Landscape videography and avoiding supreme disappointment

According to über landscape photographer Ansel Adams, "Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer and often the supreme disappointment". That probably goes even more for landscape videography (not sure that's the proper terminology).

If you've ever tried to capture an otherwise interesting looking landscape on video, you very quickly notice that your shots have a tendency to turn out rather static. String a couple of those together into a video, and you have to squint really hard to convince yourself you're not actually looking at a photo slideshow - wait, did that blade of grass over there just move? And while some people are attracted to this type of minimalist aesthetic, most of your viewers might quickly zone out. When we watch a video after all we expect there to be stuff going on.

So how do we keep it interesting? Here's a couple of suggestions:

Panning and zooming - tiltling the camera up and down, or left and right can add interest to a scene where not much is happening otherwise. If you film at a higher resolution than your final output, you can do this also to a certain degree in post production, by showing only part of your frame.

Moving the camera itself - taking it a step further (literally), you can move the camera itself by walking around with it, or mounting it on a mobile platform such as a dolly, car, boat or helicopter. The movement is going to change the viewers perspective of the landscape, especially for elements that are in the foreground.

Motion - the human eye is very good at detecting subtle motion, so as long as there's water, trees, grass, or other moving objects in your frame, it's going to look less like a static photo. Of course you can also use less subtle motion by having things like people or cars moving across your field of view.

Changing light - things like the shadows of clouds moving across a landscape can make it seem much more alive and 3-dimensional. The changing of light between the different parts of the day can also do that, but unfortunately that takes a very long time, which is why we might have to resort to our next option...

Timelapse - by capturing only one frame every couple of seconds instead of dozens of frames per second we can speed things up a little, which makes motion that would be otherwise to subtle to perceive come alive.

These are just a few quick suggestions, so if you know of more and better ways, please feel free to post them in the comments.

Comments

[Landscape lighting]

I think the landscape videos are a great idea but it would be much better if you included in the sound of nature along with it.