📷 12 HIKING PHOTO TIPS from a PRO | Landscape Photography

Today I'm out hiking and camping 150 days a year, and I've been doing this over the last decade as a full-time wilderness photographer. In this video I'm going to break down some of my favorite composition techniques and shooting techniques that you can use for a phone camera or a regular camera to get really nice camping and hiking shots. So let's first look at this image right here. I took this up in the Olympic National Park. It was on a 50-mile off-trail trip, but some things to note about this photo, whenever you're taking photos of your camp, a few things to keep in mind. Number one, you want to show scale. So if you can get up higher than the tents and place them down in the middle ground so they're not separating and showing up into the background. Notice how the top of these tents is down below in the middle ground. So there's some space between this ridgeline before it goes up into these peaks up here. And by doing this you can really see the scale of the tents because you can see that they're very small compared to the landscape up here. So work on separating your different images so you can actually see the top of the tents breaking up to the mid-ground before it goes up to something of scale. Now the other thing I did here when I was looking to set up this photo, I wanted to show how tall these peaks were. So we have a few different things to show scale. Number one, I have my two friends right here. Then I have the tents right here. This really shows the scale of the landscape. And then you can see this waterfall back here leading up to these huge glaciers. If I wouldn't have shown these things for scale, it would be a really hard time learning how big these glaciers were. And I also used the moon for scale on this one. The other thing I did here is I used the lighting of twilight. The sun had just set about an hour ago, but there was still this nice light coming up into the landscape. And if you look right here, you see I have this light hitting here. This is called a transition. Anywhere that is light or saturated is going to grab your eyes, such as right in here. And once your eyes hit those places, they'll look for areas that are dark and desaturated in the image to move through, like this mid-ground and moving back up into the background. So this is a transition from light to dark to light again, and that's going to constantly move the eyes through the photo. Your goal as a photographer is to constantly have the eyes moving throughout the photo and to have all parts of your composition be interesting. So if there's part of the composition that have something boring in them, crop them out at home or don't shoot it in the field. I tried to fill all different parts of this composition with something new and interesting. So we have the lighting, we have the detail, we have the tents, we have the people, we have the waterfalls back here, the glaciers here, the Milky Way here, and the moon here. And this is really going to help the viewer's eyes constantly move through the photo. As soon as the viewer's eyes get bored with a specific part of the photo for too long, they're going to move on to the next photo and not look at your work anymore. The next photo I have here was taken on a ridgeline in the North Cascades of Washington State. So the next tip I have for you is get up as high as possible so you can see the layers of the landscape. On this ridgeline we had just summited this peak and when we were down lower, I couldn't see all these different layers. So in this one you have the foreground layer and this is where I placed my friend. You can see the nice separation between light tonal values and the dark tonal values of his backpack. This really separates him from the landscape around it. If you have tonal values that are the same across the entire foreground, then it's really hard to separate the viewer's eyes from the center of attention person and what's going on around it. But notice how I have all these different layers of foreground to background going on in this scene. So you have layers here, here, back in here, and then you have the sky up here. By having all these different layers, it adds depth to the scene. Whenever you're shooting out in the field, looking for layers is going to ensure the viewer's eyes are first grabbing the hiker in the scene and then moving it back into the mid-ground, and then the immediate background, and then the far background. Whenever you don't have these layers, there's not much to look at and can be really boring. So if you're down in the trees, being down in the forest rarely works well for shooting action shots. It can work well once in a while, but you're going to have a much better time and much better success if you can show a wide variety of different landscape and the viewer can look back into the landscape. Notice how I also have these transitions of light all over this landscape. The light's coming in from the side here. It's hitting this foreground coming in from the side. But then you'll notice that you can really see depth in this because there's dark areas, there's light areas, there's dark areas again, then there's light areas, dark areas, and this is just called dark to light transitions. Transitions are just things that move your eyes through the photo. When the viewer's looking at dark, they want to escape to something light. When they're looking at light, they want to escape to something dark. The same thing goes for saturation. If you have a highly saturated area such as this foreground down here, the viewer's eyes are going to want to look for a desaturated area to escape that and rest. So they're going to look for a dark or desaturated area. Things that are dark are often desaturated. Things that are light are saturated. So if you can mix up your photo with all different transitions from dark to light and saturation to desaturation, that's going to work really well. The other thing that goes is having snow on the peaks. If you're out in the mountains and there's not snow on any of the peaks, the viewer's eyes aren't really going to get that sense of adventure. When you put snow on the peaks such as glacier fields, snow fields, or just lingering snow in early seasons such as spring, this really helps to add the sense of adventure to the photo. This photo was taken on a high hike in the deserts of Utah. This is the Henry Mountains and you can see my friends hiking right here. Notice what I did once again is I used a light area that's going to grab the attention of the viewer's eyes. I used this to offset these mountain peaks in the back. So if you can find your main center of attention, just do this by finding the thing in the composition that without it, the composition would fall apart. Take that and balance it with the action of the person across the center of the scene. It doesn't have to be perfect, but if you can just visualize the middle of this composition, put most of the center of attention on the back right or left, and then have the hikers be on the opposite side. This will show that balance. And then the viewer will look either at the main center of attention first, or the action of the hikers first, and then it will start to move back through the rest of the image and end up on the other side. If you can get them to look across the center of the image using this balance from left to right, that's really going to help their eyes stay interested and move across the scene. Then I did other things like having this light fade in from the side. Remember anything that's light is going to grab your eyes and pull them into the scene. Then I have all this dappled light transitions from dark to light to dark again. This dappled light is really nice for having those dark to light transitions all over the scene. So look for scenes where you have clouds up in the sky. If it's just a clear blue sky, very uninteresting. The viewer is going to look away from it. When you have clouds in the sky, you also get the benefit of this dappled light because the light is going to hit the landscape in all different ways. Notice the separation of the foreground here. Then I have a different color, which is green in the midground. So I have desaturation here. There's not much saturation. Then I have saturation here. Then I have this dappled desaturation right here. That separates this area from this background area from the sky up here. So I have all these different layers. You only get these layers when you're up high shooting. When I was down lower, I would have been in the trees or I wouldn't have been able to see the separation here to this area back in here to the mountains and up into the clouds. For all those people that think you need a really good DSLR camera to take good shots, I took this on an iPhone 14, which is like five years old now, using the pano mode. The nice thing about the pano mode is it uses a bunch of different JPEG shots and it stitches them together. So you still have a really nice large JPEG file. So I'm recording this on a 5K iMac screen. This still holds up really well. But notice I have my friend here hiking right here. If I pop out here, I'm going to make a blank layer so I can draw on this. As he's hiking, the only way to see the scale of this is a few different things. Number one, trees. I always use trees to show scale if I can. You'll notice the size of the trees compared to him. Your eyes are going to fill in the rest of this with your brain to say, okay, well I know the size of those trees, similar to him. Then I see these massive peaks. This is Mount Olympus back here in the Olympic range. This is the Bailey range. But you can see how large these glaciated peaks are compared to him. So that kind of balances the top and back of this side. But as I was saying in the previous part, if you can grab the main center of attention, which I would say this area and this area are centers of attention. If I split this down the approximate middle, it doesn't have to be perfect. Try to balance the top half of the image with the center of attention in the top left and right if you have a bunch of mountains and then use color and light and the hiker to balance off that to grab the eyes across the photo and show scale. So not only am I showing scale with the trees, I also need something to show scale with the hiker, which was this mountain peak. But then I said, well, I'll keep swinging the pan over with my phone and capturing this mountain peak as well. And that really shows the scale. Also notice here we have this saturated area down here. I kept this yellow highly saturated. And then this area all up here is white. So white is a very low saturation value color. So when your eyes are on a saturated area, they're going to want to escape to a desaturated area, which is all these light snow patches. And then they're just going to move from saturation to desaturation up here. And then I saturated all these colors down here in the trees that really help to move the eyes from here back down to this part of the image. Always if you can keep this in mind when you're shooting, take your photo and say, is this a heck yeah composition? Meaning if I saw this photo, do I really want to take it? Do I really want to edit it? If it's not heck yeah, I just say it's a no and I don't take it at all. This makes it a lot easier to filter through your photos and pick the really good ones because most of your photos are just going to be good over time because you're filtering them out in the field and saying, if it's not world class, I'm not going to take it at all. The other thing that you'll notice whenever you're shooting hiker photos is you want to help separate the hiker outline. If I would have had him hike up here a little bit further, he would have been surrounded by all this saturated area. But I hit this shot right when his body was separating from this background so you can actually see what's going on with him. If he would have been up here, it would have been a lot harder to see him because there'd be all this very high detail area next to him, which is also high detail. So if you can separate the hiker with a low detail area behind them, it's really going to help that hiker to stand out. You can also brighten up the area where the hiker is and darken things around him so the center of attention or your eyes will be drawn to that light area and that'll really help it to stand out as well. So here's another camp or tent shot. I took this on a long backpacking trip out in the Olympics. The first thing to notice here is notice that the tent is getting hit with light so it automatically grabs your eyes and shoots them into that in the foreground. The other thing to notice here is that I have really nice separation here with the tent in the foreground between the midground. If this top of the tent was sticking up into this lake, it's very hard for your eyes to decipher the depth of this. But I positioned my tripod so I had this little separation of these trees between the top of the tent and the lake. Notice that the trees and the tent color are also different so you can really see along this whole background the outline of the tent because it's color separation. Now the other thing I try to do when I set this one up is I was waiting for the light to move through this scene so this whole lake was getting hit with light. Notice the areas of the lake that aren't getting hit with light like right here. They're somewhat dark blue but I waited until the light hit that lake so the color of this tent right here and the color of the lake are very similar. That's a color that really works together so I used blue to hold together the bottom part of this scene. The other thing that I do when I'm shooting is I look for colors that complement each other. You can use color harmony. Just go on YouTube and type in Dave Morrow Color Harmony. For this one I have what's called a triadic color harmony. So I have the key color, you can pick the key color in any scene, it's just the most dominant color. I would say for this scene it's blue. So that's right here. Then I used yellow, you can see there's a lot of yellow very faintly in the bottom of this image and green. There's a whole lot of green in this image as well. And I work that in as a triadic color harmony. These are colors that work very well together out in the field and you can set up for that in the field so they're really nice looking when you get back home. The other thing for this one is leading lines. So leading lines are any lines along different parts of the image that draw your eyes and move them into the photo. Somehow I got on green here so you guys will have to deal with it. But you can use lines coming down from the side of the photo. This is a line here. Lines can be anything between light to dark or high contrast to low contrast or saturation to desaturation. You can see this is a line right here that's contrast. And then I have a line right here. And then I have this dark to light transition line right here. No matter where your eyes start in the photo they're moving into the center part which is the center of attention of the tent, the lake, and this peak back here. I used the clouds up here to fill in the rest of the detail but notice how I darkened down this part of the photo. Anything that's dark in the photo pushes your eyes away and you can use dark areas to push your eyes into things that are lighter. So you're leading the eyes from the outside of the photo into the interior no matter what part they're looking at.