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Learn Digital Photography with Sandro Dzneladze

10 awesome landscape photography tips

Category: Photography Tips
Written on Dec 26, 2010 by Sandro Dzneladze
10 awesome landscape photography tips

Landscape photography is quite tricky, as our eyes focus on those things that we find striking, whereas camera captures the whole scene. Lenses cannot capture beautiful scenes of the nature in the same way as our brain does. This fact can make a landscape photography unexciting and dull. However, with a little technique and few special tips you will be able to capture the most beautiful and appealing landscape pictures.

  1. This shouldn’t come as a surprise: You should use wide-angle lenses to get the greater angle of view instead of using telephoto lens.
    (But sometimes, very rarely, you will be using telephoto lens to capture certain patch of the landscape. But using telephoto lens for landscape photography is outside the scope of this article, so we will talk about it sometime later…)
  2. You should use a hyper focal point in the frame to achieve adequate sharpness of the landscape. With the help of hyper-focal point, the photographer can access the infinite depth of field.
  3. Another efficient tip to get outstanding landscape photos is to start your shooting at the “Golden Hours” of the day. The golden hours for the landscape photography are the first hour after the dawn and the last hour before the sunset.

    komo-lake-sunset-09.jpg
  4. While you use wide-angle lenses for landscape photography, consider the use of filters. But be cautious, heaping too many filters on such a lens will create the risk of visibility of the filter at the corners of the entire frame of the photo. Try to use an ultra-thin polarizing filter, if it is compulsory to use. Polarizing filter can introduce a number of effects in your photography due to its angle with the sun. You can increase the intensity of blues towards purple and reduce the reflection on river or lake water with the help of that filter.

    city-cognac-river.jpg
  5. Make sure that there is no distortion at the corners of the frames of the landscape image. In most of the cases, the distortion is due to the bad combination of lens and focal length. If the lens of the camera does not come parallel with vertical lines, you will experience distortion.
  6. You can also use the “Bug’s eye View” technique to create unusual and unique landscapes. By placing your camera on the ground or grass, you will capture the scene from a bug eye. You can use a tripod to so that you can go to the ground level while taking the Bug’s eye view picture. However, while using a wide-angle lens, use tripod carefully to ensure that tripod legs are not becoming the part of your photograph.
  7. Use an aperture priority mode, while taking landscape pictures to choose suitable focal points and field depth.
  8. Try to link areas, while taking photographs. Link foreground, background and mid ground with each other so that the subject of your photography does not look small.

    Budapest, Hungary
  9. Try to add drama and sense of uniqueness to your landscape photographs to make them exciting. Try bold combinations, such as red and gold against blues to create a strong effect. Shoot under cloudy sky to create perfect shadows. If you want a soft or somewhat blurred effect, try to shoot on a foggy day.
  10. Try to keep a straight horizon in your photographs. Do not use angles while shooting the horizon.
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