Laerning How To See

The greatest reward of landscape photography lies not in seeing one of our images hanging on the wall or gracing pages of a magazine or website, but rather in the heightening of our ability to see and appreciate the natural world around us. When you first take camera in hand and go out to shoot landscape photographs, you might very likely get out there and not see a thing that seems worthy of shooting. In fact, you might have a hard time convincing yourself that the little stretch of woods in the neighborhood park could possibly be fodder for landscape photography at all. But in fact - it is.

Here are the 4 - steps exercise to get you started:

1. Select the place you're going to visit.
2. Take note of weather conditions when you arrive and consider what type of mood it tends to convey or what feeling it gives you.
3. Proceed a ways into your surroundings and stand still for a moment. Look outward about 100 feet. What do you see to your left? What do you see in front of you? What do you see to your right? What do you see behind you? Do this same exercise several times, decreasing the distance by about 20 feet each time. Finally, look around at the area within arm's reach and beneath you feet. This exercise will help you begin to look at the big picture as well as the little things that make up the big picture.
   
4. Now, do this same exercise again only this time look through your camera as you view the areas around you.

Once you've completed the exercise above, you'll begin to notice that the world through your viewfinder looks significantly different than the one seen without the aid of your camera. Why? Because the image in your viewfinder is just that - nothing more and nothing less. The image in your viewfinder includes all the little details that our human eyes and mind might tend to filter out. But by the same token, the image in the viewfinder does not extend beyond its boundaries. Our eyes have the luxury of darting to and fro, back and forth, capturing detail and context along continuum of various distances as we scan a scene. But when we press the shutter, we lock in a fixed representation of a scene. A good landscape photograph will appear complete even though it's just a slice of a larger scene.

The next step is to start pressing the shutter in order to capture not what you see in a scene, but the essence of your subject and what you feel about a scene. You might find it easier if you start out small. Limit your scope to, say, an area of about 50 square feet to begin with. This will help you focus your attention and sort out the scene into what's important to you and what is not.

It's difficult to be objective about our own work, so begin sharing your images with others in order to determine if you have successfully communicated the essence of a subject and your feeling about a place. Online photography forums are good places to share your work and view the work of others.

In the beginning it will be more important to practice the art of seeing rather than the art of photography. The more images you take with your camera, the better you will become at seeing how your camera sees. Study what works and what does not work in your images, and plan to revisit the same locations in order to improve upon earlier efforts. An additional benefit of revisiting locations is that you will come to know a few places well, and that knowledge and familiarity will come to be reflected in your work.

Extracted from an article written by Dawn Lane