Landscape photography - How to compose in flat light

hi everyone and welcome to express photography i'm alistair ben um as promised we're going to go back to the workshop that i was running a few weeks ago and have a look at some of the photographs but in today's video i want to specifically talk about how to compose in flat light now it's one of those things when you're running a workshop and people have invested quite a lot of money or traveled a long way and taken time off work to come to the west of scotland and obviously we can't guarantee good weather and what we can guarantee though is lots of moodiness and empty space so on the very first day of the workshop we arrived at this first beach and it seemed really empty and the light was quite flat and what we have to do in those circumstances and part of my job as an educator is to look at what is there and try and work out how we can create photographs in that environment to kind of engage and to get excited about because i think that's one of the really important things is that we can look at a scene that superficially looks quite flat or uninteresting or there's not an awful lot going on or there's no dramatic light and everyone's thinking when's it going to kick off are we gonna get some god beams are we gonna get some warm light and when that doesn't happen it's too easy to leave the scene feeling deflated and just kind of underwhelmed by the whole thing almost as if we've wasted our time and that as an expressive photographer is cardinal sin number one leaving the landscape feeling disappointed because it hasn't delivered our expectations i think that's a huge error that i've fallen foul of in the last couple of decades but i don't fall fell off now so i can look at these images and it's not about the absence of great light it's the presence of what we did discover so what we're going to do today is we're going to dive into my lightroom catalog have a look at the photographs that i made during the whole session look at why i pointed my camera at them dissect them look at the compositions and then what i'll do is i'll choose a couple of good candidates and then i'll actually work them off camera and we'll show them at the end of the video here now one of the things about the western isles is that superficially you can arrive at these locations and they just seem empty and desolate and that's part of its charm is that that feeling of space and now when the light is flat uh it can feel a little bit intimidating and it can feel a little bit low in energy so let's dive into my lightroom catalogue and we'll start with the very very first scene now i have a confession to make i had come into this workshop having not photographed for months you know really really i'd hardly photographed at all and i've talked about this in the last couple of videos that was feeling a bit rusty and a bit out of sorts um so took me a while so i made my first image at 9 12. this the sun probably came up about 8 20 something like that so about quarter past nine i was starting to make photographs and we actually were at that beach from 9 12 until about 11 33 and during that time i made about 20 photographs so on this particular day i decided that i was going to shoot with my la wa 12 mil prime i wanted to find foregrounds that were going to fill the frame and you can see in this first scene if i go into the develop model module and click the the crop overlay this is the third line so there's only about a sixth of the frame it's actually sky and i like this backdrop i mean the the backdrop on this particular beach is beautiful it's very iconic it's a very famous place um this is looking over to the luskin tyre area on the isle of harris and this is the type of photograph where it looks superficially very very flat but quite quickly if i add a little bit of a cool to warm transition you know maybe just introduce a little bit of warmth to that beach because the light was very cool and lighten things up a little bit and the top is a little bit too blue you know very quickly we can i can kind of understand why i was pointing my camera at it and if i add some contrast to that foreground you can see the beautiful patterns in there and it was a beautiful foreground and quite quickly we can see if we compare the before and after there we can see that we've brought out quite a lot of that interest in the foreground and i can certainly understand why i pointed my camera at it it feels very spacious those lines they move up from the bottom right up to that seaweed lying on the beach and then it curves around and takes us back into the top of the frame where the surf adds some luminosity so what we're probably going to be looking at a lot today is the five triggers luminosity contrast color geometry and atmosphere they're the five things that are always going to engage me in the landscape so quite quickly i realized that there were things on this beach but we had to be a little bit more creative i suppose in finding them the next scene i focused my attention on was this one and you can see the image on the left was taken about 20 minutes before the one on the right and during that 20 minutes the light did develop slightly there was a brief period where the clouds weren't quite as thick the sun was exerting a little bit of influence on the scene and you can see just that difference it's made we've gone from a kind of blue hour feel or a very flat blue feel to a much much warmer and definitely more inviting scene now how we emotionally respond to compositions is massively important and we take our cloudy skies into the landscape with us even though it was kind of flat like our mindset is the thing that's going to shape our experience if we go in thinking ah there's no great light or there's no there's no good compositions here or there's no energy or dynamics that is what we'll find however if we go in feeling open and interested in the landscape we're far more likely to find something to engage with i'll look at this image on the right now in a little bit more detail and to kind of highlight what it was about the scene that caught my eye and why i think it's a reasonably successful photograph so i've i've made videos in the past about shooting in flat light and one of the things i always recommend is that if the sky isn't doing much finding a foreground with lots of interest in it is a really good way to engage people and i think we've been quite successful here this red rock in particular the the beautiful um colors in this uh this rock are really engaging i think there's just something very beautiful about it and then that dark patch and then there's a peel if i zoom in a little bit you know it really is a very attractive boulder and again because i'm using a 12 mil prime i'm right on top of this scene i mean and probably the camera is only maybe less than a meter above these rocks so everything's just exaggerated and stretched um but there's not a there's no distortion on the horizon it is a brilliant little lens my favorite favorite 12 mil lens ever um and i will definitely work this image for the final scene but what i want to do is kind of look at what i've done to make what i consider to be a nice composition so in flat light we're we're losing contrast we're losing that dynamics we've got no shadows which is a positive in many cases and we lose that kind of sense of three-dimensionality so what i've wanted to do here is to use transitions to create movement through the frame and how we can journey through the frame so first of all i've anchored the bottom left hand side of the frame using this strong pointed rock so that's a very strong indicator of it's like an arrow pointing into the frame i've done the same with the right hand side so both the corners are kind of very solidly anchored so the composition feels very grounded it takes us into this nice pale boulder and then because the the red dynamic rock is kind of left of center and it is really kind of quite strongly on a thirds line it's very very close to that third point it's it becomes the anchor of the whole photograph is that red rock so when we come to process it that red rock has to be very very prominent we then have this rather nice meander that kind of drifts out somewhat vertically but there are some angles in there as well so we're using the geometry to take the eye left and up and again we've got this convenient breaking wave here the surf line and then we've got a pointed uh peak there on the island and then taking us into this distant very hazy mountains of north harris and then finally we have this other point coming in from the right hand side so the whole thing is contained by geometry and then these angles that we're creating within the composition so i'm very very happy with this one and i think once it's been processed we have some very very good opportunities to make something that feels three-dimensional that has depth that has transitions from warm to cool from dark to light from textured into atmospheric so there's a whole bunch of things we can do to this photograph and it's not about making it a glorious sunrise photograph it's about making it the best that it can be i'll probably tidy up some of these little seaweed patches that have been washed up onto the beach there the tide was actually coming in um but there was some debris on the beach and obviously we need to just i i would just clone those out but we will come back to this one but i will just very very quickly demonstrate one thing which is if i pull up a gradient here and add some clarity to the foreground you will very quickly see how it increases that sensation of depth by making the foreground more tactile more close more immediate giving it detail giving it texture giving it contrast giving it some luminosity even giving it a tiny touch of saturation all of those things make it feel closer and if i just quickly compare that with the image on the left which is the the the raw file you can see how very very instantly the one on the right feels more three-dimensional and with more depth obviously i was there teaching and i had a client with me and you know i'm very very focused on him and helping him with his compositions and and discussing the meaning and feeling of what he was trying to do but during the during the time between leaving him to do his own thing i would wander around and i did find another couple of compositions this one is similar in feel it's anchored on the left by that another big strong red rock um but it doesn't have any anchor on the right apart from the contrast in the scene so what i'm just going to do with this one is just very quickly add a bit of luminosity and contrast and you will see that the image comes to life we we're adding light we're bringing up the luminosity and what that's going to do is going to increase the saturation in that red rock which will increase that feeling of a red to blue because the background is bluish the shadows and those peaks are quite blue so we're creating this warm anchor to a blue distant horizon which is always going to take the eye through the frame i quite like this one too i think this has got potential i did go with a longer shutter speed here uh i don't know why it's not showing 120 seconds so two minutes um so that's created a very smooth uh ocean there so it's lost a bit of that dynamics that we had in the previous scene with the rolling waves and so forth there was another couple of scenes this one is also a similar feel um and again it's really just a case of understanding that we have a warm rock in the foreground something warm and engaging we've also got a nice kind of arrangement of rocks i like the way this meanders out to the left here and then pulls this back right there's a little bit of oddness going on with the the way the horizon is on this scene because the island uh it's not actually horizontal is it it's leaning in slightly so we end up with this very odd situation we're trying to find a perfect um a perfect straight horizon can be quite awkward you can see that the ireland kind of pulls in because of the the slight uh the way it's it's curved really but again this is another scene that i think could be quite a beautiful photograph [Music] but it's more spacious again leading us out into space the others you know i'm always going to just point my camera things that interest me i've put on my tamron 150 to 600 here and i've zoomed right into this point of light i did mention this image a couple of sundays ago um looking at you know this the type of thing that catches her eye likewise with this the more space we have the the more air the more ocean the more calm the images are going to feel i will always focus in on details to try and explore um textures color relationships i mean here we have a bit of a cool to warm going on the ocean is slightly cool the rocks are slightly warm if i add a little bit of contrast there with the colors you can see we end up with a little bit more in the way of a cool to warm transition so i'm i'm always open to pointing my camera at anything and you wouldn't think that this was taken on a flat light day now this type of thing isn't everyone's cup of tea i appreciate that you know photos like this take you know they're not the same as a big open landscape to be to be sure but there's still things that i'm happy to point my camera spend some time with explore visual relationships uh look at the influence that time has on the scene so there's an awful lot of things that are keeping my mind ticking over and a lot of it's playing you know really it's just play i did settle near the end here on another scene which i did quite like now again this is definitely one where the horizon of the island is going to make it look kind of funky so it's almost worth leveling the island just so it feels more rational i know for a fact that that is now not level uh compared to how i photograph that i'm very meticulous in the field would make sure my camera is level all the time but on this particular case just leveling the island a little bit is going to make it feel better now i'm very interested sometimes to to explore the influence of contrast and just to see what's going to happen if i just crank up the contrast now trying to find a neutral color in these scenes can be very very difficult in flat light the light is always going to be bluish there's always going to be a bluish feel but there are some warm tones in here and it may be worth exploring that by adding a tiny bit of warmth and light to that foreground and as soon as we introduce because the sand underneath the water i mean this is the color of the beach rather than making the whole image warmer if i just use the foreground sand and lift up the feel of that it's had quite a profound effect on the overall scene we've created contrast color contrast all of these different types of contrast i discuss them in great length in my luminosity and contrast ebook and also my color of meaning ebook these are things that i dive into very very deep uh for those of you who are still interested i do have the 25 discount i've decided to extend it right through december until boxing day the 26th of december um it's just a thank you for everyone who's subscribed to the channel who's discovering our expressive photography work and the type of concepts that i'm delivering here emotional engagement with landscapes and how to understand landscapes better and how to accept landscapes better so if you want to use that cyber 25 discount code it's going to be valid until the 26th of december i think one of the most important things when we're out with our cameras is to be accepting of the conditions that are there there's nothing worse than going into a landscape thinking about how amazing it's going to be and how awesome it's going to be and then the conditions don't deliver during that 9 10 day workshop we had very little great light most of it was quite flat quite subdued but we're out in the field every day making photographs engaging with the landscape and feeling good about the days we're spending in the landscape coming away from a scene like this and feeling energized and and as if you've given your brain a workout and you're you're challenging yourself is a really excellent thing to do it's a really powerful way to spend our time so i think when we're composing in flat light the key takeaway from this video should be if the if the sky is quite flat and uninteresting that's partly perspective it's not it's not uninteresting to itself i mean the clouds don't care um but our perception of it may be it's a bit flat it's a bit uninteresting and one of the things that is a really good thing to do is to [Music] think about having less sky in the frame here i have about a quarter of the frame is made up of sky which means three quarters of the scene is basically foreground and mid-ground and even some of the background now what that's doing is it's throwing all the interest into the front of the frame which really engages the viewer and as long as we can process this to make it feel engaging because otherwise why have we filled 75 of the frame with it and i think that is the key and i will process these and we'll show a slideshow at the end of the video like i said the takeaway from this is that we take our cloudy perspectives into the landscape with us the beach is a beautiful beach the mountains are beautiful mountains the sky was lovely and atmospheric and the rocks and the geology were providing this story of time and location you know these rocks would have been dropped down that beach by a by a glacier at some point maybe 60 or 70 000 years ago so at the end of the day there's a story here the water flowing through there was a lock behind us that was draining and that's basically what these little channels are so for a seemingly flat and un interesting location i'm very very happy with this photograph so what i'll do is i'll get to work on those now we'll add them at the end of the video and i hope you find them engaging and interesting and of course you've taken something away from the video uh thank you to everyone who's been subscribing to the channel recently we've had this massive growth over the last month um and it's just incredible to to have a bigger audience and more people appreciating expressive photography and the benefits of expressive photography so thank you very much for that it is always hugely appreciated um if you have anything to say about these compositions please dive into the comments i've been really enjoying reading your comments from the last couple of videos um and we've had a couple of really good discussions kicking off as well so thank you very much as always for that um right i better get my processing boots on and we'll see what we can do with these photographs and hopefully you will enjoy what you see join us on sunday for some more expressive photography and uh yeah thanks very much for watching take care now bye [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Expressive Photography

Views: 9,760

Keywords: Lightroom, Photography, Alister Benn, Landscape photography, how to, tutorials, composition, educate, expressive photography, barriers, vision, experience, tutorial, lesson, be better, happy, motivation, inspiration, inspire, Luminosity, Processing, Understanding light, Light, landscape, emotion, personal development, contrast, Transitions, Adobe, creativity, abstraction, local, dodge and burn, masterclass, Kase Filters, Wolverine, Magnetic, K9, Grads, Polariser, remote, learning to see, seeing, looking

Id: FutRMRXs0hk

Length: 23min 40sec (1420 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 08 2021