Capture Landscape Photography Goes Digital Most photographers are familiar with the work of the late Ansel Adams. This photographer/ artist/author/teacher was renowned for his magnificent black and white landscape pictures of the American southwest. Most would go so far as to say that Ansel Adams is the most recognizable name in professional photography.

The set of pictures above illustrates how different a scene looks at different times of day. The picture with the mist on the lake was taken in the early morning. The other photograph was taken in the late afternoon. When you are on location, shoot at different times of day for different effects. Adams used filmlarge sheets of itto capture his dramatic images. But interestingly enough, in his autobiography, this master and mentor said, In the coming electronic age, scanning techniques will be developed to achieve prints of extraordinary subtlety from the original. It is true that no one could print my negatives as I did, but they might well get more out of them by electronic means. Wow! Thats quite an endorsement for digital imaging. Sure, Adams was specifically referring to scanning negatives, which is relatively easy to do with desktop flat bed and film scanners. But he made his statement well before the advent of consumer digital cameras (digicams). I wonder how Adams, who in his later years used Polaroid cameras, would have viewed todays digicams. My bet is that he probably would have taken some knockout pictures. And, he probably would have spent hours in the digital darkroom enhancing his originals which is similar to spending hours in the chemical darkroom enhancing negatives, something else for which Adams was famous. Well, you may never achieve the fame of Adams (I sure wont), but with a consumer digicam, you can have fun taking digital landscape pictures. Whats more, with an affordable imaging program, such as MGIs PhotoSuite III ($50), you can enhance your pictures in the digital darkroomnot in hours, but in minutes.

The benefits of using a digital camera for landscape photography include: traveling light, seeing your pictures immediately after they are taken and not having to worry about dust and scratches in the skyan area of pictures where even tiny specks of dust on slides and negatives are often visible. The Camera. First, lets take a look at what you need in the way of a digital camera. Basically, you want a megapixel camera, that is, a camera that offers an image sensor with millions of pixels (picture elements). As the number of pixels increases, the sharpness of your pictures should also increase. I say should because the type of image sensor and the quality of the lens also affect apparent image sharpness. For the pictures in this article (taken during a break at the ESPN Great Outdoor Games in Lake Placid, New York), I used Kodaks new DC4800 Digital Camera. This tiny wonder offers 3.1-megapixel uncompressed resolution for super sharp 11x14 prints. You also want a camera with at least a 6mm (28mm on a 35mm camera) lens. The 4800 features a 6x zoom lens (3x optical, 2x digital) and a 6-18mm lens (28-84mm equivalent on a 35mm camera). For the accompanying pictures, I used the 6mm setting. The Techniques. Now, here are a few basic tips for landscape photography that apply to photographing with a digital camera. Get charged up! Digital cameras need power, lots of it, to power LCD screens. The more you use the screen, the faster your battery will die. Zooming also runs down battery power. So, before you start shooting, charge your battery. Taking an extra battery or two is a good idea, too. If you plan to do a lot of shooting, you may want to invest in an accessory battery pack. These devices screw on to a digicam via the tripod socket and some offer many times the life of in-camera batteries. Increase your cameras memory on site. When I shoot film (which I still do), I always take more than I need. When I go digital, I take more memory cards (usually 32M or 48M) than I think Ill need. Sure, I can preview my digital pictures and delete the outtakes, but having more exposures gives me the opportunity to capture more images. It also prevents me from what we professional photojournalists call, deleting historyerasing important pictures forever. When I get home, thats when I erase my picture from the cameras memory cardafter I have burned them onto a CD. Aim High. Here I mean aim to shoot all your pictures at your cameras High or highest setting, as opposed to shooting at the Good or Better settings. The higher the image resolution, the sharper your pictures will look. Plus, at the high settings, you can make bigger, better looking enlargements than you can at the lower settings. Get Back To Basics. Digital landscape photographers can follow the basic rules of film landscape photographers. These include: Dont place the horizon line in the center of the frame. Try to shoot in the early morning or late afternoon, when you get warmer colors in your photographs. Place an object in the foreground to add a sense of depth to a scene. Remember that vertical landscapes can be impressive, too. Imaging Programs. Okay, so you have captured your images with your digital camera. Now its time to get to work in the digital darkroom. I mentioned MGIs affordable PhotoSuite III digital darkroom program. If you are new to digital imaging, PhotoSuite III is an easy to learn program. My 9-year-old son, Marco, has just as much fun as I do with it; he plays with itI work with it. If you have $600, Adobes Photoshop 5.5 offers many more enhancing featuresbut you dont need most of them for basic digital darkroom effects: making areas of the scene (or the entire scene) darker, lighter, softer, sharper and so on. Of course, you can make straight prints, that is, plug your memory card directly into a printer or print directly from your computer to your printer. However, I strongly recommend a digital imaging program (and there are plenty of them) for landscape photographers. At the very least, you can darken the sky (as you would with a graduated filter), enhance the color (as you would with a color intensifier filter). You can also do what Adams did on many of his prints: darken the edges of a scene to draw interest to the main subjecta technique he learned from master painters. In closing, here are three more important benefits of shooting landscapes with a consumer digital camera: 1) you can travel very light; 2) you dont have to worry about removing dust and scratches in the sky, as you might have to with film; 3) you can see immediately if you like the shot, especially if your camera, like mine, offers a LCD screen and high magnification feature that lets you see all the fine detail in your fine images. Have fun with your photos. And always remember: Cameras dont take pictures, people do. Manufacturers/Distributors Adobe Systems Inc 345 Park Ave San Jose, CA 95110 (408) 536-6000 www.adobe.com Eastman Kodak Company 343 State St. Rochester, NY 14652 (800) 225-5352 www.kodak.com MGI Software Corp. 50 W. Pearce St. Richmond Hill Ontario, Canada L4B 1E3 (888) 644-7638 www.mgisoft.com