Scottish landscape photography with Adam Gibbs: Solving problems in the field and blending exposures

 

 

Landscape and nature photographer Adam Gibbs is in Scotland doing landscape photography. In the video below, we join him in the field in Glencoe, which is in western Scotland, to photograph streams and waterfalls.

The first scene Gibbs chooses to shoot is a twisted tree alongside a stream. He quickly identifies two challenges with the location. The first is that it's windy, which will make it difficult to capture a sharp shot of the tree due to the leaves blowing in the wind. The second challenge is that behind the tree is a roadway, so Gibbs will need to time the shot to ensure that there's not a car passing by. Due to the overcast skies and somewhat flat light, another consideration is how to handle the reflections in the scene. Gibbs likes the foreground reflections, so he doesn't want to use a polarizer to completely eliminate reflections from the entire scene. Instead, he can take multiple shots, some with the polarizer and some without and then blend the exposures in post-processing to create a composite. The final image was captured using a Nikon D850 DSLR with a Nikon 16-35mm f/4 lens at an f/8 aperture and ISO 800. The 800 ISO was chosen to keep the shutter speed high enough (1/60s) to freeze the leaves in the tree.

To see additional images from Gibbs' Scotland photo adventure, watch the video below. You can see more of his work by following him on Instagram.

(Via Adam Gibbs)