Use and Control Colour to Elevate your Landscape Photography

Today we’re talking colour. Beautiful vibrant colour or even the complete lack of it. We’re going to look at how colour feeds into the entire photography process and how we can use and control that colour to improve our landscape photography.

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Style

One of the first things to strike us when we first look at an image is the colour. This is particular true if the colour is designed to make a statement or the photographer has just made a complete hash of it, like some of those horrible HDR’s where it looks like you’ve just thrown up all over the page.

How you use colour in your landscape photography is an important part of what gives you your style. Do you prefer big vibrant colours? Do you use more muted tones? Are you a black and white person?

It doesn’t really matter and no way is better than the other but what is happening with the colour in your image is something we need to think about and not just end up happening by chance.

Planning

The type of story I want to tell with then guide the location I choose to photograph in. The weather also has an impact on colour. Sometimes I will head out chasing that story. For example, I am in a happy mood and I want a big colour sunset type shot. I’ve checked the weather and I know there is a chance of a colourful sky. I head to the beach, find a composition and hope that the big sky comes. Sometimes it doesn’t pay off but often it does and I have told that story because I was chasing it.

On other occasions I’m not in control of where I’m taking pictures so I will adapt my story to the landscape I am in and what the weather is doing. That's exactly what happened in the Peak District. That location was set because I had plans with a friend. I knew the weather would be changeable and hopefully end well. I used colour in the images to drive that story of adverse weather from the desaturated drought shot, through the monochrome rain shot and the black and white bleak windy feeling at the top before heading through the extreme clouds and into the sunny colourful sunset at the end.

Compose with Colour

The next step I take is to compose my images with colour in mind.

Placing some striking colour into an aspect of your composition can take a photograph from a good shot to a great shot. A blue sky compared to a big colourful sky is an obvious example the it is true of the foreground and mid ground too. Take British moorland as an example. It’s covered in Heather and most of the year it is an uninteresting browny green colour. But every Autumn/September time it flowers and turns into a stunning and vibrant pinky purple colour that can turn a composition.

When you don’t have good light a scene will be much less vibrant like in dull grey conditions. When I am faced with that I will often combine the more muted colours with a long exposure to produce a more ethereal and fine art feel to the scene with muted colours or monochrome.

Black and White and Monochrome

I am not a big user of black and white landscape photography but I use it now and again. I think it’s really important to try and decide at the time of taking the picture if the final image should be black and white, rather than just using it in post to try an rescue a bad image. I still photograph in RAW colour but I have in mind that it will be black and white.

I will decide to use black and white when I have a really interesting composition but the colours are dull and actually detract from the image. Even in those dull colours you can still have some really interesting tones that I know will work well in black and white. You can also post-process these tones much more aggressively than a colour image too to really add drama to a black and white photo.
So a black and white image in monochrome but a monochrome image is not necessarily black and white. It just means we’re working with the varying tones of one colour.

Monochrome images are difficult to plan for but it’s something I am massively attracted to when the conditions present themselves.

There's lot more detail in the video or head over to my website to read the full story.

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Видео Use and Control Colour to Elevate your Landscape Photography канала First Man Photography