While the majority of landscape photography is done in clear and sunny weather, lighting conditions can be much more interesting during storms, dusk and dawn, or even at night.
The light level is inevitably lower, but its character can be delightful. This is why professional landscape photographers are especially active at the beginning and end of the day and spend less productive afternoons moving from place to place and finding potential shooting points.
In this article, we will touch on a few non-standard situations in which you can do great landscape photos, and these tips will help you avoid many of the pitfalls of shooting.
Pictures in a dark time
The expression "bad weather" was invented by ordinary people who prefer warm sunlight to piercing wind or rain, while from a photographic point of view there is simply "weather" and the less comfortable it becomes, the more opportunities arise for shooting non-standard and spectacular frames .
Different types of weather conditions create their own mood, allowing you to take a series of completely different photos of the same area. What they have in common is that the light level is usually very low, and the required shutter speed can be several seconds even at noon. This leads to the need for a careful and conscious approach to shooting, especially keeping the camera still.
Pictures during fog and smoke
Small details and the sense of three-dimensional space are lost in photos taken in fog, although more distant objects gain a brighter peak (a phenomenon known as "aerial perspective"). Fog occurs when warm, moist air hits cold land or water surfaces and the excess vapor condenses into tiny droplets.
The best time to photograph in fog is early morning, when the sun's rays have not yet managed to warm the cold ground and cause the moisture to evaporate; most often suitable conditions can be found in spring and autumn. If you can get out before sunrise, you can shoot the landscape in pastel colors, with the first morning rays breaking through the mist or leaves of the trees and creating a great lighting effect. The thick fog is not so gentle, it limits visibility to a few meters and turns the landscape into a monochrome gray mass, above which only the largest objects rise: tree crowns, cathedral towers, etc. But this should not confuse you - the graphic simplicity of hazy compositions always brings something new to the world of bright and clear landscape photography.
To make a good shot in fog, you need to play on the peculiarities of these conditions. If you want to emphasize the effect of aerial perspective, take a telephoto lens and include in the shot a long object that goes into the distance, such as a river or a road, which becomes less distinguishable as you move away from the shooting point, eventually completely disappearing from view .
The long-focus lens, which compresses the perspective, makes the effect more pronounced. Wide-angle lenses serve the opposite purpose, allowing you to include quite close objects in the frame, whose visibility is almost the same as normal.
When shooting in dense fog, try to include a bright object, such as a person in a red hat or a mailbox, in the frame to play up the contrast between its sharpness and the blurring of the rest of the landscape.
Source: https://www.svatbenfotograf.org/
