Landscape photography can be a tricky genre to work in, particularly since you don't have control of the light or the elements. There are lots of lessons to learn, and to save you time and aggravation, this great video features an experienced landscape photographer talking about lessons he wishes he had learned sooner.
Coming to you from Thomas Heaton, this excellent video features him talking about lessons he wishes he had learned sooner in his career. Of his many helpful points, the most relatable for me was understanding light. When I first started in landscape photography, I put a lot of attention toward finding nice scenes and compositions, but I didn't pay enough attention to how much light really matters — right down to its ability to make or break an image, no matter how beautiful the scene is. Once I spent the time considering and learning to read the light, and then even learning how to forecast it and predict when a scene would be viable, my keeper rate increased quite a bit. Check out the video above for Heaton's full thoughts.
And if you really want to dive into landscape photography, check out "Photographing the World 1: Landscape Photography and Post-Processing!"
I made an account just to comment on this because I was so annoyed by this video. Why was this made? Why does it take 20 minutes to say what should have taken 30 seconds? Why does fstoppers make so many redundant videos and written posts stating the same basic things?
My phone constantly suggests fstopper articles to me that all have these exciting titles like this one. The articles or videos always have the most basic advice that is stated over and over again as if it is groundbreaking. Yes tripods are important. Yes an expensive tripod will be better than a cheap one just as an expensive lens will be better than a cheap kit lens. Taking good photographs does take a lot of practice and experience. This all seems to be common sense.
Who is this video intended to help? Why should i watch a video when the person making it cant be bothered to take like 5 minutes to just film it properly without the sound of wind and traffic? Was it so important that he shared this knowledge of cheap lenses, filters, and tripods fall short of more expensive ones that this video just has to be made so quickly that there was no time for production value? Would a bullet point list fail to convey the importance of tripods in the way this weird off the cuff selfie video?
I know there is no reason for this comment and it is a total waste of time but so was that video. I'm also hungry and cranky so there it is.
Is it a bitter pill to swallow?
I don’t know whether this video is good because I turned it off after about two minutes. It began with a full minute of the presenter pulling his car out of a parking spot. If fstoppers doesn’t start doing a better job of editing its content, I’ll stop coming to their website.
I agree it has bad editing and production value. The parking lots, drives, and awful wind. I just wanted to share though that the video wasn't made by fstoppers just shared by them/someone on the community. The photographer Thomas Heaton made this on his own channel.
Thanks, I enjoyed the video. My drives are usually full of expletives from road rage and surely not useful as yours. The tips were good and sincere. I lived in England for 3yrs with the US Air Force and wish I was in photography at the time. Your tips are helpful and very helpful if your just starting out. Take care.
So many landscape images are picture of pretty places rather than an outstanding image of the place many would have walked right by. When I look at a landscape image I want to see the photographer's vision of the place, not simple a well executed post card. A couple of years ago I spent a couple of days at the much visited and much photographed South Rim of the Grand Canyon -- a place I had been to at least ten times before. I spent tens of hours the couple of months before my visit. I knew when and where on the horizon the sun and moon would rise or set from the several locations I'd chosen. I didn't simply want to repeat the tens of thousands shots others had taken or the shots I'd previously taken. It was a moderately successful shoot, but I missed the several shots I had really wanted -- the ravens soaring below me down in the canyon. The fault was mine. I should have practiced with the long lens on similar subjects and gotten better at it.
Pretty annoying,talks too much and wastes too much time, now he just does it for the number of YouTube views.