Landscape Photography seems to be easy. You go to a beautiful place and take a picture, right?
But that can’t be more away from the truth. In fact, it is maybe one of the hardest types of photography.
First, you have to travel to beautiful places. Unless you are lucky enough and live in a national park or are already surround by awesome sceneries. This can be expansive, very time consuming and sometimes even dangerous.
Then you have to scout the place and look for compositions. And finally, if you have found a great scene, you have to visit it over and over and over again to catch this one magic moment in great light. This doesn’t happen every day. The key are the clouds. And you can’t control them.
And don’t forget, that the sunrise is the best light for many or maybe even most landscape shots. There is only a small window of a few minutes or sometimes even seconds where the landscape gets illuminated by this very soft and warm light.
That means that getting up early and hiking to a spot is the daily life of a landscape photographer. But if you are lucky and you manage to catch this one magic moment … man, there is nothing more rewarding than this.
My next image from Valensole was not hard to reach. It is one of the spots, which is just there waiting for you. That’s the reason why there are 1000 of pictures of this place. But still, it took me 5 sunrises to get this shot. Five times I had to wake up before 4 a.m. and drive for almost one hour through the french mountains to get there. But it was worth it.
