Landscapes are everywhere. So abundant and waiting to be seen, to be captured. Sometimes they are grand vistas, sometimes something smaller, more intimate.
I like all of them. I don’t feel compelled to go searching out grand vistas for a large percentage of my shots. I am happy with a stream or a field. I am also happy with a desert or a mountain.
I shoot most of my landscape photos on a tripod or with a drone. I like somewhat precise framing.
There are times that the sky is the story. The clouds, sun peeking through or storm clouds. Sometimes I like to shoot a long shutter speed to blur the motion of them. Sometimes I want a shorter exposure to capture the glory of their detail as in this photo. I like contrasts so I rarely raise the foreground luminosity very much. I don’t like photos where the light is clearly behind a subject but they get processed into a fake looking shot with no contrast. Over-processing can just kill an otherwise nice photo.
Sometimes the sky isn’t great. I know people who will digitally replace skies they don’t like. To me that is dishonest and really, not needed. I take a different approach rather than create a composite that nobody could have ever seen I de-emphasize the sky as I did in this shot. This is one of the great things about drone photography and videography. One can vastly change the perspective in ways that used to be very difficult and expensive.
In future posts I will give some examples of things I like and don’t like and how I think about framing and processing. Examples and descriptions of of how I think about colors, contrasts, etc. How much I can’t stand the Photoshop Vibrance slider any time a sky is involved 😁. Spoiler alert, that slider produces a weird blue that nobody has ever seen in the sky and unfortunately for me I see it every time somebody cranks it up. If you don’t want me to ruin them for you then you might want to skip that post 😁.
