Landscapes

Long lens landscapes

It's instinctive to reach for a wide-angle lens when photographing landscapes, but a telephoto lens is also an essential part of the creative landscape photographer's camera kit.

A telephoto lens enables you to compress the elements of a scene, making the foreground and background appear closer together than in a photo taken with an ultra-wide lens.

Zoom in with a long lens and mountain ranges will seem more tightly packed, trees in a forests more densely populated.

Telephoto lenses can also make it easier to compose landscape photos as they capture a narrower angle of view compared to wide-angle lenses. Being able to simplify a scenic often makes for stronger pictures.

HDR landscape photos

High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography enables you to capture detail in all areas of a picture - from shadows through to highlights - that you normally couldn't squeeze into a single picture.

HDR photography essentially involves taking a number of photos at different exposures - either manually or using your DSLR's autoexposure bracketing function - and then blending the best bits of each exposure into a single image.

Enthusiast and semi-pro DSLRs like the Canon EOS 5D Mark III and the Nikon D800 have built-in HDR photography modes that do the blending for you in-camera. However, for more control and flexibility, do it later in specialist software like HDRsoft's Photomatix.

Long-exposure landscapes

Using a long exposure to photograph a landscape will cause any moving elements to be recorded as motion blur.

Waterfalls, waves and trees on windy days will all add interesting movement to landscape photos if you use a shutter speed of several seconds to photograph them.

Getting a slow enough exposure usually requires a small aperture, low ISO and low light. However, you can also achieve this in bright daylight by attaching a Neutral Density filter to the lens.

ND filters come in a range of strengths, each blocking the amount of light that enters the lens by a different amount.

Strong ND filters, such as the Lee Filters Big Stopper, will allow you to use extremely long exposures on even the brightest days, creating long exposure photos that stretch for many minutes rather than being over in seconds.

A 10-stop ND filter like the Big Stopper or the B+W ND110 can enable you to turn a crashing sea into a milk-smooth millpond.

Tilt-shift landscapes

Tilt-shift photography enables you to combine the sharpness of large lens apertures with the extensive depth of field you normally associate with small apertures.

This is achieved by using a tilt-shift lens, which can be both tilted (to control the plane of focus) and shifted (to correct any converging verticals).

However, by tilting the lens to give an ultra-shallow plane of focus and, you can make landscapes look like miniature models.

The most convincing tilt-shift landscapes combine an element of hardware (trains, boats, cars) and a raised shooting position to mimic the view of looking down at toys on a bedroom floor.

Tilt-shift lenses are expensive though, so why not create a fake tilt-shift miniature photo in Photoshop? The results can be just as effective.

Black and white landscapes

If you want to take great black and white landscape photos, shoot in color. By using your digital camera's raw picture quality setting rather than JPEG, you'll record a color image that you can convert to black and white later in photo editing software such as Lightroom or Photoshop.

Doing it this way means that you have full control over the black and white conversion, such as using dodging and burning techniques to make specific areas of the photo brighter or darker, split-toning the image or adding a color-popping effect.

Even though you're shooting in raw format, select the Monochrome picture style on your DSLR. This will give you a useful black and white preview of the image on the rear screen, even though you're recording a color image.

Panoramas

Instead of using an ultra-wide angle lens to try and squeeze an entire view into a single frame, why not try shooting a panoramic landscape photo instead?

To build a panorama, first take a series of overlapping shots with the camera positioned vertically - this will give you much larger panoramic image than if you use the camera horizontally.

Although specialist panoramic tripod heads are available, they're not always necessary, particularly if you're using software that stitches a panorama automatically. The latest version of Photoshop's Photomerge app is particularly adept at this process.

When you take the pictures that will be combined to make the panorama, use manual settings - manual exposure, manual focus and a manual white balance preset - to ensure consistency across every picture.

Infrared photos

Although you can create a fake infrared effect in Photoshop, nothing beats the thrill of doing it in-camera. Infrared landscapes can be in black or white or color, with both offering a very different look and feel.

For the best photos, it's worth considering getting an old DSLR converted to infrared. You won't be able to use it for regular color photography once the IR conversion has been carried out, but it's much more convenient than having to mess around with IR filters on an unconverted camera.