Landscape photography
- scenic photography
- nature landscape
A wide lens on a tripod at low sun, sharp from a near rock to a far ridge.
Opens an image model with the prompt in it. The price is on the page before you sign in.
What it is for
A landscape is a picture of distance, and distance on its own is flat. The foreground is what fixes that. A rock, a pool, a fence or a run of grass one metre from the lens gives the eye a place to start and the far ridge something to be far from.
The rest of the craft serves the same aim. A small aperture holds the near rock and the far ridge in focus at once, the tripod pays for the slow shutter that a small aperture forces, and a low sun rakes across the ground so every fold in it shows.
How it works
Name a wide to normal lens and a small aperture: 16mm to 50mm at f/11 or f/16, on a tripod. Say sharp from front to back.
Name the foreground object and its distance. One metre from the lens is normal, and it should hold the lower third of the frame.
Put the sun low. Say early morning or late evening, and say the shadows run long across the ground. Then move the horizon off centre: a third up for a big sky, two thirds up for a big ground.
When to use it
Use it for a coast, a moor, a mountain, a valley, a desert, a field system, a river. Anything that reads as a place rather than as a thing.
Leave it alone at midday. An overhead sun flattens land and removes the texture the genre lives on.
Told apart from its neighbours
Drone photography answers the same subject from forty metres up, and it gives up the foreground for pattern. Landscape photography stays on the ground and needs the foreground.
Astrophotography keeps the tripod and loses the sun. It waits until the sky itself is the subject, and the land becomes a dark edge at the bottom.
Cinema publishes Establishing Shot and Long Shot as framings, and it publishes Golden Hour as light. A landscape photograph often uses all three, but it answers to a foreground, a small aperture and a tripod.
Where it is used
Fujifilm Velvia 50, sold from 1990, became the landscape film because it lifted greens and blues and held detail through an exposure of several seconds at f/16. Before it, large format 4x5 sheet film did the same job. A group of California photographers named themselves after the aperture f/64 in 1932, because front to back sharpness was the whole argument they were having.
- Velvia 50 transparencies
- national park posters
- large format 4x5 exhibition prints
The prompt
Replace the blanks with your own subject, keep the rest. Then run it on an image model.
<place>, landscape photography, 24mm lens at f/11 on a tripod, low sun near the horizon, a large foreground rock in the near third of the frame, the horizon placed a third of the way up, sharp from front to back
What goes wrong
The horizon lands in the middle and cuts the picture in half. Say the horizon sits a third of the way up, and say which half carries the weight.
The near ground comes back empty and the picture reads as a postcard. Name a foreground object, give its distance, and say it holds the lower third.
Leave out
a centred horizon, midday overhead sun, an empty foreground, shallow depth of field
Watch for
A landscape with no foreground reads as a postcard. Name the near object and say how far in front of the camera it sits.
Questions
Shoot it
Pay for the one run. No subscription, and the price is on the model page before you sign in.
Next to it in places and things
