Landscape Photography

Fstoppers has worked hard to bring you valuable educational content from incredible photographers like Peter Hurley, Mike Kelley, Dylan Patrick, Elia Locardi, and Joey Wright. Now we're asking for your help! We at Fstoppers are preparing to create our next premium photography tutorial which will probably cost around $300. We would like to know from the Fstoppers community which genres we should focus on and who it should be with. Would you take a quick one minute survey to help us out?

Recently, I took a trip to Wichita, Kansas to see my sister get married. I packed up my camera, a few flashes, and my tripod for this trip with hopes of doing some photoshoots while in town. My two kids came out with me for this journey, and we ventured around the city.

Inspiration time. These guys are the cream of the crop on 500px at the moment. Note that this selection of landscape photographers doesn’t necessarily reflect my own judgment. It’s based on an average of 8 past articles on 500px ISO titled: “This Week in Popular: Top 25 Photos on 500px This Week.” Of this initial group, I have selected only landscape photographers, and here are their most recent works. Let’s go!

The clear night sky under a new moon is almost always the same brightness in the same location. I have blindly put my camera on ISO 6400 as a result. But after having read somewhere that Sony supposedly builds sensors that are ISO invariant, I wanted to test this claim with my own Sony-equipped Nikon D750.

David Guttenfelder shot for the Associated Press for 20 years, based in Nairobi, Abidjan, New Delhi, and Tokyo, but it wasn't until he helped open the AP's North Korean bureau in 2011 that he became truly famous. His Instagram account has nearly a million followers and is filled with stunning iPhone photos from around the world. He was one of the first photographers to publish images shot on his phone, which caused a bit of a stir at the time.

Everywhere in Europe, heathers are looking positively vibrant. I trust that it's a worldwide phenomenon along the northern hemisphere. They’re also blooming three weeks sooner than past years; a result of an early Indian summer, due to the changing climate. Ostensibly, purple heather is a magnificent subject in landscape photography, but there are many more things you can capture in what is arguably the best season for photography. So let’s get you ready to capture this herald of autumn.

During a two-day trip to the magnificent city that is Rome, photographer Milán Rácmolnár came up with the brilliant idea of photographing Rome in infrared. The result is a different and pink perspective on the cityscapes.

Lofoten, Norway has been getting a lot of attention in the last few years, and rightfully so. Known for its incredible mountains, open waters, and unspoiled lands, it has quickly become a favorite for photographers looking to capture dramatic landscape images. Australian filmmaker Michael Fletcher took two trips here recently and came away with a fantastic aerial film, captured during the season of the midnight sun.

It’s videos like this that inspire me to fly more and capture the beauty in this world. I myself haven’t done much traveling, but there are a lot of awesome places out there to see. Karim Iliya captured a lot of amazing content out in Pachamama and put together this video in a very fun and entertaining way.

Something Thomas Heaton does a lot of us taking incredible and breathtaking landscape photos. Something he doesn't do a lot is show the full creation of a photo from conceptualization to presentation, including post processing. The real story here, though, is the desire to stay close to home and try to create art out of the "normal" and "familiar." What do you do when presented with nothing truly remarkable at first glance?

This Cinemagraph time-lapse was made using only 12 JPEG images. The software allows photographers to create motion within a static photograph. You need to upload each image to the website, and then you design the movement within each image. Once you get a moving image "flowing" you can render it out and import it into Adobe Premiere Pro to create the final time-lapse.

We’re living in a visual society. Every day, we see new ways of visual advertising. Some of the messages presented without the use of words can be very powerful, as if there's some subliminal code that makes us think. As photographers, we are used to delivering messages by solely providing the image. Or are we? This series is the go-to resource for compelling visual storytelling in landscape photography and closes this week with advanced communication techniques that help create spectacular images. Join me now as we dive into the deep end, far beyond compositional elements like lines and color and learn that secret code by heart.

The single most inspirational video I have found to date is this short film describing what landscape photography is all about. Since I've seen this, my local beach has more photographic potential than ever before and I've been out five times already. You've been warned.

In the latest installment of the “More Than Just Parks” series, filmmakers Will Pattiz and Jim Pattiz journey through Grand Teton National Park and capture breathtaking visuals of the natural vistas and wildlife. Their video series aims to document all 59 national parks through beautiful imagery in order to promote the protection and enjoyment of these lands. After you check out the new video (it does not disappoint), the Pattiz brothers share with Fstoppers some of their experiences and challenges working on “Grand Teton” and the video series altogether.

Last year we teamed up with Elia Locardi, one of the most followed landscape photographers in the world, to film "Photographing The World: Landscape Photography and Post-Processing." This is a 12-hour video tutorial on landscape photography, and today, we are releasing the first lesson for free.

Photography changes year after year, but it's a gradual evolution. However, one area of photography that has been accelerating faster than the others has to be time-lapses. The videos have been getting longer, the shots more dynamic where a dolly is more common, and the quality is getting to the point of staggering. It seems that every frame could be pulled and used in a landscape portfolio. Adding to this trend is photographer Joe Capra with his 12K-resolution time-lapse of Los Angeles.

There’s a handful of people on the Pacific Island group of Pingelap who can skip this episode. But if you don’t have achromatic vision like them, I suggest giving this bountiful reference a read, because California-based USA Landscape Photographer of the Year 2015 Ted Gore wrote all about color landscape photography.

Several months ago, Fstoppers and ViewBug teamed up to host a landscape photo contest with Elia Locardi as the judge. Thousands of images were submitted with some heavy competition but the best have surfaced to the top. Check out the winning images below and get a little inspiration from the Grand Jury Winner below.

Mental images, dynamic range, luminosity masking... This week's article in this series is chock-full of terms that will send your head spinning. But when we want to communicate through landscape photography, it is best to speak the language first. I'll show you a big part of my processing workflow, introduce you to a great alternative to HDR photography, and tell you why Ansel Adams' invention is still applicable in digital photography.

Time-lapse videos are everywhere nowadays. You can see them in everything from Hollywood blockbusters, to educational documentaries, to that one weird guy's YouTube channel showing the most random things in a time-lapse format. Well done time-lapses should definitely be appreciated as, make no mistake, they are works of art in their own right.

Without composition there is just visual chaos with no beginning or end, no direction or cycle, no shape or difference between dark and light. This series is the go-to resource for compelling visual storytelling in landscape photography as it provides a condensed overview of all the elements that make up a stunning image. This week: Advanced tools that will nick the attention of the viewer and guide them carefully through your photograph.

Earlier this year, commercial photographer Lars Schneider was followed by a camera on a trip to the Faroe Islands to document his “other life” as a landscape photographer. The resulting video gives us insight into what his professional lifestyle entails and the change of pace enjoyed when shooting landscapes for personal fulfillment rather than clientele.

Landscape photography is the often stigmatized genre of it not communicating anything other than display of beautiful imagery at best. In this epic arc series, I strive to provide an integral resource for working on your own landscape images. We’ll cover planning, shooting, and post-processing, and talk about anything from composition to colour theory. And for the more advanced photographers, we’ll include the use of shapes, tropes, and negative space to aid in compelling visual storytelling. This week: A composition primer.

The port city of Cape Town, South Africa is as famous for its imposing Table Mountain as it is for its Robben Island prison, where Nelson Mandela was jailed for nearly 20 years. Budding native Photographer Janik Alheit has captured Table Mountain in a unique shot that is part futuristic, part science fiction in appearance. Alheit says it was weeks in the planning and features the Milky Way over a cloud-drenched city just before dawn.

Slowly but surely, I find myself shooting more film. It’s getting to the point where my digital cameras are almost strictly for video. They may offer better resolution and more versatility, but there’s a look to film and a fascination with the cameras that pull me to it. The one man that took me into the bottomless hole in my wallet that is film photography is Mat Marrash, a coworker and an avid large format photographer. It's some of the most gorgeous landscape photos of the Ohio Valley I've seen. A few weeks ago, Mat, myself, and the good folks at Rooted Content traveled to Hocking Hills, where Steve and Kyle from Rooted created this short of Mat’s work.

One of my favorite things to do is fly my drone around Indonesia and share photos and videos of my country's natural beauty. When I flew my first DJI Phantom back in 2013, I realized the incredible opportunity drones gave to capture that beauty from a unique perspective. Since then, I've upgraded to the DJI Phantom 3 and DJI Inspire 1 for all my aerial work; specifically, I focus on creating aerial panoramas and 360-degree panoramas. Today, I want to share some tips on how you can create your own 360-degree aerial photo and upload it to SkyPixel for their Aerial Panorama Contest for your chance to win a DJI Phantom 4.

Two weeks ago, SkyPixel teamed up with DJI and launched an aerial photography contest that could win you a brand new DJI Phantom 4 and a Huawei P9 Plus smartphone, along with several other big prizes. Contestants have been invited to submit their best 360-degree aerial photos to the world's largest aerial photography community before noon on June 20, 2016. The submissions have been pouring in, but the best image has yet to be chosen. If you would like to join the fray and take home a brand new drone, check out the details below.

In this documentary from 1958, we'll get to see first hand what founding father of modern photography, Ansel Adams, dropped in his camera bag before he went on a shoot in Yosemite National Park, as well as some rather juicy technical tidbits.

When National Geographic calls and asks you to take on a project that involves capturing one of the most photographed places on the planet, how do you come away with something new or unique? Six photographers took on this challenge and shared their stories and images in this short video.

I love going out to shoot landscapes and finding new places that I think will look really cool at night. However, sometimes it’s hard to get to these places because of how far you actually have to go to get there. Here is my story from the night of May 25.