Landscape photography requires thorough planning before a shoot, for example you must think about the location of the photo-shoot, the weather you want to capture in your image, including the type of natural lighting, the camera settings needed for these conditions and the viewpoint of the images. This style of photography aims to amplify the essence of natural or urban features for the viewer.
Landscape photography that showcases a rural setting often displays recurring features such as fields, lakes and woodland areas within the countryside, focusing on natural forms rather than man made ones. Below are influential examples of this type of photography.
Adams was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black-and-white images of the American West. He has been a visionary in his efforts to preserve this country’s wild and scenic areas, both on film and on Earth. Drawn to the beauty of nature’s monuments, he is regarded by environmentalists as a monument himself, and by photographers as a national institution. People say he was the most important landscape photographer of the 20th century, most widely known and beloved photographer in the history of the United States. The popularity of his work has only increased since his death. Adams’s most important work was devoted to what was or appeared to be the country’s remaining fragments of untouched wilderness, in national parks and areas of the American West.
This acute attention to the specifics of the physical world was also the root of his intense appreciation of the landscape in microcosm (a community, place, or situation regarded as encapsulating in miniature the characteristics of something much larger). His work expresses a remarkable variety of response, ranging from childish wonder, to languorous pleasure, to the biblical excitement of nature in storm, to the recognition of a stern and strict natural world.
Adams’ images have incredible texture, depth, layers, shadows, shapes, patterns and lines, mostly created by the use of grey-scale tones to create height and definition. All of his images were taken in natural sunlight and have a variety of highlights and shadows. In his images there is a heavy amount of contrast between the light and dark tones.
Adams preferred his photographs in black and white, he felt colour could be distracting, and could therefore divert an artist’s attention from the achievement of his full potential when taking a photograph, Adams said “I believe that a black and white photograph has a certain quality that colour will never have. By stripping the photograph of colour, your strip away distraction to the eye, and get down to the crux of the story, or uncover a secret moment that colours may have tinted too fiercely.”
In almost every photograph Adams took, he involved every tone from pasty white to the deepest black. Our eyes are drawn to areas that are bright, or areas that are sharply in focus, both forms of contrast represented in Adams’ photography. Our eyes use low level information to locate areas of interest. Adams accentuated the areas of light, pulling the eye’s attention to them. However, he creates areas of large contrast by increasing clarity and sharpness, which guides the eye in certain directions. He does this to get the eye to enter the frame at a certain point and then land on key areas.
Landscape photography is capturing pictures of nature and the outdoors to bring viewer into the scene. From grand landscapes to intimate details, the best photos demonstrate the photographer’s own connection to nature and capture the essence of the world around them. The most important thing to know , are the basic camera settings and technical information (like aperture, shutter speed, exposure, and sharpness).
Rural landscape photography is in many ways similar to photographing urban landscapes. The difference is rural photography is about capturing the “life” in the countryside. The term “rural landscape” describes the diverse portion of the nation’s land area not densely populated or intensively developed, and not set aside for preservation in a natural state. The rural landscape provides natural resources, food and fiber, wildlife habitat and inspiration. Some of the most important and celebrated landscape photographers have been motivated by an appreciation of the beauty of the natural environment and a desire to see it preserved.
Shooting landscapes forces people to get outside and find the beauty around them. Sometimes this means discovering places right in front of your eyes that you just never noticed were beautiful before. Landscape photography leads people to see the world in new ways, it pushes us to explore new places, but it gives us a push to get out during those times of day that we are often holed up inside, such as sunrise, sunset and nighttime. Getting out to shoot landscapes clears the mind and stops worrying, anxiety and distractions for most people.
Landscape photography is capturing images outdoors either nature or urban places that have an emotional connection with them or even a wow factor to them. For example, if someone was to go to some cliff sides on a windy day, they would be amazed by the scenery thats happening with waves crashing on cliff sides and you could take a picture of it because of how intriguing that scenery was. Landscape pictures are taken because the people who where amazed by the scenery want other people to see the scenery and want them to imagine what it would be like to see that picture for themselves in real life and see the reaction that a person could have to the picture giving it emotional value.
Moreover, there are different types of landscape pictures that could be taken, which are rural, costal, urban, industrial and altered landscapes.
Landscape photography is the study of the great outdoors, capturing images showing the essence of nature and the world around us. Usually, landscape photography will focus on the natural environment, however many photographers also capture industrial and man-made environments- showing the contrast between the artificial and nature. Great landscape photography really immerses the viewer into the image, allowing them to feel involved in the scene they are observing and transporting them to the location at hand.
Rural landscape photography focuses on capturing images showing the stories and life in nature and the environment around us, usually one not familiar to many people, possibly secluded or desolate. These images will use different perspectives, lighting and locations to capture areas of a landscape in a less obvious way than usual.
To create this grid of headshots, I used previous images I had taken and imported them onto a grid in photoshop, aligned them correctly so all images had the same length and width to create this final outcome. I used a range of coloured images but also incorporated a few black and white images. Each row of images complement each other, the top layer being greyscale, the middle having strong tones of red and the bottom row having a range of colours and saturation. Bright or dull lighting was created through artificial lighting and the colours were made with transparent coloured sheets over the studio lights.
Street photography, a genre of photography that records everyday life in a public place. The very publicness of the setting enables the photographer to take candid pictures of strangers, often without their knowledge. Street photography aims to capture everyday life in public places, particularly in urban landscapes. Usually it’s a form of candid photography, when the person isn’t aware they’re being photographed, which creates more realistic and powerful images. Great street photographs say something about life; they speak to us; they fill us with an emotion; or they give us insight. They are not about light; they are not about shapes or forms; they are not about faces. Light, shapes, and faces can only aid in the success of a photo; they cannot be the reason for it. When you look at a great street photograph you should not leave it saying, ‘Wow that light was amazing.’ You should leave it saying, ‘Wow the emotion or story in that photograph really hit me’.
Garry Winogrand
Winogrand became interested in photography while serving in the military as a weather forecaster. He defined a new approach to street photography in 1960s and 1970s. A relatively new book, The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand (published in March 2018), presents an inspiring and unusual overview from his life’s work, including many images that have never been seen before, along with his classic iconic photographs and some surprising early color work.
Winogrand takes photographs and captures many different gestures, facial expressions, body language and relationships. He is known for transforming photography – “…he transformed it from an art of observation to an art of participation”. People’s opinions of his work are extremely positive; “I was overwhelmed. They were the first photos that struck me as relating to the other modes of creation”.
Final Images
I like the first two images partly because of the emotion on the man’s face, he appears to be happy and content in his current situation and nothing seems to be negatively effecting his mood. What I also like about these first images is the range of black and white tones after making the image greyscale.
I particularly like these two images, although you can’t see any emotion portrayed through these two photographs, the sunlight and saturated colours are eye-catching and they create a happy, positive atmosphere, leading the viewer to think the woman in the photography is also in a light-hearted mood. I also edited this image in black and white as the natural daylight contrasts strongly with the inside walls of the coffee shop, and the woman’s body, almost creating a silhouette.
These four images capture people’s attention being grasped by something that isn’t in the frame of the photograph, leading the viewer to wonder what could be the interesting things, people or events that has gripped their attention due to the different facial expressions and mannerisms; in the bottom right image a woman is pointing questionably at something, in the top right image the woman in the couple is admiring something above her, both creating a sense of mystery for the viewer.
I particularly like these two black and white images, the wide stride of both women create a sense of confidence and dominance. In the top image, the women walking in from each side creates a geometrical reflection, almost making it look like one woman is being mirrored to the other side of the photograph. There are strong contrasts of black and white tones, the highlights are bright because the image was taken in natural sunlight. The bodies of the women, along with the sun, create elongated shadows.
Double exposure photography refers to merging multiple images. The goal is to make them surreal, emotional, or humorous. They usually feature silhouettes. In photography and cinematography, multiple exposure is a technique in which the camera shutter is opened more than once to expose the film multiple times, usually to different images. The resulting image contains the subsequent image/s superimposed over the original. The technique is sometimes used as an artistic visual effect and can be used to create ghostly images or to add people and objects to a scene that were not originally there.
My Multi-exposure Edits
I used my studio photographs I had previously taken to create these final images with multiple exposures, I layered two or three images on top of my background image and lowered the percentage of opacity to make the top images transparent and ghostly.
Photomontage is the process and the result of making a composite photograph by cutting, gluing, rearranging and overlapping two or more photographs into a new image. The highest point of it’s popularity came in World War I. In 1916, John Heartfield and George Grosz experimented with pasting pictures together, a form of art later named “Photomontage.” Heartfield was the first to use photomontage to tell a “story” from the front cover of the book to the back cover.
Images by Heartfield 1930’s
Alexander Rodchenko
Rodchenko discovered new ways to condense space, time, and information into single images, where realism and abstraction, high and low culture, and multiple narratives were mixed and layered as never before. Innovations in graphic art developed hand-in-hand with the rise of the film industry, for which artists found new work designing posters and advertising material, and with the use of montage in film editing. This revolution in style and aesthetics was helped along by the advancement of mechanical means of reproduction, such as photographic printing and lithography, and by the increasingly vast circulation and distribution of mass-media publications.
Rodchenko works with both colour and black and white, his outlines of his cut-outs are harsh and he has multiple layers to one image.
My Photomontage Edits
For this image I started with a black and white background and copied the layer for each coloured circle i made, to create the circles i used the elliptical marquee tool and created a range of sized circles on each layer whilst changing the hue to get different colours and changing the saturation to have stronger, more vibrant colours.
For these images I started with a background then cut and pasted another image on top and used the rectangular marquee tool to section the areas i wanted the second image to overlap. I selected my area, inverse and deleted it to leave the shape I originally selected. My images were already colourful as I used transparent sheets over the lights when i took the pictures. I contrasted colour with black and white to make my shapes stand out and have a sharp outline and contrast to the image behind it.
