landscape tips

9 Advanced Landscape Photography Tips

1. Expose to the right. What does this mean? Using a digital camera’s histogram, ensure that the range of tones are pushed as far as they can go to the right-hand side of the histogram graph without touching the right side. Doing this will increase the amount of information recorded in the image and therefore quality!
2. Don’t just rely on a single capture to create an image. Take two or three different exposures and blend them together later in Photoshop by combining the best elements of each. Yep—this is a big secret from the pros!
3. Wherever possible, try to avoid using filters as filters typically soften images and therefore reduce sharpness. As an example, instead of using ND graduated filters, capture one image exposed for the foreground and another for the sky and then blend them in Photoshop. If you need to use a filter to achieve an effect (e.g., using an ND filter to achieve a silky water effect) then take a separate image without the filter and another with the filter applied and blend in those areas containing all of the juicy detail that you’re after.
4. Always do your homework on a location in preparation for a shoot and if possible ensure that you have visited the location to pre-visualise the optimum composition. Pre-visualise also how the scene would appear under the optimum lighting conditions and then return well in advance of the optimum lighting arriving. Use the harsh daylight hours to perform your homework on a location.
5. Take multiple captures of water movement until the optimum water movement has been captured. If the water movement is too slow, increase the speed of the ISO and vice versa. Adjusting the ISO ensures that not only the exposure is left in tact but also the depth of field.
6. Capture panoramic images by stitching multiple image captures together. Ensure that the camera is set to manual shooting mode, manual white balance, manual focus, overlap each image segment by approximately 30 percent, and ensure the tripod is perfectly level. Positioning the camera in a portrait orientation will also give you more scope when it comes to cropping.
7. In tricky lighting conditions, experiment using different metering modes rather than always rely on the Evaluative/Matrix metering mode to determine the correct exposure. For example, use the Center Weighted or Spot metering mode.
8. To yield optimum depth of field, use hyperfocal focusing by identifying the hyperfocal distance using both the lens focal length and aperture and then focusing on the hyperfocal distance.
9. To further improve depth of field and sharpness and get images appearing tact sharp from the near foreground to the distant background, capture two separate images with the first focused on an element in the foreground and the second on an element in the background. Then blend the two images together later in Photoshop. Photoshop makes this easy by automatically selecting the sharpest sections of both images and combining them!