Understanding Light in Landscape Photography

[Music] light is the raw material of photography and while from a technical side it's the quantity of light the amount of light that enters a camera through the decisions that we make with the shutter speed with aperture through I so what I define the exposure what I want to talk about is the quality of light which is what gives the image its actual essence and for this video what I'm going to do is to break that down into three separate groups I'm going to be talking about golden light I'm going to be talking about blue light and I'm going to be talking about flat light now golden light is a kind of like that we get in the hours immediately after sunrise or immediately before sunset when the Sun is really low in the sky because it's lower and over the horizon the sunlight the actual light from the Sun has to pass through a lot more atmosphere before it reaches us and then it's journey through the atmosphere picks up a lot more dust and particles and things like that which gives them which gives that kind of like a lovely orange glow and the fact that the Sun is so low in the sky what it means is any textures in rocks and things like that are really going to be picked up and highlighted and really shown up in the kind of image that we're going to be making and then we've got a blue light which is immediately at when the Sun is just below the horizon so it's in the hours immediately before sunrise or the hours immediately after sunset now at this time of day because there's no direct light in the sky there's a lot less contrast what we do have is indirect light as the Sun which is now below the horizon the light is bouncing off the the atmosphere around it so from the sky from the cloud and basically giving us a much more even light and a much bluer light throughout the scene and then we've got a flat light which is basically what I'm going to be defined by in time during the middle of the day when the sun's in the sky but we can't see it because the weather is really overcast there's lots of thick cloud well because maybe we were in a place like in a forest or something like that below the canopy where the light doesn't penetrate and each of these three different kinds of light calls for a dip slightly different approach and different things work better depending on what the lights like and what kind of subject we're going to be photographing so let's have a look at some examples of images taken in the golden hour now one of the defining characteristics of this kind of light in the golden era is because the Sun is so low and close to the horizon the light is incredibly directional sweeping across the landscape creating lots of patches of light and shadow and it works particularly well when when the whole scene is side lit and that is really really nice when you're shooting in rural landscapes landscapes with lots of hills and texture as you can see this is an image taken in Tuscany and what we've got here is is a sense of swoops across the horizon from the from the left side of the image it's really creating lots of drama there's lots of patches of shadow and lots of patches of light and one of the great things about shooting these kind of scenes is kind of rural sense is that it really does bring out the most in grass and foliage and things like that you can see here there's a really beautiful warm glow of light but on the other side of the hill there's lots of shadow here so this kind of texture this contrast between light and shadow parts of the scene lit by the low Sun and other parts left unlit it gives a lot of depth and a lot more drama and impact to the image let's have a look at another example this is a bit more of an extreme example of the Sun being incredibly low this is very high up at about 4,000 meters on the bolivian altiplano on a Salt Lake and because we were so high because there was nothing on the western horizon the Sun the light from the Sun was streaming almost completely horizontally across this lake so you can see here what these are are ridges caused by the different plates of salt pressing together and pushing bits of salt up a few centimeters above the flat surface of the lake so because the Sun is so low whole patches of the lake are falling into shadow here and not touched by the Sun because they're being casted the light hitting these these really low lines of salt is not getting through onto the rest of the lake so this a you can see the Sun here is just kind of catching the tops of these lines of salt and because it's so warm and because it's the Sun is coming through the light there's so much atmosphere you get it's incredibly a warm golden glow here that sort of creates this really weird image and where it looks like almost liquid fire flowing across the lake but it's not at any other time of day you'd see that this is a uniform color it's just the interaction with a really low sunlight and the Golden Hour that's creating this kind of illusion now there are scenes that when you go pass it any other time of day they can appear really flat and inspiring but the golden are and the low light really creates a completely different scene like this scene of a tree in Tuscany now it's just a tree in the middle of fields but because of the low light casting creating these different levels of shadow and these different patches of light and really picking out the tree here it makes a whole scene seem incredibly different and much more photogenic here's another example again in Tuscany now the low-light is really just picking out the text you share creating the shadow is creating this depth creating a lot more contrast now I shot this scene this is the same scene just a few minutes later after the sun's gone below the horizon and what is fantastic sunset and a lovely sky the whole of the foreground just looks a lot flatter here there's no texture there's no depth it's just a massive green what really makes this scene work it's just that contrast between the light and shadow and just the Sun the low-light of the sound just picking out these trees here and giving them this lovely warm orange glow no it can also work fantastically well in the mountains now one of the things about being in mountains is because the horizon is so jagged what you find is that the Sun will illuminate parts of the landscape but other parts of landscape are hidden by the by the mountains creating lots of patches of shadow and this is particularly evident here you can see this is a scene from the Dolomites and again the depth is created here by the interplay of the other of the light and the shadow and that's also helped by the fact that it's quite a lot of clouds in the sky because clouds have a similar effect in the Golden Hour they put some sort of some parts of the scene is lit another parts are hidden in shadow by the clouds and again it's the golden hour so you can see the city the parts of the scene are lit like here or here in the foreground they lit in a particularly beautiful warm light which just is a whole scene a much more appealing look this is an example from Noi it's from water clay of beach now you can see that the whole of the foreground here is dropped into shadow because of a great big mountain that's off to to the left of me but the sensed a little bit above the horizon as you can see here on this rock at the back sounds just above the horizon the lights really low coming across a skate seat and just picking out this this this peak and really warm golden red light and that color is the only there during the golden era because the Sun is having to pass through so much atmosphere and it really warms up the light and also you can see because of the clouds on the horizon we've got this patch of shadow on the top of the peak which again it gives a whole scene a lot more depth and a lot more drama now an extreme example of that is here again and it's another shot taken from Bolivia we were very high up now any other time of day this was actually quite a flats in the mountains actually very beautiful and impressive but the whole of the brush in front of us is it was actually quite flat and brown and grey and not particularly interesting but just for a few minutes just before the Sun dropped below the horizon what happened was there's a lot of cloud in the sky which left a small gap so there's a gap just above the horizon and as the Sun passed through that gap it was below the line of the clouds but above the horizon so the Sun is streaming horizontally across a landscape and giving it this incredibly beautiful warm golden glow that only happened at this time of day and the parts of the cloud that are scattering the sky dropping other parts of the mountain here they're dropping it into shadow letting other parts be illuminated which gives a whole image a lot more depth and a lot more drama the golden arrow is just a fantastic time to shoot mountains this is another example the Sun had just risen here so what's happening is a few minutes before the whole scene was blue the light was really really blue but just as the Sun comes above the horizon what it does is it just paints the peaks here you can see just here and just over here just painting these Peaks with the first golden light the day and it's just warming up the light on those pics turn the snow a little bit pink which complements with with the pink in the sky but contrasts with all the blue in the rest of the scene in the foreground where the light hasn't yet fallen and this is another exactly the same thing now I shot this from the blue hour right through to the golden now in the blue hour the scene was a lot flatter but just as the Sun came up off to the left side of the picture what happens here is these Peaks painted and hit with this really beautiful side light just as the Sun comes up and it's a really warm light as the Sun passes so as the light passes through so much atmosphere and it really just makes a whole scene just that a little bit more appealing now when you find yourself out on the coast what I actually find is doing long exposures in the golden era for me personally it doesn't work doing long exposures of 30 seconds or a minute it is possible if you've got a really thick ND filter but it for me it looks quite unnatural when you have a really beautifully side lit scene and in those kind of scenes when I'm shooting water I'll much prefer to use slightly faster exposures of about a quarter of a second or half a second to give to show the movement of the water what I'll do is I'll contrast this with a scene with the same scene taken in the blue are about 50 minutes later with a much longer exposure but for me when you're shooting in the golden hour when you're shooting near the ocean quad river second half a second one second depending on how strong the light is works much better and in these kind of scenes when you're shooting and you can see here the Sun it's it's technically side lighting because the Sun is coming in from the side I'm shooting really wide here so I wouldn't call it backlit but you do have to be particularly careful because you can get a lot you can get a lot of flare as the light sort of interacts with the front element with the different elements in the front of the lens so you should be looking for something if not a lens hood then you can kind of move your account you can move your hand around the side of the frame and just start try to put a little bit of shadow cast a shadow on the front of the lens just to try to avoid getting any lens flare on so again this scene is side lit there's another example it's exactly the same thing the lights coming in from the side so it's really warm golden light that's hittin this peak and a shut this time of about a second here works particularly well now again a little bit later and I'll show this later on the video when the Sun had gone down and would we no longer in the Golden Hour we moved into the blue hour much longer exposures work much better this is a rare example of being able to shoot directly into the light during the Golden Hour we've actually been shooting from slightly to the side to try to keep the air to try to keep the the light out of the frame because shoot when you shoot into the golden into the Sun when the sun's are really not at the horizon what you're gonna do is there's lots of highlights now there are different ways around this you can try using filters but shooting directly into the Sun even with a thick three stop graduated neutral density filter you're still going to use highlights you can also try shooting multiple exposures which is a technique that also works quite well but if you're shooting a slightly longer exposure it can be a bit difficult because it's possible that the water of the clouds have moved between one exit one exposure and the other so I like to try to do the whole thing in one shot if possible now when you've got really thick cloud on the horizon that does give you the opportunity as in the Golden Arrow as the Sun just moves behind the low-lying cloud on the horizon as you can see here this is a sunrise and the Sun rose up we kind of went behind these clouds on the horizon what this gave me the opportunity to shoot directly into the Sun in one frame without losing highlights now another danger of losing highlights when you're shooting at this time of the day it's not just in the sky but also in the reflections in the water so you can use a filter in the sky which I'm using here but you can still start to lose detail in the water now I had to be very careful you can see just here where we started to get much brighter and there's a possibility of that part of the image burning out and losing detail which just looks very ugly and it's quite hard to pull it back in post-processing when the Sun hides behind the cloud it takes just a little bit of edge off the incredibly bright light so it's one of the few instances during the Golden Hour when it's possible to shoot directly into the Sun now his an image taken in the Sahara again I'm looking directly into the Sun here because I'm shooting so wide but even though I'm looking into the Sun you can still see that there's quite a lot of side light as parts of the dunes are lit by the Sun and other parts of the dunes I left dropping into the shadow it's created a lot of texture a lot of depth in this scene and the reason why I was able to shoot into the Sun here is because there was a sandstorm rolling in from the horizon so much cloud that a lot of the Sun was obscured and even though it's not crazy about this image of the Sun is a little bit too bright and the whole distribution of the highlights through the atmosphere which is really quite strange what it does is given it gives an example of how our early morning Sun can really pick out the different kind of textures the different shape and give so much more depth to an image now let's take a look at some examples of images taken in the blue hour now everything changes in the blue hour the Sun disappears below the horizon and takes with it a lot of the contrast where before we had that really low directional light casting you're cutting across horizon giving you lots of patches of light and shadow as soon as the Sun goes below the horizon that's completely gone but what you find is that the Sun as it's below the horizon it's bouncing up and reflecting light from the atmosphere across the whole the scene creating a much more evenly lit scene so while you do lose a lot of the contrast what you do get is a lot of warm color particularly in the sky now generally as I sing I find that these kind of rural scenes like in Tuscany work better in the golden air if you remember we looked at this one earlier this is exactly the set from exactly the same spot taken about 50 minutes later after the Sun had come up this is slightly earlier just in the blue hour before the sunrise and usually these kind of things I I really do feel that they work better in the golden hour than the blue hour because it's the contrast that really gives a lot of the depth but because of the mist here there's an extra element in the scene so it sort of helps the depth and gives us a little bit of compression because I'm shooting with a telephoto but we do lose as a contrast on the landscape so it gives you a very different interpretation of this scene now another example is this one which again this is taken in the in the Salt Lake in the earth planner this is before this is in the golden hour before the sun's gone below the horizon and this is in the blue hour so you can see the Sun still it's below the horizon but because this peak is so high it's still picking up just a little bit of light there but the whole of the rest of the scene is completely falling into the shadow and we're now into the blue hour the Sun is bouncing off the hourai off the sky and illuminating the whole scene which has completely changed the color of the foreground you can see before it was where we had the shadow in the golden light what we've got now is a much kind of more evenly magenta kind of light as the Sun diffuses it bounces around off the atmosphere and gives them much more evenly lit scene now this is an example again shot just after the sun's gone down no the golden now what happens here is is probably too much contrast this is showing Iceland in the black sand desert in the in the Highlands and this when the light starts to hit this blacks and you get incredibly high contrast really deep blacks really bright parts where the sun's reflecting off it but because the Sun Goes Down it's really given the whole landscape a lot more even softer lighting which works for this particular scene in the in the blue hour you still get a lot this lot of light in the sky and that ambient light that indirect light it still gives a lot of color to the scene I've got another scene from the mountains here again this is about 50 minutes after the sun's gone down there's no direct light anymore and while before the scene was actually impossible to shoot because the sky behind was incredibly bright and the peaks in front of fear were silhouetted against that kind of light so the contrast was so strong and consequently I couldn't get any detail in these Peaks couldn't get any depth and the whole image didn't work but as soon as the sun's gone down we get this much more even light which means that we can shoot more into the light and still get a lot more of the detail a lot more of the textures coming out even though they're not being picked out by those directional light they're much more even light of the bluer makes a whole scene much softer and work much better and you can still see that even though the light is no longer I wrecked the sides of the peaks here and and over here are still picking up the indirect light that's bouncing off the clouds and bouncing off the off the off the atmosphere back down onto the peaks this is a similar example of taken in Norway no the sunrise came up just it's almost in the frame here a little off to the right of the frame and what it meant was this peak in front of me was well didn't catch any direct light and it dropped into shadow a little bit and the whole scene had a little bit too much of a high contrast so I found that I preferred shooting this scene in the blue aisle without the direct light now at another time of year or another time of day when the Sun moves around in the sky and is picking out this rock in front of me then it would probably be great to shoot it in the golden hour but at this particular time of the year we were there in very early March and for sunrise the scene worked much better in the blue hour with a much more evenly lit scene and what it also allowed me to do was to to drop a neutral density filter onto the front of the camera and create a long exposure and really sort of blur out all the details in the water and blur some of the cloud movement in the sky again this is the scene that I showed earlier this is a shot on the same day this is in the golden hour you can see that the Sun is just on the horizon here so I was shooting it with about a half a second exposure - and a lot more drama and movement into the water but then when the Sun Goes Down and we enter into the blue hour we can shoot the whole scene in a different way now what happened here was I can move around the chapel a little bit and shoot directly into the light now I couldn't do that in the golden oh I'd have the Sun in the shot and that shirt the chapel would have been completely cut would have been dropped into the inter silhouette and if a lens flare going everywhere but because I'm now shooting into the blue are because the light is really even I can I don't really have to worry about losing highlights the whole scene is going to be much more evenly lit and I just captured a very different moon I'd have been able to use a long exposure rather than a half a second exposure which really captured the movement of the water here what I've done here is used a ligh exposure to blur the water out and just to give the whole scene a different feel now it's one not that one image is better than the other it's just that certain things work in certain kind of lighting conditions so for me and like exposures really helped to capture the mood of the blue hour and slightly faster exposures work much better in that lovely dynamic light and high contrast scenes that you get in the Golden Hour this is another example of the same scene shot in and the same day but in slightly different lights this is one that I showed you earlier in the golden era when the Sun is still up and the horizon is just before a storm came in so we got these lovely black clouds and are shooting with a half second or one second shutter speed and then as we got into the blue hour and the Sun had gone down about 15 minutes ago there was still plenty of light in the sky so there's still plenty of color but the light now is was non directional it was much more even so the whole scene is evenly lit I didn't have to worry about these rocks in the foreground dropping into shadow because they didn't have the light they weren't creating a lot of a lot of contrast with the Sun hitting them the whole scene is much more evenly lit and again it creates a much different mood to shoot with a much longer exposure this is an exposure of about a minute so you can see that the clouds are really blurred around there around the rock stack and the water is much more blurred and again it's not an either/or it's just a case of certain things certain scenes work much better this scene is it's a much Moody a scene it works much better with a long exposure shooting it in the Golden Arrow it's a very different scene it's a much more lively there's a lot more going on in the sky so you try to shoot the scene in the way that the light kind of dictates to you and then just one final shot this is again taken from taken in Norway and it's of the Rhine fjord this is taken again during the Bloor and quite often when you're shooting places with villages or some kind of urban setting and you'll get that kind of you'll get that moment when the lights come on but it's still not dark yet now the blue arrow is a really narrow period of day because as soon as a blue hour passes then it starts to get too dark and you don't get any contrast in the scene all the colour is drained out of the scene but for just that hour or depict maybe a little bit more depending on where you are in the world what the latitude is after the sun's gone down before it actually gets dark when you're still in Twilight Faison you're still in the blue our fees there's still plenty of color in the sky and it works particularly nicely when you've got a scene well you've got villages and you can see here so even though this it's still light some of the lights are start it's coming around the turn before it gets dark and there's still plenty of light and contrast and color in the scene finally let's have a look at some examples of images taken in overcast or really flat light now generally overcast and cloudy weather is considered to be pretty poor for landscape work everything looks a lot flatter and washed out and there's not really any contrast or depth but flat overcast light can really work well in some particular scenes and locations for example it's great for shooting waffles when strong light gives too many highlights and shadows in the water and creates too much contrast you get these incredibly bright spots which you'll reflect in the sunlight this shot is a good example of that because these waterfalls are actually facing south someone said any other time of day if the sun's hitting them it's creating too much contrast too much like too many highlights it's very difficult to shoot but in an overcast cloudy day which is actually really quite common when you're shooting when you're photographing and ice and waterfalls really do work much better now another example of that is here this is another waterfall in Iceland it's taken right in the middle of the day now I'd have loved to have come here in the golden hour and I'd have left have come here in the blue ion shot it with lots of color in the sky but will you're here in the middle of the afternoon and the cloud was really thick and heavy there's little spots of rain coming in but you could still actually make a scene that work because overcast light again it's got some characteristics that are quite similar to the blue out in that you get much more evenly distributed light so you don't have as much contrast you don't get that wonderful shadows and highlights that you get in the kind of images that are shown in the gold in our section but you do get a much more even light which works in particular cases now here the landscape was incredibly green and this kind of flat light is really bringing out that color and giving it a kind of subdued effect that really fits with this particular scene in with this particular mood now again I'm not saying that this wouldn't work but wouldn't work well in the golden hour and the blue but it actually also works when you've got thick overcast cloud the kind of light really does help with this kind of scene which really fits with the mood and the atmosphere that I was trying to get another example of that is here now this is a really common sunset location in Norway and again when we went here we were hoping for have really beautiful colored skies or some really dramatic sunset light that was that would pick out this this peak and the last light of day in the golden hour but it never really happened but on one particular day we were driving past here right in the middle of the day but there was lots of cloud in the sky and the flat light was really sucking almost all of the color out of the landscape so he created an entirely different effect which worked really well so what I was trying to do in this particular scene was look for textures and look for ways of enhancing that kind of overcast flat mood and giving the image depth in different ways because I didn't have the golden light and those textures and that directional light to play with and I didn't have the lovely warm colors that you often get in the blue ah so it's all about making the most of the almost monochromatic scene and looking at textures trying to keep the image as simple as possible and fit the scene to the particular mood of the lighting that I was getting at that particular time now another example of that is here in Scotland now this is a really famous sunrise location and it must be fantastic to grow up there at sunrise see the Sun come up in the east and paint these rocks and the old man of storr with a wonderful golden light as a horizontal directional light sweeps across a landscape and you get all these wonderful texts just picked out and if you're lucky you get lots of color in the sky you know I hiked up there for two sunrises and I never once saw any light and whatsoever on both of those occasions it was really foggy and mystic but it didn't also hike up there in the middle of the afternoon to scout the location and because it is such a wonderfully dramatic location I decided to take a few shots because we had this really heavy overcast cloud and there was very high winds so the clouds are racing across the sky so what I thought I'd do is just to see if I could fit that mood that really flat even light that really heavy dramatic sky fit that into the scene so even though this was shot in the middle of the day the scene actually works I dropped it into black-and-white because this has taken some time around March or April there's nothing really happening in the grass it was this kind of dirty yellow again in the Golden Hour with the Sun had been coming in horizontally that would have actually turned quite golden and would have been a lovely warm texture but under this light it really wasn't working so one technique that really does work when you're shooting in the middle of the day and flat overcast light is to is to either desaturate the image as I did in the in the previous shot that I showed you from Norway or just to turn the image into full black and white and really work on it really sort of try to bring out the textures and bring out the mood of the scene which really quite works quite well here in monochromatic light there's another example of that here which again it was a really flat really overcast and I think particularly happening in the sky would have been normally the golden hour but the cloud was completely obscuring the Sun so what I did was just really focused on the texture on creating a really long exposure and trying to fit the mood of the scene the mood of the light to the mood of the scene and just composing to get lots of text even though I don't have the texture from the directional side light there's still quite a lot going on in the foreground and just using that kind of monochromatic blue feel that the that the overcast light was creating on the scene just one final image is this one taken in the Sahara now this contrast with this image that I showed earlier which has this golden light it's a wonderful directional light which creates a lot of contrast and depth among the sand dunes whereas this image was taken in the middle of the day and the really heavy cloudy conditions there was no directional light there was nothing really there to give drama to the scene there was no point using color so again I focused on the texture I focused on the line and the form and tried to fit the mood of the scene that I was seeing in front of me into the wet weather that I actually had at the time and just created this much more abstracting not worrying about the depth not worrying about the contrast just concentrating on the actual line and the shapes within the image so that's it for this video really now as a landscape photographer I'm always going to be excited by a wonderful dynamic light and colourful skies but the reality is is that we don't get to choose the weather or the light that we have so one particularly one of the things when you're on a photography trip is if you've only got a few days in the location it can quite often be the case that you don't get that wonderful golden light or that wonderful sunset and the blue that you pre-visualize so one of the things that you need to do is to be able to look at the scene look at the light that you're getting and then see how you can fix those two things together how can you reflect the lighting conditions that you have with the scene that you're looking at and seeing if you can find ways to create mood and through practice we can quickly get a feel for how these things are interacting together how the light is interacting with the landscape and consequently how we can best shoot it now how it can best make use of the light that we've got okay that's it for this video I hope it's been useful I hope it's been interesting once again if you have any questions just please drop me a comment and thanks for watching and as ever take care you

Channel: Andy Mumford

Views: 71,653

Keywords: landscape photography, light, using light, golden hour, blue hour, norway, iceland, italy, dolomites, tuscany, lofoten, photography techniques, landscape photography tips

Id: XEQc7sovu00

Length: 30min 5sec (1805 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 30 2018