Landscapes, Nature, and Travel
I love landscapes. I love nature. I am sure I would love travel, if I did it more! Don’t just take pictures of people…take a minute to look around you and soak in the beauty of all of the non living things around you, and the nature that is alive all around you.
Landscape, nature, and travel photography are different, but they usually get lumped together. As a general rule, landscapes tend to show large sweeping views of the land, whole cities, or large bodies of water and sky. Nature photography covers a spectrum of categories, and unlike landscape photography, there is a smaller, more specific subject to the photo, like a flower, or an animal, or a tree. Travel photography can be a combination of many things…tell the story of your trip with travel photography.
Usually, Ansel Adams comes to mind immediately, as a master of landscape photography. His original prints (the REAL thing, not a reproduction) are astonishing. He worked magic in the darkroom, making his images come to life, using his famous “zone system” for black and white photography. He also had a great eye for it. He believed that “There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.”
Wide angle lenses are important for landscape photography…the wider the better. This will help to show a lot more of the horizon, and make the scene feel very vast, like the viewer is standing there themselves. Remember, don’t put your horizon right smack in the middle of the photo! Put it towards the top or bottom of the frame. If a telephoto lens is all you have, that’s fine too though. Remember what Ansel Adams said. You just won’t have as much foreground in your photo, look at it a bit differently, and approach it from a different angle, so to speak.
Poor weather is not a reason to avoid going out and shooting. Actually, the darkness of the day will allow you to use slower shutter speeds, and expose nicely for things like flowing water, and you won’t get too many distracting highlights caused by bright sunshine.
Then of course, there’s the sunset. Who hasn’t been disappointed when they tried to shoot a sunset, or a sunrise (really, same thing, just in reverse!) and got their pictures back to find a completely Unspectacular image? Well, usually your camera has been tricked into overexposing the image, because of the large amounts of dark area. Compensate by underexposing a couple of stops. Use a tripod. If you want that lovely silhouette of a person or people against the sunrise or sunset, you need to be careful with your exposure (try a couple different settings! Or try bracketing) and shoot looking TOWARDS the sun. That’s usually a no no…but not in this case. The effect we usually try to avoid is the one we want. And it CAN be done without a fancy camera, it just takes practice. I took these pics with my el-cheapo Canon A310 (probably under $100 now).
When you are dealing with nature photography, it’s all about the details. Look up, down, and all around, and use your macro photography skills to capture all of the small details around you.
Use these techniques for travel photography. Take pictures of the nature, of the sweeping landscapes, and the details. Try and tell a story with your photos.