Basic skills of landscape photography

Speaking of landscape photography, the question that everyone is most concerned about may be where to shoot. What else to shoot? But this can't be the whole focus of our shooting, because landscape photography needs to combine weather, geography, people and several conditions to shoot an ideal scenery blockbuster, and it needs to wait for the light to shoot the most beautiful scenery in the most beautiful moment. The following is the basic skills of landscape photography I brought to you. Welcome to reading.

First of all, about equipment.

No matter what the subject matter of photography is, I believe that everyone's first thought will be to make equipment. So when it comes to landscape photography, what equipment do you think of? Large format film machine? Quan Huafu digital SLR? Still no anti-digital SLR? Or a cell phone! As far as this question is concerned, it is difficult to have a standard answer. All the machines listed above can complete the shooting of landscape works well. However, as a professional photographer, he needs to show the relationship between man and nature when shooting, and express his feelings in the natural environment through the visual form of photography. As far as the author is concerned, I like to carry a digital SLR camera when I go out to shoot, because I prefer the mobility of digital SLR. As far as the current equipment is concerned, I believe that most of the cameras in your hand are nothing more than SLR and anti-digital cameras. It is an indisputable fact that Quan Huafu SLR and mirrorless cameras have better imaging because of their large image sensors, but the APS-C format sensor is slightly smaller, and many people say that the quality of shooting is average. I don't agree with this. Take Canon's 50-megapixel 5DS camera and 24-megapixel new half-frame 80D as examples. A half-frame pixel with 80D times 2 is also more than 50 million pixels, indicating that every inch of pixels is similar, so there is no difference in quality except size. After actual measurement, the picture quality of 80D is also very ideal. So don't blindly pursue equipment.

Apart from cameras and lenses, I think all friends who have photographed landscapes know that wide-angle lenses have advantages when shooting large scenes, but when shooting landscape works, the outdoor natural environment will not reflect the lens distortion difference, but when shooting urban architectural landscapes, this deformation will have a negative impact. Generally, when shooting city scenery, we use horizontal and vertical shooting methods, which can make the picture more positive to a greater extent. In order to control the distortion better, we can use the shifting lens to control the distortion, and we can also use PS software to correct it later.

Second, shooting tips

1. Relationship between focal length and image size

The wider the focal length, the more obvious the sense of space, and the longer the focal length, the smaller the sense of space. Therefore, when shooting a scene with a large space, it is doubtful whether to shoot with a super wide-angle lens, because when the super-large space is magnified by the wide-angle lens again, the distant object is pushed farther by the lens, so the distant object is too small, which will affect the visual experience. Therefore, the larger the scene, the more you can consider shooting with a small wide angle or standard focal length, but it should be noted that the size of the shot scene cannot be changed.

2. Selection of aperture

In landscape photography, a small aperture will get a wider clear range, but the small aperture here is not the minimum aperture of the lens, because the minimum aperture will obviously reduce the image quality. So my personal experience is that the aperture F 1 1- 13 can better reflect the feeling of large depth of field.

Fixed point photometry

It measures light in the form of a point, and only measures the area of a point, which is generally 0.5% to 3% of the overall area of 65438+ screen (the specific proportion varies from camera to camera). By default, the metering point is located in the center of the picture. The measuring point covers a small area, so the measuring result is very accurate.

4. The benefits of manual exposure

M-stop is an exposure mode that can completely manually adjust the aperture shutter. It is not exactly the same as the two semi-manual exposure modes of aperture priority (A-stop) and shutter priority (S-stop), because you only need to set one of the aperture and shutter separately, and the other is determined by the camera's metering system. In manual exposure mode, once the aperture shutter is set, the final exposure of the photo will not be affected by the camera metering system. We can use the photometry of the camera as a reference to assist the exposure.

When the exposure scale is in the middle "0" state, it means that the exposure at this time is consistent with the camera's automatic metering. When the exposure is insufficient, the ruler will move to the negative area, indicating that the exposure is insufficient, and when the exposure is excessive, the ruler will move to the positive area. As a reference, this can quickly help you determine the manual exposure value. At this time, we can decide how much ISO to use by adjusting the aperture size and shutter speed.

Third, the role of shutter in landscape works

When shooting landscape works, it is necessary to mention slow photography. Slow photography refers to taking photos with shutter speed below 1/30 seconds. When slow shooting is used, moving objects will leave moving images on the negative during exposure. This image is a virtual shadow to some extent. The slower the speed, the more virtual the image, thus forming the effect of virtual to real, real to virtual, and virtual to real. This is what people often say, shooting is dynamic and the picture is alive.