So here we are again, we can put our snowshoes back in the loft and start looking to warmer days and earlier starts. Yes it is that time of year when colour and warmth starts to return to the landscape, the time when we can start to head out without our sub-zero gloves and thermal layers. The life-giving spring is back in town.

If you are slightly cynical about the joys of spring, I can understand this. It is the time of year when photography forums and stock libraries tend to become overrun with certain white then blue flowers and marauding hordes of photographers twitch round the country to catch the next batch of blooms. We then lie shoulder to shoulder in lines of 10 – 20 waiting for the exact viewpoint that another photographer has just taken. Is there really any point in this? Is there another way? Surely, we have all seen enough bluebell photos by now haven’t we? Surely, there cannot be any new ways to look at bluebells left?

Well luckily, yes there are and hopefully in the course of this piece I will be able to convince you of that and pass on the joys of spring to some of the more cynical amongst us.

There are many great things about woodland landscapes and some interesting challenges too. Let’s start with pace. It can be a far more relaxed pursuit that other forms of landscape photography. Woodland sessions need not be in the wee small hours. Lovely images of woodland areas can be captured on comfortable, sunny Sunday afternoons as the dappled diffused sunlight drifts through the trees on to the forest floor.

This image of a birch among the bluebells is what I would term a quiet landscape shot and tells the story of British woodland and continuance with the young and old tree. I included this here to illustrate how your shooting can be flexible with bluebells. This handheld shot was taken while on a family walk with a camera. This as many who have tried it will tell you, is not generally the atmosphere conducive to productive landscape photography but for me it captures some of the understated and gentle beauty we associate with the UK and bluebell woodland.

After pace, there is availability. We are very lucky as we have an abundance of woodland here in the UK, so save the planet and shoot local. I like to spend time getting to know the local areas before the bluebells bloom and then keep an eye on their progress and that of the trees in the area too. For me, the condition of the trees is as important to the image as the flowers. To create the overall impression of the vibrant spring scene you need all elements to be working harmoniously so a collection of dead twigs with a few half-dead flowers at the base is not going to cut the mustard.

If you do keep your eye out for these local spots you will often find locations that are not yet on the photographer honey-pot trail. In fact, I personally have never actually encountered another photographer while out shooting bluebells, which is just the way I like it. One other tip is that organisations like the National Trust now have specific site listings on their website for bluebells. This is due to the growing popularity of bluebells & snowdrops among the population as a whole. If you use these as starting points then even the reccies can be fun. My family and I benefit from many daytime walks and picnics round this time of year, with half an eye on location scouting as well as providing lovely spring backgrounds for portrait shoots. Just remember to take your sun compass with you … and not actually mentioning that you are going on a location-scouting trip might also be deemed sensible, but I could not comment on that.

Finally, as if you would need any more convincing, time and convenience is another great perk of spring shooting. This might have particular relevance for those used to shooting winter sea & landscapes. Now in spring we can leave our wellies at home and not worry about venturing out in to the freezing surf or fog for boot-filling moments of soggy madness in the half-light of the fading sun or wading through the snow for hours to grab the shot we planned out in our heads. Instead we can stroll through mellow woodland, with bunnies skipping through the forest as the warming rays of the sun lift the mist from the forest floor and everything seems right with the world. You could even put the case that it is better than summer shooting as sunset is at such a gentlemanly hour as to allow us to enjoy the post-shoot glass of our choice while reflecting on the earlier witnessed glories of nature, even with Sunday closing times. This is of course if the inclination takes you that way and I believe from my participation on photography forums that there might be one or two photographers out there who do occasionally indulge in such constructive and reflective post-shoot analysis.

The drawbacks or perhaps the attraction of these little beauties is that they are only here for a short time each year but the good news is that this should be enough to allow you to make a few trips. There are some general principles to shooting bluebells and some key points to help you get the shots you want but as with all photography, the best results through experimentation not following someone else’s recipe.

So what steps can we take to guarantee successful trips?

First of all, the general ‘rules’ of image composition still apply. If you are new to these try googling: ‘leading lines’, ‘rule of thirds’, ‘golden section’ or even ‘photography composition’ and you will find a few pointers. These should keep you busy for a little while. However, I will attempt to keep this piece specific to bluebell photography so for me the guidelines that ring truest for these scenes are:

Sky – Less is more. Bluebells are generally found in woodland so to help convey the feeling of being alone in a field bluebell bliss to your viewers you will want to look for scenes that exclude the sky as much as possible. Naturally, the eye is drawn to the brightest part of a scene and bright sky showing through patchy trees will draw the attention away from the focal point of the scene and therefore the story that you are trying to convey, unless it is key to the story of course.

Foliage – This is the same message as the sky here, only inverted. Look for good tree cover but it does, of course, have to be the right tree cover. Patchy old twigs or nettles do not generally present an image that viewers want to fall in to. There are numerous way to go here but find woodland where the tree cover works with the bluebells. This should not generally be too hard but the key point is: good tree cover and trees sprouting fresh leaves at the same time as the bluebells flowering.

Light – I did mention earlier that the light could be varied. It can. My main tips here are really just to experiment. Try dawn shoots, try sunset shoots, try sunny day shoots and even overcast shoots. Play round with your settings and just try to tell the story that presents itself to you on your visit. My favourite time is still sunrise and sunset but the best advice is to go whenever you can, take your time and make the best of what presents itself to you.

Kit choice – so this is an interesting one and might prove controversial with some landscapers. Often for landscape shoots the wide-angle lens is our best friend. It was creating drama and super reality long before HDR entered the kit bag because it can fit in more than we could actually see with our own eyes. However, for me the wide-angle lens can generally stay in the kit bag for these bluebell shoots (obviously you can not actually leave your baby at home, because well – you never know do you?). For bluebell shots though, a longer lens will focus on the middle distance ground and therefore the bluebell heads. A wide-angled lens will give you more of an image of bluebell stems, which are (in case you didn’t know already) green. Sure there are different styles of image and do please experiment but to create the image of being lost in the woodland then the longer lens is the way to go to give that ‘sea of blue’ feeling. Another key of course is that trees, much like most buildings are generally upright. To make sure that they stay this way you will need to keep you lens levelled on all axes. You can get away with being slightly off level but lean too far forward and the trees will lean in to the centre and lean back and the trees will lean out.

So after we have the scene selected and the time out booked we need to set up our shot and we are back to the holy trinity of Aperture, Shutter speed & ISO. Now for many landscapes, particularly those we are likely to have been shooting over the winter months the recipe will be:

1) Set Aperture to optimum to give maximum depth of field for your given kit
2) Set ISO to best possible quality
3) Let the shutter speed do as it will (or slow it down to give more movement to certain elements)

However for bluebell landscapes we need to shift our mindset a little depending on the image that we are making. So firstly we need to ask ourselves about the story we wish to tell. If you wish to shoot a clear bluebell shot with well-defined flowers then you will need to think along the following lines:

1) Determine what shutter speed you need to freeze any movement in the bluebells. This will vary depending on the breeze. Still days make things easier.
2) Consider what aperture will give acceptable depth of field with your set up
3) Consider what ISO your calculations (or camera) says you need then adjust the settings or shot so that these last 2 are within acceptable ranges to give you the image you want. Luckily modern DSLRs and software are pretty good at handling noise in higher ISO shots.

Shot Style – Of course the above recipe will give you sharp images with clear flowers and decent depth but another benefit of springtime shooting is that you are not restricted by light as much as some other times of year. This of course means that you can take your time and frolic in the forest and play around with different settings, just like the joyful springtime woodland sprites even the cynical amongst us are now, no doubt, turning into. Try using longer exposures to capture deliberate movement in the trees and flowers. Try camera movement to colourful abstracts and of course don’t forget to ‘Look behind you’. There is plenty of opportunity for catching dawn views of sun’s rays through the morning mist or wistfully moving trees in their new spring clothing.

Hopefully, if you follow these guidelines you will soon be feeling the big-bluebell-brotherly-love and filling up your hard drives with the results of successful shoots galore. So go forth my brothers and sisters and bluebell up your life!

In landscape photography, one of the first and most common questions that people will ask is about methods for controlling the sky. To most mortal men ‘controlling the sky’ might seem a grandiose task on a par with something a modern day Icarus & Ithacus might take on. However, to a band of dedicated, some might say almost-committed, early rising, wet-booted, cold-footed landscape photography devotees it is one of the most basic skills we have to master. Now of course if an infinite number of chimps, working on an infinite number of typewriters, for infinite amount of time could produce the works of Shakespeare then it is not beyond the wit of man to see that us landscape chimps will come up with many complex ways to solve our sky based issues and probably then spend quite a lot of time arguing about which is ‘the’ way.

To start from the beginning, why do we need to control the sky?

Well, in fairness, it is not only the sky. Photography is basically all about ‘light’. You have a sensor or a piece of film and you need to capture the light that the lens is pointed at in sufficient amounts to make the image that the photographer envisaged at the time of exposure. The light makes the image and the light is what will guide the viewer to the areas of the image we want them to see and the way that we want them to see it. The problems come from the limitations of technology Vs the complex human form. The human eye & brain combo is a pretty lethal machine and can outwit the most complex technology. This is the reason that we have to jump through hoops to try to replicate even the most basic of views that we see and process without thought on a daily basis.

The most common manifestation of this issue is where the sky meets the land. Generally the sky is substantially brighter than the land. Our human brain knows this and the eye can cope with a substantial dramatic range and so we see the detail in the ground and the buildings or mountains in the distance but also the little fluffy clouds floating through the sky. The camera sensor though cannot cope with these dramatic differences and must be exposed for one or t’other correctly. This will result in either a blacked out foreground or a burnt out sky with no detail in one of them. If you are really lucky, you might even burn out the sky, black out the land and correctly expose for just a small part of the sky. This then is the start of the issue that we need to overcome. Realising this is unfortunately is also only the start of many problems. Many residents of the photographic virtual world tend to believe that they have ‘the answer’ and that there is some flaw in the argument of people who choose other options and they secretly believe that this flaw also translates to flaws in their psyche, personality and probably their moral fibre too.

At the moment there are several principal & popular ways to address this issue (and many sub methods within them):

1) Graduated Filters
2) Manual Blending
3) HDR
4) A mix of the above
5) Shoot low contrast scenes e.g. cut out the sky altogether

So let us take a quick look at these different methods in as balanced a way as an honest man with a pre-defined preference can manage. In these examples, I have included some initial costs of what it would take to take to get started with each of these models and an overview of how they work.

1) Graduated Filters
a. Cokin P Series rough cost about £100 to buy the adapter ring, the filter holder and a mix of hard & soft grads reputed to have a purple colour cast.
b. Hi-Tech more than Cokin but less than Lee
c. Lee Filters – V Good quality filters with hardly any colour cast (reputed to scratch easily)
d. There are loads of others and you can spend lots and lots if you are so inclined.

These come in 2 types, soft grad or hard grad. The difference is the rate at which they change from dark to light. Soft – has a soft fade and hard – changes quickly. They are each better suited to different situations and cameras.

They also come in different strengths to cope with different light conditions and can be stacked to increase their strength. The basic premise is that you darken the sky to within a couple of ‘stops’ of the land so that you have detail in both and so that the sky does still appear lighter than the ground e.g. as your eye saw it.

The alleged benefits of graduated filters are that they allow you to ‘get it right in camera’. However, there are limited in the situations that they can cope with and most landscape photographers these days process their images digitally anyway so I personally am not sure of the benefits of this model in a digital work-flow, unless you generally like cleaning and carrying things that is. If, however, this is already engrained in your practice or you are a film-based photographer then sure: ‘why change’. Otherwise, look carefully at what you want to achieve and consider if this model will actually allow you to deliver on those intentions and provide a justifiable return on your investment.

If a photographer does adopt this way of working and they honestly limit themselves to it then they are essentially restricting the number of situations that they can shoot or at least the accuracy that their capture can convey.

The main reason for this limitation is that the graduations are straight lines and even if you use a soft grad there are many situations when the elements in the foreground continue up in to sky e.g. buildings on hills, mountains, trees that you use to frame the shot etc. There are also lots of occasions when there will be light elements in the foreground that you will want to darken down too.

As for my opinion, well I like purple as much as the next man. It is a lovely colour: Regal, some might say. Freud, I believe, had other opinions. However, when it comes to landscape photography we do not need to add our own splash. I also love burnt and blackened trees as photographic subjects but I think that unless I am on charred ground or the Namibian desert then I do not think we need to add the effect ourselves. For me this model is just not taking advantage of the options we currently have available and does not do as good a job as we are capable of of representing the image as pre-visualized or witnessed.

The main downsides are: colour casts on your shots that are very difficult to remove. More chance to get something dirty: finger prints, sea spray etc & additional expense. Image quality (IQ) can also suffer using cheap versions of these filters. If you are spending good money of the best glass you can afford to get the crispest, sharpest image then would you really want to stick a cheap bit of purple plastic between you and your subject?

That said, some of the most gorgeous landscape images you see from some of the most accomplished photographers will have used Graduated filters so they can not be all bad, just a bit cumbersome and old-fashioned maybe?

If you do choose to go down this route you will need:
1 – Adapter ring to fit to any lenses you want to attach the filter holder to
2 – A filter holder that slides on to the ring
3 – The set of filters (probably start with soft grads though some people say only hard are necessary for crop sensor cameras)

2) Post Processing

a. Manual blending

The basic concept of this model is that you take a shot for the light area(s) (usually the sky) and a shot for the darker area(s) (usually the land) then put one on top of the other and ‘mask’ the bits that you do not want to see. This results in a final image; not coloured, not perfumed, just as-is. As scenes grow in complexity and your skills grow with practice you can blend as more than 2 layers to represent the scene as envisaged at time of capture. Changing ‘blending modes’ of the different layers also affects the output and pre-defined actions are available to purchase on-line. At its simplest this takes a few moments, at its most complicated it can take little while to get right. You can even replicate the straight-cut effect of a hard or soft edged graduation if you are nostalgic for the dark (room) ages.

For my money this allows you to get the closest to the scene that you witnessed in the field because there is nothing between you and the scene except your skills, your lenses and your sensor.

This method allows you as the photographer to retain control and not be restricted by a hard-edged piece of coloured glass or to hand processing rights a software app either developed by a well-meaning software developer on the other side of the world based on algorithms and equations.

You can do this in a variety of programs such as: Elements (about £100?), Photoshop (more expensive) or similar apps by other manufactures. You can usually download trial versions of the software too free for 30 days and you will probably need these programs anyway even if you choose one of the other processing work-flows.

One of the things that you will find with this model is that many people, who generally do not have too much experience with photography, call this ‘photo-shopping’ as if it is a modern idea robbing photography of purity, truth and decency. In reality though, landscape photographers have used this model since the days before filters were invented. Manually blending shots in post-processing to retain detail in the skies was actually how Eadweard Muybridge (he of trotting horse fame) had to process his landscape images in the days before Ansel Adams was even a twinkle in the milk-man’s eye.

The image below shows how this manual blending can cope with complex lighting situations and provide an accurate, faithful image.

b. Virtual ND filters

Programs like the latest version of Aperture or Lightroom now allow you to apply a ND filter to raw images post capture. This has some advantages over the ‘actual’ filters in that you can add or remove parts of the filters to give them a user-defined shape. However, the camera can only capture a limited dynamic range to if there is too much contrast in the scene then the highlights or the deepest shadows would still be lost i.e. in situations with a very bright sky and dark foreground it will not work. Therefore you cannot rely on this method alone unless you only shoot fairly low contrast scenes. However, if you only need a couple of stops then this can be a great user defined alternative the ND filters for the following reasons:

a) No colour cast
b) User defined strength
c) User defined amount of graduation
d) Easy to alter the exact position or other settings post capture

This image shows some of the customisable settings and the options allowed by this simple and powerful tool as used here in Lightroom 3.

c. HDR
HDR refers to ‘High Dynamic Range’. The principle behind this is that you take several images of the scene so that you have detail captured for all the areas of shadow and highlight within a scene. The computer will blend these images together based on setting chosen by the user to generate an image that represents potentially even greater a dynamic range that the human eye could have seen.

HDR is gaining in popularity and the techniques and software are constantly being refined. i-phones even have an HDR mode built in now. In the past this method of processing has had a poor reputation because it is very easy to mis-use. Many HDR images on the web will have a ‘cartoon’ look of being over-saturated and over-processed. This can work extremely well for gritty, urban scenes and really add punch. However, when the same techniques are applied to landscapes, for me personally, I am left cold.

However, for some practitioners who spend the necessary time to refine a method that works for them they can extract some real beauty from challenging scenes. The things to watch out for if attempting this method are: obvious signs of over processing, too much detail in area of shadow. Shadows are not evil and do exist. These can be used to your advantage. ‘The Shadows’, however, are another matter altogether though and I can think of no good reason for ‘The Shadows’ at all and if there was a software program to remove all trace of Cliff & his buddies then I think we should all take full advantage of it!

Programs like Photoshop have HDR embedded but you can also buy standalone apps such as photomatix. Again the cost for this somewhere round the £100 mark.

The other methods are fairly self-explanatory but the honest ‘answer’ is that there is no 1 way to process or capture shots. The best advice I can give is to try out various techniques then dedicate yourself to a particular process, reach a decent standard then try branching out and experimenting to augment your usual workflow. Understanding, different ways of working and increasing your knowledge can only increase the number of situations that you are equipped to deal with. The end image is after all, what that really matters. For my money though, if you can tell how a landscape image was processed then the process needs refining. When you look at a landscape image, you should be thinking about the image not obviously over darkened trees, unreal skies or glowing halos.

This topic is hotly debated on many Tog’ing forums and you just have to pick a method works best for you.

Basically there will be a cost but whether you choose to use software of hardware the cheapest option will be about £100 or so. Good luck and do remember that whichever model you go with the truth you find is only ‘your truth’ and not ‘the truth’. There is room for more than 1 Landscape model in this world so can’t we all just get along?

Many of us landscape photographers spend many hours and weeks away from family and friends chasing after spectacular scenes in dramatic far flung locations in the wee small hours, trying to put our stamp on a well known scene.

Sometimes, however, lovely scenes are just waiting for us on our own doorstep and I am lucky enough to live in the quietly lovely Surrey Hills. This main shot here is not usually the type of shot I go for. Usually, I will go to great lengths to minimise signs of human existence on the planet, preferring instead to capture the beauty of nature generally focusing on emotion rather than a record of a particular location.

Shooting a big building and car park therefore is not really in my nature. However, like many local people I have commuted past this on many occasions and knew that there was a shot that need to be taken like the itch that wouldn’t go away. As someone interested in landscape photography as an art form I also like to regularly extend my creative range and challenge myself to try different genres of shot so the time came to make an attempt on my local vineyard and town: Dorking & Denbies Vineyard in the Surrey Hills.

This second shot here is an example of my more usual style of landscape shot. This really is just abut the relationship between the two trees amongst the vast expanse of pruned vines mid winter. I liked the way the evening sun caught the grass and rhythm and feel of the shot.

Please take a look at my ‘Surrey’ gallery section for more local images, some of the towns and some of the country. All images were shot with a high resolution DSLR Canon Camera body and are of course copyright protected. They are all suitable for large prints or cards etc. so do drop me a line if you have any queries about their use.

I hope that you enjoyed the shots and don’t forget to click on the thumbnails to view the full image.

Thanks,

Ade

One of the great things about shooting trips to Dorset is that there are so many fantastic locations all around you. For this particular shoot, I initially wanted to go to Mupe Rocks near Lulworth Cove but it is closed on Monday at this time of year for the MOD to practice blowing things up, so it is not really the kind of place for a hapless photographer to go wandering.

After finding this out and with the weather getting worse I thought I would make a return trip to Durdle Door with it’s famous arch which could have been right for a mid-arch sunrise sparkle at this time of year if the weather had been good or a moody cloudy sky in a black and white shot if the predicted gray could rolled on in. However, on leaving the house at 6 ish, I saw a glorious sky full of stars and everything covered in sparkly frost – just right for a trip to Corfe Castle, so off I went with a spring in my step.

Unfortunately, while I was on my way the weather forecasters reminded the clouds of what they should have been doing, so rather than another non-sunrise at Corfe I headed over the Peveril Point at Swanage. This is just 15 minutes and a short walk away where I was greeted by some great jagged spines of rock stretching out in to the sea. (I will not mention the fact that I had to pay to park there even at 7 am on freezing cold Monday morning in the middle of winter)

The best thing is that all of these locations are within about 30 minutes of one another so whatever the weather: Dorset has you covered. What I wanted to capture in these images was the soft essence of the water on the rocks in a gentle diffused light and the juxtaposition of the rocks slicing through the sea and reaching on outwards.

To achieve these result I used a medium length lens, my Canon 24-70 f2.8 L on an EOS 50D body, tripod mounted and some ND filters. This gave me a long exposure and I shot from high up. I also chose to exclude the sky from this shot because it was not really part of the story and detracted from the overall feeling of the shot rather than enhancing it. Both shots were primarily processed in Adobe Lightroom 3.

I am very pleased to say that I will have work featured in the take-a-view Landscape Photographer of The Year again. This year I have 2 images commended which is one better than last year, so that’s great – Thanks Judges.

The images are ‘Progress’ and ‘…and a journey began’.

Both will be featured in the awards book along with the other commended images and the former will also be featured in the presentation at the National Theatre and the latter will hang as part of the exhibition. Of course, both are also available as prints, canvases or cards On-line from Redbubble.