Friday Finds: Landscape Photography

I struggled a little with this week’s theme. Can one include seascapes and cityscapes in landscape photography? Is it no longer a landscape if taken with portrait orientation? What about if there’s a person, animal or prominent building in the photograph?

I decided that I don’t really like a lot of rules.

For the purpose of creating my Friday Finds: Landscape Photography Flickr Gallery I decided that if there was land in the shot and it wasn’t a close up, I would consider it landscape photography. I’m sure I’ll meet some argument and resistance there, but you can just go get your own blog.

Get Great Landscape Shots

• 11 Surefire Tips for Improving Your Landscape Photography. The title may seem to promise too much, but these are some simple and creative tips to set your landscape photos out from the rest.

  A tripod is a must if you want to get great landscape photos! Additionally, using a narrow aperture to maximize focus is usually ideal.

• Landscape Photography Tips and Techniques. This article includes details on the three recognized styles of landscape photography: Representational (what you see is what you get), Impressionistic (kind of vague, but you can still tell what it is) and Abstract which I covered recently in Friday Finds. It also gives some tips and tricks, though most of them are the same as the DPS article.
• 16 Simple Landscape Photography Tips. Surprisingly, there’s not much repetition between this and DPS’ 11 tips! This one covers the equipment to use more than the creative aspects of getting good landscape photographs. Several tips discuss how, when and why to use various filters for richer colors, more contrast or interesting effects.
• Landscape Photography Tips from National Geographic. Unlike the other links so far, this article takes a look at several natural settings you may find yourself in and coaches you through shooting in these settings.

  You’re in a forest. What do you see? How do you capture it? How do you frame your shot? Take advice from the experts in natural photography!

• Night Landscape Photography. Though I covered night photography a few weeks back, there are some special tips and tricks to get great night landscapes.

  One amazing tip is to bring along a flashlight to sweep across your foreground as you expose the image!

Editing Landscapes in Photoshop

I waded through dozens of videos this week and none of them seemed particularly helpful or interesting with regard to photographing landscapes. I did find several videos describing how to edit landscapes in Photoshop though!

While this first video tutorial shows editing a landscape, what it actually teaches is how to use adjustment layers in Photoshop to non-destructively edit. If you’re not sure about the amazing power of adjustment layers and layer masks, watch this!

The next video is a fantastic, quick tip on using threshold and curves to super simply set your black and white points in the photo. If what I just wrote didn’t make sense, but you own Photoshop, just watch this short video. You’ll be amazed!

The last video I want to share shows a somewhat advanced, but really awesome technique for creating artificial rays of sunlight in your photos. This can be especially useful for light peaking through trees or clouds in landscape photographs. I can’t wait to try this out!

More Landscape Photography

I hope you’ve enjoyed this week’s Friday Finds article on landscape photography! Please check out all the photos submitted for this week’s theme in the Friday Finds Flickr Pool below!

Next Week’s Theme: Urban Photography

Photo Credit: Alex Murphy

A few weeks back I did street photography, but since we spent the week immersed in nature, I want to expand on the topic to include industrial settings, insides of buildings, urban decay and the citified world beyond the reaches of the sidewalk. I’m a city girl at heart and while I love to visit and look at nature, I don’t feel like myself too far off the beaten path.

If you have any photos taken in, around or of the city (and I know you do!) please feel free to submit up to five to the Friday Finds pool on Flickr tagged dwcff-urban.

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