Want to shoot great landscapes? Top landscape photographers know the best light generally occurs in the two-hour bands around sunrise and sunset, says Tony Bridge.
Next time you are in a bookshop, pick up a few books on landscape photography and have a good look at the images. See if you can guess what time of the day the photographs were taken. You will probably find that the best images were taken early morning or late afternoonn.
SHOOTING AT SUNRISE
To get landscape photographs full of drama and emotion, you need to be willing to get out of bed early – long before sunrise so you can get to your destination and set up before the sun appears.
If you want to get really good at landscape photography, begin shooting about an hour before sunrise and keep going until about an hour after. When you compare the results later on in your computer, you will see that the light and colors change dramatically over a very short time – you might be cold and sleepy and wishing you were still in bed but you will almost certainly be rewarded with interesting shots. The best landscape photographers know the value of a reliable, loud and obnoxious alarm clock!
SHOOTING AT SUNSET
Sunsets can also yield some wonderful images though it’s worth keeping in mind that there are a lot more people around at this end of the day than there are at sun-up. Of course, you can use that to your advantage, particularly if it’s your aim to show the relationship between people and their environment.
Cities are an excellent subject at sunset, providing landscape photographers a rare opportunity to work with artificial light! Don’t forget that photographing a sunset does not stop when the sun has sunk below the horizon. The next half-hour can yield pictures which have great power. As the Earth rotates, the light will begin to graduate from a pink-yellow hue through to a deep blue-black shade higher in the sky.
Tony Bridge is a New Zealand-based professional photographer. See more of his images at www.thistonybridge.com
Sunrise: Smoke trails from Australian bushfires, Lake Tekapo, New Zealand. Photo by Tony Bridge.
Sunset: In this photograph of Christchurch, I waited until the sun had set well below the horizon before
making the exposure. The gradation in the sky contrasts with the deep blues of the estuary and the street
lights provide a line to lead your eye through the photograph. Photo by Tony Bridge