The Landscape Photography Book

Simplicity

Characteristics of this type of shot: A clean, simple shot kissed by little pools of light.

Ingredients: My favorite landscape shots are usually the simplest ones—with very little going on in the shot—and this is a great example of that. I saw little spots of light hitting the top of these small hills, so we pulled the car over for me to get a shot of them. The sky had a nice gradation of color and was pretty enough that I let a lot of it show, and positioned the horizon line at the bottom 1/3 of the shot. That negative space from the sky leads your eye directly to the smooth, rolling shapes of the hills. In post-production, I painted ...