The Portrait Photography Trick That Makes Landscape Shots Stand Out

Landscape photography is one of the most crowded genres in the medium, and standing out gets harder as cameras make technically competent images easier to produce. Ben Harvey argues the answer isn't more gear or better locations; it's rethinking how you use depth of field in a genre that almost never does.

Coming to you from Ben Harvey Photography, this practical video introduces what Harvey calls "shallow landscapes," a technique that borrows depth-of-field thinking from portrait photography and applies it to outdoor scenes. The core idea is straightforward: instead of stopping down to f/8 or f/11 and rendering everything sharp, you open up the aperture, get close to foreground elements, and let parts of the scene fall out of focus deliberately. Harvey points out that at well-known "honeypot" locations like Brighton West Pier, the composition, the light, and the timing are often nearly identical from one shooter to the next. The only variables left are post-processing style and weather, which means two people can end up with photographs that are almost indistinguishable. Shooting with a longer lens at a wide aperture gives you a way to create images from those same locations that look nothing like the crowd.

Harvey demonstrates the concept using a Canon 100-400mm lens at locations around England, and he also shows up to a foggy morning field with a Canon 200mm f/2 to shoot daffodils framed by a tree-lined avenue. He's upfront that the 200mm f/2 is extreme and completely unnecessary to get results. A 50mm f/1.8 gets you most of the way there. One real-world example he shares from Burma Farm stuck with me: he was bored after getting the standard shot, put his camera nearly on the ground, and started photographing dew droplets on grass in the foreground with the Canon 100-400mm. That image stayed on his website long after the straightforward wide shots had rotated out.

What makes the technique work isn't just opening up the aperture wide. Harvey is clear that you need actual depth in your scene, something in the foreground that the camera can separate from the background. Without that, shooting at f/1.2 on a flat scene looks like nothing because there's no visual separation to show off. He compares it directly to how portrait photographers position subjects against textured walls, close enough that the nearest bricks go soft while the subject stays sharp. The framing element doesn't need to be elaborate; a branch, some tall grass, or even a doorway can do the job. He also touches on what happens when you shoot a fast prime wide open and get heavy optical vignetting, and why that turned out to work in his favor rather than against him while editing. There's more in the video on exactly how he manages foreground framing, what to watch for with busy bokeh, and how he structures a shoot to get both the safe shot and something experimental. Check out the video above for the full breakdown from Harvey.