Landscape photography in colour is a truly beautiful thing, the pink and purple hues of dawn, a red sunset or a blue sky above a golden sandy beach, colour can really make an image pop. However, sometimes colour can become a bit of a distraction or perhaps it may be that there isn’t enough colour in the scene to make it exciting for the viewer. For example, red is a very strong colour and say you’re taking a shot of a nice blue car but there is a person in the background wearing a red coat, your eye is naturally drawn to the red coat thus taking away from the car of which you were trying to make the main feature.

Not every scene will benefit from being presented in monochrome and in a lot of cases a picture can become too cluttered with the viewer not being a clear indication of where to look. So it’s time to train your brain into seeing in black and white even though we see in colour. The key to achieving a more successful mono image is to simply view the scene in terms of shape and contrast. It’s the same compositional idea that drives all photography and knowledge of basic composition ideas will give you a big head start. Look for bold objects such as a large boulder in the countryside or a fence that you can use to lead the viewer through the scene, or look for things that are in contrast to their surroundings. Lets take the image above as an example; the wood posts are virtually in silhouette against the overcast sky and bright water, so by placing the camera where I could see them arranged in a line I produced a simple yet striking composition, and with the sky being mostly overcast there was very little in terms of colour so the obvious thing was to remove it. Read More→