David Johnston

5 Compositions for Amazing Landscape Photography

David Johnston
Duration:   10  mins

Description

Professional outdoor photographer David Johnston is a firm believer that the best way to improve your landscape photography is through working on your composition. Composition is the organization of subjects within your frame to create a compelling photograph. It’s easy to walk up to a landscape and take a photo, but it’s difficult to use techniques to arrange the landscape within your frame to create a photo. In this video, David will take you around Great Smoky Mountains National Park to show you five compositions for amazing landscape photography that you can start using immediately. After watching this video, you’ll have a better understanding of composition and all the ways you can use compositions to your advantage the next time you go shoot.

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Hey, what's up guys? Professional outdoor photographer, David Johnston here and I'm in the high elevations of Great Smoky Mountains National Park and I'm actually shooting some landscape photography today, really trying to work on my compositions. And I thought I'd share five of the most essential compositions for amazing landscape photography. Now, composition is the one way that you can work on your landscape photography and improve without spending any money at all. It just takes practice.

It takes looking at what is in front of you in the landscape and constructing it into a good photograph. And the number one thing in compositions that I think should be used by landscape photographers, and probably a little bit more often, is using distance compression in your composition. Distance compression is shot with a telephoto lens. And the telephoto lens, what it does is it's using different pieces of glass internally in the lens to compress distances together. This is something like a 70 to 200 lens, a 100 to 400 or just like a zoom long lens.

Now, when you use distance compression in your compositions you're usually dealing with high elevation, like mountain shots, or you're stacking things together, like a rising sun behind a tree, or even getting into some mountain landscapes and photographing those from the ground, having a moon behind it. What it does is it makes things in the background look a lot closer to everything in the foreground. So you're constantly looking for those distance dynamics in the landscape and using a telephoto lens to compress those together. Now let's take a look at one photograph in particular. This was shot on a morning at Clingmans Dome using a telephoto lens in distance compression.

And what you can see here is that the mountain ridges look like they're stacked one on top of the other, going back all the way into the distance from that first mountain ridge. There are miles in between these mountains from the first one to the last one. So using a telephoto lens to really stack these mountains together and compress those distances creates a composition of horizontal lines that you can use to take your viewer into the background and really explore the entire photograph. As I mentioned before, you can also use distance compression with like a rising sun behind a tree. This photograph was shot on the exact same morning using the rising sun behind the tree to create distance compression and also contrast with a bright sun and a really dark silhouetted tree.

So using a telephoto lens more in landscape photography can help you by compressing distances and creating more interesting shots by using that distance compression of a telephoto lens. The number two way you can improve your composition for amazing landscape photography is using your wide angle lens to create like massive foregrounds. As you see where I'm standing right now, there's a really nice waterfall over my shoulder but there are different ways that I can frame this waterfall up, specifically with a wide angle lens. Now, this is a 12 millimeter wide angle lens and I also have a circular polarizer attached to my lens just because we're dealing with water in this video. So I can either stand right here and use this giant rock to lead your way into the frame with a massive foreground, or I can stand out here and use a different foreground element that's massive and use the water that's streaming downriver as my foreground element and lengthen my exposure to create lines that pull my viewer into the frame.

Now, there are a couple ways to use a wide angle lens to create massive foregrounds. One is to shoot landscape view and use your edges to stretch your foreground and pull you in from the sides in your composition. But you can also flip your camera vertical and user wide angle lens pointed down a little bit so that the bottom of your frame is really stretched and distorted. What a wide angle lens will do is it will stretch and distort things that are on the edges of the frame. So use that to your advantage when you're going out and photographing with a wide angle lens because you can play around with a landscape and find different compositions using stretched lines, stretched shapes, and really pull your viewer into the frame and connect them with the landscape that you are photographing.

Number three on the list is a strategy of using natural designs in landscape photography. Now, this is one of the easiest things to shoot in photography, and it's also one of the most difficult things to shoot. Easy because they're everywhere. You can find natural designs on the ground, on the sides of trees, you can find them in the leaves, in the tree canopy. There's so many ways of locating natural designs in the outdoors.

They're one of the most difficult though, because oftentimes we go on a trail and hike somewhere and our main focus is to get there but we're never looking around at the smaller details in the outdoors. So what I have here is a little section of moss that's really cool. Has some like other plants and ferns growing out of it. These smaller scenes can be shot usually with a longer lens or a macro lens, kind of just zooming in and secluding some of these small minute natural designs and details. What you wanna look for in these types of compositions are repetition and also shapes.

So if I have a lot of linear shapes, I'm gonna go with that same repetition. If I have a lot of triangular shapes, I'm gonna go with that same repetition. And I'm gonna frame up my photos that way. That's what you kind of want to think about when you're framing this up, because a lot of times it can look chaotic in your frame but just be sure you're looking for repetition and shapes to combine in a composition when you're dealing with natural designs in the outdoor landscape. For number four on the list we have what's called natural windows and these are ways to frame up your composition and frame up your subject in a unique way to draw attention directly to it.

Now, your main subject remains the main subject, but you need to be sure that whatever you're using as your natural window becomes the complimentary subject. So behind me, you see this waterfall that we have here in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. But initially you walk up to this scene and you're like, "Wow, a waterfall." How do you frame it up in a more unique way? Well, you use the tunnel of trees that's going back towards this waterfall and framing it up perfectly. What's great about this composition, and this natural window specifically, is that the waterfall is linear and then the trees next to it are also linear.

So you're pairing shapes, but you're also using those trees to frame up the waterfall. Now, what I like about shots like this, like today especially, you can handhold this shot with something like a 35 millimeter lens. It's something like 1/125 of a second, F8 to F11, and then something like an ISO of 100 to 400. Any settings within that range are probably gonna get the job done. Natural windows don't always have to be lines and trees and waterfalls.

They can also be leaves coming in on the edges of something and kind of pulling the viewer's eye towards a specific dot in the frame, or it can just be a hole that you're shooting through. Keeping these things in mind help you create unique compositions of very popular places and places people go all the time. Using natural windows you can frame up those places in a unique nice perspective. All right, guys, rounding out our list at number five is all about using leading lines in your landscape photography. Leading lines are used in compositions to direct your viewer's eye throughout your frame.

So you can use a lot of different things as leading lines, like the waterfall streams behind me. If you elongate those and a longer exposure and use those streams and patterns to weave throughout the frame. Or you can use things like cracks on the ground or tree trunks, anything like that. What's important about leading lines that you need to remember is that they have to lead somewhere. So you can't just place leading lines into your frame just because there's some cool leading lines there.

You have to make sure that within your composition you have a story to tell, and your leading lines direct you through that story. So in every good leading lines composition you have a beginning, you have a middle, and you have an ending. Take a look at this photo from a waterfall in great Smoky Mountains National Park that has a clear beginning as the background waterfall coming into this stream. You have a middle part where the two waters join. And then you have a finale, an ending of the water and that path that it takes at the very bottom of the frame.

Keeping these things in mind with leading lines is gonna help you improve your compositions when you're using lines in your photography to lead someone through the frame. All right, guys, that's gonna do it for this list on the five most essential compositions that you need to use for amazing landscape photography. Keep these things in mind next time you go out into the field. Shoot landscapes, look for interesting compositions. Use the rules and guidelines that we learned in this list so that you can create amazing landscape photographs on your next journey, wherever that may take you.

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