Photographer Chris Tennant has put together a great article on what you can do when your original landscape photography plans don’t work out.
That is actually a brilliant opportunity to show everyone what you’re made of, and make the situation work in your favor. Photography is all about creativity, and when something surprising happens, it’s definitely the time to get creative!
Work With the Weather You Have
Given the physical toll of being in the field all day combined with subsisting on trail mix and warm water, you may be tempted to abandon a shoot at the slightest hint of bad weather. But having the discipline to wait it out can be extraordinarily rewarding. In fact, some of my favorite photographs were a result of conditions that would’ve caused a younger, less patient me to abandon ship.
Overcast skies and light rain at sunrise? Wait and see if the clouds part. My neatly framed view of Mt. Rundle in Banff National Park, required such patience.
Once, while in the Adirondack Mountains under an underwhelming sky, a rain shower suddenly swept in and I began my retreat from the summit. As I happened to glance sideways, however, I saw a brilliant double rainbow nearly close enough to touch. This led me to scamper like a lunatic back up the mountain, firing off as many shots as I could. I’ve never been so happy while cold and wet.
A completely socked in, overcast, or foggy day may make you want to head for home, too. Your morale can take a hit when hiking with the expectation of expansive views, but stay on the course and work with the bad weather: Create compositions that minimize the sky while placing the primary focus on the foreground.
Perfectly clear skies can be just as challenging as fog, rain, or cloudiness. So what do you do when you can kiss any chance of a magnificent sunset goodbye? Shoot after sunset. Twilight produces beautiful coloration in the sky in shades from blue to purple. Your pictures will be subtler than with the dramatic sunset you imagined, but you may still get a keeper. Since you will lose light quickly, set a longer exposure to enhance the cool colors. If water plays a significant part in your composition, take advantage of its ability to transmit those tones throughout the rest of the scene.
Compose Creatively
Some locations rely so completely on an interesting sky that if one never materializes it can be difficult to find a compelling landscape shot. Miles of unbroken beaches, for example, make many coastlines ideal for a relaxing vacation, but unless you find some drama above, they offer little in the way of compositional interest.
During one particular pre-dawn stroll on the Outer Banks in North Carolina, I hoped to capture the experience of a sunrise at the ocean. But with so little to work with, how? A lovely palette of colors dawned, but a static shot of the ocean and a cloudless sky would be dull and uninspired. Instead I took an abstract approach, stopped down my aperture to f/22, and began to pan the camera horizontally during the exposure. What resulted were swaths of alternating colors of both cool and warm tones, which captured the essence of that morning on the beach.
Be Open to the Happy Accidents
If you’re in a remote location and your only battery runs out of juice, it’s game over. However, there are less severe situations where being flexible and thinking on the fly can rescue your expedition.
Perhaps in your haste to get to that waterfall you accidentally brought your tele instead of an ultrawide lens. Look for interesting patterns, textures, or reflections for a more abstract approach. Maybe on your hike to the summit you got a nasty scratch on your lens: Rather than shooting into the sun and exacerbating the resultant lens flare, wait until the sun has set.
Read the full article with more tips and example images over at Popular Photography.
Source: Popular Photography
