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The basic “elements of art” include an understanding of “lines”, and it should interest the photographer to know that diagonals always imply “energy” of some kind. For example, the artist who paints trees at a slight diagonal is implying that they are blowing in the wind. This usually incorporates some interest into their work, and the same can be said for photography too.

The problem with this sort of “energy” in photography is that it usually puts the camera at risk or makes things a bit difficult where blur is concerned. For the focus of this brief article we are going to consider some of the challenges and solutions for making images on windy days.

Consider the image below…

This is not an image that makes you think “Ah…a gentle breeze”. The viewer understands immediately that this is a powerful blast of wind that is causing this palm to clump together and bend so dramatically.

The photographer making this shot was wise to wait for a nearly cloudless day full of bright sun to make such an image. Why? This is because they were able to freeze the tree in motion with a very fast shutter speed. If you consider that they used a small aperture to keep the entire scene in focus, you can understand that this could have been difficult if the day was dark.

The problem with making such an image is that it might be very hard for the photographer themselves to remain upright safely in such a blast of wind. Because of this, they can always secure their tripod to the ground, and rely on a cable release or remote control to cue the shutter to fire.

The next image (above) may have presented the same sorts of struggles. The photographer used a very fast shutter to freeze the laundry in motion and to capture the effects of the wind in the grass. This was not as simple as it might seem due to the overcast conditions and the need for a small aperture to record the entire scene in sharp focus.

To create drama, they offset the focal point into two-thirds of the scene and balanced it out with the cluster of clouds that are a bit deeper in colour than the rest of the sky. This emphasizes the energy created by the garments moving in the wind.

This image would have also been possible from a hand-held position, but the use of a tripod and cable release might have been quite handy too in the heavy winds.

There are great number of landscape photography tips and techniques, but only a few that will really help you take better landscape photos. Many photographers will swear to using a tripod, others won’t. Other photographers will tell you to spend time sharpening and increasing the colour in Photoshop and others won’t.

I’ve photographed thousands of landscapes and I have compilled a list of landscape photography tips and techniques that have worked for me. Now I want to share them with you.

The first landscape photography tip I can share with you is always choose the right lighting. Do you want a dull landscape, a bright one or a sunset landscape photo? I’m puting this to you because lighting makes all the difference. The intensity of light will most certainly place a huge part in how your colour and light looks depending on what time of day you shoot. Always be mindful of the impact that your light will have on your landscape.

This also includes your seasons. In winter you will have not only less light to work with, but less intensity of light. This may mean dull, overcast days casting a blue hue over your photos. Or it may mean superb dawn and dusk shots due to the softer light available to you. Each time of day, along with the season, has a major impact on your photos.

The second landscape photography tip is always use a tripod. When you are working with a well lit scene during the middle of the day in spring, why do you need a tripod? It is because the more still the camera is, the sharper your photos will be. A tripod can also be handy if the light changes and you need to slow down the shutter. Once you slow down the shutter to under 50th of a second, handheld camera shake becomes apparent. You don’t to be running or walking to see evidence of camera shake. All you have to do is breathe and camera shake can be noticeable on some photos.

If your light suddenly changes and you need to slow the shutter, the tripod will enable you to create sharp shots. A shutter release cable means you won’t have to touch the camera, and a slow shutter without blur can be acheived.

Another landscape photography tip I can share with you is to use a uv filter, a lens hood and a blue graduated filter. A uv filter will protect your lens from fine particles of dust and dirt, a lens hood will stop any lens flare from the sun and a blue graduated (screw on) filter will give you lovely blue skies. You will need the screw on filter because you can’t use a square filter over the top of a lens hood, it just won’t fit.

Protect yourself too. Wear a hat, sunscreen and protective clothing. Or, if it’s very cold, remember to look after yourself and the camera.

Photo By Amy Renfrey

Sunset Beach, Soldiers Point, Nelson Bay, NSW, Australia

Canon EOS 500D, 1/30th, F16, ISO 400, 28mm.

Lake Cathie Beach, Port Macquarie, NSW, Australia.

Photo by Amy Renfrey. Canon EOS 500D, 1/400, F8, ISO 100, 24mm

In your landscape photography you will find that the majority is probably with a tripod. But each type of photography uses different tools. Photographers that do sports photography like to use a hand-held strategy so they can get the shot quickly. The last thing they want is to be fiddling with a tripod when they could be shooting the football player who has just won the goal for their team. Instead, they ‘ll choose a monopod which has greater flexibility and gives them greater access to the series of shots they want.

Tripods are brilliant for nature and landscape photography. But sometimes they are bulky and cumbersome. When you are shooting your landscape photography it can be a inconvenient lugging the tripod up a mountain or a steep hill just to get to the top to get that perfect shot when the sun is just right. But as painful as this is, when you look at your photos afterward, you’ll most likely say “wow, it was worth it.”

One of the great things about tripods is that they allow you to capture landscape photography beautifully. One great thing is that gentle light you see during a sunset, just before twilight. Twilight has a sweet light, and just before that there are some pretty fantastic photographic opportunities. This sweet light is ideal for landscape photography.

You’ll no doubt find that as dusk blankets the land the more photos you take the more blur you get. There’s no other time of day that feels like light changes than dusk. It feels like light is just slipping through your fingers like sand through an hour glass. And its during this time that you need to keep that camera rock-steady.

If you are in the unfortunate situation of not having a tripod at this magical time you can always boost your ISO from the mid range 400 to a higher 800. This will increase the light sensitivity quite a lot. You’ll find more noise that way but you can always fix this in Noise Ninja or other photographic post editing software.

A tripod is not only good for dusk and for very low light situations such as getting crystal clear night shots. Anytime you want to slow down your shutter speed a tripod becomes the necessity.

If you want to take stunning landscape photos photos with bold colour, super sharp focus and detail, clarity and depth take a look at our Landscape Photography website. This e-book package includes excellent step-by-step instructions on how to take pictures of beautiful landscapes, sunsets, beaches, rivers, lakes, waterfalls all in every kind of light you can imagine. It explains, in simple English, how depth of field works to get a more expansive feel in your landscapes, opening up your pictures to give them a feeling as if you were really there. Learn how to shoot professional landscape photos – just like those you see in glossy nature magazines.

I saw an ad on Facebook telling  us that getting kids into reading at a young age it very important. I couldn’t agree more. I remember being transported to another world as I hung off every word in “Adventures of the Faraway Tree” by Enid Blyton when I was about 5 or 6. My mother taught me to read well at a very young age and ever since, I get absorbed in books.

I have missed buses and trains due to getting so absorbed in a book that I forgot to catch them. I would “awake” for a moment and see the train pull away from the station and think “whoops, I was supposed to be on that.” Then I’d happily wait for the next one because it meant I could read for longer.

My father taught me the joys of photography at 7 and I became fascinated with the camera. I would sit with him in his darkroom with the red light on and watch those images magically appear out of nothing. I remember the first time I saw it. I was filled with awe, wonder and a curiosity.

I am lucky to have got the best of two magnificent worlds. There I was as a kid in the 70′s in my orange flairs and green flower power t shit, book under one arm and playing with dads old camera in another. I did this while Abba played on record in the background, and my feminist, barefooted mother would smoke hash and get stoned.

I’m lucky, because I didn’t have computers or video games to fill my mind. I had dragons, wizards, witches, magic princesses and fairies to occupy my days. I also had old photos, dark room experiences, an old camera to play with and then a small kodak camera of my own.My father gave me old photos to look at and I would pour over them, scanning every detail, until I knew that photography was going to be my life long love affair.

The old black and white photos were of my fathers old high school days. Many of them were over exposed, and blurry, but I can forgive him because he had not been taught photography yet. Once he went to college and learned the art, his photos became sharper, well exposed and more artistic.

The smell of the dark room was enchanting. I know, that’s pretty strange for a 7 year old girl to feel that way. I associated the strong, pungent sour chemical smell for a world of amazement that was about to take place right in front of me. I could see pretty well in the dark, and that red light gave me so much comfort. It was a light that said excitement and wonder. Amazing things happened when that red light went on.

Years later, much later, I became a photographer. I never lost my passion for books and stories either. I decided to combine my love of writing and my love of pictures into the one business. Now I write about photography and take photos for a living. And, I get to help people. A magic business for me indeed.

This developed into a monthly emagazine that my husband and I now offer to photography enthusiasts.  And all these years later, I am still amazed, fascinated and so incredibly drawn to well photographed images. I could stare are them for hours on end.

So what makes you tick? Where did your love of photography begin? Do you have a story to tell?

Leave comments below.

Today, I’ve been working hard on the ezine. I recorded and edited next months video on Understanding Filters. I was talking about star filters (one of Cokins special effects filters) and it got me thinking. What if I shot the stars, the real ones in the sky, with a star filter? I wonder how interesting that would look.

But there was a problem. With most astrophotography you need a telescope and a mount for the camera. This is not only to get closer to the stars, so to speak, but so that the camera and the telescope moves with the earth. This is so you get no star trails. Star trails are nice, but I didn’t want a whole sky of streaky lines.

What was I going to do?

I decided a few test shots first. I tried 3200 ISO. Nope, didn’t like it. It enhanced the light pollution from nearby streets and the city. So that was no good. I tried 1600 ISO and that seemed to work well. It gave me a dark sky without too much sensitivity to light pollution. But what about those star trails?

What was I going to do about those? After some contemplation I decided to go against what everyone tells you to do. Most people will tell you to have the camera on a really, really long shutter. That’s fine if you have a mount on a telescope tracking and moving with the Earth as she rotates through space. But even a 20 second exposure will show your stars to be tiny smudges, yes, only 20 seconds. The Earth does move at a thousand kilometers through space every second, so it’s not surprising that the pin points of light would smudge.

I decided to go for a 10-15 second exposure of Orion, at 1600 ISO and at Auto White Balance. I was pretty happy with the result. And, I used that beautiful star filter. I don’t like the cloud at the bottom right, it really bugs me, but I love the rest of the shot.

We’re due for more rain for about a week. As soon as I get another clear night, I’ll shoot it again. This time with the same settings, filter and no cloud.

What do you think?

Amy

Here is a closer look at Orion:

Just what is in this constellation?

If you are interested in doing some landscape photography you already know that one of the most common “setups” for it involves the use of a wide angle lens and a tripod. You might already have the tripod, but you may lack the funds necessary to purchase the big lens. So, how can you take impressive landscape photographs without the most essential item? Actually, a clever and creative photographer can use a range of “tricks” to make their settings look wider, bigger, taller, and more expansive.

The focus of this brief discussion will be on the various techniques that can give the looks of a wide angle without the big budget. Firstly, however, let’s just do a quick review of the ways in which most wide angle landscape photographs are actually made. There really is a generalized set of guidelines that can be followed when getting ready for such a shot.

The essential thing is the aperture, and most photographers know that the details in the foreground and the distance are equally as valuable as the details in the middle ground. This is the reason that a small aperture is used for all wide angle landscape work. Of course, this means that lighting is a bit tricky because the narrow aperture restricts the amount that enters into the sensor. Because of this, most shots demand a tripod and a longer shutter.

The shutter speeds for most landscape images tend to also demand a cable release to prevent camera shake. If this is not possible, the photographer absolutely must make some effort to use the timer on the camera instead.

Finally, because landscapes are often a bit tricky, it is always a good idea to use the auto-bracketing feature whenever available. This will adjust either the shutter speed or aperture for the course of three consecutive exposures, and is a great way to ensure at least one flawless image.

Let’s look at our first deceptive landscape photograph below:

Here we see a massive swath of green field with a huge mountain range in the background. This image is something of an optical illusion because it is using the downward slope of the hill, the central tree, and the distant mountain to create space that isn’t really there at all. The angles in the image trick the eye into thinking that a very broad landscape is captured in the scene, but in all reality the field in the foreground is only a few dozen feet wide.

In the second image we can see that lines are again being used to pull the viewer “deeper” into a landscape that isn’t all that vast or expansive. The dark green lines in the field ask the viewer to visually follow them into the center of the image. This brings them to the house and then on to the enormous mountain beyond. This isn’t actually a “wide” setting, but the viewer will believe this to be the case.

Shadows in the landscape are put to use to create a bit of an illusion in the next photograph as well. Look at the many shadows in this scene:

This is not a very wide or broad location. The rocky formations are not even that tall. It is the heavy shadow at the base of the image along with the illumination along the face of the rocks that gives an impressive sense of height and majesty. This is an extremely clever technique and puts the “sweet light” hour of dusk or dawn to excellent use.

Finally, there is nothing compared to the use of an elevated position to create the sense of a wide angle lens in use. Consider the image below:

Here we can see that the photographer is in a plane, balloon, or other aircraft. They are pointing the camera back down on the vast landscape, but they have selected a savvy angle that adds a huge amount of depth and space to the scene. How did they do this? They included the horizon and an area of the sky in the image. This gives the whole scene a great deal of scale and perspective that tricks the eye into thinking that a specialized lens is recording the shot.

There are a few other tricks to use that include standing at the base of a hill or mountain and shooting upward into it to create depth and space. The photographer can also always seek the widest or flattest subjects to trick the eye, and they might also opt to incorporate large areas of shadow to add weight and width. It is also a good idea to seek out what many call “leading lines” that somehow guide the viewer’s eye into the scene as well. Any of these techniques will provide even a somewhat limited setting with a bit of expansiveness that can easily be recorded without the use of a wide angle lens.

If you want your photography to be like this, then just visit: www.DigitalPhotographySuccess.com

When photographers think of animal portraiture they tend to imagine one of two possible groups of animals – the formal domestic pets or the wild animals. For this discussion we will take a quick look at each style and consider how to get the best effects.

Before attempting to photograph animals of any kind (wild or domestic) it is important to a bit of study or research. For example, if you plan to find the nesting area of some Great Horned Owls and wait for them to emerge at dusk, you might also need to know their general habits, whether or not they are hostile, and how they might react to your presence. Additionally, your research might make it much easier to locate the birds in the first place and to stake out a better spot to photograph them.

The research for the domestic portrait is more observational and simply requires the photographer to visit the animal, or animals, home and allow them to get used to their equipment and their person. This is an ideal way to also learn a bit about an animal’s personality which can then be captured in the photographs taken.

For example, if a few house cats are very comedic and seem to enjoy making their human housemates laugh, you will be able to observe this and figure out a few ways to get their humor as a photo. If, however, an animal is more serious and dignified you will quickly discover this as well, and your time spent in observation can allow you to mentally prepare your camera for the best shots.

Where wildlife is concerned, however, the observation process may not be so easy and can even necessitate the use of blinds or hiding places. When you do locate the position you will use for your photographic sessions, you will want to remember to put your camera into silent mode and disable the flash unit.

What if you need the flash? You may want to reconsider this because there are few animals whose eyes do not reflect the light back at the sensor, and this can often ruin the quality of the image. Additionally, you may permanently “spook” an animal from the area by blasting them with a flash unexpectedly. If you absolutely must have additional light, you will want to try to use ambient lighting and camera settings whenever possible.

Naturally, this may be very difficult in cases such as nocturnal animals. Consider that you will probably use a slower telephoto lens that with the camera mounted on a tripod to prevent shake, and without the flash the shutter speed may be too slow. If you absolutely must add a flash to your gear you may want to add a flash extender which projects the light in a bit of a diffused and less startling manner.

There are so many great things you can do in photography. One of things is the fun use of filters. Why not try a star filter with some pin points of light?

Here is a normal street at night without the star filter and then the same shot with the star filter. It does fun stuff to your pin points of light.

Have fun!

Amy

P.S Click on the images to make them larger.

Winning Photo

Theme : “Empty”

Photo By Brian Martin

No camera data supplied.

Why Brian won:

Brian has done a beautiful panorama. He’s photographed a series of shots and used software to stitch them together. This is a nice way to do landscapes- and indeed quite fun!

Brian hasn’t sent in the exif data which is a shame, because it would have been great to see what settings he used. Creating a panorama requires that you have the same setting for every photo you take.

We loved this photo for it’s composition, angle and perspective. We both loved the way it was dark around the frame and light in the middle. A great shot and worthy of being our winner. Thanks Brian, you’ve done a great job.

Amy & Paul

P.S If you didn’t win, it’s not because we didn’t like your photo. Every photo on this page is a beauty. We love all of them. We want to extend a big “thank you” to everyone whose work is contributed each month. We are very proud of you.

Special Mention Entries:

(Simply click on a photo to enlarge and see camera data.)

Thank you very much for taking the time to submit your photos. You have done a great job. We have a limitation of one Winner and 8 finalists photos. This is due to the wonderful success and popularity of Focus Ezine and that we are now getting a large number of entries each month. If you don’t see yours here it’s not because we didn’t like it, it’s simply because of space limitations.

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Please add your comments to any of these great photo efforts at the bottom of the page.

Next Month’s (March) Theme:

“Black As Night”

The closing date is the 25th of February 2011

See examples :

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