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Humphrey Head and Morecambe Bay, Cumbria (Jon) In the outdoors it’s not just what you do but where you do it that counts
In any outdoor activity, it’s not just what you do but where you do it that’s important. Even a short country stroll can take you to places unsuspected by those who never leave the roads. Mountaineers, cavers, sea-kayakers all get to places most people will never see and may never even have dreamed of. Whether it’s to show your less privileged friends, or just for your own memories, you’ll surely want pictures that capture the special qualities of these special places.
On the face of it, shooting landscapes should be easy. Landscape doesn’t run away when you approach, or start pulling silly faces: it just sits there and waits to be photographed. You don’t need expensive specialised gear either: an ordinary camera and an ordinary lens will do fine.
However, shooting landscapes well turns out to be less easy. There are a number of reasons for this. Some of them are technical, but a lot of technically competent pictures still don’t really get the message across. Indeed, in their obsessive pursuit of technical excellence some people seem to forget what the picture is actually about.
It is about the place, but places change their face. It’s also about time and light, weather and season. Returning to the same place time and again, to photograph it in different moods, can be immensely rewarding.
Seeing the landscape
Landscapes are big and complex. When you’re actively involved with landscape, you see much more of this richness than you can from a car window or TV screen. Outdoor activity brings you into close contact with the landscape and makes you much more aware of its detail and texture. A kayaker will be very aware of the way a river flows, of eddies and stoppers and calmer pools. A climber will be very focused on the fine detail of rock, its cracks and holds, the frictional qualities of its texture. A walker or a cyclist will be highly aware of gradients and path or track surfaces.
Wave, Isle of Harris (Chiz) Landscape is rarely completely static – sometimes it’s very dynamic indeed! (shutter speed 1/500s)
Many of these qualities are changeable. A lake which is a perfect mirror in a windless dawn may be all white-capped agitation a few hours later. Landscape does not, after all, ‘just sit there’. It changes constantly. There are gross physical changes like landslides and avalanches. Trees fall and rivers change their course.
Complete stillness is a rare and usually short-lived phenomenon. Most landscapes – and most landscape photographs – have movement in them somewhere. Even when there’s not a breath of wind, and no running water in sight, the sun moves continually across the sky: if nothing else appears to change, the light always does.
These things naturally affect the way you look at a landscape and the feelings you have about it – and, therefore, what you want to say about it in photographs. As with any photograph, the clearer you are about what you want to say with the shot, the better. ‘What a beautiful place’ is just a start. What makes it beautiful? What’s special about it? Is it inviting or forbidding? Does it awe you with its sheer scale and grandeur or does it seduce you with a quiet, delicate beauty?
Framing the landscape
Perhaps what makes landscape hard is exactly the quality that appears to make it easy: it’s just sitting there. It isn’t neatly parcelled up into photograph-sized chunks. With a portrait or an action shot it’s usually easy to identify what the subject is. Fill the frame with it, get it sharp and correctly exposed (which the camera can help with), and the subject will probably speak for itself.
Landscape photography doesn’t work like that. Landscape is all around you. It’s a big world, but we’re trying to catch it in a small rectangle. That’s the challenge. Put it another way: how do you place your subject in the frame if you can’t say exactly what your subject is? This returns us to some of the questions raised in Chapter 1. While ‘what to point at’ may be a no-brainer with action or wildlife, it can be the hardest decision you’ll have to make when taking a landscape photograph. In other words, framing is primary and fundamental.
Framing begins with seeing. This means more than just looking in the right direction. It means really being aware of what you’re looking at. This sounds very simple, but simple isn’t quite the same as easy. It calls for concentration and full attention to what you see, both directly and through the viewfinder.
Many books talk about ‘rules of composition’, especially the notorious ‘Rule of Thirds’. However, in practice, many of the images presented as examples of that rule follow it loosely, if at all. These so-called rules aren’t as simple as they seem. Our experience strongly suggests that they aren’t that useful either, especially with no clear ‘subject’ to latch on to (many writers also refer to ‘the point of interest’, whatever that is). It seems like more than mere coincidence that ‘Rule of Thirds’ generates the acronym ROT.
It’s pretty hard to think about ‘rules’ and at the same time stay focused on the feeling and emotion of the moment – many of the greatest photos ever made don’t conform to any known rule, and neither does landscape itself.
Bending over backwards to be fair, some people do seem to find such rules helpful. Knowing what they are and trying them out from time to time can do no harm. But don’t think of them as rules, and definitely not as laws. A picture is good because it expresses the experience you had in the outdoors, not because it conforms to the rules. Think of these, at best, as suggestions which might sometimes be useful: and beware the short-cut that turns out to be a dead end.
In fact the very word ‘composition’ is contaminated by this obsession with rules. This is why we’re avoiding it as far as possible. The alternative term, ‘framing’, says exactly what we’re doing and doesn’t carry anywhere near as much baggage.
We’ve already dropped a few hints about framing in Chapter 1. The central skill is seeing the whole picture. And it is a skill that anyone can develop, not some mysterious gift given only to a few.
The image on screen or finder is different from the real world because it has two dimensions instead of three. It’s also different because it’s a rectangle. Long before photography, the vast majority of paintings and drawings were produced on rectangular paper or canvas and often placed in rectangular frames. Today we view many images on screens; whether computer, iPad or iPhone, they’re all rectangles. We can trim images to different shapes and present them in other forms, but in practice we rarely do so and it’s usually an afterthought. Film or digital, every image starts out as a rectangle. (OK, not every photograph: some fish-eye lenses generate a circular image.)
A rectangle is defined by its edges. If we’re trying to frame images consciously, we need to be aware of those edges. Think about them as you try different angles of view. If you use a zoom lens, objects can appear or disappear at the edges of the frame as you zoom in or out: make sure you’re aware of them.
Looking at what’s contained within those edges is the other side of the coin. Don’t forget that the camera can’t read your mind and doesn’t actually know which bits of the scene you are interested in. It’s no good blaming the camera if you get more than you thought you were getting.
Looking at the viewfinder is only part of the process. This can’t directly tell you what difference it will make to move back a few metres, or switch to a different lens. You can do this entirely by trial and error, but if you stop to check through the viewfinder after every little adjustment, it’ll take forever. Landscape photography isn’t supposed to be that slow! This is why looking at the scene directly is just as important as using the viewfinder. In fact, we can all anticipate, to some extent, what will happen when we shift position or change lenses. Step closer to that gap in the trees and we’ll see more of the landscape beyond. And the more we do it, the better we get at it.