Landscape Photography ( Brighton, East Sussex)

Recently, I have been concentrating on two areas of my photography, British wildlife (mostly birds and wildfowl) and landscape, therefore most of the time I spend taking photographs is spent outdoors. In the cold snaps of weather we keep having it can be very easy just to stay indoors but with many opportunities when the sun does break through or we have one of those crisp, cold, clear days, it's worth venturing out either at sunset or sundown for some great winter landscapes.

I have never really photographed the area in which I live and although I have snapped away at some of Brighton’s very well photographed tourist attractions, the West Pier and Royal Pavilion for example, both of which can offer some interesting shots, I was keen to get out of the city and explore the surrounding area. N=Close to where I live there are some nice walks with vantage points looking down towards Brighton and Hove and on clear days you can see for miles along the south coast. I have taken to this higher ground on a couple of occasions of late, first when it snowed heavily and it was just too beautiful to miss and the second time I was hoping for a stunning sunset as it was a clear day with a little cloud here and there.

Landscape photography is something that I have dabbled with but never really focused on, it's always interested me but it seems that it can be difficult to do it well and do justice to the scenery and the beauty of the light. However, I was determined to give it a go and got my tripod, polarizer and lens hood assembled and went off to experiment. I set my camera to 'M' or 'Manual' mode because I wanted to have complete control over my exposures and also to bracket a bit so that I could account for the difference in the brightness of the sky and the land. By doing this I gave myself the option of combining images in post production should it be necessary. I found that when the light was good that I could capture detail in both the sky and the land but once the sun started to go down the land can become very dark and underexposed, which sometimes isn't a bad thing if it's the sky you are most interested in.

There are a couple of solutions to this problem that I know about, one is to do what I did and take two exposures, on metered and correctly exposed for the sky and another correctly exposed for the land/foreground, then combining the two in post production. To do this it is essential that you have taken both shots from exactly the same spot with the camera on a tripod or the two won't align properly. The other, and dare I say less time intensive, way to accomplish a more even exposure is to use a Grey Graduated Filter that will reduce the difference in brightness between the sky and the ground, typically a 2-stop difference.

The next thing on my list of things to try is the use of a Neutral Density Filter to slow my shutter speeds right down to achieve motion blur effects such as running water or fast moving clouds.