Video: Nigel Danson enjoys incredible landscape photo conditions and learns a valuable lesson

 

 

Every landscape photographer dreams of amazing weather and lighting conditions. Many shots with fantastic potential are undone by lackluster light and poor weather. However, as photographer Nigel Danson recently found out, sometimes special conditions can be overwhelming.

"It just feels like I want this to last forever," Danson says in the video below of the fantastic, moody conditions. When the conditions are excellent, the urge to shoot as much as possible can be strong. However, as Danson found out, you can end up rushing. "There's literally shots everywhere here," Danson continues. If there are shots everywhere, how do you select the best possible shot given the fleeting conditions?

An important consideration is determining the conditions' biggest strengths. In Danson's case, he has very moody conditions with a perfect amount of fog. Too little fog, and it just looks boring—too much fog results in flat, overly hazy images. The perfect fog lends depth to your landscape photos while providing a strong simplifying element to creating compositions, especially in the woodlands where Danson is shooting. These areas can often appear cluttered, but the fog significantly reduces background distractions.

While Danson captures many lovely images in the video above that take full advantage of the brilliant conditions, he admits that he made numerous mistakes. There are compositions he wishes he had done differently, including some that would've been simple to fix in the field by moving his camera slightly. Ultimately, Danson says these mistakes were due to not taking his time.

Fortunately, Danson wasn't treated to just one day of amazing conditions, he was given a second chance the next day to capture woodland landscape images in epic photography conditions. The second chance didn't go to waste.

Even if there were images Danson wishes he'd approached differently, especially on the first day, the experience still delivered what's so special about landscape photography. Being out in the field and enjoying amazing conditions is always worthwhile. Of course, Danson did capture spectacular photos to add to his portfolio.

Have you ever "lost your head," as Danson puts it, when faced with amazing photography conditions? Let us know in the comments below. I know I have. The first time I saw northern lights, I was scrambling to get as many shots as possible and didn't focus nearly enough on the overall composition, especially the foreground. It was still an amazing experience that I'll never forget, but better aurora shots have long since supplanted those first, rushed images.

To see more from Nigel Danson, visit his website and YouTube channel. You can also stay up to date with his photography by following him on Instagram.

(Via Nigel Danson)