Landscape photographers are known for chasing some of nature’s grandest scenes. Towering mountains, panoramic seascapes, grand views of the Milky Way – all photos with a massive scale. But there’s another side of landscape photography, just as full of potential but often overlooked. It’s called the intimate landscape.
I decided to write about intimate landscape photography following the fall colors workshop that Nasim and I just hosted in the mountains of Colorado. During the workshop, the cottonwood and aspen trees were showing off brilliant colors, but we faced a challenge: no clouds! For a whole week, every day was nothing but blue and sunny. Anyone other than a landscape photographer would have been thrilled.
Sometimes, photographers throw in the towel when the conditions aren’t right. But I think that’s usually a mistake. There’s always something to photograph, even if you have to look a little more closely to find it. In fact, an entire sub-genre of landscape photography – the intimate landscape – thrives in conditions where the grand landscape doesn’t.
But how do you find good subjects for intimate landscape photography, and is there anything you can do to take better intimate landscape photos? In today’s article, I’ll answer those questions and more.
What Is Intimate Landscape Photography?
Intimate landscape photography captures smaller scenes from the natural world. It can involve standing close to nearby subjects or zooming in tight to something in the distance. One prevailing theme is that intimate landscape photos usually do not include the horizon or the sky in the photo. Instead, they show a smaller part of the larger landscape.
That said, there’s a bit of a blurred line between typical landscape photography and intimate landscape photography. Is the photo an intimate landscape if it zooms in on a towering waterfall? What about photographing a single tree branch with the sky behind it in the background? It’s hard to say. I go back to the word “intimate,” though, and would say that an intimate landscape photo simply feels closer than other landscape photos do.
At some level, maybe it doesn’t matter if we make the distinction at all. A good photo is a good photo; do intimate landscapes really need to be their own category? But I think they do. If nothing else, many of the artistic and technical considerations for intimate landscape photos are different than for grand landscapes. Often, it takes a different mindset to capture them in the first place.
I’ll go back to an example from the fall colors workshop last week. During one sunrise, uninspired by the cloudless sky, I shifted my focus away from the mountains and toward the ground. Beneath my feet, curls of grass covered in frost made for elegant compositions. They didn’t stand out but spoke more softly. Most of all, mentally, switching focus toward smaller details felt no less significant than switching between something like landscape photography and portraiture. I was now completely ignoring the mountains and looking for altogether different types of subjects to photograph.
How to Capture Intimate Landscapes
There are generally two ways to take an intimate landscape photo. You could take a close-up picture of something nearby, or you could zoom into something that’s further away. In either case, it’s easier to capture intimate landscapes with a longer focal length – usually at least a 50mm equivalent, and often more.
My favorite lenses for intimate landscapes are 70-200mm and 100-400mm zooms. I still love prime lenses, too, but the flexibility of a zoom is hard to deny for pulling smaller compositions out of a larger scene. As a bonus, many of today’s telephoto zooms have excellent close focus capabilities, so they’re great choices whether the intimate landscape is on a distant hill or right below your feet.
From a technical standpoint, a tripod is a huge help for photographing intimate landscapes. Well, a tripod is almost always a huge help as a landscape photographer – but when your subject is small or in shadow, and you’re zooming in further to photograph it, you’ll quickly hit the limits of a safe shutter speed. Not to mention that depth of field can be a challenge with intimate landscapes (more on that in a moment), so a tripod gives you maximum flexibility to pick the camera settings you need.
Shooting from a tripod, I’m usually comfortable at my camera’s base ISO value unless there is some unwanted movement (like grass blowing in the wind). I’ll shoot in aperture priority mode and allow my shutter speed to float freely, though I’ll shift my exposure using the exposure compensation dial. Most important is my aperture. When shooting intimate landscapes, I am very often at f/16 (or the full-frame equivalent) and sometimes even f/22. Of course, not all subjects need that much depth of field, but many do. Shooting at f/22 may sound sacrilege to anyone who knows about diffraction, but experience has shown me that inadequate depth of field is a much greater problem where sharpness is concerned, especially for close-up photography.
You might wonder if the solution is to try focus stacking. However, I would caution against it. Focus stacking is one of the most challenging techniques in photography to get right, and often, it’s impossible – especially when photographing grass or plants that can shift in the slightest breeze. I’m not exaggerating when I say that every time that people have sent me full-resolution focus stacked images, I’ve found some lingering artifacts that the software failed to remove. This is true even with stationary subjects and high-quality focus stacking software, let alone any photo with a bit of subject movement.
I won’t fully condemn focus stacking because it can be useful sometimes, and in the right hands, you can overcome some of the issues. But it is a much more fraught technique than many photographers realize, and it isn’t something I would use outside of the most extreme situations. Meanwhile, I’ve printed 24×36-inch photos at f/16 that look sharp even with your nose to the glass – something that cannot be said if depth of field is insufficient.
Other Intimate Landscape Photography Tips
Before I wrap up this article, I’d like to share a few quick tips that can help improve your intimate landscape photos, both technically and creatively. Feel free to share some of your own tips in the comments section, too!
1. Find a Primary Subject (or a Pattern)
From a composition standpoint, photos are usually stronger when they have a clear subject. Maybe this sounds obvious, but I’ve seen (and taken) ineffective photos of very interesting scenes where my eye just wanders around the frame, unable to find a landing point. When you’re composing an intimate landscape, try to hone in on a good primary subject that can anchor the composition, rather than just zooming in arbitrarily.
Sometimes, rather than a distinct primary subject, you could choose to capture a pattern that fills the frame instead. This type of photo would be a lot more abstract, but there’s nothing wrong with that if you do it intentionally. Just know that a viewer’s eye will wander more freely across abstract photos, so any distractions or unwanted elements in the photo can have even more pull than usual.
2. Use a Polarizing Filter
I’m a big proponent of polarizing filters in landscape photography, and intimate landscapes are no exception. If anything, polarizers are even more influential when you’re photographing subjects like leaves, water, rocks, and grass up close.
One misconception is that polarizers have a maximum and minimum setting. In fact, it depends upon the subject you’re photographing and the direction of the sun. You might rotate the polarizer for maximum effect in one photo, only to find that the same position has the minimum effect on another.
Intimate landscape photography makes this abundantly clear. Don’t just leave your polarizer where you had it for the previous composition. Check the rotation each time that you change subjects. If you’re using it correctly, you will need to readjust it more often than not.
3. Embrace the Shallow Depth of Field
If you want your photos to have full sharpness from front to back, intimate landscape photography presents some challenges. Shallow depth of field is a constant companion – recall that the three things that influence depth of field are subject distance, focal length, and aperture. Intimate landscapes often push your subject distance and focal length pretty far, resulting in a shallow depth of field.
Sometimes, you can mitigate this with a sufficiently narrow aperture – or, despite my hesitation to recommend it, focus stacking. But in many other cases, I would rather just embrace the shallow depth of field. Don’t think of it as a necessary evil, but instead as a tool that you can use to enhance the story of the photo. Buck the trend! Not every landscape photo benefits from full front-to-back sharpness.
4. Lower Your Tripod
You might be surprised to hear it, but even with a 200mm lens pointed straight down, a large area of the ground will end up in your photo. Unless you put the tripod a lot lower, you definitely won’t be filling the frame with something like a feather or a snail shell! This is a good time to remind you that tripods aren’t only meant to be used at eye level. Lower it as needed – and if you have no other choice, better to bring a 300mm or 400mm lens instead of something that maxes out at 200mm or less.
Conclusion
One reason why I love intimate landscape photography is that it’s a totally different flavor of landscape photography. It almost feels closer to photographing wildlife – you’re searching for something that’s hidden, not immediately obvious, and honing in on it with your composition. For photographers who enjoy the treasure hunt side of photography, I would give intimate landscapes a try.
I also like the creativity and variety that’s possible with intimate landscape photography. You could go to the same landscape 100 times and take roughly the same wide-angle photo of a mountain in front of you. Yet if you decide to focus your lens on smaller, more hidden scenes, you might end up with 100 totally different images. For photographers who want to cultivate their unique personal style, intimate landscapes afford you a lot of flexility and creative license.
Finally – as was the inspiration for this article – it’s almost always possible to practice intimate landscape photography. Even if you don’t live somewhere “epic,” even if the conditions aren’t right, even if it’s noon on a sunny day… you can take good intimate landscape photos. You’re not dependent upon a grand sunset over a majestic mountain peak. You can just walk to a local pond and photograph frost-covered plants in the morning.
So, next time that you’re out as a landscape photographer, take a moment to consider all the possibilities of the location in front of you. Turn your lens away from the obvious shot and zoom in, or walk forward, toward something smaller that catches your eye. I think you’ll be happy with the results when you do. Intimate landscapes aren’t always as flashy as a grand scene, but the photos can be just as impactful.
Hi Spencer,
Thank you so much for this article. It has really helped me identify what it is I’m naturally drawn to. I didn’t even know the intimate landscape is it’s own genre, but I’ve always liked taking more ‘intimate’ photos of the natural world, although have been a very haphazard and occasional photographer…until now! Having read your article I feel I have something to focus my attention on, and a subject I can make my own…and I’ve even been inspired to join my local photography club. So thanks again.
Jayne
That’s awesome!! Very happy to hear it, Jayne. I hope you enjoy the photography club and keep taking some great intimate landscapes.
Hi Spencer, nice article. Just a comment on Focus Stacking.
Obtaining large print size quality FS photos is feasible, particularly with Landscape Photography. Nowaday even more than in the past, with focus shift implemented in many cameras. I’d recommend you to try more.
Of course all the darwbacks you mentioned are true (wind effects, parallax, issues with software…….)
That’s why you never have to stop after shooting one stack, but try always to have three or four of the same subject with tiny but significant variations of the setup.
Real issue with FS is that you need gear that maybe you do not want to carry with you (heavvy and sturdy tripod with a 3-way geared head, maybe a micrometric slide……). This is a real issue – at leasy for my legs :-)
But I (personally) prefer very little artifacts from FS that diffraction issues.
Thank you, Mauro! I’ve got nothing against focus stacking in theory and use it occasionally. It’s also true that the built-in stacking feature on today’s cameras speeds things up and reduces the error rate if used correctly.
But my statement is still true: “Every time that people have sent me full-resolution focus stacked images, I’ve found some lingering artifacts that the software failed to remove.” We do a monthly photo critique at Photography Life with some of our Members, and I’ve been sent a number of focus stacked images. There have always been some artifacts.
I’m not saying it’s guaranteed that you’ll get artifacts when focus stacking. With precise technique in the field and post-processing, and with carefully-chosen subjects, they can be avoided. It sounds like you utilize proper technique, and I’m sure you’ve taken focus stacks without artifacts. However, it is not a tool that I would casually recommend.
I understand. Likely also the photos that I consider good at 200% will show some issues. I love stacking but I use it to shoot impossible shots. Even f/32 do not give the same result. Maybe this is the reason why I tolerate minimum and negligible artifacts.
Good point, it can be a balance between artifacts on one hand versus diffraction on the other. Not to mention that, depending on print size and the photographer’s technique, any artifacts may not be significant at all.
For me, the threshold is f/22. If a photo still doesn’t have enough depth of field at that point, I’ll happily focus stack.
Hi Spencer, thanks for the refreshing article !
I’ve not been interested in photography for very long, but I feel like I’ve already seen too many WA/UWA sunset/sunrise landscapes. Yes these pictures can be splendid and amateurs don’t shoot too much of these well thought out landscapes pictures, but looking at pros and enthusiast photos can feel a bit monotonous
I think one of the reasons intimate landscape photos are somewhat underrated is that they can look mundane in isolation. I think these pictures benefit from a careful presentation and selection to highlight a theme and a style, while typically grand landscape photos can stand up on their own.
I also enjoy your try here at shallow DoF landscape. To my taste, the foreground is maybe a bit too prominent at article display size thumbnail, but pretty cool when displayed full screen :)
I’m glad you liked it, thanks Geofrey! I agree, intimate landscapes can be more powerful as a set or a photo story. They also add some variety if someone’s portfolio mostly contains grand landscapes.
And you bring up another important point – the display size of a photo has a big impact on how it appears. The example with the shallow depth of field is clearly (to my eye at least) less effective at a small size, and more effective at a large size. Whereas other photos are the opposite.
Agreed. I think that particularly applies to the Iceland large format photos you recently posted on Patreon. They need an exhibition.
Very kind of you to say, thank you, Robert. The one photo of that set which most needs to be viewed large is the first image of the waterfall. In that photo, the out-of-focus effect highlighting the flower in the foreground doesn’t show up clearly at a small size. I’d love to print that photo huge one day.
Hi Spencer,
I really liked the subject of this article since it’s something I’ve done often through many years of photography, and I think it gets short-changed as a photography style. I live in Indiana where magnificent, big-landscape style scenery is very hard to come by. Closer up photography, including macro and intimate landscapes, is a large part of what I do. And I fully agree with Massimo’s thoughts as given below.
I noticed that among the photos you used for this article were some taken with the Sony f/4 70-200mm macro lens. I’ve been a Nikon user for a few decades and my go-to lens for much of what I do is a 105mm Nikkor macro usually used with a 1.4x extender. I recently bought a Z8 Nikon and it gripes me to no end that the 105mm Z macro cannot be used with tele-extenders. I haven’t bought that lens thus far for that reason. After Sony brought out their 70-200 macro zoom, I figured that Nikon would follow up with one of their own soon after. I really think a 70-200 macro would fit my photo style very well and would expect it to be on my camera a large percentage of the time. I’m beginning to think I should have switched to Sony mirrorless instead of sticking with Nikon. What’s your opinion of the Sony lens? Any rumors out there that Nikon might bring out one of their own in the not-to-distant future? Thank you, and keep up the informative articles.
Thank you, Lee! I do really like the Sony 70-200mm f/4 and wish Nikon had an equivalent. I’m still a Nikon shooter and was only testing the Sony because I’m working on a review, but it’s an awesome lens. That said, the Nikon Z 70-180mm f/2.8 could be similar to what you’re after. It shoots 1:2 magnification macro photos (albeit the magnification is highest at 70mm) and accepts teleconverters.
Did you take the Sony 20-70 to Iceland? If so, what did you make of it? I quite fancy it to team up with a 70-180/f2.8 or 70-300, according to subject.
I did and really liked it – that lens paired with a 70-XX telephoto zoom would be all that most landscape photographers need. Maybe with the 14mm f/1.8 added for ultra-wides and Milky Way photography.
Enjoyed that!
For the more financially challenged, a 70-300 is very useful. Especially with a Z7 (not too expensive now, bought used) as you can still get 24mps at 450mm (efl). And it’s a light-ish, small-ish lens. Might even add a Sigma 50/f1.4 or Nikon 85/f1.8 (both c£350 used!). Could even get a 24-70/f4 in the same bag should a photogenic cloud fly unexpectedly by.
I agree, the Tamron 70-300mm being the main option for the Z system right now, or adapting the excellent F-mount 70-300mm. It’s a very useful class of lens for more than just wildlife photography on a budget!
Hi Spencer,
Nice article! Living in north-central Minnesota, and having a day job that doesn’t allow me to get out and about much, intimate landscapes are pretty much the only landscapes I do. The only ‘grand vistas’ around here involve big gulps of dramatic sky, and/or lakes.
I like the big frame you put around the idea – everything from small details up close, to including big features farther away. It’s a little like the range of ideas about what ‘landscape ecology’ is: most people would say landscape ecology is about stuff at the spatial scale of a road map, but a subtler and more useful definition makes landscape ecology about spatial arrangements and their consequences.
So while I’ve been doing intimate landscapes for a while, as always I can pick up further ideas and inspiration from coming to this site.
Thanks!
Mark
Thanks, Mark! I’m sure Minnesota has some incredible intimate landscape possibilities. Lakeshores and frost – a hard combination to beat.
I really like how you put the term “landscape ecology” and am glad that you got some inspiration from this article.
Hi Spencer, great article!
One thing I’d like to point out is that “grand vistas” are often associated with well-known or iconic places. By developing an eye for intimate landscapes, a photographer can produce fresher photos based on a personal view and can leverage local places.
That’s a great point! It’s possible to take good intimate landscapes almost anywhere and put your own personal style into them.