Nowadays, the amount of technical expertise in photography is astounding. A short Google search for any particular area will yield photographs that are well-composed, taken in the proper lighting circumstances, and altered to perfection. The trouble is that the number of people capable of taking these flawlessly composed photos is also growing. When people with similar images are grouped together, the number of persons with similar photos decreases. What is the solution to this problem? If you still want to capture a specific environment, think about additional inventive ways to do so.
So, what is the solution? If you still want to shoot a specific environment, consider employing some more creative techniques to do so. Continue reading for six tips on how to improve and be more creative with your landscape photography.
1. Infrared Photographic Techniques
Infrared photography is a lot of fun to play with and has been around for a long time. As the name implies, infrared light is used to capture photographs in this type of photography. You can’t see the infrared spectrum with your eyes anymore, but a camera sensor or special infrared film can.
When shooting with a digital camera, you’ll need to either alter the White Balance in-camera or utilise post-processing to achieve the signature infrared appearance (note you can also get an old camera body converted especially for capturing infrared images). What does infrared look like? These images have gloomy black skies, dazzling white greenery, and typically motionless water as a result of a long exposure. To shoot this style of photograph with a digital camera, you will need a filter or a refurbished camera.
2. Aerial Photography
A high perspective looking down is one of the best viewpoints in photography, and it may result in some really unique landscapes. Many people have taken wonderful shots from the sky thanks to developments in drone technology, while consumer-level drones still do not capture the greatest quality still images. If you want to try your hand at aerial photography, you have a few possibilities.
- Airplanes – Take shots from the skies by sitting in the window seat of your plane. Make sure you have a fast shutter speed; remember that your plane is moving quickly, so you need a fast shutter speed to produce a crisper image.
- Drones – A consumer drone will provide you with amazing angles and photographs of sufficient quality for internet sharing but not for printing. Professionals use larger drones that allow them to attach their dSLR cameras to them.
- Hot air balloons are a type of balloon that floats in the air. Taking a hot air balloon flight is a fantastic experience, and the images may be breathtaking. Attaching a camera to a weather balloon and sending it almost into space is even more extreme!
3. Refraction
The use of refraction to bend light through a glass item is essentially how your lens places a picture on your camera sensor. This effect can be achieved with spherical glass objects or even ones filled with water. The image inside the refracting object will be upside down, capturing a large portion of the scene behind the ball.
Because the image inside the ball has the qualities of a fisheye lens, this is an interesting method to capture a creative environment. The scene will be compressed if you use a lens with a lengthy focal length.
4. Shoot a 360-Degree Panorama
This inventive landscape concept employs post-processing to get a miniature planet impression. The effect is related to the principle of refraction in that you are generating a globe, but the appearance is totally different.
You’ll need a panoramic landscape photograph to make this photo. If you’re a purist, you’ll construct the panoramic landscape by rotating the camera through 360 degrees. Once you have your panorama, you must reformat it into a square image, flip it upside down, and then apply the polar coordinates filter in Photoshop. Go to filter > distort > polar coordinates to find this filter.
5. Long Exposure
The various types of photographs that long exposures allow for will spark a burst of creative landscape photography. All you need is a tripod and a camera that can shoot long exposure photographs. Long exposure has the effect of making objects move. Car light trails, water, and cloud movement are the main subjects. Of course, astrophotography is also long exposure, but more on that later.
- Car light trails – These are created by capturing images that are five seconds or more in length. For capturing car trails, an overhead angle from a bridge or large building is frequently optimal, but images from street level often look great.
- Water – A long exposure might look lovely everywhere there is moving water. When photographing waterfalls, the white water becomes as smooth as silk with exposures of more than two seconds. Long exposures of 10 seconds or more can be used to flatten the sea and its waves.
- Cloud movement – Clouds moving across the sky create a dreamlike aspect in your photograph; to achieve this, you’ll need a lot of clouds as well as some clean sky. The faster the clouds move, the easier it is to photograph them. A robust tripod is essential here; clouds move faster on windy days, so the camera must be motionless.
6. Astrophotography
Astrophotography is a popular genre of photography for those interested in landscapes. The most recent cameras enable you to photograph starry skies with improved noise performance at high ISO levels. Recent trips to Dubai’s deserts and the southern English coast revealed a phalanx of photographers interested in this type of photography. The most common genres of astrophotography are those that depict the Milky Way or the rotation of stars around the pole.
- The Milky Way – Including the Milky Way in your composition can result in a spectacular and creative landscape photograph. This is the subject of a separate article. Between March and October in the northern hemisphere, shoot at the constellation Sagittarius. Use the biggest aperture you have available, with exposures typically lasting 25 seconds and an ISO of 6400 or higher.
- Star trails – The goal here is to position your camera at either the north or south pole and film the earth’s rotation over a long period of time. The shot can be a single long exposure of 15 minutes or a succession of shorter ones. Taking many 30-second shots and stacking them together is the best way. StarStax is a useful piece of software for creating this style of image.