Landscape Photography, No Camping Needed

One of the great things about photography is how flexible it is. As a hobby, as a professional skill, as an artistic expression, photography is all things to all people and can be used in whatever way your own muse moves you. When people first dip their toes in photography they are almost always attracted instinctively to a certain field of photography – portraits, family photos, still lives, urban street scenes. While most of these focal points can be explored easily, if your spirit moves you to the sphere of landscape photography, though, you might think you have one major obstacle to your new passion: The travel required to get to stunning landscapes.

Or do you? The fact is, many of the landscapes that have been made famous by amazing photographers weren’t known as obvious choices for landscape work before those very photographers arrived on the scene. Photography is often about finding the beauty in unexpected places. In fact, if you’re interested in landscapes, you don’t need to plan for a long car ride into the bush for a camping trip. You just need to look in your backyard.

The Landscape Secret

Landscapes rely on natural beauty for their impact, but if photography was simply the act of pointing a camera at pretty things and moving on, everyone would be a successful photographer. Photography, especially landscape photography, is instead the act of pointing the camera at something beautiful and then editing that image into something greater than what’s found in nature.

That editing can involve everything from the precise section of the world you choose to frame in the lens to the time of day or year that you choose to take your pictures, to later manipulations in software. This editing means that no matter where you choose to take your photo, you can create something remarkable through your own specific perspective.

Choosing Landscape

Go outside with your camera. Even in a suburban area, there will be patches of green, little spots where nature has crept in – it might be your backyard, where a majestic tree or two shades your home, or it might be a dual carriageway divider near your home where a line of evergreens provides a sound break.

Once you have a slice of the natural world, all that’s required is the right framing – with a little patience you can find a way to capture the natural beauty while cropping out the modern world, and suddenly you have an example of stunning nature photography right in your own backyard.

It’s important to remember that photography is transformative. No photo shows the ‘real’ world – it’s always a perspective, and the visuals are always affected by the point of view of the artist behind the camera. Landscapes aren’t documentary evidence of the world – they’re art, and that can come from any source.

Have a fantastic image no one would guess came from your own backyard? Click here and let us turn it into a piece of high-quality wall art to display for everyone.