Landscape Photography

We’ve all engaged in landscape photography at some point in our lives. Think about it. If you have a camera, you’ve most likely taken a photograph of some piece of nature outdoors. Whether it be a lake or a mountain or a field, it’s all nature and it’s all landscape. If you’re reading this post right now, I’m guessing you’re somewhat interested in photography and you want to learn more. That’s good because that’s why I’m writing. To offer a few tips that will hopefully help pave the way for you.

7 Easy Landscape Photography Tips​

In this post, I’d like to offer seven very simple tips that I hope will enhance your landscape photography. While these tips are very straightforward to read about and learn, it’s important to remember them before you go out for a shoot. Either that or write them down so you can review them in the field. It’s so easy to review these types of things on the internet, head outdoors with your camera, and then forget all about them. You need to go out with a plan in mind for what you’d like your photographs to look like.

Use the Rule of Thirds

Most of of us probably already know what this is. If not, here goes. The Rule of Thirds basically states that if there’s a prominent object in your scene, set it to one of the intersections of an imaginary tic-tac-toe board that’s overlaying the same scene. so if someone is standing in a field, offset them so they’re not standing directly in the center of the field when you take the photo. Move the camera to the side a bit so they’re off-center. This will create a more balanced photograph.

Use People to Demonstrate Scale

I fall victim to overlooking this tip all the time. I’ll head out into the woods and take photos of a giant tree or a huge waterfall and when I display the images on social media, people ask what the big deal is. I tell that that the tree was “huge” or the waterfall was “giant.” No one seems to care. If I had someone stand in a strategic location near one of these elements, I’m sure my photo would have a much greater impact.

Pay Attention to Reflections

If you’re taking photos of a lake, remember the reflection. How many times have you seen one of those absolutely gorgeous landscape photos of a lake and some mountains and were blown away by it? If you look back at each of those photos and pay close attention to reflections, I’m sure you’d see that they played a large role in each one. Never underestimate the reflection. It can make or break a photo. Use them and make them a primary aspect of your images.

Capture the Movement

Playing with shutter speed to capture movement in landscape photos can make an enormous difference in an otherwise stale or just “okay” shot. Think about it. How many times have you simply used your camera’s Auto mode to take a picture of a stream? I’m sure quite a few. Now, how many times have you set your camera up on a tripod, turned your camera to shutter priority of about three seconds and then captured your image? I’m guessing not as much. When it comes to moving water or night photography, definitely take advantage of those longer shutter speeds. They can completely transform an image for the better.

Remember Your Lens Filters

Lens filters are very inexpensive these days and there’s really no reason not to own one of these less expensive sets to experiment with. I personally love taking advantage of the magnifying filters for macro photography and the neutral density filters for the long exposure shots I mentioned above. If it’s a nice sunny day, I’ll attach the polarizing filter to the end of my lens for some extra color in my landscape shots. There’s a lot of creativity to be taken advantage of when it comes to these things, so be sure to keep them close-by in your camera bag.

Use a Wide-Angle Lens

This one is a no-brainer. If you don’t own a wide-angle lens and you plan on taking an interest in landscape photography, I encourage you to start shopping for one. After you try one, you most likely won’t want to remove it from your camera body any time soon. I get addicted to mine. It grabs so much more content than I would ever have gotten with a regular zoom lens. I own the Sigma 10-20mm wide-angle lens and I think I paid about $300 for it, so they can be competitively priced if you’re not looking for the best lens available. But the results, oh my.

Small Aperture For a Clear Shot

When taking landscape shots, it’s important to create as much depth in your photos as possible, meaning, have the entire scene in focus. In order to do this, you’ll either need to use a small aperture size (anywhere from F/22 to F/32) or you can use a wider aperture, take multiple shots and then take advantage of the focus stacking technique. I actually suggest you use the focus stacking technique because that will allow you to capture the clearest photos as possible by using a larger aperture. Small apertures can create softer images and this is never desirable. The point is that the images needs to be in focus from front to back. How you get there is less important.

Tips For Night Landscape Photography​

When it comes to low light night photography, there are a few solid tips you need to take into account to make your endeavor a successful one. These aren’t terribly difficult things to grasp, but you should keep them in mind when it comes to setting up your scenes. Night photography is much like daytime photography in that you’ll be in many of the same locations, but it’s also much different in that the focus of the photographer will change from objects in the scene to the relationship between objects in the scene. Since lighting is scarce, it’s important to see how the different elements of a scene play off one another as opposed to simply being present.

Mind Your Shutter Speed

The first and most obvious tip is that you should know your shutter speeds. Depending on the available light in the surrounding areas and atmosphere, you’re going to most likely need a shutter speed between 30 seconds and a few minutes. Because of this, you’ll need to switch your camera shutter speed to bulb mode. Don’t think you’re going to get away with a 15 second exposure on a normal night. That level of light will require much more time. Obviously, if there’s more than average light in a scene, that shutter speed will change.

Consider Distance Between Objects

Next, try to set objects that are close to you against objects in the distance. Because night photography plays objects off one another, you can get very good results when you make the primary subject of your photo as something up close to you and then continue to show the sky and mountains (or whatever) in the background. You’ll likely need to change your position and shooting angle when engaging in something like this, but that’s to be expected. Even in daylight photography, getting down close to the ground and shooting upwards always adds an interesting perspective that not many of us see too often.

Look for Contrast

If there was no contrast, you’d have no shot. This is true for normal light situations, but especially true for low light situations. You may only be able to see outlines and glows, so be sure to include those areas in your images. It’s best to photograph at night while there’s still some light in the sky. You’ll need that for the camera sensor to absorb. The darker things are in an absolute sense, the more trouble your camera will have with capturing the scene. Cameras are especially good at absorbing light, but they’ll need something to work with.

Limit What You Shoot

Finally, just as you do with normal light photography, you’ll need to section off your scenes. Low light photography is slightly different though in that contrasting edges need to be taken into account much more and objects that you might ignore during the day may be the primary subjects at night. You probably won’t be able to take many big landscape shots, so work with what you have. If that’s something in the foreground and then a glowing mountaintop in the distance, that’s what you’ll need to capture digitally. Take stock of what you can work with angle by angle and place by place. Pretend that you’re a movie director looking for the best place to position your camera and then go with it.

What is Hyperfocal Distance?

Did you know that if you focus on something in your landscape scene that’s too close to your camera, you may not be able to keep the mountains that are far away from you sharp and clear? That’s right. This subject has to do with what’s referred to as hyperfocus and it’s sort of a complicated area to understand. Actually, it’s not really that complicated if it’s explained properly.

I’ll use a few examples to make my point. These will be completely made up, so don’t hold me to the figures I’ll offer below.

Let’s say you’ve got a Canon Rebel T6i camera with a 24mm prime lens attached to it. You’ve got the aperture set to f/8. You’re standing on top of a mountain and there are a few trees with branches hanging down right in front of you. You’d like to frame the mountains in the distance with the leaves and branches of these trees. You also want everything in your shot to be sharp, including the branches and leaves that are close as well as the mountains in the distance.

That’s the setup. The question is, how can you keep everything in your scene in focus like you want? Is there something you need to consider and keep in mind? Yes, there is. The sharpness of those mountains all the way in the distance depends completely on how far you’re standing from the branches and leaves that are close to you. As you may have guessed, you’ll probably focus on those close-up leaves first, just to make sure they’re sharp. Then, you’ll leave it to the camera to make sure the mountains are sharp too. The only problem with this is that you can see the clarity of those leaves fairly clearly through your camera’s viewfinder. It’s not as easy to see if the mountains are in focus as well.

As I said above, the ability to keep both the leaves and the mountains in focus depends on the distance between the camera and the leaves. If you stand too close to the leaves and focus on them, you’ll reduce the distance at which your lens can focus. If you stand farther away from the leaves, you’ll give your lens the ability to focus on infinity. The trick is to find out the minimum distance at which you can stand from the leaves and still keep the mountains in the background sharp. This is called the hyperfocal distance.

Now that we know about hyperfocal distance, the question is, how can we determine this distance? The answer to this is this; there are tons of resources available to offer the distance, depending on your camera setup, aperture setting and a few other things. I’m trying to keep things simple here, so I won’t get into all of that. If you really want to read up on this, you can read this much more in-depth article. For now, take a look at this handy chart:

Chart courtesy of Amateur Photographer.

If you take a look at the chart above, you can see that the distance you stand from the leaves by analyzing a few things. These things would be the aperture setting of your lens and the focal length of the lens. If I take a look at the top chart because I’m using a T6i, which has a cropped sensor, I’ll see that, with an aperture setting of f/8 and a focal length of 24mm, I’ll need to stand at least 12.6 feet away from the leaves to be sure that both them as well as the mountains are in focus. Pretty easy, right? I think the toughest part of all this is getting your brain to understand that these calculations need to be made in the first place. Once that happens, it’s all a snap.

Where to Focus When Taking Landscape Photos​

If you’re interested in taking landscape photos, you probably already know that these photos should be sharp from front to back. Shallow depths of field and creative blur is best left to artistic, more close up photography. When it comes to landscape, the viewer wants to, and expects to, see the blade of grass that’s close to the camera just as sharply as the tip of the mountain that’s far away.

In this section, I’ll share a few tried and true tips that will help you immensely with your landscape photography. None of these tips are particularly difficult to grasp, but they will certainly add quality to your images.

Use a Tripod

The first tip is to use a tripod when shooting landscape. This may seem simplistic, but most of the time when it comes to photography, the best tips are. Tripods are all about stability and most professional photographers and serious amateurs use them for these types of shots. Remember that it’s important to level your camera when shooting landscape and tripods are essential for doing this type of thing. Don’t get all caught up on what the tripod is made of (aluminum, carbon fiber, etc…). Just be sure it’s of high quality and that it doesn’t shake when in use or anything like that.

A lot of landscape photography incorporates long exposure times, so this is another reason for using a tripod. There is no way in the world you’ll be able to avoid blur and camera shake if you attempt to hand-hold your camera during a long exposure shot. Don’t even attempt something like that.

Turn Off Image Stabilization

Another tip for great landscape photos is to turn off your lens’s image stabilization. When you hold a camera in your hands and take a photo, that feature is the perfect counter to the shaking and vibration that stems from your hands and body. No matter how hard you try, you can never be completely still. When using a tripod though, the image stabilizer can actually add blur and softness to your final photos, so it’s best to keep this turned off.

As I said above, we want the greatest depth of field for our landscape photography. We want sharpness from front to back. If you’ve been practicing photography for any length of time, you most likely know that the smaller the aperture (higher the number), the deeper the depth of field. So the question is, why not crank our aperture settings up to something like f/22 or f/32? Wouldn’t that create a very deep depth of field? The reason we don’t do this is because of something called diffraction. At very small aperture sizes, light is only able to travel through the lens and touch the camera’s sensor in a certain fashion. This fashion creates softness in the final image. So, instead of shrinking the aperture size down so small, keep it around f/11 or something more moderate. The depth of field will still be extremely deep because of the great distances in your scene and you’ll keep the clarity and sharpness you’re after.

Now let’s discuss where we should focus when we’re taking landscape photos. If you’re familiar with how depth of field works, you know that in most cases, sharpness falls one third in front of the point of focus and two thirds beyond it.

When focusing inside of your scene, if you make your focus point too far into it, such as half way, you’ll end up seeing blur in the foreground (wasting it in the background). If you focus too close to the camera, you may see blur all the way in the background (wasting it in the foreground). So, as you may have guessed, you need to focus right at the perfect spot, which is approximately one third into the scene.

While this one third distance rule is a decent one to follow, it’s not infallible. There are some cases when you may need to modify the focal distance and to assist with that train of thought is a concept called hyperfocal distance (mentioned above).

Keep in mind though, wherever you focus is up to you. Take some practice shots and determine what you like best and then focus on the best area to achieve your goals. You shouldn’t blindly adhere to some hyperfocal distance calculation if it’s not giving you the results you want.

I’ll tell you from personal experience, calculating a hyperfocal distance can be cumbersome. Sure, there are apps to handle these things, but it’s just not practical to be checking an app when you’re trying to shoot great photography. With this in mind, some brilliant photographers came up with a novel idea that they call double distance focusing. To double distance focus, all you need to do is find the closest thing, object or area in your scene that you would like to be sharp and then double the distance of that object and focus your camera on whatever is there. So if you have a rock that’s five feet away that you would like to remain sharp in your image, simply focus on whatever is sitting ten feet away and you should be good to go.

If you’re finding that it’s impossible to obtain a deep enough depth of field in your landscape photos, there is one thing that can help. Actually, there are a few things, but this is the easiest. It’s called focus stacking and it will require that you capture multiple images at different focuses and then merge them during post-processing. I’ll be covering focus stacking in great detail on this website in the future.

If you have any questions regarding landscape photography, please ask in the comment section below. I’ll do my best at helping any way I can.