TECHNIQUES

Capture fresh colours and dramatic weather in the season of renewal

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Winter may provide us with some highly unique image opportunities, such as snow blanketing a familiar landscape, but after a few months the promise of spring is a welcome relief. Spring has always been a season of hope and excitement. In centuries past, surviving the winter months until the skies began to clear and the lands turned from white to green was something worth celebrating. For perhaps slightly less existential reasons, but by no means less emotionally uplifting ones, spring promises photographers new opportunities to experiment with colour, try new genres, and broaden their artistic horizons.

As a season it presents an intriguing challenge. The colour palette may broaden as the weeks roll on, but it doesn’t quite match autumn for overall variety. Meanwhile, vegetation returns, and the trees exhibit a fuller crop of leaves, but there are still gaps, due to local environmental factors. Spring can therefore seem like an inbetween season, where the transition from barren winter landscape to vibrant summer scenic creates pockets of detail, interspersed by sweeping areas of negative space. This provides great potential for dramatic images if you know where to look.

Spring is also a very changeable season, and the weather can shift dramatically in a short space of time. This generates some incredible lighting, which can be used to enhance texture and strengthen colour contrasts.

Here we’ll show you how to capture successful images over the next few weeks, by exploring how to use strong directional sunlight and understand the progression of spring colours.

Capture close-up details

Seek out and shoot the little details to tell an in‐depth story about the spring season

Intimate moments Capturing small details within a wider scene can help tell the story of the changing seasons, as the world comes to life during spring

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So often landscape photography is seen as purely ‘scenic’ imaging, concentrating exclusively on wide vistas encompassing panoramic detail. When mentioning the term many people immediately think of wideangle shots of Yosemite, the Grand Canyon or an expanse of the Lake District. Perhaps more worryingly, this limited concept of landscapes is shared by many image creators themselves, who rarely stop to consider the smaller details of a scene that have the power to tell a far more intimate story.

The opportunity for intimate scenes is never clearer than during the spring months. As new life erupts in an explosion of shoots, unfurling ferns and fresh leaves, looking closer, rather than wider, can reveal textures, colours and patterns that hint at the bigger picture in a far less obvious or literal way. It’s also a good chance to try new perspectives and apply lesser-used camera skills.