The trick behind landscape photography

On behalf of Rich De Gouveia

In my humble opinion, one of the most difficult things to capture is a beautiful landscape as it’s so much better in real life than it will ever be in person. However, because the scene is so epic we want to be able to share it with our friends and family.

“Our eyes are the most incredible cameras on the planet”

One of the most important things to remember when photographing a landscape is to have a subject in the photo. Even though your breath may have been taken away by the beauty of the scene you saw, the photo will lose major impact without a subject to focus on.

In the above photo, I chose 2 subjects using the rule of thirds. The Jackalberry tree takes up the right hand edge of the photo acting as a frame – this then leads you into the lioness staring at the beautiful colours rendered by the setting sun behind her. 

This shot was taken on a Nikon D7000 body with a Nikkor 70-200 f2.8 VRII lens set at f2.8 with a shutter speed of 1/320^th second. I had to bump the ISO up to 800 because of the fading light and underexposed the photo to capture the colours in the sky. Once I had the photo in the lightroom I added a bit of fill light to get the underexposed bits to closely resemble what it had looked like through my eyes that evening.