Landscape photography lesson

I went out in the freezing cold to take these landscape photos to follow on from the lesson on camera settings.

Many photography courses stress the importance of 'framing' your subject, which means getting it away from the edges of the picture.

My subject in this first picture is the tram, it seems framed. Now look at the perspective, the tram lines, and all the other lines in the picture. They all go away from us towards a point on the horizon where they would converge if this was a drawing. This perspective gives the shot depth.

The patterns in the pictures make the shot more interesting, while the colours break up what would otherwise be a boring image.

This picture, which was the first I took, isn't quite as good as the picture at the top of this post. I took this picture in 'landscape' mode and I haven't edited it. It looked reasonable good on the preview screen on the rear of the camera, so I knew if it came out a little dark, that could be adjusted in editing.

All the images were a little dark and needed to be made lighter, which I did by making them brighter in Windows Live gallery.

The difference between using auto and landscape is the aperture, shown here as F10 which is quite a narrow aperture. The sensitivity of the sensor is the ISO and that increased to 400, because it was so dark with the cloud. This photo would have been lighter with a higher ISO, slower shutter speed or a wider aperture. I chose an aperture of F10 because a narrow aperture gives us depth of field and more of the shot in focus.

This shot looks OK, but compare it to the first picture and you will see the track is now behind the tram. We have lost the perspective the track gave us. This tram was on my side of the station going away from me to Birmingham. This was shot with the landscape setting, but with a much higher ISO at 400, and a wider aperture giving a shutter speed of 1/160 of a second. The camera adjusted for less light and maybe the movement of the train before I took the shot too.

Still on the landscape setting, but I moved over to the other platform to take this shot of the tram going to Birmingham. It's a good photo, but could I improve it with a manual setting like in the first picture? Look at the track where it changes at the end of the platform; the track looks like it gets lower, but that's just a trick of the light.

For the next shots, I set the ISO and aperture myself on A (aperture priority) and got the shot I started with today.

This shot is OK, but the first picture is still a lot better with more perspective. Here the tram seems flatter at the front, so a closer shot is better.

You can get good shots, with the landscape setting, but you can get better shots if you understand the settings and set them yourself. I think I should have tried a higher ISO setting to make the sensor even more sensitive to light. The light didn't look too bad, probably because the pupils in my eyes dilated to compensate for the dark cloud! An ISO of 800 and F8 would have given me a faster shutter speed and that would be better for a moving tram.

You can view the original post on Mike's blog A Zillion Ideas.