<h1>So You Want To Shoot Landscapes</h1>
Shooting landscapes, if you waant to do it right, is more than just pointing your digital camera and clicking. It takes time and work to do it right. You must consider all of the various lighting situations, sunrise, sunset. cloudy, clear, partly cloudy. They all can play a role in getting it just right.
We all have admired the beautiful pictures in the National Geographic Mangazine. Surely their photographers are among the best there is. One of them, National Geographic photographer Jim Richardson has shot photos around a great part of the world. From the Celtic
lands of Cornwall, the architecture of Venice, and the whisky country
of Scotland, he has traveled in search of the elusive perfect shot. . But when he returns home, it is to Lindsborg, Kansas, on the Great Plains of Kansas.
"Kansas is where I grew up, and it's where I choose to live," he says. "For me, no other place smells quite right, you know." Two years ago he proposed a story for National Geographic on the state's Flint Hills region, the last remaining expanse of tall grass prairie on the continent. But he knew going into the project that he was facing a photographic problem.
"It's a place I'd visited many times in my career, and as a photographer I'd never done very well there," he says. "It is a prairie, and prairies are tough to shoot." The Flint Hills are simply rolling hills and grass, with few landmarks to place in the foreground to create a sense of depth. "Once you pick up a camera and point it at them, they just kind of diminish in the distance. They're not like the Tetons in Wyoming, which are big enough to fill a 4x5 frame."
His solution was to "work the story for all it's worth." A landscape is rarely successfully photographed in one day. "One of the things you do is to drive a a lot of miles to find the place that has the look you envision," he says. Richardson had the advantage of a lengthy shooting schedule: He began work in March 2006 and didn't finish until late the following autumn. He was able to shoot as prairie chickens began their courting, or "booming," in early spring, and later in the summer, when ranchers burn off dead grasses in a man-made version of the natural prairie phenomenon that keeps nongrass vegetation from taking root. Still later he shot the intense regrowth period, when new grass turns the region emerald green.
With the backing of National Geographic Richardson was allowed to hire a plane for aerial shots, but he essentially relied on his knowledge of the area to get the pictures he wanted. He knew that Kansas thunderstorms create a lot of visual drama, and he knew the back roads that led to little-known corners of the state. Most of all, he says, he remained alive to creative possibilities -- shooting lightning bugs over a field of wild alfalfa an hour after sunset, or creating a panoramic image of the Milky Way with four separate exposures. This type of thoroughness is what it takes to be a top notch photographer.My son is an amateur and he will shoot several hundred shots and make his selection from them. Point and shoot is not in his bag.