10 Things to Try

Give your seasonal landscapes a distinctive twist

Get inspired! This issue: winter landscapes and the Gotham look

One of the biggest challenges in photography is keeping your work fresh, particularly if you like to shoot outdoors. If you’re not careful, your seasonal shots can look very generic. The best early winter landscapes capture the essence of the start of winter. They are a record of your emotional response to a specific location at a specific time of year, and transcend seasonality, so are still rewarding to look at in high summer.

Careful composition, as always, is vital. Use large swathes of snow for compelling minimalist effects, and don’t obsessively exclude people. How people interact and contrast with the winter landscape can make a great subject. Experiment with different white balance settings – the Tungsten preset will add a cool blue hue to daylight scenes, enhancing the wintry feel – and use darker days to experiment with long exposures for creative motion-blur effects.

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* Whether your landscapes are sharp or blurry depends on your creative purpose. A combination of the two aspects can often create dynamic images. Fix the camera to a tripod to keep stationary parts of the scene sharp and set a slow shutter speed to blur waves and clouds. An ND filter can help here. * Black and white obviously suits bleak wintry landscapes; turn on the Monochrome picture style and shoot in raw, and you can see immediately how a scene will look on the rear screen. Because you’re shooting raw, all the colour information is saved, enabling you to carry out the mono conversion later in Lightroom or similar software. * When shooting snow, your camera’s meter can be fooled into underexposure. To avoid the dreaded grey snow, be prepared to dial in some positive exposure compensation. * Wrap your camera tightly in a plastic bag before heading indoors, so that any condensation forms on the outside of the bag rather than the camera body itself.