Photographing Landscapes

Hello all! Today’s blog is about photographing landscapes. This is by no means an exhaustive list of what to do and not to do, rather some basics and tips from what I have learned through photographing landscapes. The first thing I would say is to figure out what it is you want to photograph. Is it a stunning wide vista photo, a gorgeous sunset or sunrise photo, a majestic waterfall photo, etc. Once you decide what you want to photograph then you can decide on a location and further from there what else to place in your photograph. For example, I have several photos in my landscape portfolio of sunsets. This is because that is a favorite overall subject of mine to photograph, since Arizona has hands down(in my opinion) the best sunsets around. Now, knowing I love to photograph sunsets, what do I want to add to my sunset photograph in the way of foreground or interest? Well, this is where you get creative! You can add boulders, train tracks, cactus, a lake, reflections, trees, silhouettes, etc. the only limit to what you can add is the limit you place on your creativity! Let’s use a vista with a large amount of cactus as an example. Now, there are a ton of different ways to go about taking this photo based on what your artistic choice is, due to that I am not gonna go over all of those ways, rather I am gonna detail how I would take this photo. In this case I would most likely be using a wide angle lens and set my camera on a tripod and position the tripod and camera in a location where there is a nice foreground interest with leading lines pointing to either the sky or lets say a mountain range in the background. Once I have my composition down, I am gonna dial in the settings on my camera. For a sunset photo or any low light photo for that matter a tripod is important because you’ll need to use a slower shutter speed to create an appropriate exposure, hand holding a camera with a longer shutter speed with introduce camera shake and make the photo blurry. That being said I would use a shutter speed anywhere from 1/20 of a second to 1/200 of a second or potentially even slower! For my aperture, I want as much of the scene in focus as possible, that means a wider aperture, typically around f11-f16 would work. For ISO, as stated in my blog on photographing wildlife, I utilize auto ISO in my camera. But again please know that more light equals a lower ISO and less light equals a higher ISO. Ok, so now that we have our settings, and our composition, where do we focus? Yes, that’s right we still need to find the focus point for the photo, this will determine how much of the photo is in focus and is sharp. Typically I focus in the first quarter to about halfway into the scene, theoretically this should allow the camera and lens to focus till infinity (so long as your lens and camera are set to do so), thus creating an image that is sharp throughout. When you’ve done these steps you can take your photo! One last recommendation before we call it a day. With photos utilizing a slower shutter speed, I would highly recommend wither setting a timer for the shutter or using a remote shutter, this way you can minimize if not completely remove any camera shake and therefore reduce the risk of having a blurry photo. As always, if anyone has any questions about photographing landscapes please feel free to reach out and ask. Have a great day!