Keep it composed

Mike Harris shows you how to improve your landscape photos with a few simple compositional tweaks

- Mike Harris

Landscape photography is arguably the most popular genre and it’s not hard to see why. It’s a brilliant way to head out into the great outdoors, explore new locations, and leisurely practice your hobby with your favorite Nikon camera. In this issue we’ve gone back to the very basics and compiled a comprehensive guide to perhaps the most important technique photographers have at their disposal: composition.

The great thing about landscape photography is that you often have plenty of time to really perfect the composition of each shot, a luxury other disciplines, such as wildlife and sports photography, rarely afford you. In this tutorial, we’ll run through some of the key points to think about when composing your shots – from using the classic rule of thirds, to breaking away from this tried-and-tested method and experimenting with different compositions.

We’ll also look at how to make the space around your focal point work harder in your shot, and how to look for natural lines present in your scene that can be used to guide the viewer’s eye towards your point of interest.

Pro landscape photographers will nail down their composition and then return to a location multiple times until they are presented with the perfect light, so don’t be disheartened if you get a good composition, but the light looks a little flat on your first try. Be patient and keep coming back, because when you finally experience perfect conditions you’ll know just where to stand and what to frame.

Frame & adjust