Andrew Lilley Photography

Landscape photography tip no. 3: Make moving water smooth

March 9, 2012 by Andrew | Leave a comment

Probably 90% of photos taken by pros show moving water in nature smooth and streaky. This makes the water look closer to how we see it with our own eyes, but it also makes it look more beautiful in my opinion. It will give your photos a much more professional look. Freezing moving water can be impressive in the right situation – for example for a wave hitting some rocks, but more often than not it’s not as pleasing to the eye.

It’s pretty easy to do – set your camera’s shutter speed to something slower than about 1/3 of a second or so. Adjust the aperture and/or ISO to get the speed you need. The speed you need will vary depending on the speed of the water and look you’re after.

For a typical waterfall, I find about 1/2 second is optimal – if slower, the water can look mushy and unreal, and if faster, the water spray can be distracting. You should take the same shot with different speed and see what looks best on the LCD after the shot. The shot above had a shutter speed of 0.3 seconds and was taken at f/8.

For waves at a beach, the range of shutter speed is much bigger – a second or two can smooth out waves nicely, and even 3 minutes can be used for a nice effect! The shot below took 1.6 seconds at f/16.

It can sometimes be hard to get the long shutter speed you need as the amount of light is too high. Worry not, use the smallest aperture, such as f/22, set your ISO to the lowest number (ISO 100 or even ISO 50 on my camera), and get out your polarising filter, which reduces the amount of light by 2 stops. Shooting in cloudy conditions and at dawn and dusk also helps.

You have to use some sort of camera support as the shutter speeds are much too low for hand-holding the camera! A tripod is the obvious solution, and something you should be using for landscape shots anyway!

Posted in Landscape, Tips Tagged landscape, tip, water |

Landscape photography tip no. 2: Rule of thirds

March 9, 2012 by Andrew | Leave a comment

Following on from my first tip on foreground interest, this is also a really important one, but an easy one to learn and put into practice! It’s about making the composition of the photo pleasing to the eye.

When used, it’s hard for the photo to ‘fail’ in it’s composition. The photo using the rule of thirds feels balanced, ‘at ease’, and helps prevent the viewer’s eyes from darting from one half of the photo to the other in search of something to look at. The eye is naturally drawn to a certain part of the image without force.

To use the rule of thirds, you just need to imagine two horizontal lines splitting the image in the viewfinder equally into thirds, and the same vertically. Effectively you have a grid with nine equally sized cells. You will want to place the horizon either on the top line or the bottom line. You can also place main items of interest, like trees or rocks, at the intersection of these lines. Easy!

Sometimes an item is too big to fit easily onto one of the lines, but that object has a main point of interest, like the light in a lighthouse or a bird sitting in a tree. Place that light or bird on the intersection.

Look at photos in magazines and books and see if the images are composed using the rule of thirds. Sometimes they aren’t, but they succeed as the photographer is a pro and knows when to break the rules! Master the rule of thirds first, then look to break it!

Posted in Tips Tagged landscape, rule of thirds |

Landscape photography tip no. 1: Foreground interest

March 9, 2012 by Andrew | Leave a comment

Here’s the first of a number of tips for landscape photography beginners. These tips won’t be in order of importance or anything, so keep coming back for helpful ideas on how to improve your landscape shots!

One thing pros keep banging on about is foreground interest. That is, things closer to the camera, not the horizon, that keep the picture interesting and add detail to an otherwise bland scene. Often, when beginners take landscape photos, they think ‘landscape’ and think fields, mountains, sea etc. That’s often enough to make a great landscape photo, but it often creates an uninspiring scene and a ‘point and shoot’ feel to the image. There’s nothing to lead the eye into the scene, and the picture lacks an impression of 3-dimensions.

With something or things close to the camera, in focus, the viewer gets a feel for the physical location of the photo, and is led into the picture from something interesting. The foreground is often the main point of interest as well, with further afield parts playing second fiddle.

Look for a foreground that contrasts the rest of the scene, like bright colours, high contrast, lots of detail, and basically anything interesting (funnily enough!). Things like flowers, rocks, water. Use a wide angle lens (often as wide as you can get), get down low and make sure both the foreground and background are in focus. A small aperture like f/16 or f/22 is necessary to get everything sharp. The horizon can be a third of the way from the bottom or a third of the way from the top, it doesn’t matter.

Think ‘foreground photography’, not ‘landscape photography’!

Posted in Tips Tagged foreground interest, landscape, tips |

iPhone nature photo wallpaper

August 20, 2011 by Andrew | Leave a comment

I thought I’d share some of my nature photos for those of you with iPhones and a desire to bring some life onto your iPhone’s screen. The images are cropped and optimised for the iPhone 4′s Retina display resolution. This is also the resolution used by the newer iPod Touches. You can still download and use them on older iPhone/Touch devices.

To get a photo into your iPhone’s photo library, the easiest way is to:

1. On a thumbnail, right click on the small thumbnail below, and choose “Save link as…” (not “Save image as…”), OR, on the full size image, right click on the middle of the picture so that neither the forward or back arrows are shown, and select “Save as…”
2. Find the saved picture and email it to your iPhone’s email account.
3. On your iPhone, view the email and press the icon that shows an arrow pointing left, and choose “Save n images”.

Then just choose the image as usual to be shown on the Lock and/or Home screen. Some photos are better suited to the Lock screen than the Home screen. I hope you find one or two you like!

Posted in Nature, iPhone Tagged iphone, nature, wallpaper |

Feelings of summer

June 28, 2011 by Andrew | Leave a comment

The first pictures I’ve actually had time to take this year, so although they’re nothing amazing, I’m happy to have been out in the sun and got something. Some were taken in the midday sun, which is normally very bad for nature photography, but I think with these photos works quite well with the strong contrast and bright colours, evoking feelings of a hot summer.