PICSPIRATION SUNDAY: This time of the year the rolling and colored fields of my home commune Ås give great inspiration for my camera and me.
I have presented photos from the fields in Ås, Norway before. Why? Because Ås is where I live – and the fields show themselves from their best side in autumn.
Ås is a small Norwegian university town surrounded by lots of farm fields. It can be very beautiful, but I still often struggle to find the best spot for landscape photos.
Why is that?
Because landscape is all about composition. But the landscape in Ås is mostly quite flat – and that makes it hard to find elements in the landscape that will give me the composition I want. A good landscape photo should usually have both foreground, middleground and background – and preferrably also some lines leading the eye into the image.
It is hard to find these spots – and usually I try to always be on the look-out when I am jogging or driving around in my home commune.
About this landscape photo
I realized this might be a good spot when I was passing earlier in the day coming back from shopping. Therefore I returned in the late afternoon when the low sun puts more life into the landscape.
In composing I figured the tractor tracks in the green field could work both as foreground and as composition lines that direct the eyes into the photo. I was also very happy with the clouds – and following the rule of thirds for composition I decided to give more space to the sky than to the fields.
Technical info
I used a polar filter for this image. A polar filter reduces reflections and bring out more of the colors in blue and green.
The ISO is 100 – and the aperture f/16 to give good depth of field. It is a HDR photo composed of five exposure: 1/30 sec, 1/15 sec, 1/8 sec, 1/4 sec and 1/2 sec. The exposures have been merged in HDR Efex Pro – and the final image given touches in Lightroom. I usually do not use Photoshop for this type of images.
Photo location
Other landscape photos from this shoot
Here are some other photos from the same night and an evening earlier the same week.
Field curves. Photo: John Einar Sandvand
Rolling fields. Photo: John Einar Sandvand
Autumn fields. Photo: John Einar Sandvand
These really are some beautiful landscape pictures. Lesson learned, among others, is that there is beauty closer to you than you imagine. There are lines, shapes, lights everywhere to make up nice things like these images. I’m inspired.
Thank you very much for your kind words, Geir! Glad to year you are inspired!