Some Questions about landscape photography

[Marcopolo9442]

I had a discussion with a friend of mine who is very critical of my photos, especially my landscapes. First, he thought I had difficulty with exposure and I tended to underexpose my shots. Now he has only used film mostly and I use digital. I find that underexposing slightly keeps the images from having blown out highlights, then I work with the raw files in photoshop to bring up the shadows and apparently he thinks my method underexposes the images and therefore they lack detail. Is this not a good strategy to avoid blown highlights? I do use a polarizer and sometimes a 2 stop graduated neutral density filter.
Second question, on my wide angle landscapes, if I can I use a tripod and take the photo at between f16-f22 as I found this gives me the best depth of field. He thinks I should try around f5-f11 because according to him it gives better sharpness and detail in the areas that are within the depth of field, and he thought that having a large depth of field made many of my photos appear dull and boring. Basically he things a lower f-stop would make the photos sharper and more interesting. To me this seems counterintuitive and against what I have learned. What are your thoughts on this, who is right?

 

[Steph]

Second question, on my wide angle landscapes, if I can I use a tripod and take the photo at between f16-f22 as I found this gives me the best depth of field. He thinks I should try around f5-f11 because according to him it gives better sharpness and detail in the areas that are within the depth of field, and he thought that having a large depth of field made many of my photos appear dull and boring. Basically he things a lower f-stop would make the photos sharper and more interesting. To me this seems counterintuitive and against what I have learned. What are your thoughts on this, who is right?

It is true that if using a very small aperture, such as f22, the picture looses a bit of sharpness due to diffraction of light around the aperture blades. It is a compromise between depth of field and ultimate sharpness. Personally, for landscapes, I very often prefer maximum depth of field and use small apertures; I can live with the slight loss of image quality. If however, your subject does not require a small aperture, it makes sense to use something like f8-f11 for (slightly) better results.

I'll leave the first question to somebody else as I am not familiar with exposure/post-processing with a digital camera.

 

[Marcopolo9442]

thanks, now that I have learned how to post photos, here are some of the ones he was critical of-

I had some others I wanted to post to show, but apparently this is the only one it is letting me post at the moment. I used a 2stop Cokin graduated neutral density filter, as I recall it was at around f18 or f20, Nikon D300(brand new camera for me, was using a D50 before) ISO lo1, active D lighting set to high, later tweaked it further with CaptureNX(program that came with the camera) and Photoshop which I have been playing around with about 2 years now. . He thinks it lacks sharpness and detail, especially with the rocks. He also thinks a lot of my compositions are boring. Of course my mother and my girlfriend say they like them but I have not had too many serious critical critiques of my work so far.

 

[ksmattfish]

Here's a good link on aperture diffraction.

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/diffraction-photography.htm

Personally I try to avoid going beyond f/11 with APS-C format and f/16 with 35mm format. For landscape photography with wide angle lenses this isn't very difficult. DOF with APS format, 17mm focal length, and f/5.6 focused at about 9' is approx 5' to infinity.

Check out an online DOF calculator.

http://www.dofmaster.com/dofjs.html

DOF is "the area of acceptable sharpness", and of course "acceptable sharpness" is an opinion. Old school advice when using the DOF scale on lenses was to stop down once more to insure good sharpness.

 

[Coldow91]

I'd say that shot needs nothing changed. It helps the shot to not have every detail in the rocks showing I think. I think the composition is very good

 

[manaheim]

I'm interested in this too, and please someone correct me if I'm wrong here...

My understanding is that you can do a larger aperature if you focus to infinity, giving most or all of the objects in the frame sharp focus (except those that are relatively close to you). I haven't tested this yet... please tell me if I'm wrong.

Marco... one thing I have determined is that if you are focusing on things quite far away you may want to do the manual focus to infinity thing as the camera doesn't always nail it. It'll at least be "fine", but sometimes it will be just SLIGHTLY off, and that's all the difference in the world. This is particularly so when taking pictures of darker subjects or scenes. I had this problem with my nighttime skylines until recently.

Also, in my personal experience, I find that you don't want to underexpose ever. It results in noise, even if you are using RAW... simply because when you underexpose you risk not getting that pixel of color here and there, and there's no way the camera is going to be able to "guess" later on and get it right. I do my very best to expose it dead on, assuming I'll have a little leeway due to the RAW capture.

 

[tirediron]

Manaheim: What you're referring to (I believe) is selective focusing using the apeture scale. If you look at this picture:

You can see that it has aperture graduation below the focusing ring. To get the maximum DoF for a given lens, set the desired apeture, and then manually focus your lens so that the focusing index (in the image set to infinity) is resting at or just slightly past the aperture you have set on the scale. ie: If you set your aperture to f11, then you would manually focus the lens so that the the focusing index was in line with the "11" on the scale below the focusing ring.

The problem is, a lot of modern lenses (including some high end stuff) no long has this scale. Then it becomes a case of figuring it out on your own. Some people who use this a lot will actually make their own scales out of tape and put them right on the lens.

With respect to the exposure question, with film the rule was "Expose for the shadow, develop for the highlight", but with digital you should expose for the highlights and process for the shadows. Manaheim's correct in that you should avoid under (or over) exposing if at all possible, but if you must, then under-exposure is usually better.

 

[Marcopolo9442]

Here is another one he criticized, he said that it was compositionally boring and that I don't know how to handle light in bright daylight situations very well. He also said it was a shame I didn't capture the scene better because he thought they were nice flowers-

 

[tirediron]

Here is another one he criticized,
<image snipped>

Are you happy with it?

 

[Marcopolo9442]

well, I seem to have different tastes in photography than some other people do. I want other people to enjoy and admire my work too, and frankly I would also like to eventually sell some of my prints. If everyone thinks my stuff it terrible that is a problem, especially if I want to sell anything.
Here is another one, he thought that it was underexposed and lacked detail, and that made it a bad photo. He said that professional photographers don't make these mistakes-

Basically even if I am happy with it, or sorta happy with it, but everyone else thinks I suck, doesn't do me much good. I know I am not exactly Galen Rowell, I have room for improvement, but if my work is terrible and there is not much chance of me improving maybe I should reconsider some of my plans. I think I am in the same position as that guy in the other post who said he aspired to sell his work but everyone was telling him he was terrible.

 

[Marcopolo9442]

Okay, here is why I come in here discouraged. I have not gotten too much critical review of my photos yet. My parents of course say they like my photos, that is a given they would say that. Women I have dated since I started this have all said they liked my work, but that is also a given since they are/were dating me or want to of course they are going to tell me my work is good.
However, recently I put up a website at smugmug, I want to get it set up for possibly selling prints of my work, and I showed a former coworker who I have stayed in contact with, showed him the site. I consider him an unbiased source. He basically said I needed a lot of work, that most of my photos were both technically bad as well as compositionally boring to him. I don't think he is being mean, he is just an older French guy and that is how he is. He basically says things how he sees it. He doesn't know everything about photography, he knows how to use a film SLR but has yet to seriously shoot digital. Still I felt really awful, and still feel really awful, after showing him my website. It is still under construction but here is a link to it- http://www.rasmussenimages.com

If you guys could give me specific technical advice on how to improve that would be appreciated. Can any of these photos be saved through post processing? I have tried to get good at both the photo taking and post processing since I started but apparently I am still not good enough yet. If they are compositionally off or boring I suppose that means I don't have the talent to be good enough at this to ever sell my work

 

[Solthar]

Damn, I'm seriously impressed by what you've done there- in my opinion, you've got nothing to worry about. After seeing your photographs, though, I'd start asking some questions about your friends critiques instead of your photos.

One major question is if he is critiquing the photos before or after post-processing. If it's after, the underexposing should of been fixed in post proccessing.

Another question is if he offers suggestions for improvement while critiquing your photography. You said he didn't like the daffodil picture - did he also offer advice on what he would of done in that instance, or did he only critisize? I'd say this is one of the more important questions as in one instance he is trying to help you grow as a photographer, but otherwise comes across as a "film is better than digital" guy.

Mind you, I really don't want to get into a film vs digital argument! I personally believe both mediums offer their own unique advantages. It's just that some people have very strong viewpoints regarding one or the other, and that your friend comes across as one of those people to me.

 

[Marcopolo9442]

Another question is if he offers suggestions for improvement while critiquing your photography.

Daffodil pictures no, but he did suggest I don't underexpose my landscape photos by .3 to .7 EV. My question on this suggestion, is that I don't think he understands how easy it is to get blown out highlights with digital, or slightly dull colors if it is even slightly overexposed(my experience anyway). Now he doesn't think I should underexpose in the first place, but if my end result is still underexposed, then he has a valid criticism. I try to bring the shadow exposures up to where I think it looks good, but maybe I am still not doing enough there?

His other suggestion was to use a wider aperture, like f5 to f11 for even wide angle landscapes, wheras I typically use f16-f28 to get the greatest depth of field I can. He seems to think that too much depth of field makes a scene look boring, and it would have more interest if part of it was thrown out of focus. I countered that Ansel Adams used great depth of field in HIS landscapes, and he told me that Ansel Adams actually had compositionally interesting photos to begin with!(implying mine were not apparently) :-((
He saw some of my originals before when I visited him and took a bunch of photos of the area, and he mentioned he thought they were underexposed, which they were by my usual -7 EV. I tried to explain to him why I did that and he thought I was going about it totally wrong. He also mentioned that he thought I should learn to shoot black and white to understand the basics of photography.
This recent time I just showed him my website. We were not communicating face to face, we were on skype(an internet conference service much like talking on the phone through your computer). I sent him the link to my new website while on skype and he tool a look at it while we were talking on the computer.

 

[Syndac]

I'd love to see some of his photos to be honest, beause there is nothing wrong with yours. Some are better than others as is the case with any photographer, but your portfolio is far from "boring".

I actually really like the last one you just posted in this thread. The only suggestion I'd make is cropping a bit of the sky off the top, but otherwise it looks great.

 

[Arch]

Yes you are underexposing, BUT in some circumstances its best to, as long as its not over the top and/or unnecessary for the scene.

Your editing skills can be improved, and tbh you are not doing anything too wrong in camera that cannot be improved in PP.

This shot for example is difficult to expose correctly anyway because of the elements involved, the sky, reflection and object.
You can see by this quick edit how under you still are tho... you need to work with your levels and curves (with layer masks) to bring out a brighter looking exposure.

I think tho that your general approach to landscape photography is good, you are certainly on your way to doing some really great stuff.

The advice id give you now is to work on two things, editing and composition.
Editing you can work on by following tutorials around the web, reading books and of course forums such as this.
Composition is best learned initially in books (imo) and then no where is better to test your compositions than this forum. Post your pics one by one in the landscape gallery and ask for some CC... you will get better and better the more people comment on your work.