Photographing landscapes can be hard work, sometimes very hard work. This involves waking up before daylight in most cases and working under sometimes very harsh conditions. Most of the time, you will stay in the woods until it gets dark and wait for the right moment, which may not come even after your bravest efforts. Then again, it makes sense to do everything possible to turn the circumstances in your favor. Here are some thoughts on that.
1. Be there!
There’s no substitute for being on location when the lighting is right and all the environments are working. There’s an old saying from a photographer, “VG the Famous,” from the forties and fifties: “F/8 and stay there!” Probably the most important thing for any type of photographer is to be there when it happens! You can’t make a stealth image of something the camera isn’t aimed at.
Explore your locations thoroughly. I usually return to favorite spots several times during 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. Look at the light
Lighting is everything in photography, and great lighting can make even the dullest, most uninteresting subject appear visually compelling. Become a student of light. Study how this affects the material you are painting. Probably, everyone knows that we have to manage the amount of light passing through the lens and then through the shutter, which will change the properties of the film or sensor in your camera, thus producing a latent image. However, many people do not fully understand the other properties of light that 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 photos of virtually anything and make it look attractive. I will write another post in the near future about lighting, what it is, what it does, and how to make it do what you want so that your photos become effective tools that convey the message you want.
3. Manage depth of field
Ansel Adams once famously said, “The only thing worse than a clear picture of a vague concept is a vague picture of a clear concept.” There’s nothing worse in photography than reviewing an image you worked so hard on, only to find that it’s either disappointingly out of focus or your depth of field doesn’t match the subject.
There’s a tool I use in almost all of my large-format photographs called “The Scheimflug Principle.” When applied, it changes the depth of field from a horizontal near-far relationship to a top-down relationship. Using this allows me to set my camera so that the depth of field shifts vertically, instead of moving horizontally. When this happens, I have depth of field that is seriously sharpened from the near foreground to infinity at the wide-open aperture. (I will discuss using this principle in the next post about depth of field and how it is often wrongly taught and misunderstood – even by experienced photographers like me!)
Here is a picture of a desert bighorn ram that I encountered while living in the desert. I was walking on a trail and I heard small stones falling from the rocks above me. Feeling that I was being watched, I focused my attention on the Eye of Rama. Using limited depth of field and contrasting lighting, I isolated this gorgeous, almost full-figured desert lamb from the chaos of the background.
4. Ignore the rules of composition
Many photographers limit their work to strict adherence to the “rule of thirds.” It would be better for them to draw from their heart and make emotional statements rather than following rigid, arcane rules that they don’t fully understand. I once knew a photographer from Albuquerque, New Mexico, who marked rule-of-thirds crash points on the ground glass of his view camera and never deviated from them. If you always follow the prescribed “rules for fools”, your images will essentially look the same.
Here’s a photo I made of a forest above Steamboat Springs, Colorado. By placing the most prominent aspen in the foreground, I exaggerated its size compared to the surrounding trees. Initially, I found that the fallen trees below the main tree were distracting and I tried to remove them. However, they were tied down very securely. Later, I realized that those three dead trees make the image unique.
5. Be aware of the works of great gurus
As much as I admire Ansel Adams, there are other accomplished landscape photographers whose work I 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 photographers whose work you dislike, until you become experts in their styles. Not to copy them, but to stand on their shoulders and go beyond what they achieved. Study their work and become visually literate to understand what you like and don’t like.
6. Avoid iconic places
Try to say something about the place you’re photographing that’s different from what everyone else is saying. I once arrived at Mesa Arch in Canyonlands well before sunrise, only to find the parking lot crowded with cars and people. Needless to say, the effort went in vain. Lesson learned! To make your landscape photos stand out from the work of others, you have to do something different. Remember, rarely does anyone walk more than thirty feet from their car, so you may need to do some research.
Many years ago—more than 35 years ago—I discovered a small canyon in northern Arizona. No one would tell me where it was, so I started searching. Eventually, I found the valley and photographed it several times before it was discovered by others. Now, it is impossible to visit Antelope Canyon without encountering huge crowds. Although this valley was once a haven of solitude, it is now too crowded for me to function effectively.
At the time I made this image, I was able to spend five days with my wife in this little valley – just the two of us and our one dog. I would set up the camera, open the shutter of the scene I was photographing, and walk out of the valley into the sunshine to eat my lunch. Due to very low light and interaction opportunity its exposure lasted about 50 minutes. I recently saw a video that was made at this location, and it was wall to wall people, so you can see how impossible it would be to depict it artistically today. If one wants to take photos in Slot Valley, there are dozens of them in the immediate area. Now the issue is that if I show this photo at a gallery opening, almost everyone there will be in the valley, and hence the uniqueness of my vision will be lost in the crowd.
So, look for your own unique places and keep visiting there from time to time until you know the place well. Places are like finding a new girlfriend—they’re exciting, but you’ll never know the secrets based on one meeting. To know the true character of a place you have to visit it from time to time, so it has time to tell you its secrets. However, be careful, the crowd will find your place in time, and then you will have to find a new place.
I buy all my film and paper from B&H in New York. They are excellent, they have everything I need in stock, and their shipping is excellent. Here is the link to his film page: B&H Film,
Photographic chemicals can also be purchased there. Everything I use is made by Photographers’ Formulary in Condon, Montana, and sold through B&H. Here is the 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 lensLarger format doesn’t work well for most wildlife photography.
The remaining photographs were made 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.
