How to Photograph Layers Within a Landscape

One endlessly enjoyable inclusion in any landscape photograph is layers. Not only does it give the difficult-to-convey depth of the real scene, but it's also often pleasing to the eye. In this video, watch how these beautiful layered landscapes of mountains were created.

As absurd as it feels looking back, I didn't see mountains — real, large mountain ranges — in person until I was in my twenties. I live in a horridly flat part of the U.K and while I had traveled to lots of different places, none of them had been mountainous. Then, in the space of 5 years, I had seen many and they have captivated me ever since. There is something about the scale that is humbling, but also for me, there is something about the way light behaves around them.

When I was last in Iceland a few years ago, I took my rented Jeep on something of a test of its 4x4ness. I drove right up into the mountains, but somewhere there aren't many tourist attractions in the way of waterfalls, glaciers, or plane wreckages. It was just a remote area with a high altitude and lots of mountains. I quickly became obsessed with the way the low sun — which lasted many hours there — created natural layers to the mountains and turned the distance from the usual abstract backdrop I was used to, to gradient.

In this video, watch as Adam Gibbs takes you on a similar shoot, albeit in a different part of the world, and see how he captures layers within his landscapes and how doing the same could improve your own work.

Rob Baggs's picture

Robert K Baggs is a professional portrait and commercial photographer, educator, and consultant from England. Robert has a First-Class degree in Philosophy and a Master's by Research. In 2015 Robert's work on plagiarism in photography was published as part of several universities' photography degree syllabuses.

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1 Comment

TL: DW. Seriously, I could probably scan through most of these video transcripts in two minutes rather than having to sit there and watch for fifteen. If you're going to always put videos up, put up a transcript or a description of the highlights. Then I can decide whether or not I want to watch.