How To Make Good Landscape Or Interior
Photographs Quickly
by William Lulow
Making great landscape or interior images takes time. The question is, how do you make great shots when you’re in a specific place for only a limited amount of time?
One trick I use is to visit a local tourist curio shop and look at the postcards. Postcard images are usually shot by local photographers who have been in the area for a long time. They tend to know all the best spots for great landscape photographs. Once you have decided on a few choice locations, make an effort to shoot them at times when the light is most unusual (in early morning or late afternoon). This doesn’t mean you can’t get good shots during the noon hours, but if you’re looking for more dramatic shots, early or late is best.
Another trick I have used successfully is to pick a spot, later in the day. Set your camera on a tripod and try to get an image when lights are just coming on in houses or buildings. You get the kind of an image that includes the warmth of the lights but also shows details in the buildings.
If you want to get pictures of places with no people, try setting your camera on a tripod, stopping down the lens all the way (f/26 or f/22 – f/32 if you can). You may have to use a neutral density filter (a filter to cut down on the light but doesn’t add any color). All this so that you can use a very long exposure. I have made scenes with exposures of 5 minutes or so at f/32. Long exposures will cause any moving subject to blur so much that it will become invisible to the camera. An example of this technique is below. Sometimes you catch the faint blur of a person or object that isn’t moving fast enough, but it can be easily retouched out completely.
So try these techniques and see if your scenic imagery improves. Neutral density filters are a neat way to go. They come in various shades of gray, usually in single f/stop increments. An ND 0.3 is a one stop exposure increase, ND 0.6 is a two f/stop increase and ND 0.9 represents a three f/stop increase. You can use these to be able to shoot at wider apertures or very small ones with a correspondingly longer shutter speed. Here is another example of how a longer exposure can help make people disappear in your shot:
When I made this image, there were literally groups of people working hard to set up tables and buffets for a party. I instructed them to keep moving and not to stand in one place too long. You can actually see a faint image of one person who was sitting at a table near the lower left of the photograph. Exposure was 8 minutes at approximately f/16 with the help of several strobes set up strategically with assistants firing them during the last part of the exposure.
