Saurabh Chatterjee is a trek and travel freak and his obsession is photography. He runs regular weekend classes on photography at Hyderabad, SIA Photography. He has been trekking with Indiahikes since its inception. Saurabh’s photography blog will appear twice every month on the Indiahikes website.
This article is in continuation to series on Shooting landscapes. If you have not read them , please have a look here - Shooting Landscapes Part 1 , Shooting Landscapes Part 2, Shooting Landscapes Part 3
Leave your comments/questions at the end of the blog.
Shooting Night Landscapes
For many of us Night photography is an unexplored territory but if you have some interest, a trek can kick-start your passion for this genre of photography. Due to minimal air and light pollution in the hills, it’s a great opportunity to take great night shots.
Night photography in the hills can be very interesting. When exposed for a long time, the camera can see what our naked eyes cannot. One thing good about night photography is that the light situation does not change at all. Thought it’s a practice to sleep early in the hills, if you are passionate about night photography, you might end up spending the whole night under the stars!
Here are some tips on how to take great night shots.
Carry a Tripod
For night photography, the importance carrying a sturdy tripod for cannot be stressed enough. I call it – a night photographers’ best friend. Though it’s cumbersome to carry a tripod on a trek, it’s an absolute must if you are keen to take some good shots.
Most new lenses are equipped with a feature called Vibration Reduction (VR) or Image Stabilisation (IS) or Optical Stabilisation (OS). This will just allow you to shoot at a couple of stops slower and will control the blur but it cannot eliminate it altogether. Hence, this is not particularly helpful for night shots.
Mounting the camera on a tripod does not ensure that your pictures will come out sharp. Pressing the shutter release button while your camera is mounted on a tripod can result in slight shakes, enough to ruin your masterpiece.
If you don’t have a tripod and still want to shoot, try to find a rock or keep it on the ground. Low angle shots can look very interesting at times.
Self timer is a very handy utility that all cameras are equipped with. This can come as a very handy tool when shooting at shutter speeds as slow as 30 seconds. For longer exposures you will need a device to control the shutter externally.
This picture was shot at 9:30pm without a tripod by keeping the camera on the ground for about 3 minutes. Aperture f/11.0
Use Manual Focus
Most professional photographers prefer using Auto Focus for most cases, but for night shots, Manual focus is the preferred way.
Before getting into more detail, let me explain what this Manual focus means. It is the process of adjusting the focal point by rotating the focusing ring yourself and not using the Autofocus. This has no correlation with the Manual Mode (indicated by M in the modes dial). The Manual Mode (M) in your camera is to allow you to set Aperture and Shutter speed arbitrarily to control the amount of light coming in.
Your obvious question will be - why use Manual focus? This is because the camera’s auto-focus won’t work at such low lights. So, when we cannot see anything using our eyes, due to the darkness, how can we set the focus manually? Most lenses have a focusing distance indicator. (Unfortunately, the 18-55mm kit lens does not have this) To make the camera focus to infinity, rotate the focusing ring till the focusing distance indicates infinity (). This will make sure that even the distant objects will be in sharp focus.
This picture was shot at Keylong. I spent almost the whole night under the stars! ExposureTime - 501 seconds FNumber - 14
Shoot in Manual Mode
Since the light at night is very low, the camera’s light meter won’t be able to determine the Shutter speed or Aperture while using in Aperture priority (A for Nikon and Av for Canon) or Shutter priority (S for Nikon and Tv for Canon) mode. This is one of the situations where we need to switch to Manual Mode (M) and take control of the Aperture and Shutter speed.
What settings should you choose for the exposure? There is no way we can tell you the exact settings. You will get know this using trial and error. An aperture of f/8 or f/10 is good enough to start with, for getting sharp pictures. You need to experiment with the shutter speed depending on what you want.
Since light at night is very less, an exposure of 30 seconds might not be enough especially if you want to capture star trails. In this case you need to use the BULB mode. This is a setting that is available only when you shoot in Manual (M) mode. If you keep decreasing the shutter speed in Manual mode, you come across this setting. In BULB mode, the shutter can be kept open for an infinite time period, provided your batteries don’t run out! To use this mode, you need a wireless or a wired remote to control the opening and closing of the shutter. Pressing the remote for the first time will open the shutter and pressing it again will close it. Wireless and wired remote controls – required for shooting in BULB mode.
Wireless and wired remote controls – required for shooting in BULB mode.
 
This picture was taken at Loharjung in the Roopkund trek. Occasionally, I saw the clouds glowing and wanted to capture it. Exposure 30 Aperture f/4.2 Focal Length 34 mm .
I used an exposure of 30s (the maximum you can do without a remote) You might be wonder why I used such a wide open aperture of 4.2 which won’t give a good depth to the picture. This is because I did not have a remote at that time. An aperture of f/8 or f/11would have resulted in under-exposed images even at 30s shutter speed. One more thing, this was taken using an 18-15mm lens which does not have an symbol. I got a good focus by trial and error.
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Neelima Vallangi is a travel photographer and blogger. (The Wandering Soul's Wander Tales..). She has trekked extensively across the mountain ranges in India, including the Himalayas. At a young age her photos have appeared in the Getty Collection. Neelima’s photography blog will feature twice a month on the Indiahikes website.
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Graduated Neutral Density Filter and its advantages in Landscape photography
Most of us must be familiar with circular polarizing filter and neutral density filter. However there is a third essential filter according to me that must be included in every Landscape Photographer’s kit and that is a Graduated Neutral Density Filter also known as Grad ND. While a neutral density filter serves the purpose of reducing the amount of light reaching the sensor, thus allowing for longer exposures, a Grad ND also serves an almost similar purpose with some differences.
But before we venture deeper into understanding what problems these filters solve, let me ask you a question. Have you ever wondered how the sunset and sunrise photos have such a deep sky and a fantastically lit foreground? Have you ever wondered what is that you are missing when you try to shoot a monsoon sky and all you get is overblown highlights instead of that lovely mist you were seeing? If you ever tried shooting in manual mode, you would’ve faced this problem. In situations where the exposure difference varies too much between the darker and brighter areas in the scene, if you expose for the brighter area the dark shades totally lose detail with black shadows and if you expose for the darker area the lighter areas totally lose detail with overblown highlights.
Being a landscape photographer I used to use face this problem regularly. And not just that, given my love of monsoons I used to find the clouds and mist so wonderful but the feeling seldom translated to my photographs because of the tricky lighting conditions. Often times I used to find myself spending hours in post processing trying to correct an image as the one shown below to bring out some details in the top portion. That was until I knew the secret of the pro landscape photographers.
The difference can be clearly seen in the two photos that how using a Grad ND has helped me retain the details of the mist and mountains even after exposing the foreground
The secret was a simple yet effective tool called the Grad ND filter. A Grad ND Filter is a clear filter with the top part gray or opaque. The gradation between the dark and the clear part can be either abrupt (called hard-edge) or gradual (called soft-edge). In fact the best example I can give of Grad ND effect is that it is just how the “Graduated Tint” effect in Picasa works.
Since half the filter is dark, it allows much lesser light and the other half is clear, it exposes the darker regions suitably to balance the tonal range within the image. What this means is now your sky retains the wonderful details while the foreground also retains the details.These filters come either as a rectangular filter with the adapter system or as circular screw-in filters. They come in varying stops as well, stops denotes the degree of darkness. Depending on the quality of the filter, there could be problems of reflections on the filter, color casts, scratches etc. But none of these problems are a big hindrance for the hobby photographer, however if you are ready to pay for it, the top quality filters eliminate these problems.
I personally prefer the rectangular filter component system which comes with an adapter which screws onto the lens. This adapter will contain slots to place the rectangular filter. The advantage being, you can move the filter up and down according to the requirement.
If not a graduated nd filter, the other ways of tackling this problem would be to either try an HDR or to take multiple shots and try and painfully merge them into one. I prefer to get most of the work done on field rather than later in post processing.
Check here if you are wondering what an adapter and a Grad ND Filter looks like.
For any questions regarding photography, post your questions to Neelima on the comments box below.
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Shooting Landscapes Part 3 |
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Saurabh Chatterjee is a trek and travel freak and his obsession is photography. He runs regular weekend classes on photography at Hyderabad, SIA Photography. He has been trekking with Indiahikes since its inception. Saurabh’s photography blog will appear twice every month on the Indiahikes website.
This article is in continuation to series on Shooting landscapes. If you have not read them , please have a look here - Shooting Landscapes Part 1 , Shooting Landscapes Part 2
Leave your comments/questions at the end of the blog.
Capture rains creatively
It is rare not come across rains during a trek. Though we are a reluctant to use our cameras in the rains, using a protective covering and taking pictures can make very interesting pictures in the mountains.
To capture the streaks of rain noticeably visible in your pictures, put your camera on TV mode (in Canon) or S mode (in Nikon) and set your shutter speed to a slow value (somewhere around 1/60th of a second). You can alter it to a faster or slower value to get the desired effect. Since we are using slow shutter speeds, we should either have a tripod or place the camera on a steady surface (like rock) to avoid shake.
I will talk about protecting your gear in a trek on a different article.
This picture was taken on the way to Valley of Flowers during heavy rainfall from a tea dhaba by placing the camera on a bench.
Change your Exposure Value (Exposure Compensation) while shooting in snow
Most of the snow pictures we shoot look dull and grayish. Why? The camera’s light meter is designed to calculate an average light intensity of the frame and set the exposure. Though this works most of the time, it gets confused and fooled when the frame is too bright or too dark. The results we get are under-exposed or washed out pictures.
Snow reflects most of the incident sunlight and hence looks very bright. Since the camera’s light meter thinks that the scene is too bright, it underexposes the pictures. This is the reason for the dull pictures that get in snow.
Solution – When in snow, increase the EV by half a stop or one, depending on the amount of snow in the scene and see the difference it makes to your pictures.
This picture was taken during Roopkund trek with an increase of EV by one stop.
Shoot RAW
Did you ever go to the Image size menu of your camera and wondered what the RAW format is? RAW is the original ‘raw’ digital data that the camera captures and is often referred as the digital negative. During the processing of the images to JPEG within a camera, there is a huge amount of data that is discarded. Taking pictures in RAW preserves all the data that can be used later. For example, if you have some highlights in your picture, you can recover the colors of those areas to some extent if you use RAW format. Apart from this, RAW files indestructible – they can never be modified. All the changes done to a RAW file are recorded in another file. The White Balance and Exposure Compensation values can also be altered later during processing if you use RAW format. As for every good thing, you need to pay a price and RAW is no exception. You cannot open a RAW file unless you have the plugin for that specific model and manufacturer. You cannot share them on Facebook or Flickr. You need to process them to JPG first. RAW files create huge size files thus slows down the camera while saving files in the memory. If you are shooting lot of landscape pictures, I would strongly recommend shooting in RAW.
Use White Balance creatively
I’m sure you must have come across pictures that look more blue or red than usual. This generally happens when we shoot in lights of different colors. For example, while shooting in Tungsten light, the pictures have an orange colorcast. Incandescent lights add a blue colorcast. How to we correct this - By changing the White Balance. In simple words, White Balance is the adjustment that makes objects look in their natural color. Though the Auto White Balance (AWB) does a good job most of the times, there are situations when it might not work. In those situations, you need to take control and change it to one of the values that come close to your light conditions. How it works – When we change the White Balance to Tungsten, the camera knows that there is more orange color in the frame, hence adds more blue to achieve a balanced color and makes the picture looks natural. Similarly, if we use WB as Incandescent, the camera knows that there is more blue color in the picture, hence adds more red to balance.
WB can also be used creatively to enhance the colors of your picture thus giving a mood to it.
In this picture, shot at Gangotri, the WB was set to Tungsten, hence the camera added a blue colorcast.
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How to capture unique photos
Neelima Vallangi is a travel photographer and blogger. (The Wandering Soul's Wander Tales..). She has trekked extensively across the mountain ranges in India, including the Himalayas. At a young age her photos have appeared in the Getty Collection. Neelima’s photography blog will feature twice a month on the Indiahikes website. This is her second blog. Read her first blog here: Six tips for shooting better trek photos
Leave your comments/questions at the end of the blog.
Let’s face it, most of us would’ve had faced this problem one time or the other on a trek. Chances are we’d all end up with similar photos. This situation can be avoided with some thinking on the lines of composition, but there is something more that one can do to create some unique images.
Here’s how.
1. Move around, there is infinite space all around you
Well if you don’t want photos like everyone else, don’t do what everyone does. Don’t stand where the crowd is and try to click. The trick is it to find interesting perspectives. Move around to get a different view. For example, reflections in lakes change as you move further or towards the water. From the other side maybe a nice lonely tree is adding to the composition. You’ll never know if you never move. Scout the location thoroughly. Chances are similar photos from same point of views are already shot by many photographers earlier. If you want a unique photo, the only option is to find a unique perspective.
2. Shoot from either a high angle or find a low angle
A photograph can express different things based on your composition. For instance, shooting a subject from a high angle can imply the surroundings are overpowering the subject. Whereas the same photograph when shot from a low angle gives a feeling that the subject overpowers the surroundings. Try a low angle when shooting landscapes as it lends more depth to the image. Try a high angle shot when you want to show the setting of the subject or show the environment around it. If not these, two try all sorts of angles that come to your mind. All of them might not be good but you might hit jackpot with some angle!
Using a low angle let me include the grass which complements the clouds and fills an otherwise empty frame. This was shot near Hassan.
3. Bad weather is no excuse to not shoot
We all know that a bright sunny day with clear skies is perfect for photography. But many times on treks we encounter cloudy days without much sunshine and this is the time when you most certainly should not pack your camera. Cloudy skies look great if you are able to capture the drama somehow. The exposure is not that easy to manage but if you are able to capture the mist rolling in from the mountain tops or dark skies, it makes for a great photo. HDR or bracketed shots help in this case. If you use filters, try a Graduated Neutral Density filter, it helps greatly.
This was shot during a monsoon trek in the Western Ghats to Brahmagiri Peak.
4. Observe your surroundings and anticipate
When it rains, it soon shines. Be ready! In the mountains, especially in Himalayas I have noticed that soon after the rains the sky clears up spectacularly. And not just that, 80% of the time I have noticed the formation of fantastic rainbows! It pays well to observe and anticipate in such cases. If around a lake, you can expect the winds to calm down for clear reflections. If near the mountains, after the rain, you can expect for a glimpse of that might mountain peak hiding behind the clouds. If sun shines through a rain drop after it rains, you can expect a mighty rainbow. But it is just a moment before the winds blow, clouds obscure or the colors fade. Be ready to capture the magic. Else you will be cursing yourself for not having the camera with you at the right time.
It was a long day with a long walk in the rain. I knew a rainbow would appear soon and I was ready to shoot it. Just as I thought, as we were nearing our campsite the rainbow formed and I was there to click at the right moment. This was shot on the Kugti Pass Trek.
5. Shoot the interaction of photographers/trekkers with the surroundings
Capturing photographers and trekkers on field makes for interesting compositions. People react different to the surroundings and at times the jumping jacks or the watchful photographers add beautifully to any frame.
Caught in action! This was shot in Desert National Park on a trek in Rajasthan.
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