Landscape Photography

This is one of the most accommodating and the most challenging areas of photography. Of all subjects, the land simply lets you photograph it from any angle, at any time, and in any weather, but you must work to find the ideal viewpoint.
There are three essentials of landscape photography - place, time, and means - but the most crucial of all is place. And it will do you no good at all if you have an original approach to landscape in mind, but have not learned how to find just the right position from which to depict the place. To discover the perfect position you cannot rush at it, hoping it will be obvious once you get there. Once you see a view that is promising, you need to slow down completely -even put your camera away. Then just walk and look, walk a little more and look a little harder. That is all there is to it.
One of the most popular, some would say essential, accessories for the landscape photographer is the polarizing filter. This is a neutrally dark glass filter on a rotating mount. When fixed on the front of a lens pointing away from the sun, then rotated to a certain angle, the filter has the effect of making blue skies appear dark. This is because most of the light from a dear sky vibrates in a narrow range of angles: however, a polarizer passes light that is vibrating in one direction only and blocks all the others. The polarizing filter is an effective way to reduce the luminance range of a scene, but it works most effectively when the sky is already blue (and so is darker than sky with diffused cloud), when it can cause over-darkening. This filter is best used on an SLR, where you can see any changes through the viewfinder. Modern polarizers should be of the circular polarizing type. Don't be tempted to use linear polarizing filters - although they are less expensive, they cannot be recommended for most modern cameras as they render •autofocus and some metering systems inaccurate.