Landscape Photography: How to simplify busy landscapes

[Music] so [Music] so as you can see it woke up this morning and it was snowing and it's kind of still late november so this is kind of unusual for us here we've got the car park at the top of the glen here and we've just walked up and the first thing that really caught my eye was this really isolated trees in the autumn grasses there and i think this is how i who i tend to see generally is that there are things that stand out you know there's lots of busy things around about us there's lots of trees there's lots of snow there's lots of grass there's an awful lot of stuff and this is the thing that can be so overwhelming in the landscape is that we come into it and we see everything and from a photographic point of view i think a lot of the time we're trying to find order we're trying to find something that stands out something that summarizes the hole without showing the hole and this is why i've got my tamron 150 to 600 here and i've zoomed in to something just short of 300 millimeters so between 250 to 300 millimeters and i've taken one wider shot because there was still some fog and stuff around the trees and it was creating a lot of depth and atmosphere but that fog is dissipating really really fast and now the scene is suddenly even just looking at the back of my camera here it's kind of descended into something busier again and somehow lost something of that aesthetic simplicity i'll just take another one and then what we can do is we can look at the one that we still had some fog and the one i've just taken where the fog is mostly gone to demonstrate how atmosphere simplifies low contrast simplifies some a difference between this and that simplifies the scene so i think this is going to be a bit of a theme today is that how can we simplify the landscape to make more articulate and [Music] cohesive images but ultimately i think the other important thing to remember is i'm out here with my wonderful wife and christine it's snowing well it's kind of almost raining now but you know it's just joyful to be out and this is what i've touched on in previous weeks is expressive photography is about feeling the passion for being in the landscape the photographs will come naturally to us it's not something we need to force so i'm not out here looking for scenes i'm just waiting for certain things to to sort of tap me on the head and say point your camera here so here we are back in the studio and this is the first scene that we were looking at there so you can see the bigger picture the trees isolated against those grasses the background this is looking at the whole glen really or the full depth of the glen and there's bits of it i like i mean i like the way the trees are isolated i guess the fog and the pine trees with the snow on them at the back all look really great and there's kind of ghostly oaks in the background but this foreground with these uh little birch branches in the front did bother me quite a lot and so i did then go in tighter and by doing so that birch in the lower left-hand corner gets a bit more out of focus and that will be very easy to clone out in photoshop um i have not worked these really i've given them a little tweak to make them look a little bit better than the raw files but they're not work files i want to focus on why i pointed my camera at them at the first place what it was that attracted me so this scene here we can see how beautifully the the two trees there are isolated against this beautiful foggy background and that is what i saw the golden grasses and i'll make a few little tweaks here i can punch up the warmer tones um create a little bit of a cool warm transition there i can brighten up some of the highlights just to make that fog really sing and quite quickly we can make an image that that feels pretty harmonious it sits in the frame well uh as it's normal for me or has been normal for me i do shoot a lot of squares um and a square format is a harmonious format it's you can put anything in a square anywhere in the frame and it's just about going to look okay so i'm really quite happy with this the next photo however this is the one i took there while i was talking and you can see as soon as the fog goes this area at the top loses that separation if i just pull up the two shots side by side we can see [Music] the one on the right there was the one with the mist and the fog and the one on the left the fog had moved through and i haven't moved the camera or the tripod that is just exactly where the the camera was set up the atmosphere in this frame on the right hand side makes it it really helps to isolate those subjects and to create a far more ethereal and the feel of the frame is entirely different i'm very attracted to atmosphere shallow depth of field fog you know that type of element and i really like how the way it simplifies the scene and really makes that subject that the trees and the grasses really sing there [Music] so what i'm looking at just now through the camera is a very very tight section of the river again you know 150 200 millimeters really really tight and there's just some ripples of the water a slight polarizer with my case magnetic polarizer here and then there was some nice warm light reflected in the in the water and it was creating this beautiful thing and as you can see from the slow-motion film the constant change of ripples and textures and negative space is hypnotic it's truly hypnotic and it really takes me back to the sort of pink floyd videos from the early 70s where they had these projections on a big screen of kind of oil and water and just the sort of randomness of that now you'll see uh with the number of frames that i'm showing here this is all of the frames i took uh at the the second scene here where the i'm zoomed right in on these ripples and this is probably about that size of water you know maybe 30 centimeters by 20 centimeters it's quite a very small area there but what you will see is that the randomness of the water flow i always shoot with a two second timer on my camera so you're not you're not shooting what you see almost you're shooting at what what happened two seconds after you decided to to push the shutter so there's a lot of randomness to this i found that whole situation of looking through the viewfinder at this incredible moving ballet of light and texture and color to just be entirely fascinating i mean it was really really beautiful but you have to expect that not many of the photographs are going to turn out to be aesthetically pleasing i mean some of them are going to be nicer than others what i've done is i've just highlighted the one here that i that i think is possibly the most successful um and by successful i don't want that to sound in any way sort of judgmental although i suppose it is um i think what i'm really meaning by that is that this pattern of ripples on the left-hand side the way this is sharper this area uh in the right-hand side there um and i may elect to to sort of crop this down a little into something even more panoramic you know just to consolidate the interest in this frame and i need to add a bit of clarity and texture just to sharpen up some of these ripples and then i'm happy to give this a good old boost of vibrance and find a color palette and again i'm just doing this super quickly i'm going to boost those and then pull down the blues a fraction so i want it warm so the warmth of the frame is going to suck you in and make it feel a bit more inviting but i don't want it too warm you know so that it feels forced in a way so fine-tuning that white balance is probably going to be the hardest job on here but um at the moment the aesthetics of that swirling rippling rib cage of water light there um i do feel very very appealing and i think this has got the makings of actually quite a nice photograph it might need to go a lot darker and then i'm going to use a brush to just highlight that area that's where the most detail is so if i'm kind of pulling the eye into the area with the greatest texture so that area on the right hand side is a little bit less in focus the area on the right hand side is a lot more in focus so i'm generally happier with this i do like that i'm starting to really like this sort of moodiness now me being a midi guy and there we go you know i'm kind of i think that's a really beautiful photograph but it's the randomness of that experience it's how it just sucks you in um so that you're you're just fascinated with the with what's going on and i think that's such an important part of landscape photography is that we allow ourselves to notice the tiny details in the landscape it's not always about the big picture of course sometimes it can be and we can photograph the big landscape if that is what is catching our eye but i do love this sort of serendipitous approach of just seeing something that you would never have thought of you know and and i really like this so now what i want to talk about a little bit just now is i used to have a member's channel here on youtube and i moved it in the summer to a private forum for people to subscribe to and it's a growing community of people who really want to express themselves in a unique and meaningful way now these photographs i'm making here are engaging and hypnotic and just suck me in they're just experientially incredible to witness and the but they might not be particularly popular on social media or you know they might be a bit odd or a bit challenging and one of the things we were talking about recently on a zoom session uh with the group was chaos and whether chaos is something that's inherent in the landscape or whether it's just our perception of it in the landscape and i think this would be a very good set of photographs to look at when we get back to the studio to really make a decision are they chaotic or is it just us thinking that they're chaotic because we can't find order in them if you want to check out the members forum there's a link in the description below it's a monthly or an annual subscription you can post your images there the community is incredible the feedback that everyone gives on photographs is incredible so if you want to surround yourself with like-minded expressive photographers who are really keen to further their own personal development through their art and creativity then i would strongly suggest checking out the expressive photography forum and you may find that you find a community there that is incredibly supportive that will help you grow as an artist and as a person back to my chaos i think one of the joys of coming into the landscape with an open mind is how to surprise yourself you know i i spent so many years of my life coming to landscape with a vision of what i wanted to achieve or ideas of what i wanted to achieve and that's great you know you can practice photography that way and you can make beautiful photographs but as i've become more expressive and more focused on my personal development and using my art to better myself to feel better about my life to feel better about my relationship with the landscape to get rid of expectation to get rid of judgment to be more accepting all of these things have led me to discover photographs that i wouldn't have made this particular scene behind me is just enthralling me you know it might mean nothing to any of you but to me it encapsulates the morning this beautiful pink light the snow the reflections the elements that are working together to create an aesthetic that i truly truly love and i would much rather put that on the wall than a big landscape i could look at this photograph or look at this short piece of film almost endlessly because it's a play of light it's a play of luminosity contrast color geometry atmosphere all the things i talk about in my books are personified in this very photograph and what better way to spend your day than just discovering new things about things you like and what the landscape can tell you about yourself and your creativity it seems like a no-brainer to me and i really really hope this stuff resonates with you because it's changed my life and i'm going to carry on here because it's beautiful so all in all i took quite a few shots of those reflections in the middle of the river there and i really found it a fascinating experience it was such a tight section of the river there it was uh you know really zoomed in almost to the maximum focal length of my 150 to 600 lens there and there was just this delicate transition of pink light cold light and slightly textured reflections of the trees versus the atmospheric blurry water and i've kind of focused in on um one of them either this one or i think it was this one yeah this one here obviously we're looking at something upside down and and i i did think about flipping it so that it becomes more like a very stylized uh landscape photograph of trees and and light but i feel the upside downness of this actually makes it more surreal and it really kind of sucks me in so let's just have a little look at what we can do to this to just highlight that atmosphere although really it's beautiful as it is this little pale patch there i would need to clone out in photoshop i think it is a distraction um and it's just something floating on the surface of the water and there's nothing you can do about that some of the others have more of that stuff floating about um and that is just something that is unavoidable if we look at this shot though there is a delicate beauty to it as it is i mean i have made a few little tonal adjustments but very very subtle we can't be very heavy-handed with photographs like this we have to be very very gentle because the the atmosphere that diffused soft ethereal feel to it would be destroyed if i was to be too heavy-handed with this so you can see we're having to make very very small adjustments you know if we do anything too dramatic you know it's going to massively increase the impact but we have to be very mindful about the contrast and the saturation in particular it's not something that we want to get too saturated i would say now because i'm i i am drawn to dark images i mean it's it's in my nature and as long as that darkness and mysteriousness is juxtaposed with that warm atmospheric glowing light then obviously i'm kind of happy for it to be there so it's just a case of looking at the overall contrast and tone until it sits right with me i i do like this a lot at this moment in my life and so i think i'll probably leave it like that what i'll do is i'll tidy up some of these things and we'll show the images at the end of the video here as a little slideshow i'll show all the images that we've worked today [Music] something we touched on right at the beginning of today was the difference between simplified scenes and complex scenes and i think this is a classic example of that in that when we walked down here that tree the fog had dissipated and the scene was a little bit cluttered what we're seeing now is as the fog is starting to roll in again is this old oak tree there is really getting isolated and i'm emphasizing that now with a shallow depth of field the minimum aperture of this lens at this focal length is 5.6 at 5.6 so it's not as bokeh or shallow depth of field as maybe an f 2.8 lens or an f 1.8 lens but even at f 5.6 that this magnification is blurring the background and there's also an area in the right foreground which are trees that are closer to us that are getting further blurred and what that's doing is creating a real sense of um focal isolation of the key subject which is the oak tree in this case so we've got this very very subdued muted color palette we've got low contrast the main subject is super clear and super isolated and as i move the frame around and either position the tree in the center or off to one side it changes the feel of the photograph it changes the amount of negative space versus the subject as it were and the feel of the image changes every little thing that we do to our photographs in the field and in processing changes how they feel and this is the beauty of expressive photography everything's valid nothing is off the table explore it get excited and be you and the final scene we we had look at today was this um oak tree isolated and it was actually something that anne christine saw while i was playing in the middle of the river there and she called me up thinking that it would be something that would make a lovely composition and of course she was quite right when we first got there the tree was just beautifully isolated in fog again and um it stands out beautifully the tones need to be tidied up it's a little bit on the cool side but that's something that's a really easy fix and as it's quite the other format i do like are more sort of panoramic formats and what i've done is i switched into a 16 by 9 aspect ratio and the one i'm going to look at just now is this version where the oak tree is really taking center stage but by including more of this right hand side it's allowed more out of focus foreground and background to create this atmosphere atmosphere is an incredibly important element in photography it can either be caused by things like falling rain snow sleet hail even ice flowing water fog low cloud any of those types of things are atmospheric elements and they're so important and that's really the theme of this video today is looking at subjects and how they're isolated by depth of field and atmosphere and i think what we've done is we've created a series of photographs that has so much atmosphere they feel airy and light and open and we are emotional people and at the end of the day atmosphere is an emotional element it's it's probably the most emotional element color and atmosphere if i was to quickly take this into um the develop module as i cool the photograph you can see it gets more austere it feels more um harsh it just feels a little cooler if we warm it up on the other hand you know and it doesn't have to be much the photo takes on a much more airy and because it's become a bit more neutral i think my preference is on the slightly cooler side but not too cool it's good if photographs can feel cool without being too cool i'm going to crank up that there and then pull down the blues again in there and what that's done is it's allowed a little bit of the richness of the the grass there to come through this those nicer warm tones again like the previous photograph if it gets too dark it's going to lose that atmosphere it's going to feel crunchier so i think this is a photograph where we need to be very mindful of the overall luminosity of the shot and even the openness of the shadows there there's nothing there's no blacks in this photograph if i were to crunch the blacks see what happens everything just gets heavier we're adding gloom and if you think about you know this is what i'm trying to say to you all the time every slider has an emotional consequence the blacks are adding gloom so we need to be very mindful of how black those blacks are going to be if we want to retain that atmospheric light-hearted and very emotionally uplifting style in this photograph so i hope you've enjoyed this little wander through the snowy glands of the west of scotland with christine and myself it's been a beautiful morning and what better way to spend the day than to be out and discovering beautiful things in nature the theme that we've just been working on now i'm not exaggerating it makes me want to be a better person i look at it and feel a sense of aesthetic beauty and harmony and light and energy and atmosphere and that just makes me feel better about myself because until i pointed my camera at it it was just a reflection on the water and now it's a piece of art and that is creativity that is spontaneous serendipitous joyful passionate creativity which is born out of my own imagination and vision if you want to embrace that concept then this is the channel for you to be on if you want to get better at seeing the world as you and to find things that are truly unique to your vision and your perspective and your values and beliefs and aesthetic preferences then please click the subscribe button here give us a thumbs up and a like because that's going to help us out and all we're trying to do is help you and i want you to feel as good about your landscape photography as i do tune in next time for more expressive landscape photography and uh yeah i'll be as surprised as you are the content because i don't know what it's going to be yet so thanks for watching have a great day wherever you are and yeah embrace your creativity and the joy of life take care [Music] you

Channel: Expressive Photography

Views: 21,566

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: dQOBGGGpxX0

Length: 27min 54sec (1674 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 05 2021