In my humble opinion, one of the most difficult images to capture is a beautiful landscape. When we see these with our own eyes they look just perfect but to capture the picture and mood with a camera just seems to fail time and time again.

Our eyes are the most incredible cameras on the planet, being able to adjust and compensate for all types of light and allowing for the perfect range of tones from high to low.

One of the most important things to remember when photographing a landscape is to have a subject in the photo. Even though your breath was taken away by the beauty of the scene you saw, the photo will have lost major impact with the absence of a subject. In the above photo I chose 2 subjects using the rule of thirds. The Jackalberry tree takes up the right hand edge of the photo, acting as a frame and leading you into the lioness staring at the beautiful colours rendered by the setting sun behind her.

This photo was taken on a Nikon D7000 body with a Nikkor 70-200 f2.8 VRII lens set at f2.8 with a shutter speed of 1/320^th second. I had to bump the ISO up to 800 because of the fading light and underexposed the photo to capture the colours in the sky. Once I had the photo in "light room" I added a bit of fill light to get the underexposed bits to what the scene had looked like through my eyes that evening.

Expose your balance

Richard de Gouveia

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