5 Essential Tips On Shooting Landscape Photography

From sun-kissed mountain ranges to magnificent seascapes, here are our essential tips for achieving stunning landscape photography shots.

Invest in a wide-angle lens

Landscape photography is a genre where you can use a wide range of lenses, from wide-angle to telephoto. Ultimately, the location and subject will always determine your focal length and technique, but having an ultra wide-angle lens in your kit will always come in handy. For an APS-C camera, look for lenses with a focal range of 10-20mm and 15-30mm for full frame cameras.

Maximize your depth of field

While you might want to get creative at times and experiment with your depth of field, a general approach is to use the smallest aperture available to ensure that most of your scene is in focus. Do note that by using a smaller aperture, the amount of light available is reduced, so you might have to compensate by either increasing your ISO or reducing your shutter speed.

Filter life

Pro photographer shooting tip: Filters aren’t just for Instagram! Polarising and ND filters are essential in your landscape photography kit, as they help to deepen blue skies, remove glare, reduce reflections and increase colour saturation. Check out our article on the different filters, and which you should get.

Don’t forget blue hour

Most people know of the golden hour – that hour or so just before sunset where the world is bathed in a beautiful, golden light, helping you to achieve that dreamy, ethereal glow in your photos. But what about blue hour? Basically twilight (after the golden hour has passed), this time of the day is dominated by blue and violet wavelengths, lending your photo a wonderfully cool blue light. Depending on your scene, this could add much needed “mood lighting” to your shot, and add depth to your landscape photography shots.

Capture movement

When you think of landscape photography shots, what comes to mind? Is it a still sunset scene of mountain ranges, or a forest reflected in a calm lake? These shots can be beautiful, and we’ve taken plenty of them in our career, but adding movement into such a scene can make your shot dramatically more interesting. This is definitely one of our top shooting tips, so pay attention! Including a flock of birds flying over the lake or fast moving cloud behind the mountain range could dramatically add depth to your photo. What about water flowing over a waterfall, or the sea rushing over sandy shores? Mother nature is rarely (if ever), completely still, so don’t be afraid to add some little touches of movement in your landscape shots.