lovelifey: June 2024

Jun 30, 2024

[Photography] Aperture and Landscape Photography: Why f/16 Isn’t (Always) Best

The post Aperture and Landscape Photography: Why f/16 Isn’t (Always) Best appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by David Shaw.

Aperture and landscape photography: a guide

Landscape photography is, in my opinion, one of the most difficult disciplines of outdoor photography and perhaps one of the most challenging genres of photography in general. Sure, at first glance, it seems straightforward. You find yourself a pretty piece of scenery, wait for some good light, and click the shutter. Easy, right?

And yet that’s not the end of the story. I have screwed up endless opportunities by making errors in composition, focus mistakes, and of course, by messing up the settings of my camera. I suspect anyone who has dedicated much time to the art of landscape photography can say the same.

But while entire articles, even books, have been written about each of those errors and frequent mistakes, there is only one I’m going to discuss here: aperture. It’s a relatively simple setting, yet it makes such a difference to your landscape photos. Careful use of the aperture setting can result in beautiful, breathtaking images; haphazard use of aperture, on the other hand, can ruin an otherwise great shot.

Below, I offer my best advice for choosing the right aperture setting when shooting landscapes. I cover a wide variety of subjects and shooting scenarios, from more conventional wide-angle approaches to aerial and even nighttime landscape imaging.

Let’s dive right in!

What’s the best aperture for landscape photography?

Choosing the right aperture for landscape photography

(If you’re not already familiar with the basics of aperture, I encourage you to read dPS’s more general aperture guide before tackling this article!)

What aperture should you use in landscape photography? It’s f/16, right? That’s what I’ve always heard. It’s a narrow aperture setting that offers the perfect combination of sharpness and depth of field. So set your aperture to f/16 and shoot away.

That’s it; the article is finished! I hope you enjoyed it!

I’m joking, of course! There’s plenty more to be said about aperture. But I am surprised by how many landscape photographers assume that is the end of the story.

The real answer to the question of which aperture to use in landscape photography is all of your aperture settings, depending on the situation.

First, landscape photography is about much more than just the classic composition that includes a foreground element in front of lovely background scenery. There are detail shots, aerials, night photography, telephoto landscapes, and plenty of other sub-genres to consider. For each of these niches, and for each specific situation, a different aperture is often appropriate.

Aperture and sharpness

Before I delve into aperture recommendations for specific landscape scenarios, I feel obligated to warn you: different aperture settings will affect image sharpness, and not just in terms of depth of field. Let me explain:

Wide apertures (generally) produce softer photos

Use pretty much any lens wide open, and you’ll end up with softer images. When set to the maximum aperture, every part of each glass element in the lens is put to work, and any imperfections in the lenses, dirt, scratches, and the physics of light all combine to mess with your photo’s sharpness.

This is part of the reason that high-quality fast lenses cost so much; the glass has to be excellent to retain sharpness wide open.

Very narrow apertures produce softer photos

When the aperture is closed way down, images also show a reduction in sharpness, but not for the same reason. Rather, something called diffraction occurs, which is a concept that comes from the physics of light.

Take a look at the terrible hand-drawn illustrations I made below, and you’ll see why I’m a photographer, not a painter. Hopefully, however, you’ll also learn something about diffraction. The lines on the left show waves moving across space. Think of them as light waves or ocean waves; it makes no difference.

As the wave approaches a wall with a large opening, the gap allows the waves through largely intact, causing only a slight dispersal and curving of the incoming wave. But apply a smaller opening (below), and suddenly those waves are heavily curved and dispersed:

In photography, a large aperture will cause relatively little change in the light waves entering your camera. A small aperture, however, will force a small amount of light to spread, disperse, and curve before hitting the sensor unequally and with less intensity. This results in a loss of sharpness.

While the physics of diffraction is interesting, when it comes to landscape photography, what you really need to know is this: very small apertures will be less sharp than mid-range apertures.

Attaining sharpness

It’s probably clear to you by now that if you wish to achieve maximum sharpness, neither fully wide-open nor closed-down apertures are best. Rather, maximum sharpness can be found somewhere in between. For most lenses, two stops down from wide open is the sharpness sweet spot.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, an f/16 aperture is very popular in landscape photography, and perhaps this explains why: it’s a good compromise between sharpness and depth of field. At f/16, you get a deep depth of field, and while the files will be softened by diffraction, the effect won’t be as noticeable at f/16 compared to, say, f/32.

Choosing the aperture to match the scenario

So…what now? We’re back where we started, right? Just shoot at f/16, and your images will turn out sharp from foreground to background, corner to corner.

Well, if tack-sharpness was the end-all and be-all of landscape photography, that would probably be the case.

However, sometimes you may wish to sacrifice some lens sharpness for a shallow depth of field effect or suffer some diffraction blur for the sake of attaining a long shutter speed. It really depends on the scenario, as I explain below:

Landscape detail shots

Landscape details are those small parts of a landscape that catch your photographic interest. This may be a cluster of autumn leaves, a stone in a tundra meadow, or light upon snow-covered trees, among many other possibilities.

In such situations, you may want to isolate that interesting subject from a cluttered background. You can do that by embracing the shallow depth of field created by a wide aperture.

I was photographing a couple of years back on a crisp autumn day. Frost covered the meadow I was walking around, and each stem of grass glittered in the early morning sun. Spotting one particular stem, rising from the rest, I paused. I wanted to isolate that single piece of grass.

So, using a 70-200mm f/2.8 lens, I opened the aperture wide to create a shallow depth of field, composed, and shot. Here’s the result:

I’ve used this strategy again and again in my landscape photography. Shooting autumn colors, I frequently wish to isolate a single leaf or patch of foliage from a distracting backdrop. A fast aperture and a shallow depth of field is the only way to do this.

In such cases, I’m happy to sacrifice a bit of sharpness.

Aerial shots

In aerial photography, you are always a great distance from the landscape you are photographing. (If you aren’t, you’d have much greater concerns than taking photos!) Thus, depth of field should not be a major concern.

Meanwhile, the vibration of the airplane or helicopter’s engine creates a much greater risk of blur than setting your aperture too wide.

When I’m shooting aerials, I open my aperture all the way to maximize shutter speed. When you need a shutter speed of around 1/1000s at minimum, a wide-open aperture is the only practical way to go.

Long-exposure photos

Slowing down the shutter speed for multi-second (or even multi-minute) exposures requires you to greatly reduce the amount of light hitting your sensor. Even with a low ISO and a neutral density filter, trying to create a long-exposure shot on a bright day is impossible without stopping down your aperture.

I was photographing along a river in Alaska a couple of years back on assignment for a conservation organization. It was a bright afternoon, but some clouds were breaking up the sky, creating decent photography conditions.

I knew I would be unable to return to the spot in the evening, so I needed to make the most of the situation. Despite the bright afternoon light, I wanted a long exposure that showed flowing water.

I lowered my ISO to its minimum setting (50), put on a 4-stop neutral density filter, and stopped down my aperture to f/22.

Yes, I sacrificed a bit of sharpness, but by using an ultra-narrow aperture, I was able to get an 8-second exposure of the flowing river. The rippled water blurred pleasingly to a ghostly reflective surface, and I got the image I wanted.

My point isn’t that you always need an f/22 aperture for long-exposure landscape photography. But if you want a long-exposure shot on bright days, you may need to narrow the aperture past f/16 to get a lengthy shutter speed, and that’s okay. In the end, landscape photography is often about compromise!

Landscape photography at night

Here in Alaska, I spend a lot of time shooting the northern lights, and I also spend a lot of time taking out visiting photographers to do the same. There is a myth about aurora photography that you need a long exposure. You don’t. In fact, you don’t want one!

One of the things that make the aurora so spectacular is the details in the curtains, the shifting colors, and the near-constant motion. A long exposure – anything more than a few seconds – will cause all those details to blur away. Fast shutter speeds (or speeds as fast as you can manage) are far, far better.

To get a fast shutter speed at night, you have to be willing to open your aperture all the way up, even if it costs you sharpness. High ISOs and fast lenses set wide open allow shutter speeds fast enough to capture the details of a fast-moving aurora display!

The same is true of astrophotography. While you generally have a bit more leeway compared to photographing the aurora, Earth’s rotation causes the stars to blur (and then streak), so it’s important to keep your shutter speed short and your aperture wide open.

Take better landscape photos by adjusting the aperture!

To wrap things up: Sure, in classic landscape photography, with a foreground element and background scenery, you’ll want a deep depth of field and maximum sharpness. In those conditions, by all means, set your aperture to f/16 and forget about it. But that’s not all there is to landscape photography.

Your cameras and lenses are equipped with many tools, each with a wide range of effects. To say there is only one aperture that is “right” is like saying that the only tool a carpenter needs is a hammer. Sure a hammer is the perfect tool for a carpenter when he needs to bang in a nail, but it’s really lousy at cutting boards.

What is the lesson here? Set your aperture for what is needed for the scene, not how you’ve been told it should be by someone else. Supposed “experts” say a lot of things. You don’t always have to listen to them!

Now over to you:

How do you approach aperture in landscape photography? How will you approach it in the future? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Landscape Photography

The post Aperture and Landscape Photography: Why f/16 Isn’t (Always) Best appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by David Shaw.

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[Photography] How to Take Top-Notch Senior Portrait Photos

The post How to Take Top-Notch Senior Portrait Photos appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Meredith Clark.

How to take better senior portrait photos

Have you ever tried to photograph a high-school senior, only to come home and discover that all your photos look awkward and stuffy? Whether you’re a professional portrait photographer who’s being paid or a friend snapping photos in the backyard, senior portraits can be a huge challenge for photographers of all types – not just due to technical difficulty, but because you have multiple clients to please.

High-school seniors need to have fun and look like themselves in their photos. It’s also important to capture images that will please their parents and fit their school’s requirements for the yearbook photo. Having many cooks in the kitchen can make things challenging, but not impossible! Here are a few tips for before, during, and after the session that will help you take senior portraits that are loved by both kids and parents!

Before the session

Senior portrait photography begins long before the day of the photoshoot. If you want to satisfy your clients, you should always:

1. Ask questions in advance

When it comes to senior portraits, every high school does things a bit differently. Some high schools have very specific requirements for the senior portrait used in the yearbook. For instance, I once encountered a school that specified all girls were to be photographed wearing a black crew neck shirt with pearls while standing against a gray backdrop and turning slightly to their left. Other schools are much more relaxed and may specify only the orientation and whether the image should be color or black and white.

Also, some schools require that seniors use their in-house photographer for the yearbook photo, but they can use images from independent photographers for graduation announcements and other things. So as the photographer, you must be aware of how your images will be used, and if they are for the yearbook, the photo requirements that you’ll be dealing with.

When I consult with my clients ahead of a senior portrait session, I always ask about each school’s deadline to submit photos to the yearbook. Some schools require that photos be submitted before Christmas, and other schools don’t cut off submissions until late spring. This is another situation that varies from school to school, and it’s a really important question to ask. You’d be surprised how often I get calls for senior portraits two or three days before a school’s deadline, asking if I could squeeze in a session, where the parents assume that the images will be edited and ready to go the very next day.

Sometimes it may work for me to squeeze in a session, with the agreement that I’ll provide 3-5 images by the yearbook deadline and the rest will be delivered within my standard time frame. Other times, I just can’t swing it. Asking the question allows me to be transparent with prospective clients and also helps me set reasonable expectations for the session well in advance.

2. Discuss wardrobe choices

Every photographer approaches wardrobe selection a little differently. Some ask their client to model prospective outfits in advance, and then help them choose. Other photographers create little handouts that include examples of what to wear (and what not to wear). And there are also photographers who ignore wardrobe entirely and like to capture the senior in the clothes they show up in.

Your approach will likely be influenced by whether you tend to capture styled sessions or lifestyle sessions. I find myself somewhere in the middle. I want my clients to be comfortable and to look like themselves, but I also find that most people benefit from some gentle direction about what to wear for a session.

When it comes to senior portraits, the direction that I usually give is to bring three outfits:

One casual outfit; something like jeans and a solid-colored top
A dressy outfit; slacks and a button-down shirt for the guys, a dress or slacks and a nice shirt for the girls
One outfit that describes their senior year in a nutshell. This might be a sports jersey, a t-shirt with their favorite band, their prom dress, or it even a really trendy outfit that they absolutely love.

For the first two outfits, I usually tell both the seniors and their parents to select medium- to dark-wash jeans with no holes, and either a solid-colored shirt or very classic patterns (like plaid). I also tell them to feel free to be creative and think outside the box when it comes to the third outfit. I’ve found that the parents typically prefer the images of their kids in the first two outfits, while the seniors typically prefer the images of themselves in the third outfit. In my experience, offering this simple guidance in terms of wardrobe has been the most important factor in ensuring that both the parents and the kids love their senior portraits.

senior-portrait — Two examples of “outfit three” images!

3. Think about posing

High-school seniors are in a bit of a tricky spot. At 17 or 18 years old, they’re young, but they want to look and be treated like adults. I really try to be conscientious of that dual dynamic.

This may be my own personal soapbox, but I also try to be mindful to guide these kids through poses that make them feel like confident and strong young adults, without being overly risqué or mature. DPS has great posing guides. Take some time to scroll through and identify the types of poses that you think are age-appropriate for high school seniors prior to the session!

During the session

Well, it’s the day of the senior portrait photoshoot, and you’ve hopefully asked plenty of questions, guided your clients through wardrobe selection, and considered poses to use. Now it’s time to ensure you’re at the top of your game when you arrive with your camera. Here’s what I recommend:

1. Build rapport

As you begin your session, ask the senior about themselves. If they play a sport, ask how their season is going so far. Ask about their plans for next year, or what they think they’d like to major in. Find out what they usually do on a Friday night. Get them to tell you about their favorite part of high school.

Really listen, pay attention to their answers, and when they share something awesome, tell them so! Hearing praise from someone other than their parents will help build their confidence in front of the camera. More importantly, when you’re genuine with your feedback, it helps build relationships and trust, which in turn will lead to more genuine photos.

2. Mind your aperture

I love seeing the images that families choose for the graduation announcements. More often than not, that image is a head and shoulders portrait of the senior looking at the camera and smiling with a nicely blurred background. There’s something about that sort of image that’s timeless and classic.

To achieve that look for senior portraits, I almost always have my aperture set somewhere between f/1.8 and f/2.5, depending on the lens. Basically, you want to use a relatively wide aperture, and you want to ensure that the senior is a good distance from the background. Take a look at this next example, where the background elements are blurred through a combination of aperture choice and subject-background distance:

3. Acknowledge the awkward

Portrait sessions are odd for most people. When you add hormones, acne, insecurity, and that not-quite-adult dynamic we mentioned earlier to the mix, senior portrait sessions can feel downright embarrassing. One of the most effective techniques I’ve found has been to simply acknowledge the awkward.

I’ve been known to say things like, “I know it feels weird to be the center of everyone’s attention and to be posed like a doll, but you’re doing a really good job and everything looks great so far!” Or maybe something like, “I know this is going to feel absolutely awkward and ridiculous, but I want you to give me your biggest, loudest Santa laugh. Like this [insert ridiculous Santa laugh here]!” I know it’s a weird request. They know it’s a weird request. Acknowledge the weirdness, and be willing to be an active participant in the craziness. It’s really not about the Santa laugh itself. But if you can get them to participate, it’ll often make them smile or laugh, which is the moment you’re really waiting for.

Just acknowledging that senior photos are not a comfortable everyday experience for most kids can go a long way toward putting them at ease and capturing images that really show their personalities.

After the session

So you’ve completed a successful senior portrait photoshoot. Congratulations are in order (both for you and your client!) but your work isn’t quite done. You still need to edit the images, share them with the client, and keep the momentum going.

Shortly after the session, I post a preview image to my Facebook page. I try to select one that I think will please both the kid and the parents, which is often those head-and-shoulders portraits I mentioned earlier. Many of the images in this article were the preview images I posted to Facebook after the sessions.

I also make an effort to post a caption for the image that touches on one of the cool things that the senior shared with me during the rapport-building part of our session. My goal in doing so is to affirm and acknowledge these kids. I’ve photographed a lot of different kids from a lot of different backgrounds, and each one has blown me away talking about their passions and hopes for the future. I want them to see and hear that they matter and that they were heard during our session, as well as to encourage each of them and build them up, if only in some small way.

You’ll have to find your own groove in terms of how exactly you share images on social media, but for high-school seniors especially, don’t skip this step! I’ve had more referrals for senior portraits come from Facebook than any other avenue.

high school senior portraits Facebook social media

2. Use a classic editing style

When it comes to editing senior portrait sessions, I try to keep my editing style clean and classic. Every photographer has their own style, and I’m not suggesting that you change yours. I am suggesting, however, that you be mindful of creating images that will stand the test of time.

For me, this often means offering more black-and-white images than I might from other sessions and fewer images with a matte treatment. (Glance once more at the photos displayed throughout this article, and consider how many are in monochrome!)

For you, this might mean dialing back the color grading, avoiding ultra-heavy vignettes, or sticking to subtle tonal adjustments instead of intense HDR edits. Basically, when in doubt, keep it natural!

Go take some amazing senior portraits!

Capturing senior portraits that both parents and kids love is one part preparation before the session and one part rapport-building during the session – with a drop of thoughtful post-processing thrown into the mix.

It’s not difficult, but it does take some advance preparation. It also requires a willingness to engage with your clients and focus on their needs rather than your own photographic interests.