Landscape Self-Portraits

Hi, I'm Ian Plant and right now I am photographing the exceptionally beautiful Southern coast of Lake superior in the United States. I've been exploring this incredible landscape with my kayak. Whatever type of photography I'm doing, I try to have my photos tell a story to engage the viewer both emotionally and visually. To draw them into the scene and forge an emotional connection between them and the subject. And with my landscape photography, this often means adding a human element.

Usually when adding a human element to my landscape photos I'm trying to accomplish one of three goals. First of all, I want to create a sense of scale in the scene. So having a human element in the photo can give viewers a sense as to the relative size of landscape features that are in the scene. Second, by adding a person to the landscape scene you create a strong focal point that's automatically going to draw the viewer's eye and this can help you make your landscape compositions more compelling and powerful. Third, by adding a human element you create an invitation for the viewer to participate in the composition.

The human element serves as a stand-in or a proxy for the viewer, so when they're looking at the photograph they feel like they're the one who's actually standing there within the photograph. They feel like they're part of the scene. It gives them a sense of place. And this helps forge a deeper emotional connection with the viewer. Adding the person to the landscape can be easy if you have a friend traveling with you and you can play art director.

You can tell the person where to stand and what pose to assume, but more often than not when I'm traveling, I'm traveling alone which means I have to take self-portraits. This used to be difficult because I would have to set up my composition, trigger the shutter with a ten second delay, run out into the scene, guess where the best position was, wait until the shot was taken them, and run back. Check the composition and if it wasn't to my liking, I would have to start from scratch. It was this trial and error that would take up a lot of time. Nowadays, things are a lot simpler.

Most modern digital cameras have a wifi feature that allows you to connect to a smartphone app so that you can preview the composition in live view and remotely trigger the shutter. So now what I do once I have my general composition set up. I walk out into the scene. I enable the camera app and I turn on the live view feature and then I assume the perfect pose and position. Once I have everything worked out, I trigger the shutter remotely with a two or a ten second delay.

Then I hide my smartphone, I assume the position, and then I wait for the perfect photo to be taken. So wherever your adventures may take you, always think about adding a human element to your landscape scenes. Not every landscape photo calls for such treatment, but for some landscape scenes the human element is the perfect touch to bring the entire composition together. I'm Ian Plant and thanks for watching.