What makes a good landscape photo? The answer to this question really depends on who you ask. I personally think that simple photos are the best, but you don’t want them to be so simple that they’re boring. On the other hand, you don’t want so much going on that the viewer doesn’t know what to look at. You have to strike a balance between being too plain and being too complicated. I think that the key to this is balancing the background vs. the foreground.

Many prototypical landscape shots are taken with a large depth of field, so you want the aperture to be smaller (using a larger F value). This ensures that objects close to the lens are in focus as well as objects far away from the lens. Of course there are exceptions to this rule, as in if you want to get the blurred effect of some objects in the foreground, but with the background in focus. For example if you’re taking a shot of a mountain through a field of flowers, you might want to experiment with how it looks using a large aperture which can be used to blur the flowers in the background and keep the mountains in focus (or vice versa), or you can try keeping the aperture small so that the entire scene is in focus instead.

Don’t Forget the Foreground 

A common problem that leaves many landscape photos feeling too plain is lack of using a proper foreground. Yes, you can take a beautiful sunset or ocean shot and I’m sure it looks lovely. But it probably looks just like the other 10 million sunset or ocean photographs out there. Try being a little more unique. Use your surroundings to your advantage. If you’re on a beach, see if you can stand near a cool rock formation, jetty or dock and place that in the foreground. Keep in mind, you don’t want these objects to overpower the main subject of the ocean or sunset, but instead you want them to complement the main subject.

Other creative ideas for foregrounds include using trees, flowers or other natural objects in front on your main subject. Also, man made structures can often provide a great contrast to beautiful nature landscape shots in the background. If you’re shooting from the top of a building, try including other buildings in the shot as well. At sunset, if you place objects directly between the sun and your shot, you can often get hard-line black silhouettes which can have a neat effect at times. Shots of people are always interesting and anonymous in the foreground silhouettes, and add a personal touch to your photos.

Hopefully this gave you some ideas and things to keep in mind the next time you’re out shooting sunsets, oceans, mountains, landscapes or other nature photography. Keep that shutter clicking!

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Tags: background, digital photography, foreground, landscape photography, nature photography, photography tips

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at 4:58 pm and is filed under photography tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.