I really love to be outside and to capture the beauty of nature in a picture. BUT it has to be practical for me: I don’t want to carry a heavy backpack with a ton of equipment. I don’t want to worry about the right lens and I don’t want to get myself crazy with the technical settings. There are just a few things you have to keep in mind to take breathtaking landscape photos – here you won’t find any “buy this lens to get this photo” or other bullshit. Just plane photography skills.
Point #1: golden light
Theoretically you have 24 hours to take pictures – practically you have just one sixth of it to do that. Of course you need some time to sleep, to eat and to pet your favourite lens BUT try to shovel the hours around sunrise and sunset free. That is the time to sleep somewhere in the mountains, get up with the birds and catch the beauty of nature. Make sure to check the weather forecast beforehand.
Point #2: special perspective
Nobody sees the world like you do. You have a certain height, two special eyes and a mind to interpret everything you see. But when you look at your holiday pictures you will realize that they look just like your friends’. Everyone already saw them. They are not new and therefore also not exciting. As a photographer there are two ways: First you take a particular shot because you saw it somewhere and you want to have it yourself. Or second: You take a picture of a landscape that has already been taken a thousand times, but you use your two special eyes and your mind to do it differently. Or maybe you just did nonsense and somehow something good came out of it.
Point #3: put the cherry on top
However you got your special, crisp and sharp image which is dipped into golden light – it’s time to put the cherry on top of it. Luckily you shot your photo in RAW format, so you can bring it directly to Camera Raw where you can play with highlights, shadows, colour settings and so on … that is where all the magic happens.
Besides that there are other things like framing or image composition – but let’s talk about that another time. I hope I could help you out and enjoy your next photo adventure.