5 Simple Things You Can Do to Improve Your Landscape Photographs

St. Croix River Sunrise - Summer 2013, Stillwater MN
Canon 5D Mark iii + 17-40mm L @ 18mm w/ 6-stop Tiffen Variable ND Filter

Call this one a tweener... a little something from home in between our Costa Rica 2013 recap.

• Use a tripod to increase stability, slow you down and permit long exposures.
• Wake up early, be on site before sunrise and shoot the pre-dawn light.
• Use a strong foreground element like a rock, tree or color to add balance to the image.
• Use lines to lead your viewer’s eye into the photograph.
• Try to expose in a way that stretches your histogram from the brightest whites (at the right) to the darkest blacks (at the left). This offers you the greatest flexibility when post processing. If the exposure range is greater than five stops between the extremes, then shoot multiple images at various exposures. By capturing a bracketed series you can merge the divergent exposures in software like Photoshop, Photomatix, or Nik HDR Effex. 

St. Croix River Sunrise (#2) - Summer 2013, Stillwater MN
Canon 5D Mark iii + 17-40mm L @ 18mm w/ 6-stop Tiffen Variable ND Filter

These pictures were taken on August 13, 2013 @ 6:10 a.m. Each was from a single exposure where I worked to maximize the dynamic range prior to and after image capture. The photographs were pre-processed in Aperture 3.4.5 and finished for presentation in Photoshop CS 5. 

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