How to shoot city scenery: a set of skills to shoot city scenery

Traveling to a city, we will inadvertently find the difference in this city. The construction of each city has its own urban characteristics. We leave our own figure here and try to think of leaving our own commemoration.

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

1. Find and Add Levels

Like shooting natural scenery, layered urban scenery is more popular. A picture with clear foreground, middle scene and background is more likely to lead the audience's eyes to the depths of the picture one after another.

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

If the background scenery is not good enough, the audience may not see the depth of the picture at all, and the layering 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 look at your theme, change the angle, and add some foreground and middle scenes to the picture. Add interest and atmosphere to the foreground picture, and the middle scene is responsible for the foreground and background.

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, plus the foreground in the picture. Soon, we found that the surrounding scenery was suitable for foreground.

Add the railing next to the dock to the picture, and does the layering suddenly come out?

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

Continue to adjust the angle and add a railing post close at hand in the picture:

How's it going? Foreground, middle scene and background have different levels. 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 picture of a city with a good composition:

The bridge in the foreground can effectively guide the audience's eyes to the trees in the middle scene; The tree shape of the middle scene becomes the frame composition of the background, which draws the audience's attention to the twin towers in the background.

This composition effectively attracts the audience's attention to the depth of the picture and runs through most of the width of the picture from left to right, which is unsuccessful:

2. Choice of theme

Hierarchy is very important, but the choice of scenery should also be taken into account. There is not enough layering.

Take the picture as an example, the audience's eyes will shift from the middle scene to the background, largely thanks to the existing two Petronas Towers 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, if the foreground and the middle scene are not good-looking, it will not work.

If the foreground and the middle scene are ugly, it is estimated that the audience will 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 there is only the background scenery without 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 picture ratio of unsightly 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 viewfinder to add a lot of color to your photos.

As shown below, gray walls, bare red bricks, white railings and green windows.

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 very obvious.

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 colors.

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 sense of freshness:

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

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

Blue can be used to reflect the cold and bleak feeling, orange can be used to create a warm feeling, fake a sunset, or add bright yellow to a cloudy picture to make it more "sunny".

4. Pay attention to the 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 a building.

Always pay attention to your position, the position of the sun and around you, and whether your subject is in front light, side light or backlight. Different light positions make different subjects suitable for shooting.

Backlighting is a panacea when the scenery is bad.

The surrounding environment may bring unexpected shadows or light sources to your photos. There may be a dazzling glass curtain wall reflecting sunlight in your background, or there may be a large shadow:

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

What kind of light position 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 Characters

Seeing people in landscape photos is not always a photographer's pleasure, but the city's scenery is different, because people are a natural part of the city.

Don't be afraid to appear in the photo. When there are only one or two people in the picture, it will become a "point of interest" so that the picture will not appear "empty"; In addition, people are 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 is easy to cause confusion; And it is best to choose the type of characters suitable for the environment and theme.

As shown below, these chefs are well matched with the environment; If you put on a few white-collar elite straight suits, it will seem out of place with the environment. Of course, this contrast is also good, and you can make a similar attempt.

You can not only add people to the picture, but also try to delete people from the picture where there should be people.

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

You can also try to play with people with long exposure, and turn the messy crowd into 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 get the effect of the above picture; If exposed for a few minutes, the crowd will be blurred, but it will not look good.

It is easy to talk on paper. 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.