16 Simple Landscape Photography Tips

1. High vantage points that give you a commanding view of the scene are ideal - and if you have a camera that gives you control (e.g. an SLR) over the exposure settings, a small aperture of f/11 or f/16 will let you keep everything in focus.


2. Early morning and late evening are the best times for shooting landscapes. This is because the low angle of the Sun picks out shadows and reveals textures.


3. The best landscapes are rarely found at the side of the road. So be prepared to go for a trek with a map or a GPS Unit in an effort to seek out the most interesting locations.

4. Wide angle lenses are commonly used for landscapes because they will allow you to include more in the frame and open up perspective. A wide-angle zoom lens gives you more latitude in framing the scene and cropping out distracting features.

5. Whenever possible, place something of interest in the foreground of the shot to create a sense of depth. At the same time, ensure that you use a small aperture to keep everything in focus.

6. Another great but simple landscape photography tip is to anchor your camera to a tripod to slow down your pace of working when shooting landscapes - this means you'll take fewer but better pictures. Get a light model to cut down on weight if you do a lot of walking to your locations.

7. Look out for scenes that will let you crop the top and bottom of the image to produce a more dramatic "letterbox" panoramic composition.

8. Use a polarizing filter to darken the sky and saturate the colors in the landscape (this is the one must-have filter for landscape photographers).


9. Use graduated grey or neutral density filters to darken the sky and reduce the contrast between the landscape and the sky. Polarizing filters aren't much use for bright cloudy skies but graduated filters are. Frequently, the sky looks burned out in photos because the films or digital sensors don't have the range to record the brightness differences between it and darker foreground scenery. (Films and sensors still aren't as good as the human eye!)


10. Use color correction filters to change the color of light on a landscape. These filters can either warm up the landscape or cool it down, depending on the filter color used. In this image, a sepia graduated filter was used upside-down to color the foreground rocks only.


11. Try using a soft focus filter to add an ethereal quality to the scene. These filters blur the bright areas of a scene into the shadows to give the image a glow.

12. If you're an experimenter, try making your own filters. There's no guarantee you'll get good results, but your photos will certainly look different. You can make a filter out of anything that's at least partially transparent - a bit of old stocking, colored sweet wrappers, vaseline rubbed on an old filter (don't ever rub vaseline directly onto a lens - you'll ruin it permanently!) Or you could try breathing gently on your lens (in cool conditions) to get a soft-focus effect.


13. Use the Hyperfocal Distance to obtain the fastest shutter speed with greatest depth of field. Hyperfocal focusing allows you to get everything sharp, from things close up to the camera to those far away. It's more reliable than just setting the focus at infinity. You will need a camera that allows manual focusing though.


14. If you use a digital camera, and your camera is capable of it, shoot RAW images rather than JPGs. The RAWs will take up more room on your memory card but there's no in-camera processing done on the image (as there is for JPGs). RAW images will give you greater latitude for image manipulation (using Adobe PhotoShop, PhotoShop Elements, Paint Shop Pro or some other image manipulation package).


15. Be original! Develop your own style and unique vision. Any competent photographer can duplicate others' work. Truly great photographers produce unique images. Avoid cliche photography. Go for non-standard viewpoints, say from ground-level rather than eye-level. Imagine the world as seen from an animal's viewpoint rather than a human's!

16. Tell a Story! Why tell stories with your camera? Well, for one thing, people who look at pictures will enjoy looking at a story over a snapshot any day. Telling stories with your camera forces you to slow down and think about what you are doing. What is it about this scene that makes you want to make a photograph? What moves you or attracts your eye? Is there a theme, a phrase or a point of view that you want to capture and preserve?

The Best Time To Shoot

When is the best time to shoot a landscape photograph? Timing is a very important aspect of landscape photography. It determines what light is falling on a scene, conveying mood, ambience and atmosphere. Photographs of the same scene taken at different times of the day, under different lighting conditions, will look completely different and will elicit totally different emotional responses.


The beauty of landscape photography is in its variety - even one viewpoint can provide infinite possibilities, depending on the weather, time of day, and season. Usually, you have a limited choice in this respect; few people can afford the time to make several visits to a location in order to capture the right conditions. Nevertheless, within the constraints, you should anticipate the appearance of a scene at different times, and try to work to the preferred one. As a general rule, sunrise and sunset are the best times. Then, a wide variety of lighting conditions are available for one or two hours, giving warm colors and low-angled lighting that shows up textures and shadows.


Very often people looking at my pictures say, 'You must have had to wait a long time to get that cloud just right (or that shadow, or the light).' As a matter of fact, I almost never wait, that is, unless I can see that the thing will be right in a few minutes. But if I must wait an hour for the shadow to move, or the light to change, or the cow to graze in the other direction, then I put up my camera and go on, knowing that I am likely to find three subjects just as good in the same hour.
- Edward Weston

The worst time to take landscape photographs is around midday when the Sun is high in the sky. The flat lighting, particularly in the tropics, is often hard to cope with adequately, and is usually more satisfactory with inherently strong shapes, tones and colors. Shadows are almost non-existent. It's great for holiday snaps but photographs taken under this light rarely convey the ambience of a scene. They do provide a pictorial record - here's what he place looked like - rather than giving the essence of the place - here's what the place feels like; it has a kind of magical, mystical quality and so on.


Dull, overcast skies are an even more severe problem. Even though the diffuse lighting gives accurate color rendition to everything, the quality of light is formless (i.e. lacks direction), and the contrast between sky and land is too high to record both at a proper exposure. A graduated filter can be used to compensate for this extreme contrast.


Generally, landscape photographs benefit from soft light, particularly that around dawn and dusk when there's a pronounced golden quality to the light which is flattering to almost any scene. You can shoot directly into the light for sunrises and sunsets or off at an angle for a scene that's softly lit by the low Sun.

On location, natural light is both your best friend and worst enemy and can make the difference between an atmospheric or lifeless photograph.


Skies are important in landscapes as well. While you can use a polarizing filter to enhance blue skies or a graduated filter to darken dull and flat-looking skies, the most effective skies are usually natural blue ones, preferably with a few fluffy white clouds or some thin, but dramatic, clouds to add some interest.


If the sky is white and overcast, your chances of getting a good picture are seriously curtailed. On a related point, you should always make sure that the horizon is flat - it's an easy detail to overlook as you concentrate on other aspects of the scene - and that it's not dead in the middle of the picture. Use the Rule of Thirds and offset it so that there's two-thirds landscape / one-third sky or two-thirds sky / one-third landscape. Having more sky than landscape will convey a feeling of openness. (On a side note, Sloping horizons can be corrected later in Photoshop if you have that facility).


If you'd like to predict local Sun rise and set times so you can make the most of the golden hours (or Moon rise and set times if yo want to include the Moon in your photos), my LunarPhase Lite software will provide this information along with diagrams and compass directions for the Sun and Moon as well as plenty of other information.

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