8 useful tips for landscape photography | Articles | Photo, video, optics

Suc­cess­ful land­scape pho­tog­ra­phy relies heav­i­ly on prop­er loca­tion, com­po­si­tion, and light­ing. Land­scape pho­tog­ra­ph­er Mark Den­ny shared tips for pho­tog­ra­phers of all expe­ri­ence lev­els.

Insta­gram Mark Den­ney @markdenneyphoto

No. 1. Elastic support

Attach a sim­ple elas­tic cord to the hook at the bot­tom of the tri­pod. Addi­tion­al weight can be attached to it to make the tri­pod heav­ier and pro­vide a more sta­ble and lev­el foot­ing. Thus, you can hang, for exam­ple, a bag.

Pull the elas­tic cord through the han­dle of the bag and attach it to the tri­pod hook, this will allow the bag to rest on the ground, which will ensure that the tri­pod is secure­ly fixed.

No. 2. Shooting in the water

When shoot­ing in water, Dan­ny rec­om­mends extend­ing the bot­tom of the tri­pod legs rather than the upper leg seg­ments. This keeps water and sand out of the tripod’s hinges, extend­ing the life of the tri­pod and caus­ing few­er prob­lems when it comes to clean­ing it.

Number 3. Polarizing filter

Although a polar­iz­ing fil­ter can tra­di­tion­al­ly be used only in cer­tain sit­u­a­tions, such as when shoot­ing mov­ing water to elim­i­nate reflec­tions and flare, this fil­ter can help in oth­er sit­u­a­tions as well.

Dan­ny uses a polar­iz­ing fil­ter on every shoot, at least to see how it affects the frame and whether it can improve the end result by remov­ing light reflec­tions from dry leaves, for exam­ple, and cre­at­ing a brighter image.

No. 4. Shower cap

To pro­tect your cam­era from rain, you can use a sim­ple show­er cap. This is an afford­able and com­pact addi­tion to a pho­tog­ra­pher’s kit that will save your equip­ment.

No. 5. Vertical telephoto panorama

A long focal length lens cre­ates a shrink­ing effect. To solve this prob­lem, Den­ny rec­om­mends set­ting the cam­era ver­ti­cal­ly and pan­ning from left to right.

No. 6. Shutter movement

If you want to cre­ate motion blur, such as in water or the sky, and you don’t have a neu­tral den­si­ty (ND) fil­ter to do it, you can low­er the ISO and increase the aper­ture val­ue, which will reduce the amount of light. This will give you the option to move or slow down the shut­ter to add a blur effect to the frame.

No. 7. Capture the sun’s rays

To cap­ture the sun with beau­ti­ful rays pass­ing through the branch­es or leaves in the for­est, it is enough to reduce the aper­ture, for exam­ple, to f / 32. Depend­ing on the type of lens, the sun’s rays will dif­fer in appear­ance.

Notice the dif­fer­ences in the pic­tures. In the first pho­to, the shut­ter speed (SS) is 1/40, and the aper­ture val­ue is 5.6. In the sec­ond shot, as Dan­ny advis­es, the aper­ture is reduced to 32, and the shut­ter speed is 1 / 1.3. At the same time, the ISO val­ue remains the same — 320.

No. 8. When taking a panorama

To make it eas­i­er to shoot panoram­ic images, Dan­ny takes a pho­to of his hand at the begin­ning and end of the panora­ma to make it eas­i­er to iden­ti­fy the start and end of each sequence when import­ing and edit­ing images.