharp. The result probably won’t look good, and to a knowledgeable observer there’s a reasonable probability that the result will simply be dismissed as a focusing error, no matter what your intention is for blurring the foreground. Note however that if your entire field of view is filled with distant objects, such as mountain ranges that you’re zooming in on, no matter what aperture you choose it’s all may be far enough away to qualify as infinity, so go ahead and open the aperture up to let in enough light to keep the exposure time reasonable for that zoom factor.

Caveat:
Cameras with large sensors have lower depth of field at a given f-stop (compared to cameras with smaller sensors). f/16 on a full frame 35mm sensor may be equivalent to f/11 on an APS-C sensor DSLR, which may be similar to f/8 on a compact digital camera. This is why many compact cameras can get away with a smallest aperture of f/8. It’s also why they have a harder time producing background blur for portrait shots… they’d need much wider apertures on the wide end to get that same effect.

Select Hard Filters
UV filter: cuts haze, also acts as protection for your lens if you bump it against something.
Circular polarizers reduce reflections and glare, increase contrast (make clouds stand out more against a darker sky), and increase color saturation. Don’t assume that a polarizer is only for a sunny day; you can get glare off of rocks and leaves on cloudy days as well. A polarizer can be particularly helpful to reduce glare and increase saturation when shooting Fall colors.
A Graduated Neutral Density filter uses a half-dark area to darken a bright area of the image such as the sky, while enabling shadow detail (such as in the foreground at sunset) to come through.
Skylight filter: slightly reduces the blue cast of light under clear blue skies. This is particularly important for shooting at high altitudes, where the light is more blue.
Warming filter: makes things look more warm (orange).

Rules of thumb: landscapes are often shot with 50mm or wider field of view, with a small f-stop such as f/16 for maximum depth of field. Often you’ll want to shoot in Aperture Priority mode to control depth of field, adjusting ISO up to keep the resulting shutter speed reasonable for your subject (making compromises as necessary if ISO adjustments would then result in too much noise).

Exposure
Take each exposure with some specific intent, either a “normal” exposure (with maximum range of light and color tones), or “artistic” (silhouettes, motion blur, star trails, etc.).

Automatic Exposure
Using the camera’s guess for exposure is a reasonable place to start, but you should always ask yourself whether it’ll over-lighten a dark scene (sunrise, sunset, etc) or over-darken a light scene (beach, snow, etc).

Set Exposure Compensation (camera feature)
Compensate (adjust) your camera’s exposure recommendation up or down to account for the ambient lighting and how you want your image and prints to turn out. To look natural, a sunrise or sunset will probably be adjusted darker than a mid-day shot (or the camera’s assumption, that all photos are taken in bright sunlight on a sunny day).

Typically you adjust your exposure in 1/3 or 1/2 stops of light, relative to “0”, the camera’s guess at an average exposure value (EV).I typically shoot with my camera set at -1/3 EV.

Recommendation: Also Use Automatic Exposure Bracketing. Always.
Digital photos are essentially free… set your camera to take 3 exposures of each shot you take. Often the main, or middle exposure will not turn out to be your best. Fortunately, trying obsessively to nail exposure perfectly is a hangover from film photography days, particularly slide film with low dynamic range. You had to nail exposure dead on, since slides have no printing step for adjustment, and to avoid the cost associated with taking extra shots simply to ensure one with decent exposure.

Exposure Time
For handheld, non-stabilized shots, the general rule is that you can shoot an exposure as long as one over the focal length before you start to get too much blurring. In other words, with a 50mm lens you can shoot at 1/50th of a second or faster. Image stabilization will enable you to go one or two stops longer, or 2-4X longer in exposure time. Some lenses enable 3 stops (8X longer exposures).

Postprocessing Software and Workflow
Many cameras produce slightly soft, low contrast, low color images with poor dynamic range (range of light and color that is captured). Just as darkrooms allowed for these types of adjustments for film cameras, all of these deficiencies can be fixed in your digital images using software.

A free tool to start with to try out editing would be Picasa 2 by Google. If you use a digital SLR however, you’ll want a Spot Removal tool and a Clone tool to eliminate dust spots, so I recommend Photoshop Elements (about $50-100), which also adds the ability to manipulate photos in layers, then blend the results back together again.

If you shoot a lot of images, you’ll find that Adobe Lightroom is a great tool for manipulating lots of images at once. I find its 4 sliders for adjusting light to dark tones very convenient, and you can increase saturation of one color without making other colors look cartoonish. It also has a “punch” present that can increase definition of details. Lightroom costs about $199, but you can download a trial copy and use if for 30 days for free.

If you take my advice and start bracketing exposures, you’ll discover find some interesting things out about your camera and its results. Try adjusting a sequence of three exposures for an image to all have “normal: exposures. Often the darkest image looks best with more saturated colors, but it has a lot of noise in the shadows. Your middle exposure will look pretty good everywhere but would need some contrast boost and maybe slight saturation boost to look as good as the darkest exposure. Your birghtest image will have the most detail and may be adjusted to look as good a the darkest two images, but on some of the newest cameras a shot that’s even one stop above normal will have “blown highlights” that are totally white, and no darkening will restore the lost detail. Which of the three images turns out best will depend on the shooting conditions for that shot and on your camera’s specific sensor and internal processing characteristics.

There’s one more step that can add a lot of value. It’s called High Dynamic Range or HDR software, with Photomatix being the leading vendor (free trial at www.HDRsoft.com, $99 purchase). A given scene can include light to dark tones that cover a range of up to 17 stops of light. While the human eye can handle roughly a range of 13 stops of light and a film camera can capture up to 11 stops, a digital camera can only handle at best 8-9 stops in a given image. In other words, with nearly every single image you take on a digital camera, you’re going to lose a fair amount of shadow and highlight detail. If you exposure bracketed your shots however (and had your camera on a tripod so the three exposures line up), you may extend you main exposure by up to 2 stops up and down, to a full 13 stops of light represented, of you combine the three shots in HDR software. Not everyone chooses to take this extra step, but the technology will continue to evolve and improve over time, and for situations that are important to you, I’d recommend taking and saving all 3 bracketed exposures in case you want to revisit them a couple of years from now (when you might have embraced HDR).

Special Cases
If you want to blur flowing water, you may want to manipulate your exposure times longer. The blur depends on the speed of the moving water. Small cascades often work well with the main exposure in the 1 to 2 second range. A taller waterfall may be fine at .5 seconds, a slower section of river might require several seconds to blur.
Waves may require 15 to 30 seconds, which can give you an ethereal misty quality to the surface of the sea. Similarly, you can often use 20 to 30 second exposures to blur clouds moving overhead at sunset or during a full moon.
For star trails try a trial exposure of 5 minutes at f/5.6 and ISO 400 (you may need an accessory remote shutter release to exceed 30 seconds), then adjust settings to get longer trails with brighter or darker foreground.
To zoom in on the moon with minimal motion you’ll want to use a main exposure of 2 seconds or less. Look up the moon rise times and plan ahead to catch the moon on the one day per month when it first clears the horizon shortly before sunset, so the exposure of the moon and the surrounding landscape will be close. Later as the moon seems much brighter compared to the surrounding landscape, To get the shot dark enough to pick up moon detail, you might need to go to you’re camera’s maximum -2EV exposure compensation setting AND you may need to set +/- 2EV as the Automatic Exposure Bracketing interval (so you’ll get at least one frame 4 full stops of light below what the camera thinks that frame should be shot at). That still might not be dark enough; you may have to note that darkest exposure’s settings, then switch to manual mode to go even darker.
To minimize star motion in a night shot, use your lens with the widest aperture, open it all the way up, boost your ISO sensitivity, and try to use an exposure of 30 seconds or less. Using a use a wide angle lens can make the star trails seem shorter in the overall frame. Shooting directly towards the North Star also minimizes trails, since it barely moves (and the starts around it don’t move much either as the earth rotates any given degree of rotation beneath it). Some of the newer cameras than can shoot at ISOs of 3200 or 6400 can produce great impressions of the Milky Way.
Another way to spice up night shots is to use a flashlight to “paint” light on a landscape feature such as a rock or tree, or a foreground prop such as a tent. Different bulb types produce different colors to the camera, and colored filters can be placed in front of the lens or you can use a colored reflector (even your jacket) to bounce soft, colored light onto the foreground.
For events with special timing such as lunar eclipses, Fall Colors and wildflowers, there are resources on the Internet to help you get your timing just right to be in the right place and time for the best shot.

Some people vilify editing as if it were somehow wrong. I suspect that those are mainly the people who have chosen not to try or master editing software, but let’s look at the situation. Is it “wrong” to perform work that might change the way that the original scene looked? Ansel Adams intentionally changed the look of a scene with filters, then spent a dozen hours or more in the darkroom manipulating each print that he produced. He chose to aim for “realistic” (plausible) instead of “real”. It may be argued that by making conscious decisions about each of his shots he enabled photography to transcend being a simple recording medium. He enabled his images to be considered art, while influencing them with such skill that you don’t look at his results and say “Yuck, that looks so unrealistic”. It’s your call, but I recommend giving various editing options a try; you have nothing to lose, and potentially a lot of freedom, flexibility, and quality results to gain.

For more information on these topics follow the links I’ve provided to more in-depth information. You may also find my article “16 Steps to Great Results” to offer a lot of these same concepts in a different way.