Travel photography can be challenging. You might be at your dream location but the conditions might be atrocious. A bit of planning and understanding the landscape helped me get one of my grail shots at Mc Way Falls.
Read MoreSunset at Monument Valley.
Mastering the Desert Landscape
The Desert is a punishing landscape subject. In this post, I’d like to share some tips that I learned from 7 years of photographing the American South-West.
Read MoreThe portrait composition and landscape photography
Portrait compositions in landscape photography is a tough ask. As a landscape photographer, you learn to love the golden hour, when your whole surrounding is getting bathed in warm golden light. It's difficult to eliminate elements purely for the sake of compositions. I especially struggle with it because I love vertical compositions, but my natural inclination is always to go for wider compositions at beautiful vistas. It is quite natural for me to get lost in a wide expansive scenic view and completely forget about the more detailed and nuanced landscape elements.
I used to get frustrated by the fact that I had very similar looking compositions and took it as a plan to change my shooting strategy. After a bit of introspection, I realized that I over plan my trips. We planned our trips to the hour, jamming in as many spots as we can visit. This way of planning usually means that we don’t have a lot of time at any given location. There were other reasons as well to make changes to our plan. We were getting old, and it was taking us a long time to recover from the hardships of the road. We started to enjoy our road trips less. So we needed a change in our planning strategy. I began to look at our trips as the first of many and allocated more time to explore the spots which made it to our list.
Taking the extra time made a tremendous change in our trips. We started to enjoy them more, and the quality of images improved drastically. Compositions became more deliberate, and all in all, felt more peaceful. The beautiful horseshoe bend near Page Arizona is the subject of the last picture in the post. It’s a large hairpin bend made in the sandstone terrain by the mighty Colorado River. There is about a half a mile hike to the viewpoint from the parking lot. Usually, we reach here just around the sunset, and then struggle to hike through the sandy trail to the viewpoint and get a spot among the throngs of photographers vying for the coveted spot by the canyon rim. But this time, we arrived way earlier, mainly to make sure my dad, who was with us, could hike to the canyon at a leisure pace. So, we had a couple of hours at the canyon, and by the time the sunset was in full swing, I was already done with my wide shots and had ample time to try my portrait compositions. I liked how the diagonal ridge on the rim complemented the vivid colors on the clouds.
My advice is to force yourself to compose your images in vertical composition. While it may appear as if you are leaving out valuable elements from the composition, what you are doing is eliminating the more distracting elements. It will help you tell your story better.