So many photographers will tell you that certain pieces of kit are the key to enabling you to capture amazing landscapes.
Well, guess what?
I’m not one of those photographers.
To me, what enables you to shoot landscapes that provoke emotion in people has nothing to do with anything remotely technical. Landscapes evoke emotions and that takes a lot more than having the right gear, so here are my 5 Big Tips that will actually help you shoot amazing landscapes EASILY!:
1. Use This Lens: Your Favourite Lens
Yep, that’s right, I’m not telling you to use a specific lens.
I’m not even going to tell you what lens to use for different landscape scenarios! If you’ve been using your gear for a while you will know what lens you love using the most. It’s usually the one you always first grab out of the bag when you go out on a shoot.
But why not a particular lens recommendation?
It’s because when we’ve developed a rhythm using a particular lens, we’ve actually found the tools that best capture the world AS WE SEE IT. You have established a visual storytelling aesthetic and this is really helpful when looking through your viewfinder at the amazing landscapes around you.
It can be incredibly easy to fall into the trap of believing that we need to buy amazing wide-angle lenses. But its actually about staying loyal to our existing photographic storytelling voice and using that as a launching pad for capturing the vista before you.
2. Familiarise Yourself With The Location.
I know this may seem like a really obvious tip, but it really does help immensely.
Going on a reconnaissance drive-by beforehand to the area you want to capture really helps, as it will make the actual shoot a lot easier knowing exactly when you need to be there for the light you want and how much time you have to capture it before your desired light disappears.
Familiarising yourself with how the light falls on the stand-out features of your landscapes at certain times, what other subjects are similarly lit at the same time, these are all little observations you can make note of that really make the difference in creating considered works as opposed to snapshots.
3. Be Open to Other Compositions Working Better
One of the biggest mistakes we can make when photographing landscapes is becoming incredibly attached to producing a particular image. Even though we may have been able to plan according to the light and for how long, there are still many possibilities for anomalies or obstacles to arise that prevent you from getting that shot.
Be it agricultural machinery being in the way, fallen branches, unexpected humans being there or unexpected animals for that matter, whatever it is it’s really important to be able to detach and work with these new unanticipated elements, or to find a completely different composition.
I can’t tell you how often this has happened to me, where the images I have come away with and love are not the ones I necessarily intended to take!
4. Try Shooting ‘Landscape Portraits’
When you think of landscapes you typically think of wide-angle, all-encompassing images that take in the whole vista, or even a panorama! These shots can be wonderful but they are a dime-a-dozen on the camera rolls of many a tourist and also the fronts of many postcards in gift shops around the world.
Think about when you visit a new landscape for the first time. The first 30 seconds are you marvelling at the beauty of its entirety, but it doesn’t take long for your eyes to start roaming around the scene and singling out individual features of the landscape.
The features that grab you straight away are what will make fabulous compositions for landscape portraits.
Landscape images that mimic the way our eyes view elements in scenes in nature are what pulls us in as viewers, and forms an intimacy between the view and the landscape.
5. Shoot What Landscapes Interest YOU and WHERE YOU ARE!
In this age of photographers making a name for themselves on Instagram, there is now quite the entrenched trend of making a pilgrimage to a popular spot to get “that shot”.
Think about places like Lake Wanaka in New Zealand, where it seems every photographer feels compelled to get that shot of the arching tree just offshore in the lake itself.
But what about the rest of the area AROUND the lake, it is nigh impossible for there not to be any, equally beautiful compositions! There is somehow this perceived ‘legitimacy’ that comes from photographers taking shots such as these.
But what do you actually learn from replicating compositions done tens of thousands of times?
The beauty of being a photographer that captures landscapes is that you are offering how YOU see that landscape, the beautiful features that stand out to you.
The landscapes that pull people in the most are either from places they might not know about (more often than not locations in YOUR area) or different compositions of places they know.
What interests YOU in a landscape and staying true to your photographic storytelling aesthetic is what will make your images unique and interesting… oh and AMAZING!
