Alex Wise Photography

These are just a few things that I take into account before going on a shoot. They aren’t rocket sci­ence I’ll admit and are actu­ally quite sim­ple but I hope they help a little.

Loca­tion

Too often I see pho­tographs where peo­ple haven’t even left their house or back­yard which for the major­ity of shots is really bor­ing and dull. This is what eas­ily sep­a­rates work, putting in the effort to explore dif­fer­ent loca­tions is reward­ing for both you as a pho­tog­ra­pher and the viewer. Land­scape pho­tog­ra­phy is relax­ing and com­ing across beau­ti­ful loca­tions is truly a won­der­ful expe­ri­ence which the viewer appre­ci­ates all the more.

My process of find­ing a loca­tion for water­scape pho­tog­ra­phy is rel­a­tively easy. The inter­net is a great tool as it enables me to come across local surf­ing com­mu­nity web­sites where there are pic­tures and reports which gives an ok under­stand­ing of how con­sis­tent the loca­tion is and a rough idea of if there is any pretty rocks on the beach or what not. I like to use social pho­tog­ra­phy web­sites like flickr to see what’s on offer and how oth­ers have gone about shoot­ing the loca­tion. Just search­ing for Mt Field National Park brings up lots.

But this also requires pick­ing the right time for the shot.

Time

Peo­ple that expect to take a nice land­scape or water­scape shot at 1pm are kid­ding them­selves, don’t waste your time. Instead use these tools to help you find the time of the sunset/sunrise and when the golden hour will be to get the best shot. My only excep­tion to this is over­cast weather which I sug­gest tak­ing a trip to your local waterfall.

Golden Hour Calculator

The Photographer’s Ephemeris

Cam­era functions

Learn parts of the cam­era inside and out, this may include focus points, brack­et­ing, etc. With the sky quickly chang­ing dur­ing a sun­set or sun­rise you don’t really want to waste too much time fid­dling around with the cam­era. Whilst with the LCD on cam­eras being far from per­fect it’s handy to under­stand how the cam­era his­togram can be of ben­e­fit to you. Instead of drib­bling on about this I sug­gest you read up over at Lumi­nous Land­scapes.

I shoot the low­est ISO pos­si­ble in most cases as this gives me the longest expo­sure pos­si­ble and also reduces noise/grain. As you can see in the exam­ple below the use of ISO makes a lot of dif­fer­ence in terms of image clar­ity which is impor­tant if you intend to print your images.

Yuck.

Pro­cess­ing

As the say­ing goes, you can’t pol­ish a turd and this very much applies for the post pro­cess­ing of your photography.If your image lacks tech­ni­cally then apply­ing over done HDR isn’t the answer. Ensure you’re shoot­ing RAW as this enables greater recov­ery of a bad expo­sure. Even as a begin­ner shoot RAW, you might lack the pro­cess­ing skills now but there is always the future to come back to explore old images.

Keep things sim­ple and please avoid the ugly trends (selec­tive de-saturation, over done HDR, etc) as you will only shud­der in a few years when this goes out of flavour.

Don’t get too seri­ous

Don’t get too upset if a photo shoot doesn’t go your way. Often I take dri­ves and won’t even take my cam­era out of the car as the light isn’t how I’d hoped. Last sum­mer I got up at 4am and drove for an hour in the buck­et­ing rain and finally made it to watch a non exis­tent sun­rise, it sucked but wasn’t the end of the world.