In this article, I will show you one of the most critical skills a landscape photographer must have. It helped me take the title photo and many of the best images in my portfolio.
I'm talking about the ability to previsualize. It's essential for planning your photo trips and during scouting. During planning, it helps to find areas with photographic potential. In another article, I already showed how virtual scouting can help. Here, previsualization is required to imagine how the landscape and the subject will look under different light, how the seasons affect the look of the final photo by introducing various colors, or how the weather might influence the photo shoot.
It also helps when looking at photos of a location shot in less-than-ideal light. Imagine midday photos someone might take to document their travels. Those are still the most typical photos you find when researching an area. You must learn to previsualize how those scenes would look in ideal conditions. Can you take a great photo there? What's required to make it work?
You need the same imagination during scouting. If you follow my advice from this article, you'll do the scouting well before the actual photo shoot. The light at that time will paint a completely different landscape than when you usually take photos. Golden Hour or Blue Hour light has little in common with the harsh light around noon. Some scenes might look unphotogenic during the day but turn into a landscape photographer's dream around sunrise, sunset, or night.
Like this night photo I captured during the landscape photography tour I recently led in Morocco, where the barren landscape didn't offer much in the harsh light of day. While the jagged peaks hinted at the photographic potential, it wasn't easy to find a pleasing composition. With no clouds in the sky, it was clear that there wouldn't be a dramatic sunset. I had to imagine how the scene would look at night with the stars above. Based on this previsualization, I then set out to find a foreground that would look great in the cool blue colors I imagined the night photo would have.
I then used my cell phone to try out different compositions. It's essential if you plan to use a wide angle lens. Those test photos can help you understand the perspective this lens choice will create in the final image. Here, it showed how the tiny, dried-out plant in the foreground, which looked unspectacular viewed from above, could be turned into an interesting foreground element pointing to the mountains in the background.
In my mind, I started to draw the picture of this plant, the mountains, and thousands of stars above: the peaks slightly obscured by darkness, the foreground softly lit by cool, blue light. With PhotoPills, I checked the best time to photograph the stars using the augmented reality preview. The best time was at 3 am, just after the moon had set. I knew it would be too dark to photograph the foreground then, so I returned during Blue Hour to set up the camera and capture the photos for the foreground. I left my tripod in place and went back to camp for dinner and some sleep before I returned six hours later to photograph the same scene with the stars above.
I use this process for nearly all the night photos to achieve the highest-quality results. Without previsualization, it would be impossible to see how the pieces fit together.
Now, the question is, how do you best learn to previsualize? As with so many other things, the answer is practice. Spend time out in nature during different times of day and observe how it transforms in different light. Get comfortable using your cell phone during scouting and take many photos. Compare those to the final images you take during sunrise or sunset. Try to understand how the different quality and directionality of the light transformed the scene and how different cloud patterns in the sky improved or impaired the final result. The more time you spend scouting and taking photos, the more you'll be able to imagine the landscapes around you with dramatic light, in harsh weather, at night, with clouds, with autumn foliage, and so on. Your photography will benefit from it.
