Chapter 16 — Exercises

Landscape is learned by being outside at the right time, so most of these exercises send you to a view — your park or trail at the edge of town is enough for nearly all of them, and a phone is a real landscape camera. Difficulty is marked ⭐ (warm-up), ⭐⭐ (core), ⭐⭐⭐ (stretch). Do the starred and odd-numbered ones at minimum; model answers and critiques for those are in the book's Answers to Selected Exercises. Keep everything you shoot — your strongest depth frame may become your Portfolio keeper.

A reminder before you start: you control almost nothing in a landscape except where you stand and when you're there. Several of these exercises are really about training those two decisions, so plan, scout, and be patient. The attempt in the field is the lesson.

Part A — Seeing the land (Read the Frame & Eye Training)

Exercise 16.1 ⭐ — Grand or intimate? Walk your trail and find five natural scenes. For each, decide in one sentence whether the stronger photograph is the grand vista or the intimate detail, and why (usually the light and conditions decide it). You don't have to shoot them — the goal is to train the habit of asking both questions instead of always reaching for the wide view.

Exercise 16.2 ⭐⭐ — Write a landscape Described Photograph. Find a landscape you love (yours or a famous one) and write a full Described Photograph using the six fields (THE FRAME / THE LIGHT / THE MOMENT / THE CHOICES / THE EFFECT / THE LESSON). Pay special attention to naming the light (direction, quality, time of day) and the depth structure (foreground, middle, distance). This doubles as alt-text practice.

Exercise 16.3 ⭐⭐ — Reverse-engineer the conditions. Find three landscape photographs you admire and, for each, deduce from the image alone: what time of day and what weather produced this light? Where is the sun? Is there a foreground anchor, a leading line, a scale element? Write your reasoning. You are learning to read backward from effect to cause — the skill that lets you plan your own shoots.

Exercise 16.4 ⭐⭐⭐ — The horizon audit. Pull up 10 of your own past landscape photos. For each, note where you put the horizon and whether it's level. Count how many are dead-centered or tilted. Then, for the three weakest, describe the specific re-crop or re-shoot (lower horizon for a better sky, higher for a better foreground, straightened level) that would improve it. Be honest; most beginners center and tilt far more than they think.

Part B — Depth and the foreground anchor (Shoot This)

Exercise 16.5 ⭐ — Find five foreground anchors. On one short walk, find and photograph five potential foreground anchors — a rock, a flower, a root, a puddle, a fence post — each shot low and close so it looms in the lower third with the scene behind it. You are not making finished images; you are training your eye to spot anchors everywhere.

Exercise 16.6 ⭐⭐ — The depth pair. Pick one wide view. Photograph it twice: once with no foreground (just the distant view, the way a tourist would) and once built for depth (a strong anchor low and close, wide lens, the view stretching behind). Same scene, minutes apart. Lay the two side by side. The difference is created entirely by your decision about foreground. Keep both.

Exercise 16.7 ⭐⭐ — Get close, get low, go wide. Make three landscapes where you deliberately get physically closer to a foreground than feels natural — close enough that the anchor nearly fills the bottom of the frame — using your widest lens (or your phone's ultra-wide). Push the near–far exaggeration as far as it will go. Notice how the background falls away dramatically behind the looming foreground.

Exercise 16.8 ⭐⭐⭐ — Near-to-far sharpness. Make one landscape with a very near foreground (within a metre) and a distant background, and get both acceptably sharp. On a camera: stop down to f/11–f/16, focus about a third of the way in, then zoom in on the rear screen to check the near and far corners. On a phone: tap-focus a third in (its deep depth of field does the rest). If f/16 can't hold both, describe how you'd focus-stack it. Submit the frame plus a note on what aperture and focus point you used and whether the corners held.

Part C — Light and weather (Shoot This & Eye Training)

Exercise 16.9 ⭐ — Same view, two times of day. Photograph one landscape view twice: once at harsh midday and once at golden hour (the hour after sunrise or before sunset). Same frame, same day. Compare what the low raking light does to texture, color, depth, and mood. This is the chapter's thesis made visible in your own work.

Exercise 16.10 ⭐⭐ — Shoot the weather. Go out in conditions you'd normally avoid — fog, light rain, a clearing storm, heavy overcast — and make a photograph in which the condition is visibly the subject (fog for layered mystery, wet ground for saturated reflection, breaking clouds for drama), not an obstacle you shot around. Shoot 20, keep 3, and write one line each on what the weather gave you.

Exercise 16.11 ⭐⭐ — Overcast: turn around and look down. On a flat, grey, overcast day — the worst light for a grand vista — make three strong intimate landscapes instead: tight, frame-filling details (wet leaves, bark, a tide pool, frost, a single plant) that the soft even light actually flatters. Prove to yourself that "bad" light for one kind of landscape is ideal light for another.

Exercise 16.12 ⭐⭐⭐ — The afterglow wait. At a sunset shoot, do not leave when the sun goes down. Keep shooting for a full 20 minutes after the sun crosses the horizon, into blue hour. Compare your best frame from before sunset with your best from after. For many evenings the afterglow — clouds lit from below — is the best light of the day, and almost everyone misses it by leaving early.

Part D — Filters (Settings Drill & Shoot This)

Exercise 16.13 ⭐⭐ — The polarizer (or the phone trick). If you have a polarizer (camera filter, phone clip-on, or even a lens from polarized sunglasses held in front of the lens): photograph a stream, wet leaves, or a blue sky, rotating the filter through its full range and watching the glare, reflection, and sky-tone change. Shoot the same scene at minimum and maximum polarization. Note what the filter let you see (e.g., into the water) that you couldn't see without it — the effect software can't fake. (No polarizer? Write what a polarizer would do to a wet, glaring scene you find, and why editing couldn't fully recreate it.)

Exercise 16.14 ⭐⭐ — Smooth the water. Make a long exposure of moving water or clouds. On a camera with an ND filter: tripod, slow shutter (try 1–4 seconds, longer with a stronger ND). On a phone: use the long-exposure / live-photo-to-long-exposure mode. Compare the silky result with a normal fast-shutter frame of the same flow. Note the shutter speed (or mode) you used.

Exercise 16.15 ⭐⭐⭐ — Bracket a high-contrast sky. Find a scene where the sky is several stops brighter than the foreground (sunrise/sunset). Capture the full range two ways and compare: (a) one frame metered for the sky and one for the land, to be blended later (or your phone's auto-HDR in one tap); and, if you own one, (b) a graduated ND in a single frame. Write which approach you'd choose for this scene and why (hint: is there motion in the frame?).

Exercise 16.16 ⭐⭐ — Settings drill: choose the filter. For each scenario, write which of the three filters (polarizer / ND / graduated ND) you'd reach for, the exposure consequence, and the phone alternative: (a) a waterfall in shade you want silky; (b) a wet rainforest trail where leaf-glare is dulling the greens; (c) a beach sunrise with a brilliant sky over dark wet sand; (d) a deep-blue sky with white clouds at 90° to the sun.

Part E — Composition and scale (Shoot This)

Exercise 16.17 ⭐ — Level the horizon. For one week, turn on your camera's or phone's level/grid overlay and make every landscape with a dead-level horizon. Then audit: how often were you tilting before? Submit three level frames and note how the overlay changed your shooting.

Exercise 16.18 ⭐⭐ — High horizon, low horizon. Find one scene and shoot it twice: once with the horizon low (sky gets two-thirds — do it when the sky is the strongest element) and once high (land gets two-thirds — do it when the foreground is strongest). Keep both and articulate which horizon placement suited what each frame was about.

Exercise 16.19 ⭐⭐⭐ — Prove the scale. Make a landscape of something genuinely large (a canyon, a cliff, a wide sweep) that feels large in the frame, by including a scale element — a person, a lone tree, a structure, a boat — small in the frame so the viewer's mind can measure the vastness against it. Shoot the same scene without the scale element for comparison. The difference is how you make a viewer feel size.

Exercise 16.20 ⭐⭐ — The leading line. Find a natural leading line in the landscape — a river, path, shoreline, ridge, fence, furrow — and compose so it carries the eye from a foreground anchor back to a focal point near the horizon (a peak, the sun, a tree). Make the eye's journey deliberate: entry, route, rest. Keep the strongest of five attempts.

Part F — Planning and being there (Shoot This)

Exercise 16.21 ⭐⭐ — Plan a sunrise or sunset. Pick one accessible spot. Before going: use a sun-position planner to find exactly where the sun will rise/set relative to your composition, get the exact golden-hour times, and check the cloud forecast. Scout the spot beforehand for foreground and vantage. Return, arrive at least 30 minutes early, and shoot the whole window (including 15 minutes past the horizon). Submit your best 3 and a short note comparing what you planned to what actually happened.

Exercise 16.22 ⭐⭐⭐ — Scout, then return. Choose a location and visit it twice: once in convenient but unspectacular light (midday is fine) purely to find your compositions — note the best foreground, vantage, and leading line, and predict where the good light will fall. Then return at golden hour, blue hour, or in the right weather, already knowing where to stand. Compare a scouting frame with a return frame. This is the professional rhythm; feel how much better the return shoot goes.

Exercise 16.23 ⭐ — Add a landscape entry to your Light Log. For one local view, write a Light Log entry predicting the best light and weather to photograph it — even if you can't be there to shoot it now. (E.g., "the east-facing meadow wants a winter sunrise with low fog; the sun would rake across it from the right.") You are training the planning eye.

Part G — Interleaved (mixing prior chapters)

Exercise 16.24 ⭐⭐ — Exposure triangle in the landscape. You're shooting a grand vista at f/11 for depth, at golden hour, hand-held, and your shutter has dropped to 1/15 s — too slow to hold sharp. Using the exposure triangle (Ch. 3), write three different ways to get back to a safe shutter speed, and name the trade-off each one costs (depth, noise, or needing support).

Exercise 16.25 ⭐⭐ — Black-and-white pre-visualization. Pick one landscape and previsualize it in black and white (Ch. 8): where is the brightest tone, the darkest, the key textures? Shoot it, then convert. Did removing color strengthen or weaken it? Landscapes with strong tonal range and texture (the Adams tradition) often become more powerful in monochrome.

Exercise 16.26 ⭐⭐⭐ — Compression vs. expansion. Photograph the same distant landscape feature (a row of ridges, a line of trees) twice (Ch. 9): once with a wide lens up close to a foreground, and once with a telephoto from far back. Compare how the wide lens expands the near–far space and the long lens compresses the distant layers into stacked planes. Both are valid landscapes saying different things.

Exercise 16.27 ⭐⭐ — Fix the photo. A friend shows you a landscape that disappoints them: a famous valley shot at noon, horizon dead-center and slightly tilted, no foreground (the bottom third is empty grass), and a washed-out white sky. Diagnose every problem and prescribe the exact re-shoot — time of day, horizon placement, foreground, filter or bracket, and what to do about that sky. They are not allowed to blame the camera.

Stretch challenge

Exercise 16.28 ⭐⭐⭐ — One location, four conditions, one month. Choose a single accessible landscape near you and photograph it across one month in four genuinely different conditions: golden-hour clear, overcast, fog or rain, and blue hour. Same location, four lights. At month's end, lay the four side by side. You will see, undeniably and in your own work, the chapter's central claim — that the land is the constant and the light and weather are the photograph. Note which condition gave the strongest image and why, and whether it was the one you expected.

Model answers and critiques for the starred and odd-numbered exercises appear in the book's "Answers to Selected Exercises." Try each in the field before reading them — in landscape, being there at the right time is the whole lesson, and no critique can substitute for the dawn you got up for.