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- It's important to preplan,
especially for landscape,
because a lot deals with light.
A lot deals with what you're actually shooting.
But most of it is time of day.
So really knowing like how long
something's going to take to get to,
when is the best light.
And it really comes down to that.
You want to set yourself up to win.
So you want a nice photograph,
and as your end result,
you don't want to do all that work
and then have to come away with nothing.
So that's why pre-planning and scouting is really important.
We are hanging out at Hawksbill Crag in Arkansas.
I picked this spot
because it's great for early morning shooting landscapes.
It's got a nice point that sticks out.
We have some campers out there on it,
and so it adds for nice subject for our landscape.
So plugging people into landscapes
is sometimes adds some really good scale.
Usually it's good to take the early morning light,
because especially a couple minutes ago,
before the sun came up, we had some really good light
before the sun peeked up over the mountains over there.
Importance to that is because you can still capture
all the detail in the landscape, the detail and the texture.
Whereas like if you have a high sun
and it's just blasting down,
you're going to lose all that detail and color,
where it's just going to become real dark shadows
and real bright brights.
So with this shot, composition-wise,
you have your subjects or the outcropping there,
and then you have the sky.
So it's always important to keep the thirds in mind
when you're shooting landscape,
if you're having exposure differences,
like such differences with the exposure.
So you can take two shots,
where you will get the detail below,
and then you expose and take the same exact shot
and expose it differently,
where you're getting the detail in the clouds in the sky.
So then later on in post processing,
it's a little bit of work,
but with an app called Blender,
you could paint in the,
mask in the sky of your underexposed landscape below,
and then you can paint in the sky,
so you'll have the detail of the sky
and the detail of the landscape below,
and it works really nice.
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- Now, composition is 100% going to depend
on the scene that you're in.
It's going to be different in every situation.
So the first compositional concept
I want to talk about is probably the most basic,
but the most important, and that is perspective.
Now, perspective is essentially how you orient yourself
in accordance to your subject.
So with landscape photography,
it's essentially where you choose to stand
to capture your photo.
Now, depending on where you are,
your scene can greatly change.
For example, if you shoot behind a bush,
or in front of a bush,
now you add a foreground element to your scene
that you didn't have before
when you were shooting in front of it.
If you choose to climb a tree and shoot from a tree,
well that's going to give you a much different perspective
than if you were shooting below the tree
where you couldn't see the top of the mountain, for example.
I think one of the big misconceptions
about landscape photography
is it's always done from a tripod.
You just set your tripod up and take the photo,
and yes, maybe some landscape photographers shoot like that,
but for me, I like to move around.
Yes, I'll put my camera on a tripod
if it needs to be on a tripod,
but I'll be constantly moving around
and just trying to come up with new
and interesting compositions.
Now, the second compositional topic
I want to talk about is this idea of leading lines,
and leading lines are basically just lines in your image
that help guide the viewer's eyes
to a specific part of the image
or a vantage point in the image,
for example, the edges of mountains,
or where a lake hits the shoreline,
or even a beach that kind of wraps around
and guides your eye to something in the distance.
For example, the leading lines in this image are manmade,
and they're coming from the train track.
So you can see the train tracks just naturally lead our eyes
onto this bridge and into the background there.
Also, the tree branches are kind of helping
navigating our eyes to the center of the scene,
and also the lines on the bridge
just make it very easy for our eyes to focus
on the most important part of the frame,
which is just the bridge.
I think this photo is also a really good example
of our next compositional topic, which is depth.
Now, depth is very important for landscape photography
'cause it gives the viewer an idea of the actual size
and scale of that location that you're shooting in.
And the best way to show depth in our landscape photos
is to make sure that we have a foreground,
a midground, and a background.
So foreground elements
are things that are closest to our frame.
The midground is basically just the middle of our frame,
and the background is something that's further
away from the frame,
like maybe some mountains in the background.
Now, you can easily add depth into your scene
by just stepping behind something.
For example, if there's a bush nearby,
you can step behind that bush,
and you can use that as a foreground element
to just better show depth in your scene.
The last compositional topic I want to discuss
is this idea of the rule of thirds,
and the rule of thirds tells us
that we should divide our frame into thirds,
and then place our subject on the intersecting lines.
This just makes it easy
for our eyes to navigate throughout a photo
and also focus on the most important parts of the image.
This is a photo by Luca Bravo.
First off, it's absolutely stunning.
I think it's a beautiful image,
but you can see our main subject here
is very easy to identify,
this little boat shack, I guess you would call it.
It's kind of anchoring the photo
and just allowing our eyes
to easily navigate throughout the frame
and see all the most important parts of this image.
But those are some of the basic concepts
that I want you guys to think about
when you're shooting composition,
perspective, leading lines, depth, and rule of thirds.
I think those are just the most essential
compositional concepts that you should know.
And you can take those, and go out and shoot,
and have those in mind
when you're creating your compositions,
and use them as guidelines for capturing great compositions
while you're out shooting in the field.
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- Okay, let's talk a little bit about light.
We try for the best for a landscape.
Generally, it's directional light
that makes for the best pictures,
and therefore that would mean sunrise
and sunset, which we like to call magic hour.
And for that, those two times of the day,
I always have a subject.
We plan our day around that light.
And so for every sunrise, I already know where I want to be
in order to put the subject in that early morning light.
So maybe you're not so lucky.
Maybe it's even raining.
Well, there's advantage to be gained there.
I'm in the place called Wullingyuan.
It's a national park in China.
Its feature is these spires, 300 foot spires of rock
that come straight out from the valley floor.
It's where they filmed "Avatar."
It's not easy to photograph in that the only time
you get this really nice cloud layer, fog,
which gives it atmosphere, is when it's raining.
So I was praying for rain.
And here I am on the cable car
that's taking me to the top of the mountain.
Well, that also became an element of my photograph
in that I'm using the size of that little cable car
to give you a sense of the scale
of how big these spires, these stone columns really are.
So I get the atmosphere with the bad weather,
with the clouds, and shooting from the cable car.
I'm in mid distance,
so you can see on one side
I'm not all the way up to the top,
and I'm somewhere in between, shooting straight this way.
Incidentally, once I found this angle,
I must have taken this car up and down a dozen times.
So once you zero in and see what works for you,
once that vision clicks in and you see the picture,
then I guarantee I'm going to get it
by repeating as often as I can.
So in this case, I think I shot an hour or so,
or maybe more, until the cloud cover disappeared.
And I just kept round tripping on that cable car
in order to get this, these different perspectives.
I'm in Italy.
I'm in Genoa, and its beautiful facade,
and I get there, and it's pouring rain.
So what am I going to do?
The rain stops.
The sun pops out.
I walk over to shoot a picture of this building,
and I look down and I get this amazing cheap aerial,
where I'm seeing the facade reflection in a puddle.
And all I had to do was hang around
and wait for something odd to happen.
And I have this beautiful light,
and I have this cheap aerial, and that's what it did.
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- [Narrator] Thanks for watching.
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