Making the Most of Natural Light
When you shoot natural landscapes, you become as much explorer as photographer. Beautiful shots are all around you; it’s your job to locate them in time and space. As you wander through nature with your camera, you develop a new way of looking at the world. You learn to see the subtle differences in lighting at different times of day, for example, and how shadows affect your photograph. The most important principles of nature photography follow.
1. Shoot with sweet light
Photographers generally covet the first and last two hours of the day for shooting (which half explains why they’re always getting up at five in the morning). The lower angle of the sun and the slightly denser atmosphere create rich, saturated tones, as well as what photographers call sweet light.
It’s a far cry from the midday sun, which creates much harsher shadows and more severe highlights. Landscape shooting is more difficult when the sun is high overhead on a bright, cloudless day.
2. Layer your lights and darks
Ansel Adams, the most famous American landscape photographer, looked for scenes in sweet light that had alternating light and dark areas. As you view one of his pictures from the bottom of the frame to the top, you may see light falling on the foreground, then a shadow cast by a tree, then a pool of light behind the tree, followed by more shadows from a hill, and finally an illuminated sky at the top of the composition.
3. Highlight a foreground object with flash
Sometimes you can lend nature a helping hand by turning on your flash to illuminate an object in the immediate foreground. Remember, just because your eyes can see detail in the dark area at the bottom of the frame doesn’t mean that your camera can. Look for an interesting objecta bush, perhaps. Move the camera close to it and zoom out. Then turn on the flash and shoot. The effect can be stunning.
