The Wild Photographer
Learn techniques, tips, and tricks for improving your wildlife, travel, landscape, and general nature photography with Court Whelan. Whether you consider yourself a beginner, serious hobbyist, or advanced professional, this is the way to rapidly understand and implement new skills to elevate your photography to new heights.
The Wild Photographer
The Way Pro Photographers Get Extraordinary Landscape Shots
When you see a professional landscape photo, usually in a gallery, a magazine cover or photobook, there is just something different...it's jumps out to you as "pro level."
In today's episode, I do a deep dive into how you can achieve this same look and vibe in your own photography. Spoiler alert, there is no shortcut. But, I do have a roadmap.
It involves a lot of the "classic" photo ingredients like timing and aperture, but the list goes well beyond that. And frankly, it's the combination of all or most of these techniques that give that pro look.
I hope you enjoy and get out there and take some extraordinary photos as a result!
Big thanks to LensRentals.com for support of this podcast. I highly recommend renting lenses from time to time, either to test out a new lens before you buy, or getting that primo lens before a big wildlife photo adventure.
Use promo code WildPhotographer15 for 15% off!
My Full Camera Kit:
Canon R5 Body
Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8
Canon RF 24-105mm f/4
Canon RF 100-500mm f/4.5-7.1
Canon RF 70-200 f/2.8
Canon EF Macro 100mm f/2.8
Canon RF 50mm f/1.8
Peak Design Carbon Fiber Tripod
When you see an extraordinary landscape shot, you just know it. It's like less than a second and you know it's something special. It's a special angle, time of day, an awesome set of colors. It's maybe something you haven't quite seen before in that way, or if you have seen it before, you pretty much instantly know it's one of the most special portrayals of this scene you've ever seen. So what is it that makes this so special? Well, I alluded to a couple of the key ingredients, but there's so much more, and how you combine these things, how you look for them and how you capture them in camera is gonna be the subject of today's podcast. So join me, folks. Here we go. Before we get into it, I wanted to give a quick shout out to an awesome company that I partnered with to help support this podcast, and that's Lens Rentals. Lensrentalscom I've been using Lens Rentals for years now and partcom.
Court:I've been using Lens Rentals for years now, and part of the reason I'm putting them in this promo position on the podcast is because I genuinely believe in what they do. It's an amazing resource. I highly highly recommend renting lenses from time to time, whether it's renting something before you buy it, to see if you really really think that that lens is going to be helpful, or kind of splurging a little bit and before your next nature safari, renting that 400, 2.8, renting that 70 to 200 for trekking gorillas. And I got to say every time I've rented it's been a pleasure, it's been easy, the lenses have arrived on time, if not before. It's just, it's kind of like the apple of lens rental companies because everything's just nicely packaged and easy. They've got return shipping boxes and labels and they even give you like tape to tape up your boxes. It's just, it's amazing. It takes a lot of the thought out of it. They're super professional. So, yeah, I'm partly just doing this because I think it's an awesome resource and now if you use the promo code wildDPHOTOGRAPHER15, you get 15% off Again. That's WILDPHOTOGRAPHER15. Cool stuff.
Court:When you initially walk up on a landscape scene you want to photograph, you're probably thinking about focus first and foremost. I know I do and I think a lot of people do. It's not wrong. But the key thing is don't overthink about focus, not so much that it's not really important. Overthink about focus, not so much that it's not really important. It's huge, it's like one of the most important things in photography. But it's very, very simple for landscape photography, and if you think first and foremost and only about focus, you're going to miss out on like 10 or 11 other really key ingredients that honestly make it even more important. Obviously, if your shot's not in focus, if you don't have the right hyper focus or the right depth of field, it's going to look off. But the point is is that there are so many other things beyond focus that this first thing that we usually think about is definitely not the be all end all. But that being said, let's talk about focus. So you do want to have a wide depth of field, and what I'm talking about here is a small aperture or a big F number. These are all the same things we're talking about F8, f11, maybe even F16. But where to focus is probably equally important.
Court:So let's get one of the more complicated things right out of the way is you've got a big landscape scene. It's relatively uniform. It's a meadow, it's mountains and it's a sunset. Let's just say those three elements foreground, midground, background, right, sunset's. The furthest mountain is the midground and then the meadow with, let's just say, some wildflowers, is the foreground. You want it all in focus If those wildflowers are, you know, blurred, mildly blurred or way blurred, not going to look good. Same thing with a mountain and the sunset less consequential, but we still want definition in those clouds. If it was blurred it wouldn't look quite right. So where do you focus?
Court:Well, in comes this terminology, this concept of hyper focus, and if you Google this online, you're going to see some really, really complicated equations about how to calculate hyper focus, and it takes into account the focal length of your lens, about how to calculate hyperfocus, and it takes into account the focal length of your lens, how distant you are to the foreground, mid, ground and background, and a few other things as well, like gosh aperture, even shutter speed, just crazy stuff. You can see where I'm getting at. Don't think about all that stuff, don't worry about it. I'm gonna give you a really, really simple trick right here is to achieve hyperfocus. Even if you did all those calculations, pretty much each and every time, you're going to land on this focus about one third of the way into the scene. Okay, I'm gonna say it again focus for landscape photography, about one third of the way into the scene to get maximum depth of field and to get just about everything intact, sharp focus that you could possibly hope for. Now. There's a mild exception if you have a very strong foreground element and you're doing some creative artsy stuff here. But the point is, for the vast majority of landscape shots, we just want everything in focus and this is the way, in combination with a great aperture of F8, f11, or F16, that you're going to get as much in focus as possible.
Court:Now, since we broached the topic of camera settings and we're talking about aperture, I'd be remiss if I didn't also mention shutter speed and ISO at this point. So when you are getting those big F numbers, as you may or may not know, you're going to be faced with light limitation because as you go higher and higher in number, your aperture closes down more and more and limits the amount of light getting into your camera sensor. So this is where we usually see people with tripods. Right, because what happens is you, you do want a low ISO. This is going to give you the best clarity, definition, quality of shot. So, like ISO 100, iso 200 is is pretty important for the best, like best, best landscape shots. Not only is it going to look better, but it's also going to be the most editable. We'll get to that at the end of this talk about how to process and edit these shots.
Court:But what does that leave you? Well, in this golden triangle of aperture, iso and shutter speed, if you know you want two of the three at very specific settings, it's your shutter speed that usually just is a consequence of the other, meaning you don't want to have to worry about your shutter speeds. This is why we usually see tripods, especially in lower light, like sunrise, sunset, landscape photography, because you may. If you're setting your camera on F16 and ISO 100, you may find that your shutter speed is one second or one tenth of a second, even one twentieth of a second. I really don't advocate handholding. So, as a result, tripod is really quite a nice tool to have for great landscape photography, and I can almost promise you, if you're marveling at a landscape photo as your desktop background, that you automatically got populated by your, by your computer's operating system, or if you're seeing a screensaver that's automatically on there, or all of these stock photos of the best landscape shots in the world, I'm pretty sure everybody's shooting on a tripod. Because you just don't want to worry about being handheld, you want to prioritize ISO 100 or 200, aperture of F8, f11 or F16, and then just deal with whatever shutter speed comes your way.
Court:Okay, now we're moving on from camera settings. We're going to talk about more of the je ne sais quoi, more of like the gosh, you really had to be there, sort of element of things, and this does come down to finding a fantastic time of day. I think that a huge part of the best and again we're not talking about good landscape photography or great landscape photography you can make lemonade out of anything in front of you, and you've probably listened to other episodes I have on just main tenets of great landscape photography. We're talking today about how to get the best, how to get the pro level shots, and really comes down to finding a time of day that is really quite special. The time of day may be special because nobody else is seeing that landscape at that time of day. So even if someone's seeing that mountain scene that they've seen a thousand times before, they're going to look at it as really special because you shot at an arduous time of day at the blue hour, at twilight, at the golden hour. You know, when I say arduous, I just mean you're going the extra mile.
Court:So what are those times of day. Let's rattle them off, list them off right here, right now. So the no brainer is sunrise and sunset. It's when the light is lowest angle. That low angle also filters through a little bit more atmosphere and usually you get more of a golden angular light. It just looks really darn good.
Court:So sunrise, sunset, you know, the first we're talking about like first, minutes after the sun rises or minutes at just before the sun sets. Obviously it's subjective. You might find that you have 20 minutes or even an hour um before, after, et cetera, et cetera, but that that technically gets into slightly different times of day. So this category is sunrise and sunset. But that does beg the question what about just after sunset or before sunrise, like the dawn and dusk time? So we call this in photography the blue hour. I've done a whole episode on nothing but photographing the blue hour, so I definitely recommend checking that out. But it's essentially the 20 or 30 minutes after the sun has literally gone down below the horizon and what this does is it sets a really really nice blue hue in the sky. This is definitely tripod territory, but it's an extraordinary time to get some really really cool sky color which then translates to really the overall color palette of your scene. So blue hour is awesome.
Court:We normally think of blue hour after sun sets because it's like more convenient, you can get blue hour on awesome. We normally think of blue hour after sun sets because it's like more convenient, um you, you can get blue hour. On the flip side, like an hour before or, let's say, the 20 or 30 minutes before sunrise, a little bit more difficult to be there and time it a little more difficult to hike out to the spot or set up your shot in the dark. So usually after sunset is more common blue hour. But let me take that as a moment to say you know what, if it's more common, more people have seen it, more people have photographed it and it's going to be less special, it's going to be less pro worthy. So you know, if you have the chutzpah, get out there before sunrise, an hour before sunrise to scout out, set up your shot and get that dawn blue hour, because it's those difference makers that well, gosh makes the difference. So blue hour awesome time.
Court:Now, uh, an easier time of day and this is a time that a lot of portrait photographers like to use, maybe if you are doing a slight portraiture element of your landscape photography, meaning if you do have a really cool subject or feature like a tree or a rock or a waterfall, and it's the golden hour. The golden hour, again, we typically think of it as the hour or so before sunset. As that sun goes down an angle, it definitely turns more yellow, more golden, more orange, on the warmer tone. You're going to get this at the flip side of the day, so in the morning as well, but again, that evening hour is probably most common and the golden hour is fantastic. It casts this really, really nice golden light on everything that you can capture in your camera and do nothing with, and it gives this beautiful warm tone. In addition, as we'll learn later in the episode, is as you start editing these colors and boosting the warm with a little bit of a warming filter or like a warming white balance, and it just makes it that much more dreamy, that much more captivating. When you increase the saturation of an already saturated scene or increase the warming white balance of an already warm scene, you get a lot of room to play with is the basic gist I'm getting at. So these are really good times of day.
Court:Let's talk about a time that is a little bit more stochastic, a little bit more just capture in the moment, and it's like storms and weather. So storms bring in amazing clouds, big billowy cumulonimbus and all sorts of really cool wispy cirrus clouds. So anytime storms, wind, come through, if you want to elevate your landscape photography, it's a really, really good time to get out and go check places out. Now the thing is is that usually in a storm A, you're going to, you know, be in the storm yourself, so scouting out a place is going to be really, really helpful ahead of time. And then, when you know that, oh gosh, if a storm comes in, this is the shot I want, because this landscape is going to lend itself to amazing clouds Get out there during storms. Be safe. Of course, you know, on the rims of canyons like Grand Canyon and Bryce Canyon, it's quite dangerous because these lightning storms come through and you're at a high point. So, goodness gracious, be careful when you're out there. But also realize that storms provide some amazing, amazing atmosphere and helps elevate your landscape photography to that pro level. A common theme you're going to hear throughout the day is that the more of these things you combine, the more pro level it is. So I'm going to continue with this list. We've got a lot more things to talk about. So keep in mind that time of day and some sort of moodiness whether it's that bright golden hour or it's moody from, uh, ominous clouds that's a checkbox you want to put on your list with everything else I'm about to talk about here.
Court:Composition is super critical. Well, to all photography, but especially to landscape photography, because there usually isn't a real dominant subject, or if there is, it's not as dominant as, like, wildlife portraiture. Another thing that I've talked at length about on this podcast composition. You know you can read books on composition. I'm going to distill this down into sort of my three favorite composition techniques. The first, of course, is rule of thirds. You probably heard this a zillion times, but I've got to mention it here because it's it's always my starting point, a hundred percent of the time my starting point and, I would say, for the vast majority of photographers out there, 90% of the time their ending point too. There, there isn't a need to go too much beyond this, but of course I'll give some examples as to how and when.
Court:But rule of thirds basically, you break your scene down in the thirds instead of halves or quarters. Uh, the human eye, human brain, really likes these thirds. Imagine a tic-tac-toe board over your scene and break your scene with the sky, mountains and foreground into thirds, top to bottom. Break it left to right as well. Again, a common theme for landscape photography is the more layers you can add on with complexity, meaning if you have a great top to bottom rule thirds going on in your scene, then also, look, how can I also make this a left to right rule of thirds, or right to left. You know how can I break it into vertical components too. Maybe the tallest mountain is on the left and then there's a valley in the middle and then a midsize mountain on the right. You know, break it into as many ways to employ the rule of thirds as possible.
Court:Also, think about those intersecting points. This is a really really common strategy for wildlife photography or portrait photography, where there's a single dominant character in the scene. You want to put that person off-center. So the main focal point, like that person or that animal's eyes, is right over one of the four intersecting points. What do I mean by intersecting points? Well, if you have that tic-tac-toe board, there are four places where those lines cross one another. That's where you're going to want to have something of significance. So one of the tricks I'm about to tell you about is, with landscape photography, is to choose some sort of focal point or some sort of foreground element. That is a really, really great place to put that foreground element is at one of those intersecting points. So if you're using and employing the rule of thirds in every which way, it's just going to be more and more layers, more stacking the deck in your favor to get a bodacious landscape shot.
Court:Now the next thing is an iteration of the rule of thirds that I've learned about relatively recently, the last few years, and it's called the phi grid, p-h-i, the phi grid, and it's basically the rule of thirds, but it's actually a little bit more attuned to the Fibonacci sequence or the golden ratio, which is something that I'm not actually going to talk about here. You can tune into my composition podcast to learn more about that. But basically what it does is it breaks the rule of thirds. You know similar ratios, but it's actually as if you squeezed the lines a little bit more towards the center of the frame, meaning it's not exactly equal. From left to right it's a little bit bigger, on the left. It's a little bit skinnier in the middle and a little bit bigger on the right, such that the left and the right are equal, but that middle column is a little bit more reduced. Same thing from top to bottom. So again, it's as if you took that tic-tac-toe, those two lines left and right, those two lines top and bottom, and just squishing towards the middle. Now, the reason to think about this isn't because you now need to go affix a five grid on top of your, your camera's viewfinder, but when you are setting up that scene and you put that subject in the dead middle of one of those intersecting points of the grid of the actual rule of thirds grid, play around with maybe putting it slightly inside, a little bit more towards the middle, because there are some laws of aesthetics. With this Fibonacci sequence, a very common mathematical principle, there's a laws of aesthetics. With this Fibonacci sequence, a very common mathematical principle, there's a rule of aesthetics that says it might look a little bit better towards the middle of the scene. I'm going to end there and not say much more, because that's really all you need to know in this big overview episode, but there's something to it.
Court:Now. The next one is again, if we're talking about layers, we're talking about multiple ways you can make your landscape shots better and better and better. Try to incorporate leading lines. Now, the thing here is that they work really well on their own and they work really really well in concert with the rule of thirds or the five grid, and the leading line is basically some sort of dominant line in the scene. Since we're talking about landscape shots, we're usually thinking about something in nature a curving river, a branch of a tree, the triangle outline of a mountain, and just think about how those lines, those edges of natural features, are leading your eyes in a certain direction. So you know, and a great example could be, if there's a tree on the left hand side and there's lateral branches, horizontal branches, like, let's say, a fir tree extending out to the right, completely flat, those could be leading lines into a meadow to the right. If you're really trying to draw the eye towards a certain part of the scene, leading lines are a very, very good way to do it. Now, leading lines without anything to point to aren't all that powerful, but you'd be surprised the artistic impression you can really conjure up with leading lines, meaning that they're going to lead to something in the scene. But the more you can put these leading lines, the more you can find leading lines in nature that really direct the viewer's eye towards a dominant part of the scene a river that snakes around and points to a mountain, a mountain that points in a triangle like an arrow up to the sun or up to a really amazing colorful cloud. These lines are gonna really again just pump steroids into all these different elements we're talking about to make your landscape shot better and better and better. So leading lines are really really great thing to think about.
Court:Now, one thing I'm going to kind of throw around here is that so many of the best landscape scenes do not have real flat horizon lines. Even if you are adhering to the rule of thirds really nicely and you're putting that horizon line at the bottom third and leaving two thirds of sky, usually, especially with mountain scenes, meadow scenes, pretty much anything but beach scenes you're probably going to get some blending right, like that mid ground is going to, is going to jag into the background or the foreground, like you're. You're not going to have a smooth line between each section, but I want you to think about how much sky, how much mid-ground and how much foreground you have in those rule thirds. But also look for elements that mesh those thirds together, meaning maybe the mountain scene is indeed in that middle third, but there's a huge mountain or a big tree that breaks into that sky third. Those things are gonna really bring the scene together and make it less exact. I don't see a lot of scenes where you could put a rule of thirds grid over and every single thing has its own delineation, its own separation in that scene. A lot of times the elements of the landscape mix a little bit. That river kind of goes between one and two of the thirds, or the upper third and lower third. The tree kind of breaks into like a jagged line, into the upper third even though it starts in the bottom third. So look for elements to help bring things together and make that line a little bit less exact between your composition of your photo.
Court:A really good way to start out taking landscape shots is to center them around some sort of foreground element. A really good way to start out taking landscape shots is to center them around some sort of foreground element. A foreground element could be just about anything you find in nature, whether it's a large rock or boulder, it could be a specific wildflower, it could be a tree, it could be even a smaller mountain range of a very big mountain range in the background. But I find it really, really helps to have something that the eyes of the viewer can affix to right away, and usually that's the thing closest to them. So if I'm looking at a photo, my eyes are naturally going to go towards the thing that is closest to me, which is going to be that meadow in front of the mountain, it's going to be that seashell in front of the beach.
Court:So if you find a dominant foreground element, I really do like to make it quite prominent in my scene. But what this does is this this kind of flips the page a little bit on how to focus and where to focus. Because if you do have a dominant foreground element like a boulder right in front of you, you can't not have that in focus, like that needs to be in focus. So if you focus on that even at F8 or F11, if you're really close to that rock or that tree, the background might get a little bit blurred. So what do you do?
Court:Well, you want to do your best to give yourself space between you and the foreground element. In other words, you want that thing to be in the scene but you don't want it to be right underneath your nose. You want to give it 10, 20, 30 feet of distance. This might even require you use a telephoto lens we're going to get to that in a second as a really, really good strategy for next level pro landscape shots. But you do want to give a little bit of space. Because of this ratio, if you are right next to your subject and then your subject is way in the background, it's gonna be blurred. The background's gonna be blurred no matter what F number you have. You can go all the way to F22, it's still gonna be blurred. So you wanna give a little bit of space. Exactly how much space is a pretty complicated equation. This is a great time to experiment a little bit. But again, you do wanna give it many, many feet. Step back quite a ways. Put that foreground element in the frame as that bottom third. You know like we're talking about with foreground, but just give it so that there's a little bit more distance between you and the subject, so that subject is a little bit closer to the background, and that's going to help tremendously with the depth of field issue we're talking about. It's going to make it so everything is indeed in focus.
Court:Okay now, the penultimate thing we're going to talk about here, before we get into a little bit deeper dive into post-processing and editing of pro landscape shots, is we're going to talk about thinking outside the box. What are the things that you can be doing that you possible? Because this is gonna be what gets your landscape shot to look different and jump out of the page and be something that people have never seen before, and really stop scrolling and pay attention to what you have. Stop navigating websites, stop flipping the magazine and really take a look at your art. So the first thing I alluded to already is something I use very, very often for my next level landscape shots is a look at your art. So the first thing I alluded to already is something I use very, very often for my next level landscape shots is a telephoto lens. So many people right out the box think, oh, if I wanna make my landscape shot even better, I'm not gonna use my normal lens, my wide angle, I'm gonna go to an ultra wide, because it's gonna get way more of the landscape in the scene. Yeah, there's totally a strategy here and I'm not going to discourage you. But I will tell you that a telephoto lens can work absolute wonders for your landscape shots. If you don't believe me, go try it out.
Court:When I'm talking about a telephoto, I mean something between like a one and 300 millimeter. You can, of course, use a 400, 500 millimeter. These are comparable to like a six to 10 times zoom, more or less. You can use those bigger zooms, but really what I'm talking about is like two to six times zoom. Here is like a 100 millimeter. A 300 millimeter, um, like my 70 to 200 is one of my favorite landscape lenses out there because, well, it allows me to do a few things. One is it allows me to see the scene differently and again, I keep hampering on this, but it's super important is you have to see and portray scenes differently to get them to really stand out and get people to pay attention and say, ooh huh, look at that. I've seen maroon bells before, but I've never seen it that way. You know that's what we're talking about here. So something like a little bit of telephoto can be a different look, a different way of seeing a landscape scene.
Court:This is not a requisite for every time you use a telephoto in landscape. But it also allows you to do what's called zoom compression, and this is a really awesome technique. Probably the most well-known and famous way to use zoom compression is anytime you see those scenes with a huge moon in the background and like the Acropolis on a hill or some sort of you know a temple or a building, and then that huge moon is behind it and you say, golly, that is that looks fake, it's Photoshopped. Well, it might be, but you actually can do it in camera quite well, and what you're doing is you're standing quite far away from that building, from that temple, from that tree, with the moon behind it, but then as you zoom in with a big beefy telephoto, it's making everything big. It's making the temple big, so it looks as if you're standing right in front of it, and makes the moon big as if you're standing right in front of it. So basically, what it does is it brings the background and foreground a little bit closer in size and it just makes this really, really interesting look where something behind your foreground element can take on an otherworldly size and appeal.
Court:This works really well for mountains. You can make a mountainside look like Mount Everest. Basically, you can fill the frame with just part of the mountainside, with a wildflower in the foreground, or with a meadow in the foreground or a river in the foreground, and this is all done by standing quite a bit far away from the scene you're photographing but then using that telephoto to zoom into it and cropping it, basically composing it just like you would a wide angle, but you use a telephoto and get yourself away from that very same seam. It's a really, really awesome technique. And then other things you know we've already mentioned this, but an exquisite sunrise, you know, adding this in for something outside the box, a wildflower bloom, doing your research and figuring out when are interesting phenomena going on, when is this desert bloom going to happen? You know, when is the Aurora Borealis going to happen? All that sort of stuff.
Court:These are things that are really next level awesomeness that if you can get them in your landscape scene, it's just going to send them over the top. A waterfall in a sensational landscape, a crazy perspective, like getting half in the water and half out of the water, or getting your tripod just above the water's edge, so you're actually photographing a little bit of the hazy water on top, maybe a supreme aerial shot, you know, just an incredible top down. You're in a plane you're in a bush plane across Alaska or across Africa and you're getting just a perspective that people don't see before. Now, again, with any of these things I just rattled off, if you do them without any of these other tactics, without thinking about composition, without thinking about the lighting, without thinking about the aperture, you're probably not going to get a pro level shot. But if you create check boxes of all of these things, you're going to start noticing that when you layer them on top of one another and incorporate them all, you're going to get that pro level look.
Court:So we've now come to the time where we talk about post-processing, the editing of your photos. This is getting more and more important in today's day and age. Ironically, in some ways it's getting less important because cameras and lenses are getting so dang good. We don't really have to sharpen anything, we don't really have to add contrast, because if you have really good equipment, it's just looking so good out of the camera. The reason it's more important to do this is because sounds weird to say it's because everybody's doing it, when you see the exquisite landscape photos of Iceland or of auroras or whatever. You're photographing mountain scenes and you're comparing your shots with pros. Even if you do all these check boxes, the reason that their photos are going to look more eye popping, more dramatic, more special than yours is because they have edited their photo. So what are they doing with their editing?
Court:Well, this is by no means an extensive editing course, but I do want to give you a few ideas. Mainly, they're always going to be using masks with gradients and ellipses, meaning that they're probably not going to be changing the sharpness or the contrast of the whole scene. They're not going to increase or decrease the exposure of the entire scene. You kind of want to, you know, make light coming from a certain direction left to right or the top corner to the bottom corner. I've seen other photographers make a little bit of a sandwich with some of their contrast, with some of their darkness, meaning the top of the scene is a little bit darker, the bottom of the scene is a little bit darker, and that actually has its own way of leading your eyes into the middle of the scene. So these masks with gradients are hugely helpful in Photoshop and Lightroom primarily Lightroom, but I use Adobe Camera Raw, which is kind of like an intermediary program between Adobe Bridge and Photoshop, but it's the same as Lightroom. But I use Adobe Camera Raw, which is kind of like an intermediary program between Adobe Bridge and Photoshop, but it's the same as Lightroom. But gradients are huge. And then what you're going to be changing with the gradient gradient is really just a way of applying a very specific amount of your editing technique in a gradient.
Court:The editing technique you're going to be using, I would say exposure, is always one to think about. A lot of photographers will barely touch exposure because it's a very dramatic, heavy handed way of editing a photo, and they'll touch more on the whites and the blacks and the contrast. Contrast is really just increasing lights and decreasing darks at the same time. But then also, you're going to want to think about the color of your shot, and white balance is something I've talked about at length on this podcast and other platforms, and you really want to think about changing the color temperature of your shot. You know, if you are photographing at the blue hour, you can add a little more of a cool white balance, like a daylight effect, and that will add more blue in your shot If you're photographing a great sunset or a sunrise, and it's already inherently quite yellow. Like I said earlier, is it boosting that via a little bit more warming filter, ie a cloudy or a shady white balance? It's just gonna. It's gonna be able to hold it much better, like the photo will not start to look fake because you're already shooting on a really, really nice, warm tone. So, yeah, white balance is huge, but then also, sometimes you might wanna saturate your colors.
Court:I will say that, between saturation and vibrance, like every color slider, whether you're on like a Mac photo program or one of the free ones online for PCs, or all the way up to a proper Photoshop and Lightroom, you're gonna have these two options right next to one another, and you're probably gonna to want to touch one or the other a little bit. Generally, saturation is the heavy-handed one. It's just going to saturate every color more. Vibrance, though, is kind of a smart saturation, so it saturates the colors, but it goes easy on those colors that are most likely to make the photo look fake, and, frankly, those are the greens, kind of like the yellow side of greens and oranges. So if you saturate everything with saturation slider, you're gonna notice if you have a lot of greens in your shot, it's gonna look really messed up. So I almost never touch full saturation like the actual saturation slider in place. I'll just uptick the vibrance a little bit.
Court:And then two of the more new sliders that are kind of like these meta or combination sliders that take into multiple edits all at once is clarity and D haze. Clarity is really really good for kind of bringing more definition and more pop and more, more chutzpah to to your shot. People use it for the ripples on water. You might want to use it for the edgesipples on water. You might want to use it for the edges of a mountain. And then de-haze does really really well with cutting some of that atmospheric haze that may be distracting Sometimes. It's actually really really nice in landscape shots but it does make your photo pop more. And de-haze is something that I I use not only on landscape shots but sometimes, if I just don't know what a photo needs, I might uptick the dehaze a little bit because it really focuses on increasing the dominance and the saturation of the blacks in your photo. But it also does some other things that have to do with sharpening and clarity and all sorts of stuff. But it really is one of these catch-all, be-all, end-all type edits that's just like oh, all of a sudden my photo looks dramatic and Dehaze is really nice for that.
Court:Now, when I do this, usually what I'm doing is I'm selecting either the sky or the background or my subject first, and I'm making my edits that way, using gradients and ellipses. When I'm making my edits, I'm probably gonna click on the slider with my mouse or with my trackpad, and my technique is really to slide it all the way to extremes right off the bat. That means if one of my sliders, like exposure or contrast or clarity, is starting at zero, I'm gonna slide it all the way to 100. And as I'm sliding it pretty quickly, I'm taking notice of whether it's improving or making the photo worse. So I'm obviously never going to go all the way to a hundred on any of these things.
Court:You know, shadows is another great one to play around with, but what it does is it quickly allows me to figure out if contrast or shadows or clarity or dehaze is the thing I need to focus on, and then, once I like the effects, I'm going to go in and make really small micro adjustments and I might only go one or two units, or five or 10 units at a time and just make small, sensible adjustments. And I'm going to get to the point where it's over-correcting, it's over-editing, and then I'm going to go back quite a bit. I don't want it to even approach that level, so editing, and then I'm going to go back quite a bit. I don't want it to even approach that level. So, again, going from zero to a hundred real quickly in the sliders. It's so easy. It happens in real time to your photo. You can see the effects.
Court:It's a really, really helpful tool to quickly experiment with these various editing techniques to find, you know, your own style and the things that you like the look of most. At the end of the day, this is art. So even if you are editing to make it look a little bit different or quite a bit different than the way the photo was originally taken, that's okay. You're creating here. I personally like to make the photos look as much as how I saw them in the moment as possible. So sometimes they come into the camera without sharpness, without contrast, really not the way I remember seeing them. Some of the times, you know, I will be in these amazing landscape scenes and I'll just have this euphoric feeling, watching this exquisite sunset and you know all sorts of things going on that makes me feel so good that I I I remember the scene being so much more magical than the photo actually captured it. So, yeah, I will absolutely edit and make that photo look fantastic.
Court:So there's no real wrong way to edit on these things and, I do think, defining your own style, whether you like really warm photos or cool photos. If you are the kind of person that wants to have a certain color palette to all of your photos, maybe injecting a little bit of teals or oranges, that's a okay, I think, one of the best ways to all of your photos, maybe injecting a little bit of teals or oranges, that's a-okay. I think one of the best ways to really define your style and to see what's out there is just get on Google type amazing landscape photos and hit images and just start cycling through all these things but actually visualizing stuff and seeing what's out there and starting to notice oh, I didn't even really notice that they did this certain technique that Court was talking about, but once you see it in these examples, it's gonna be all the more clear as to why you need to start incorporating it into your own pro level landscape photography. And there you have it, folks a pretty extensive dive into how the pros get extraordinary landscape photos. We're talking about aperture, big depths of field, low ISOs for great quality and great editability. Make sure you get out there at a really unique time of day. Do some research to figure out are there interesting phenomena going on? Or maybe is a storm approaching and you found this really, really great vista or vantage point that would just be exquisite with some big billowy clouds. Make sure you nail those composition techniques.
Court:And, as a quick aside, it's always better to shoot a little bit wider than a little bit more zoomed in, because you do have that ability to straighten your shots. You have that ability to crop into the rule of thirds and make sure your photo matches as best as possible. And yeah, just think about all those outside the box things. The more things you can incorporate, like amazing foreground elements, extraordinary things like wildflower blooms or waterfalls or anything that is a big X factor in terms of something that's gonna put your landscape photo in front of people and send it over the top, the more you can add in, the better your shot's gonna be. But individually, these are all the ingredients. You just gotta figure out what is gonna go into your cake, and by cake I mean photo.
Court:Okay, folks. Well, once again, this is great, always a pleasure. I hope you learned something and thanks so much for joining Friends. I really do appreciate you listening in today. This is absolutely a passion project of mine. I hope you can tell, and I'm so glad to be able to teach so many about what I personally find the most valuable and helpful in the world of nature photography. It's a big part of my why to preserve the beauty of our world. If you'd like to get in touch with me, you can do so at wildphotographerpodcast at gmailcom. You can give me questions and suggestions for new episodes anything you'd like. You can also check out other related tutorials related to this content, as well as a lot more in the world of science, nature and adventure at my YouTube channel that's just at Court Whalen. That's all one word C-O-U-R-T-W-H-E-L-A-N on YouTube, and I've got some nifty videos there. It's been fun and looking forward to the next podcast. Thanks again.