Valley of fire, NV

I’ll give you a few landscape tips for beginners, today.

1. 1. Use the right lens. I recommend either the ultra wide lens (10-20 on a crop camera, 16-35 on a full frame camera), to show perspective and depth; or a telephoto lens, to bring backgrounds closer.
   2. Use a low ISO, like 100 or 200.
   3. Use a high f-number, like 11 or 16. Especially important if you use the telephoto lens above.
   4. If you can, use a tripod. The two settings above may well require it.
   5. Focus one third into your scene. That gives you the best sharp focus range.
   6. Just in case, carry a polarizer and an ND filter. The polarizer for removing reflections or to emphasize some blue skies, and the ND filter for slow shots of waterfalls or water surfaces.
   7. Consider shooting some panoramas. For those, use manual setting, so that all pictures are exposed equally. Avoid foreground objects. Turn the camera while on the tripod, overlapping successive images by, say, 30%.
   8. Don’t pack too much. Weight doubles hourly when carried!
   9. shoot at the best time of day. Often, that means 5pm or 5am, the “golden hour”.
   10. Consider bringing a flash. More than you’d expect, you’ll want to light up your foreground.
   11. Keep the image simple. Pay attention to detail.
   12. Look for attention points in the foreground, middle ground, or background. Like frames, reflections, s-curves, juxtapositions, etc.
   13. Prepare. Enter location coordinates, found on google, into your gps.
   14. take one iPhone picture so that you have the coordinates, and then copy them in Lightroom from that iPhone picture to your other photos. Unless, of course, your camera already has a gps built in.

These fifteen rules should get you going! For a little more detail, see my Landscape Photography book on http://Learning.photography .

Come to my April 27 workshop in Toronto, if you want flash techniques that work. See the previous post.