Winter chills don’t affect your cameras.

 Last Saturday I had the privilege, along with Sally Phillips and Cliff Threadgold, to be part of the judging panel for the Laurie Thomas Landscape Salon.  This is the premier landscape salon associated with Photographic Society of New Zealand.  It is organised by the Christchurch Photographic Society.  The decision to have it judged in the North Island was a good one as there has been criticism in the past that the South Islanders were biased about what was a good landscape.  Actually, the Photographer’s Mail identified this as they pointed out, perhaps two years ago, that at last a North Island image had received a top award.  I don’t know how accurate this comment was, as I look at the quality of the images and not where the photographer was domiciled.  And anyway, I got a silver medal in this Salon last year.

Back to this year.  We had over 500 images to assess and allocate awards and acceptances to, just over 100 slides and over 400 digital images.  The winning series and acceptances were very good.  We had some great debates over the final placings, but otherwise we were very much of one mind.

One thing really worried me, looking at these images, was that there were a number of images that lacked any real understanding of what a landscape was all about.  There were major problems in the slides, lack of good colour and exposure, obviously filthy dirty slides with finger marks and scratches on them. All resulted in “Not acceptances”.  Poorly composed too, or simply just boring.

Then the digitals.  Here the exposure and colour was much better, but there were a significant number of images that were over or under sharpened, colour corrected to the point of garishness and lack of attention to cropping or removing distracting elements.  Also, there were a number of images in both slides and digital where the photographer obviously had no concept of the essence of a good landscape photograph.

On top of this, recently, when looking at the WPS digital images entered in the past two years to try to find a set of three top landscape images for the PSNZ Bowron Interclub competition, I was hard pressed to find four images from four different people of sufficient quality to warrant an entry.  I am still looking.

Later this year we will be running a workshop on Landscape Photography.  In the meantime I want to suggest to you some things you can do to make your attempts at landscape photography more successful and even stunning.

A good landscape is well composed.  That is, it “looks right”.  It should have a foreground, a middle ground and a background. One element should lead you to the next.  Now you can eliminate one or more of these things, but you must have a stunning image to get away with it.

The best hours of the day for landscape photographs is the first two hours and the last two hours of any day.  Therefore, winter is often the best time for making superb landscapes.  Look for low angle lighting.  Turn your camera towards the light source.  You might be surprised at the result.

Bracket your exposures, by one or two stops even.  It may surprise you.  And no, don’t rely on doing this in your computer.  It may not work the way you think it should.

Use the wonderful Waikato fog to get some interesting images.  Some of my best images have come from doing this, and Janet had one of sunrise through the dawn at Otorohanga that got acceptance in the Laurie Thomas Salon.

Look for dramatic clouds or introduce them from another image. (Yes, that is allowable, but just make sure the judge can’t tell).

Enough for now.  It is winter, get out your camera and go look for great landscapes.  The Memorials competition entries must be in on 22nd July and one of those must be a landscape.

Keep well wrapped up though.

John Greenwood - July 2008