How Light Completely Transforms Your Landscape Photography

Same location, completely different results. Over the course of this shoot the conditions kept changing and each shift pushed me to see the scene in a new way and approach it differently. And I'll show you exactly how I captured each one of these along the way. This time I'm out in the deserts of Arizona. It's incredible. And I'm doing one of the most underrated things you can do as a landscape photographer, and that is scouting. So cool. I love this peak. And then over here there's also some beautiful formations as well. So what I'm doing is looking around for foreground. Got some really nice cacti over here and some beautiful cacti right here as well. And then what I can do here is as I'm scouting on Google, I can just like place pins on when I find some cool stuff. I can save it, make a little note for myself and then I'll be able to revisit that. So one thing I love doing when I'm scouting and I've got my phone is I can actually use the 0.5x. It really mimics that ultra wide lens. Look at that now. So we can get right up to the cacti, fill the frame, get some pretty cool scouting pictures. So if I use my regular camera I will probably end up focus stacking this. We'll have to see. Let's see what happens if we kind of get further back. So I'm just going to kind of look around and see what makes the most sense here. The next morning I was up early for my first shoot and the conditions were pretty spectacular. Alright you guys, well it is an amazing morning. I've been shooting a lot of cool stuff, but let me show you what I'm working on right now. Just an incredible scene. So we've got all the cholla cactus in here and I've been playing around with sort of moving in different positions to change my composition, getting lower and higher. But even just this simple frame right here looks pretty cool with that sun star. And in order to get that sun star I'm using f16. So watch as I bring this down to f5.6 we lose the sun star altogether. So in order to shoot this composition, looks like the clouds are kind of dumping out. I shot this like a couple minutes ago with some beautiful clouds over top. But in order to get this composition, because of the dynamic range, what I'm ending up doing here is using hyperfocal distance to get my cholla cactus nice and in focus. And then I just bump my shutter speed. So one, two, three, one, two, three, and one, two, three. And then I can go ahead and blend those images in Lightroom super easily. The other thing you can do is if you find that the sun is creating too much flare in your frame, you can actually just cover the sun with the finger or your hand, and then you can blend that frame in for the foreground, and then blend the rest for the sky. I'm going to take a few more frames. The clouds were unreal earlier, so I'm excited to show you what I've been shooting here. So this is my first image of the trip, and it's a pretty classic one for this area. And for good reason, it just works. Scouting really made the difference here using photopills to line up exactly where that sun star would break on the horizon. From a technical standpoint, this one was pretty simple. Just an exposure bracket blended in Lightroom. Even though I love the way the shot turned out, I wanted to push things a little further and find something a bit more creative. Now, of course, this morning was the ideal situation with incredible clouds and color, but what about those days when it's totally clear and hazy out? Well, the next morning, I tried something completely different. I decided to pull out the telephoto lens, the 100-400, and it's one of my favorite things to do when the weather is clear like this is to just get rid of the sky, which is, at this moment, a big patch of kind of hazy blue. But let me show you what I found here. Look at that spectacular backlighting. You can even zoom in here to change the position. And then a lot of your cameras are going to have an automatic focus stacking system. This one, I think I need to update my firmware. I just do it manually. To give yourself some extra breathing room on that focus stack, I would recommend going to a higher f-stop because that's going to increase the range of focus. And then what I'm going to need to do is in post-processing, either Photoshop or Helicon Focus, I'm going to need to stack these together. Got a two-second timer on here. One for the backgrounds. Make sure those mid-ground ones are in focus. Hop a little closer. Grab these ones. And then for good measure, I'm going to focus down here at the bottom. I really loved zooming into these patterns and textures. And again, if the sky isn't doing anything for your shot, well, just remove it. Now when the light got even harsher, I didn't stop shooting. I decided to focus on some high contrast black and whites. And here's how those turned out. Now things can change in the desert pretty quick. And sure enough, some clouds rushed in and I started looking for some good evening compositions. That's incredible. Look at this. Look at the clouds and the light. So cool. So I'm going to wander this direction and see if we can find some interesting cacti scenes. Alright, so I've got my 14mm 1.8 lens. This is a new lens I've been playing around with. And I'm doing a really wide vertical frame here. And I'm getting a sun star so you can see the sun just peeking out between this rock. And then I'm using all of the cacti to frame the rock out in the distance. And what I'm having to do here is an exposure blend for the sun. But then I also have to do a focus stack. So I'm focusing on the mountain in the background, or rock, and then one cacti, two cacti, and then three cacti that's closest to the camera. Okay, so this was a pretty complicated image to shoot. So I wanted to show you what those individual frames look like. So again, I have a five image focus stack going from the foreground all the way to the background. And then I'm doing an exposure bracket for the sun out there in the distance. And then I blend everything together using Helicon, Lightroom, and Photoshop. Again, when I'm doing a focus stack like this, I do try and set myself up for success by just shifting on over to f16 to make sure more of the shot is going to be in focus. I did this focus bracket manually by again just picking the different distances of cacti and then focused on the background for that exposure blend. Now here's something completely different. And it's funny because I see this image more like the telephoto compositions than I do the wide angles I had been shooting. Now this is still an image captured at 14 millimeters, and you can see that sun star peeking through the cacti. But for this one, I just wanted to focus on the cactus itself and not have any distractions in the background. I tried to get as close as humanly possible, and I really liked the effect that it provided here, especially with the color contrast of the sky back there. Now I wasn't sure if this was going to turn out while I was photographing it. But to be honest, that's how some of my favorite images were created. Oh my gosh, this is amazing. Just look at how magnificent this peak is right here. Catching that warm orange glow, and then it's perfectly contrasted by those deep blues in the sky behind here. It's amazing. For this composition, I'm kind of playing around with some different angles here, getting some over on the left side, some on the right side. What I kind of like about this right side frame though, so you see how I'm including the cacti coming in sort of more on the top right, and I feel like that balances out with the brighter notch on the top left of the peak here. Or else it feels like the image is almost more left heavy if I don't include something on the right to balance it out. So I think what I'm going to do here is shoot f16, and I've got my ISO breathing room at 500, and I'm just doing a bit of a focus stack. So making sure to get those foreground cacti in focus. Check out this amazing light. Clouds are starting to catch color, and I'm doing my focus stack, but then also have this cholla cactus right in the middle of this one that's closer to camera. And then we have the beautiful peak in the background. This might be my favorite image from the trip, and you can see it's that mountain that we were scouting earlier. Everything just came together perfectly for this shot, and similar to that experimental image, I tried to get as close to the cactus in the foreground as possible, and then I'm using it to frame that little cactus right in the center. This image required a five image focus stack from the front to background, but did not require any exposure blending because we were facing away from the sun. And now I'd love to hear from you. Which one of these photographs from the video so far has been your favorite? Please let me know in the comments. After this, the weather changed dramatically and a storm rolled in, and it provided a totally different atmosphere to this landscape to work with. So we have some amazing stormy light right now. Sun is filtering through the clouds. You can see the peaks in the background. This is definitely going to be a test to see if my focus will work. Let's check this out. I decided to go very close to the cacti for this composition just to make it more dramatic. That's turning out pretty cool though. Let's see what it looks like here. I actually feel some raindrops, which makes sense. It's looking looking pretty dark right there, but you know what? I'm gonna I think I'm gonna wait out the rain, see what happens. Because when you get these dark dramatic clouds, if that light pokes out of the clouds, it's just that much more contrasty because you know it goes from dark to bright super fast. And I think that kind of mood would be amazing out here. I really enjoyed the look of these images with that soft beautiful light, and it goes to show that you don't need to capture every image at sunset and sunrise. Okay, and well sometimes you just get lucky. This rainbow kind of appeared out of nowhere, and even though it was small in frame, I thought it was a great addition to this composition. It was a pretty fleeting moment. It looked like it could have gotten stronger and bigger in frame, but as quickly as it appeared, it kind of dissipated on the horizon. Now it looked like the sky was getting pretty socked in, but luckily I was treated with one of the best sunsets I've ever seen out in the desert. Oh my god, this is insane right now. Just catching the last glimpse of sunset here, and the sky is burning. It is gorgeous. So my shooting technique, I'm facing into the sun, so I have to do a bracket for the sky. So I'm basically focused out in the distance, and then I do my bracket one stop. So let's say I'm down here when it's dark. One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three. And then from there, I need to do my focus stack, and I'll start focusing more on the foreground, and I'm gonna have to blend all these shots together. We'll see how that turns out. I'm not excited about that part. I am, however, very excited about the shooting part. There's something so magical about when these cacti get lit up with backlighting. Even if it's soft backlighting, it looks just spectacular. I think what I'm gonna try and do is get even lower here. See if we can get the background in focus. Boom. And then go back up, and then just get a little bit of a focus stack for that. For these, it was a blast getting right up to the cacti and using them as framing elements, doing the focus stack, and exposure blend for that crazy sunset. Basically taking all the techniques we used through this video and kind of cramming them all into one shoot. I took tons of images that I was really proud of on this trip, and I think I can attribute that to a few different things. The first was the scouting. I mentioned this a few times, but that's the foundation to be ready when the light truly hits and not feel scrambled. Second, it's not relying on the perfect conditions or weather. Now, of course, it's amazing when we do get those beautiful clouds, and they certainly did come in this trip, but I was fully prepared for harsh cloudless days, and I really loved the way some of those images turned out. And finally, not relying solely on golden hour and just shooting all day if you feel creatively inspired. Because regardless of what the light's doing, there's always something you can capture. With that, I really hope you enjoyed this video, and if you did enjoy it, please give it a thumbs up and consider subscribing to the channel for more. And if you want to learn more from me, you can check out my workshop page, link in the description. As always, I really appreciate you watching, and I'll catch you in the next one.