Chapter 6 Assignments

Silhouettes at Sunset

Silhouettes at sunset are such an important part of landscape photography with skies. This is something that you really should experiment with before there is an outstanding sunset in front of you. Find a landscape with some trees that can be clearly seen against a sunset sky. Shoot a series of compositions of those trees against the sunset. Use your zoom lens to make the trees big in the frame in some pictures and then just a small part of the scene at the bottom of the composition. Try all sorts of positions for those trees against the sunset.

Check out a Blank Sky

Go out and deliberately photograph a landscape with a blank sky. I’m not talking just about a sky that has no clouds—a rich blue sky can be an interesting sky. Instead, look for a sky that doesn’t have much color and doesn’t have much in the way of clouds (or if it does have clouds, the clouds have no definition). Try a variety of compositions where the sky fills up most of the frame all the way down to the sky being barely visible. Notice how much that blank sky will dominate the picture.