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Landscapes have never been my forté and I'm not a huge fan of photographing landscapes. However I've been pushed to broaden my skills from a fellow photography friend so went out today to take these.

Can anybody share some tips about landscapes and what to look out for to make it more interesting? I'm guessing lighting is one of the keys (and cloning out dust bunnies) but please enlighten this ignorant soul









Thanks and my humblest appreciation in advance.

Cheers,

Wayne

the first one is actually quite good it's got background and foreground elements just the rock at the bottom seems to look constrained in the framing i would of shot that scene slightly wider so the rock has a comfortable buffer between the bottom left edge

last one is good too it shows scale, but a good test for how much scale you should show is to reduce that image by 50% if the chair becomes so small it's unrecognisable it probably means its too small, you could re-crop that image tighter so the chair is slightly bigger in your comp

One easy trick is to shoot wide with a 12mm or nearest equivallent lens, everything looks super spatial at that range I use the nikon 12-24 and at 12mm the lens distorts landscapes in a way that makes them ultra spatial
here is what 12mm does

its almost a cheat, ive shot the same scene at 24mm doesn't look special
so make sure you work on your basics first, composition, tone etc
then snap it with a 12mm lens and your sweet

in terms of composition you can use off balanced composition
to lead the eye and 12 trick to make the scene more interesting is to use foreground elements this allows a nice visual interplay between foreground and background and shows relational scale


nothing wrong with placing an object neatly in the middle but sometimes a variation on obvious composition is more desireable

also helps if there are leading lines present that at least one leading line ends at one of the corners of the frame


anyway best thing is to keep on shooting and experimenting you'll get the hang of it in no time trust your visual judgement, landscape photography can be formulaic but it can also be stylistic so there are no rules.

thanks for the tips wendell Will definitely keep trying things out.

Wendell, let me complimenmt you on your landscapes. As well as knocking out some great portraits and people shots your landscapes are good too. Your book on France might be closer than we realise with those images.