Landscape photography tip: don't fixate on your subject

Tuesday 12 January 2021, 20:02 by Nando Harmsen | 4,285 views | 0 comments

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

You have found a beautiful subject in a landscape. You frame it beautifully, with a nice composition, set your exposure and take the photo. Then you get home and notice that the background contains distracting elements. Pay attention to this when you take photos. Don't fixate too much on your subject.

We can easily become so fixated on what we want to photograph that we start overlooking things. That's understandable, especially when we're overwhelmed by the beauty of the landscape. As a result, there's a chance that we simply won't notice things.

Those things are distracting elements. Branches hanging into the frame, trees that are only partly in the frame, things in the foreground that we overlook, or simply elements that we don't want in the frame at all. By concentrating only on the subject, you don't notice these kinds of distractions.

You only notice the distracting elements in your image once you're home, when you look at the photo on your computer. Sometimes you can still remove them, but if something is only partly in the frame when it should really have been fully visible, it's too late. These are often things you could have easily prevented by paying less attention to your subject.

The branches on the left are distracting in the frame, something you can easily overlook if you concentrate only on the sun and the pine tree in the foreground.
The subject has been chosen, you know what you want in the photo. So there's no need to keep fixating on it. Instead, look carefully at everything happening around your subject, and make sure all distracting elements are outside the frame and that everything that needs to be fully visible is fully in the frame.

These can be small things, from simple leaves in the foreground to large things such as an unattractive bare branch. But also a pylon on the horizon, or twigs that hang unnoticed at the top of your frame. So always pay attention to the edges of the photo, and avoid fixating on your subject.

De Landschapsbijbel, with 101 tips for magnificent landscape photos

This tip is part of the book De Landschapsbijbel, in which I give 101 tips for magnificent landscape photos. The book, full of beautiful photographs, gives you all the information you need to start creating your own fantastic landscape photos.


Don't have De Landschapsbijbel yet? Order it via the order page and buy the book on its own, or at an attractive discount together with a membership of Photofacts Academy.

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