16 Simple Landscape Photography Tips

http://www.great-landscape-photography.com/landscape-photography-tips.html


1. High vantage points that give you a commanding view of the scene are ideal - and if you have a camera that gives you control (e.g. an SLR) over the exposure settings, a small aperture of f/11 or f/16 will let you keep everything in focus.


2. Early morning and late evening are the best times for shooting landscapes. This is because the low angle of the Sun picks out shadows and reveals textures.

3. The best landscapes are rarely found at the side of the road. So be prepared to go for a trek with a map or a GPS Unit in an effort to seek out the most interesting locations.

4. Wide angle lenses are commonly used for landscapes because they will allow you to include more in the frame and open up perspective. A wide-angle zoom lens gives you more latitude in framing the scene and cropping out distracting features.

5. Whenever possible, place something of interest in the foreground of the shot to create a sense of depth. At the same time, ensure that you use a small aperture to keep everything in focus.


6. Another great but simple landscape photography tip is to anchor your camera to a tripod to slow down your pace of working when shooting landscapes - this means you'll take fewer but better pictures. Get a light model to cut down on weight if you do a lot of walking to your locations.


7. Look out for scenes that will let you crop the top and bottom of the image to produce a more dramatic "letterbox" panoramic composition.


8. Use a polarizing filter to darken the sky and saturate the colors in the landscape (this is the one must-have filter for landscape photographers).

9. Use graduated grey or neutral density filters to darken the sky and reduce the contrast between the landscape and the sky. Polarizing filters aren't much use for bright cloudy skies but graduated filters are. Frequently, the sky looks burned out in photos because the films or digital sensors don't have the range to record the brightness differences between it and darker foreground scenery. (Films and sensors still aren't as good as the human eye!)

10. Use color correction filters to change the color of light on a landscape. These filters can either warm up the landscape or cool it down, depending on the filter color used. In this image, a sepia graduated filter was used upside-down to color the foreground rocks only.

11. Try using a soft focus filter to add an ethereal quality to the scene. These filters blur the bright areas of a scene into the shadows to give the image a glow.

12. If you're an experimenter, try making your own filters. There's no guarantee you'll get good results, but your photos will certainly look different. You can make a filter out of anything that's at least partially transparent - a bit of old stocking, colored sweet wrappers, vaseline rubbed on an old filter (don't ever rub vaseline directly onto a lens - you'll ruin it permanently!) Or you could try breathing gently on your lens (in cool conditions) to get a soft-focus effect.

13. Use the Hyperfocal Distance to obtain the fastest shutter speed with greatest depth of field. Hyperfocal focusing allows you to get everything sharp, from things close up to the camera to those far away. It's more reliable than just setting the focus at infinity. You will need a camera that allows manual focusing though.

14. If you use a digital camera, and your camera is capable of it, shoot RAW images rather than JPGs. The RAWs will take up more room on your memory card but there's no in-camera processing done on the image (as there is for JPGs). RAW images will give you greater latitude for image manipulation (using Adobe PhotoShop, PhotoShop Elements, Paint Shop Pro or some other image manipulation package).

15. Be original! Develop your own style and unique vision. Any competent photographer can duplicate others' work. Truly great photographers produce unique images. Avoid cliche photography. Go for non-standard viewpoints, say from ground-level rather than eye-level. Imagine the world as seen from an animal's viewpoint rather than a human's!

16. Tell a Story! Why tell stories with your camera? Well, for one thing, people who look at pictures will enjoy looking at a story over a snapshot any day. Telling stories with your camera forces you to slow down and think about what you are doing. What is it about this scene that makes you want to make a photograph? What moves you or attracts your eye? Is there a theme, a phrase or a point of view that you want to capture and preserve?

HDR

HDR, an acronym for High Dynamic Range, is a method of processing digital photographs. Three or more digital images are combined to create a composite with a wider range of tones and detail. One image is neutral, one over-exposed, and one under-exposed. The over-exposed image adds details and improved tones in the shadow areas, the under-exposed image doing the same to the highlight areas.
Combining the images is only half the battle. Using software, the combined image must be tone mapped, reducing the contrast and improving it aesthetically and technically for printing. Tone mapping could be considered a black art – getting the level perfect requires patience (and voodoo).
Playing with HDR can be a lot of fun and open up some new visual possibilities for your photographs. It’s easy to get started, if you have a DSLR all you need is HDR software. Photomatix Pro by HDRsoft is the leading application for combining and tone mapping HDR images.
Before you can start processing the images you need to take them. Here are the tips on taking HDR photos:

■Use a tripod and remote shutter release. The three or more photos you are taking need to be identical as they will be combined. A tripod will allow you to lock your camera in position, and a remote shutter release will cut down possible vibrations or minute changes encountered when using the shutter release button on the camera.

■Use the lowest ISO setting on your camera. The images will have less digital noise and be noticeably sharper than high ISO images. Don’t shoot you images at ISO 800. Set your camera at ISO 100 or ISO 200.

■Go manual. Some photographers advise using the auto-bracketing setting on your camera. Adjusting this setting to -2 and +2 EV will provide you with the three image needed for HDR work. Beware. Depending on how your camera accomplishes this you may be changing the depth of field in the images. For best results shoot in manual mode, and change the shutter speed to over and under-expose the images, not the aperture. If auto-bracketing is available in your camera’s Aperture Priority mode, that can be used instead of manual mode.

■Shoot in RAW. Don’t shoot JPGs. RAW images, digital negatives, record more data than JPGs. Your final HDR results will be better with RAW files than JPGs that have been processed and compressed by your camera.
After the images are captured it’s time to experiment. Be warned: Processing HDR images can take hours – as you will get deeply involved trying to create the perfect image. Have fun.

resource: journal.phottix.com/category/photography-tips