Six Steps to More Effective Landscape Photographs

Photographing the landscape can be hard work, at times very hard work. It entails rising well before daylight in most cases and working in sometimes very harsh conditions. Most of the time, you will be out in the woods until well past dark, waiting for just the right moment, which may not come—even after your most valiant efforts. It makes sense, then, to do everything you can to stack the odds in your favor. Here are some thoughts on that.

1. Be There!

There is no substitute for being on location when the light is right, and all the atmospherics are working. There is an old saying by a photographer, “Weegee the Famous,” from the forties and fifties: “f/8 and be there!” Probably the most important thing for a photographer of any kind is to be there when it’s happening! You cannot create a latent image of something the camera isn’t aimed at.

Scout your locations well. I typically come back to favorite locations many times, in different seasons of the year, until I know the place well. I know its secrets, where things are, and how the light will fall at different times of the day and in different seasons.

2. Watch the Light

Light is everything in photography, and great light can make even the dullest, most uninteresting subject visually compelling. Become a student of light. Study how it affects the material you are portraying. Presumably, everyone knows that we have to manage the amount of light passing through the lens and then to and through the shutter, which will change the properties of either the film or the sensor in your camera, thus creating a latent image. However, many people do not thoroughly understand the other properties of light we must consider to create good—or even excellent and meaningful—photographs.

Once you understand light—what it is and what it does—you can create photographs of virtually anything and make it attractive. I will write another post in the near future about light, what it is, what it does, and how to make it do what you want so that your photographs become effective tools that convey your intended message.

3. Manage Depth of Field

Ansel Adams once famously said, “The only thing worse than a sharp photograph of a fuzzy concept is a fuzzy photograph of a sharp concept.” There is almost nothing worse in photography than reviewing an image you worked very hard for, only to find that it is either hopelessly out of focus or that your depth of field doesn’t match the subject.

There is a tool that I use in almost all of my large-format photographs called “The Scheimpflug Principle.” When applied, it shifts the depth of field from a horizontal near-far relationship to an up-and-down relationship. Using it allows me to set my camera so that instead of the depth of field running horizontally, it shifts vertically. When that happens, I have depth of field that is critically sharp from the near foreground to infinity at wide-open aperture. (I will discuss using this principle in a subsequent post about depth of field and how it is often mis-taught and misunderstood—even by seasoned photographers like me!)

Here is a portrait of a desert Bighorn Ram I encountered while out in the desert. I was walking along a trail and heard small rocks falling from the cliffs above me. Realizing I was being watched, I placed critical focus on the ram’s eye. Using limited depth of field and contrasting light, I isolated this gorgeous, nearly full-curl desert ram from the chaos of the background.

4. Ignore Rules of Composition

Too many photographers confine their work to strict adherence to the “rule of thirds.” They would be better off photographing from their hearts and making emotional statements rather than following rigid, arcane rules they don’t fully understand. I once knew a photographer from Albuquerque, New Mexico, who marked the rule-of-thirds crash points on the ground glass of his view camera and would never deviate from them. If you always obey a set of prescribed “rules for fools,” your images will inevitably look the same.

Here is a photograph I created in a forest above Steamboat Springs, Colorado. By placing the most prominent aspen in the foreground, I exaggerated its size relative to the surrounding trees. Initially, I found the fallen trees in the crotch of the main tree distracting and tried to move them. However, they were wedged too securely. Later, I realized that those three dead trees make the image distinctive.

5. Be Aware of the Works of the Great Masters

As much as I admire Ansel Adams, there are other masterful landscape photographers whose work I also greatly respect, such as Morley Baer, Christopher Burkett, Joseph Holmes, and John Sexton. Become a student of photographers whose work you admire, as well as those whose work you dislike, until you are an expert in their styles. Not to imitate them, but to stand on their shoulders and go beyond what they accomplished. Study their work to understand what you like and dislike, and become visually literate.

6. Avoid Iconic Locations

Try to say something about the place you are photographing that is different from what everyone else is saying. I once arrived well before sunrise at Mesa Arch in Canyonlands, only to find a parking lot full of cars and crowds of people. Needless to say, the effort was wasted. Lesson learned! To separate your landscape photographs from the work of others, you must do something different. Remember, hardly anyone walks more than thirty feet from their car, so you may need to explore.

Many years ago—over 35 years ago—I learned of a tiny canyon in Northern Arizona. No one would tell me where it was, so I began searching. Eventually, I found the canyon and photographed it many times before it was discovered by others. Now, it is impossible to visit Antelope Canyon without encountering huge crowds. While this canyon was once a haven for solitude, it is now too crowded for me to work effectively.

At the time I made this image, I was able to spend up to five days in this little canyon with my wife—only the two of us and one of our dogs. I would set the camera up, open the shutter on the scene I was portraying, and go out of the canyon into the sunshine to eat my lunch. The exposure for this ended up being about 50 minutes because of very low light and reciprocity opportunity. I saw a video recently that was done at about this location, and it was wall-to-wall people, so you can see how artistically portraying this today would be impossible. If someone is wanting to photograph in the slot canyons, there are dozens of them in the immediate area. The issue now is that if I show this photograph at a gallery opening, almost everyone there will have been in the canyon, and so the uniqueness of my vision gets lost in the crowd.

So, seek out your own unique places and go there time after time until you know the place well. Locations are like finding a new girlfriend—they are exciting, but you’ll never know the secrets based on one encounter. To know the true character of a place, you will have to go there time after time so it has time to tell you its secrets. Be aware, though, the crowd will find your places in time, and then you’ll need to find new ones.

I purchase all of my film and paper at B&H in New York. They are excellent, having everything I need in stock, and their shipping is excellent. Here is a link to their film page: B&H Film.

Photographic chemicals may also be purchased there. Most of what I use is made by Photographers’ Formulary in Condon, Montana, and sold through B&H. Here’s a link to the chemical page: B&H Chemicals.

The Desert Ram photograph was originally created using a Canon 6D camera and a Canon 70-200mm lens. Large format doesn’t work well for most wildlife photography.

The rest of the photographs were created using a Toyo 45A camera and a variety of large-format lenses. The "Eye of the Storm" image was created using a Crown Graphic camera.