How to shoot beautiful landscape works with film

For landscape photographers, light is always the first consideration. The word "photography" means "painting with light" in English, and the importance of visible light to photography. Light is like the soul of a photo, and a photo without light is as dull as an evacuated soul.

The best time for landscape photography is usually before sunrise, in the evening and after sunset. Before sunrise, with the angle of the sun, the environment gradually changed from high color temperature to low color temperature. In a clear sky, there are usually a series of changes from dark blue to lavender to red to pink to yellow to golden yellow, which will be very dramatic with the different shapes and scales of clouds in the sky. After sunset is a reverse process, and the color temperature gradually changes from low color temperature to high color temperature.

These two periods are usually the busiest moments for landscape photographers. Generally speaking, shooting sunrise and sunset usually refers to shooting before sunrise and after sunset, that is, the moment when the sun is above or about to be above or slightly above the horizon, and the moment after sunset is the moment when the sun sets or a small part is still in view. Because when the sun is completely in the sky, the light ratio between the foreground and the sky is too large, and it is impossible to keep the details of both at the same time, which is fatal to landscape photography. This will be described in detail in the exposure section below. In addition, under different weather conditions, there will be dramatic effects, such as rainbows after storms, or light beams that suddenly break through clouds in cloudy skies.

Step 2 color

Color is perceptual, which can render the atmosphere and affect the expression of images. Strong and striking colors can convey the vitality of life. If used properly, a small color contrast can make a certain part of the image attractive even if it is not dominant in the picture. Color contrast is due to the juxtaposition of red, blue and yellow. Or the three primary colors are adjacent to their complementary colors of green, orange and purple. Large pieces of color contrast the depth of the scene and hide the details.

Although the use of colors depends on personal preference, the general rule is that eye-catching colors tend to contrast with weaker colors. Colors are also divided into cold tones and warm tones, and cold tones feel quiet and leisurely; The warm tone seems to welcome the rising sun and is full of hope. In fact, the contrast between cold and warm is relative. Put green in yellow-green, green gets cold, and put green in blue gets warm. There are also strong and weak contrasts between cold and warm. The closer the color is to the warm and cold attribute sphere, the weaker the contrast between warm and cold. When it reaches the cold and warm poles-blue and orange, it forms the strongest contrast between cold and warm. Therefore, when choosing shooting content, it is very important to organize the distribution of colors in the picture reasonably and choose the main body of colors.

Step 3 write a composition

Like other subjects, composition plays an extremely important role in landscape photography. Many people take pictures of the scenery and come back to see it. They always wonder why the photos don't look so grand, or they don't feel like the scene. Basically, these problems come from composition.

In my understanding, landscape photography needs to reflect the characteristics of the scene and what you want to express through composition. For example, to embody breadth and depth, we should highlight the sense of distance and space through the proportional collocation of foreground, middle scene and foreground. I use Hasselblad 5 camera, and the frame is 6X6, so it is decided that my scenery photos need to be composed in 6X6 square frame.

The 6X6 frame has always been considered as a classic frame, and the classic land-to-land double shot also uses 66 frames. Because the image produced by the camera lens is circular, the quadrilateral with the largest area in any circle is a square. However, the box also has obvious shortcomings, that is, its framing range is equidistant from the left, right, up and down, resulting in a relatively moderate composition range. Therefore, in order to avoid the golden mean in composition, when I compose a composition, the first consideration is to highlight the content of the picture, reasonably divide the location of the scene and guide the viewer's line of sight.