Traditional Culture Encyclopedia - Photography major - How to take landscape photos

How to take landscape photos

Lead: You think the scenery in front of you is so beautiful, but why is it flat? See what skills can improve your landscape photos!

1. Try the macro

Using macro photography can make tiny objects in life have more macro impact. Even if you only shoot sparse and ordinary flowers, try to get the camera close to the subject, and you will get a more dramatic picture. Shooting flowers with a macro lens is like giving human insects a vision, giving you countless imaginations and making your photos more novel.

The thistle above was taken in the botanical garden. Although it seems that the flower presents barrel distortion, it was not shot with a fisheye lens, but with a Canon macro lens of100 mm. ..

In this extremely close macro condition, in order to ensure that the hand-held camera can get a clear and sharp picture, it is necessary to use a high-speed shutter. So the aperture of the camera should be large enough, resulting in a shallow depth of field. The special peripheral blur gives people a barrel-shaped distortion effect, which is also a surprise brought by macro to photographers.

At the same time, the peripheral blur effect of macro photography makes it easier to highlight the key points of the photo and make the tiny objects look more shocking.

Directional blurred photograph

Sometimes shooting empty is not necessarily a bad thing. Photos with ghosting in the picture will make the static scenery more artistic and vivid. For example, the photo above was originally just an ordinary forest. However, Chris used a low-speed shutter in his creation. When he pressed the shutter, he moved the camera slightly in the vertical direction, so that the forest in the picture appeared the afterimage in the vertical direction. This makes the original ordinary forest suddenly have an ethereal artistic conception.

This creative technique seems to use the outline and color of the scene in front of us as a brush and transfer it to the imaging element of the camera? Smear? Landscape, so as to get an abstract surreal picture.

Chris will repeatedly use this technique to shoot landscapes in practice. Because of the unpredictability of hand motion range, the picture will be different every time, which is the fun of shooting. You never know what kind of picture you will get after pressing the shutter next time.

Clever use of multiple exposures to create afterimages can also make your photos more vivid. For example, the photo below. Chris aimed the lens at the center of the flower bed when shooting, and then made multiple exposures at this point. It should be noted that after each exposure, he will rotate the camera at an appropriate angle and then press the shutter.

After getting five or six materials, the camera's? Multiple exposure function? These photos will be automatically synthesized, and then the overlapping parts in the picture will be erased. Finally, you get the effect shown below.

Chris told us that it is more sense of design to take this kind of photos with residual images, otherwise the picture will become blurred and the subject will not be recognized. In these two works, he boldly used the contrast between color and regular lines.

For example, in the first photo, the dim trees have a bright background, which makes the outline of the trees clearly visible. In the second picture, the contrast technique is also used. The white and blue flowers and green grass in the picture are highly recognizable, and the flowers are arranged in concentric circles, which will not cause the feeling of composition confusion to others.

3. Long exposure

Long-term exposure can capture the trajectory of objects. Applying this technology to landscape photography will make your photos look more magnificent and dramatic. The above photo was taken by Chris with a long exposure. The highlight of the picture is the white clouds in the sky, and the photosensitive elements clearly record the long-term movement track of the clouds in the sky. Finally, the picture presented gives people a sense of shock, as if clouds were galloping overhead, which strengthened the shock of landscape photography.

But this photo was taken during the day. Even if the aperture is minimized, it may be difficult for the shutter to fall below1100 second. So Chris installed a miniature lens in front of the lens to help reduce the amount of light, thus extending the exposure time to 60 seconds.

Under similar lighting conditions, Chris still used a reducing mirror to complete the following seaside scenery shooting. However, contrary to the effect of the above picture showing the dynamics of white clouds, in this photo, the originally fluctuating water surface looks completely static. After 90 seconds of exposure, the water surface is as smooth as satin, giving people a different kind of quiet beauty.

It should be noted that in order to ensure clear image quality after long exposure, please use tripod and cable releaser to assist shooting.

Step 4 shoot the scenery with telephoto

Although the mainstream of landscape photography is to use wide-angle lens to express the grandeur and magnificence of natural landscape, telephoto lens can also make your landscape film shine. The unique perspective of telephoto lens will make the photos look more compressed, make the scenery look more dense, and reduce the sense of distance between human eyes and the subject. These characteristics often make the scenery shot by telephoto lens cover fewer elements, look concise and bright, and highlight the key points.

Chris took two photos in the same place with a telephoto lens and a wide-angle lens, showing us the difference between the two lens perspectives. As you can see, the first photo (above) is like a partial screenshot of the second photo (below). There is no redundancy between the sky and rocks, only the distant mountains hold up the whole picture. At the same time, the depth of field compressed for the first time highlights the loneliness in the valley.

It should be noted that it is best to use a tripod to shoot scenery with a telephoto lens, because even the slightest jitter of the lens will be exaggerated when the focal length is very long.

5. Let the sunshine flow into the picture

We often see that in portrait works, photographers will take pictures of sunlight passing through the model's hair or cheeks, because such scenes will give people beauty and warmth. Similar shooting techniques are also applicable to landscape photography. Before shooting, you need to be careful not to shoot the camera under the strong sunlight, because sunlight will damage your photosensitive element and be harmful to your eyesight. You might as well choose a time when the sun sets, such as early morning or afternoon.

The above photo was taken in the Adirondack State Park in new york in the afternoon. Chris took off the UV mirror in front of the camera before shooting, because any filter may produce glare when shooting sunlight, which will affect the picture. In order to shoot beautiful starlight, we can't overexpose, so we should shoot with a small aperture and a high-speed shutter. However, sometimes such a parameter configuration will cause the foreground to be too dark, so the photographer will turn on the flash to fill the foreground.