Landscape photography is the easiest?!! Oh you got that one wrong

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Photography is a contemporary art. And it has many forms as well. Fashion, Wild life, Landscape and nature, architecture the list goes on. Once you have a camera at hand the things that you can capture is limitless. But once you get the grip of it and start to realize that some things matter more than the rest when it comes to shooting them. For me Landscapes make me tick. For some faces does. And you can’t say one is superior than other.

By the look of it being a landscape photographer is easy. All you have to do is visit some place and shoot away. Hardly anything can go wrong. The mountains don’t run away or you don’t need any license to shoot it. And you don’t need to take an appointment with a mountain as well. It’s always there. Always camera happy. On the other hand working with people or shooting animals is much harder it seems. You need lot of patience and people handling skills equally to the skill of handling your equipment.

Photograph - Priyantha Bandara. Knuckles mountains Sri Lanka

But like any form or art or profession, just doing something for sheer fun and doing something for a purpose greater than that is always harder than it seems. When you want to make a picture which is jaw dropping good then shooting a still mountain or a moving face is equally difficult. And it requires careful attention and knowledge.

First of all a good landscape photographer must be physically fit enough to travel. Hiking up a nature trail to capture the best sunset over a mountain or climbing down a waterfall to capture its grace cannot be done by everyone. Furthermore baring up harsh weather conditions in places such as freezing cold mountain ranges to burning hot deserts is also not an easy endeavor. (I can remember the hours of walking I have done on mountains when it was raining heavy even the wildest animals was hiding in their dens.And the weird thing is that I can do it all over again if it comes to it)

A landscape photographer is a soldier fighting its own war carrying a camera in one hand, tripod in the other and a several lenses and other heavy equipment on the backpack. Not to mention the survival kit like food,water,torches,jackets or even blankets etc etc. When he sets his mind to reach a place on a specific time and capture that place he does not have the comfort of stopping and resting each time when he feels tired. Because that one shot with that perfect light is what he was aiming for. That perfect sunrise or the sunset with that perfect cloud formation will not last a life time unless its captured exactly at the right time at the right place.

As I mentioned earlier even though you don’t have to take an appointment with the mountain to shoot it nature can always make you to come later. And those elements such as rain, clouds, winds you cannot control. If so all the long tiring walking and money you have spend it just gone down the river for nothing. Which is a harsh truth yet must be digested by every landscape photographer some day in his long photography journey.

This is what a good landscape photographer does. We travel for the sake of photography with a certain objective in mind. And when that place is reached the rest of the world with time just stops. It’s you, your camera and the mother nature. I can’t think of another possible combination which sounds better!!

Photograph - Priyantha Bandara. Dothalugala falls Sri Lanka