Landscape Photography
Digital Photography Tips and Tricks

These landscape photography tips will give you the digital photography technique needed to take great landscape photographs. Following this digital photography tutorial will help you take better pictures.

Camera Settings

If you can adjust the settings on your camera, you should. Maximizing the control you have over your camera will give you better results. Set your camera to a small aperture or higher f-stop number to get a greater depth of field. Doing this will allow you to get everything in the picture in focus.

With the aperture smaller less light will be getting into your camera. To make up for this, set your camera to a slow shutter speed or low ISO setting.

Composition

Find Your Focus

The problem many first time landscape photographers have is finding a focual point for their pictures. Without a focual point the viewer has no ideal what to look at in the picture and the photo looks very blah and unimpressive. Find something in your picture to focus on. Why would you take a picture with no point of interest at all?

Remember the Foreground

Include an interesting forground. Foreground is an often ignored part of a picture that can provide a lot of visual interest and drama.

Capture Dramatic Skies

Remember that the sky will usually take up quite a bit of your landscape photography. Photograph skys that are colorful and dramatic. Clouds can add drama to a photograph. Don't limit your photography to sunny days.

Filters

Using filters can help bring depth to the colors in your landscape photography. You can use a polarizing filter to darker the sky. It is best to use on bright days. It will also heighten the color saturation in the landscape.

If the day is cloudy a polarizing filter won't do you much good. For cloudy days use a neutral density filter or a graduated gray filter to bring out cloud definition and get rid of some of the contrast between the land and sky.

You can also play around with color correction filters to see what kind of effects you get.

Other Tips

Use a tripod. With the slow shutter speed you'll need to keep the camera steady for a long time. If you use a tripod, you'll get a better picture that's more in focus. A tripod also makes you slow down a bit and really survey the scene before taking a picture.

Straighten the horizon. Always check to make sure the horizon is straight. If you don't, you can correct it later, but it's best to deal with it when you're taking the picture.

Photograph in the best light. I've told you this before, but it's so important I'll tell you again. Photographing during the golden hour will improve your results. That's the hour before sunset and the hour after sunrise.

Try different angles. You can get great landscape photography when you take pictures from someplace high up, but you don't have to be limited to that. Sometimes getting close to the ground will give you good results. Experiment to see what works best for each situation. Every photograph requires a fresh perspective.

Consider black and white. Some landscapes look great in black and white. Find out more about black and white photography here.

Shoot in RAW. RAW files will give a better quality image. If you don't know about RAW files find out about them here.

I hope these digital photography tips and tricks have helped you out. Now get out there are start taking pictures.

If you enjoyed these tips you might like my other digital photography tutorials.