Three Things I Wish Somebody Had Told Me About Landscape Photography

Here are three things I wish I'd known when i started out with landscape photography.

1. Don't burn out your highlights!

Landscape photography is all about capturing every detail of a scene. So if you overexpose your image you are losing precious information. One should aim to find the perfect balance between getting enough detail in the shadows, without blowing out those precious clouds in the sky.

It's better to take a dark image and recover the shadows in lightroom than to take an overexposed image and recover the highlights. Shadow recovery will produce noise and thats not good either but it's much better looking than those flat colors that highlight recovery of a burned out sky produces.

Too bright skys can also be battled with a gradient nd filters (personally i've never used them) or multiple exposures.

2. Find your balance of maximum sharpness and depth throughout the scene.

To achieve a crispy image with enough depth to cover the entire scene you must find the optimal aperture setting of your lens. Lenses are often the sharpest at f/8 but the depth is not optimal for landscape photography. Here some experimentation might be required but if you stay in the range of f/11 - f/18 you should be able to capture a satisfying amount of detail.

Next you want to focus your lens so that everything is sharp, this place can usually be found about 3/4 of the way to the horizon or as far as you can see. These two things will help you produce an image so sharp that you could shave yourself with it.

3. A better camera only makes things easier.

A good photographer can produce stunning images with a potato so before you set out to get a fancy new dslr or that set of zeiss lenses that is the stuff of every photophiles dreams, you should ask yourself if you have pushed your gear to the limit.

For example if you find yourself craving more megapixels or a wider lens, both can be solved by shooting panoramas. A 5-shot panorama image with a 10 megapixel camera gives you about a 40 megapixel image to play with that looks like it's shot with a wide-angle lens. Sure it would be alot easier to use a 40 megapixel camera and take that shot in one go but is it really worth the cost? The creativity that comes from shooting on a budget can really push your photography to a new level.

Need a wider view? Go panoramic! Need more dynamic range? Shoot multiple exposures! Need sharper images? Try focus stacking! Now combine them all and you will get an image that not even the best cameras can capture.

(If you do please share you results, I'd love to see them, you madman)

To be continued...