This is a properly composed landscape that just happens to have a hiker coming over the horizon. I composed the shot, then waited for him to walk right into the frame.

It’s important to divide photos of hikers into two groups: landscapes and portraits. You have to know which one you want to create before you shoot. This lesson is about landscapes that contain hikers. There is a separate lesson for portraiture to put the emphasis on the human.

You’ll need to understand the exposure triangle before going on.

In this lesson, you’ll learn more about using negative space as well. For a simple comparison, imagine a conversation that has a dramatic pause. Think of that dramatic pause as the negative space in the conversation. It’s nothing, but its emptiness gives more weight to the words around it.

The first photo follows some of the guidelines for composition but it isn’t a great landscape photo. The second version deletes the hiker and adds a grid. The lower two thirds are okay but the top is uninteresting. The ridge line leads the eye through the picture, but it has no destination. There’s a trail on the right third of the grid that vanishes in the center of the photo, but it doesn’t add much real value. The picture isn’t bad but it is far from great.

The landscape is composed using thirds and halves as a guide. It was shot at 28mm f10 400iso 1/200. If the shot were one or two stops longer, the hiker would have been blurry from moving.

In this case, the lack of interest in the photo is a major asset. There’s a vast landscape on display. Your eyes are searching for something to land on, and a hiker provides that resting place. The dead space in the lower left provides a dramatic relief behind the human. The slope of the foreground adds to that effect. A trail emerges from the center of the photo and travels directly toward the hiker. The trail and hiker together provide an excellent sense of scale. The trail in the foreground also leads directly to the hiker, adding to the sense of direction. The distant mountains may be boring as a key component of the photo, but they make a majestic backdrop for a hiker who’s relentlessly pushing up a never-ending hill. To emphasize the enormity of the landscape, the mountains break above the line and extend halfway into the top third as well. All the items of specific interest are in the bottom half. Everything above the center line is just background.

To get the most out of thees photos, you’ll need good camera settings. ISo darkness, motion blur, bokeh, etc.