How To Make An Effective Landscape Image

How To Make An Effective Landscape Image

by William Lulow

In the last article, I spoke about making Black&White landscape images. Here, I will explain, in more detail, my technique for making them along with all the technical information you will need to know to duplicate my efforts.

This was an image I saw as I walked out to the beach on a kind of stormy day by the Gulf of Mexico in Florida. My photographic knowledge was telling me that there were some intrinsic values in this image which just needed to be brought out a bit. First, I shot the image with a Cokin P-Series filter over my Canon 20mm F/2.8 lens. I use NEUTRAL DENSITY GRADIENT FILTERS like the one below:

This filter is darker at the top and lighter near the bottom. It heightens the contrast of the sky while leaving the foreground relatively the same. I have these in several different gradients and they can be combined to produce more enhanced images.

I had in mind to make the sky darker and to “clean up” the image by eliminating extraneous information like the items on the right and the extra lounge chair, more toward the background. Here’s what the finished image was:

I knew I wanted to make a dramatic image because the feeling I had walking out on that beach just after a storm, was kind of somber. I had just come to this place for a vacation and was not anticipating bad weather. But the umbrellas all tied up, the crashing waves and the cloud formations, all added to the feeling I had.

Here is one that I actually converted from an RGB image. This was the original picture:

Now when I saw this scene, I loved the highlights on the rowboats and the railings that lead the eye right into the image. There were a few things I thought I would change when I converted it to a monochrome photograph, however. One was the light reflected in the water was a little too bright and the other was the horizon line, since it also was bright and tended to distract the eye from the main subject. So, here is the conversion. The original was also shot with my ND gradient filter on the lens:

This image, although not shot in original Black&White, still had the requisite contrast for a monochrome image, but with the additional retouching of darkening the reflection in the water on the right and eliminating the sky, actually strengthened an already strong image. It kind of stands on its own in color, but I think is a bit stronger in Black&White. But I like the blue water and the sky that highlights the dune in the color one as well. I guess some of this is personal preference. One thing that has become apparent though, whenever a conversion is made from a color image, contrast almost always needs to be increased to render the blacks really black. But care is needed to make sure that as the contrast is increased, the detail in the shadows is also preserved.

Here is yet another image that cried out to be made in original Black&White. Since the tree was mostly gray anyway, I decided to focus in on its detail and try to eliminate everything else. I made this image while walking around Longwood Gardens in West Chester, Pennsylvania so I didn’t have my tripod nor my whole bag of lenses and filters. I always have my gradient filter with me, but this time I shot the picture without any filter, with my Canon 20mm f/2.8 lens, getting fairly close to the subject. After I processed the image I did a little bit of retouching in post-production to further eliminate any unwanted details so that the tree itself would be the highlight. Here’s what the original image looked like:

You can see that the walkway to the right was a distracting highlight, so that was removed enabling the eye to complete the composition by focusing all attention to the tree trunk itself. The shot was made with the camera hand-held with autofocus aimed directly at the middle of the tree.

Here is a detailed, illustrated description of my setup for making landscapes:

This is the filter cluster mounted on the 20mm f/2.8 lens. I can vary the filter strength as needed, using all three, two or just one filter as well as center the filters and raise or lower them to get the desired effect. Here’s the result of a test I did just earlier last week:

The image on the left here was made with all three filters in place with all of them in a normal position to emphasize the clouds. The image on the right was with made with filters slightly elevated to make sure that the trees were light enough to show detail. If you wish, you can easily darken the sky even more with a QUICK SELECTION tool in Photoshop. When the sky is more or less like a rectangle, it is really easy to do this in a matter of seconds.

Also, I tend to gravitate to the 20mm lens for landscapes because on my crop-sensor, it’s roughly equivalent to a 32mm lens on a 35mm film camera. So it’s just a little wider than normal. This allows me to include most of a scene I’m shooting as well as lets me crop in during post-production or actually move closer to my subject when I’m actually taking the picture. It is really my “go to” lens for most of the landscapes that I shoot. Remember, each lens has its own specific purpose. Telephotos bring distant objects closer, fill up the frame and create shallow depth-of-field (something you don’t always want in a landscape). Super wide-angle lenses usually distort too much of the scene but are designed to be able to encompass a greater portion of what the camera sees. Also, wide angle lenses render many items sometimes too small to see. Therefore, something just about like a medium wide-angle or even a normal lens is probably the best for landscapes.

So, one of the secrets to making really good landscape images is to have an idea of what you want to do first. Either you see something that drives the creative tendency you have or you see an image that you know you can improve to make it stronger. Usually, I come upon a scene that evokes a feeling. It could be the lighting, the subject matter or a combination of them. Then I start thinking about the kinds of techniques the subject demands. Whether it’s Black&White or color. What needs to be emphasized or de-emphasized? What kind of crop makes the image stronger? What should be the real focus of the image? A lot of the time, I will make a picture knowing that I will edit it quite a bit in post-production. I have mentioned Ansel Adams’ technique when it came to this. He always knew that he would work on his images in the darkroom. As a matter of fact, these days, any image you take can probably be made stronger by cropping, retouching, making selective changes or just improving on small details in the image. No finished image comes from the camera “untouched” at least in some way. It enhances your ability to see the possibilities in an image by knowing how you might alter it in post-production. All photographers should develop the ability to “see” beyond what they’re actually seeing and think in terms of making the picture a better photograph by really looking at all the details. That’s the secret. When you look at a scene, try to imagine it as a completely finished image. Ask yourself what you would eliminate or enhance to make it strong. In the days of view cameras, big, bulky tools that required much more concentration to make an image, the ground glass was where you would really examine the image. But, it was upside down and backwards so it really took some doing to examine it edge to edge! That is what you must do with your digital camera or even an iPhone to make your images truly effective.