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When it comes to horizon placement in scottish landscape photography, the answer is pretty easy. Don’t take the amateur route and always place the scottish landscape photography horizon in the dead centre of the photo, or your landscape shots will look like snapshots. Instead, decide which thing you want emphasized; the sky or the ground. If you have a great looking sky, then put the horizon at the bottom third of your photo, which will give you much more emphasis on sky; if the ground is more interesting, then make sure that it is the main focus of the photo and place the scottish landscape photography horizon at the top third of your photo. This puts the emphasis on the ground and either way will give your shots more depth and interest. If either the sky or the ground is particularly boring and uninteresting in a specific shot, you can break the 1/3 rule and eliminate as much of the boring view as possible by leaving only 1/8 or so of the less interesting subject, focusing then on the more interesting subject.

Another way to get more interest is to shoot from angles you don’t see every day. If your subject is mountains, don’t shoot them from the road at the bottom of the mountain. This is exactly how we see mountains every day when we drive by t hem on the interstate, so if you shoot them like that, you’ll create shots that look normal or average. If you want to create mountain shots that have real interest, give people a view they don’t normally see; shoot from high up! Either drive up as high as you can on the mountain, or hike up as high as is safe, then set up your camera and shoot down on r across the tops of the mountains. This is the same theory as not shooting down on flowers. We don’t shoot down on flowers because that’s the view we usually have of them. In turn, we don’t shoot up at mountains because we always see them from that same view. It’s boring, regular and doesn’t show your viewer something they haven’t already seen many times before.

On an average day, if you were to walk by some wildflowers in a field, or along a bath in a garden, you’d be looking down at these flowers growing out of the ground, right? That’s why, if you shoot flowers from a standing position, looking down at them like we always do, your flower shots will look very average. If you want to create flower shots with some serious visual interest, you have to shoot them from an angle we don’t see every day. That usually means not shooting down on them, and instead getting down low and shooting from their level. This is another one of those things the pros routinely do and most amateurs miss. Hey, if you’re going to shoot some great flower shots, you’re going to have to get your hands dirty, or at least your knees!

You don’t have to have a macro (close up) lens to get great flower shots – zoom lenses work just great for shooting flowers for two reasons – you can often zoom in tight enough to have the flower nearly fill the frame, and it’s also easy to put the background out of focus with a zoom lens, so the focus is just on the flower. Start by shooting in aperture priority mode, then use the smallest aperture number your lens will allow. Then try to isolate one flower, or a small group of flowers that are close together and focus on just that flower.