Landscapes ?

I am yet to master the art of landscape photography. This is something I intend to work on in 2009. I have requisites for a landscape shot - lovely scenery, lovely light/mood and an animal doing something. This is an earlier attempt. Looking for some advise,pointers,critics.So please let them flow.

Vikram,
I agree with you that the opportunities for landscape images in Kabini is huge. It is only limited by your imagination.

The techs for this image is as follows:
ISO 200, 12.1mm equivalent to 73mm, f8, 1/1000, DMC - FZ20, Center weighted metering.

You have to be careful when you are including the sun in the Scene.

In this scene the Sun is still high up and is bright. A slightly lower position would have given better colours.

The Sun is much brighter then the subjects. In this case the metering is centre weighted metering. When you click an image it does the meter reading from the centre. You have placed the Sun at the side. The exposure as determined by the centre metering is much higher for the Sun, as the Sun is much brighter than the portions of the scene at the centre. So the details in the Sun is lost. You need to give a negative exposure compensation to the image to tone down the Sun.

When you are shooting a scene with the Sun, people using SLR, should be careful in not directly looking through the lens. As your eyes would get damaged. Better to keep your camera on tripod or bean bag and then shoot and recompose till you get the Sun in the right position and with the right tones.

Check the histogram and the portions that become burnt would give you flashing highlights (I think most cameras have this feature).

The elephants on the right are bunched togather. Clear separation between them would look good as the silhouettes would be much more effective.