7 Common Landscape Photography Mistakes

Landscape photography has a lot of potential pitfalls to it, and it takes the confluence of a variety of techniques and creative ideas to make a successful image. This great video details seven common mistakes landscape photographers commonly make and how you can avoid and/or fix them.

Coming to you from Nigel Danson, this helpful video discusses seven common mistakes landscape photographers make and what you can do to fix them. Of them, I think one of the most common is using the wrong light. I firmly believe that all light is good light in landscape photography; in other words, I think that you can make great photos no matter what the light is, but the key is learning to read the light and make photos that it is conducive to. It can be easy to fall into the trap of looking at a scene and visualizing a certain composition, but if the light does not work with that composition, then the image will not be successful. Of course, the beauty of landscape photography is that you can plan for when the light works for what you want. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Danson.

And if you really want to dive into landscape photography, check out "Photographing The World 1: Landscape Photography and Post-Processing with Elia Locardi." 

Alex Cooke's picture

Alex Cooke is a Cleveland-based portrait, events, and landscape photographer. He holds an M.S. in Applied Mathematics and a doctorate in Music Composition. He is also an avid equestrian.

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5 Comments

Touches all the bases of landscape photography. Every landscape photographer should pay attention to this one. Well worth the watch.

I feel like the 'x misakes' 'y ways to improve' format is fairly saturated but this was still a good watch. I liked Nigel's use of other photographers' examples.

Just a good video. No drama, just good instruction.

I agree. I hardly ever watch these kinds of videos any more. Not because I don't have anything else to learn but because they aren't targeted at where I'm at in my photography. This is a great video. Instructional, to the point, no drama, uses plenty of examples. Kudos to those who allowed their photographs to be used, and Nigel is an example of how to give constructive criticism. He's got my follow!

Thank you for this excellent reminder of things I’ve learned to do over decades but mistakes I continue doing.

I have learned to post process many of my pictures by cropping in to have a different perspective and improve the composition by following your examples. This makes the pleasure of photography extend to beyond the picture taking phase. This sometimes mean that pictures I delete are recovered to focus on the best parts and remove unneeded aspects or wrong ratios. But of course getting it right at the start is even better and that might just mean moving around or changing lens.

The one critical aspect that is not easy to recover is lighting so best to get that right but as a travel photographer it is not always possible to come back at the golden hours. Some graphically interesting pictures that are ruined by bad colours are sometimes recovered by switching to black and white.

So thanks again for this « basics » lesson even for long time photographers, it helps continuing to improve.