BEGINNER Landscape Photography ADVICE To IGNORE

Many thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this week's video. You know, on this channel, we discuss all things related to landscape photography. We discuss tips and tricks and best practices that you can apply to your infield and on-location workflow. We discuss post-processing techniques that you can apply to your landscape photos, whether it's in Lightroom or it's in Photoshop. We discuss beginner experiences and beginner advice. But one thing that we've never discussed on this channel before is bad advice. And I believe that understanding what not to do is as equally as important as understanding what to do. And that's the topic of this week's video is to discuss beginner landscape photography advice that you should ignore. Now, all the advice mentioned in this video is advice that I either received directly or indirectly in my first 12 months of landscape photography. And I implemented every single one of these things. And every one of these items negatively impacted me one way or the other, whether it was from a monetary and financial perspective, or it was from just an overall growth and progression perspective. Now, I do wanna preface this video real quick by saying this is purely just my opinion. What I consider to be bad advice might be great advice to somebody else. But these are all things, as I mentioned, that I implemented when I was a beginner that did not serve me well. Now, I rated all of these items, all of these pieces of advice in order of importance. So bad advice number nine is, I guess, the least egregious of them all. And bad advice number one is, hands down, the worst piece of landscape photography advice that I received as a beginner. So to jump right into it, bad advice number nine is, you always need to be shooting in manual mode. So when I first got into landscape photography, I consumed as much educational content on the genre of photography as I could. I watched tons of YouTube. I listened to lots of podcasts. I read tons of books and articles. And I kept hearing this kind of reoccurring theme, this sense of urgency, that a beginner needs to stop using the automatic modes on their camera and begin using manual mode as fast as possible. Don't even use aperture priority. Don't even use shutter priority. Only use manual mode. Now, I do agree with this to a certain level. I do think that everyone should understand how to use manual mode. It's gonna help you understand your camera better. It's gonna help you understand the exposure triangle better and how aperture, ISO, and shutter speed impact the overall exposure of your image. But I do not think you always need to be shooting in manual mode. I don't think shooting in manual mode is a badge of honor. I don't think that, or I know plenty of professional photographers that shoot in aperture priority mode. I even know some professional sports photographers that shoot all of their games in shutter priority mode. So I think it depends on the specific scenario a photographer finds themselves in or the photographer themselves. But I do not think you always need to be shooting in manual mode. Bad advice number eight. If you're gonna be into landscape photography, you must get a set of graduated neutral density filters. I believe there is only one filter that is a must-have and all other filters are the nice-to-haves. I think a circular polarizer is the only filter that a landscape photographer absolutely should get for one reason. Well, there's many reasons, but the main reason is because a circular polarizer's effects cannot be replicated in any post-processing software that exists today. But a graduated neutral density filter's effects can easily be replicated in pretty much any post-processing software available today. And also, this is another big one too, using a graduated neutral density filter is a destructive workflow. If you're not careful, and this has happened to me many times, especially when I was a beginner, when I would slide the graduated neutral density filter in front of my camera, I thought it was perfectly straight on the horizon. It looked good in camera, only to find when I get the image back home and I start to review it, that the filter was a little bit crooked. And when you find yourself in that scenario, there's nothing you can do. The image is ruined. That's what I mean by a destructive workflow. If you use a graduated ND effect in post-processing and you don't like the way it looks, just delete it and add another one. So that's why I think you do not have to have a graduated neutral density filter to be into landscape photography. Bad advice number seven, you should always expose to the right. This is also commonly known as E-T-T-R, exposed to the right. And it's a common fundamental or foundational piece of advice. And I don't really know if it applies as much today as it did maybe 15 or 20 years ago. But the thinking is to expose your images as bright as possible, and stop right before you blow out your highlights. With the thinking being that you're going to get as much detail in the shadows as possible. And then when you get your image back in post-processing, you can decrease the exposure to an acceptable level that looks good to you, but you'll still retain all that detail in the shadows. But I think modern day cameras today are shipping with such high levels of dynamic range. I know my camera does. I don't even shoot with a new camera. I'm still using the Sony a7R II, which I believe is like three or four years old now. And even that camera has plenty of dynamic range that I can pull one, two, sometimes three stops of clean, noise-free shadow detail out of the darker areas of an image. So I actually do the exact opposite now. I don't expose to the right. I actually expose to the left a little bit. I underexpose every one of my photos by one to one and a half stops usually in order to protect the highlights and knowing the capabilities of my camera. So I think it really just depends on your actual camera. Bad advice number eight. No, I'm sorry. Bad advice number six is you should always shoot on a tripod. What's interesting about this is the reason we shoot on a tripod, the main reason we shoot on a tripod in landscape photography is because we're shooting with a shutter speed that is too slow for us to handhold. Now, a lot of times you're not shooting with that slow of a shutter speed though. I've shot plenty of landscape photos where I'm shooting at a shutter speed that's plenty fast. I found myself when I was a beginner using a shutter speed almost a thousandth of a second and I'm still shooting on a tripod, but you can easily handhold faster shutter speed images. Actually, cameras today, almost all of them have in-body image stabilization and many lenses, most lenses have optical image stabilization so you can handhold very slow shutter speeds, sometimes as slow as a full second and still come away with a very clean image. So I don't think that you always have to be shooting on a tripod for landscape photography. Bad advice number five, if you wanna make a great landscape photo, you must be shooting during the golden hours. You have to shoot sunrise and sunset. And when I was told that, it seemed like great advice at the time because those are probably, those are the two best times, honestly, to shoot landscape photography. You get that nice warm sidelight that wraps around and creates structure around any type of object that's in your image, but it's not the only time that you can make a great photograph because there's plenty of my favorite images that were captured right in the middle of the afternoon, albeit it was on a very overcast day, which is some of my favorite conditions to shoot in, where you get that kind of nice, just very even light across the landscape. But to say that you can only shoot at sunrise and sunset to make a great image, I think it's just bad advice. I think the good advice would be to really pay attention to the light that you're experiencing because you can't assume that shooting during the midday is gonna be harsh light. A lot of times it is, but oftentimes there's not. There's always clouds in the sky, or not always, but a lot of the times there is, and it just creates just a natural soft box effect, soft box effects, which just creates fantastic light on the landscape. So no, I don't think you always have to shoot during the golden hours to make a great landscape photo. Bad advice number four, you have to get a full-frame camera. This could not be further from the truth, and I fell victim to this very hard because I started with the D, I believe, 3200, which was like a $300 camera at the time, and I heard about a full-frame camera. If you're into landscape photography, you've got to get a full-frame camera, and I did just that. I went out and bought a D750 within a few weeks. I returned the 3200, bought the Nikon D750, which was going from basically a $300 camera to, at the time, I believe it was almost a $2,000 camera as a beginner, and I did not really see any increase in photo quality, maybe a little bit, but it didn't make me a better photographer. I guess if I zoomed into the image, you could definitely see a little bit of difference, but it didn't improve my overall photographs is what I'm trying to say, and there's plenty of information out there. It's kind of a hot topic nowadays. There's lots of articles and videos on this topic where it'll show an image taken with a micro four-thirds camera and a crop sensor camera and a full-frame camera, and can you tell the difference? And I tell you what, it's really hard to tell sometimes the difference between the cameras out there, so I don't think it's a must-have to have a full-frame camera. It's a nice-to-have. The only scenario where I think you have to have, or it's really good to have a full-frame camera is if you're into astrophotography and shooting the night sky in a milky way. Full-frame is very good in that scenario because it's gonna enable you to collect more light with that full-frame sensor, so that's definitely a huge benefit for that style of photography. Bad advice number three, and this is where they really start to get good or really get bad. You don't need to buy an L-bracket. I was told, Mark, don't waste your money on an L-bracket. It's only gonna do a couple things for you. It's gonna waste your money, it's gonna make your camera heavier, it's gonna make your camera bulkier. If you need to switch your camera from a landscape orientation, just roll the ball head over into the little notch, and then you're in portrait orientation that way. You don't need to buy a piece of gear just to do that. And I'm not 100% sure exactly how long it took me to get an L-bracket, but it was a long time, well past my first year. But when I decided to get an L-bracket, within a week of using it, I realized what I was missing. It is so much easier to use an L-bracket than it is to not use an L-bracket, because whenever you don't use an L-bracket and you wanna switch to a portrait orientation, and you roll your camera over, it changes your composition. It changes the balance of your tripod. You have your camera and lens hanging off to one side, and it makes shooting a pano a little bit more difficult as well. So getting an L-bracket is a piece of advice that I would highly recommend, and it was a piece of bad advice that I received to not waste my money on one, because I think next to the tripod and your camera, I guess, it is some of the best pieces of equipment that you could possibly buy. Bad advice number two. This is a big one for me, and I kind of flip-flopped this one, number two and number one. I wasn't 100% sure which one is the worst piece of advice, but I have this one as number two. Never, ever crop your photos. Always get it right in-camera, and I heard this constantly. And I think this might have been more true in the past, 15 years ago, when cameras weren't shipping with the resolution that they are nowadays, and you didn't wanna crop your photos then, but I think that the cameras nowadays, you can easily crop in your photographs, and I actually do it on purpose now. I don't only use the crop tool to remove distractions from my image. I actually use the crop tool on purpose. I shoot for the crop, or I compose for the crop, and what that is is when you're on location, you get your composition set. I actually zoom out a little bit because I wanna create additional real estate around my composition, so I have a little bit of additional leeway when I get my image back in post to crop because these images, they have plenty of resolution to crop in a little bit. I used to really get nitpicky, and when I was a beginner, I would really sweat just kind of moving the crop in just a tiny bit because I thought I was ruining my image. I was losing resolution, but it's just simply not the case with modern day cameras today. You have plenty of resolution to crop. Now, bad advice number one, and hands down the worst piece of advice that I received, mainly because it impacted me in such a negative financial perspective, and that advice is you wanna get the holy trinity of lenses, and what I mean by that is, it's not so much the three lenses. It's the thought track that you need to get lenses that cover the focal range from wide or ultra wide all the way to telephoto, so whatever that is, 14 to 16 millimeters to 200 millimeters. You wanna get lenses that cover that entire spectrum, so that's exactly what I did. I went out and bought a 25 millimeter prime. I went out and bought a 55 millimeter prime. I bought a 85 millimeter prime, and I bought a 70 to 200 zoom lens. I don't own any of those anymore, but I bought them all at the time to fill out that focal range, and I only used really one of those lenses. It was my 25 millimeter prime. It was a Zeiss Batis lens. Fantastic lens, but that was really the only lens that I used. I never shot with the 55. I never shot with the 85, and I rarely shot with the 70 to 200. It was all with that ultra wide lens, but I bought them all because I thought that was just what you were supposed to do. Now, what I think the better advice is is to start with one lens. I would recommend a wide angle zoom, a 16 to 35 to start, and use it for six months or maybe a year, and figure out exactly what you want beyond there. Figure out exactly what you're missing, but don't go out and just purchase all of those lenses just to fill the holy trinity of lenses to cover every single focal length between 16 and 200, because you should really just get what you want to shoot with. Every photographer shoots a little bit different. Heck, now I only use two lenses. I use a 16 to 35 millimeter zoom lens, and I use a 100 to 400 millimeter lens, so I either shoot wide or I shoot long, and that's it. I don't have anything in the middle, so I wasted a ton of money in my first year of landscape photography. I think five or $6,000 on those lenses. I only used one lens, and I really wish somebody would have told me, Mark, don't do that. Just start with one, use it for a while, and figure out exactly what you're missing, and then go get that lens, and figure out exactly what you want to take, and go get that lens, but don't just fill out that entire focal range. So those are the nine worst pieces of advice that I received as a beginner in landscape photography, and I hope some of that resonated with you. I hope you didn't know all of it or heard all of it. Hopefully it'll help you in some capacity that you can apply to your landscape photography workflow moving forward. 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