Jul 17 2010

How To: Photograph Barren Landscapes

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They can take your breath away when you’re standing there looking at them, but those incredible, bleak landscapes are notoriously difficult to photograph. You might have felt humbled when you took the picture, but your emotion when looking at the results is more likely to be disappointment.

When confronted by a wide, sweeping landscape, the temptation is to try to show the whole scene in front of you by sticking on a wideangle lens. This has the effect of making everything look smaller in the frame. Your magnificent landscape will appear insignificant. The way to avoid this is to use a telephoto and not a wide lens and concentrate on a small part of the picture. This will magnify any detail in the frame and make the picture more visually stimulating.

Sahara Desert by Steve Davey

Light and Shadow

For good pictures you need the interplay of light and shadow, and a relatively featureless landscape isn’t going to create many shadows, especially if you shoot in the middle of the day when the sun is high in the sky.

There are a few ways that you can minimise this. Firstly, try to only shoot in the first and last hours of the day. The sun will be lower in the sky and will be more likely to cast shadows. It’s also likely to be softer and warmer. Also concentrate on details in the landscape; this might be a fold in the land that casts a shadow, or a lone tree.

Sahara Desert by Steve Davey

Lens and filter tricks

In order to boost the saturation in your picture, you can use a polarising filter. This can sometimes darken skies and also reduce tiny reflections on sand and rocks making them appear darker and more pronounced. The best way to see if this is going to work is to simply look through the viewfinder and rotate the filter. If the scene appears to darken, then the light is coming from the right angle for the filter to work.

Socotra by Steve Davey

If you can only shoot in the middle of the day then there are a couple of things that you can do to improve your shots. The effect of hazy midday light is more pronounced when shooting at a distance, so compose your picture to have an interesting object in the foreground. You can do this with a wideangle lens and have the object in the foreground and the horizon at the top of the frame. Another technique, if it’s very hot, is to use a telephoto lens to accentuate the heat haze. In this way you might even be able to show a mirage!

Don’t ignore the details

If the ground is parched and cracked then point the camera at the ground so that it fills most of the frame and have the horizon in the top of the frame for context.

Namibia by Steve Davey

When shooting an expansive landscape, don’t overlook the small details, such as a beetle scurrying across the sand or a plant struggling to survive in a parched land. Don’t shoot these from above, get down and shoot them from ground level and include the rest of the landscape as a background. This can either be in focus or out of focus depending on your depth of field.

Other useful techniques that you can employ are to compose the picture so that the landscape fills a small area at the bottom of the frame, and the rest is taken up with an expansive and interesting sky. You can also experiment with shooting into the light to create a misty and evocative image.

Botswana by Steve Davey

Steve Davey has his own exclusive range of travel photography tours to exciting parts of the world, including Morocco, India and South East Asia. Land arrangements are provided by Intrepid Travel, and Steve accompanies each tour giving detailled tuition and encouragement to help everyone improve their travel photography. More information on www.bettertravelphotography.com/phototours

Got any more advice to share? Tell us in the comments below.