Landscape photography is more than just taking a picture, it is about emotion, it’s learning to see and experience the location, to capture the atmosphere. It should create an impression and grab the attention of the viewer to bring out their emotions.
The one thing that makes a great photo is its ability to convey emotion and feeling. To make a photograph more than just an image, I need to feel inspired by what I am photographing so my photograph can be a reflection of my experience and how I felt. Any scene can look beautiful, but to communicate with viewers and create something compelling, it needs something more. I need to get to know a place and look at its heart and soul. I ask myself: What makes a place significant? What makes it special? Why is it inspiring?
“A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense and is, thereby, a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety.”
Ansel Adams
Carmen Norman
Carmen is an award-winning landscape and portrait photographer based in the Lake District, where she runs landscape photography workshops and courses, as well as shooting studio photography, weddings and family lifestyle photo shoots.
I want to pass on my sense of awe and what made me stop and consider the location. One way I try to do this is through composition and adding depth, layers and flow to images. My images may contain a foreground, mid-ground, and background that each add to the drama and beauty of the scene or they might be quite minimal to express the silence and solitude.
To decide on my compositions and the message I want my photograph to convey, once I reach a location I put the camera down and forget about shooting for a moment to just sit and observe.
Creating emotion in a photograph requires careful thought and deliberate choices in how we compose our images. I try to begin a landscape photography session with a few quiet moments and a stroll around the location to study
