Hot answers tagged landscape
37
The approach you take will probably depend on whether you wish to photograph star trails, do short-exposure astrophotography, or long-exposure astrophotography. Star trails are relatively easy to capture, however short and long exposure astrophotography must be done with a little more care. These tips assume you are using a DSLR.
Required Gear
To take ...
31
The Black Card Technique is a workaround for the problem of the limited dynamic range of digital cameras. The dynamic range of a camera describes the difference in light levels it can record.
The limits of dynamic range are often seen in landscape photography - you will often see photos where the sky is nicely exposed, but the ground is underexposed, or ...
22
Filter Types
There are essentially 3 kinds of GND filter: Soft, Hard, and Sunrise/Set. All these come in various 'strengths'.
Soft GND filters have a gentle gradient from dark to transparent and so are good for landscapes with irregular horizons such as mountains, hills and to some extent buildings.
Hard GND filters have a more sudden change between dark ...
22
Short of asking Peter Lik himself, or finding he posted the techniques online, I could only speculate on which techniques he actually did use. I am assuming he did post processing. Some possibilities include:
Start with a good dark sky location. The Australian outback has a lot of that. Some places elsewhere are also good (at times).
Use prime focus ...
19
If you're not using a polarizer, try that first - it will often help to cut through some of the haze.
Heres a link with an example close to what you want even: http://www.dslrtips.com/workshops/How_to_use_polarizing_filters/reduce_haze_deep_blue_sky.shtml
19
A very long exposure doesn't help with shots like this due to the rotation of the Earth. Depending on your field of view you can get star trails (where instead of individual points of light you get lines where the stars have moved relative to the camera) with exposures of only 10 seconds. With a wide angle lens you can get away with longer exposures, e.g. 30 ...
15
I think this is an example of: use the opportunities you have, rather than the ones you wish you had. The situation you describe is tricky, and it'll be difficult to get the kind of grand, well-lit landscape that you seen in magazines. But, as Kyle suggests, perhaps there are different interpretations of the scene that could work. Some specific suggestions ...
15
You need to shoot from an angle - if all the trees/signs are in front of you then they will all appear vertical in the image regardless of the slope.
This is actually a well known illusion that gives rise to "gravity hill", a road which slopes downhill but looking head on in the absence of any visual cues the brain interprets it as flat/sloping up, which ...
15
There is overlap between the two terms, as you'll see as you browse the lists of both at LensHero. Basically, they're two different directions from which to approach the problem of narrowing down lens choice, and the site offers both approaches.
A wide angle lens has a specific definition without much flexibility — it's any lens with a wide field of view, ...
14
Use a graduated filter to tone down bright skies
Take multiple exposures and use a HDR technique to combine them (personally I hate these but that's a taste thing)
Take your photos at sunrise/sunset when the light is more manageable. I find mornings best as waters are calmer and there are fewer people around etc.
14
Yes and No. That's the only true answer.
A lens has to be adapted to your vision and subject. Landscape is a very broad category and I know fine-art landscape photographers who mainly shoot with wide lenses and others mainly with telephoto lenses (ex: 70-200mm).
The angle-of-view of ultra-wide lenses really emphasizes the foreground. Moving back with a ...
14
I usually use this technique for pictures taken through windows, but I think it works here, too. In GIMP, I go to Colors | Curves and change the slope of the curve to use all of the available color information:
I like to set the new start/end points for the curve to where the little black line along the bottom of the curves starts and ends. Usually ...
14
The rule of thumb is you can hand hold a 50mm lens at 1/50th second, or a 100mm at 1/100th second and have reasonable lack of camera shake. VR extends that a few stops. So it depends on the amount of light.
In bright sunlight, at f/16 and a 35mm lens, you wouldn't need a tripod or VR.
In low light, VR won't be enough, you'll need a tripod
In between ...
14
my (beginners) understanding of landscape photos is that you generally want them to be with a wide-angle lens
My understanding of landscape photos is that they should contain some landscape! I can understand the association with wide angle lenses, though. You typically want to get a lot in, a photo of a rock is not a landscape photo.
Any focal length ...
13
If anything, the longer the exposure, the less detail you will get, because it gives things more time to move. Even when you're looking at a "still" landscape scene, the tree branches may be moving a bit, water will be rippling, clouds will be slowly scudding across the sky...
A few of my all-time favorite photos are technically marred because of this. ...
12
Images with your camera will start showing signs of diffraction around f/4 to f/5.6 due to the size of the sensor. Shooting at a significantly smaller aperture (like f/11) will only increase the diffraction problems. You'll lose resolution.
Here's a good tutorial on diffraction:
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/diffraction-photography.htm
11
tripod. Use your lowest ISO (50 or 100). I always use a cable release to avoid vibration in the camera. You'll get circular trails if you point the camera at Polaris (the north star; assuming northern hemisphere here); pointing it at something interesting and just letting the trails happen is fine.
exposure length is something to experiment with, start at ...
11
I use LightTrac for the iPad. Not only does it tell you when but also the angle from which the sun will be coming at sunrise, sunset and right now, as the sun position varys seasonally. Besides, it's cool to be able to drag the slider around and see how the direction of the sun rays will vary.
So say I want to photograph the tower in the middle of the plaza ...
11
There are a couple posts here already on what filters are available and why you would use them, having been around the block a couple times on filters used for outdoor photography I'll try for an answer from a different angle: what I actually wind up using.
Polarizing filters: Loved them at first, never use them now because they give an unnatural look to ...
11
It's important to appreciate that what you're looking at in this flickr set is a gallery prints for sale, probably the work of several years by a professional photographer.
To answer your question as best I can...
As far as I know, light in the Netherlands is of the same nature as light in any other place of comparable latitude! Clearly the photographer ...
11
In addition to MikeW's answer, I would suggest a few other benefits that tripods provide for landscape photography.
Often with landscape photography there is the desire to compose an image exactly and then wait for the light to be "right". With a tripod it's possible to set up in advance, and then wait for the sun to rise or set or for that shaft of light ...
10
Just take two shots. One to get properly exposed reflections (and a blown moon), and another to get a properly exposed moon (and everything else pretty much black). In Photoshop, copy and paste the properly exposed moon on top of the other image.
If you don't want the halo, copy and paste the entire sky in the top right corner of your picture. If you ...
10
Well, the moon is around 16 stops brighter than the landscape, so short answer: no. I think even with very heavy ND filtering it would be tricky. You're better off doing a simple HDR stack, which you can do without getting the "HDR look". You might not even need to muck with any HDR software; just put each exposure in a layer and mess with opacity a bit.
10
Landscapes and Light
When it comes to landscapes, lighting is King. When I first started doing photography, I started with landscapes. My first few hundred shots were technically perfect, but artistically morbid. I had spent over a year reading about cameras, exposure, and all the various details about photography from a technical perspective, so I could ...
10
The lens you have should be perfectly fine. For mountain landscapes, you'll want a wide angle lens so the wide end of your 18-200 should do nicely. You'll want a lot of depth of field for these types of shots, so you'll actually want to stop the lens down quite a bit. So using a large aperture lens would probably be a waste. Instead of getting a new lens, ...
10
You're right.
The atmosphere has a prismatic effect, spreading white light out into its constituent colors. As the sun moves down to the horizon, you the viewer move into the orange-red band of light. The lower the sun can get, the more red the light will be.
The atmosphere is also a diffuser. The more of it there is between you and the light source, the ...
10
Unfortunately, Facebook strips the EXIF data from images, a terrible practice, so I can't get his actual settings. However, a wide angle lens with a reasonable aperture that is focussed to the hyperfocal can put a huge portion of the scene in focus. For example: a 16mm lens at f/8 focussed 3.55 feet away effectively puts from just under two feet away to ...
10
On Sharpness
Sharpness is a factor intensely related to viewing context. To use more laymans terms, how sharp a photograph looks greatly depends on how large it is viewed, how closely it is being viewed, how well it is lit (if not on a computer screen), and the visual acuity of the viewer. As such, it is very difficult to judge sharpness without a proper ...
10
Portfolio. Build it. Make it better. Repeat. Don't worry about all this other stuff you mentioned.
Seriously, no one will take a second look past your portfolio if it isn't excellent. Specifically you asked "how does one start out to become a landscape photographer". The basics are not websites, social media, marketing, etc. The basics are great photos ...
10
Here's a few methods I'm aware of:
Circular Polariser filter
A lot of the light from the sky is polarised during the day, so a simple CP filter can drastically cut down the amount of light you get, so that it doesn't blow out. You also get a lot of polarised reflections from vegetation and water, so this can cut glare and improve contrast throughout the ...
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