Use a Landscape as a Background

Sunday 22 May 2022, 14:41 by Rob Jansen | 3,506 views | 0 comments

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

A beautiful landscape can certainly add something to a photo of a person. After cyclist Geke asked me to photograph her passion for cycling, I looked around for a location and found this beautiful rapeseed field.

This seemed like the ideal background for her photos.

Rapeseed field
In the end, 3 completely different photos were taken in the same landscape.

Photo of a cyclist riding along a rapeseed field

In the end, 3 completely different photos were taken, each with the rapeseed field as the background. All the photos were taken with a Nikon D850 combined with a Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8 lens.

This photo is basically a standard cycling photo of Geke cycling along the beautiful rapeseed field.

Here, a fast shutter speed of 1/1600 was chosen to freeze the action and keep the subject sharp in the frame. The aperture used was f/4.5 at an ISO value of 160.

Photo taken in the same landscape using the panning technique

For the second photo, I used the panning technique, so that the yellow rapeseed flowers blur and horizontal lines are created that suggest speed.

Panning is a technique in which the photographer moves along with the subject while using a slow shutter speed, in this case 1/40 of a second.
This does require some practice, but it is great fun to do. It was a very sunny day, so I had to use the following settings: aperture f/10, shutter speed 1/40 sec, and an ISO value of 50.

It would have been better to use a neutral density filter, which would let even less light reach your sensor and allow you to lower the aperture number further, to f/2.8, for example.

You can also choose to use an even slower shutter speed. This makes the background blur more and creates longer lines.

Photo taken in the same landscape at sunset with flash

The photos above were taken at around 3:00 pm. We decided to meet at the same place again during the golden hour, hoping for a beautiful sunset.

I had the idea of using a flash to light Geke against the background of the yellow rapeseed field, with hopefully a beautiful sunset.

Here, I used an Elinchrom ELC500 flash and placed it on a tripod. If I had not used a flash, Geke would not have been lit and a dark silhouette would have appeared. That would have been nice too, but it was not what I was looking for.

First, the correct exposure had to be determined. The exposure of the landscape is determined by the aperture, the exposure of Geke on the bike, and the light intensity of the ELC500.

This had to be adjusted constantly because a setting sun also means that there is less and less light, so you have to keep adjusting the aperture, ISO value and light intensity of the flash.

It was important here to press the shutter at the right moment. This had to happen exactly when Geke was cycling within the range of the flash.

In the end, we were lucky to have a beautiful sunset, which gives the photo a lovely atmosphere.

Because the flash was visible in the image, it was removed in post-processing. I also removed the electricity pylons and cables from the railway line because I found them too distracting.
In the end, this photo was created.

All in all, these are some examples of using a landscape as a background for another subject.

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