Photographing the snowy landscape

It's snowing, and the whole world looks new and different, covered in as yet unbroken white.

It's time to take some photographs. But snow photography is tricky, and you can be disappointed in the results unless you are smart.

First of all, take care with your white balance or the snow can come out blue!

Secondly, if you're taking a snow photo on an overcast day, remember that when your light meter sees the snow, it will think 'Wow! That's bright!' It will underexpose and the photo will look grey and dingy. So if it's overcast, set the camera's exposure to +1 or +2.

A practical tip; protect your camera from the cold - batteries will fail quickly if they get too cold.

Now for the more creative stuff.

• look for footprints, melting patterns, and ice patterns. I've just taken some photos of bubbles in an ice puddle. I'm also going to try a time lapse of how footprints gradually clear the sidewalk of snow on a city street - that could be interesting.
  
• consider the light - shining through ice, or catching the snow on the trees.
• Capture snowfall with a slow speed so you can see the flakes drifting. Or if you want to fix the movement of the flakes, use flash to do it.
• Use light to capture the forms and textures of the snow - to see the landscape under the white blanket. Low light, at sunrise or sunset, is particularly good in casting shadows across the landscape to bring its shape alive, otherwise your photos will look flat and two-dimensional.
• Look for colour contrasts - two walkers in their bright scarves and hats on top of a snowy hill, or the green shoots of young plants poking through the snow.
  

And my final tip for snow photography; have a nice pot of soup ready for you when you get home, or a thermos of coffee in the car. You'll need it!

Using a longer lens

Mostly we tend to take landscapes with a normal or wide angle lens. However, sometimes a longer lens can be useful - and it will change the way you visualise and take your landscape photographs.

By using, say, a 200 mm lens, you will be able to focus further away, cutting out the foreground. That can be particularly useful if you're taking pictures from the road. You can eliminate the verges, power lines, and buildings close to the road - and focus on the landscape out in front.

The longer lens also has a flattening effect. So if you're taking pictures of patterns such as dry stone walls or sand dunes, you'll have a more even picture with better depth of field across the photograph. With patterns, or with roads running into the distance, or river meanders, you can get an almost abstract effect which is stunning - and very different from what you'd achieve with a wide angle lens.

A longer lens can also help you isolate an interesting feature, for instance a craggy rock or a single tree.

You're also far enough away from the subject that parallax - converging lines - isn't going to be so strong. So using a longer lens and going further away can be a good strategy for architectural photography too.

Remember though, using a longer lens will give you shake. So on bright days, make sure you're using a high shutter speed - 1/250 or above - or, better, take a tripod or use another support (in extremis, the seat of a motorbike or the top of a car!)

Best filters for the landscape photographer

Landscape photography depends on light. But the light isn't always quite right.

Filters can make a definite difference to the quality of your landscape photography. And compared to buying a new lens, a filter is a much lower level investment - costing around twenty quid, perhaps. Even cheaper if you can find second hand filters.

• Polarising filters are invaluable to the landscape photographer. A polarising filter will help darken the sky, and give clouds better definition. They can also help cut through haze that would otherwise soften your shot, and remove distracting reflections (for instance, in shots of brightly painted surfaces or water). If you have autofocus and auto exposure, buy a circular polariser, not a linear filter.
  
• Graduated neutral density filters are useful in situations where you have a bright sky but poorly lit landscape, for instance in a sunset shot. The graduated filter is darker on top and clear at the bottom, allowing more light to be captured from the landscape and preventing the bright sky from overexposing the shot.
• Use an ND (neutral density) filter to cut down the amount of light entering the camera. If you want to make a long exposure shot, for instance to get the effect of a waterfall or to track car lights at dusk, an ND filter can help prevent overexposure.

And now for the big tip. Remember the huge difference in price between filters and lenses? Buy a cheap weak ND filter for all your lenses, and always use the lenses with it on. If you drop the lens, or the filter gets scratched, you've lost a cheap filter - not an expensive lens.

Landscape photography tips

Landscape photography is on one level an easy craft to learn. Unlike studio photographers, landscape photographers don't need to light the shot. The sun will do that for free. And landscapes don't move, pick their noses, or look the wrong way.

But getting the most effective landscape shot is a real science. You'll need to study the work of great landscape photographers like Ansel Adams, Alfred Stieglitz or Fay Godwin. Notice the photographic and compositional techniques they're using and try to make your own versions. But don't just copy - they each have their own photographic style and 'voice', and you'll develop your own as you get more experienced.

However if you're just starting out, a few landscape photography tips can help.

• Look for patterns in the landscape. For instance, the pattern of light and shade when a low sun falls on a ploughed field, or the pattern of fence posts receding into the distance. An effective landscape photograph can sometimes be created when you find a break in the pattern - the end of a fence, a tiny patch of unploughed greenery surrounded by ploughed field.
• Go out early and stay out late to get the best shots. When the light is falling directly from above, it flattens out the landscape. Sunrise and sunset have more directional light that brings out the shape of the landscape with shadows. Sunrise and sunset light is also mellower, giving your colours more life.
• Use the 'rule of thirds' to create an effective composition. Place the centre of interest one third or two thirds of the way across and up the photo. (Of course there are exceptions. Sometimes, a photo that is exactly divided in two can be very effective. But usually, the 'rule of thirds' will give you the best results.)
• Look for spots of vivid colour. A field of red poppies. Bluebells in a wood. A single red painted shed in a prairie. All these can make for a great landscape photo.
• One of the best landscape photography tips I've ever been given is to look for discontinuity. Two people walking in a desert landscape. A single big hoarding by a road that runs straight into the distance. One tree in an otherwise barren landscape. Look for the unexpected.
• Use foreground elements to complement the landscape behind. For instance, you can use the boughs of a tree to 'frame' your image of a lake, or focus on a tree stump in front of fields and hills. To do that you'll need to use the maximum depth of field - landscape stop on point-and-shoot camera, f16 to f22 aperture on SLRs.
• Look for dramatic skies. Use a polarising filter if you have one to make the clouds emerge strongly from the background. If a sky is more interesting than the landscape under it, then why not take a skyscape instead, using the landscape as if it's just a foreground?
• A very simple landscape photography tip but not to be overlooked - make sure your horizon is straight! (Unless of course you want a diagonal photo, in which case it's obvious that this is an artistic decision, not a mistake.)
• Change your point of view. Hug the ground for a worm's eye view, capturing the feel of the terrain. Find a higher vantage point to shoot from - even just climbing up to the top of a wall can make a huge difference. Wander around the site to find different views - don't just take the obvious shot.

The best tip for landscape photography, though, is that you're trying to capture the spirit of a place, the patterns and textures of the landscape. The most important part of taking a landscape photo is not what kind of camera you have or what technique you're using - it's what's going on in your mind before you take the camera out of its case.