Developing your eye for how natural light can shape your composition comes with time. Contemporary landscape photographer Kyle McDougall has put together five excellent nuggets of knowledge to take with you the next time you’re out shooting.
McDougall’s first tip relates to the importance — or not — of golden hour. While you might assume that this is the best time to head out, it very much depends on what you are photographing, as I’ve found out through my own experiences of shooting landscape photographs deep in a forest. With such dense trees and lack of changes in elevation, sunlight tends not to reach parts of the forest floor until long after the sun has risen, and consequently, getting up early can sometimes feel like a waste of time. Similarly, under the canopy, the evening’s golden hour can arrive long before the sun nears the horizon and some of the best moments happen a lot earlier than you might otherwise expect. All of this changes if you can gain some height by finding some higher ground, which can sometimes allow you to extend golden hour and suck a few extra rays of sunshine out of the day.
Which other tips would you add to McDougall’s suggestions? Let us know in the comments below.