10 Tips for Landscape Photography

Here’s a list of 10 tips for landscape photography which I hope you will find useful.

1. Always take a tripod (a good tripod)
Always bring along a tripod for those landscape shots. Also, make sure your tripod is steady. There’s no worse feeling than being in front of that perfect scene with your camera on the tripod and noticing that your system is shaking a little bit because of the windy conditions.

2. Carry a cable release
The timer function on the camera is no substitute for a cable release, BTW. The cable allows you the release the shutter when you want to release the shutter, not 2 sec or 10 sec or 15 sec from when you want to release. The release makes it so you don’t have to touch the camera at all which will definitely minimize camera shake.

3. Polarizer and filters
Bring along that polarizer, as well as neutral density filters and graduated neutral density filters. The key to landscape photography is control of light. A polarizer will help take glare off the water and other reflective surfaces like leaves. It also gives some contrast to an otherwise flat, hazy day.
Neutral density filters will evenly stop a specified amount of light from hitting your sensor. Let’s say you want to get that nice silky effect on a water fall but the day is sunny. If you just shot the image without a ND filter, you might not be able to slow down your shutter speed enough without blowing out the highlights.
The grad ND filter is dark on top and clear on bottom and there is a “gradual” transition from the dark to the clear area. Again, these filters come in different strengths. By placing the grad ND filter in front of your lens you decrease the amount of light reaching the sensor from the bright part of the scene (the sky), thereby allowing nice detail from the foreground to show through without blowing out the highlights.

4. Use a hyperfocal distance chart
Hyperfocal distance is the distance from the end of your lens you should focus at to get the maximum depth of field and still have infinity in focus (for a given f stop and focal distance combination). Always carry this sheet with you in your camera bag.

5. Know the weather conditions before going.
Unless you own a sealed camera like the Nikon F5/D1 or Canon 1D/1V series, you’ll want to protect your equipment from rain (e.g. using things like a plastic bag and an umbrella).

6. Landscape = wide-angle lens
This tip is a personal preference, but I think many will agree with this statement.

7. Foreground, midground, and background
Remember the 3 elements of a good landscape: foreground, midground and background. Try to have something in these positions. This is just a rule of thumb … and you know what they say about rules.

8. If possible, try to avoid shooting in the mid-day
There’s lots of harsh light and unflattering shadows around mid-day, so try to avoid taking your shots during that period if possible.

9. Histogram function
If you have a histogram function on your digital camera, use it! The LCD often gives inaccurate representation of the exposures. Personally, I rely on my histogram, not the little image of the scene I just shot to tell me my proper exposure. As a rule of thumb in digital, shoot for the highlights (as opposed to for the shadows, suggested for film). I’d rather have a slightly underexposed shot than an overexposed one in digital. Underexposed shots are much more easily corrected than an overexposed one.

10. Digital camera metering
Some people will use a digital camera first to see what kind of metering is needed to get the proper exposure, because there is instant feed back. Then they will set up their film camera with the same settings. This is a great idea which I use regularly.

Training Your Eyes

In order to get the most stunning prints you’ll need to train your eyes to see in terms of lighting, highlights and shadows. Especially if you’ll be taking your photos in colour and editing later, it’s important to be able to visualize what a scene will look like when it’s converted to black and white. The more practice you get with this the easier it will be to do without thinking, but start off by just trying to pay attention to where certain lights fall and where the shadows are being created.

Detail or luster can sometimes be lost when converting to black and white so play with your settings as much as possible and compare your end result to the predicted outcome you were hoping for. Taking notes on which settings worked best for specific scenarios can help to give you a better understanding of why some techniques may have worked in certain cases when they failed in others. Like most aspects of digital photography, the best way to advance your skills is to just keep shooting everything you can and get as much practice as possible.

The Perfect Slide Show

If digital photography can be thanked for one development, it must surely be the rehabilitation of slide shows. If you have ever been cornered by a friend just returned from holiday who demanded that you come and see their slides, you have known what it is to die just a little inside. However, online slide shows are a lot less about looking at three versions of the same photograph of the Acropolis, and more about slick presentation.

Anyone can make a slide show now, with the innovation of digital slide shows. The process is a whole lot more dynamic and the photographs are displayed in a far more eye-catching way (although anything is more eye-catching than a series of out-of-focus shots beamed onto a wall). The option to add music also makes the process more enjoyable to create and to watch.

The ease with which photographs can be stored and rearranged online means that there is a far more persuasive sense of sequence to an online slide show than the old fashioned way. People can see the photographs more clearly, watch at their own speed, and click back to see a photograph that made them smile.

Of course, more slide shows means “more bad slide shows” too. But with the more modern way of doing things, you don’t have to sit around waiting for a bad one to end. This development is certainly a positive one for anyone who has endured a slide show from hell once too often.

Why Photography Can Be Just The Job

As children, we are often captivated by seeing a photograph – the thrill of seeing your likeness documented in this way is as close as most of us get to being on TV in our early days. As we get older, we are usually more reluctant to be photographed, and the magic drops out of the medium for us. However, being on the other side of the camera can be something of a buzz.

If you find that you are a talented photographer, then you can start to look at it as a career. Good photographers are often in demand. When you think about it, every newspaper needs one, as will many companies – realtors will always need someone to take photographs of the houses they are selling and there are very few companies that do not have a website.

Some of the best money available can be made as a wedding photographer. This is not an easy job by any stretch of the imagination – a bride, groom and two families are counting on you to get it right, and the best bet initially may be to photograph a family wedding for no fee, and use the best shots from that in your portfolio.

Good wedding photographers can make a lot of money, as families set aside a large budget for a wedding. For a short day’s work, this can be a figure in the high three figures or into the four figures, and you have the opportunity to spread the word – if the family like the photographs, then you may well be recommended and called for other weddings too.

Preserving Your Happiness – Or Embarrassment!

Somebody who has just found themselves in a somewhat embarrassing situation will often shout at onlookers: “Why don’t you take a picture, it lasts longer?”. Of course, given that it is now easier than ever to do exactly that, this sarcastic rejoinder is something of a risk at the best of times. It seems like the only way to avoid the preservation of embarrassing memories these days is to not do anything embarrassing.

Most of us have an embarrassing photograph or two out there, but we tend to be fortunate enough that our parents keep them in an album and only bring them out when a potential life-partner is already too deeply enmeshed in our lives to make a quick getaway. However, with the innovation of digital cameras and online photo posting, this has become something of a minefield.

There is not much you can do about embarrassing photographs making their way on to the Internet, short of confiscating all cameras whenever you are around people – and due to the decreasing size of the average cell phone this is pretty difficult to manage anyway. So all you can really do is accept that you are not the first person to have it happen to them and will certainly not be the last.

What you need to be careful of is the increasing number of sites that are devoted to placing embarrassing photographs where the whole world can see them. There are several sires now devoted to bringing embarrassing Facebook photographs to the wider world. You don’t want to be noticed by strangers and hear them giggling “There’s the guy whose pants came down on the Eiffel Tower”.