Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Landscape photography from the hip


Cut tree, originally uploaded by jiihaa.


Red bush, apple trees, originally uploaded by jiihaa.


Roadside trees, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

Today while getting a bit of exercise by walking in the nearby woods I decided to try taking landscape photographs by shooting from the hip - not stopping to make a careful composition but instead point the camera to the general direction of the subject and shoot on the go. There was enough light to get 1/100 second exposure, so most images were sharp enough (thanks to image stabilization).

Here is a short story in images of the walk in the forest. Most photographs were not interesting at all, but there were some which weren't too bad. The non-typical composition makes the images more fresh than most of my more carefully framed landscape images. These images were not cropped afterward, so you get the full benefit of the random shooting. Of course, there was quite a lot of selection afterward when I deleted most of the images, but that is another matter.

2 comments:

Markus Spring said...

#3 does it for me - the convergence is what triggers my brains.
For me it would be difficult to loosen up for this kind of photography - I am so much concentrating when framing to 'get it right' that at the moment I could not exchange this for shooting from the hip where chance plays a big role in how the resulting pictures works...
But then, this could be part of my problem, this crampedness. So perhaps I should try this, too.

Juha Haataja said...

I'm not sure if I'll do this ever again - today I just needed the exercise, no stopping for photography - but I think there was something in the randomness which could be interesting to explore, but in a more deterministic way.

There were quite a lot of blurry images also, some of them quite surprising (I had no memory of taking such photographs), but none were good as photographs.