How to Use Shapes for Outdoor Photography

Hey, what's up guys, professional Outdoor Photographer David Johnston here and in this video, what I wanna talk about is using similar shapes or patterns in your composition for outdoor photography. It's a technique that's really gonna help you level up the quality of your outdoor photos and help you shoot repetition in nature. Nature is built up of shapes or lines that you can photograph and pair together in an image to create a really compelling photograph. So what I wanna do today is photograph a trail that I'm on in Middle Tennessee, and really feature a lot of linear shapes, or long rectangles, in my composition, to give you guys an idea of how to do this, and really use this in other shapes and forms of outdoor photography as well. So using shapes in nature outdoor photography is really not all that difficult.

Shapes are everywhere in nature, and in this trail specifically, there are tons of lines going down this trailhead that we're on right now. I'm not even a third of the way down the trail, and I've found shapes to work with. And in this photograph, I'm working with lines. So basically, I'm using the center trail as my main line, and then I'm using trees as other lines that are going in the exact same direction down the trail. It's a good example of how you can use a trail as a leading line, directing somebody back into the frame, but then also using longer rectangle shapes or longer linear shapes throughout the scene to continue that process of shapes and lines going back.

So since this is cloudier condition, the scene is a little bit dark, so I had to bump my ISO all the way up to 800. And I wanted to get even focus throughout the entire frame, So I'm using f/8, and I'm shooting at 1/60th of a second. It's kind of a difficult exposure to handhold. But using it like this allows me to easily move up and down and try to get different angles on this and also tilt my camera very quickly up or down to give me different angles on my leading line going back through the frame. Shapes don't only have to be just lines, they can be triangles, rectangles, circles, anything in nature that you can pair together that you see as a shape, even if it is an abstract shape.

You can pair it and create repetition with shapes and compositions in your outdoor photography. Again, the great thing about shapes is you can literally find them anywhere in nature, even if that is right off the trailhead, in your own backyard. You just have to get out and explore and easily pair shapes together to create fantastic outdoor photography compositions.