11 Landscape Photography Tips

1. Maximize your Depth of Field
While there may be times that you want to get a little more creative and experiment with narrow depth of fields in your Landscape Photography – the normal approach is to ensure that as much of your scene is in focus as possible. The simplest way to do this is to choose a small Aperture setting (a large number) as the smaller your aperture the greater the depth of field in your shots.
Do keep in mind that smaller apertures mean less light is hitting your image sensor at any point in time so they will mean you need to compensate either by increasing your ISO or lengthening your shutter speed (or both).
PS: of course there are times when you can get some great results with a very shallow DOF in a landscape setting (see the picture of the double yellow line below).

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The Sky and our Landscapes

We can also wait for the clouds to do their designs in the sky and the same photographs will have a very different view. The bottom photograph was done with a filter that only darkens the top part (clouds) of the image. The photograph in the middle was done with a polarizer filter, notice how everything is toned down and has basically the same tone. The top photograph was taken with no filter! The clouds started to move around and create shapes, colors and cover parts of the building.

Photographing landscapes

When photographing landscapes it’s a good idea to go to the scene at different times of the day and experiment different lighting. The morning light is very different from the evening light and the stormy day will add a whole different mood. Framing things and editing elements can allow you to photograph the same place many times and make it look like a different place. If the sky is too light or too gray put less sky in your images. If it's cloudy, add contrast by exposing for the sky or you can get a filter that will darken the sky. I haven't used a filter, I control my exposures and frame so that the sky will not take priority unless the clouds look fabulous! These photographs were taken on different days and different times.

Video-Interaction of Shutter Speed and Aperture

This helpful video gives an explanation of the interaction of shutter speed and aperture.

Slow shutter speed vs fast shutter speed

Many times we think that we should do our landscapes with water by freezing the motion of the water and keeping everything crisp. We can make these images have more texture and more life by changing our shutter speed.
A slow shutter speed will make the movement of water softer and more interesting in landscape photography. By using a slow shutter you can maintain a small aperture so that everything that does not move will be sharp. Take a look at the 2nd image. You can see the turtle on the rock because the water is softer around it. The two elements do not compete with each other. On the sharper image above, the turtle gets lost.
You will need a tripod for slow shutter speed photography!

Sharp Depth of Field

A Sharp depth of field will give importance to all the elements in the photograph. This photograph was taken with an F-stop of 11. In Buenos Aires.... for a great tango.... The sharpness was essential to show all the texture in the building, floor and the lady's dress.

Botanicals and the aperture

When you find your beautiful botanical, move around to search for the perfect background, the one that will make your colors and shapes stand out.



These photographs were taken at the Fairchild Gardens in Miami Florida. A wide aperture was used. The wonderful thing about the soft focus is the dream- like quality that the photograph elicits.

Botanicals at the Fairchild Gardens in Miami, Florida

Notice how important the curly needle like part of the plant becomes! It looks like it's going to sew the leaf below it. The soft background keeps our eyes on the plant by helping to frame it. I used a tripod for this photograph. In fact I use a tripod for all botanicals that way I would not be limited by my shutter speeds.

More on the aperture

When I photograph botanicals I don’t follow a set of rules re the aperture. If I want to emphasize a color I will use a wide aperture (F 1.4 or F2) and focus on the plant that I want to be sharp. The rest will soft.

How to Use Aperture to Control Light in Photography

This portrait of my client Lisa Jeffery (coach in communication skills) is a good example of how I used the shallow depth of field to give emphasis to Lisa and Valentina. I wanted to show the landscape and it's colors but I didn't want it to compete with lisa.



"Besides changing the shutter speed to manipulate light as it enters the camera, you can adjust the aperture, the opening through which light enters the camera. Like an eye, the aperture expands or contracts according to how much light you want. The aperture is adjusted according to a scale of f-stops. The lower the f-stop, the wider the aperture opening and the more light is allowed in. An f-stop number is universal from one lens to another."

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Compare the aperture to your eye. When it gets dark the pupils open up to allow more light in. The lens's aperture does the same.
The F stops on the aperture will give you the measurement of the opening.
F2 is a wide opening.
Have you seen those lovely portraits of people where the background is all soft focus and it seems that the colors are floating around? That is done with a wide aperture. F1 or F1.4 , F2 or F2.8.
So the aperture controls the amount of light that goes through the lens (and reaches your film or your digital media) and it will also control the amount of sharpness your photograph will have.
The amount of sharpness is also called the depth of field.
F2 has a large (wide) opening. It allows a lot of light to enter the lens.
F2 has a shallow depth of field. The only area that will be sharp is the one you focused on - the background will be soft.

By controlling the depth of field you will be able to control the areas in your image that will have more importance or emphasis.

Sports and Dance Classes Prove a Winner for Photographers

"School photography is big business. With hundreds of portrait clients crammed into one space, a sales rate of between 70 and 85 percent, and revenues that can reach as high as $1,000 an hour, it’s no wonder that photographers are keen to get their foot in the school door. And it’s no wonder too that the market is generally dominated by large companies who have the capacity to manage a stream of subjects, process the images and make them available to parents. When the organization is this important — more important perhaps than the quality of the photography — schools tend to stick with the firms they know."

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WD My Book Elite Review

"Western Digital has unveiled its new My Book Elite desktop external drives. The new My Book Elite drives feature automatic and continuous backup with WD SmartWare software and 256-bit hardware-based encryption."

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A note on drives and backing up work:
Many of us don’t back up our photographs and documents until something drastic has happened. Hurricanes (I live in Florida), floods, theft, and just mistakenly erasing important things while chatting on the phone….we should take up doodling again, it’s so much safer. And...I digressed. It’s important to keep everything you do on an external drive. I keep very little on my desktop. When I’m working on a project I immediately save it to the external drive. Eventually I make copies of work onto DVDs or CDs. Always keep the drive at your office or home. When you take your lap top to a coffee shop or a workshop, save your work onto your computer and then onto the drive when you get to your office.
I have heard so many stories about people not saving wok in separate devices. The most recent story is of a friend who traveled with her drive and the computer and both were stolen. She did not have an extra drive with everything at home.
So back up the back up. Don’t wait for a disaster.
I also use the Lacie drives. They have them in all colors and sizes.

Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF1 Camera Review

"The Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF1 ($899, with lens) is a compact interchangeable lens camera that uses the Micro Four Thirds standard. When Panasonic introduced their first Micro Four Thirds camera, the DMC-G1, many folks (myself included) were disappointed that it was fairly large, and not the compact model we hoped the MFT format would deliver. Olympus upped the ante with their E-P1, which has a compact, retro-styled body that is a lot closer to what many people expected in the first place. Unfortunately, that camera was plagued by slow autofocus, no built-in flash, and the lack of a viewfinder (with the exception of the one mated to the 17 mm pancake lens)."

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Photoshop CS3: Converting Color photos to Black and White

"More often than not, instead of shooting a picture using my camera’s black and white (or “grayscale”) setting, I prefer to take color photographs and convert them to black and white. Rather than going to Image/Mode/Grayscale in Photoshop CS3 to turn a color photo into black and white, here is a new technique that I learned from the wisdom of Scott Kelby."

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Freelensing

"While perusing the Internet for new photography techniques, I came across something referred to as “freelensing”. This technique is achieved by detaching the lens from the camera but holding it in place, then shifting the lens around to focus the shot. Shafts of light are “leaked” into the image, a high degree of bokeh is achieved (since the aperture is effectively at “0″), and one can capture extreme macro shots. This technique also somewhat demonstrates the principles of tilt-shift photography, where the plane of focus and the line of sight are no longer parallel to one another - basically, objects that are at different physical distances from the camera can all be in sharp focus if they lie on a straight line."

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