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landscape photography

Matching Colors

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Exploring with your camera can be a fun thing to do when you are on vacation or just taking a few days of rest. The other day I was out and about in Rockport and drove by one of my favorite doors along Main St. A nice yellow wreath and fishing balls were hanging on the storm door. The colors are what drew me in. The complimentary red and yellow color gave me the image. Three main elements gave me the composition I was looking for. My tour clients often ask about colors and composition. I like to think of it this way; I look for one main color with other complimentary colors that add to the scene.

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Leica M-P 240  90mm Leitz Summicron  ISO 400  1/250s  f5.6

Landscape photography tools – leading elements

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One of the most important elements of landscape photography is the leading element. It’s that one aspect of the image that pulls the viewer right into the frame. On one of my recent tours to Good Harbor Beach we were faced with a very low tide which gave us some very cool mounds of sand created by the tide. This added to the visual aspects of this image by also giving it some texture. The curving structure of the rivulets of sand leading up to the rising sun pulls the viewer into the image.

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I shot this in both horizontal and vertical but the vertical to me is much better. It gives the image more depth.

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The sun star is much better in this image because the sun is lower, but I still like the vertical even if it does have some sun flare from the filter as the sun was higher.

Reflections – A powerful landscape photographers tool

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Last week while on an early morning tour to Good Harbor Beach in Gloucester we were faced with a full moon low tide that seemed to go out forever. Normally this is not a great thing but in this instance it offered our group an interesting perspective on the cliche sunrise photo.

We set up looking for the sunrise over Thacher’s Island and the early morning dawn did not disappoint. It had a wonderful glow about it which started to brighten up the clouds in the south with incredible pinks, yellows, oranges and blues. I kept looking over in that direction at the clouds changing colors and could not help but think that there is a photo there. My Canon 5D Mklll was on the tripod with a longer lens but I had my Sony Nex7 with the wide zoom available. I grabbed this “little” camera and ran down to a large puddle and using the tilting LCD I made some shots at water level of the incredible colored clouds just before sunrise.

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I have shot reflections before and know that the best way to photograph using them is very low at water level. Of course this does not work in every case but in this case it works. The mounds of sand in the foreground give this scene a realistic look not just a copy of the scene above and help the viewer look over to the left following the clouds.

This image is not overdone with saturation and and is very real as the color is how I saw it. In my view it’s important not to overdue things in Lightroom or Photoshop as it takes away from the natural scene. When this image was shown to the folks in my tour we moved down to the small pond and made some great images as the sun came up.

Another successful Cape Ann Photo Tour!