The Landscape Photographer's Worst Enemy and Best Friend

In photography, as in life, the things we curse as impediments can sometimes turn out to be blessings in disguise. With careful observation, good timing, and a little luck, embracing this often challenging aspect of landscape photography can really raise the impact and emotional depth of your images.

I distinctly remember a winter day a few years ago when a blizzard suddenly struck as I was driving home that afternoon. At one point, the snow was falling so heavily that I could barely see where I was going, even with the wipers running at full tilt. Just as I started to contemplate having to pull over and wait for the storm to pass to finish my journey, it suddenly lifted. As the snow tailed off and the sky began to clear, this incredible soft light with a subtle pink hue fell across the snow-covered landscape. There were no other cars on the small country road that I was driving on, so I pulled over for a moment and actually got out of my car to marvel at the trees on either side of the road, decked in fresh snow and illuminated by this wonderful, almost otherworldly pink light.

Alas, I did not have my camera with me at that moment, and there are very few times in my life when I have regretted not having a camera as much as I regretted it on that occasion.

For a landscape photographer, the weather is at the very least a constant consideration, and at worst a foe to be fought at every turn—a seemingly relentless obstacle to the pursuit of your craft. Finding yourself soaked, cold, and uncomfortable kind of goes with the territory, though, if you’re serious about photographing the great outdoors. But the weather can also be your greatest ally if you’re mindful of its patterns and are willing to risk some degree of discomfort to put yourself in the right place at the right time to take advantage of the spectacular opportunities that it can present the photographer.

As a resident of New England for more than 25 years, I consider myself very fortunate to live in one of the most beautiful areas of the United States. The opportunities for landscape photography in my region are limitless, but the other great advantage of New England is its varied and often capricious climate. There’s a saying here that goes, “If you don’t like the weather, just wait a minute.”

The mountain ranges that traverse especially Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine create their own unique weather patterns that, in combination with the majesty of the landscape, can yield some breathtaking scenes. To take full advantage of this as a photographer, however, you also need to be something of a meteorologist. Following the weather forecasts is part of this, but it also helps to understand the patterns of the weather and how these can affect the ambient light and the atmospheric conditions. Winter storms, for example, that cross the region as bands of snow, can produce alternating blizzard conditions and periods of clear skies, during which the winter light can be spectacular—especially against the dark background of a receding or approaching storm.

The incredible, otherworldly light that I described earlier was the result of a combination of the low winter sun and an upper atmosphere still heavy with moisture in the form of snowflakes. As this low-angle light is scattered by clouds and snow, the shorter wavelengths of light closer to the blue end of the visible spectrum are more strongly absorbed, leading to the predominance of longer, redder wavelengths that give the light a pinkish hue. As somebody who trained as a scientist and undertook research with a specialty in physics and optics, I have a tendency to be interested in the technical details of how these atmospheric conditions come about—but if you want to take advantage of them as a landscape photographer, it’s enough to be cognizant of these weather patterns without the need to sweat the details of the underlying science. What’s really important for the photographer is to be mindful of the weather patterns that often accompany these potentially promising conditions for capturing spectacular landscapes.

Perseverance and timing are also critical. Being in the right place at the right time to capture a landscape bathed in the incredible light that follows a winter storm may require you to sit out the storm at your shooting location—especially since these conditions often don’t last very long, and you need to be right there ready when they happen. Fortune definitely favors the prepared photographer. One very important caveat in all of this is that Mother Nature always does her own thing, regardless of our hopes and expectations. As with any natural phenomenon, there are no guarantees when it comes to the weather. Shivering your way through a storm as you perch on a mountainside waiting for those magic conditions to arise does not guarantee that they will happen for you!

The pursuit of the extraordinary visual magic that the weather can bring to your landscape photography is both a waiting game and a numbers game—and one that requires a level of persistence and perseverance for success.

Extraordinary atmospheric conditions can also arise in places where the land meets a body of water such as an ocean or a lake. In the New England states that border the Atlantic Ocean, the maritime climate can yield some fantastic opportunities for creating some (literally) atmospheric landscape images. On the seashore in Maine, where we like to vacation in summer as a family, we often experience an eerie sea fog that rolls in off the ocean in the late afternoon. This phenomenon, known to meteorologists as advection fog, results when warm, moist air moves over the cold waters of the Gulf of Maine. This strange fog can roll in off the ocean as a thin layer of mist only a few feet thick that hugs the ground and produces an effect that resembles the kind of stage fog created for musical and theatrical productions using dry ice or commercial fog machines.

You can see an example of this in the photograph below, in which an ordinary scene of a beach full of people walking, playing games, and enjoying their summer vacation is transformed into something far more enigmatic and interesting—a strange sea of figures moving in a pool of white vapor.

This confluence of warm, moist air with cold water is also the driver of a lot of the ocean mist and fog that is very common in coastal areas. This kind of mist sometimes blurs the boundary between the sea and the sky, with the effect of erasing the horizon. This is a phenomenon that I love to take advantage of when photographing landscapes next to the ocean. Like the strange, pink hue to the light that follows a winter storm, this phenomenon can confer a very contemplative and emotional aspect to your landscape photographs, with the power to transform what would otherwise be a rather ordinary scene into something far more compelling.

The occurrence of these ocean mists is harder to predict than the more tangible and large-scale weather events like snowstorms, requiring more perseverance (and luck) to capture in your landscape photographs. Armed with some knowledge of how they arise, however, the best way to optimize your chances of capturing them is to find locations for your landscape photography where these phenomena are known to occur, and aim to be on location for your shoot during conditions that are most likely to give rise to them—coastal Maine in the summer being a great example of this.

Another technique for featuring the weather as a primary visual element in your landscape photography is to prioritize the sky in your compositions. There are times when the sky offers an incredible tableau of textures and tones that might even merit making it the primary subject of your photograph. As we described earlier, the conditions that give rise to this can often be the result of weather patterns that are rolling into your area or have just moved through it. In the two images below, both of these landscapes were captured on the heels of a storm—one in the winter, and the other in the summer. In each case, the sky is far and away the most dominant compositional element in the scene, with the small sliver of landscape at the bottom of the frame serving mainly to provide it with some visual context.

As much as the weather can be an enemy of the landscape photographer, an understanding of weather patterns sufficient to be able to take advantage of the varying light and atmospheric conditions that they bring can be an invaluable adjunct to any landscape photographer’s tool chest of skills. Previous generations of artists, such as the 19th-century Impressionist painters, for example, understood the dramatic impact of the ambient light in landscapes. If you’ve ever been to the South of France and witnessed for yourself the incredible, vivid light that the climate in that region can produce, it’s easy to understand why so many of them flocked there to capture its iconic landscapes on canvas. To some extent, the weather is always an element in any landscape photograph, but an understanding of its shifting patterns, a recognition of the impact that it can have on your images, and a willingness to work with it to incorporate it more consciously into your photography can be truly transformative in your landscape work.