Landscape photography

We shall start with a good example, it’s always best to start off on the right foot!

When photographing a Landscape composition is the biggest thing you should be thinking about. Have a good look through the view finder. What are you photographing? is it obvious, what might be obvious to you might not to others and when you show your friends they see something else you will get all offended!

The photograph above has hopefully followed the rules “Rule of Thirds” a little anyway 😀

This is a bad landscape

I was photographing the mountains can you tell? You can’t? You thought I was photographing the field or maybe the sky, who knows eh. If you like soil you will love this photograph. For me this is a bad example of a Landscape I have no idea what the subject it, I am just looking at the soil which pulls my focus and then I see sky, the heavy row of trees distracts from the mountains behind it’s all just wrong!

Then you see a beautiful mountain sticking out like a pin on a cushion it’s amazing  so you photograph it.

You’re caught in the moment, forgetting pylons and weather stations on top of beautiful mountain, the grass in the lower part of the photograph is distracting.

Slow down! Look around you, relax. Unless you are in a mad rush you’re better off taking your time and coming home with 2 amazing pictures then none at all. The way I was taught was imagine your photo in print does it look the way you want it to?

 

These are the French Pyrenees we were on route to Lourdes which is an extremely weird and wonderful place!

Taken on an Olympus E3 using the 50mm-200mm lens at ISO 100

 

 

Portable photo studio

This is a very quick run through on my new toys.

I bought THIS mini portable studio from Amazon. It’s quite good, it comes with different coloured backgrounds White – Black – Red and Blue  the blue and black are velvety on one side

I’ve used it for the very first time this morning.

Set it up, it comes with two lights which get to almost volcanic heat in about 5 minutes and smell like they are melting.

 

Set up

 

The elephant was to dusty so I um got something else LOL

I’m really not good with lighting. Fine with a flash,practice will of course help, and the books on lighting on my shelves too.

 

I changed the background to black because I am impossibly impatient and was trying to see what it was like while my two youngest children slept.

So set it up, changed my mind about back drop and subject fiddled with the camera settings and  in 10 minutes I had this (should only take 5 minutes)

Not bad eh.

I often like to take pictures of flowers and other things like toys so I got this. Hopefully I’ll actually work out how to eliminate shadows.

Photoshop Actions

I am from the school of  take the picture as you would want to see it on print. This goes back to when I was learning with the Leica m4-P and developing and printing my own film.  Since then obviously things have moved on and I am digital and love it. I also love playing with my photo’s 2 years ago I would never of even contemplated doing it, now well I love it.

I see a lot of photo’s out there heavily processed. I can see what people are aiming for, well I think I do.

If you are not yet understanding what I am on about then have a look at the set of Photo’s below.

Downloading actions is easy, you might want to run them through a virus checker before you use them.  Deviant Art have loads just type ‘photoshop actions’ And if you also google it you’ll find loads of website with them. BE CAREFUL many, have virus’s and then really stuff up your photoshop application.

You can also buy actions from Totally Rad there is a whole 130,000 results waiting for you to go explore!

You can have a lot of fun, but go easy, don’t apply it to every photograph.