During the last few months I have tried to get more serious about expressing myself in photos. I started out by photographing small things like insects and flowers and eventually got a macro lens. More recently I have been taking photos of larger things, like turtles, frogs, and wading birds. Yesterday I decided to try a landscape picture, without really knowing how to do it.
I’ve read enough to know that I wanted maximum depth of field and saturated colors. So I set my camera up on my tripod with these settings, f22, 1/50 sec, ISO 100, and 21mm on my 18-55mm zoom lens. I also used exposure compensation to underexpose by one f stop, figuring that reflections off the water might cause the image to be overexposed.
My subject was Cameron Run, a stream that runs into the Potomac River. There are concrete slabs at intervals that run across the stream, presumably to help the water flow as it moves downstream. I was standing on one of them with my camera on my tripod when I took this shot, looking east toward Old Town Alexandria, VA.
I’m pretty happy with the result. What you see if pretty much what came out of the camera—I am not sure what adjustments I should do in Photoshop. Perhaps I’ll try more like this, especially if I travel outside of the suburban area where I do most of my shooting.
Cameron Run looking east toward Old Town Alexandria, VA
© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.
Mike Powell 
Best view of Cameron Run that most people will ever see.
Thanks. It’s really hard to exhaust the shooting possibilities in the local area. Cameron Run is where I have found the egrets that I have featured in another blog post and also a little green heron.
I don’t think that I would change anything-it’s a beautiful shot.
That is a terrific photo, especially if that is pretty much just what came out of the camera. If you like experimenting with the artistic side, try downloading the program called Photomatix. It allows you to merge several photos of exactly the same image but with different exposures of that image. The fusion of these images gives you the High Dynamic Range (HDR) type of composite photo. This is what I used for some of the photos in the “Sierra Nevada backyard” http://bybio.wordpress.com/2012/08/17/in-the-sierra-nevada-backyard-again/
Thanks for the recommendations, Sue. I’ll check out Photomatix. I’m like a kid in a candy store exploring all kinds of new territory in my photography.
I’ve seen people do HDR, and it looks pretty cool- I’ve never been able to make it look right though. My own style for landscapes is pretty natural, I figure, like bugs- God made ’em look that way for a reason- so let’s enjoy the beauty. Put a person in front of a landscape though- add some off-camera flash…then I get creative.
Yours is a nice landscape by the way, good colour and I like the leading lines!
Thanks for the encouraging words. I’m not ready to switch to landscapes yet, but it was fun trying something different. When it gets colder and too dark to shoot outdoors I might even have to photograph people!