I Love it When a Plan Comes Together
It’s no secret that landcape photography is one of the things that drove me to get my first DSLR. I love traveling and exploring and wanted a better way to document those moments to be able to look back on them or share them with friends and family. I started much like anyone else would when presented with a landscape, camera in hand. Just point the lens at things and hit the button! Occasionally I’d get lucky and come away with a decent image, but most of them would hardly be worth sharing.
If you’re getting into landscape photography and can’t quite put your finger on why your images are always a little underwhelming, you may have the same problem I did. I never turned up at a location with any sort of plan or an idea of what kind of image I wanted to capture. If the photos turned out looking uninspired, it’s only because they were. I can’t tell you how many times I look back at old photos from my travels and have this lingering feeling of regret, because if I’d only had some sort of plan, maybe I would have come away with much better images.
How do you plan for landscape photography? Research. If I am able to, scouting the location in person ahead of time is what I would prefer to do. There are many times where the conditions aren’t right to come away with a great photo, but you can always find a good composition to come back to. That time might be later in the day, the next day, or maybe even several weeks or months later. Also, you can take advantage of a number of websites and mobile apps to help you with planning your photography. Whether it’s using Google Earth to find a location or a weather app to predict conditions at sunrise or sunset, the more you can prepare ahead of time, the less that luck will be a factor in getting the results you want.
This photo of the Milky Way over Gloss Mountain State Park in Oklahoma was months in the making.
Last May, I was headed to Black Mesa in the Oklahoma Panhandle (known for its dark skies that make it an excellent place for astrophotography), and Gloss Mountain was on the way. Since I already had my mind on landscape astrophotography, I decided to scout out the areas around Gloss Mountain for that exact purpose. From the north side of the state park, I found a composition that I thought would look great with the core of the Milky Way almost completely vertical directly behind the peak. This is where another mobile app came into play. PhotoPills is a great tool if you need to know exactly where the sun, moon, or even the Milky Way are going to be at any given time. I opened the app and found that the best time for me to come back to that exact spot to get the photo I wanted would be at the end of August at around 10:30 PM (it’s that precise). I didn’t have to guess what time the moon would set or the Milky Way would be in the orientaion I wanted in the sky. PhotoPills did that for me. All I had to do was come back at the right time and hope the weather cooperated.
Unfortunately, during the rest of that trip to Black Mesa, the weather would not be my friend. On the plus side, because of the slight detour I took to scout another location, I ended up getting my favorite photo of 2022 a few months later. I also have a location pinned in Google Maps to go back to near Black Mesa at some point in 2023. Stay tuned!
Thanks for reading and if you like this photo, prints can be found here.
- Justin
