Putting People in Your Landscape

For so many years, “proper” landscape photos never or rarely included a person in the shot, but today it’s very common to see a person, or people, in a landscape photo. There are very accomplished and quite popular landscape photographers on Instagram who have made having a person in their shot their “look,” and it’s becoming more and more popular every day. If done well, it can actually add a lot of visual interest, and a sense of scale, without taking away from the landscape itself. Some examples are a fisherman in a stream, someone walking alone on a beach, a hiker way up in the mountains, or a person in the front of a canoe looking out into a vast lake (or maybe someone standing alone on a dock looking out into a huge lake). It can be as simple as someone sitting cross-legged in the foreground looking out into the scene, or a group of people camping at night with their tents lit, or even a shot of another photographer out there, with their tripod, shooting the scene from a different angle. If you haven’t thought of including people in your scene, maybe now is the time to give it a try.