How to emphasize the foreground in landscape photography to create a more powerful photograph

 

 

Composition is one of the most important aspects of any great photograph. In landscape photography, there is a lot of consideration placed on composing the frame from front to back. After all, you often want to produce images with a lot of depth. In a two-dimensional medium such as photography, there are different ways you can create a sense of depth. One of the most common ways is by including foreground elements in your frame. Something as simple as a rock near your camera can do a great job of creating a sense of depth and leading a viewer through your frame.

In the video below, photographer Adam Gibbs has combined clips from two different photoshoots to help illustrate how you can emphasize the foreground in your landscape photographs. Further, he offers some general tips for composition, including breaking down individual scenes on the back of his camera to offer us insight into his creative process. As you can see, leading lines are a very important aspect of many images, as they either can accentuate a subject or point a viewer toward the subject of your shot. It can be very tricky when shooting beautiful nature scenes to actually have a centralizing subject in the frame because the scene itself is often so nice that it is all too easy to simply snap a photo rather than slow down and carefully consider the frame. This is where lines, shapes and textures can help a lot as they offer you a powerful way to frame a specific element within a larger scene. You certainly don’t want to ignore the small details as it can sometimes be the case that a small part of a shot ends up bringing everything together into a visually pleasing arrangement.

(Via Adam Gibbs)