Tips to improve landscape photography

Improve your landscape photography

Ansel Adams said: "Landscape photography is the supreme proof of the photographer and, often, the supreme disappointment."

This usually happens because many people are dedicated to doing what I like to call «postcard photo» in which they simply photograph what they have in front of them, without looking for anything else. And of course, there is a photo with little life, which says nothing. But, as in everything, there are tricks to avoid it.

Obviously, each landscape is a world, and there is no master key that works perfectly in all, but, there are three points that if you follow them (at least one of them) you will see how they change immediately your Colorado landscape photography.

The foreground

Surely hearing about a close-up in landscape photography is weird, but believe me, it is the real key to success. Imagine that you are going to take a picture of a landscape, for example, with a castle. In this case, it is normal to focus on framing the castle and taking the picture.

In doing this, it is not that we take a bad photo, but it is not as good as it could be. And, to give it that special point, we have the foreground. The use of this plane is spreading more and more in current photography and the reason is that it brings two important advantages; positions the public in the photo and brings a sense of depth to the landscape.

Position the public

Making the person who sees the photo feel inside it is like transporting it to that same place, hence it is so valuable. To achieve this, you have to see, in your photo, elements close to the position from where you took it. This is achieved with short focal lengths or, failing that, bending down when taking the photo to capture part of the ground or nearby elements, its also important to select the best cameras for landscape photography.

Feeling deep

By introducing elements in the foreground you also provide a reference to the distances in your landscape. In this way, it is easier for the public to know how far each element of photography is. This, for example, is more difficult to appreciate in shots taken with long focal distances or in which other intermediate references are not appreciated. These focal points also tend to flatten the photo, since, the more zoom, the more closely are the planes of your photo.

For the foreground elements, there are two very interesting ways to do it. The first is unfocusing them, which is good to frame the image and give a different appearance to the bottom or when this area has too much detail. This will be achieved by leaving these elements out of depth of field. The second way is to use the hyperfocal distance, so that you will get the whole scene to be clear and more like what you see in reality.