Silhouette the Landscape

In previous posts I've talked about creating silhouettes from isolated subjects, but there's no reason that you can't take that idea to a larger scene--namely the landscape. Essentially the process is exactly the same, you find a dark subject against a light background and expose for the lighter area. Finding landscape subjects for this kind of treatment is a bit tricky and the best place to look (did you guess already?) is along the edges of hilltops.

Because hilltop landscapes (a row of barren trees, windmills, a lighthouse) are situated against the open sky, they're easy to silhouette. I found this farm scene in a rural corner of Iowa and I envisioned it as a silhouette from the moment I spotted it. I worked the scene from a lot of different angles and with several focal length lenses, but I knew that I wanted three main elements in the scene: the tree, the edge of the barn and a cow. The cow was the tricky bit because every time I fine-tuned the composition, she went for a walk. I had to wait almost a half an hour for her to walk into the frame where I wanted her (I was starting to wish I had a cardboard cow to substitute for her). The line of the fence tied the whole scene together.

The only editing that I did to this image (all in Photoshop CS3) was to enhance the contrast a bit (using the curves too, but the brightness/contrast adjustment would have worked) and I also used the selective color tool to clean up the white sky a bit. One last tweak that I made was to use the midtone slider in the levels control to bring up just a hint of green in the foreground grass. But to be honest, the silhouette straight out of the camera would have been very close to what I wanted.

Don't be afraid to tackle more complex scenes as silhouettes because the results are usually very interesting and it's easy to tweak scenes like this in editing.

Include a Dark Foreground in Landscapes

I like landscape photos that really pop off the page, that have some element of drama that forces you take notice of them. One simple way to do that is to frame your scenes, when possible, with a dark foreground. Because the eye naturally seeks lighter areas or areas with more color, using a dark foreground helps to point the viewer to your main subject. It's easy to find dark foregrounds just by exploring a scene a bit until you find an area that is not as brilliantly lit as your main subject. In this scene I used an area of marsh grass along the riverbank that was in shadow and contrasted it with the brightly lit boats. By exposing for the brighter areas the foreground went even darker and made the frame a much bolder element. Also, I was careful to include the dark pilings on the left side of the frame to tie the foreground and middleground areas together.

Photo notes: Photographed with a Nikon D90 with a 24-120mm Nikkor zoom at 120mm (180mm in 35mm terms). Exposure was 1/125 at f/5.6. White balance: cloudy weather.

Turn Around and See What's Behind You

One of the flaws that I am most guilty of in photography (I have flaws?) is getting obsessed with one subject or one area of a location to the exclusion of other interesting possibilities around me. I'll often get so intent on getting a good shot of a particular object or detail, for example, that I forget to lift my head and look around and see what's to the left or right or, more often, behind me--and it's an oversight that has caused me to miss some great shots.

The day I took this photo, for example, I was photographing some old steam locomotives and trying to find an angle that would show the ruggedness of the hulking old engine (and considering that nearly the entire engine was painted jet black, it was a bit of a challenge, too). Typically, I was working at the end of the day and the sun light, which had just pierced through an overcast sky, was shifting and fading quickly, so I kept shooting and refining the shots until the light was no longer sculpting the edges of the engine. I worked one particular shot for about 10 or 15 minutes and barely lifted my head from the viewfinder other than to step forward or back a few feet or to check camera settings. Also, because I was standing on oil-slicked railroad ties and rails while I was shooting, I was also concentrating on keeping my body vertical.

Finally the light was a bit too far gone and I'd run out of ideas and angles and I turned to start walking back to my car. Wham! There right behind me was this extraordinary old water tower up on a hill and silhouetted against an incredibly tumultuous sky. It was the clouds in the sky, in fact, that had been playing havoc with the lighting on the locomotive, but it never occurred to me that the sky itself might hold a great shot. And to be honest, I never even noticed the water tower until I turned around to leave and looked up--and almost simultaneously heard my girlfriend say, "That's a pretty shot." (This thing where she notices great shots that I don't see happens a lot, trust me.)

I had just enough time to pop off exactly three shots before that nice edge of light slipped off the left side of the water tower and the sky returned to the on-again, off-again dismal gray mass that it had been. The moral of this tip, I guess, is to remember to take the time to lift your head and look around even if you have to force yourself to look away from your main subject. Don't get so focused that you fail to look around--especially when the light is changing fast, as it does at the beginning or end of the day. Of course, it doesn't hurt to have a friend along to look out for things that you might be missing. I'm lucky, I travel most of the time with someone has an artistic eye and who is always spotting things that I don't see--and that's not a bad quality to have in a travel companion.

Soften Landscapes with Hazy Light

I'm as guilty as anyone of waiting for nice sunny days to go out and shoot pictures. Maybe its my inherent laziness that says if it's a bit too cloudy or hazy, I don't have to bother hauling out the cameras and shooting any pictures. But soft hazy light can be a real blessing, especially in landscape photography and it's far better to embrace it than use it as an excuse not to shoot.

The nice thing about working on very hazy or overcast days is that the contrast is dramatically reduced which makes getting a good overall exposure much simpler. I shot this photo in the aperture-priority mode (using a Nikkor 24-120mm zoom at f/18 to get good depth of field) and while I shot in RAW and could have easily tweaked the exposure in the conversion process, the exposure right out of the camera was fine. Another nice thing about hazy lighting is that you get those lovely muted and saturated colors that so often get blown away in bright direct sunlight. In fact, it was the many different shades of green contrasting with the red barn that caused me to slam on the brakes (literally--unfortunately for my passenger) and hop out to shoot the photo.

I shot this photo toward the end of the day with thunderstorms threatening and the sky turning deep gray behind me and, in fact, a few raindrops fell on me during the 20 minutes or so that I worked the shot. A deep sky might have looked nice in this shot and I would have included it had it fit the composition naturally. But I wanted the barn to dominate the scene and if I had zoomed back at all (to take in sky) it would have diminished its impact. Also, I really like the way the haze on the hill behind the barn provides a hint of depth to the scene.

Embrace the hazy light of cloudy or pre-stormy skies and you'll love the softness it lends to your landscapes and the nice rich colors you'll get in your prints.

Visit the Greatest American Landscape

If you're making travel plans for the coming summer and you'd like to see the American Southwest, there is one place that should be at the top of your list: Monument Valley in southern Utah (just over the Arizona border). There is no other place in America that symbolizes the beauty and mystery of the American West like this extraordinary place. Monument Valley is actually a Navajo Tribal Park and is administered (and lived in) by the Navajo. The Navajo name for the valley is: Tse'Bii'Ndzisgaii.

Monument Valley presents some of the best landscape photo opportunities in the world and features "monuments" or rock buttes that rise up between 400 and 1000' high. By the way, the photo here was shot from the rim of the valley, near the visitor's center--and while that's a beautiful viewpoint, you have to get down into the valley to see just how spectacular it really is.There is a 17-mile self-driving tour through the valley (entry is just $5/person) and the Navajos also offer guided tours. I've spent several days there at a time and there is always something new to see, always another view to photograph. It's mind boggling, to be honest.

Interestingly, quite a number of Navajo live in the Valley and so when you're there you're not just in a park, but in their living room, so you also get a sense of the history of the Navajo people. Considering the way that Native Americans have been abused in every conceivable way in this country, it's amazing that they even let us on their land, yet they are incredibly welcoming to strangers.

There is only one hotel (now) that is close to the park and that is Goulding's Lodge (a great place to stay, you can see the valley in the distance from virtually very room), but I'm told that the Navajo are building their own hotel where the visitor center is. I really hope this doesn't commercialize the park too much since its remote location has always kept it somewhat of a secret. Just getting to the valley is a challenge, by the way, it's a four-hour drive from Flagstaff and it's 25 miles from the nearest town (Kayenta, Arizona). Still, it's a beautiful drive and worth every effort it takes to see this extraodrinary landscape.

Be a Landscape Minimalist

Landscape photos, by their very nature, often require including somewhat complex visual elements. If you're photographing an interesting pattern of ripples in a sandbar at the edge of the sea, for instance, and also want to include the surf, a few palm trees and some interesting clouds, you've got to find a way to organize those elements to strike a good and non-competitive visual balance. But sometimes the best way to organize them is to simply reduce, drastically, the number of visual elements.

Over the years I've tried to play a little mental game when I'm composing a landscape by challenging myself to reduce the number of graphic elements necessary to tell the story. I've shot lots of sunsets over the desert in Arizona, for instance, and they usually include a lot of elements: saguaro cactus, the sun, rock cliffs, a path, etc. The day I shot this photo though I was struck by how far down I could distill the elements and still capture the scene before me. I ended up just using two bold ingredients: a black silhouette of mountain and a colorful sky. What else did I need? This is exactly what sunset feels like to me in Arizona, so why clutter it up?

You may not always be able to reduce a landscape to two elements, but the more you whittle down and refine the primary ingredients, the more powerful each of them becomes. Again, by doing that with this scene, I've established a fierce contrast of earth and sky.

Entice the Eye with Leading Lines

Lines are like a visual siren song to the eye: where lines lead, the eyes will follow. If you've ever stood beside a long flat road leading off to the horizon, you know that it's almost impossible not to follow the road down to its vanishing point. I think it's just part of our visual curiosity; our brains just need to know the end of the story. Lines are easy to find in most outdoor scenes: fences, roads, a row of sailboats in a harbor. The key to using lines to entice the eye is to find a vantage point the provides a clear view of the lines and then to compose the shot to accent those lines. I photographed these corn rows early one spring near Prairie City, Iowa and shot from the raised road shoulder to get a little bit of height. I love the way the rows just seem to disappear over the hill. In this case the lines themselves became the subject.