How to Take Digital Landscape Photos
Landscape photography is the art of esthetically capturing natural or man-made locations into the two-dimensional art of photography. Modern digital cameras have all the necessary features to capture any type of scenery. Knowing the basics and having a creative photographic eye are all it tales to produce breathtaking landscape photographs.
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Instructions
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Mount your camera on a tripod. A tripod is an essential stabilizing tool that ensures razor-sharp focus on your images. This is specially important if you want to enlarge your photos later because image blur will be more obvious in blown-up prints. Most of the time, professional photographers never take pictures with their cameras hand-held.
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Decide on the orientation of your photo. Just because you're taking landscape photos doesn't mean you have to capture the scene horizontally. Landscape or horizontal shots convey a sense of space. However, you can take vertical shots if you want to focus on a scene's detail or if the subject calls for it, for example, when shooting tall trees or showing the height of buildings.
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Compose your image on the viewfinder. In landscape photography, a classical concept is to add a foreground, middle ground and background to illustrate depth or dimension in a photo. Foreground can show existing foliage, seashells on the sand or rocks and stones. Middle ground can be your main subject, and the background can be trees, buildings or clouds and the sky. Add interesting lines, curves, colors, contrast and other visual elements that attract you to that scene.
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Use the right lens filter if necessary. Use a polarizing filter to enhance and bring out clouds in the sky. You can also use a neutral density filter to balance the light in a scene. This kind of filter has two sections: a dark half and light half. If the sky in a scene is too bright, position the dark part of the filter on the upper portion of your image so the lighting will be balanced from foreground to background.
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Set the proper exposure needed to take the shot. Use your camera's light meter to read the existing light. Your camera will automatically suggest a correct exposure, but you can "bracket your shots," which means using the exposure compensation button on your camera to allow more or less light to enter the camera. You can then view the results and decide which exposure, either lighter or darker, gives a better overall look. A small aperture or lens opening is necessary to have a sharp focus from the foreground all the way to the background on the scene in your photo.
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Focus your subject by pressing the shutter button halfway in most automatic cameras. Sometimes, you may need to switch from auto-focus to manual focus, for example, if the focusing system focuses only on the elements in the foreground and blurs the background. In manual focus, you rotate the focus ring on the lens barrel until the image in your viewfinder is in sharp focus.
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Fully press the shutter button and take the shot. Using a digital camera allows you take numerous shots, depending on the size of your image storage capacity. Instant preview is also available on your LCD viewing screen so you can review, recompose, adjust exposures and reshoot as much as necessary to accomplish your desired results.
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Tips & Warnings
Shoot early in the morning or late in the afternoon to avoid bright sun, which can produce over exposure or wash out parts in your image. Favor the lighting conditions during dawn and twilight hours to create dramatic landscape photos.
References
Resources
- Photo Credit landscape image by varman from Fotolia.com
