Whilst there is technically no wrong or right answer on when to start landscape photography, summer can be the perfect time to start your adventure into landscape photography.
Longer days and warmer weather let you escape to the great outdoors and discover what nature has to offer.
If you are new to landscape photography the often sunny days of summer offer the best time to get to grips with your camera so using the features will become second nature when the real drama for landscapes occur in the autumn, winter and spring.
The summer weather can inspire you to get up early, as you don’t have to worry about battling against the elements such as in winter!
Summer landscapes tend to have a limited colour range with green foliage and blue skies, but here are some tips to inspire you to get out and create colourful compositions.
All you need to get started in landscape photography is a camera and few basic bits of gear and a lot of inspiration!
Photographing the Great British seaside
What better way to spend a summer’s day than at the glorious seaside. In Britain, we are lucky to have such a vast amount of coastline and many interesting and charming seaside resorts. The coast is a good place to start your landscape photography inspiration as it offers many different vistas to shoot and you can easily capture the extra little details which can make your images far more interesting.
One of Britain’s classic seaside towns is Southwold, perched on Suffolk’s Heritage coast, it has everything to entice you to start landscape photography.
As well as a refurbished pier and rows of brightly painted beach huts, the town streets are full of quaint cottages and colour-wash houses.
An iconic working lighthouse stands in the middle of the town. There is also a lovely expansive town green at Gun Hill complete with cannons looking out towards the sea.
You can easily concentrate on the iconic themes it has to offer and base your photography around them; the pier, beach huts, lighthouse and quayside are good starting points to work from before you add the finer details using a range of lenses and filters.
You can find lots of other inspiration to photograph in detailed form for example ropes, fishing nets and boat wheels along the quayside as well as the famous water clock on the pier.
Get your gear together
Other than your camera, a few pieces of equipment are necessary:
Tripod
To give you time and space to steady your camera and compose the shot.
Cable release
This prevents camera shake ruining long exposures.
Zoom lenses
To cover everything from wide angle landscapes to telephoto details the classic landscape photography pairing of 24-70mm and 70-200mm is ideal.
ND grad filter
This will help you to balance a bright sky with a darker foreground.
ND filter
Will enable you to make long exposures during daylight hours.
Polarising filter
Is ideal to have especially when shooting the brightly coloured beach huts as it boosts colour saturation.
What to shoot
The beach huts at Southwold are often the first stop for photographers and you can easily produce some interesting shots. You can crop in tight to create a stronger composition that emphasises the lines and graphic structures.
If you use a telephoto lens with a narrow aperture you can shoot through the porches of the beach huts to bring them into sharp focus.
This will enable you to produce some interesting frame lines, especially if you use a carefully placed model at the far end so that the eye has something to lead into the image and rest on. Try using a neutral density filter to create a long exposure as shown here.
During the 45 second exposure, the muted grasses and sky blur to create motion within the frame which helps to emphasize the colourful beach huts.
Many photographic opportunities can be found by capturing the pier sweeping out to sea from along the shoreline or by walking onto the pier and looking back inland towards the picturesque town.
The lighthouse at Southwold is another of the town’s iconic structures and if you are lucky to encounter a day of bright blue skies this is the ideal time to get some stunning shots. When you have a bright subject like a white lighthouse, your meter can be fooled into underexposing so you have to add some exposure compensation.
With this type of subject with a relatively flat field you don’t need lots of depth of field and so it is best to shoot at an aperture of around f/5.6-8 for the best sharpness.
Knowing when to start landscape photography
If you have been inspired by a visit to Southwold there are lots of other interesting seaside resorts to discover.
Great inspiration can be found all along the coast and many resorts have piers ranging from Cromer in Norfolk which has a lovely traditional Victorian pier to Southend-on-Sea which at 1.3 miles has the world’s longest pleasure pier.
Knowing when to start landscape photography relies on you as much as the conditions and you having time to explore different areas for great shots.
If you enjoy composing contemporary quirky shots such as the beach huts more can be found all along the coast such as in Mablethorpe in Lincolnshire, Cromer and Sheringham in Norfolk and Wells-next-the-Sea in North Norfolk which is famed for its colourful stilted beach huts overlooking sweeping golden sand to the front set against a backdrop of pine forests.
Dovercourt, Harwich is home to the brightly coloured seaside beach hut ‘My Happy Hut’ which was named competition winner of the ‘Beach Hut of the Year 2016’ by ‘Location, Location, Location’ TV presenter Phil Spencer.
On your travels you may discover many of the beach hut contenders and entries for this year’s Towergate’s Beach Hut of the Year Competition, the winner of which will be announced in August 2017.
If the coast has stirred your creativity to start landscape photography, encouraging you to venture further, be sure to check out our YouTube channel where you will find several videos that have been filmed at some of the above-mentioned locations.
Good luck with exploring the landscape and creating some great images.
We would love to see how you get on, so please do tweet us!