Essential Skills you Need as a Landscape Photographer
With any hobby or discipline, there are normally a set of skills you need to become familiar with. This is true of photography and especially landscape photography.
Landscape photography is an art that requires a particular set of skills to master, from controlling the camera for the conditions you have in front of you to being patient enough to get the perfect conditions for that scene. When you understand these, you will get better landscapes that you will be proud to hang up on your wall.
let’s start with the obvious ones and then move on to the less obvious ones. They are all important and all play a part, and will all combine to make you a master photographer … or at least the knowledge to become one …
Pen Y Fan and Cribyn Christmas 2019
A Keen Eye for a foreground
When you find a great landscape, sometimes it is great on its own, but other times, it needs a supporting character. This can be in the form of a foreground. However, it is not just a case of finding a bit of wood and putting it in the foreground.
You need to find purpose for that foreground to be in your frame, it needs to lead the eye, or link into the background through a matching or opposing shape, have some similarities with the background. Just something that will link it in so it doesn’t just look like you’ve found the quickest solution and photographed it.
However, in saying that, this is the way to develop your knowledge of what works and what doesn’t … if you don’t try and put something in your foreground there’s no way of knowing if it will work or not.
Foregrounds are very subjective and they can sometimes be hard to fathom … the only thing that will help you drive this forward is to go out and shoot … on a regular basis.
With the experiences you build, you will start to get an understanding of what you like, what works and what doesn’t. But building a keen eye for a foreground opportunity, is priceless.
Changing the foreground can really change the look of your landscape photography
Knowledge about Bracketing Your Photographs
Bracketing is the photography skill of taking a series of photographs, of exactly the same scene and then blending them together to increase the dynamic range of the photograph above the dynamic range of the camera you have.
This enables you to capture all of the detail you need to get a great photograph.
This is also known as HDR Photography or high dynamic range photography. I have written an article going in depth about this so if this is something you haven’t learned yet, so click here to add another skillset to your arsenal.
It might sound a little daunting, but it is quite straightforward and is definitely worth learning about … and nowadays, most good editing programs/apps will be able to do this effortlessly.
I also have done a tutorial on it … if you’d prefer to see the video, Click here.
Getting multiple shots of the same scene can save the photographs highlights and shadows
Panorama Photography Skills (It’s easy when you know how)
Panoramas are a way of capturing big long landscapes into one image. I love shooting panoramas and I have to admit, I am a little addicted to them … I tend to include at least one in every video I have filmed over on YouTube.
In saying that, it is another skill worth knowing about because if you come to a landscape and it doesn’t lend itself well to the wide angle lens you might have just bought. It is worth putting on a longer lens and capturing a panorama of it.
If you want to learn how to shoot panoramas, check this video out … I test out the four different ways of shooting a panorama and also go through the principles of shooting a panorama later in the video.
Panoramas are one of my favourite things to photograph when out hiking
Focus stacking to Get Everything in Focus
When you have found a great foreground, you might want to get really close to it to get it in proportion with the background you have … but when you do, it is impossible to get everything in focus from front to back, even when shooting with a narrow aperture of f16. This is when you need the photography skill of focus stacking.
This is where you focus on the foreground, take one photograph, focus on the mid-ground, take a second photograph and then focus on the background and take a third photograph. To find out more about focus stacking, click here for my tutorial of how I do it.
Then it is a case of stacking these into photoshop or helicon and blending them together to have everything in focus from front to back.
I find that photoshop does an ok job but I often have to tidy up the blending process afterwards, whereas the dedicated focus stacking program Helicon Soft does a much better job.
Helicon Soft is primarily designed for macro photography, but it works equally as well for landscapes.
Perseverance
If there is one thing you need in abundance with landscape photography, it is perseverance.
If you put off a shoot or a trip, if you hit snooze on your alarm clock or turn it off completely, this will be the biggest killer of great photographs that you never took.
“Nothing is more expensive than a missed opportunity” H Jackson Brown
I have had quite a few mornings where I have looked out of the window and thought it wasn’t good enough for a sunrise, only to find out later that day, it ended up being the most epic sunrise ever known to mankind …
In fact, Rick Bebbington made a fantastic video, linked here, on this very thing recently and it is well worth a watch!
On the other hand, I have been out to some locations over 10 times before getting those amazing conditions. So you have to persevere when it feels like you shouldn’t … persevere when the conditions aren’t good; knowing that when you do just keep going back to that location, there will be that one time where everything just comes together perfectly.
… and nothing can beat that feeling!!
I have been to this location 5 times and I still haven’t got the photograph I want from here … hopefully next time!
Understand Your Camera
A lot of people say you need the right camera … and from all of the posts I have read, this is normally a full frame camera … but then medium format cameras are becoming more readily available now, so aren’t they better? If bigger is better, why not go all the way to a large format camera?
However, this is the wrong way to approach this thought of what is the best camera for landscape photography.
Most cameras can capture amazing photographs nowadays, in fact I was out with my Sony A6000 and kit lens the other day and got what I thought were some great photographs with it … and I was surprised at the quality I was getting as well.
The way I got these was knowing my camera inside and out. How the camera worked, what the limitations of the camera were and how I could get the best out of this tiny crop sensor camera.
If you know a certain lens doesn’t work that well with the aperture wide open (with low f numbers and a big aperture) then you need to avoid this aperture where possible.
If you know the dynamic range of your camera is not so great, knowing how the histogram works is a great way to know when to take a single shot and when to bracket your shots … but if you don’t know your camera and you haven’t practiced with it, this is when you can get less than stellar results causing disappointment and annoyance with your photography and the results you might not be happy with.
So take time to get to know your camera. Get to know where all the settings are and how to access some of the more advanced features and this will get you in sync with your camera and will inevitably help you get better photographs.
Getting to know my camera on the Malvern Hills
Prioritise Lenses Over New Cameras
With so much kit being marketed to us every day, there is a massive temptation to spend as much as you possibly can on your camera kit; from blowing the kids trust fund, to remortgaging the house … but it doesn’t have to be this way.
Like I said in the last point most sensors are fantastic, so whether you have an APS-C camera, like the Canon 600D/T3i or the Sony A1, they both can take amazing photographs … but equally they can both take really bad photographs.
Now if you get a firm understanding of photography, the one thing that will really affect the quality of your photographs … is the quality of your lenses.
If it was a case of deciding between upgrading your camera and upgrading your lenses, I would upgrade my lenses. Having great quality glass is such an asset to your photography and it is the best way to get much better quality images over just upgrading your camera to get a few more megapixels to work with.
In fact, if you have average lenses and upgrade to a higher megapixel camera, this will just highlight the flaws in those lenses.
I remember when I had just started to shoot with digital cameras over film. I just wanted a camera to test out what all the hype was. so I got one of the early Canon DSLRs … I think it might have been the Canon 350D …
With it, I bought a £100 telephoto lens, as I was a bit broke at the time, and I really did regret it.
I was getting fringing, a really soft image and it just spoilt the whole experience …
So I’d say start off with the kit lens … with this, you can get some good photographs, then save up your money and try to resist buying the cheapest lens just so you have a bigger focal range. Save up a bit more and go for the middle of the range lenses and then build up from there.
It took me years to build up my kit that I have now, but I did my research, and made sure the lenses I bought were upgrades from what I previously had … most of the time …
A Good Alarm Clock
The most important bit of kit to be a landscape photographer
Now this isn’t so much a skill as an item of kit, but it is important nevertheless. If you don’t wake up when your alarm clock goes off, you’ll never get out for those sunrises and you will miss so many of those opportunities where the light was perfect at the location you had in mind … and mornings are so much quieter than sunsets …
So get yourself a good alarm clock and when it goes off, make sure you get up … and this goes back to that earlier point of perseverance … keep on getting up time and time again, and you will end up with some amazing photographs that you will be proud to hang on your wall, that you will be proud to share on your social media sites and you might even think of gifting to your friends and family.
If you enjoyed this article, try clicking on one of the links below, They all link to one or more of the skills you need to take your landscape photography to the next level … and if you have any questions about landscape photography in general, please do get in touch through the contact page linked at the top or bottom of this page.
Thanks
Mike
Why a wide angle lens isn’t always the best for landscape photography