7 Helpful Tips for Sharper Landscape Photos

Pretty much every genre of photography seeks sharp images, but in landscape work, sharpness is often of a particular importance. If you would like to take nice, crisp photos, check out this fantastic video tutorial that will give you seven useful tips to help you take sharper landscape photos. 

Coming to you from Mike Smith, this outstanding video tutorial will show you seven tips for taking sharper landscape images. One mistake newer landscape photographers often make when looking for sharper photos across the entire frame is stopping down to an extremely narrow aperture like f/22 or f/32. While it is true that this will increase your depth of field, past a certain aperture (normally f/11 or f/16 depending on your camera's pixel pitch), diffraction will start causing increasing softness. Rather, at this point, you should either employ the hyperfocal distance or focus stacking to achieve sharpness throughout the frame. Thankfully, neither of these methods are particularly difficult or effort-intensive and will give you a significant improvement in image quality. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Smith. 

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.

Log in or register to post comments
2 Comments

1. Use a tripod
2. Use the self timer
3. Don’t use the widest aperture
4. Use mirror lock up
5. Follow the focal length shutter speed rule
6. Remember to sharpen your photos when editing
7. Switch off image stabilization when using a tripod.

Sharpness?! About time to killed the over-kill of the subject imo
Unfortunately I don't have name of the photographer who penned this one liner --"when someone says my photograph is sharp I assume there is nothing else to like about the photo "
Like most others; I have been side tracked with the worried about my photo sharpness . That worry also wasted so much money! :(
Once I learnt ''photography is mostly about the light , the quality of that light , and the shadows from that light'' I could start to stop the sharpness worry . Just a couple things I wish I knew/understood 20-30 years ago . Not sure I heard about sharpness 40-50 years ago

"a blurry photo is a mistake, ten blurry photos are a trial, a hundred blurry photos are a style". by Aldo Palin , Just B+W FB group