10 things you can shoot, edit and create this month, from butterflies and castles to the perfect confetti shot
1 | LANDSCAPES
Mark Bauer and Ross Hoddinott explore another element of classic scenic shots
One of the biggest problems that landscape photographers face can be summed up quite simply: the world is three-dimensional but the medium in which we are trying to represent it has only two dimensions. One of the main reasons why landscape photographs fail is that they don’t convey the sense of depth that we perceive when we view the scene in reality. Often, when we see a photograph that doesn’t quite work and we say it looks a little flat, we mean it quite literally.
Fortunately, there are a few compositional and technical tricks we can employ to circumvent this problem and create the illusion of depth in a two-dimensional medium.
Foreground interest
One effective way to create depth in a photograph is to include a strong foreground element, often in conjunction with the use of a wide-angle lens. Emphasising the foreground in this way adds depth to a picture by creating an entry point for the eye, pulling the viewer into the scene and providing a sense of distance and scale. This technique works particularly well with wide-angle lenses because of the way they stretch perspective, exaggerating the size of elements close to the lens and opening up the view beyond.
When using this technique, you will need to pay attention to what’s going on in the middle distance, and also to the height of the camera. Because of the way in which a wide-angle lens can open up the planes in the middle distance, if you shoot from too great a height, there can be too much empty space in this area. The solution is to shoot from a lower viewpoint, which compresses the middle distance. Get too low, however, and you may find that there’s not enough separation between objects in the middle distance, or between the middle distance and the background.
It may sound like a straightforward technique, but to apply it well takes skill and attention to detail. Too often, photographers fall into the trap of sticking anything and everything in the foreground, regardless of whether it suits the picture or not, and ignoring the rest of the scene. It’s worth spending some time finding foreground elements that complement the background and exploring different ways of relating foreground, middle distance, and background to make a cohesive whole.
