Using Foregrounds to Enhance Your Landscape Photography

If you’re like me, you have plenty of experience with landscape photography, but still have your weak spots. For me, improving my compositions using foregrounds has always been a challenge. 

In this video, Nigel Danson runs through a series of tips to improve your landscape photographs through the use of foregrounds. Perhaps most helpful (at least for me), he runs through photographs that he considers weak as well as other photographs, which he considers strong, while evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of each. In doing so, he illustrates several of his tips, which I look forward to implementing the next time I head out with my camera.  

At the time of writing, I had just come back from a two-week trip in the Alps, where I took a lot of landscape photographs and spent half or so of the flight back thinking about what I could have or should have done to improve my work. My initial reaction to this video was: “huh… I really should have made more of an effort to improve my compositions through nicer foregrounds.” The challenge for me, still, is that I took only telephoto lenses, whereas Danson’s video seems to focus on wide angle to ultra-wide angle lenses. With that said, the video has provided me with plenty of food for thought. 

Do you tend to use longer or shorter focal length lenses for your landscape work? Do you have any additional thoughts or advice to improving foregrounds? 

James Madison's picture

Madison is a mathematician turned statistician based out of Columbus, OH. He fell back in love with film years ago while living in Charleston, SC and hasn't looked back since. In early 2019 he started a website about film photography.

Log in or register to post comments