Landscape Photography

There are many rules that you can stick to to make your landscape shots look more professional and in this section we will take a look at a few of them. Using some simple techniques you can transform boring everyday landscape shots into something you will be proud of.

Firstly to get great landscape shots you need to be aware that there are only two times of the day when the light is at it best, this is at dawn and dusk and around half an hour either side. At these times of day you won't get harsh shadows from the sun but you will get soft golden light. All professional photographers seem to stick to this rule and that's how they get amazing shots.

If you are shooting at dawn or dusk you will definitely need a tripod as you will be using low light, this means you will be leaving the shutter open for longer and will need the tripod to keep the camera steady and avoid camera shake and blur.

Another thing to consider is the composition of your shot, you need to have a foreground, middleground and background, for example the background could be the sky, the middleground hills or mountains and pretty much anything that takes your fancy in the foreground.

The horizon line is very important in landscape shots and if it's on an angle and it's not intentional it's going to stick out like a sore thumb. So for great shots you can use a spirit level which can be attached to your tripod or your accessory shoe. If you do get it wrong you can always adjust the straightness whilst editing on your computer.

If you are shooting blue skies then a polarizing filter is fantastic for adding richer tones of blue to your shot. You can rotate the ring on the filter to vary the amount of polarization and even take reflections off shiny objects and glass.

Another great filter for landscape shots is a neutral density gradient filter this will balance the exposure of the ground and sky. The filter is dark at the top and graduates down to transparent this allows you to take a shot where if you expose for the sky the ground won't be too dark or if you expose for the ground the sky won't be too light.

Leading lines always look great in landscape photography, for example winding pathways, fences or even waves, if you get the angle correct you will draw the viewer into the shot and this makes for a much more interesting photo.

Sometimes just turning the camera to portrait orientation will dramatically improve your shot, this works well if the sky is interesting or you want to include a lot of the ground.

Above all rules are meant to be broken and sometimes you just need to experiment to get a great shot, don't just set up your camera in the same place that everyone would, trying taking shots from the ground and including lots of detail or even adjusting the aperture to pick out one part of the image.

The great thing about digital photography is that we can see our images immediately and therefore take more shots using different setting and techniques to see how it looks, so be creative and take loads of shots and just edit out the bad ones later.