How To Photograph Landscapes | Beginners Guide

Hey everyone, I'm Will and in this video we're going to be talking about settings and settings specifically for landscape photography. I want to show you how I set my camera up, typical settings for shooting out in the field. Overall I just want to help you be confident with your camera and show you how to get a sharp correctly exposed image. Let's get the camera out and I'll talk about a few adjustments I make within the menu and then we'll go for a walk and actually do some photography. But let's take a look at the menu itself and some of the things that I typically set up when I first get a camera. First thing we're going to talk about is changing from shooting in JPEG to shooting in RAW plus the white balance as well. So take a look here. By default your camera will probably be shooting in JPEG. JPEG images are compressed and have a lot less data compared to shooting in RAW. So I suggest going in and changing the format to RAW files. This way you're going to get a lot more data out of your stills. The next thing I'll suggest is with the white balance. A lot of people ask about this. The white balance is telling our camera what white is and then bases every other color off that. I typically just leave mine on auto. Because we're shooting in RAW files we can adjust the colors later on in our post-processing. So just leave the white balance on auto. If your camera has inbuilt stabilization you'll definitely want to make sure that that is turned on. That way you're going to be able to shoot handheld at a lot slower shutter speeds. The last thing I'll mention is the color profile. Now I typically shoot in what's called vivid. Your camera might be called landscape. This basically gives a bit more saturation and contrast to your images. However because we're shooting in RAW when you get these files on the computer they'll go back to looking quite flat. So I'm only setting this up just so I'm getting more of a real-time look while I'm shooting at how the final image will come out. If anything it just gets me a little bit more inspired when I'm out shooting instead of just having a flat standard profile. Okay that's the menu side of things done. Let's go for a walk now and we'll talk about the settings in regards to ISO, aperture, shutter speed and getting a sharp image that's correctly exposed. I want to encourage you guys to be shooting in manual mode. Manual mode will give you complete control of your camera and it's going to make you a more versatile photographer able to shoot in any scenario. Whether you're on a boat, in a plane, shooting handheld, tripod, astro etc. So that's what we're going to be talking about now. Shooting in manual mode and I'll run through the typical settings that I use when I'm shooting landscapes. Now obviously there are so many variables, different light, different subject matter but these settings are going to give you a ballpark idea of what you're looking for to get the optimal results. When we're shooting in manual mode we're controlling the exposure triangle, our ISO, our aperture and our shutter speed. So let's talk about these three and the typical settings that I use in my photography. When it comes to the ISO, the lower we are the better our camera's dynamic range is going to be, the ability to capture the highlights and the dark shadows and the noise is going to be lower. So for that reason I'm typically trying to shoot at lower ISOs and around the native ISO of my camera. So every camera has a native ISO and that's where it's going to perform the best. Typically this is going to be either 64, 100 or 200. So just look up for your individual camera. My native ISO is 100 so 90% of my images are sitting around ISO 100 or 200. It's very rare for me to go above ISO 200. Now if I start to go above it's kind of like slow and steady. We don't want to be skyrocketing that ISO. The only time I'm really doing that is for astrophotography. So otherwise I'm shooting at ISO 100 or even 200. So right now if I'm going to shoot the forest here I'm going to throw my ISO on 100. We're now going to talk about the f-stop. The f-stop is all to do with our lens and it's controlling our depth of field. In landscape photography depending on how close you are to your subject matter as well as your focal length that's going to determine what f-stop you might need. I like to have everything sharp within my frame which typically means I'm shooting at higher f-stops. These are what you'd call narrow apertures and here we're getting way more depth of field than if we're opening up the aperture and shooting on these lower numbers. So if like me you want to have everything sharp within the frame you'll probably be sitting around f8, f9, f11 but there's so many variables. How close are you to that foreground that subject matter? If everything's far off in the distance your f-stop won't need to be as high but if you're quite close to something in the foreground you'll find that you'll definitely need that f-stop around f11 even f16 etc. The only real way to know the exact f-stop you need is basically trial and error. Begin at something like f8, take your exposure and then you'll just have to zoom in on the camera and check the foreground, check the background and see if you're sharp all the way through. If you're not just slowly put that f-stop higher and higher. Absolute worst case you might want to tweak your composition slightly you just can't be incredibly close to that foreground matter and expect to be sharp there as well as the background. In those scenarios we might actually have to focus stack and take multiple exposures. Now you probably don't want to be doing that at this point in your photography so just come back a little bit, simplify your composition and keep in mind the wider you are on the lens the more depth of field you're going to get. So if you're 16mm at f8 you're probably going to get everything sharp anyway. If you're f8 at maybe 35mm you'll find that the depth of field is a lot shallower so there's so many variables. The aperture and depth of field is a tricky one from a teaching perspective so the best thing I can say is keep that f-stop a little bit higher and then trial and error. Just take several different frames compare them and then you'll get the feel for what you use. Once I've set my ISO and my aperture the last thing is the shutter speed and what I like to do here is keep an eye on my histogram. Histogram is a graph that's showing us the data that we're about to collect in our image or if you've taken the exposure you can check the histogram afterwards and see what you've brought home. Basically what I'm looking for is not losing my highlight details. We have pretty good shadow recovery these days in digital cameras so I'm not too concerned if the left hand side of my histogram the data's clipping slightly. What I want to make sure is that the highlights are not significantly leaving the graph, that right hand side. If you want to learn more about histogram just check out this video here. Now if you're handheld, shooting handheld like I do pretty much all the time, you'll just want to make sure that your shutter speed's not too slow. That's going to come down to the camera you have, how stable your hands are, there's so many variables so if you are a complete beginner I definitely suggest just getting a cheap tripod with a ball head. It's going to help you when you're first starting out. I'm going to shoot handheld this is a relatively slow shutter speed here one third of a second so for that I'll definitely put the camera up against my face so I'm extra stable and then typically I'll just hold my breath to take this exposure. Now after that's done I bring up the image, I check the histogram, make sure I'm happy with that and then the final check is zooming in, pushing the magnifying glass and just making sure that I'm actually sharp. Did I get the depth of field I was after? Was I shaking because I was handheld? So you want to check those things. If your histogram is fine, you're happy with the comp and you are sharp, you're in focus, sweet you've got the exposure. In regards to the exposure and the histogram, I know it can be a bit confusing, just make sure that the data is not significantly leaving the right hand side. If the histogram is falling and ending in the middle that's completely fine. This is where our post-processing really comes in. We kind of finish off that exposure later on. Remember shadows are meant to be relatively dark and highlights are meant to be relatively bright. We just want to make sure that we've got the data there to bring home and then we can adjust the exposure later in post. With all that out of the way, let's do a little summary. When you come out on location and you find your composition and your subject matter, we're going to be on manual mode and now all we need to adjust is the ISO, aperture and shutter speed. ISO, keep it low, so stay relatively close to your native ISO to get less noise and a better dynamic range. With the f-stop, you're just going to assess your depth of field. If you've got something close as well as something far away, you have a big depth of field, you probably want that f-stop number being higher somewhere around 8, 9, 10, 11 and then you'll just really need to take the exposure and check and see if you're getting all that depth of field. From there, once you've set that f-stop, obviously it's the shutter speed, this is where the histogram comes in, it's showing us the data, the light that we're about to capture. Adjust your shutter speed accordingly. If you're finding that it's getting too slow, maybe you want to put the ISO up a little bit, maybe you want to get the tripod out. If you're trying to freeze action, you'll want to speed the shutter up to be a lot faster. There's so many variables but that gives you a ballpark idea. Alright guys, I hope that helps a little bit. Obviously every scenario is going to be different but hopefully that's just put you off in the right direction. If you have any questions at all, just leave them below, more than happy to help you out. Otherwise, I hope to see you in a new video soon. Cheers.