5 Tips to Improve Your Landscape Photography

By Kahli April

Landscape photography is a popular genre of photography. It’s certainly is at the core of my passion behind the lens. As with any genre, to capture compelling images there’s more to it than meets the eye. Bettering my own photography is an ongoing process that I’m constantly journeying through. Whilst the art we create is subjective, there’s always a few things that most photographers would agree on to help you get better results from your own time outside with your camera.

These aren’t all of the answers but the landscape photographers out there who always find themselves taking photos that don’t feel like they do the scene justice, here’s some helpful places to get started.

1. PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT GRABS YOUR ATTENTION
This may seem obvious but it’s one of the most untalked about elements of landscape photography. I’ve found from my time teaching workshops that this is a step that really helps ground photographers in their scene and help them find their way with what they want to photograph. Quite simply, when you arrive at your location, let your eyes wander and pay attention to what they settle on. What are they naturally drawn to in the landscape in front of you? It could be anything of interest to you. A particular tree or rock, a bunch of wildflowers or even a distant peak or layers in the landscape. If you’ve allowed adequate time, you’ll probably find that you keep returning to the same one or two subjects. I’ve found my own way with this personal process now and find it helps me connect with the landscape and is usually what draws me to get my camera out of the bag and ready to shoot.

2. SIMPLIFY THE SCENE
Time to do some cleaning up! This is usually best done by moving your feet and actually walking around your subject a little to find out if there’s anything in the frame that you want to either include or exclude intentionally. Typically, I’ll be looking out for things that break the edges of my frame to start with. Maybe they break into the image enough to contribute to the image and lead my eye to the main subject? Perhaps it’s a small rock or tree branch that just keeps distracting me from enjoying the main subject? If that’s the case, I’ll simply move myself around and adjust to exclude these from the frame. Or, if by moving I’ll be compromising too much on my composition, and the distraction is small enough, I’ll rely on my content aware tool in Photoshop after the fact to help me here.  Perhaps changing your focal length could tidy the frame by removing unnecessary parts of the scene that don’t contribute to the image. When I’m happy with what I see and I have as few distractions as possible in my frame I’ll start taking some test shots.

Photo by Kahli April.

3. FOREGROUNDS
If you’ve seen my work, you’ll know that this is something I like to incorporate a lot as I find it helps ground me in the image. With a strong foreground, my eyes are drawn to it first before moving into the rest of the photograph. By using a foreground you can add interest to the scene while also telling more of a story and creating depth. Foregrounds exist in all shapes and sizes and do not have to be symmetrical or even big. You can be creative and look for small subjects, ones with interesting shapes or patterns and go from there. This can be a useful tip if you’ve spent some time exploring a location that you’ve visited before as it will take your attention away from a potential composition you’ve photographed before.

4. MOVEMENT
This might seem like a paradox when we’re talking about taking still images but being able to capture movement in your images can create some very unique and beautiful landscape images. More commonly, this will be in the form of water, such as waves, waterfalls, rivers, streams etc, but could also be tied into the movement of wind around us with clouds or even plants that ripple in the breeze. This may be where you need to get creative with filters and shutter speeds but deciding what to do with this movement can drastically change the feel of your photo. For example, smoothing out water can create a calm feeling whereas capturing the texture and detail in a breaking wave can help us feel its power. 

Photo by Kahli April.

5. USE PERSPECTIVE TO STRENGTHEN YOUR STORY
My final tip for the day is to move your camera around whilst looking through your LCD on the back of your camera to see what happens to your scene. Even better, use a cellphone camera screen first to find potential interesting compositions, then move back to your camera to get the shot. Try looking at things from high and low vantage points and also when you tilt your camera more downward or upward. You’ll see the perspective of your landscape changes. For example, with a foreground in front of a mountain scene, by bringing the camera slightly up and tilting it downward toward the foreground, you can include more of the ground elements, whilst getting a slightly distorted sense of height on the mountains. 

There you go! 5 useful tips you can apply next time you head out with your camera. But, don’t forget the most important step first: to enjoy your time out there and not get too wrapped up in “getting the shot”. 

Photo by Kahli April

Kahli April is a landscape, night and adventure photographer, an a Contributor to OFFBEAT.

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