The old Zen axiom “Less is more” applies to lots of things in life, including landscape photography. If you take a picture and include too much information, your viewers won’t have any visual clues to lead them through the image — or worse yet, the image will be so busy that it won’t have a focal point.
Even though you’re looking at the photograph through a small LCD monitor, you’ll still be able to tell whether you have an interesting image. If you shoot a picture and there’s too much information, try one or more of the following remedies:
Zoom in. Zoom in until unnecessary objects are not visible in the viewfinder.
Change your vantage point. Moving a few feet often gives you a totally different image. Move a few feet and then put the camera to your eye. Repeat until you see something interesting and then take a picture.
Change lenses. Many photographers think a wide-angle lens is the best way to photograph a landscape. However, if you don’t have a prominent object in the foreground, the amount of visual information the lens can capture overwhelms viewers. When you switch to a longer focal-length lens, you include less information and have larger objects for the viewers to latch onto.
