Landscape Photography Tips

Seven great tips for shooting better landscape photos.

Landscape Photography Tips :#1

Never rush into shooting on arrival at your location

By studying the foreground detail available and any lead-in lines before you click away you'll get a more interesting composition and a better image. When you see what appears to be a good landscape to shot, don't fire away until you've assessed the variation in the vicinity. For example, by moving sideways a short distance you may find an improved angle or a better foreground object, or even some kind of line or a curve that'll guide the eye into the scene.

Allow time to explore the vicinity and place the tripod where you think you'll get a great shot. Then take time to move around, looking through your camera's viewfinder for that ideal position. Don't rush this bit. Seek that perfect site, and experiment with various focal lengths, heights and angles. I know this is a pain, but it really has to be done. Sooner or later you'll find that ideal position from which to take the shot. Then just attach the camera to the tripod and take some test shots in order to fine-tune the final position.
 

Landscape Photography Tips :#2

Use a Tripod

As for all landscape shots it's best to use a tripod. You can't get away from this because there's no way you'll acquire really sharp images by holding that camera in your hands. Why? because the average landscape exposure time is around half a second or thereabouts due to the use of graduated and/or neutral density filters. And on top of this it's a good idea to use mirror lock and a remote release cable. If you don't have a remote release cable you can always select a timer delay from the camera's menu.

Landscape Photography Tips :#3

Use a Graduated Filter

As a landscape photographer you should use a graduated filter when there's a bright sky's present in the shot. This will allow for a balanced exposure in-camera and save you time messing about in Photoshop afterwards trying to retain sky detail. The downside of is an increased exposure time, hence the half a second reference previously, and why a tripod is essential if you want to acquire really sharp images.

Landscape Photography Tip :#4

Use a low ISO value

To keep sensor noise to a minimum use you lowest ISO, and certainly no more than ISO 100. And if the light's low... use the tripod.

Landscape Photography Tip :#5

Use Spot Metering

Spot metering works a treat with landscapes. What you do is spot meter off a bright part of the scene, check the histogram and adjust settings manually to get a better tonal range. If your camera doesn't have spot metering, use center-weighted metering, which works pretty well.

Landscape Photography Tips :#6

Maximize the Depth of Field

To acquire maximum depth of field use a small aperture (high f-number). This will increase exposure time, but you won't care about that because you're using a tripod anyway. You then autofocus one-third of the way into the frame then switch to manual focus. You do this to prevent the autofocus from hunting, especially because of the low light level entering the camera.

Landscape Photography Tip :#7

Shoot in RAW

For maximum detail and image processing flexibility shoot in Camera RAW mode. This doesn't mean you can cut corners when out in the field just because you can mess about with the image later. Instead, RAW shots simply yields the maximum amount of detail your camera can deliver. Yes, you can play around later in Photoshop or your dedicated camera RAW software, like changing the white balance, saturation, levels, etc. But that's not what photography's supposed to be about. Shooting in RAW gives you all the detail you can see in the landscape image without any artifacts, which you get in JPEG mode.

And anyway, after you've done any small adjustments and saved your image as a TIFF file, you'll still have the unaltered RAW file in your archive, just in case you need to come back to it later.

And that's it... shoot away and get that super image you have always wanted.