15 Tutorials To Improve Your Landscape Photography Technique

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Honing your landscape photography technique can be a life-long endeavour. It is, in fact, one of the most amazing but demanding genres. It requires extreme levels of patience, usually waking up really early, and decent physical conditions (in the photographer and the weather!).

That's why only the most passionate photographers manage to capture the most mind-blowing images of nature and the world around us.

Here are 15 tutorials to help you improve your landscape photography technique and become a better landscape photographer.

Photo by Alexandre Godreau on Unsplash

Let's Start With These Beginner Guides To Improving Your Landscape Photography Technique

Straight-Up Beginner Landscape Photography Tips (+ What to Avoid)

This tutorial is a great place to start. In it, Russell gives us an overview of the camera gear we will need to start our landscape photography journey, compositional elements that we should keep in mind when starting out and potholes to avoid.

Russell's dos and don't to improve your landscape photography technique include:

  • Don't forget to include the foreground elements,
  • Don't unnecessarily rush your shot,
  • Sometimes think about shooting in Portrait,
  • If you have another lens or can zoom in, then do it,
  • Straighten that crooked horizon

Bite Size Tips: Quick Landscape Photography Checklists

In this Bite Size Tip, Dahlia Ambrose shares with us some really useful tips for preparing everything you'll need for capturing those beautiful landscapes. It is really a great place to start.

Here, Dahlia provides 3 checklists as a quick reference. One for before getting out of the door, another checklist for while you are outdoors and some final quick tips for when you get back home.

8 Common Landscape Photography Mistakes Beginners Make

Also, a topic that is good to review is the common mistakes that beginners to landscape photography can make. Here Richard Walker (Award Winning Landscape Photographer – Winner of the Olympus Global Photo Contest 2017), gives us a rundown of those things we should avoid when we are out and about.

Finding Your Location and Inspiration

7 Inspiring Locations For Landscape Photographers

As Jasenka Grujin says – “every continent has its own unique places that are worth visiting at least once in our lifetime.” While capturing great landscapes in your own backyard is wonderfully fulfilling, combining travel and landscape photography is the ultimate privilege. Take a look at these 7 inspiring locations to get the creative juices flowing (or maybe you are lucky enough to live here already)

Looking For Great Landscape Opportunities? Stay Where You Are

Conversely, rather than travel, why not stay where you are? Here Jason D. Little runs through the benefits of staying where you are when you are looking for great locations to get into landscape photography.

The benefit of staying where you are encourages you to look at your surrounds in new and interesting ways. This provides for great photography inspiration

20 Stunning Landscape Photographs That Will Leave You Spellbound

Here Ritesh Saini has compiled a wonderful selection of photographs to inspire you and your landscape photography. Hopefully, this post will fuel your creativity, or just give you beautiful images to peruse over at your leisure.

Composition And Technique

7 Composition Tips That Will Skyrocket Your Landscape Photography

This fantastic tutorial by Rob Wood covers 7 great composition tips with will take your landscape photography technique to the next level. Covering tips from the rule of thirds to symmetry, this is a great place to start to understanding composition particularly as it applies to landscape photography.

How to Perfect the Art of the Monochrome Landscape

Landscape and black and white photography have had a really close relationship since pretty much the beginning of photography.

Here in this guide, Jason Row shares with us some in-depth information about how to perfect the art of black and white landscapes.

How To Use A Neutral Density Filter For Daytime Long Exposures

ND filters are going to be your best friends if you are slightly interested in landscape photography. Understanding how they can affect light could be very tricky, but here our friend Jason D. Little makes it easier for us by explaining how to use them for daytime long exposure photographs.

Photo by Priscilla DuPreez on Unsplash

How To Capture The Landscape At Its Best

Bite Size Tips: The Misty Water Effect

One of the things people are more intrigued about landscape photography is that silky, misty and creamy look water can get when doing things right. Here in this set of tips, you’ll find a lot of useful information about how to achieve that beautiful look with long exposure settings.

How to Control Contrast So You Always Get Amazing Landscape Photographs

But getting the perfect contrast for a landscape shot can be difficult. Here Jason D. Little give us some tips on how to deal with some tricky contrast situations. Looking at what to do when your contrast is too high and too low, Jason ensures that you will be able to adapt your shooting style to obtain the image you want.

5 Tips for Capturing The Magic of Golden Hour Photography

One of the most magical times to capture landscapes (or any kind of image for that matter) is in the golden hour. In this how-to, Jason D. Little gives us some tips for shooting at this time.

As Jason notes, in very informal terms, the golden hour is simply the first hour of light after sunrise and the last hour of light before sunset and during each golden hour (morning and evening), you will find that the sun is low in the sky and when a light source is larger and closer relative to the subject, soft, diffused light is produced. Magical!

Set That Alarm Clock: Capturing The Morning Blue Hour

The blue hour (which is different from the golden hour)  also provides an opportunity for beautiful landscape photos. Here Jason Row invites us to get up really early in the morning, and trust me, it is worth every minute you will skip sleeping.

Photo by Luca Baggio on Unsplash

Bonus: Space Is The Final Frontier

Bite Size Tips: How To Photograph The Milky Way

Have you ever seen some magnificent photographs with the sky filled with stars and you wonder, “how they make them?”. Landscape photography isn't just for the land, it can also be enhanced by looking towards the sky. In these bite size tips, you will find the basic information you'll need to know in order to capture the Milky Way.

How To Photograph The Moon (With 10 Great Examples)

And speaking of pointing our cameras towards the sky, capturing the moon is an amazing thing for any photographer to learn.  There is a level of difficulty too as the light and the moon's motion all need to be understood and worked with to get the perfect shot. In this tutorial, you'll get an overview of how to achieve some brilliant photos of the moon that will definitely take your landscapes to the next level.

We hope these tutorials will help you improve your landscape photography technique and inspire you to capture some amazing images of the world around us.

If you wish to take your landscape photography to the next level, make sure you check out Landscape Photography by Photzy.

Please don't forget to share your views in the comments below or share your amazing photos with us in the forums or in the Tank as well for some valuable feedback.

About Author

Federico has a decade of experience in documentary photography, and is a University Professor in photography and research methodology. He's a scientist studying the social uses of photography in contemporary culture who writes about photography and develops documentary projects. Other activities Federico is involved in photography are curation, critique, education, mentoring, outreach and reviews. Get to know him better here.

One thing that I learned from reading various things that I thought was interesting, was to take photos with lenses that are less wide angle than people might typically use for landscapes, as that can usually reduce distortion (for example 35mm or 50mm focal length). In fact, some have even merged those kinds of photos with wide angle photos, to get a distant mountain to look correct. Landscape photography is great, but I have found it sad when I go to the bookstore and there’s pretty much all I have ever learnt from books though there are still a couple or more books that I would recommend, once I find the titles again.

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