Shooting Sharper: Landscapes & Cityscapes
It’s time for another edition of Shooting Sharper. In this increasingly tardy and humourless series, I decided to get slightly more specific and focus on particular areas of photography rather than just general rules. To start that off I am writing about landscapes. So yes it is about to get a lot more humourless from here on.
Landscapes are normally defined as photographs with mostly natural subjects and scenes. It brings to mind photographs of lakes, rolling hills, and pastoral beauty. Since I live in Karachi, the closest I get to “pastoral” is when a few emaciated cows occasionally stagger into the empty plot next to my house and eat the garbage. So in order to make this less frustrating for city-folk, I have also included tips related to cityscapes.
This blog, of course doesn’t even scratch the surface of the complex art that is landscape photography. But I have attempted to give a few basic tips to get the enthusiastic amateur started.
Locations
You don’t have to backpack across Europe or fly up to the mountains to take great landscape shots. Even if you live in Karachi or Lahore for instance, you can take great cityscapes of the skyline from good vantage points. The beach is also a great place to shoot landscapes. Aside from these typical shots, you can also pick out a more personal location and shoot that – such as the view from your apartment or from atop your office building.
Timing
Overcast days make the light even and flat, while cloudless days make for very plain skies. The most ideal days to shoot are partially cloudy days, when the atmosphere is clear and visibility is high. That said there are no fixed rules about when you can shoot, and great shots can be taken in any type of weather if you are creative enough.
A good time to shoot on any day is when the light is changing: The final two hours leading right up to sunset of course are great, as well as sunrise and two hours past it. If you are shooting a skyline of course, nighttime is also a great time to shoot, when there are many city-lights and high contrast. The idea is to get great hues on the land, as well as capture most of the sky – in the harsh afternoon light, a large part of the sky usually gets “bleached” by the sun and, whereas in the evening the setting sun is more forgiving and you can capture clouds and many colors as well.
In the afternoon, if you shoot with the sun right behind you, you will get flatly lit landscapes. If you shoot with the sun to your left, right or diagonal, you may get more interesting shadows and textures in your landscape.
Composition
In every given situation there are many ways to compose your shots. But you can follow a few steps to come up with better pictures. For one thing, you can step back and check to see which part of the scene is the most interesting, for instance are the clouds more interesting or is the horizon? Which part of the scene keeps attracting your gaze?
You can then compose your shots so that the most interesting part of the scene dominates the picture. You can, of course put it in the centre, but you can also put it in one of the thirds of your photo, and set it up so that the surrounding elements of the photograph call attention to it.
The same goes for the ratio of sky-to-land in your photo, if both sky and land are equally interesting, you can put the line of the horizon in the center of your photo (make sure it’s straight!) – but if one of them is much more interesting than the other, you can let that bit of your photo dominate more by placing the horizon line on the top third or bottom third of your image. You can also make your photo more interesting by including a visually compelling element (even a person or their silhouette) in the foreground; this can add depth and character to your photo when done well. Usually for landscape photos, you should shoot with your camera horizontal (also known as “landscape”, however on some occasions, vertical shots looks even better than horizontal ones, especially when there is more interesting things in one particular area rather than all along the horizon.
Settings
Be sure to expose your photos properly, most POS cameras have a “landscape” or “sunset” mode that you can use.
If you can use your camera on manual mode or have a DSLR, you can keep your aperture relatively high (Like F/8 or above) so that there is greater depth of field. Try to keep your ISO settings low too, because you probably don’t want grain or noise in a scenic shot.
In dying light or at night-time, it can be challenging to avoid camera-shake, so you can use a tripod or rest your camera somewhere while taking the shot rather than shooting it hand-held. If you do find someplace to rest your camera, you can experiment with slow shots (slow shutter speed), which result in great, dreamy pictures of certain locations, such as city streets or waves on a shoreline.
Alternative Devices
Don’t have a fancy DSLR? Don’t even have a camera? Well you can still take cool photos these days with new functions and increasingly better quality cameras on your phone (usually smartphones). New panorama apps on Android phones for instance allows you to make stunning wide shots by just using a steady hand to pan your camera along your shot.
Post-processing
There is a lot of hidden potential in a well-shot landscape image. What looks like a good shot, often turns into a great shot after you tinker with the levels and colours in Photoshop.
Sometimes changing the exposure just a bit, or enhancing the saturation results in that final finishing touch that makes an ordinary shot into an extraordinary one.
Focus on getting your colours in the right hue and tint (the colours can be true-to-life or even slightly different, depending on your taste), check the colour of the sky and the ground.
Of course editing photos is an art in itself (and a delicate one at that). It requires its own entry entirely – something that I am working on as well.
Sana Agboatwala, Muhammad Omair and Fehd Siddique are three photographers from Karachi who let me use their landscape images in my blog, thanks guys!
View the other entries in the Shooting Sharper series here.
The views expressed by this blogger and in the following reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Dawn Media Group.