An Introduction to Intimate Landscape Photography

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.