Creative Composition for Landscape Photography: A Visual Guide to Improving Your Photographs

This beautifully-illustrated book explores landscape photography in an easily approachable manner by laying out practical steps you can use to inject more creativity into your own work. It introduces you to many so-called “rules” of landscape photography and invites you to apply them when they work, scrap them when they don’t. And it presents photographs that will challenge you to stretch your own view of what a landscape photograph is. The result is a beautifully-illustrated cookbook of fresh ideas you can try out in your own photography. The 170 photographs, in both color and black and white, offer a wide range of techniques that can be readily applied by photographers with limited time or ability to travel to exotic locations. As landscape photographers, we each yearn to bring home the best photos we can, often those picture postcard shots of places with unusual natural beauty. But aside from being in the right place at the right time with the right gear, what can we do to duplicate the majesty of the jaw-dropping photos we see in books and magazines? And besides, is that all there is to landscape photography? Or are there other ways we can creatively approach the craft of photography that will lead us to achieve our own, unique vision? In this book, you’ll be introduced to a wide variety of techniques you can easily apply to your own photography, including • The rule of thirds • Centered subjects • Positioning the horizon • Showing depth in two dimensions • Incorporating horizontal, curved and zigzag lines and circles • Using triangles in compositions • Showing perspective with receding lines • Using framing and overlapping to show depth • Using atmospheric layers to show distance • Showing distance by using relative scale • Focal length and focus point as compositional techniques • Using lighting and texture in compositions • Color priority and color contrast • Single dominant elements in compositions • Incorporating balance and weight • Symmetry and asymmetry in compositions • The rule of odds • Using repeating elements • Simplicity as a compositional technique • Using themes as organizing principles • Having creative fun in composition • Combining multiple compositional elements Written especially for beginning and intermediate landscape photographers, the book nonetheless assumes you have at least the basic gear you’ll need and that you know how to use it. There are plenty of other guides to help you wade through the wealth of excellent cameras, lenses and other equipment, as well as basic books on exposure and other aspects of using your equipment effectively. By doing so, the text and photos in this book are thus freed to focus entirely on ways you can achieve greater creativity in composition and how you can freshen your approach to photographing the world around you. By clarifying the concept of creativity and stretching your definition of what makes a landscape photograph, this book will spur you on to see new compositional possibilities as you progress toward establishing your individual photographic style. The author has more than 35 years’ experience in photographing landscapes on four continents. His photographs have been published thousands of times and are available through several microstock agencies.