5 Essential Landscape Photography Tips
Ian PlantFor outdoor photographers, practical landscape photography tips can be invaluable. In this free video, world-renowned outdoor photographer Ian Plant travels to the Badlands and shows you five essential landscape photography tips to help you improve your images and landscape photography composition. The first is to look for a dramatic sky with colorful clouds. Second, you want favorable light, usually found at dawn or dusk in glowing golds, oranges, and pinks. Third, find dramatic background scenery as in the case of the textured hills and buttes of western South Dakota. Fourth is including a compelling foreground, such as in the hills of the Badlands where the erosion patterns lead the viewer’s eye from near to far. Fifth, you want everything from near to far to be in focus, achieved through the choice of a small aperture. Join pro photographer Ian Plant for five landscape photography tips that will help you capture beautiful outdoor images no matter where you are.
This scene brings together what I consider to be the five key ingredients to a successful landscape photo. Now, you don't need all five of these ingredients for every landscape photo you make. But when you can make a photo that brings these five together, you've got something that's really good. So the first thing is that you wanna have a compelling sky. Right now we've got some great clouds, richly textured clouds from a passing storm.
The sky looks incredible. Second of all, you want favorable color and light. And we've got that. The sun is setting and these clouds are beginning to light up with yellows, oranges, and pinks. Third of all you wanna have really dramatic background scenery.
And we've got that with these eroded badlands. Fourth of all, you wanna feature a compelling foreground and I've got that with these erosion patterns. The patterns are gonna lead the eye from near to far in the image, bring the viewer deeper into the scene. And the fifth thing that you want is near far sharpness. You want everything in your landscape photo to be completely in focus and sharp and you achieve that through critical choice of your focusing point and through using a small enough aperture to get depth of field that covers near to far.
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