COMMON MISTAKES IN LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY

The more I meet and interact with photographers, the more I am sometimes surprised at the delusions that are circulating among the landscape photography community. Also, some of the participants in our landscape workshops or expeditions come with really "interesting" opinions and need to be refuted with verifiable arguments and put back on the right landscape path. So I decided to write up and highlight some of the fatal sins a landscape photographer can commit.

Otherwise, I would like to point out that I am not inventing anything new and revolutionary. The vast majority of what follows is based on years of experience of famous landscapers who used similar techniques decades and decades ago. We should only build on them in a more modern form. Let us now map out, in the form of quotations and responses, a few of the errors that have been reported.

"I DON'T EDIT MY LANDSCAPE PHOTOS, I DON'T STACK PHOTOS FROM DIFFERENT EXPOSURES, I DON'T LIKE ARTIFICIAL PHOTOS. I WANT TO CAPTURE THE SCENE AS I SAW IT AND TAKE PHOTOS THE WAY THE OLD LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHERS DID."

I register such mistakes especially on photographic servers quite often. But this is a fundamental ignorance. Why? Because the best cameras today have a dynamic range of about 14.5 EV in laboratory conditions. However, human eyesight can handle up to 30 EV! So if we are shooting a dynamically demanding scene - e.g. in a backlight with the sun in the frame - the camera cannot capture it perfectly due to technical limitations. The sun tends to be overblown and the lower parts are black without drawing. Therefore, we have no choice but to work around the technical limitations.

Using graduated ND filters (which I personally avoid) or ideally using exposure bracketing, we make up for what the camera couldn't do, but we as photographers saw at that place and moment! So by using exposure bracketing we increase the dynamic range of the camera and bring it closer to the dynamic range of human vision. Or rather, we are not increasing the dynamic range of the chip as such, of course, we are merely circumventing its technical imperfections.

As for landscape aces and how they work, then I would recommend Ansel Adams, for example. An American landscape legend (1902 - 1984). Just read about his photographs and their editing and you may be surprised to learn that he, like us, had to deal with too much dynamic range in a scene. He did similar things by hand in the darkroom as we do today in post-processing in digital form.

"I SHOOT AT F16, F22 OR HIGHER APERTURE TO KEEP THE SCENE SHARP FROM THE FOREGROUND TO THE END."

This is a very widespread and absolutely fatal mistake. Sometimes I think it is a kind of landscape epidemic :) But it's obvious where it came from. Many "erudite" authors have started writing books and publishing articles advising aspiring photographers and telling them that if they want a nice sharp photo, they need to have the highest aperture. However, they no longer tell them where the limits of the lens are and what diffraction is.

First of all, we need to know the lenses we use to take pictures. Each lens has its own sweet spot. This is the aperture (or focal length for zooms) at which the lens has the best drawing. For starters, it's a good idea to look at sites that test lenses on a professional level. For example, www.dxomark.com. There you will find that f16, f22 or even higher apertures, if the lens allows it, are already far beyond optimal drawing. On the contrary, at such high aperture numbers, there is a significant deterioration of the drawing and a phenomenon called diffraction. It is not necessary to know the definition, we should just know that it is a physical phenomenon of light bending at the edges. If the aperture is open, then there is enough light that passes unbent through the centre of the aperture that the effect of diffraction is not visible. But when we stop down, typically around aperture 16 or more, diffraction becomes apparent. The drop in sharpness is most noticeable in the center of the photo. It follows that diffraction, as a physical phenomenon, occurs in all lenses. However, professional lenses, due to their internal construction, will exhibit less diffraction at higher apertures than is the case with cheap kit lenses. It is worth mentioning that despite tests in laboratory conditions, every given lens, i.e. every piece from the same brand, behaves differently. Therefore, it is more than advisable to make our own tests of our lenses, so that we are not unnecessarily disappointed that we missed a good photograph just because we did not know how much to stop down.

Moreover, increasing the aperture beyond a certain limit will not bring us anything positive in terms of sharpening the scene! Normally, it is enough to aperture at f8 or f11. The difference in sharpening between f11 and f22 is absolutely negligible. Yes, the edges of the image will be slightly sharpened, but the area that is in focus will be significantly blurred! This is true not only for the photo as perceived as the area from the center to the sides, but especially for the depth of field (DoF)! This is why we should really avoid increasing aperture numbers at all costs, as this can have a really significant impact on the quality of the photograph. Don't believe it? Just shoot a scene at f11 and f22, make 100% crops of the centre of the photo and the edges and you will be convinced.

There are basically 3 reasons why photographers today disproportionately increase apertures - 1) ignorance, 2) increase time, 3) create attractive sun rays on light sources. I tried to correct the ignorance in the previous lines. As far as time extension is concerned, it is better to use a good quality ND filter to extend the time, instead of a pointlessly high aperture. And creating nice rays on light sources can be solved by first exposing the photo with a normal aperture appropriate to the scene (so say somewhere between f8 - f11) and then shooting the photo again with the maximum aperture. Overlay both photos, using only a small portion of the more overexposed one as a light source. Of course, just stopping down to f11 will sculpt the light source rays very nicely.

"I LIKE DARKER PHOTOS, SO I UNDEREXPOSE MY SCENE TO AVOID OVEREXPOSURE. THEN I LIGHTEN THE DARK PARTS OF THE PHOTO SOMEHOW."

This bedtime story just gives me bad dreams. This is a major expositional blunder that will lead our photographic endeavors to ruin. It should be remembered that pulling the drawing out of the shadows, i.e. lightening an underexposed photograph, significantly degrades the technical quality of the photograph. It leads to the appearance of noise, can lead to the disintegration of the drawing or the introduction of posterization! On the other hand, the exponometrically correct procedure is that we take the scene a little brighter and by darkening it we can achieve the same dark and saturated photograph as we intended, but with high quality drawing without noise and posterization. If we are using exposure bracketing, then we just overexpose the photo and apply it to the bottom dark parts of the photo. Namely, we darken the overexposed photo until it matches the reality of the place and time. We use the middle and underexposed bracketing photo on the remaining parts of the image, especially the sky.

The negative effects of underexposing a photo are very pronounced in photos without clear contours, i.e. in foggy photos. The negative effects are even more pronounced if the photo is taken before sunrise for a longer period of time. If we want to achieve a really good quality drawing in these scenes, we have only one option - to make the photo significantly lighter.

These three transgressions described above can make our resulting photographs completely unattractive to the viewer. Our early morning wake-ups and climbs to the top of the mountains with heavy photographic equipment will turn from joy to disappointment.

I would like to mention two more mistakes that sometimes accompany large-format panoramic photography.

"I'LL DO PANORAMIC PHOTOS WHEN I WANT TO DO TWO-METER PRINTS."

In this case it is a complete misunderstanding of why to take large format panoramic photos. As one of the arguments of the opponents of panoramic photos, it is more and more often said that it is enough to buy a camera with high resolution, take single shots and there is no need to shoot the pano photo, because thanks to the resolution we already have enough data for large prints. However, it is important to remember that having enough data for quality large format prints is rather a secondary reason to take panoramic photos. However, this only applies if it will shoot standard horizontal or vertical single shots. If we want to have a square format, then there is only one option. That is to cut the single shot into a square. This loses both the composition and the data. So if we want to have the resulting photo in a square format with high resolution, then panoramic photography is the only possible solution.

Panorama compiled from total of 30 frames (3-level exposure bracketing of 10 frames in two rows).

Therefore, just briefly. The main reason to take panoramas and compose them is that by using different lens, the photographer can offer the viewer a different view of the scene, even if it has already been photographed thousands of times. Traditionally, this has been particularly applicable to compositions where a wide-angle lens is required for the single shot. For example, if I instead reach for a normal lens and shoot a panorama in two rows, the viewer gets a completely different view of the whole scene by using a non-traditional focal length. Multi-row panoramas are thus a new creative tool for the photographer to distinguish himself from other landscape photographers.

"I DON'T SHOOT PANORAMIC PHOTOS BECAUSE WE CAN'T COMPOSE A PHOTO WITH RUNNING WATER ETC."

This argument is completely false. On my website I think I have presented a sufficient number of panoramic photos, single- and multi-row, photographs with dynamics in the scene (flowing water, flying clouds) where dynamic structures were seamlessly connected. Again, as I have mentioned in some of my articles, we don't clone the errors, because most of the time it is not even possible. So no big deal :) For an example I give the following photo.

Panorama compiled from total of 18 frames (3-level exposure bracketing of 6 frames in one row).

There are a number of other photographic misconceptions, superstitions and rumours, and I have tried to point out some of the most common ones in the current landscape photography community. Other misconceptions in landscape photography and their solutions are discussed in more detail in our workshops, where there is more time for this (including the possibility of practical demonstrations) than is offered in an article on the internet.