Nomadic Vision

The Nahoon Nature Reserve in East London offers travelers a touch of wilderness within the city.

With the World Cup Football around the corner, travelers from all over the world will be flocking to South Africa. Whilst the main show will undoubtedly be the football, I’m sure more than a handful will be interested in capturing the South African landscape.

This article was originally published in Pix magazine about two years ago, but it remains relevant and may help you, or someone you know, come back from South Africa with some awesome looking landscape work.

Please note, this was never intended to be a travel guide for photographers (although that would be a great idea). I’ve written this article to point out some of the many landscape themes in South Africa and to try to stop you from making the same mistakes I’ve made when shooting them.

Mountains

The Eastern Cape region of the Drakensberg is rugged, remote and almost completely unspoilt. Accomadation can be found for under £3 per night.

I’m a collector of landscape images and most of them have a mountain of some sort in them. The Grand Teutons, the Half Dome and the Himalayans to name a few. But to get great mountain images, there is no need to look past South Africa.

The Drakensburg mountains stretch from KZN to the beginning of the Western Cape. Throughout this range, there are literally thousands of peaks begging to be shot, not to mention all of the other mountain ranges also in South Africa.

After bumping my head hundreds of times learning them, here are some strategies to help capture decent mountain scenes:

• Mountain peaks look their best when they are shot with side lighting. Therefore, when you are exploring an area to look for shooting potential, take note of where the sun is going to rise or set. If you plan your shoot so that the sun will be setting on your side, with the mountain in front of you, the mountains will appear to look more three dimensional in your photographs.

• Be aware of the play of light and shadow. Often, one mountain peak will cast a shadow onto another, leaving only the peak of the mountain in direct sunlight. Selecting a white balance to neutralize the blue light of the shadows will result in a mountain peak that is glowing in warm light.

• Lastly, be very careful when choosing your outfit. Mountains are notorious for quickly changing weather patterns, so be prepared for a snow storm in summer. Also, although they are not very comfortable, gumboots are great for walking through mountain streams and through snow.

Beaches

You don't need to try very hard to to find yourself alone on an unspoilt beach.

South Africa is blessed with some of the most beautiful beaches in the world. Take a walk along the Wild Coast or along the Garden Route coastline and you will find it very difficult to deny the urge to take a picture. Unfortunately, its not always easy to capture the feelings and emotion that the sea can stir up.

Here are some tips for shooting “seascape” images that will hopefully be full of emotion and drama:

• The movement of the ocean is a big part of what makes beaches so special. Most seascape photographer’s favorite trick is to exaggerate the movement of the sea. By using a slow shutter speed, the movement of the water is captured as it moves over quite a large distance. The key to successfully capturing this movement is to observe the direction of the movement for a couple of minutes and using the movement as part of your composition.

• A more extreme version of the above strategy is to use a very long shutter speed to completely flatten out the sea movement. Many seascapes don’t work just because the actual sea looks too busy. Using a very long exposure emphasizes the subject you are trying to capture by flattening out the “busyness”.

• Finally, dealing with the elements can be quite a problem. I’ve shot a scene where my lens was covered in sea spray in a matter of seconds. An innovative photographer with me shot with his dirty lens and went for the “diffused”, “dreamy” look, but I found a cloth to wipe down my lens proved very useful. When returning from shooting a seascape, ensure that you wipe down your camera and lenses with a damp cloth, just to remove any salt residue from the sea.

Waterfalls, streams and rivers

Waterfalls, like the Howick Falls in the Natal Midlands, are common in South Africa's mountainous areas.

I’m quite sure that every city in South Africa has a waterfall nearby that is a favorite spot for a local photographer. I’ve never figured out what makes waterfalls such an irresistible subject, I simply give in to the temptation and go shoot them.

I was extremely disappointed with my initial attempts to capture waterfalls. Burnt out, blue patches of water with pitch black rocks were a common feature of my waterfall images. Fortunately, after literally hundreds of hours of shooting them, I’ve managed to overcome my initial problems.

Here are some of the lessons I’ve picked up:

• Use a polarizer. That has to be the most important waterfall tip. Waterfalls are best shot on overcast days, where the sky is like a giant soft box. This creates soft, even lighting but also causes glare, known as specular highlights. A polarizer reduces most of the specular highlights, which helps extend the dynamic range of the scene, meaning you will be able to capture detail in both the highlights and the shadows.

• Another benefit of using a polarizer is that it allows slower shutter speeds. Slower shutter speeds means that movement is flattened out, creating a far simpler composition. Another useful filter for slowing down shutter speeds is a neutral density (ND) filter.

• Waterfalls often have indirect light as the only light source, which is far bluer then direct light. This can result in an image that looks quite blue. I’ve found that taking a white balance reading from the foam of a waterfall or rapid, gives a far warmer image than the white balance my camera automatically selects.

A Human Touch

Sometimes a human element is crucial to the composition of a landscape image.

For lack of a better phrase, I’ve called all scenes that show the hand of man or even a human in the landscape a human touch. Peoplescape just sounds too clumsy.

Many landscape purists refuse to take any images showing the influence of man. Although I can understand their sentiments, some scenes are just topped off by showing human influence.

Here are some techniques to introduce human influence into your images:

• Many scenes cannot be fully appreciated unless the viewer has an idea of the scale of the scene. Adding a person to the scene quickly gives a sense of scale and can also help to emphasize the wilderness of a spot.

• Treat the subject as you normally would treat foreground in a landscape. In other words, give your subject prominence and use the scenery as a backdrop.

• Mix ambient and unnatural light. One of the best ways to display a building in an image is to use the warm light of the building to make it stand out from the cold light of a post sunset sky.

Other Themes

The themes I have provided are by no means complete, South Africa has many other opportunities like deserts, plains and cities to name a few.

I hope that by writing this article I will have inspired you to go and capture these scenes and hopefully avoid the many mistakes I have made along the way.

The City of Cape Town is incredibly diverse for landscape work. Here you will find beaches, mountains and waterfalls to add to the normal city subjects.

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