Landscape Photography - Behind The Scenes

This guide to landscape photography follows the story of twenty images. It explores the decisions made, the composition techniques used, the settings and edits applied: everything which goes into creating a finished photograph from the landscape.

Rather than explain simple photography concepts with complete, finalised images, this book reviews the challenge of finding compositions and integrating the whole process of photography: from setting up the camera, to editing the image.

Each chapter is a behind-the-scenes guide to every stage of creating a photograph. We go beyond the basics of photography and rules of composition to understand why we are drawn to subjects, how to lead a viewer around an image, and what makes up our photographic style.

A workshop in a book

Creating a landscape image often feels like a journey, with ups and downs, progress and setbacks, as we try to find a way to capture the right features, work with the conditions, and create the finished photograph. The chapters take you on that journey: twenty guided tours through different landscapes to discuss the tools and techniques of photography.

This book doesn’t present an idealised view of flawless photography. It examines the ideas which go into a composition, the compromises made and alternatives considered, the experiments and failed attempts. It's about what landscape photography is really like, and teaches how to question our decisions and understand the options available so that we can each build our own style of photography.

Creating the book

I’ve travelled with a camera to fifty countries, and my images have been published and sold as prints around the world. My photographic style is based around simple arrangements, rich colour and finding shapes and patterns in the landscape.

For several years, I have created free tutorials for each image on my instagram page, showing how I found and evolved the composition in the landscape, captured it with the camera, and edited the raw frame into a complete photograph. This book takes that idea and expands it for a full discussion of landscape photography, using twenty images chosen to show a wide range of composition and editing techniques and how they are used in practice.

To get a sense of how this book works, there are dozens of summary tutorials available here: www.instagram.com/shuttersafari