7 SIMPLE composition TIPS for WOODLAND PHOTOGRAPHY

so in this video what i'm going to do is talk through my process of how i find and photograph compositions in woodland like the one i took in this beautiful area here where i walk pedals [Music] different mysteries full of mixed with tease we are happy most of [Music] through the ups and downs we [Music] okay morning everybody and fantastic to see you all again so i am at kanik chase which is a new woodland for me and i thought it'd be really good to show you how i go and explore a new woodland and look for compositions so i'm going to go and have a look see what i can find and hopefully we might get a little bit of rain and a little bit of atmosphere because at the moment it's fairly flat light so what i want to do is try and talk about some tips that i can share about how i go about looking for woodland compositions because it is really difficult um i i find it's one of the most difficult compositional challenges i think in photography because it's quite chaotic woodland photography so i've got a few things that i look for and one of them the first one is framing so trying to think about how the trees that you're trying to shoot are framing the scene and that could be maybe one or two trees or just some opposing trees and how they're working together to frame the scene and and these are tips they're not like rules you don't have to have all of these things to make a good photo but i find that if you can get these then it can be a good way of creating something really special i've just spotted something over here which looks really good there's three trees i think just work together as a group of trees but they also frame really well together so we'll go over there have a look at it and i can take the shot i've got these three trees over here you can see um there's one sort of silver birch where you can see the silver of it on on the left-hand side there's another one um just next to it going straight up and then that one sort of frames the top of the image because the the the sort of branch of that goes over and then that leads into the third one in the background that you can see that the leaves are just sort of backlit a little bit now the light's not perfect on this but really it's it's more about trying to find compositions and having the perfect lighting conditions because the lighting conditions aren't right now so what i want to do is try and find those compositions that ultimately i can come back to um and and check out as well in lightroom afterwards and then come back to when the light's a little bit better so this looks good i've got the shot and we'll talk about some other framing shots as i walk around [Music] so one of the most important things in woodland is distractions and making sure that you don't have too many things that are distracting within your shot you want the viewer to be looking at the things that you want them to look at and not be distracted by things you don't want them to look at and you can see as i walk through this woodland here it's a beautiful woodland there's some really nice old silver birch and the bracken have changed color but above me there's the sky and you can see there's a definite line between the tree line and the skyline and that doesn't look great your eye immediately goes up into that and it's one of the things that you can do really easy by composing your shot differently for instance in this shot i could make it as a pano or i could zoom in a little bit and get rid of that sky but the best thing that gets rid of that and helps to blend the sky in it's fog and it's one of the reasons i like fog so much it's not that that fog is just creating layers and depth to the image but it's helping to blend together those bright areas in the sky that you often get in woodland but on a day like this we haven't got fog and we've got the the sky that's those white patches it's all about trying to find compositions that totally exclude the sky i think it's starting to rain that's good keep going okay so first of all i'd say that i struggle with woodland photography and i think anybody that does woodland photography struggles so all the photos you see that are great take a lot of time and effort to find and i'd also say again that the conditions that i'm in today where we've not got any wet foliage and there's no fog makes it more difficult but i have found something here that's really interesting so i thought i'd talk about this because it it shows two tips in one really the first one is making sure that the foliage at the bottom of the frame so the foliage that we've got sort of down here is is interesting so i've got this this um fern here and then i've got a green fern just on this trunk here which looks really good so so making sure you've got something at the bottom that's not too distracting maybe you've got a little bit of interest but sort of leads right into the scene is important and then the other tip which you're showing on this one is making sure that your branches or your trunks are aligned in a way that's pleasing so you know it's sometimes difficult to stop them all being crossed over but really what you want to try and do is not have multiple crossed over trunks because sometimes just moving left or right just a little bit can make a difference so i'll show you if i just take this off you can see that if i if i just moved this way then that just actually opens up that trunk in the background and you can see that where it was before the trunk is hidden in the background so you've either got to be here where it hides the trunk or here where it shows that tree in the background but you don't really want to be here where that tree in the background is becoming entangled in the foreground tree and making the scene look a little bit more complicated so what you're trying to do is declutter this chaotic scene this chaotic woodland scene and by moving your camera just small distances like this can make such a big impact on the composition of a woodland scene [Music] so one of the things that i like to look for in woodland is contrasts so that might be contrast between colours or contrasts between textures or shapes and in this case behind you can see that there's this really old really interesting oak tree and it's got a contrast of bark so there's some bark on this side of it that's probably dying off i should think so it's gone a little bit lighter it's catching the light really nicely and then that contrasts really well with the dark bark of the oak and then also we've got the straight um silver birches contrasting with the twisted silver oak in the background i shot another shot here as well that also shared that contrast of the oak and the curly nature of the oak limbs and the straight nature of the silver birch and i think sometimes that contrast within an image can produce something really powerful as you can see in this one that i shot a few days ago [Music] [Music] [Music] so one of the things i find in woodland photography is it's really important to have a central character like groot here and if you can have a character something that you can compose that composition around then it just adds something special to that composition and it doesn't have to be something like groot which is pretty amazing isn't it it could just be a broken branch or just a dead tree or a tree with some strange limbs or a tree that's got some contrast to the other group of trees around it but having that central character can really set off your woodland photos okay i need to take a picture of groot now it looked good i think with some fog here as i say with all my woodland shots but be wrong let's take a photo of him [Music] i'm back in my studio now and i had a great morning just looking around that new location down in staffordshire and just trying to find some compositions um when i go to a new location i i always feel that there's loads of potential there with woodland photography i think there's just so much to photograph that sometimes you get a bit your mind gets a bit boggled by all the different compositions but the more you go to a location the more you find um better compositions i find but the conditions weren't great then it was dry foliage and there was no atmosphere no fog no mist no low cloud or anything like that but i really enjoyed it and i think i've got some good compositions to go back to and hopefully you found um that useful in terms of the way i go about looking for compositions in woodland there's a few other things i just want to talk about as well but um what i wanted to say as well is that my woodland photography um just like all my elements of photography particularly my woodland photography has only progressed i'd say in the last sort of five years um prior to that i didn't shoot a lot of woodland and it was a big learning curve for me when i started shooting it and i found it at first when i went into woodland i used to just enjoy walking through woodlands it was very relaxing for me um you know it's a good way of de-stressing just taking my time just wondering through the woodland and and just enjoying the moment really but then when i started taking more photos in woodland um i found it just fantastic because i felt like i had a little bit more time in woodland than when i go and take a sunrise or a sunset you know quite often the conditions stay the same for a longer time um not always the case but quite often they do so i feel like i can slow down relax take my time and just take in that sort of atmosphere in the woodland which i find really really great you know and eventually i started to improve you know if you looked at the first shots i took of the enchanted oak image then you know they weren't great i knew it was a good spot but i went back there multiple times before i finally got you know that that image that i really liked in the summer this year it's the same in many places if you look at this shot here this was a shot that um i i shot at the same time actually as i shot this image um and and the difference is that it's just a few meters back and because i i'd gone and i walked through this woodland all the time with pebbles it means i can start to spot things that are probably not so obvious and i wanted to point this one out because i think it's got a lot of elements that combines the sort of things that i was speaking about so it's got an interesting tree this beech tree here but i didn't want to show the whole beach tree mainly because i didn't think it was quite as interesting above but i think it leaves a little bit to your imagination about this big tree sort of over the the woodland there's this broken arm of this beech tree here which is a bit of the story and then we've got this silver birch in the background but then other trees as well we've got this fern that's changing color and i think all these things add up to make something that's quite interesting but what really makes it is the fact there's a little bit of atmosphere there and we've got this light area that your eye sort of goes through to and that's quite a good thing i didn't speak about that having a light area within an image that your eye can go through into can really help out your your woodland photos just like this one here is a good example of that where you've got the path leading to that light area i've got another one in fact there's another one in in my calendar did i say i had a calendar i might have mentioned it a few times but yeah there's another one in my calendar that is a good example of that so we've got this here and we've got this this light area just just here i'll put it down here so you can see a little bit better so we've got this light area here and that sort of draws your eye through so so having an area in the middle that's a bit lighter can create depth and allow your eye to draw through the woodland in into that which which can be really really good i wanted to go back into the woodland um into a different woodland in a minute and just talk to you about one other thing which is shooting when there's a little bit of light in the woodland because i didn't i didn't talk about that because obviously i didn't have those conditions but before i do that i want to tell you about um a new course bundle that i i'm part of it's called the five day deal and you might have heard of it before but it's it's a really really good deal i heard about it for the first time a couple of years ago and it's basically a bunch of professional photographers that have got together and um and and we all put in a course and then we sell that course as a bundle but try and do it as cheaply as possible so we put all these courses together i think the total value is almost three thousand dollars and and we're selling it for 89 and donating 10 percent of that as well to charity it's a brilliant thing um i've got a new course that's just exclusive to that which is all about shooting landscapes in all different types of lighting conditions so go and take a look at it the link's in the description there's also some fantastic videos from people like nick page mass peter everson who does this brilliant stuff on time blending in photoshop and then also ryan dyer who is an amazing landscape photographer talks a lot about how he processes astro photo images absolutely amazing amazing stuff but there's i think there's over 22 courses in there for eighty nine dollars it's it's a steal basically so go and check it out the link's in the description and it's just for the next five days okay we'll go back into the field now if you've liked the video so far please give it a like it massively helps me and helps the algorithm of youtube to promote the video to other people and if you're not subscribed then i'll click the subscribe button below okay back out to me in the field with a bit of light so what i like to do when the sun's out like this is try and find some backlit leaves like this and if the sun's just coming through and casting on them you also get some nice shadows the leaves start to look good and it can look amazing especially if you get a little bit of mist like we're lucky enough to have this morning pebbles is tied out right but the key thing is try and do it when the sun's low and shoot into the sun and not with the sun behind you because if you shoot with some behind you then you get shadows cast on the branches and it really doesn't look great [Music] okay that's it i hope you've enjoyed it until next sunday when i'll be talking about an amazing 250 000 subscriber giveaway bye paper kites carrying dynamite we are in full bloom

Channel: Nigel Danson

Views: 93,088

Keywords: photography, landscape photography, photography tips, woodland photography, how to shoot woodland, woodland photography tips, landscape photography tips, nigel danson, nigel danson photography

Id: Ik6-hmQ_qQI

Length: 18min 32sec (1112 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 18 2020