6 Common Mistakes in Landscape Photography
Landscape photography is a popular form of photography. It seems so easy, drive to a nice place, wide-angle lens on your camera and just click. But there is a lot involved in landscape photography to go home with beautiful pictures. You can learn this by doing a lot, not a punishment in beautiful nature, but maybe I can already help you to avoid the errors below.
The wrong time
The time at which you photograph largely determines the end result of your photo. In the middle of the day, the light is at its loudest, which means dark black shadows and a little color in the landscape, making your photo look flat and dull. Especially in the middle of summer with a bright blue sky without clouds, this is at its most extreme and the light is at its loudest. Click here to learn from online photography workshops.
For landscape photography, this is killing, the contrast difference is so great that shadows appear completely black or the sky completely white. You can remedy this by using gray gradient filters, but you often miss the direction of the light earlier and later in the day that helps accentuate the landscape.
You may already be familiar with the term 'the golden hour'. In this period just before sunset or after sunrise, the light has a nice warm glow (which is often stronger in the evening than in the morning due to the amount of dust in the atmosphere) and it falls low, which accentuates the landscape nicely.
Many landscape photographers photograph exclusively during this period, but also in the period after sunset or before sunrise when the colors of the clouds are still discolored and the landscape slowly says goodbye to the blue glow, you can still take beautiful landscape photos.
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After sunset and before sunrise means staying early or late in the landscape. In the summer, a big challenge when the sun rises at 5:20 am (regardless of the need to drive to the desired location and be there an hour before sunrise, which means that the alarm should be set at 3:20 am), but earlier and later in the year, you can set the alarm a little later. With a program such as the Photographer's Ephemeris, you can investigate the time of sunrise and sunset at a specific location.
The success of a landscape photo depends initially on the subject you are photographing and the composition, but the light also plays a huge role. The place where you are may still be so beautiful, landscape photography stands or falls with the quality of the light.
Only use a wide-angle lens
For landscape photography, a wide-angle lens is, of course, a perfect tool. Thanks to the wide viewing angle you can easily visualize a large landscape and if you position yourself low to get a foreground element in the picture, you can still see a large part of the landscape in the background.
However, an (ultra) wide-angle lens sometimes also results in the landscape looking a bit flat, especially if you do not pay attention to your foreground and are still relatively far away from your subject. A grand and impressive landscape simply changes into a much less spectacular picture. And the viewer of your photo has no idea how spectacular it looked when you were at that location.
Of course, a wide-angle lens is a preferred lens in many cases, but do not forget to also make compositions with other lenses. The choice of the lens has a great effect on your composition. With a telephoto lens, the image is compressed, the longer the lens, the less depth the photo has. The perspective is limited, objects seem to be closer together.
With a wide-angle lens you can see a large number of the surrounding mountains and show in what beautiful surroundings the Commando Memorial monument in Spean Bridge, Scotland is:
Ben Nevis falls away in the larger landscape and especially the landscape in the middle of the photo is not very inspiring. By choosing my 70-200mm lens and zooming almost completely, I have noticeably changed the composition.
The monument was photographed from about the same angle (of course I had to go back a bit to get a good view of the monument), but the composition is completely different. Taking a few steps left or right allowed me to place Ben Nevis exactly in the composition where I wanted it:
Forgot to shoot in portrait mode
As you can see in the photo above, in addition to choosing a telephoto lens, I also changed the composition from landscape to portrait mode (vertical orientation). It is obvious to photograph a landscape in 'landscape mode', but in many situations, it is often better to emphasize the foreground and to eliminate elements to the left and right of the photo. Especially if you include a vertical subject in your photos, such as a windmill or a lighthouse.
But also, for example, with a beautiful cloud or lines in the landscape (of a wall, river, patterns in the sand, etc.) you can perfectly use the portrait mode to create a beautiful composition.
No stable tripod and remote control
Landscape photography often takes place in soft light for a nice golden yellow glow and with a relatively dense aperture (f / 11 or higher) for maximum depth of field. This means that the shutter speeds will often be relatively slow. And this again means that a stable tripod is very important to avoid getting blurry and blurred photos.
It is important to invest in a good tripod with a good tripod head so that the camera does not drop under the weight of the lens and thus produces blurred photos.
In general, with tripods, cheap is expensive. The average photographer buys three tripods in his life, a cheap tripod made of a light material that quickly makes the camera move too much, a better tripod of a few hundred euros that is stable, but heavy so that you never take it out of the trunk when longer trips. And a really good tripod - perhaps made of the light but strong material carbon - with a good headset that you can use for years.
Ultimately, choosing a good tripod right away is cheaper than buying three tripods, but sometimes it is also necessary to know what you do not want before you can make a good choice for something that can last for years. And for the same money, landscape photography doesn't appeal to you.
Use of a tripod
If you are shooting on a tripod, turn off the image stabilization of the lens or camera. Some systems cannot handle it properly when the image is perfectly still and will then cause movement.
Also, enable the function to flip the mirror up the first time and let the photo be taken and folded down the second time (mirror lockup). Make sure that there is about three / four seconds between the moment the mirror pops up and the mirror folds down again so that the camera comes to a complete stop before the picture is taken.
Liveview can also help with this. In addition to making it easier to compose on a larger screen, here too the mirror is no longer raised before the picture is taken (because it has to be raised to display on the LCD screen), so you get sharper results.
Another handy tool is a remote control, so you don't cause movement when you press the shutter button with your finger. In addition, you can often clamp the shutter button so that you do not get a cramp when you press a minute when you take a photo with very slow shutter speed.
If there is the (strong) wind, try to shield the camera and the tripod from the wind with your body, so that no extra movement occurs. Some tripods also have a hook on which you can hang weight to keep the tripod stable.
A skewed horizon
Another common mistake is a horizon where the water of the sea seems to run out of the picture on the left. When shooting, you focus on a specific subject and often forget to look through the whole image. This error also occurs relatively often when you keep the camera in portrait mode, your head is bent, making it difficult to see whether everything is straight.
Use a spirit level that you can place on the 'hotshoe' of your camera. Or use the lines you can show in the Liveview view if your camera has one. Some new cameras offer functions to show whether the camera is held straight. If you do not have these functions, you can also use the two focus points that are furthest apart horizontally or vertically. Check if both fall on the same line in the composition, then the image is straight.
Fortunately, this error can easily be corrected afterward by straightening the horizon in a photo editing application. Often software provides a number of guides that allow you to judge whether the horizon is straight. Keep in mind, however, that depending on how angled the horizon is, part of the picture will fall off, this could just be a crucial part.
Incorrect exposure (use filters)
In a landscape, it is important to get a good balance between the exposure of the sky and the ground. Often you can see a difference between how light the sky is and how dark the surface is if it is larger than the camera sensor can perceive (note, the human eye can see more than the camera sensor), it can mean that the sky is overexposed whether the surface is underexposed.
Despite the possibilities to take photos with different exposures and to merge them in post-processing (HDR) or afterward adding a gray gradient filter via post-processing, gray gradient filters still give me the most natural and fastest result. These filters are mainly used in landscape photography and serve to reduce the contrast difference between the light and dark parts of the photo so that all light tones are properly captured on the camera sensor. This is particularly important if you are dealing with a large contrast difference during sunrise or sunset.
Left without and right with a gray gradient filter
The gray gradient filter, which you place in front of the lens, starts dark at the top and then slowly fades to the bottom part, which is completely transparent. Compare it to the blue stripe on the windshield of a car. The dark part ensures that less light can fall on that part of the sensor so that the contrast difference between the light and dark parts is reduced.
Normally you place the dark part over the sky, with the overflow from dark to light on the horizon (generally at 1/3 or 2/3 of the image). As a result, less light from the air falls on the sensor, which reduces the contrast difference between the air and the foreground. This gives you a better chance of creating a detailed image in both the foreground and the sky.
By using gray gradient filters, even with backlight like here, you can ensure that you have both the sun and the foreground well exposed so you can see all the details
For landscapes with a prominent horizon with few vertical objects, you can use a filter with a hard line (hard graduated), if the scene has one or more vertical objects, it is best to use a filter that goes from dark to light with a softer transition (soft graduated). You also have different color filters to make the scene blue or yellowish (tobacco).
How good a filter is partly determined by whether you have really neutral colors or whether there is still a blue or red glow over the photo. Lee Filters are among the best filters, other commonly used filters come from Cokin, although they often show a light color tone when you use multiple filters at the same time.
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