Have you ever wondered how photographers can obtain super sharp images, with great colors and silky smooth water?
Do you want to improve your Landscape photography and bring it to another level but you keep saying that your camera is not good enough? This article is for you.
I will cover the basic equipment we should have to start improving Landscape Photography with a few accessories and a small investment; I’ll share with you great tips to take a great shot without having expensive camera bodies and just using the correct settings in your camera. This article is split into 2 parts to make it easier and to not overwhelm you with too many pieces of information.
The most important thing you should add to your camera bag is a tripod.
It’s not a great tip, right? It seems obvious and many of us are lazy to bring a tripod every time we go out for a walk. But if you want to shoot great landscape photos, you cannot forget it at home under your desk.
Most of the time, I see people spending tons of money on camera bodies and lenses but they never invested a dollar to hold their expensive stuff when it’s necessary. There’s a misconception, for those who start into the world of Landscape Photography, that the use of the IS (or Ibis or whatever it’s called in each camera producer brand), the image stabilizer in the lens or the body, will make the image for you if you have to capture an amazing landscape in low light.
No matter now how much you spend on a tripod if you don’t have one, just buy one and use it! the market is full of alternatives that you can find from 50$ to thousands of dollars, in magnesium, aluminium or carbon fibre material.
If you are new to Landscape photography or photography in general
My advice is “try to look at some tripod on a budget”, to first gain confidence in using it and then, after a good intense use, you will understand better what are your needs. Maybe the weight and the compactness are important to you, or maybe you will prefer a more steady solution but reliable in situations where you don’t have to hike for 5 5-hour trek.
I fastly browsed Amazon and I immediately spotted plenty of options. If you check these 2 tripods, for example, they’re cheap and reliable for beginners and amateurs. We are talking about 45-50$ out of your pocket, and in exchange, you will have a completely different result in terms of quality, sharpness and long-exposure images.
8.0 sec at f/13, ISO 400 @ 24mm – Canon 5d mark II with Canon 24-70 f/2.8L
Ok, you bought a tripod! Now you are already a few steps away from having great photos in your portfolio. As long as you carry your tripod with you, you can use it for different purposes in terms of Landscape photography.
These are the main landscape photographic situations you should use it and I will go through each one by one
Sunrise and Sunset or during golden and blue hours
During sunset and sunrise hours, there’s always low light because the sun is too low on the horizon. We can surely bring home some images without a tripod but it will be not as sharp as we can obtain with it. Moreover and not less important, using a tripod will help us to maintain a low ISO setting, it will let us use a closer f value to avoid a shallow depth of field and it will help to maintain a slow shutter speed without losing sharpness.
Low light landscape
For the same reasons I mentioned before, we should use a tripod also in these situations. Low light situations can occur frequently; on cloudy and rainy days for example or in specified spots where we don’t have much natural light available. Have you ever tried to take a photo in a jungle or a dense forest? Or during a walk in a canyon surrounded by giant rock formations? That’s why you need a tripod.
Night sky photography
Not much to say about this situation. I always smile when I see someone trying to get a snapshot of the sky during the night, either with a mobile or a DSLR. There’s no way you can get a decent shot without a tripod; in 2020 there’s still someone who prefers to occupy the memory of their cards with black images.
Sometimes a tripod is not enough to photograph the sky or for deep-sky photography; serious night sky photographers need a series of other accessories such as a star tracker and very bright lenses. I will not investigate this matter in this article. I can surely say that if you want to catch the stars in the sky, you should follow some rules, first one is using a tripod, then you can refer to the rule of 500, commonly used to avoid star trails in the final result of your exposure.
if you want to explore the fascinating world of the night sky and Milky Way photography you can find here a good article that explains better the rule.
Panorama stitching
In terms of panoramas, I have to be honest and say that photo-merging software and tools reached a level of precision that helps a lot when we want to shoot this kind of image. But, in case of low light, it will be pretty impossible to handheld our camera in a vertical orientation and turn randomly some degree to capture our wide view panorama shot while we are using a shutter speed of 2 seconds. Not only we are not using the full potential of the lens (because using the camera handheld will never lead to a precise movement and will never let us maintain the horizon at the same level in the frame), falling into the process of extra cropping the final composition, but we are capturing blurred not usable photos.
In this case, a tripod with a simple ball head it’s our hidden weapon.
You can still try to capture panoramic images handheld, but a tripod, with a ball head or a panoramic head, is ideal to get perfectly aligned stitching in the post-process.
Not to mention that using a tripod will give you another advantage: if there are people in your composition and you would like to remove them from the photo without using crazy hours of editing, you can tweak the settings in your camera and slow the shutter speed to make them completely disappear. In this way, you will help the editing software to avoid ghosting in your photo sequence and you will get a clear merged image without distracting elements.
Using people and crowd movements in long shutter-speed photos is interesting, give it a try! Think about them as water flow. (check the waterfall, sea, and river situation mentioned below in this article)
Night cityscapes
Another reason to use a tripod is to capture the coloured lights of a city during the night. If you are not a wild spirit but you prefer to stick around easy paths, night cityscape photography is always rewarding and it can be funnier if we bring a tripod with us. The stability that it will give to our camera will improve the quality of our images. As I mentioned in the previous photographic situations, a tripod will let us open new horizons in terms of low-noise night photography.
Using a low ISO will make the buildings and the city details stand out like never before and the lights on long exposures will acquire a new life. If we have car traffic in our composition, we can use their lights to create interesting motion trails. Try it and tell me! You will never go back home with boring shots after you tried.
Water elements (waterfall, rivers, lakes, and sea)
We often visit beautiful waterfalls or angles of paradise where the water is the main subject in our scene but we always go back home with the same images of our friend that he used a mobile phone and auto settings. Well, I have good news for you, forget those days and bring a tripod with you. If we struggle to catch the power of water is mainly for 2 reasons: the composition is wrong and/or you are using the wrong shutter speed. I will explore composition in one of my next articles, but for sure I can help you with the shutter speed issue. Most of the images that have water as a subject don’t express any movement or power of this element; this is why we should use slow shutter speed to achieve that silk effect we all want. Not only the photo will look better, but the smooth effect we get will help our eyes to read better the movement and the direction of the water. Creating these “lines of action” will drive our eyes to a better understanding of the power, speed and volume of our main subject.
I always suggest exploring different shutter speeds, ranging from 1/60 of a second if we have strong, fast-falling waters, to 2-3 seconds for smaller and slower waters. Of course, you are free to push your limits further and experiment on your own.
So how can you maintain a long shutter speed handheld? You can’t! That’s why you need a tripod.
If you intend to work for stock image platforms as a contributor
If you ever worked as a contributor or you have in mind to start a business in stock image platforms such as Alamy, Shutterstock, 123rf and similar, you have to be ready to face a lot of rejections due to lack of sharpness or low-quality photos. To maximize your approval rate is strongly necessary to use a tripod and the mirror lock-up function on your camera. Despite sunny days and high contract scenes, using a tripod will make your photos as shaper as possible, avoiding micro-blur and giving you more control over the depth of field. Most of these platforms sell Royalty-free images, but Alamy it’s more oriented for Right managed licenses. This kind of license is for clients who will probably print your image for magazines, and big commercial advertisements and they want the best quality ever for their final product. So a tripod will make your life easier in your Stock photography career. Feel free to browse my Right managed license in the dedicated section of this website
When you want to use a long focal length for your landscapes
Most beginners think that to approach Landscape Photography is necessary a super wide-angle lens (16-35mm or 17-35 for example). I want to demystify this myth.
Less is more
A lot of great landscape photos are captured with a standard zoom lens (such as a 24-70) or a telephoto lens. In terms of filling our frame and creating a pleasing composition, I always have in my mind a famous sentence by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe a German-American Architect, a pioneer of the modernist architecture movement and the last director of the Bauhaus who said “Less is More”, meaning that simplicity and clarity lead to better design and result.
This concept is very precious in Landscape Photography and a telephoto lens is the best option to isolate interesting subjects and let out distracting elements.
In conjunction with a telephoto lens, we need a tripod to ensure sharpness and long exposures in case of low light. Moreover, we will be able to frame better our composition, use the Live view function to preview our exposure on the screen and easily get a shot for our portfolio.
To achieve the best sharp image output from your camera
Ok, the photo for this section is not related to any landscape situation as I mentioned before, I did this macro in the early morning (around 7 am, not so early) but it’s here for the main purpose of telling you how important a tripod is in photography. Without it, I would never be able to catch a perfectly sharp image of this dragonfly. I usually avoid using artificial lights in my photos and the sun at that time was too low to take a shot at low iso ( to maintain detail and have a not noisy result) with this sharpness.
If you want to bring your photography to the next level this accessory it’s a must-have.
Today I talked mainly about landscape photography, but a tripod it’s useful for many different subjects. The list of benefits of using a tripod every time is endless, sharp images, long exposures, panoramas, nightscapes and much more. Carrying it around is not always a pleasure, but in exchange, it will give you big flexibility and it will open more creative opportunities for your future photos.
It’s not my intention to say that without a tripod you are not a real photographer, or that your pictures will look worse.
With this article, I’m trying to show you how really useful it will be to have one. I will write soon the second part of the article where we will talk about filters, mirror lock-up function and other small tips and tricks, especially Polarizer filters, an essential tool that we all should have in our camera bag all the time.
If you still cannot take sharp pictures after reading and using my suggestions, you should stay tuned for my future articles where I’ll give you a better understanding of how to properly use a camera and always get sharp images with the right settings.
I hope you enjoyed reading this article and please feel free to ask anything or give a comment about my articles using the field below or contact me directly. I’ll be happy to answer and in case clear your doubts.
