When Shooting Landscapes, take a few things into mind before shooting your masterpiece.

Step 1: Know what you want. It is essential for you to have a general idea of what you want to achieve before shooting your photos.

Step 2: Know your camera and Know your lenses. Generally, for landscape photography, a wide angled lens is most appropriate, but some photographers manage to get away with a standard lens. Also, know your camera. Make sure your picture won't be over or underexposed (unless you want it to be), and if your not sure how your picture will turn out, play around with your camera until you get it right.

Step 3: Aperture and Shutter Speed. Know when to adjust these and when to leave them alone. If it's a windy day, your probably best going with a faster shutter speed unless you have a very sturdy tripod. You can also adjust the aperture depending on time of day, type of shot and light levels.

Step 4: Get a TRIPOD! It's a lot harder to shoot a masterpiece without one. it's also pretty much impossible to have a slow shutter speed. But, when buying a tripod, get a well built one - The sturdier the tripod, the less it will move around in windy and rough conditions.

Step 5: Polarizers, Neutral density filters, and Graduated neutral density filters. The key to landscape photography is control of light. A polarizer will help take glare off the water and other reflective surfaces like leaves. Neutral density filters will evenly stop a specified amount of light from hitting your sensor. Let's say you want to get that nice silky effect on a water fall but the day is sunny. If you just shot the image without a ND filter, you might not be able to slow down your shutter speed enough without blowing out the highlights. No problem, ND to the rescue! Gradual ND filters are invaluable to the sunrise or sunset shooter. By placing the grad ND filter in front of your lens you decrease the amount of light reaching the sensor from the bright part of the scene (the sky), thereby allowing nice detail from the foreground to show through without blowing out the highlights. If you're a beginner, I suggest getting a 3 stop hard and a 2 stop soft grad ND filter. All other filters are optional and I'm sure you'll experiment with them once you master these ones.

Step 6: Remember the 3 elements of a good landscape: foreground, midground, and background. In my photos, I prefer to think of the foreground as the ground, the midground as the subject and the background as the sky, but these can easily be changed and experimented with.

Step 7: Focus. Every photo should be in focus, but not necessarily every area of every photo has to be. For the ordinary landscape photo, you'll want the whole thing in focus, but try doing something different every once in a while. Put a silhouette in the foreground of your photo, have a very soft focus to give your photo a magical sense or just use photoshop to manipulate your photos into something special.

Step 8: Shoot RAW if possible. If your camera lets you, shoot in RAW image format. Sure, the photos will take up more space on your memory card, but you'll get far more freedom to manipulate your images in photoshop, etc, when your done.

Step 9: Be ORIGINAL! Try and do something you haven't seen done before, or try and find out how someone else took a photo and try and replicate that photo - just to learn something new.

Step 10: Tell a story - make sure your photos have a subject, message or meaning to them so that they are something different.


Thanks for reading, jRiff