Shooting a Moving Landscape

Nature photographers love capturing that iconic mountain-lake landscape. We all know that image of dramatically lit mountains reflecting in the still waters of a lake or pond. Clichéd? Perhaps. But that has not prevented photographers (including myself) from trying. While in Alaska, I tried shooting the Sawyer Glacier from a moving cruise ship. Here are some basic tips for handling light when taking these moving landscape photographs.

Getting the correct exposure is always a challenge when taking landscape photographs. Sometimes the ground may be properly exposed, but the sky is blown out.  Sometimes the sky is the right hue and the clouds pop sharply, but the land is lost in murky, undefined shadows.  As technologically advanced as we think our camera technologies are, they still can’t simultaneously expose separate parts of the same scene like the human eye can. With the camera, you have to expose one or the other. A choice must be made.

There are a number of ways to compensate for this technological limitation. In the accompanying photograph of Sawyer Glacier in Tracy Arm Fjord of Alaska’s Inside Passage, I used a graduated neutral density filter, which helps limit the amount of light in the brightest half of the frame. I also shot in RAW format so I could more easily tinker with tonality with software in post-processing.

If I had been able to stay very still, I would have considered bracketing my images. In computer post-processing, I could have merged the images with high dynamic range (HDR) software to get a final image with correct exposure all around.  However, since I was on a moving boat these options were not feasible. I’ll be sure to discuss them further in a future post.

Graduated Neutral Density Filter

I think photographers claim that circular polarizer filters are their number 1 go-to items to top a lens. I bet that graduated neutral density filters come in a close second. While half of the filter is clear, the other half is a neutral transparent gray that blocks some light from entering the lens. The clear and gray sides of the filter gradually meet in the middle.

As I previously mentioned, landscape images tend to have varying exposure areas. Usually, these areas are split by the horizon line. With a graduated neutral density (ND) filter, the gray half will darken the lit side of the horizon, bringing it closer to the exposure in the other half of the composition. The stronger the contrast between light and shadow, the stronger the ND filter you should use. The added benefit of an ND filter is that the dark side also acts as a polarizer, which can help reduce glare and make your skies bluer and your clouds pop.

While there are some circular graduated ND filters that you can simply screw onto the lens, I prefer using a rectangular filter. With circular filters, your composition will always be stuck with the horizon in the middle, where the dark and clear portions of the filter meet. With a rectangular filter, you attach a filter holder to the lens and then slide the rectangular filter into the holder. You can move the filter up and down as needed to match where you want the horizon in the image. This provides more flexibility when you want to compose your image with the horizon in a place other than in the middle.

When photographing vast landscapes, the general rule is to shoot with your aperture at f/8 or smaller to keep everything in focus. Since I was on a moving boat when shooting this image of Sawyer Glacier, however, I couldn’t shrink the aperture too much. Together with a neutral density filter, I would lose too much light, causing my shutter speed to slow down. When moving, or shooting a moving object, a slow shutter speed may contribute to blurriness.

One way to compensate for this loss of light is to also increase your ISO. However, raise it as little as you need. Raising your ISO too high would risk causing digital noise in the shadows and a loss of color sharpness. Thus, I engaged in trial-and-error, trying to maximize my f-stop and shutter speed while keeping a low ISO.

RAW Format

Get a bigger hard drive. You may need it if you’re going to shoot RAW format images. While JPEGs are good for showing works on websites and elsewhere, I prefer shooting in RAW.

While JPEGs compression format may save space on your hard disk, its files lose data each time it is opened and closed, especially if using “Save As…” You do not lose data with RAW. With all this extra data and no compression, RAW files tend to be larger than your average JPEG. Hence the need for a bigger hard drive.

RAW files are bigger because they contain much more data and are uncompressed. JPEGs capture one layer of light. RAW captures details in highlights and shadows that JPEGs would ordinarily miss. With RAW, you can also change your white balance in post-processing!

When you import your RAW images onto your computer, you will need a RAW processing program. Adobe Photoshop has a Camera Raw Plugin. However, I have always found Photoshop to be better for illustrators. It’s a bit too cumbersome for photographers. Recognizing this, Adobe created Lightroom, which rearranges all of Photoshop’s photographers tools into a more manageable space. Photoshop’s less expensive baby brother also performs non-destructive edits, thus eliminating the need for layers. I hear that Aperture is also a very good similar program, primarily used by Mac users.

When you view your RAW images on your computer for the first time, do not be surprised to find that they look quite colorless and flat. This is expected. You then need to use the RAW processing program to draw out your vision. While it may be daunting at first, you will soon find that processing RAW images becomes amazingly easy over time and will provide you with tremendous control over the exposure, tonality, color, and sharpness of your images. When used effectively, especially with the incredible batch processing options, you can save hours, if not days, of processing time.

Composition

You also want to provide some compositional interest to the image. Don’t forget to draw your audience’s eyes in with some foreground and background elements. Perhaps some mid-ground elements for good measure.

In the first image above, the foreground elements is merely a reflection of the background element. The fjords jutting into the frame provide an interesting mid-ground element, that also adds curves, making the water look more like a road winding into the distance. In this second image to the left, a small island replaces the reflection as the foreground element, providing a very different perspective and adding a sense of scale.

Quite often, photographers use wide angle lenses to capture the vastness of the scene. During this shoot, I kept flipping between my wide angle and telephoto lenses to get a variety of shots. In both of these images, I used a telephoto lens, zooming in at 170mm, which had the result of making the island and glacier look much closer to together than they really are. There’s more than one way to shoot a vista.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 10th, 2010 at 8:45 pm. It is filed under Shooting and tagged with Composition, Filters, Landscapes, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.