Transcript
There’s nothing worse than when you’re looking at one of your fantastic landscapes later on and finding a tourist just walking through, or a bit of garbage, or even a garbage bin–anything that doesn’t belong in the beautiful landscape. Three things I like to do when I’m taking a landscape photo to try to ensure it is distraction-less. The first is, I’ll use a variable-ending filter. This allows me to slow down my shutter speed so that everything moving faster than the shutter speed–traffic, people, you know, things blowing in the wind–disappear from the photograph. The second thing I like to do is really evaluate my angle. Depending on where I am, I might be seeing a garbage bin, but if I move a little bit around the corner, that garbage bin might be hidden by a tree.
By thinking about where you’re placing everything in your photograph, you’re starting to take a more impactful or a much better landscape photograph.
The third thing I like to do is re-evaluate my photograph and take it as many times that I need to. I look at everything that I take, so I don’t go home and think, wow, when I was in Peru, I wish I had taken that photograph. Having a distraction in your photograph is kind of like Leonardo da Vinci having painted a construction crane in the back of the Mona Lisa. Sure, it might look a bit interesting, ’cause it’s 400 years before the invention of the construction crane, but it doesn’t belong. And anything that doesn’t belong in your landscape doesn’t need to be there when you’re processing at home.
