Last Updated on 10/02/2018 by Mark Beckenbach
Screenshot image from the video by Adam Karnacz.
Filmmaker and landscape photographer Adam Karnacz is back with another educational video to help you improve your landscape photography. This time around, he talks about how one can use and control color to elevate their landscape photography.
In the 17-minute video, Adam highlighted five aspects – planning, composing with color, black and white and monochrome, post-processing, and printing – to help you wield color to your advantage. He emphasized that no matter whether one prefers vibrant and saturated colors, or muted colors, or monochrome or black and white, “…what is happening with the color in your image, you should be in control of because we don’t want that happening by chance.”
“How you use color in your landscape photography has a big impact on your style,” he said.
There are many little nuggets of practical advice in the video, some of them reinforcing what most photographers already know. One example is deciding from the get-go whether you are going to shoot in color or black and white, and not, say, salvage a poorly taken image by converting it to black and white.
I find that the most important takeaway from this video is that color isn’t just a by-the-way that you only worry about during post-processing. On the contrary, color is a crucial detail that should already be in your mind the moment you start planning your image or story. It could make or break your photo, depending on how well (or poorly) you utilize it.
Anyone can take a photo of sprawling valleys, mountains, moors, plains, and other natural landscapes and call it landscape photography. But there are several things that spell the difference between a run-of-the-mill landscape image and an outstanding one, and one of these is color.
Watch the full video below:
When you’re done watching this, you might also want to check out another video by Adam in which he talks about how one can rediscover their passion for landscape photography.
Via the First Man Photography channel on YouTube.