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Raphael Dyen
I'm a freelance landscape photographer from Germany who loves nature and traveling. My travels have taken me all around the world, and I had the chance to explore and photograph many beautiful places. I have visited various countries in Europe, North and South America, Oceania, Asia, and Africa, and here, I share my favorite moments from those travels as photos, videos, and articles.
Capturing the landscape and travel photos shown on this website took me over a decade, and I'm far from finished yet. Photography is my passion, and I will regularly add new content as I visit more fascinating places. And I hope those images transport some of the joy I felt while taking them.
The galleries section contains my photos categorized by continents and countries. I've been fortunate enough to visit more than 30 countries, and in the galleries, I share my best landscape, architecture, travel photos.
My goal when taking landscape and travel photos is to capture the atmosphere and essence of the places I visit. For this, I apply a special photo editing workflow. I describe it in all detail in my video tutorials. In addition to those tutorials, I recorded a video with some before and after editing examples. It gives you an idea of how I edit my photos.
Besides taking photos, I write for photography magazines and my blog. It is filled with articles about landscape photography, my travels, and photo editing. I also have a growing Youtube channel where I take you behind the scenes of my photography trips while sharing information about various aspects of landscape and travel photography.
In this article about landscape photography in Java, Indonesia, I show you some of my favorite photo locations in the eastern part of the island. Featured are spectacular waterfalls, temples, and the volcanoes for which Java is known.
Java is the largest island in Indonesia and also home to its capital, Jakarta. It's located between Sumatra in the west and Bali in the east and has a length of more than 1000 kilometers. Since I already showed you some of Java's west in my Sawarna landscape photography guide, I want to dedicate this article to the eastern part of the island.
Volcanos, thundering waterfalls, and lush vegetation make this area a landscape photographer's paradise, offering a wide range of breathtaking scenery. From the bustling city of Yogyakarta to the serene waterfalls south of Malang, from Mount Bromo to Mount Ijen, I show you some of the best photo spots.
For landscape photographers, the latter is the only viable option. You might think renting a car would be more flexible, but it's not a good idea for foreigners in Indonesia. I explain the reason for that in my previous article.
We visited Java in October, which marks the end of the dry season. Unfortunately, the rainy season had started early, and we experienced some monsoon-like rains during our visit. It made landscape photography difficult.
For a bit more of a landscape photography adventure, you can hike down into the bowl where the many cascades of Tumpak Sewu unite. Down there, you'll experience a lot of spray. Depending on how powerful the waterfall is during your visit, it can be difficult to take a proper photo. I decided not to head down when I was there because of the conditions you see in the image above.
The good thing about landscape photography at Madakaripura: the most photogenic area of the gorge is dry. So you can take your time setting up your tripod and taking photos without worrying about your photography equipment.
At the start of the hike, they rent out masks to protect you from the sulfur fumes that rise from the mines in the crater. If you don't plan on heading down there and want to stay at the rim for some landscape photography, you don't need one. I also heard from people who went down into the crater that the masks didn't help much.
As you saw in this article, Java has a lot to offer. It's one of the best places for landscape photography in Indonesia and provides a large selection of photo spots. And if the weather is bad and the views obscured by clouds, you can still explore the different gorges and waterfalls. There you can take great photos even on rainy days.
So far in my landscape photography series, I've talked about compositional elements, including their weights and how to use their properties to balance the composition by imagining a balance of torques around the middle axis of an image. I've also discussed the balancing of negative space, the perception of subject direction and the often-overlooked importance I attach to the separation of elements. Finally I've discussed the perception of depth in an image.
This time I'd like to talk about an element critical to many landscape images, but one that people often seem to misunderstand, over- or under-emphasize and perhaps confuse in terms of its place and importance in landscape imagery.
The sky is a very strong feature in most landscapes. Its light and colors draw the viewer's eye and affect the rest of the elements in an image; the formations it holds can be wonderful compositional elements with all the properties we discussed in the previous articles; it can increase an image's dynamics when its properties (for example, brightness levels) are vastly different to those in the rest of the image. But experience shows that it's very easy to get things wrong when making decisions about the sky in a photo.
One could also claim that including the sky in a landscape image is essential to the connection the viewer feels to the landscape. Since we are used to seeing the sky when walking around in nature, it makes sense that it would feel more natural for the sky to be shown in the photograph. I tend to agree with this claim, and feel like there's more to the sky than just another bunch of compositional elements, and that an image is missing something without sky. There are many exceptions, though, like the example below.
The only things we can control about the sky at a given point in time are the direction in which we shoot it, and how much of it we include in the image. These two variables are critically important in any landscape composition, so let's looks at them in greater detail.
Firstly, shooting direction. In the vast majority of cases, the way a landscape image looks is much more dependent on its ground elements (rocks, mountains, icebergs, rivers, flowers) than it is on the sky. This means that if we want to compose the ground elements in a certain way, we are more or less bound to seeing the sky from that direction. The photographer can shift slightly, but the ground elements' compositional balance and the relations between them determine the shot.
In summary, one should treat elements in the sky as equal compositional elements, but the sky is both more and less than that. Skies create perceived depth, serve to create a more natural feel in an image of nature, connect and contrast the ground elements. But the true interest of a landscape photograph almost always lies on the ground, and the part of an image the sky occupies should reflect this. Don't be tempted to put too much sky in the image, even if the clouds/aurora are amazing.
If you'd like to experience and shoot some of the world's most fascinating landscapes with Erez as your guide, take a look at his unique photography workshops in Indonesia, Greenland, Madagascar, Namibia and the Argentinean Puna.
He was making a point, and did like dramatic weather, all right. Just for fun, I picked up my copy of Adams' 40 examples book and counted the pictures. Many of the landscapes had no sky whatsoever. Of those with sky, 11 had a featureless sky, and 9 had clouds or mist, although in some of those the clouds are unimportant. So I'm not so sure that's much of a rule.
I'm glad that DPR is throwing in some of these articles as they sort of give us a break from the "new tech" articles and gossip that seem to dominate the front page. Personally, I'd like to see more of these types of articles (not specifically landscape or even photography -- could be photo editing, or techniques for various genres of photography).
the other thing is that you don't have to go to some exotic place to get great landscape shots. I mean it helps but it's not always necessary. If you live in the midwestern "flat lands" then your options are more limited, but I've done woodland photographying in the midwest and am mostly pleased with what I can get. And it doesn't cost me much of anything as it's only maybe a 30 minute drive from my home to the place I go to. This isn't to say I don't travel for landscape photography (as I do two "Landscape" trips per year) but in between I do local landscape photography (and I live in corn country, but luckily we have plenty of forests too).
Excellent article and beautiful images that inspire! The "bad" one is not bad. I do have a minority opinion about blue skies that have no clouds. For me they are not boring. With the right composition of landscape elements a blue sky, even one not minimized, can be beautiful.
Since most of my landscape photo trips involve travel and limited time off from my job, I have to take the skies I get. A blue sky means I can frame more of the landmass that is the subject of my photo. People write songs about blue skies. Willie Nelson ain't wrong, right?
The vast heavens over the flat ground of the Low Countries sometimes dominates the "Dutch Masters" when composing in oil on canvas. You could say that the sky IS a big subject and that what is portrayed on the ground makes less of an impression. Not that 2023 photographers need to benchmark oil painters. But the balance of ground and sky seems to work well in those scenes. In tightly framed or crowded pictures, "breathing room" from giving enough sky to viewers can lead to a claustrophobic effect. When that is the intent, so be it. But when it is unintended, then more sky makes for a scene that is easier to dwell in.
So obviously I prefer to practice Landscape photography but in terms of art I can get just as much pleasure from looking at a stunning portrait as I can form a great landscape photograph and appreciate the artistic value of both.
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