Daytime Landscape

Characteristics of this type of shot: Daytime landscape where the sky is the focus of the shot.

Ingredients: Four things make this simple shot work: (1) It has wonderful balance. The shack on the left, with its strong simple shape and colors, balances wonderfully and diagonally with the clouds in the top right, and that sense of balance really gives the shot its cohesiveness. (2) Outside of the shack, the foreground is otherwise uninteresting. Minimizing the amount of it you see is the way to go compositionally, so the horizon line is very low in the shot, emphasizing the sky and those great clouds (though, the streak of clouds above the shack, to me, is more interesting than the large clouds on the right), and (3) the sheer simplicity of the shot makes it compelling. Lastly, (4) while we are shooting in direct sun, the light and shadows aren’t harsh. In fact, you don’t really see shadows at all—just on one side of the shack. It’s hard to come by direct light that’s not harsh and nasty, but this particular scene hid the harshness, which was a lucky bonus.

Location: Southern Iceland on the road between Gullfoss waterfall and Reykjavik.

Camera settings: Shot in aperture priority mode; handheld; 24–70mm f/2.8 lens at 30mm; ISO 100 at f/8; shutter speed: 1/800 of a second.