Learning landscape photography: Thomas Heaton’s great guide to planning & shooting landscapes

 

 

Photographer Thomas Heaton has a new video covering a wide range of tips and tricks for capturing better landscape photos. Let's get right into it with the first topic, the weather. You've really got to check weather forecasts in advance. While they're not perfect and surely not always accurate, they arm you with information and that's a very powerful tool to have at your disposal. Knowing what the conditions might be like allows you to pack the right gear and plan ahead for the right kinds of shots.

If you want to give yourself the best chance at nice landscape photography, you're going to have to get up early and/or stay out late. Near sunrise and sunset, conditions are often the most visually interesting. You can get nice colors, dynamic lighting, interesting contrasts and shadows. It's not easy getting up before the break of dawn, but it's something successful landscape photographers do frequently. Heaton says that the best way to get great landscape shots is simply to get out there and chase them. You can't get awesome landscape shots while sitting at home. It may seem simple and obvious, but it can be easy to spend more time wishing for a shot than working after it. You may have to go to the same location day after day before you get a shot you like, but that's simply the way it goes. And other times you'll get lucky, but you have to be there to be lucky.

Sometimes you just show up somewhere and point your camera and click, voila, great shot. The hard part is getting up early, getting out there and being able to keep at it even when things don't go well. Other times it isn't as obvious what a good shot from a location will be. Heaton has some tips for composition as well. It may seem obvious, but it's critical to find a subject. Sometimes a vista will look amazing in person but doesn't translate well to a photograph because you didn't choose a specific subject to anchor your composition. Balance is an important consideration as well, is your subject balanced in the frame? An imbalanced image can work in certain cases, but often it is just a distracting and doesn't quite come together for a pleasing final image.

On the more technical side of things, Heaton keeps it simple with respect to exposure…check your histogram and don't blow out your highlights. You don't want to lose your sky. You can help keep exposures balanced in tricky conditions by utilizing graduated neutral density filters. Another filter a landscape photographer won't want to leave home without is a polarizer. While some filters can be replicated in Photoshop, that's not the case with a polarizer. It reduces glare, cuts down on reflections and can prove indispensable in many conditions.

To see more videos like this, subscribe to Thomas Heaton's YouTube channel. You can also stay up to date with his photography by following him on Instagram.

(Via Thomas Heaton)