A beautiful vista overlooking a valley below with gorgeous sun-dappled light is something always to capture, whether it be for a print you want to hang in your house, an image you want to sell, or just for the memory of a good day out. For these reasons, landscape photography has long been the most common genre in photography and will likely continue to be so as time goes on.
While landscape photography may not be the most complex at the surface level, so many little facets come into play when composing and crafting the final image. True enough, if the landscape is absolutely stunning, it's pretty hard to take a bad photo! But there are always things that can be tweaked, improved upon, or changed simply to make it your image. This article will touch on as many technical aspects as possible that you can factor into your landscape photography and will be updated as often as possible with links to other blogs with more in-depth discussions about topics as we write them.
The Gear
Nearly any camera will work for landscape photography, so don't stress this point too much; begin working with what you already have! Cameras that are newer and cameras with larger sensors are ideal because they can capture more information in a single image. More detail is retained in highlights and shadows for editing, and colours are more accurate. This is the only aspect of a camera that truly matters in this genre, as you can take your time with everything else.
Lenses are the tools we will use to create a unique image better than our eyes can see. If you like the effect, a wide-angle lens will show a lot of information within a single shot, but it's not the only type of lens for landscapes! Telephoto lenses are great for focusing the image on a single significant aspect of a scene and simplifying the clutter. If you like minimalism, this is often the way to go. It's good to play around with different focal lengths to find out what jives with your creativity rather than trying to copy what is "normal." In addition, you do not need fast, heavy, expensive prime lenses as we usually shoot at F8-11, but they should be sharp with nice coatings.
TRIPOD. DO NOT IGNORE THIS. Seriously though, many photographers prefer to shoot handheld for the portability and out of laziness of not setting up a tripod, but it will save you frustration in the long run. You avoid any sort of handheld shake even if you think your shutter speed is high enough, and it allows you to fine-tune your composition and take multiple exposures with the exact same framing in case you need to stack images. So get a good sturdy tripod, but not something so big and heavy that you never take it with you.
Remote shutters/self-timers are a handy tool to use when your shutter speeds drop below 1/100s. When you have your camera on a tripod, you can use one of these options to keep your hands off the camera to avoid shaking it when the photo is being taken. Even a 2-second time makes a big difference!
Filters
This is a more prominent gear topic and deserves its own section on this blog page. Filters such as circular polarizers and neutral density (ND) filters are not often considered essential tools for photography, but they will bring the quality of your landscape photos to the next level by enhancing the mood you are going for in any image.
The majority of filters can be used either as a standalone tool or in conjunction with other filters to push the image into new realms beyond what you see literally. For example, you can create photos with dream-like, ethereal feelings, photos with extreme contrast between the sky and foreground, or photos with less haze and light pollution than we can see with the naked eye.
ND filters are used to darken the front of a lens using a neutral-coloured piece of glass to darken the scene. A longer shutter speed is used, and all movement that occurs during the shot is captured to create something new that we can't see. This is how people take images of waterfalls that look silky smooth.
Circular polarizers are used to reduce glare from the sun off of your subject. They can take the shine off leaves and windows and cut through the surface of calm water to see what's below. They also create more contrast in the sky by darkening the blue and making the clouds pop.
Composition
This one's the biggie. If your photo is poorly composed with a crooked horizon and trees half cut off in the frame, it will not turn out well. Composition refers to how you orient your camera within a scene to show the viewer a particular perspective of a subject.
There are a few main aspects to consider when choosing a composition. Firstly, you want to decide what your main subject is. It may be a lone tree on a hill, a river meandering through a valley, or a mountain prominently displayed on the horizon. Whatever it may be, that should stand out as the primary focal point of your image, and you should use everything else only to accentuate it.
Checking the edges of your frame is vital to ensure the viewer doesn't feel that something is missing from the image or dragging their eye away from the main subject.
Another crucial piece of the composition puzzle is how the image balances visually. There isn't a hard-fast way to determine this one, but you want to have a relatively even split of negative space throughout your image. For example, if you have your subject and all other details on one half of the photo and a blank sky across the other, the negative space of the sky will create an unbalance in the frame.
Locations!
Obviously, this is a very important consideration in your photo. An urban green strip will not offer as many photos as a mountainside meadow, so decide what kind of image you want to create and start looking for locations in whatever way you know how. Dropping pins on Maps when you notice a site while driving or hiking is an effective way to remember a potential shot. You can use Google Maps street view if you know you will be in a particular area but don't know the terrain all that well. This can give you a ballpark idea of what subject you want to shoot in advance, but give yourself time to find the best composition.
To give some unsolicited advice, don't go somewhere that has been photographed a million times over (*cough cough* Moraine Lake). Or, if you are at a trendy place, do something different; focus on another subject or experiment with something weird. Otherwise, you will have the same photo as everyone else with probably worse lighting than the best photos.
Tied into location is the time of day you choose to shoot at. Look at which direction your main subject is facing and ensure the sun is facing it. If you want to shoot during sunrise or sunset for golden hour, this part is critical, and reverse that thinking for blue hour. Once the sun has gone down (or before it rises), the entire foreground will be the same, low-contrast brightness level, but the skies directly behind what you are shooting will be lovely pastel tones.
Don't neglect shooting during the day just because people on the internet tell you not to! Very harsh light is admittedly hard to use, but filtered sunlight through a canopy can be beautiful, and overcast will allow different opportunities. Plus, it gives you more time to work on your skills of composition and exposure.
Getting Sharp Photos
Unfortunately, every composition, location and camera lens will be different, so we can't make definitive statements. But we can give you tips for the best possible outcome!
Manually focus your lens to avoid having the camera second guess what you want the main subject to be; it happens all too often when we trust the technology entirely! If you have a low, wide-angle shot composed, you will need to either prioritize what is the most essential aspect to focus on or take multiple photos focusing on different planes, then combine them in post.
As far as camera settings go, set your ISO to its native resolution (usually 100 ISO) and your aperture to F8-F13, whichever that lens is sharpest at. It is generally worth taking 20 minutes to test your lenses to see where they perform their best, but when in doubt, F11 is safe. Finally, set your shutter speed to wherever it needs to be for the exposure value you want. Often this shutter speed can be low, which is why we use a tripod! But if it's breezy, you may need to compromise your ISO a bit to raise the shutter speed.
Editing
We will paint with some very broad strokes as you can get incredibly in-depth when editing RAW photos. If the sky is present in your image, bringing the highlights down can add definition to any clouds or gradations in colour, and lifting shadows but adding some depth to the blacks will create clean contrast.
When tweaking the photo's colours, an overlooked factor is to create contrast in the highlight and shadow colour. As an example, the orange-cyan colour combo makes an eye-catching pop to the image (to use an overplayed trope.) When you move your shadows From a deep blue to a cyan and your highlights to an orange hue, your colours contrast each other creating more separation between elements. This same idea can be applied using any opposite colours on the colour wheel, and either colour could be highlights or shadows. This technique is best done subtly unless you're making a movie poster or going for a stylized effect.
Exposure
Getting your exposure dialled in perfectly is critical to ending up with your envisioned photo. While we can pull back a lot of overexposed parts of a RAW image, the colour, contrast, and detail will never be quite the same as if we got it correct in-camera; the same goes for shadow details. So how do you know your exposure will be what you are looking for?
Firstly, envision the image's most important subject and decide how bright you want that part to be, whether that is positive or negative on the EV scale. Now, you can use spot metering on your camera's metering system or an external light meter to determine the settings to get the brightness you want on that particular subject.
If those settings interfere with the exposure of the rest of the image, you can shift brighter or darker a little bit to balance the rest of the frame. Alternatively, you can use filters to darken areas that are too bright. Several tools on your camera can help you ensure an even exposure for your image, such as the histogram.
For more details on exposure, we have another blog post dedicated to explaining it: https://a8842.americommerce.co...
Conclusion
While landscape photography seems relatively simple on the surface, there is much more to it than taking photos of a nice location or scene. There are many aspects to consider and get the approach right to end up with the best possible image to fit the vision of the scene you have in front of you. So the best thing you can do is go out and practice! Even if it's just the lake near your house, the techniques and skills are the same and going out often will ensure you are ready when on a big photo outing.