How Using Depth and Separation Will Greatly Improve Your Landscape Photography

If you want to take your landscape photos to the “next level” depth and separation are two hugely important factors you need to consider.

As summer approaches and many of us are still not able to travel, it is a great time to explore and photograph some local forests. Even though it is the autumn colors which many landscape photographers cherish, I personally prefer the lush green summer and early autumn colors of the woodlands. There is something optimistic and lively about green that reds, oranges, and yellows do not have. However, green forests can be very hard to photograph, as they are often chaotic and full of distracting specular highlights. You can of course use direct light to help guide the viewer’s eye, but the one thing that really makes a big difference to forest photography is mist and preferably fog.

In my latest video, I head to a local forest where I hoped for some humidity to create some sunbeams through the trees. Sadly, I was utterly disappointed as fog formed just above the forest and killed the sunrise. I did get to fly my drone above the forest and got some nice video, but after half an hour, the fog luckily descended and gave me foggy conditions in the forest instead. This gave some fantastic conditions for separating the trees from each other and emphasized the depth of the scene. How thick fog you will need differs relatively to how close the trees are to each other. In the video above, you will see some photos where the foreground trees hardly have any separation; however, the foreground is clearly separated from the background. Besides the separation, the fog also creates a fantastic calming and ethereal atmosphere, which does give your photos a hint of something mystical.

Check out the video above and let me know if you use fog to improve your photos.