Perhaps one of the single most talked about aspects of photography as a whole is related to composition and especially when it comes to landscape photography. I’ve always felt that the best and fastest way to improve your photography is by focusing on composition and that’s exactly what I did when I first became interested in this genre of photography. I consumed as much content on the topic as I possibly could, I read, listened, and watched everything I could find related to perfecting landscape photography compositions. And looking back on all the compositional tips & tricks and best practices there’s really only one piece of advice that stands out that had the single largest impact on my landscape photography.
What’s so important about this piece of advice isn’t solely the advice itself rather why you want to do this that matters most. I was told this golden nugget of wisdom about five years ago, but I wasn’t told exactly why I should do this and wasn’t told when I should do this - I was simply told, “find your focal point and get low”, that was it. I was left to figure out the how, why and when on my own. I spent the majority of the next year trying to figure out the details surrounding this approach and in this article I discuss the many reasons why I think getting low is the best landscape photography advice I’ve ever heard.
#5 Texture
Whenever you have interesting textures in your foreground, that’s a great opportunity to get low to the ground. You don’t necessarily need to lay on the ground, but dropping your camera a bit closer to the areas of interest is a great way of showing off texture. Being able to accurately portray a specific type of texture, for instance sand in a photo, is a very powerful thing as you wont be able to obviously feel the sand in the photo, but if you can “optically feel” the sand it’s a beautiful thing!
#4 Moving Water
This doesn’t only apply to an ocean, it could be a river or a stream, but when you have moving water in your foreground this creates a great opportunity to get your camera low to the flow. This is an excellent way of creating those immersive images where it appears as if the water is flowing directly into the viewers perspective.
#3 Reflections
Reflections are a great way to create symmetry, balance and harmony within your landscape photographs. Getting low to whatever is reflecting a portion of your image, which is generally water in landscape photography, is a fantastic way of making those reflections really stand out and enables you to create powerful eye catching images.
#2 Enlarge Foreground
This is perhaps one of my favorite reasons to get low, especially if you happen to be using a wide angle lens. If you have something interesting in your foreground getting low and up close to it with your camera is a great way to exaggerate the size of the foreground interest and ensures that it becomes a focal point in your image.
#1 Create Depth
And, for my top reason for getting low! It’s great for creating separation between the foreground, mid ground and background layers of your scene. What happens many times when you’re shooting at eye level is that you miss out on capturing any foreground in your image, therefore you’re left with mid ground which often will blend into the background. This will almost always result in an image that lacks depth and separation between the layers of your photo. Being able to create a three dimensional effect with a two dimensional object like a photograph is something I always strive for and by just getting a bit lower is a great way to accomplish this.
Those are the 5 reasons why I think getting low is the best landscape photography composition advice I’ve ever heard. I hope you were able to get some useful information out of this article that you can apply to your on-location photography workflow moving forward.
As always, thanks so much for reading & sharing!
Mark