Landscape photos are easy!

Landscaapes... most of peoplelove it. There are nice colorful with lot of details. Why in hell none of my picture looks the same? Probably I do not have Eur 5000+ camera equipment. No no. The truth is much simplier. Hot to shoot landscape? Hot to make landscape pictures? Lets have a look hot to do it step-by-step. Simple manual how to make landscape that all of your friends say just wow.

Any camera can produce wonderful landscape

I am really sorry but you do not need to buy new camera. Here are list of thing we need to make nice landscape pictures. Basically we have two parts of our work. One is field work - you need to shoot landscape somewhere. You probably can not use any of your older pictures because their are simply bad for this purposes. Two is a bit of photoshop magic or better call that digital black chamber work. Do not worry. It takes 5 minutes no more!

You will need this:

• Any camera (with some manual control is better)
• Tripod
• Circular polarizer filter (higly recomended)
• Good weather condition (no landscape is nice without clouds, sundown, sunrise... sun and noon-time is not a case here at all!)
• Some software, here we are going to use HDRsoft Photomatix
• Mars bar :)))

Lets go shooting

Go to the woods and find some nice scenery. Put your camera on tripod. Now we are going to shoot more pictures that has to be exactly same except exposition. These pictures we are going to compose to get one which much higher dynamic range. If your camera support bracketing feature use it (set 3 pictures witch step 1 EV). Bracketing means that camera by itself make more images at once with different exposition. No bracketing? Do not cry about. You simply shoot one picture on auto mode then set exposition compensation down (-1 EV) and shoot another one. 2 pictures can be enough however always make 3 (+1 EV). No one never know which one you need. Try to focus on closer subject if you know how (rock on the picture for example).

Important thing is that all pictureas has to be exactly same so do not move with camera. If your camera support bracketing try to use selftimer to avoid any handshaking. Better pictures you have larger landscape you can produce (better details). Result should look like this (yes this kind of pictures we usually get):

Note for the lucky ones who having manual controls: To get best results set lowest ISO (means best quality), high Aperture - f8 on compact cameras (usually maximum) and f16 on DSLR (no more because average lens giving best result around this) and focus on 1.5 m for wide picture (this distance is close to hyper focal lenght which means everything above 1.5 m be sharp).

Honey, I'am home!

So lets start our computer work. Run Photomatix and get this

Our case is probably second option so lets continue. Open pictures you made in nature. Be sure they are the same (if not the result will be pretty blurred. Sometimes you have to use just pictures because of handshaking or wind blowing - it has moved camera or plants on the picture). When you open them it should look like this:

Menu HDRI -> Generate HDR. As result you get very strange looking picture. Do not worry about it.

Menu HDRI -> Tone Mapping. And now we are getting to interesting part which you will like the best:

Now we have to tune our picture. (1) is control of dynamic of the picture. Usually is better to not using max so -5 is best here. (2) is histogram control. Good picture need shades as well as shine parts. Try to make histogram wide by black and white point controls. Last control is whole saturation of the picture. Its all upon you: wanna colorfull picture or rainy-like dark scenery? My setting here are following:

And thats it. Easy, dont you think? The final result in this case is here:

Conclusion

There is nothing to conlcude... I whish you luck!

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 9th, 2007 at 7:20 am and is filed under How to. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.