Landscape Photography: 3 Mistakes You Should Avoid
Landscape photography can be incredibly difficult to master, especially as it’s extremely hard to capture the moment with a point and shoot attitude.
This isn’t to say you can’t get a great landscape scene from your mobile phone, but it’s incredibly rare to capture the raw beauty without changing some settings or thinking about the composition first.
Because it can be quite a difficulty form of photography to master, here are 3 mistakes that you should avoid when trying to capture the dramatic landscape in your photograph.
Skewing the Horizon
One of the most powerful tools in landscape photography is the horizon. A flat, straight horizon gives your scene a sense of depth and keeps the eye focused on the scene as a whole.
If your horizon is angled it can detract from the scene and distract the eye, making it focus more on the horizon than the whole image.
This can be corrected using editing tools during post production, but you may have to crop areas from your shot to get it looking right. One way to avoid this is getting it right when shooting, so that you aren’t wasting time and effort trying to correct it later on and possibly sacrificing elements of your shot in the process.
Switch on the grid in your camera viewfinder and line up the horizon with a horizontal line and you are good to go!
Shooting in Landscape Mode All the Time
It’s quite easy to assume that to take a landscape photo; you need to be shooting in landscape mode on your camera.
Although this is a great mode for capturing many landscapes, portrait mode can also used to capture stunning landscapes too. It works especially well when the subject of the image is more vertical than it is horizontal, such as a mountain scene.
It will give your image depth and capture the height, too!
Misusing Negative Space
When used correctly, negative space (the space around the subject of your photograph) can really enhance the image.
In landscape photography, the sky will be the negative space and although a crisp, blue sky can seem beautiful, it can sometimes leave your image looking bland and uninteresting, especially if there are no clouds or birds in the sky.
If you find that the sky isn’t interesting enough for your shot, try to give more attention to your scene and crop most of the sky out of the shot and make is a small part of your photograph. If this isn’t possible, try to come back another day when there may be some clouds to make your scene complete.
Landscape photography is a great skill to master, and there are many great opportunities around the world to photograph and enjoy.
If you’d like to try your hand at landscape photography but feel like you need a more advanced camera to work with, why not take advantage of our camera exchange service? For more information about what we do here at Camera Exchange store, contact us today by calling 0208 371 4179.
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