Learn landscape photography settings for any camera. In this video, I answer a question from the community – asking for the best landscape photography settings. I talk about things to consider for your lens, your camera, and even stability for different situations. Dive into the best settings for landscape photography.
Transcription was done by Descript‘s automated transcription services which means it’s an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain spelling, grammar
Hey, this is Scott Wyden Kivowitz a storyteller with a storyteller, with a camera talking about all the things photographers like you and I are thinking about. And in this video, we’re going to be talking about camera and lens settings. When it comes to landscape photography, you see, I had a question in the community about, well, what settings to have the camera for landscapes. So today I want to cover that in this video right now, right now I’m recording F four, right? Aperture is at F four and everything behind me is going to be out of focus. It’s going to be very, very shallow depth of field, meaning I’m in focus and everything behind me is very, very soft. The first tip I have for you is to adjust your aperture to be a F eight F 11 F 16. Something like that, because what that’ll do is this.
And as you can see right now, everything behind me is more in focus. Still, not a hundred percent in focus, but more in focus. Now, the reason you want to do this is when you have a landscape you’re talking that is going to be different objects, different things at different focal points at different focal lengths, different focal planes. So you might want that shed to be in focus. You might want the trees to be in focus. So by closing up to an aperture like F 11, F 16, maybe F 22, whatever it is, you’re going to have more things in focus than you would at F four at F 2.8 at F 1.8 1.4, whatever it is. So keep that in mind. Your aperture makes a big difference when it comes to landscape photography. Another thing to keep in mind is actually what you are focusing on.
So if you want to, let’s say that this is a rock in the middle of water. Those are trees back here that are just trees behind the water. And then let’s see may neighbor’s house is actually mountains in the distance, right? You’ve got all these different things. So what you are focusing on is very important. You may not want to focus on, let’s say this tree here or that grass. You may not want to focus on the mountains. What you may want to focus on is the rock or the shed that’s in the foreground because that’ll actually give the eye something in particular
To really
Capture the attention. And then the rest of the scene, add to what you’re seeing as to that beautiful landscape view. One additional piece of advice is you may not want to use a wide lens, like what you’re seeing right now, right now I’m using a 14 millimeter lens. You may not want to use a lens that are super wide. Instead. You might want to use a long lens, 85, 1 to 5, 1 35, 200, 304, 500. Something like that to get in closer to that, uh, landscape scene. Because if you want to see more of the mountains, you might have to get in closer in order to do that. You need a, a long lens. So keep that in mind as well. The focal length of your lens can actually completely change the view of your landscape. We’ve already covered the aperture that your lens is set at. We’ve also covered what you were focusing on, and we have covered actually how
Far you were actually,
You know, looking through your lens, what focal length lens you are using. But there one other thing that is very important when it comes to landscape photography, and that is tripods. Tripods are basically an essential when it comes to landscape photography, because you don’t want to move the camera for a few reasons. One is you might be using a longer shutter speed. Now using a longer shutter speed might actually mean that your clouds in the sky are more fluid that are more organic shaped. It might mean that the water that you’re photographing is more foggy, like or smoother that you can see the rocks below the water. So if you’d like to learn more about long exposure photography, I’ve got a whole course and an ebook just on long exposure photography, click the link in the description down below. And I would love for you to check that out. And if you have any specific questions about landscape photography, leave me a comment, happy to answer them. And finally, another reason why a tripod is extremely important is you might want to consider focused asking, instead of just focusing on one part of your landscape scene, you see focus stacking is when you are actually focusing with one aperture, one shutter speed, one ISO, your, everything is set in the camera, but what is changing is actually what you’re focusing on. So focus stacking will make it so that you are focusing on, let’s say these trees,
The house, the grass, that tree,
The tree line over here, and even maybe my neighbor’s house back there, you’re focusing on all of that different stuff, all these different focal planes, and then either in camera, cause the Nikon [inaudible] can do it in camera or maybe light rooms, photo merge, photo focus, stacking feature, or maybe Photoshops focus, stacking feature or tools like on one photo RA or any other software that can do focus stacking. Maybe you take all those and you combine them. And the software, the focus stacking software will actually mask automatically mask the different focal planes into one image where a hundred percent of the image is in focus.
Think about that as well.
When it comes to landscape photography, typically focus stacking is seen with product photography so that the a hundred percent of the product isn’t focused cars, things like that. However, it can make a big difference in landscape photos as well. So there you go. There’s a bunch of tips that I can use that I just gave you about improving your landscape photography with certain settings, certain effects, certain different things. I hope that you consider those, give them a try comments, come back here, comment. Let me know how they work for you. And of course I do have that long exposure, photography education available if you’d like it as well. Thanks for watching. And I’ll see you in the next video.
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