Nikon® D5000 Digital Field Guide

Chapter 15. Urban and Rural Landscape Photography

• In This Chapter

• Preparing your shot

• Urban

• Silhouettes

• Desert

With landscape photography, the intent is to represent a specific scene from a certain viewpoint. For the most part, animals and people aren't included in the composition, and so the focus is solely on the view. Landscape is a very popular type of photography because anyone can do it. There are many famous landscape photographers, the most famous of whom is probably Ansel Adams.

Preparing Your Shot

Landscape photography can incorporate any type of environment — desert scenes, mountains, lakes, forests, skylines, or just about any terrain. You can take landscape photos just about anywhere, and one nice thing about them is that you can return to the same spot, even as little as a couple of hours later, and the scene will look different according to the position of the sun and the quality of the light. You can also return to the same scene months later and find a completely different scene due to the change in seasons.

There are three distinct styles of landscape photography:

• Representational. This is a straight landscape, the "what you see is what you get" approach. That is not to say that this is a simple snapshot; it requires great attention to details such as composition, lighting, and weather.

• Impressionistic. With this type of landscape photo, the image looks less real due to filters or special photographic techniques such as long exposures. These techniques can give the image ...