Stop Doing This in Your Landscape Photographs!
In landscape photography, there’s a tendency to travel to famous, iconic, and Instagrammed to death places
While these renowned landscapes are usually spectacular, easy to travel to, they usually come with one caveat.
A quick Google image search shows just how often this exact location has been photographed.
They’ve been shot to death.
The key problem with seeking out these places is that we’ve all seen the same shots of the same places before. It’s really difficult to create something fresh and exciting in these famous landmarks.
These places are also often over crowded, not only is it harder to produce an image that no one else has, it’s also makes it harder to get to the best position or angle for the shot.
Recently, I’ve been given the honour of being one of the judges in a photography competition. And as I sieved through over a hundred photos to find a winner, I realised what I was looking for - a photo that presented a fresh perspective. Something that we’ve not seen before. Something that shows me that the photographer has given great thought to his composition, and it is not seen in a hundred other images.
When you’re at an iconic landscape that’s been “shot to death”, it’s almost impossible to present a perspective that’s never been seen before.
So picture this(pun intended) instead. You’re in an unknown landscape. A bare tree bathed by the morning sun, a field of green grass or even a random park. You’re forced to exercise your photographer’s eye to find new and delightful compositions. It’s possible that no one else has created the same image as what you are about to create.
I saw these horses silhouetted against the rising sun, and used the vegetation in front of me as a framing element to compose the scene.
As a photographer, you become a storyteller. You have a story of how you discovered new place, a new photograph that is uniquely your’s. No one else has the same experience randomly stumbling into that unknown tree, seeing how the light interacts with your subject and beauty of the place in relation to its background. In that special space, you have created something that is unique your’s, and it would be very difficult for anybody else to replicate.
A random bare tree bathed in fog, set against the early morning Sun’s rays.
Here are 5 tips you can use to create unique landscape photographs:
1) Explore your local area, including parks and less-traveled paths. Most photographers ignore these places in favour of famous iconic landmarks in foreign places, you might be able to find something that is relatively less photographed, more interesting and something that is less recognisable than to travel to a famous landmark to shoot something that everybody else has been shooting.
The following shots were all taken on top of the roof of a neighbourhood bus interchange:
2) Understand how weather and light can affect the look and feel of a place. Different weather conditions in the same places can greatly impact the effect of a photograph.
3) If you’re in a famous location, you can incorporate your human elements to famous landscapes to make it uniquely your’s. These places might be shot plenty of times, but use your own creativity by adding your own human figure to the scene to create something that is not often seen.
4) Shoot nightscapes. Don’t put away your camera when the sun goes down. A landscape can look unique and interesting with the milky way above it, or star trails in the image.
This is a 6 exposure vertical panorama. Nikon Z8, Z 20mm F1.8 S. ISO 1600, F1.8, 30s
5) Focus on the small stuff. Using an ultra-wide angle lens, photograph a small detail in the foreground the subject of the photo, and the landscape in the background can simply be contextual information in the photograph. Most photographers only shoot looking at the background, but when you shoot for the foreground, you can create a fresh perspective that could be unique and refreshing to the viewer.
Nikon Z7ii, Z 14-30mm F4 S, ISO64, 14mm, f16, 240s
I hope this article encourages you to go out and explore, and to shoot images that have not been seen before.