Once you have all the equipment you need to start taking landscape images, you need to decide on how to tackle your scenery. One of the most important factors of landscape photography is the light. For this you need to do some forward planning! Shooting a landscape successfully takes time. You will notice that from hour to hour the scene changes depending on the light. It pays to check the weather conditions beforehand as rain and overcast days may not wield the best results.
Usually an early light gives you the best effect or sunset. If chasing the sunset golden light, then you must take a tripod because light levels are very low. Choose a small aperture so that everything is pin sharp and in focus, and use a remote control or cable release to take the picture to avoid any blur. Touching the shutter button will generally cause a little shake – it is minute, but you will probably notice it once you get home and zoom right in. This can be avoided with a remote control!
1. Don’t forget to take something to sit on and a flask! You may end up waiting for a long time for the perfect light and only have a few pictures to choose form but that is part of landscape photography.
2. When choosing a lens, a wide angle is best – you can get more detail in a show off vast landscapes. However, you need to think about framing too. If something looks boring try tilting the camera from an angle looking up – does this give the landscape and even more dramatic effect?
3. Always have an area of focus in the picture – reams of green fields mean nothing in photography. Look for rocks, a wall, trees, water – anything – to be a focal point. Remember that a landscape shot does not always need to be framed horizontally – you can take vertical shots, just make sure you choose water with some features in it and sky that has some detail so the shot isn’t bland.
4. Look for balance in the shot. You don’t want too much foreground but not too little either. You want there to be the sky, the middle area and a foreground area. Ideally whatever is in the foreground leads the eye into the distance to a focal point. Alternatively, you can use a zoom lens and move in close to a focal point. Zooming normally compacts the landscape too giving an interesting feel to the image.
4. Another idea is to stitch the images together after you are done. There are various pieces of software you can now buy (or just use Photoshop) which will allow you to stitch a number of photographs together. By gluing together say 5 images you can end up with a super panoramic image to take photographs off – this also works well if you want to end up printing your photographs or using them as stock images.
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