SPECIAL
Creative techniques for photographing the world’s emptiest landscapes
Words and Photography Lisa Michele Burns | OM SYSTEM Ambassador
It’s easy to lose hours exploring with your camera when every shadow, shade of beige or grain of sand feels photographically important.
Once you start seeing
the seemingly hidden creative possibilities of desert environments
it’ll only be a matter of time before you’ve dedicated a whole afternoon to capturing the perfect shot of a lone tree.
There’s something, though, about the first glimpse of a vast landscape that can take a moment to process. The sheer scale can inspire a sense of awe, but photographically, it can feel a little overwhelming. Your eyes are busy taking in an enormous expanse of sand, salt, rock or sky, and it’s not always immediately obvious where to point your camera.
I’ve experienced this in central Australia, among the salt flats and volcanic landscapes of Chile’s Atacama Desert, beneath the towering dunes of Namibia, and while exploring the scorching terrain of Death Valley.
They’re epic landscapes and a photographer’s dream, yet they can easily make you say things like, ‘I just can’t do it justice’, ‘I’m not capturing how it feels to see this’, or ‘my photos still make it look empty’.
Let’s take a peek at some techniques and settings to try if you ever find yourself staring into a sandpit of endless composition opportunities.
Namibia Desert, Africa.
THE ART OF EMPTY SPACE
Scale is one of the first things to look for. In Namibia, for example, the size of the dunes can be surprisingly difficult to translate into a photograph. Fill the frame entirely with sand and they can become abstract. Beautiful and artistic, but disconnected from any sense of their enormous proportions. Include a tiny tree, person or animal, however, and suddenly there’s a reference point.
Experimenting with how small that element can become within the frame, while still holding the composition together, is a useful way to emphasise the vastness surrounding it. It’s tempting to move closer whenever something catches your attention, but in vast landscapes, stepping back can say far more. A figure walking beneath a dune or a vehicle crossing a distant plain can communicate the scale of an environment in a way that photographing the landscape alone sometimes can’t.
Namibia Desert, Africa.
Namibia Desert, Africa.
The space surrounding that subject becomes just as important. Sparse landscapes are ideal for experimenting with negative space because there’s no real need to fill every corner of the frame. A huge expanse of sky above a tiny horizon, a solitary formation surrounded by sand or a single road cutting through an otherwise empty scene can all work precisely because there’s so little else happening.
Approaching the composition as an equal trio of colour blocks can work well too. Blue sky, orange dunes, and beige sandy foreground; not too much sky, not too much sand, just an equal balance with a central subject that pulls it all together.
Death Valley is particularly interesting for this. Across salt flats, dunes, mountains and seemingly endless expanses of rock, there are compositions that can initially appear almost too simple. Rather than automatically relying on familiar compositional rules, experiment with where the horizon sits within the frame. If the ground is filled with texture, pushing the horizon towards the very top can give those details more prominence. If the sky is clear and almost featureless, doing the opposite can allow that emptiness to become part of the composition.
Badwater Basin, Death Valley, USA.
SETTINGS NOTE: WHERE TO FOCUS
For expansive scenes, start around f/5.6–f/8 for a useful balance of depth and image quality without automatically reaching for the smallest aperture available. Try using a single AF point to give you more precise control over where the camera focuses, placing it over an important element within the landscape. If there’s no close foreground element that also needs to remain sharp, a smaller aperture such as f/16 may not be necessary.
Details in the Distance: This shot of Lincancabur Volcano, which sits on the Chile-Bolivia border above San Pedro de Atacama, was taken from about 30km away as the crow flies. With the lack of humidity, the air clarity is exceptional, making it an ideal environment for layering details and tones within the frame and leading viewers' eyes toward your subject.
DETAILS IN THE DISTANCE
The longer you spend in these environments, the less empty they begin to appear. Once the grand view has registered, smaller patterns start revealing themselves everywhere: the edge of a dune, cracked earth, salt formations, geological layers, wind-blown ripples and shadows that shift gradually as the sun moves overhead.
This is where a telephoto lens can completely change the way you see the landscape. I regularly reach for my M.Zuiko 40-150mm F2.8 PRO to scan for smaller compositions, isolating details that would disappear within a wider scene. Essentially using my lens as binoculars. Longer focal lengths can also compress distant elements, bringing layers of dunes, ridges or mountains visually closer together.
In the Atacama Desert, where volcanic peaks, mineral-rich earth, salt flats and high-altitude lagoons can sometimes exist within the same view, this approach can reveal combinations of colour and shape that aren’t immediately obvious when taking in the landscape as a whole.
Atacama Desert, Chile: Shadows and sand are a creative match made in dunescape dreams. When you’re photographing sand dunes, light can help to transform a beige scene into a work of art, it’s just a matter of waiting it out or arriving at the right time.
Repetition can be a useful starting point too. Among a series of similar lines, look for the one that bends in another direction, or a trail of footprints interrupting an otherwise smooth dune. Within a limited colour palette, a darker ridge or tiny patch of contrasting colour may provide just enough separation to build a composition around.
Perspective becomes increasingly important when there are fewer elements to work with. Getting lower to the ground can turn ripples in the sand into leading lines, while photographing across a salt flat can see crusty ridges dominate the foreground. From higher ground, those same details might disappear, and the landscape becomes more about layers, shape and colour. At Mungo National Park, photographing from the Walls of China can reveal layer upon layer of dunes and eroded formations, with the elevated perspective bringing together shapes and tonal variations that are far less obvious from ground level.
Mungo National Park, NSW.
Moving around while composing, even if it’s only a metre or two in either direction, can completely alter the relationship between the few elements within the frame. A small shift might separate two distant ridges, position a tree against a cleaner background or remove an unwanted overlap entirely.
GEAR NOTE: COMPRESS THE LANDSCAPE
Try using a telephoto lens around 100–300mm to isolate layers within the landscape. If you’re using nearby elements to frame the scene, a wider aperture can blur the foreground and create additional depth. When shooting handheld, keep an eye on shutter speed and increase ISO if needed to maintain sharpness.
THE WAITING GAME
Sometimes the composition is already there; it’s just a matter of waiting for something to enter the frame. In an otherwise empty landscape, a passing animal or distant figure can provide both a focal point and an immediate sense of scale. Find a frame that interests you, settle in and watch what moves through it. A little patience can turn an empty scene into something completely unexpected, even more fun if you bring snacks for the wait!
SETTINGS NOTE: EXPOSE FOR THE HIGHLIGHTS
If you’re shooting in the middle of the day, bright sand, salt and pale rock can quickly push highlights towards overexposure, so keep an eye on your histogram or highlight warnings and adjust exposure compensation when necessary.
Badwater Basin, Death Valley, USA: The salt lakes can photograph quite ‘flat’ if you’re not moving around and looking for textures. Standing upright and pointing the camera straight ahead produces a bland image of the scene, whereas getting low and placing your camera against the crusty lines of salt, helps to highlight the patterns and environmental wonders of the scene.
FORGET THE GRAND VIEW
There’s an assumption that vast landscapes call for equally wide photographs, but some of my favourite images from deserts and open environments show only a fraction of what was actually in front of me.
This is where you can get wildly creative and have a little more fun with framing. Look beyond the obvious view and search for smaller sections of the landscape that work as photographs in their own right: the curve of a dune, a cluster of salt crystals, overlapping ridgelines, a shadow cutting across the sand or a tiny detail surrounded by an enormous amount of space.
Move closer, photograph through foreground elements, leave parts of the scene deliberately out of focus or frame so tightly that it’s no longer immediately obvious what you’re looking at.
A telephoto lens is particularly useful for this, isolating distant ridges, patches of light and finer details that disappear within the wider view. But abstraction doesn’t always require a long lens. Sometimes it’s simply a matter of changing your position, looking down rather than out, or getting low enough for a foreground element to become a fuller part of the frame.
With fewer obvious subjects dictating where the camera should point, there’s room to experiment. Walk further, look behind you and pay attention to the lines, textures, colours and small details that catch your eye. The photograph doesn’t always need to explain exactly where you are. Sometimes the most interesting frame is the one that leaves a little to the imagination and has people wondering, ‘What even is that!?’.
SETTINGS NOTE: TRY A WIDE APERTURE
Not every landscape needs to be sharp from front to back. If a foreground detail helps frame the scene, try working around f/2.8–f/4 and focusing beyond it, allowing that element to soften around the edges of the frame. Alternatively, focus selectively on a small detail and let the wider landscape fall away. Both approaches can add depth while creating a more abstract interpretation of the scene.
QUICK TIPS
Step back and use small subjects to emphasise scale
Look for patterns, layers, colour and texture within the wider scene
Try changing your position before changing your lens
Use negative space rather than trying to fill the frame
Try a telephoto lens to isolate details and create abstract compositions
Find a frame and wait for wildlife, people or changing light to enter it
AFTER DARK: WHEN THE SKY FILLS UP
There’s another advantage to spending time in some of the world’s emptiest landscapes. Once the sun disappears, the lack of towns, traffic and artificial light can reveal a night sky that feels almost impossibly crowded.
Deserts are ideal environments for astrophotography, and you can approach photographing the night sky in much the same way as you would the landscape during daylight, with a little more tilt upwards, of course! While the stars are the show, also look for something within the landscape to give the image context, whether that’s the silhouette of a dune, a tree, mountain, rock formation or even a tent beneath the sky.
With the OM SYSTEM cameras, Starry Sky AF is particularly useful for focusing on stars without relying entirely on manual focus in the dark. If you want the stars to appear sharp and sparkly rather than forming trails, a starting point for settings could be around f/2.8, ISO 1600–3200 and 10–20 second shutter speed, adjusting from there depending on focal length and ambient light.
Check the first few frames at higher magnification rather than relying solely on how they appear on the back of the camera as sometimes the details can be just a little bit soft until you lock in the best settings.
For something a little more technical, Live Composite makes creating star trails surprisingly simple. Rather than capturing dozens of frames and combining them later, the camera does the hard work for you, taking a sequence of exposures and adding only the new areas of light as the stars move across the sky. The frames are composited into a single image in-camera, and you can watch the trails build on screen before stopping the exposure when you’re happy with the result.
Keep some attention on what’s happening below the stars too. A dune, mountain, tree or tiny tent can anchor the composition and give all that sky a sense of scale.
There might be nothing to see for kilometres, but once the sun sets, look up, and you’ll find an entire galaxy circling above.
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