How-To / Guidance
How to shoot good landscapes
You only need five things to be a good landscape photographer and 3 of them require no photographic skills whatsoever!Patience, planning and luck are the basic essentials, but of course you need an eye for composition to create a strong photograph, and of course the technical skills that allow you to correctly anticipate/ measure exposure and focus etc.
Planning so that you anticipate weather and lighting conditions, as well as ensuring you have supplies necessary to allow you stay warm and fed, whether this means hiking boots or petrol and a map.
Patience so you can hang about waiting for optimum environmental and light conditions.
Luck with the weather so that you get a scene worth shooting at all, or that you stumble across a hidden pathway bringing you somewhere spectacular, yet off the beaten track.
Composition is the critical element, and this can only be refined through practise and self criticism of your previous work, call it learning from your mistakes. Thus the more you shoot, the more you self criticise, the more you learn and the better quality pictures you will take in future….
A guide to good composition can be found here…
The ability to master your camera comes with practise. However correct reading of your desired scene is something that requires good observation e.g. difference in stops between brightest and darkest parts of the scene (the dynamic range of your camera even shooting raw will probably be less than the dynamic range of the environment in which you are shooting).
Choosing your focal range is also a skill that comes with practise. A depth of field (DOF) chart can assist you in working out what will or will not be in focus depending on the distance from the camera and the f- stop selected. But ultimately getting outdoors and considered shooting is the only way to improve your output.
How to retouch - best practises
There is really no alternative than Adobe Photoshop for retouching photographs. There are open-source applications available on GNU public license, see www.gimp.org for details.
Its not essential to have the lastest version of Photoshop (PS), in fact CS4 is quite buggy in comparison to the more stable CS2 and CS3. For retouching purposes CS2 is perfectly adequate and second hand versions are available at a fraction of the cost of a new copy of CS4.
There are only 2 essential principles to best practise retouching, but being photoshop, there are of course different ways to go about sticking to these principles!
• Work in such a way that the original image data is retained. Or in other words, work in such a way that no pixel data is destroyed.
• Work in such a way that allow you to revert back without having to start over. What is sometime called ‘the way of fast retreat’. In other words working in such a way that you can undo any creative process you have applied without sacrificing other changes you made.
• Backup your files to an external location or drive.
• Work in 16 bit colour when possible
The incorporation of adjustment layers and smart filters (not to mention saved masks, paths and selections) into your workflow ensures that both the above mentioned principles can be adhered to without too much difficulty for the experienced user.
For beginners however it will make the learning curve a little steeper and require a little more for-thought. However having to revert to original a couple of times will soon persuade you to work according to these principles, as there is nothing more frustrating than having to repeat some time-consuming image manipulation actions because you didn’t think before you jumped!
There are many hundreds of photoshop practitioners who publish their own webpages and online tutorials about how to get the best out of photoshop. I would recommend only a few of them however, foremost Scott Kelby, Kevin Ames & Guy Gowan.
How to shoot and process RAW
A RAW file is a digital negative, and like a film negative, it must be developed before it can be used. RAW files come with different file extensions, .cr2 & .crw (favoured by Canon), .dng (favoured by Adobe), and .nef (favoured by Nikon), there are many others however.
Each RAW file must be processed (just like one would process a film negative in chemical baths and tubs) and exported into a rasterised image, for example a photoshop file (.psd), a tiff (,tif) or other.
The parameters and settings used when processing a RAW file will determine how the resulting image appears (dark/ bright, sharp/ saturated etc).
A RAW file is the actual data recorded by the sensor in the camera, and as such it is the purest cleanest data as it has not undergone any manipulation or compression in order to make it intelligible to the user/ photographer. Even the preview that is displayed on the lcd on the back of your camera displays an image that has been processed by the camera. That’s why your lcd display is a poor guide to judge an exposure, learning to read the histogram will help tremendously, but it also is representative of the jpg your camera created by applying some processing to the raw file, and is NOT of the raw file itself.
The RAW file will also record other data such as date and time and camera settings which are useful too.
RAW files will look soft and low contrast when opened with your basic settings in your RAW processing program, be it Adobe Camera Raw, Hasselblad Raw Convertor, Canon’s Digital Picture Professional or Nikon’s equivalent.
The development settings you use will determine to what extent your resulting image appears sharp, contrasty, saturated, noisey etc…
Get familiar with your development software as it contains many useful features such as noise reduction (both chroma and luminance based), image distortion ( to remove pinhole or barrel effects) and of course black, white points and colour balance.
There are many thousands of video tutorials posted online, not to mention those on YouTube, that deal with processing raw files.