How to shoot the city scenery?

Traveling to a city, we will inadvertently find the difference in this city. Every city has its own urban characteristics. We leave our own figure here and try to leave our own souvenirs.

So, how to use photos to express the scenery and characteristics of this city? Let's take a look at some strategies compiled by Bian Xiao to help you retain the unique charm of the city through photos and keep them as your own souvenirs.

1. Find and add hierarchies

Like shooting natural scenery, layered city scenery is very popular. A picture with clear foreground, middle scene and background is more likely to lead the audience's attention to the depth of the picture one by one.

A perfect hierarchical composition should consist of a concise foreground, an important intermediate scene and an attractive background subject.

If the background scenery is not good enough, the audience may not have the nature to see the depth of the picture at all, and the sense of hierarchy will naturally come out:

Choose interesting scenery, such as spectacular buildings, novel and beautiful buildings. The next thing to do is to add foreground and intermediate scenes.

Always keep your eyes on your subject, change your angle, and add some foreground and middle scenes to the picture. The foreground adds interest and atmosphere to the picture, and the middle scene is responsible for the foreground and background.

Just saying it may be a bit boring and difficult to understand. Let's give an example to illustrate. For example, when we saw a bridge over the river, we found it very interesting and decided to take it as the main body:

But if you just shoot the bridge itself, you always feel that the picture is not rich enough and a bit dull. Then start the next step: change the distance and angle and add foreground to the picture. Soon, we found a scene suitable for the surrounding prospects.

Add the railing next to the dock to the picture, does the layering come out at once?

If you think there are only two floors and the layering is not obvious, add some scenery.

Continue to adjust the angle and bring the balustrade close at hand into the picture:

How's it going? The foreground, the middle scene and the background are obviously layered. Is the picture better than just one layer and two layers?

It would be better if the foreground or middle scene is a guide line with the function of line-of-sight convergence.

Let's look at a good composition of the city scenery map:

Bridges in the foreground can effectively guide the audience's eyes to the trees in the middle scene; The tree shape of the middle shot forms a framed composition of the background, which draws the audience's attention to the Petronas Towers in the background.

This composition effectively leads the audience to the depth of the picture and runs through most of the horizontal width of the picture from left to right, which is not unsuccessful:

2. The choice of shooting object

Although layering is very important, we should also consider the choice of scenery. It is not enough to have a sense of hierarchy.

Take pictures as an example. The audience's eyes will turn from the middle view to the background, which is largely due to these two towers with great presence and the dazzling stars on the roof.

If these two buildings don't exist, the picture will only have two floors, with plain trees as the background, and the overall effect will be greatly reduced:

The background determines whether the audience looks deep, so it must be attractive; Similarly, the foreground and the middle scene are not beautiful.

If the foreground and the middle scene are ugly, the audience is likely to lose the desire to look directly at the background. Let's look at a negative example:

The foreground and the middle scene are really ugly, but what if the background has no layering? Then reduce the proportion of the foreground scene in the picture.

For example, if you want to shoot a skyscraper in the distance, because the height is not enough, take an old building as the foreground. In composition, the old building has formed the function of approximate frame composition; But the problem is that these old buildings themselves are really not beautiful enough.

Therefore, it is advisable to screw the zoom ring to the telephoto end or cut it later to reduce the proportion of ugly old buildings. This will not only make the picture more beautiful, but also maintain a sense of hierarchy.

3. Color is king

Using and strengthening color contrast is also a good way to make your photos eye-catching. Make good use of your eyes and frames and add more color to your photos.

As shown below, the gray walls, bare red bricks, white railings and green windows are in sharp contrast, but they are not chaotic:

The color of the scenery is relatively single, which is not necessarily bad.

When you broaden your horizons and shoot from a distance, you will find that large single-tone scenes are rare treasures. You can easily create color contrast and spatial layering.

As shown below, the green trees, the Yellow Temple and the blue sky are distributed in the front, middle and back scenes respectively. Yellow, green and blue are in sharp contrast, and the layering is also remarkable.

Of course, to achieve bright colors, photos often need to be adjusted later. You can adjust the overall contrast or selectively enhance the saturation of a color.

You can also do the opposite, adding a uniform cool tone or warm tone to the picture to reduce the color contrast and form a small and fresh feeling:

After reducing the contrast of the original image, add orange tone.

It is necessary to reduce the contrast of the original image. What hue to add depends on what emotion you want to express.

You can use blue to reflect the feeling of desolation, you can use orange to create a warm feeling and a false sunset, and you can also add bright yellow to a cloudy picture to make it more "sunny".

4. Pay attention to lighting conditions

In urban landscape photography, light conditions are more complicated than natural landscape photography. One moment, you may be bathed in direct sunlight, but the next moment, you are in the shadow of the building.

Always pay attention to your position, the position of the sun and the surrounding environment, and pay attention to whether your subject is in the light, side light or backlight. Different light levels make different subjects suitable for shooting.

In the absence of scenery, backlight is a panacea.

The surrounding environment may bring unexpected shadows or light sources to your photos. Your background may have a dazzling glass curtain wall that reflects sunlight, or it may have a big shadow:

Is it good or bad to cast mottled shadows on buildings?

What kind of light level is the most suitable? Are the flashes and shadows in the surrounding environment good or bad for photos? It's hard to say, it depends on your actual needs.

5. Add/Delete People

The appearance of characters in landscape photos is always not something that makes photographers happy, but urban scenery is different, because characters are a natural part of the city.

Don't be afraid of the people in the picture. When there are only one or two people in the picture, they will become irresistible "points of interest" so that the picture will not appear "empty"; In addition, people are still energetic and dynamic elements, which can make your picture more vivid:

The cyclist in the lower right corner adds vitality to the picture.

Of course, the more people in the picture, the better, otherwise it will easily appear chaotic; Moreover, it is best to choose the type of characters suitable for the environment and theme.

As shown below, these chefs are very compatible with the environment; If you put on a few white-collar elites in suits and well-dressed, it will seem out of place with the environment-of course, this sense of contrast is also good, and you can make similar attempts.

You can not only add characters to the picture, but also try to delete the characters from the picture.

For example, get up early to shoot the streets that are full during the day and now empty:

You can also try to play with the long-exposure crowd, so that the messy crowd becomes a virtual shadow, which not only does not add chaos to the picture, but reflects the prosperity of the city:

Exposure for tens of seconds will probably take the effect of the above picture; If exposed for a few minutes, the crowd will be blurred, but it will be unsightly.

The things on the paper are very shallow, so we might as well use this upcoming Dragon Boat Festival holiday to combine theory with practice! See if you can learn these skills and become a photographer.