This article is also available as a video. So if reading is too tedious for you, the YouTube video is linked below.
Landscape photography is a genre where the latest and greatest equipment is absolutely not important. Look for good noise behaviour, the ability to make manual adjustments and the possibility to shoot in raw format. With that, you are well served for the time being.
This allows you to use specialised lenses and achieve a wide range of results with the same camera.
In my opinion, kit lenses are a waste of money. It’s better to spend a few euros more and invest in something decent. Either way, you’ll notice it after a very short time.
I would invest in a good lens right away. For landscape, a standard zoom with maximum aperture f4 is perfectly adequate for the first time.
Don’t buy a super expensive lens with extreme speed if you want to do landscape photography. In practice, the maximum focus is often between f5.6 and f13 (maybe even f16). In this genre, high speed is only really necessary for aurora photography, and if you want to do a lot of milky way and star photography, it is at least helpful.
In my opinion, one of the most important investments. A good tripod will last you for years, longer than any camera. Don’t save money at the wrong end. Putting a camera worth several hundred to a thousand euros on a €50 tripod is not a good idea.
Use smartphone triggers or a 2‑second timer instead.
As a landscape photographer, you will be on the road a lot. Being able to carry your own equipment around safely and well packed on your back is worth a lot.
In landscape photography, we normally use the available light. If you want to explore more creatively later, you can of course include artificial light sources. But for the beginning, there are more important and sensible investments.
Photography is painting with light. Get to grips with different lighting situations. Stray light, backlight, frontal light, hard light, soft light, etc. and see how they look in your pictures. If you don’t like a picture, it is often due to the wrong light for the chosen motif.
This and all other shots of this post you can request under “Prints” as an art print for your wall at home directly from me.
Photographers who see can create outstanding photographs with “bad” equipment. Photographers who are blind to their environment and have no vision cannot even achieve average results with top equipment.
Pictures often have a special effect when certain colour harmonies determine the picture. Sharpen your eye for such situations.
A picture can benefit immensely from certain contrasts and interesting or special shapes. Learn to pay attention to such features.
Learn to reduce your images to the necessary. Subject, as the main actor, and supporting actors that play to the main actor. When taking pictures, pay attention to what you can and should place outside the picture. This is at least as important as paying attention to what is in the picture.
You can find many well-known locations online via Google Maps, Google Earth, Locationscout, etc. and can plan your photos and visits in advance. However, you can only find many, especially unknown, motifs by being out in nature. Use Sunday excursions, walks and hikes to discover motifs. Save them and come back for your photo in the best conditions.
Set up your photo locations and spots in digital form right from the start so that you always have them available. Google’s MyMaps service is great for this.
Get to grips with weather maps, forecasts and weather apps and you’ll always be in the right place for the best weather conditions.
Use different angles, vary the position of the camera, especially in height.
Use the golden ratio, rule of thirds and central perspectives for a photo. This ensures a fundamentally well-constructed image in the first place. But in certain cases, consciously decide against it.
When did the respective rule work, when did it not? When was the conscious “breaking of the rule” right and when was it not?
You need to know what the aperture does, what effect different exposure times have and what you can achieve with different ISO values. Everything else will come late
Especially at the beginning, everything is so much. An infinite number of settings, buttons and possibilities. You don’t have to master everything immediately, be aware of that. Some things you will never use, that’s normal. So why overwhelm yourself with a bunch of different lenses or other gadgets at the beginning. There are photographers who have only ever had one focal length for their entire photographic career, maybe you are one of these people? Keep your equipment to the bare minimum, especially in the beginning.
Especially at the beginning, you don’t want to spend a lot of money. Therefore, don’t believe any advertising promises made by filter manufacturers. Theoretically, you can reproduce any filter effect digitally. Only the effect of the circular polarising filter is not possible digitally. Therefore, if you need a filter, this is it.
This filter is not an “always on” filter, use it deliberately. In damp forests you reduce the reflections on leaves and bring the colours back into the picture. Contrasts in clouds in the sky can be enhanced. You can also use it to reduce reflections on the surface of water. Learn to use this special filter consciously.
You will certainly have lenses with different filter diameters at some point. Therefore, it is better to spend a few euros more on a larger filter that you can adapt to lenses with smaller filter diameters using inexpensive adapter rings. All in all, you will save a few hundred euros.
An expensive camera, an expensive lens and then you put a cheap junk glass plate from a cheap filter supplier between the subject and the sensor. That makes no sense. Buy — if you can — a high-quality filter from a renowned brand (NiSi, Kase, etc.) This will give you sharpness, colour and low chromatic aberrations.
Use matrix metering in the beginning and don’t worry too much about spot metering and others. This will basically give you a balanced exposure that you can get the most out of afterwards. As long as you don’t end up with burnt out or completely underexposed areas.
The histogram already shows you when taking the picture whether there are too dark or too light, burnt-out areas in the photo. This maximum black, or pure white, can no longer be produced in image processing. On the left, the dark and on the right, the light areas of the image are added up in the diagram. If there is an accumulation on one side, the exposure must be corrected.
If you have a lot of dark areas but only a little white (for example a waterfall in a dark forest), your camera will aim for a medium exposure. Parts of the water would be shown in maximum white without structure, without any chance of correction in the image processing. You have to correct the exposure downwards.
If you have a lot of light areas but only a little black (scene in snow or fog), the dark areas may be too dark. When restoring the image in image processing, you get so much noise in the image, some dark areas may also be completely without information. Exposure correction upwards helps.
Modern cameras have the option of taking an exposure series. In this case, the camera takes several pictures with different exposures in one go. From underexposed to overexposed. This is always necessary when the dynamic range of the recorded scene exceeds the dynamic range of the camera sensor. The individual exposures are simply put together in post-processing, resulting in a shot with a larger dynamic range and all the details from dark to light.
You have to decide which software is right for you. Adobe Lightroom & Photoshop are the comprehensive top dogs. With Luminar you might get there easier and faster, but after a while you might miss the control for all the details.
The cameras of today are not yet able to reproduce the landscape scenery as you have experienced it and as you have raised it in yourself. And that is what it is all about. Convey to the viewer what you have experienced, what you felt, your moment in nature. No automatic system and no artificial intelligence can do that.
In der Anfangszeit kann es sinnvoll sein, sich Raw + JPG Dateien von der Kamera ausgeben zu lassen. Gerade wenn man noch nicht so vertraut mit der Bildbearbeitungssoftware ist kannst du die Out-of-the-cam-JPGs gut nutzen. Aber sobald du später deine Fähigkeiten am PC ebenfalls verbessert hast, stehen dir mit den RAW-Dateien alle Möglichkeiten offen.
In landscape photography, the aim is often to achieve continuous sharpness from foreground to background. Therefore, learn how to set the right focus point and the hyperfocal distance.
In many cases of landscape photography, you want sharpness throughout. Sometimes focal length or aperture limit us to such an extent that we cannot get everything sharp in one image. Then we have to take pictures with different levels of sharpness and merge them in post-processing.
In some focal length ranges, continuous sharpness is no longer possible without a huge effort. For these longer focal lengths, play around with depth of field in the foreground or background.
The light is perfect, you found a great composition and took a picture? Great! Now don’t stubbornly stick to this composition. The light is perfect so try something else, because in a few minutes the light won’t be there anymore. Especially in the beginning you should try out, experiment and photograph, photograph, photograph! If later, as an experienced photographer, you focus on the one master shot, that is of course perfectly legitimate.
I know, one is often overwhelmed by the grand scenes of this world and desperately wants to squeeze everything onto the sensor at once. There’s nothing wrong with that at first. But be sure to remember point 14 “Reduce”! You should get into the habit of focusing on the small details in nature. They can become your foreground in a wide-angle shot or maybe even your main subject in a macro shot and so on. That reminds me…
We had just said it. You’re standing at a vantage point. Great light. Mega view. In front of you rivers, forests, meadows, mountains, clouds. You get your wide angle on the camera. Zoom in to the minimum focal length, stand there and pull the trigger. I’ll tell you in a minute. These pictures are for documentation purposes at most, but they are not useful for your holiday photo book or for anything else. No one knows what exactly they are supposed to be looking at. That’s why you should look for something interesting in the foreground. Make it the star of the shot. Get close to it. With a low position you reduce the yawning emptiness in the middle ground, and so on. If there is nothing in the foreground, use a longer focal length. Pick out an interesting detail in the landscape. A tree that is beautifully lit by the sun, or, or, but don’t pack everything into your wide-angle shot at once. That won’t work.
As a beginner, you should shoot in all light conditions and analyse afterwards what the special features are. Golden light, side light, back light, diffuse light through cloudy skies or fog, in the rain, high-contrast light at midday, which can be great for black & white photography, at night and the blue hour, in artificial light, and so on. Gain experience. But the important thing is to analyse the images you take.
In landscape photography, we benefit from the long shadows and soft light before sunset and after sunrise. The time of the blue hour also holds many surprises. You should, of course, focus on this time.
If it doesn’t fit, you can still take photos at inconvenient times. Because taking photos is better than not taking photos.
There are many myths about backlighting. The fact is, backlighting can create many great effects. It can reduce an image to minimal colours, such as golden yellow. There are possibilities to capture sunlight stars and even for portraits, backlighting can be very interesting. So go ahead and try it out.
Each lens is supplied with a lens hood. There is a reason for this. In the case of light coming from the side, or disturbing light from unwanted light sources, it prevents the direct incidence of these light sources into your lens and the associated loss of contrast. To avoid such situations, use the lens hood. If the main light source comes directly from the front, however, it is of no use.
Colloquially bad weather can mean the perfect photogenic weather for photographers, so be prepared if you ever find yourself in the rain.
You are at the location. You have discovered an interesting motif or a beautiful foreground. Cool. Take the camera in your hand and take your first handheld test shots. If necessary, use automatic mode or aperture priority with automatic ISO. Move yourself and the camera up, down, sideways. Tilt the camera. Take a step forward, back. How does the scene look with different focal lengths. Have you found the perfect composition? Good, then…
If you know what, how and why you want to take this shot, then control your settings and get the most out of the image. Remember: you’re taking a picture, not a snapshot! If you need the tripod for a longer exposure, now is the time to set it up. You need a polarising filter? Then put it on now and capture your masterpiece on the sensor.
Don’t measure yourself against others, only against yourself. Don’t make colleagues in your genre your competitors. If you think the people around you in your photographic environment are your competitors that you are trying to beat, they will notice in no time. Do you want to work in a hostile environment? Do you want your colleagues to share all the good opportunities with you or keep them to themselves? You get what you give. We might see each other as enemies, but we should rather perceive each other as colleagues who can also benefit from each other’s success.
Always remember. It is not important to be better than everyone else. It is only important to be better today than you were yesterday. That’s the only way to get ahead!
Be aware of this at the beginning and minor setbacks will throw you off track much less often. You don’t automatically become a professional through a single workshop with a well-known photographer. There is also no one golden rule. Learning to photograph is an ongoing process. You can learn to press the shutter in a few hours or minutes. Seeing and photographing, possibly for a lifetime.
Even if the many points may “overwhelm” you at first. Take them to heart and read them from time to time, then you’ll get off to a good start and save yourself a lot of frustration.
I hope there were some tips for everyone and please let the community know if you have a good tip for the landscape photography beginner and write it in the comments. Thank you for your support and see you next time.
I’ve also put all the points together in a video, feel free to watch it and give feedback if you liked it!
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