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.

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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.

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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.

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Taking photographs has become very easy due to the innovations in camera technology, and as a result there are a lot of occasions where people take a photograph just because they can. By doing this, they never really learn how to capture a moment in the right way. Of course, it is no big deal if people are just taking photographs for their own enjoyment. But when you receive an email which has 25 photographs of the same thing, it gets annoying.

The advantage of shooting only when you have to is that you consider the photograph a lot more closely. If you want to get the best depiction of your chosen scene, you need to take into account the way that subjects are positioned, the way that you are positioned, and the light as well as a number of other factors.

If you want to seriously take up photography, you may have noted the fact that professionals will often have fifty or more shots to get the one that “really works”. However, they are working to an exceptionally high standard and often with motion and human models. They still need to be on the mark for all fifty shots, as the right picture does not happen just through luck.

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One of the harshest, but truest sayings there is, goes as follows: A bad workman always blames his tools. Now, it may well not be the case that you are a bad photographer – in any case, there is a world between good and bad – but the important thing to remember is that blaming the equipment you use, and replacing it, can sometimes hold back your improvement.

When you take a photograph and it comes out looking bad, it is important to bear in mind that there could be countless reasons for this. It could be the light, it could be the positioning of the shot, it could be any number of things. It could, indeed, be the camera, and if this is the case then replacing the apparatus may be the only way to go. Regardless, you have to know the difference between a bad photo and a bad camera.

Some of the best photographers around started with cheap cameras that had defects, and became such good photographers by learning to work with what they had. Rather than spending money trying to find the best camera, it is advisable to spend time trying to become the best photographer you can be.

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What this means for amateur photographers is that, just because it is easier to take a photograph these days, it does not mean that you can replace quality with quantity. It is better to critically survey your photographs, delete the ones that don’t pass muster, and keep in mind what you got wrong initially and how you can get it right next time.

You see, if you just snap away in the hope of getting the right shot, you are as likely to get twenty shots of which maybe five will be good enough to be considered “decent”. If, on the other hand, you take the time to get it right, you can get five photos of which all are impressive. Making the effort to get the shot right gives the shot a sense of occasion.

Photography is not easy, and anyone who attempts to claim otherwise is being either naïve or ignorant. Getting the right shot makes demands of a photographer, and the sooner you learn to meet those demands, the easier you will find it as time goes on.

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The answer to this question, frustratingly, is “it might be”. When you get down to it, there are not so many companies or agencies who will demand that you have a certificate to prove you can take photographs. The best way to document a talent for photography is by showing the photographs that you have taken. That said, doing a photography course may help in other ways.

It cannot be denied that, if you take a course in photography that is taught by a professional who has worked worldwide, you should learn a lot from them and may also be able to make contacts in the business. There is a major difference between being able to take impressive photographs, and being able to get the perfect shot when you are on the clock and conditions are being unkind.

It is not so much the certificate that will be given to you on graduation that will be important, but the things that you learn during the course. There are all sorts of tricks that can make a photograph look better, and make a good photograph great. Informing yourself about these is worth the effort.

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There is a difference, one which needs to be noted, between taking such a photograph for artistic reasons, and doing it because you have seen it done elsewhere. The photograph may make the item look like something else, or it may show people a side of the subject that had not been seen before. If it is done because “it looks a bit arty” then it will usually be fairly obvious.

Many of the photographs taken to depict a subject in an unfamiliar way do so by making use of filters. Filters can be purchased and fitted to the lens of a more old-fashioned camera to provide soft-focus looks, a sepia tone or some other form of tinting. They may, alternatively, be added at a later stage to digital photographs using Photoshop. Some cameras, indeed, have specific filtered settings.

If you want to take a photograph that has an interesting look, give some thought to photographs you have seen. Are you bringing something new to the table, or experimenting with what you yourself are capable of doing? Or are you, alternatively, taking a photograph of a table through a sepia filter because you think it is what you are supposed to do?

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Digital photography is the cause for much of the change that has taken place. It used to be the case that we would take a photograph and think “I hope I haven’t messed that up”, in the full knowledge that you would have to wait until a couple of days after you got back from holiday to see whether or not you had. As almost all digital cameras now come fitted with a preview screen, that’s not an issue anymore.

There is some debate over whether this has led to any real improvement in the quality of photographs most people take. You can have five, ten or even twenty goes at truly capturing the majesty of the Eiffel Tower, but if you are unfamiliar with how to position yourself it will not matter whether or not there are people walking through the shot.

Camera phones have taken things on a level. It is now possible to take a photo on your cell phone and post it to a site such as Flickr or to your Twitter account within seconds. This has its good points – you can make your friends jealous and keep them posted – and its bad points too. It only takes one ill-advised drunken photograph to disgust a lot of friends.

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This – combined with the presence of old-fashioned black and white movies – gives an impression of age and for some people an impression of depth to photographs taken these days using black and white film or filters. Many of the iconic photographs of all time, taken as they were in the early half of the 20th century, are known to us in black and white.

One of the most famous images – the assassination of President John F Kennedy, an incident that took place in 1963 – happened after color photography was introduced, but before it was widespread and before color photographs could be widely reproduced. Hence, it is an incident we “remember” in black and white.

Photographs of the first Moon Landing do exist in color, but the most iconic – of Neil Armstrong descending the ladder onto the Moon’s surface – is also in black and white. Whether it is for reasons of historic grandeur, or because of the questions left unasked, many people even in this age of color photography still like to use black and white for more artistic shots.

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