PhotoTips #4
People in Landscapes
When out shooting in the wild you will no doubt have a chance to capture yourself or a walking buddy exploring the landscape. But how do you get a photo that not only shows off your surrounding, but also makes for a great shot to share with your family and friends of your adventures?
Below are a few tips to help you create stunning landscape images with you and a friend as part of the scene.
- Distance is key. Try to get your subject far away from the camera and into the landscape scene as possible. Having a smaller figure in your scene will help you create more drama and give your epic scene scale. Scale is very important as it will help display the grandness of your adventures and what you witnessed along the way.
- Remember the composition rule, the Rule of Thirds. Keep your person on one of the intersecting sections of your scene using the rule of thirds. Divide your scene into thirds both horizontally and vertically. Place your person on one of the intersecting sections. This helps also give balance to your scene as well as allow the viewer to look out to where your person is also looking.
- Don’t get your person to “over-pose” - try and capture them being natural and exploring the scene. A good example of this is someone walking along a hiking path or a person viewing a large vista. Use the natural actions of someone to create a sense of natural movements and actions. Of course, having some silly and funny selfies is always fun too.
- Play around with your camera’s aperture settings. Try using a shallow depth of field (Small aperture number) to help separate the subject from the landscape, focusing on your subject. You can create some beautiful images by using the depth of field to blur out the background and really emphasis your subject. Even though the background of your scene maybe blurred, people can still make out where you are or what you are exploring.
- Lastly, don’t be a hero and try to get that unbelievable and usually dangerous shot of your mate by climbing over edges, or fences or going to places that are simply too dangerous to stand. No photo is worth a trip to the hospital, or worse…
