This Christmass I shot some new portraits for my Back from the Future project. These are the first three and another three will follow soon.

Walk around and look at it from every angle. Take your time and it’s even best to visit a location more than once.

2. Choose the perfect aperture

Usually lenses perform best at apertures f/8 to f/15. Only go higher than f/15 (e.g. f/22) when you need an extreme long exposure or a large depth of field.

3. Prevent blurry pictures

Due to strong winds or pressing the shutter by hand, you could end with soft images. Chances are you’ll probably see this at home, when there’s nothing to do about it. Hang your camera bag to your tripod and use a remote shutter release to prevent motion blur.

4. Leave a little extra room in your composition

You can always crop an image afterwards. This also gives you the opportunity to straitening the horizon in post-production without losing any of the important components in your picture.

5. Bad lighting gives bad pictures

“You can’t make chicken salad, out of chicken shit”: so true.

6. Rule of thirds

Pay attention to the famous ‘rule-of-thirds’ and try to place the subject on one of the crossings (not in the middle!).

7. Underexposing is better than overexposing

In post-production an underexposed picture is better to correct (without loss of data) than an overexposed one. When you’re not sure in the field: underexpose a little.

8. Use filters for color and exposure

Every landscape photography at least has two types of filters in his/her bag: polarizing and graduated ND filters. You can read more about filters here.

9. Less is more!

When you’re in a beautiful place it’s tempting to put a lot of elements in your picture. But often it’s better to leave the composition relatively empty and focus on one subject.

10. Foreground, subject and background

Always try to look for an interesting foreground, subject and background to give a picture more depth and make it more interesting for the viewer to ‘read’ it.

11. Tell a story

Tell a story and make it easy to ‘read’ the image. People read pictures somewhat the same way as they would read a newspaper: make sure the image pulls the viewer into it by adding natural lines.

12. Photography is art!

Please ignore all of these rules whenever you feel it gives you a better image. Photography is art!

Up in the Northern part of the Isle of Skye are the impressive Quiraing mountains (Wikipedia). A surreal scenery, very popular by landscape photographers.

As it was raining in the early morning we got here around 11 AM. A little late for landscape photography, but fortunately the harsh light of the sun (already high in the sky) was compensated by the heavy clouds drifting by. With the strong winds, the lighting conditions changed constantly and we didn’t have to wait long before we had some nice sunlight on the mountaintop.

Moving picture

How I made these images

Both images were shot on my fullframe camera with the Canon 70-200mm lens on it, with a focal length of 70mm. With these windspeeds I choose a 1/800th of a second shutter time at f/9.0 with ISO 320. I also had to stabilize my tripod by hanging my camera bag onto it.

Also see my previous images from the Highlands.