"There's a field, with a great tree, two miles from where I live. "The same landscape scene in four seasons is a great, under-shot project," Tony maintains. Morning is quality shooting time."įinding a favored landscape near you gives you the benefit of a quicker early-morning journey, and the advantage of being able to get there year-round to catch the changes the seasons bring. That's why in the morning long exposures work better. ![]() In the morning, you have more light slowly showing up to work with, from pre-dawn glow to sunrise. At sunset, the light's great and then it's gone. Of course you can shoot the late light of afternoon, but, as Tony says, "It gets darker a lot quicker than it gets brighter, so morning will give you a lot more time to shoot various levels of light than sunset will. Some people have a hard time doing that, but that's when the pictures happen." They have to be there at first light, and that can mean getting up at three, four, five in the morning. But I've got to get them there plenty early to get the great light. "Once the participants get to the location, they're fine fired up and ready to make pictures. "I see it all the time at the workshops," Tony says. ![]() The issue is not where the action is, it's when." "You have to know the time and the circumstances that will give you the best light. If you want to do it right, whatever it is, you have to get the light right."įor Tony, who conducts a series of nature and landscape workshops, the right light starts with scouting. "See the same scene in great light and lousy light, and it's like you're in a different part of the world. So if "the landscape" is pretty much everywhere and everything outdoors, what do you look for to make effective images of all that variety? He learned it was okay to interpret the grand places, but he didn't have to be limited or constrained by feeling that he had to go to those iconic locations. The photographs depended on what I made of them." It could be a local field with a few trees and great light. Then I went out west-different places, bigger things-but the die was cast from that beginning: I photographed outside, where there were no people, and it was beautiful. So I went to the Cincinnati Nature Center-a few ponds, trees in the water, good reflections, and to me that was the landscape. "It was all 'nature photography' then," he says. "The landscape can be two miles from your backdoor," Tony adds, driving home the point. It was liberating to realize that once you get outdoors, the landscape is anything and everything you want to make it, and once you think of the landscape that way, it becomes a lot more accessible than, say, just a vacation destination. "But what kind of landscape do you want to talk about? A grand landscape, a tight landscape, a macro landscape?" Tony does them all, and we found that by working out definitions and differences, we came up with variety and opportunity. Tony Sweet brought this to our attention when we asked him if he'd be interested in talking with us for a story about landscape photography. ![]() You know, the big stuff.īut landscape photography is also about the components of the big stuff, as well as the textures, colors and details of small slices of outdoor life. When you think of landscape photography, chances are the images that come to mind are the awesome vistas-something from Bryce Canyon, Yosemite or Mojave maybe the Badlands, the Adirondacks, the Everglades.
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