Chapter 1. Landscapes are Everywhere

The undulating sand dunes of Death Valley test your compositional skills to make sense out of endless patterns of form and light.

John and I love photographing landscapes and we’re thrilled to share our strategies with you in this book. We live in the mountains bordering Yellowstone National Park, so fabulous natural landscapes are all around us. At first, we considered landscapes to be geysers, waterfalls, rugged mountain peaks, seashores, sand dunes, and other natural features. But landscapes are really more than that. We don’t photograph a lot of man-made landscapes, but they are certainly legitimate subjects. Old buildings, barns, bridges, farms, lighthouses, and a massive field of sunflowers are all landscape subjects. We tend to avoid big cities which, in our opinion, are any towns with more than one restaurant, but city images are surely and often opportune, urban landscapes.