Capturing Winter Landscapes
16th November 2022
Capturing Winter Landscapes
Winter is a sensible time of year for photographers, dawn allows for a bit of a lie in and dusk doesn’t mean missing supper. But you still need to plan, check the times of sunrise and sunset, know your location before setting off from home to ensure you make the most of what nature has to offer.
A low winter sun is a gift to the hardy landscape photographer. Its glancing light highlights the contours and lengthens the shadows, adding a little extra depth and dimension to the landscape. But that mixture of light and long shadows can often prove problematic, increasing the contrast that a camera has somehow to manage. There can be as much as three stops of difference between the exposure value of the sky and that of even a reasonably well lit landscape, but add to that the contrast caused by deep shadows and that’s quite a lot to handle. Clever use of filters can help to reduce the contrast, delivering a tonal range that the average camera can just about manage. They can also help enhance the vibrancy and saturation in a picture, adding drama to moody skies.
Everyone loves a snowy scene, but all that bright snow can wreak havoc with a camera’s metering capabilities, often making the image seem dull and grey. There are ways of ensuring the camera captures the scene as it actually appears though, without losing detail in that all important sky. Filters can help here too, although getting around the metering system while at the same time ensuring a balance between a bright snowy foreground and a bright blue sky can still be tricky.
Often a winter landscape can look bleak and quite bare, and there’s always a temptation to try and include too many elements in a picture to compensate. But there’s a stark beauty in bleakness. ‘Less is more’ is a bit of a well-worn cliché, but when it’s applied to barren winter moor under a dark and lowering sky, it can reach into a different aspect of our consciousness, we’re somehow drawn to the feeling of solitude. You could be forgiven for thinking that capturing a feeling of emptiness in an image should be quite a simple task, but in fact it can be very difficult. We’re into the realms of structure, balance and composition, controlling the light, enhancing the elements, even adding the fourth dimension of time by creating blur and movement.
I would much rather have hanging on my wall a dark and brooding winter scene than a bright and breezy picture postcard landscape any day. But then, I’d rather be on some windswept shore on a bracing winter’s day, facing the elements, all wrapped up, than lazing around on some sunny beach!
This is why we chose mid-February to hold our first weekend of landscape photography courses in 2012. Two whole days of landscape workshops commencing with Landscape Part 1 on Saturday followed by Landscape Part 2 on Sunday, at John Ruskin’s Lakeland home, Brantwood, on the shores of Coniston Water. Students can of course choose to book either course, but several have so far opted to make a weekend of it and join us for both days (with the prospect of a social gathering on Saturday evening).
The light on the landscape is never the same from one day, one moment almost, to the next. The skill of the landscape photographer is in the methods used to capture those fleeting moments. You are welcome to come and join us at Brantwood, to pick up some useful tips and advice on creative landscape photography. We hope to see you there.
Winter is a sensible time of year for photographers, dawn allows for a bit of a lie in and dusk doesn’t mean missing supper. But you still need to plan, check the times of sunrise and sunset, know your location before setting off from home to ensure you make the most of what nature has to offer.
A low winter sun is a gift to the hardy landscape photographer. Its glancing light highlights the contours and lengthens the shadows, adding a little extra depth and dimension to the landscape. But that mixture of light and long shadows can often prove problematic, increasing the contrast that a camera has somehow to manage. There can be as much as three stops of difference between the exposure value of the sky and that of even a reasonably well lit landscape, but add to that the contrast caused by deep shadows and that’s quite a lot to handle. Clever use of filters can help to reduce the contrast, delivering a tonal range that the average camera can just about manage. They can also help enhance the vibrancy and saturation in a picture, adding drama to moody skies.
Everyone loves a snowy scene, but all that bright snow can wreak havoc with a camera’s metering capabilities, often making the image seem dull and grey. There are ways of ensuring the camera captures the scene as it actually appears though, without losing detail in that all important sky. Filters can help here too, although getting around the metering system while at the same time ensuring a balance between a bright snowy foreground and a bright blue sky can still be tricky.
Often a winter landscape can look bleak and quite bare, and there’s always a temptation to try and include too many elements in a picture to compensate. But there’s a stark beauty in bleakness. ‘Less is more’ is a bit of a well-worn cliché, but when it’s applied to barren winter moor under a dark and lowering sky, it can reach into a different aspect of our consciousness, we’re somehow drawn to the feeling of solitude. You could be forgiven for thinking that capturing a feeling of emptiness in an image should be quite a simple task, but in fact it can be very difficult. We’re into the realms of structure, balance and composition, controlling the light, enhancing the elements, even adding the fourth dimension of time by creating blur and movement.
I would much rather have hanging on my wall a dark and brooding winter scene than a bright and breezy picture postcard landscape any day. But then, I’d rather be on some windswept shore on a bracing winter’s day, facing the elements, all wrapped up, than lazing around on some sunny beach!
This is why we chose mid-February to hold our first weekend of landscape photography courses in 2012. Two whole days of landscape workshops commencing with Landscape Part 1 on Saturday followed by Landscape Part 2 on Sunday, at John Ruskin’s Lakeland home, Brantwood, on the shores of Coniston Water. Students can of course choose to book either course, but several have so far opted to make a weekend of it and join us for both days (with the prospect of a social gathering on Saturday evening).
The light on the landscape is never the same from one day, one moment almost, to the next. The skill of the landscape photographer is in the methods used to capture those fleeting moments. You are welcome to come and join us at Brantwood, to pick up some useful tips and advice on creative landscape photography. We hope to see you there.