The Wild Photographer

Landscape Photography 101 & 102: Tips to Instantly Elevate Your Landscape Photos

• Episode 70

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In today's episode, Court records in-location while prepping to photograph the Rocky Mountains from Boulder, Colorado—then pours a couple decades of landscape photography lessons into a practical, no-fluff playbook. From where to focus (so everything’s sharp) to when to shoot (with specifics for best times of day), to nearly a dozen other tips, this is a field guide you can use immediately—whether you’re shooting mirrorless, DSLR, or point-and-shoot. He concludes with bonus content on editing and forecasting for the best weather and sun position.

Summary

Landscape photography gets dramatically easier when you simplify it into a repeatable workflow:

  1. Build the scene in layers (foreground, mid-ground, background).
  2. Lock in focus and stability (hyperfocus “one-third in,” tripod, and a no-shake shutter method).
  3. Let time-of-day do the magic (golden hour + blue hour are your unfair advantage).
  4. Nail exposure the smart way (manual settings, protect highlights, and hedge with slight underexposure).
  5. Edit with intention, not chaos (masking first, then a few powerful sliders).
  6. Scout light and weather (and use tools like Sun Surveyor to predict where the sun will be in relation to your subject). 

Mentioned Resources & Links

Sun Surveyor (official site): https://www.sunsurveyor.com/  

Will Patino's Editing Videos: https://www.youtube.com/@WilliamPatinoPhotography


Court's Websites

Sponsors and Promo Codes:


Court Whelan (00:00)
Hey friends, welcome back to The Wild Photographer. I've got an interesting episode today because, well for many reasons, but for one, I'm in location, quite literally looking at the Rocky Mountains from Boulder, Colorado, and I am taking some landscape photos, and I thought this would be a great time to distill what is, frankly, a couple decades of landscape photography experience into this single episode.

So this is Landscape Photography 101, tips to instantly elevate your landscape photos. We talk about tripods, we talk about hyper-focus, exposure considerations, weather, editing, so much good stuff in today's episode. I'm really excited about this one. And again, just kind of the novelty of it for at least myself, maybe you can visualize it as you're listening to this with myself, the host, looking at this extraordinary landscape view, ripe with landscape photo opportunities as I'm literally recording this episode.

Before we get into the episode, I do want to give a quick thanks to sponsors. First up, we've got Art Storefronts. I want to tell you about this because it's seriously been a game changer for me as a photographer. It's my website with Art Storefronts. If you've ever felt that sort of tension between wanting to create and showcase your best work, but then really kind of stressing about how you're supposed to sell it or portray it, Art Storefronts is a really incredible all-in-one solution. It's quite literally a full system from start to finish.

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I also want to thank

our gear kits are constantly evolving. They're never really done. mean, for someone like myself that has oodles of gear and lenses, I'm always thinking about, always looking for the next lens, the next piece of gear, and that really helps me in refining my own technique and style. Maybe you have outgrown a lens. Maybe there's a piece of gear that would unlock the next level of creativity for you. The question isn't if your setup will change over time.

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Let's get into the show where we talk about landscape photography 101. So much to go over here.

purpose of this section isn't to talk about the perfect way to use autofocus, but more importantly where to focus in your scene. Because when we're talking about landscape photography, nine times out of ten you want everything in focus.

So there's this really fancy term that's called hyper focus, just H-Y-P-E-R focus. And this is a technique to figure out how and where you should focus in order to get the entire scene in crisp sharp focus. Now of course, if you're used to setting apertures, you might be thinking already, well, all I gotta do is set it on F8 or F11 and focus somewhere in the scene and hopefully everything's in focus. Well, that's a good starting point. And of course,

I'm gonna skip over the fact that you should be shooting on a deep depth of field or a big F number like F8 or F11, but this section is really about where in this scene, you know, I'm looking at the Rocky Mountains right now and I've got this beautiful grassy meadow in front of me. I've got a little city in the background, which is Boulder, and then I've got the beautiful Rocky Mountains. So that's a pretty deep scene. where in that whole scene should I focus? Should I focus on the thing closest to me? Should I focus on the mountains? Cause that's the real star of the show. Well, hyper-focus,

is a really easy way to figure that out. And I'm just gonna cut to the chase right here is when you do focus, you should be focusing one third of the way into the scene. That means when I'm looking at this grassy meadow, I'm looking at Boulder, the city and some of the apartment buildings and the downtown area and these cobblestone bricks I can see in the distance, and then the snow capped Rockies, I am focusing about one third of the way from where I'm standing to the end of the scene.

And for this scene in particular, I'm actually looking at one third as right around where this little city area starts, because that's roughly one third of the distance from where I'm at to the extent of my

the very deep back part of the Rocky Mountains. Now, if you wanna dive deep into very specific hyper-focus settings, there are equations you can use. Hyper-focus as a term is not just another way to say one third of the way in the scene.

It's a way to dial in the perfect place you should focus. Now, the reason that I'm jumping forward and telling you one third of the way is because the actual calculation is wildly complex. It has to do with your focal length. It has to do with the distance in the background. It has to do with your aperture. And I can tell you, from doing these calculations for many, many years, I found that 99 times out of 100, where I should be focusing is very, very close to one third of the way in the scene.

So for travel photographers, landscape photographers, people that are on the run, on the go,

a lot of time to break out a calculator, just skip forward, don't worry about the calculations, don't worry about plugging in your exact focal length and whether you have a crop sensor or not, and just focus one third of the way into the scene. Let me stress, what that means is one third of the distance from you to the background. So if you're looking at a distance of probably 10 to 15 miles in the background, you're gonna be focusing a

about five miles away roughly. ⁓ Mix that with a great aperture setting like an f8 or f11 and you're going to find that this is the quickest, most powerful way to get the whole scene in focus. Now I mentioned this scene with the nice foreground, mid-ground and background and that's the other thing I want to talk about with landscape photography is to get your best shots you need to have, you know, honestly a lot of stuff going on. You can definitely go the minimalism route. You can look at silhouetting trees. You can get just the sunrise or just the sunset.

You can photograph with just a sliver of the Rocky Mountains and get the whole sky, or you can get most of the Rocky Mountains and just a sliver of the sky. All those things are great. There is not a perfect formula that's a one size fits all for every scene before you. But the key thing here that we can break all this down into and simplify is that you really ought to think about your landscape set up, the scene before you in these three components, a foreground, a mid-ground and a background. So in my scene here, I have this nice grassy, amber waves of grain meadow.

with a mid-ground of this sort of cityscape and foothills of the mountains, and the background being a really beautiful, jagged, rocky mountain, snow-capped peak goodness. I have a foreground right in front of me, mid-ground in the middle, and background in the end. You could take this a step further and start thinking about how to break this down in terms of more advanced things like the rule of thirds and leading lines, but we're talking more about components versus composition. When you're looking at your scene, this could go for...

big landscapes, could go for very small landscapes. You want to think about those layers as having something more or less in front of

the viewer's eye can be drawn to initially. These are these grassy fields in the meadow in front of me. You want to have something in the mid-ground that has some sort of intrigue. In this case, it's the skyline of Boulder, but it could be quite literally anything. It could be more wildflowers, it could be a river, it could be a fence line, it could be any number of things.

And in that background, even though I'm looking at majestic mountains, and they're absolutely beautiful right now, that is the background that kind of brings it all together. That's the extent of my scene. So when you're setting up the scene, maybe skip over the rule of thirds for starters. Obviously, once you see these components and look at what you can do to break down your scene into some sort of balance, but make sure your scene has these components to begin with. Foreground, mid-ground, and background.

The next up, let's talk about times of day. This is probably the most important thing with landscape photography. Now obviously everything in this list and this lineup is important. You need to have your scene in focus. You need to have intriguing, entertaining things that make a story and makes a scene like the for, mid, and background. But weather is probably that X factor that is going to take a good photo into a great photo or maybe turn it into an award-winning photo.

So I like to think of times a day in simple terms. For every single day throughout the course of the year, you have exactly two blue hours, two golden hours, one night, and one midday. I'm not going to go into detail of what 10 a.m. looks like versus 2 p.m. That is all midday.

It's really these other times that I'm talking about that I think are the real secret sauce for great landscape photography. And that's gonna be your golden hours, probably primarily. And then next up is gonna be your blue hours.

actually represent. So we'll start with the very, very beginning, and that is night. So you get one night. It doesn't matter if it's 3 a.m. or just before sunrise,

sky.

that is going to be night. And that's gonna be great for astrophotography and you can start thinking about silhouetting, but really for landscape photography, it starts getting good just as the sun begins to shed some light on the sky and really paint this beautiful sort of indigo blue across the landscape. And that is going to be your first blue hour. And that's about roughly 20 to 30 minutes before the sun rises itself. So if you look on the Weather Channel app or any sort of other app out there, about 20 to 30 minutes before actual sunrise,

you're going to get your first blue hour of the day. And these are great times to photograph. Like I said, it just does an amazing thing for the sky. It does really good things for soft, even lighting across your landscape. And it gives you something very, very interesting to photograph in the background, which now becomes that beautiful blue indigo sky. Now this quickly turns into sunrise and sunrise is its own beautiful time of day. And I love photographing sunrise with the golden colors and the intense bright sun that you can often use as a focal point to your scene.

But probably more importantly, the best time of day for landscape photographers is going to be that golden hour, which is roughly one hour after the sun rises. Now it's up to you whether you want to really photograph the sunrise itself, like, i.e. the sun in your scene. But once that sun rises a little bit, or even if you're photographing in a different direction away from the sun, your entire landscape, your entire scene is going to be bathed in this lovely, lovely golden light. And that would be, I would say, the number one time of day to photograph. So think about...

roughly one hour after sunrise. So the next time of day is going to be your midday. This is when light gets frankly kind of harsh. Your sun rises further and further. It's more top-down lighting. You get more shadows. You get more contrast. It is stereotypically not a great time of day to photograph because you do have those shadows. You have harsh bright parts of your scene. You have harsh dark parts of your scene. However, it can still be a great time of day to photograph.

You just have to think a little bit different. And I like to think in black and white when I'm taking midday photos. I like to, when I'm on my photo expeditions, take photos at all times of day. I'm taking photos at night. I'm taking photos at the blue hour. I'm taking a lot of photos at golden hour. But I don't just skip midday because it's a little bit too harsh. Oftentimes I will think in black and white. I'll take my photo in full color. But I know that when I put my photo on the computer, some of the best editing power I have is to actually reduce the saturation, if not...

completely convert my photo to black and white

start really honing in and exaggerating some of that contrast. Are some parts of the scene too bright? Yeah, well black and white does really really well

and low-key scenes. We have a really shadowy, darkly silhouetted mountain or tree and a really really bright sky or a really bright reflection on a lake or a river.

Traditionally, we don't like those bright spots and those dark shadows because we don't see a whole lot, but when you force yourself to think in that black and white term, you start to notice that midday can be an extraordinary time, just as any other time of day, for photography of landscapes. But again, you have to think differently, and I like to think in black and white.

So

we're now at midday, and again, I bundled the whole midday as one big ball of wax, and then I fast forward until later in the day.

until my next golden hour. So this is the second golden hour of the day, and this is roughly one hour before sunset. This is when that sun is low angled in the sky, it's more of a yellowy golden light, I get softer lighting, I get softer shadows and softer bright spots. Notice this is quite in contrast or quite different than those harsh tones and harsh high key, low key lighting that I was talking about before with midday. That golden hour softens everything, that low angled light.

makes everything in the landscape look beautiful. So if you're like me and you're sitting in front of the Rocky Mountains, I'm going to physically wait until about an hour before sunset to get my shot that I'm gonna really work on the most. I'm gonna spend the most time thinking about setting up, trying variations, trying different focal points, trying different layers with my foreground, mid-ground, background. I'm honestly not gonna spend a lot of time doing that and setting that up at midday because I know golden hour is gonna be my prime time, best time of day to photograph this landscape.

just about all the landscapes in the world. But it doesn't stop there. We've got one more blue hour. So after that sun sets, you get this lovely tint in the sky. And just like before sunrise, just after sunset, you get a second blue hour. And it's pretty much the reciprocal of the morning blue hour. Obviously, it's getting darker and darker. You start with a very light blue tone. And as it gets later, it gets darker and darker and more and more rich of blue color in the sky. But nevertheless, you get a second opportunity for that blue hour. And

If you're like most photographers, you're going to prioritize one time of day over the other. You're probably not going to be up at four in the morning getting the first blue hour and the first golden hour and the second golden hour and the second blue hour. It's A-OK to prioritize for just the second half of the day. But just keep in mind, you have two of each of these wonderful times to photograph landscapes. And then, last but not least, you get another night scene again.

So after that 30 minutes when the sun has set and you lose nearly all light in the sky, you get great night photography. And this is when the stars start coming out. This is when you're going to get a lot of really good Milky Way photography. If you're at the poles and you're in the Arctic or Antarctic, you might get some Northern Lights. But nighttime is sort of that final part of the day before, fortunately, the sun rises again and we get to do all those lighting schemes over again and start with that next blue hour just before the sun rises the next day.

Now you may be wondering, well gosh, these seem like really low light times a day. Aren't you using a tripod for this sort of stuff? And yes, I absolutely am. And that is the topic of the next section, is tripod work and remote shutters.

tripods are really quite handy and almost critical for very top quality landscape work because it takes the shutter speed issue out of the equation.

you're hand holding a camera, you are very limited by shutter speed. We can boost up the ISO to 3200, 6400, 8000, 12000 to get faster and faster shutter speeds. But because we know with landscape photography, you almost always have to be shooting at f8 or f11, and you really want to be shooting at the lowest ISO possible, like 100 or 200, it's your shutter speed that's going to have to flex. Now, oftentimes when we talk about wildlife photography,

you can't flex completely with a slow shutter because you also have to think about wildlife movement. So even though a tripod takes the limiting factor of shutter speed out because you no longer have to worry about the movement of your own hand while photographing, it is going to be an issue with wildlife photography because wildlife, if it's moving, you still have to shoot at faster shutter speeds. But here's the brilliance is that landscapes don't move that much. Yes, there might be some breeze. You might have a little bit of swaying in the trees, but generally,

1 10th the 1 40th of a second is going to freeze all landscape movement and then as you get into darker and darker scenes going from the golden hour to the blue hour to night time you can get down to 1 4th of a second 1 half a second 1 full second 5 full seconds and beyond and for those things you absolutely have to have a tripod so a tripod does come with me on each and every landscape photo shoot in fact I have one here right now and it's not so much that I can't shoot fast enough I'm actually photographing in mid-afternoon right now

So things are okay for shooting at 1 over 100 and F8 and ISO 100, but I know that I'm want to prioritize that low light of golden hour, later golden hour, and especially when that blue hour comes about and I get that beautiful blue sky as I'm leading into nighttime photography.

tripods could be very, long-winded

And I have whole episode that talks about nothing but tripod use, the pros and cons of different brands, the different makes and models. But the gist here is that if you are going to bring a tripod, bring a good one. You know, the tripod's main use is to stabilize, to be rock solid. A lot of these cheaper tripods, a lot of the very small lightweight travel tripods, they are just not sturdy enough to work really well. If you do have a slight breeze, if you do have unstable terrain, like you're photographing on the deck of a cabin or you're

getting a little bit of breeze from one direction or the other and that camera's swaying, it's just enough to create instability in your tripod and all of sudden your tripod becomes defunct. It's not as effective. So I'm a huge advocate for getting a big, beefy, heavy tripod, especially if you don't have to travel with it, like check it in a bag or carry it on a trail. The heavier the tripod, technically the better it's gonna work for photography. Now obviously the converse of that is the worst it's gonna work for hiking and toting and flying with it.

But nevertheless, you want to find that right balance for you where you can carry it. It is heavy. It is stable. It's not going to move on the ground. Good tripods go a really, really long way for great landscape photography, simply put.

And what I'll do is I'll actually get to a point when I'm talking about my settings is I'll dial in f11 on my camera. I'll achieve hyper focus by photographing one third of the way in the scene. I'll dial in one over a hundred and then I will actually adjust my shutter speed until I get an even exposure. So I'm actually not worrying about changing aperture or ISO to get the light that I want. I'm only worrying about shutter speed. Now, if I was handheld the whole time, that's a big deal because I have to be shooting fast enough to minimize hand movement. But once again,

When you have that tripod,

only think about shutter speed, only have to worry about shutter speed, and you're going to get really, really great shots because of that deep depth of field, low ISO, and then just simply put, not having to worry about shutter speed because of that rock solid tripod.

So with tripod photography, often comes the question of, I need a remote trigger or some way of deploying the shutter button, pressing the shutter button without actually having to press the shutter button? And the reason we don't like pressing the shutter button when taking a landscape photo is because that little bit of pressing actually moves the camera just ever so slightly that you could risk getting a little bit of blur into your scene. So you have a few different hacks here.

The one that I use most often is actually just the two second timer hack. This is where I'm using my camera's remote shutter, putting it on a two second delay. So that way when I do hit my shutter button, it's a two second delay between me pressing the camera, moving the camera, even a fraction of an inch,

then the shutter actually going. So what this does is it allows the camera to settle down, not move anymore, and then take the shot. So that way there's absolutely

zero movement in my camera, in my tripod, when the photo is actually being taken. You have to be hyper sensitive of camera movement when you are doing slow shutter speeds. So minimizing that using the two second exposure is one of the best, easiest, most effective ways to do tripod photography. But there are a lot of great remotes out there today too. And I actually have one myself. It's the Canon, I think the BRE-1. It's a little Bluetooth remote. And that way I can step back, I can sit in a chair.

And when I see the lighting hit just right, maybe a little ⁓ sun ray comes out of the clouds, I don't even have to be at my camera. I can be standing 10 feet away talking with friends or maybe rifling through my camera bag and actually press that shutter

the photo from afar. Now, the issue with remote triggers in my mind is that it's just another piece of gear. It's another piece of electronics that sometimes pairs well with your camera. Sometimes it doesn't pair well. It can be, well, frankly, a little bit cumbersome. It's just another thing to worry about.

whereas that two second delay is foolproof. It's right in your camera. You don't need more than two seconds. The only downside is that it slightly delays your ability to take that photo, but usually 99 times out of 100, that two second is not going to change the scene. You're not going to that much better off by using a remote. I do think the remote makes it a little bit easier, a little bit nicer. There's something gratifying about taking the photo in the exact millisecond that you want to take it, but don't get hung up on needing a remote trigger.

for great landscape photography, can simply rely on that two second timer that every single camera has built into its system.

Before I continue on to the exposure section of this talk, I wanna take a quick break and thank Bay Photo as one of the sponsors of this podcast. Printing your work is honestly one of the simplest ways to elevate your photography for yourself and for others. You're gonna love what you do more because you get to see it in the flesh and get yourself out there more via print photography.

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and now back to the show.

Exposure is another really important facet of landscape photography.

getting the right exposure for your landscape photos is really paramount. And of course, you can edit and we're going to talk about that in a bit, but getting it right in camera or at least as close to right as possible in camera is absolutely the right way to start. Now, you can do a number of different things in terms of camera settings. You can change how you evaluate the light in your scene via evaluative or matrix metering. But really what I like doing, and I mentioned this already, but it's so important that I want to mention it again.

is I go into full manual mode, I dial my camera into F11 for my aperture, ISO 100, and then I change my shutter speed until my little exposure dial goes to zero, okay? So I'm letting ISO stay at 100, it's the highest quality, it's the most editable form of your raw photo. You definitely want aperture at F11 so you get as deep a depth of field. There's a little bit of a caveat in that you don't wanna go too much higher than F11 because sometimes you'll...

you'll actually get reduced megapixel count because of these deep depths of field. It's a fancy kind of complex term called the law of limited diffraction. You can look it up, but the point is I don't go to f22. I rarely go to f16. F11 is my sweet spot. But once again, I'm changing the shutter speed until I like the

my final choice. That is really what's letting in the light for my shot.

Now I'd say I do start with zero. I like having my exposure even. I like my camera being able to evaluate whether I have too much light or too little light. Sometimes I'll use the histogram, but more often I'm just kind of judging from the back of my camera. I know that there's a little bit of a risk because you have a backlit LCD screen. It can depend if you're in dark lighting or bright lighting, but in general, I'm looking at my LCD screen to figure out.

Am I getting the shot right in the back of my

So as I mentioned, I am generally starting at an exposure of zero. I'm gonna take at least one or two photos that way so I have a quote unquote even exposure. The camera thinks it's the right amount of light. But when I'm in doubt, when I have a complex scene or especially when I have a dark scene, I'm going to slightly darken my exposure to minus one third or minus two thirds.

In other words, I'm going to err on the side of being a little bit too dark, then a little bit too bright. Even tends to get it right, but sometimes I will buffer, I will actually hedge my photos, hedge my bets here by underexposing by 1 third to 2 thirds of a stop, because I know that I'm going to be able to get details out of the shadows, whereas if I overexpose my shot and get overly bright, blown out highlights, I'm never going to be able to rescue that part of the scene. There is no data in blown out highlights.

where there is still some color data in too dark of shadows. So always err on the side of a little bit too dark and a little bit bright, but I do like to hedge my bets and shoot at even minus 1 1 3rd and maybe minus 2 3rds just to make sure I have a few different options when I'm going to the editing part of my photography.

So I often get questions when I'm talking about lighting about what about HDR? Do you use HDR? Is there still merit in HDR? And let's talk for a minute about what HDR is. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range, and it had a real glory day probably about 10, 15 years ago when it first came about or when it first really started to emerge as an easy to use tool. And the basic gist is that a lot of cameras will either allow you to do this in camera,

or you can at least do it manually by taking three photos in succession. This is once again where a tripod is huge because you need to have the exact same photo. You can't have a tree move slightly or you can't have the mountain in different part of your scene because you're taking three identical photos at three different exposures. So it's actually not too dissimilar from the advice that I just gave you, but the big difference is that you're actually using software to blend those three photos together.

So the computer or your camera actually pulls out the highlights, the dark shadows, and the midtones, and it puts together what it thinks is this well-packaged mixture of the lights and the darks to give you, hopefully, what your eye is more likely to see naturally. Now, HDR is often vilified because it also creates very fake-looking images. Because it's trying to mimic what your eyes see,

It's giving you a lot of light and shadows. It's giving you a lot of midtones and dark tones in the bright spots of your scene. So I've found that generally it kind of makes my photos look a little bit more like a video game. It's very even lighting, which can be aesthetic and very pleasing. I've seen some really great HDR work, but I do think it starts to look very fake very quickly. These days I have nixed the HDR techniques. I don't use it anymore.

Instead, I will take a shot that is evenly exposed or slightly underexposed and really work with the shadows and the highlights in my post-processing software,

or Adobe Camera Raw, and not use this blending software where I'm letting the computer decide this mixture of lights and darks and midtones because I just think it's just too much. It's too much for me. It makes it look too fake. I'm going for not necessarily a purist stance, but I don't want it to have that

video game look, that oversaturated look, which is really, really commonplace with hardcore HDR photography. So that was really just a quick way of saying, hey, this is what it is. You can try it. It's very, very easy to do when you're in Lightroom or Photoshop. You just load all three photos and right click and say, photo merge to HDR. Give it a try. If you've never tried it, why not? You might love it for certain types of photos. But I found for the top level landscape of photography,

Really all the shots need is a little bit of treatment at the extreme ends of the lighting, like the dark shadows and the bright highlights, and I'm not using HDR personally.

On a similar vein, let's talk about filters for a second. So as far as gear goes, you know, a great wide angle lens is gonna be your friend. You know, like a 24-105 or an 18-55. I also use a 70-200, a lot for landscape photography. Those aren't gonna change my settings. I'm still gonna shoot at f11, I'm still gonna shoot at ISO 100, but those different lenses will change my perspective and I love using telephotos for landscape stuff. If you haven't tried that and you've been stuck with a 24 millimeter or

or an 18 millimeter most of your time with landscape photography, give it a go with a 100 to 300, a 100 to 400, a 70 to 200. Start zooming in on those landscape features because it makes a really beautiful scene. And I think more importantly, maybe most importantly, it's giving you the ability to portray something in a way that others have not seen before. And for my style of photography, at least, I love that. I'm trying to portray something in a little bit of a different light, pun intended. I'm trying to showcase something

that is not immediately obvious to the eye. I'm trying to take something beautiful and give a different perspective and a good telephoto lens is fantastic. ⁓ I definitely went on the tangent there because I really wanted to talk about filters, but I guess I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about some of the classic landscape lenses as well. ⁓ But filters are something where it's, that's very polarizing these days. And gosh, I'm full of the puns, know, polarizing filters. It's polarizing the sense that there are some people that love filters and still use them.

And there's some people that say you don't need filters anymore. I am a little bit more in that latter camp and that you don't really need them much anymore, but there still are some filters that are very, very helpful and just plain interesting with photography, especially landscape

let's start off with that very polarizing filter. So a polarizing filter, if you haven't used these yet, they're not cheap, but they're not super expensive. You can probably get a pretty high quality one for about $100.

Some of them will clip onto your lens, some of them will screw onto your lens, but most importantly, you need to put on a polarizing filter in place of your UV filter. You don't want to stack filters with landscape photography because you're going to start to see very pronounced vignetting on the sides. Because of the thickness of the glass, you're going to start to see just little dark edges, dark corners of your shot. So this is honestly one of the biggest reasons why I don't like using filters is because I do always have a UV filter on my lens at all times.

mainly because I want to protect my glass in case dust or a scratch happens. But in order to get good polarizer shots, you need to have the UV filter off and the polarizer on so you don't get that vignetting. But a polarizing filter, you know, honestly, the biggest value is it cuts reflections. You know, that's what it does. You know, a lot of us have polarizing sunglasses nowadays and we can see the benefit. You can look at clouds and they get, you know, even more pronounced silver linings.

the blues of the sky get a little bit more saturated, even the greens of leaves and trees, they reduce their sheen, their luminance, and they can become really kind of a different look, almost like more saturated, but not in an overly fake sort of way. So polarizers can be really good, but you have to have the time, you have to have the chutzpah. I do think you probably ought to have a pretty good polarizing filter in the first place, like some of the bargain ones that you might get off of an online site for $20.

they're just not gonna give the same good look as a good $100 B &W filter or a Hoya or like a Polar Pro or all the way up to the highest levels like the Singrays. But spending $100 for a good polarizing filter is probably gonna give you a little bit of a new arrow in your quiver, especially if you're in front of scenes that have reflections.

So as I mentioned, reflections can come across in many different ways, whether it's reflectivity off of a green leaf, but most commonly it's when you're photographing on lakes, on oceans, on bays, on any sort of body of water, where you do have really, really pronounced reflections from the sky or from the sun or just from the ambient light. And a polarizing filter will reduce that and give you, honestly, I wouldn't say a better look, just a different look. So that's why I'm a little bit ambivalent about whether a polarizing filter is important today or not, because

It's not an immediately better look, it's just a different look. I will say that one of the best parts about polarizing filters is it allows clouds to pop more.

notice that when you photograph with clouds, know, really good billowy clouds like those that might have some rain in them or some color or some texture, even sunsets and sunrises, is those clouds will be more defined in the atmosphere. They'll have...

sharper edges that give you a little bit more structure and texture to the shot, a look that is really quite good. However, one thing I've found that you can do in place of using a polarizer is actually in Lightroom, you can go to the color mixer panel, go on the luminance tab and actually decrease the luminance of certain colors. And it does kind of mimic like what a polarizing filter would do. It's not a perfect replacement because anything you can take in camera is always going to look better.

than what you do with a slider on Lightroom or Photoshop. But nevertheless, nowadays with that luminance slider, specifically the blue luminance, you can make that blue sky, you can make those clouds pop more and give the color and texture that mimics what a polarizing filter does really quite well.

The polarizer isn't the only filter. There are really two other filters that I'm quite keen on, and one is going to be a neutral density filter. And these are very, very good when you have moving water. So a neutral density filter is basically just like a sunglass tint for your lens, And I find that I use these most when I'm photographing in midday conditions.

and when I'm photographing long exposure water scenes. So this might be a waterfall, it might be a battling brook, it heck might even be the shoreline of a coast or a beach when I want to have one full second exposure to kind of blend the motion of the tides and create this very silky water look. The issue is that if you're photographing at midday and you're at the lowest ISO and you're trying to limit light as much as possible and you're forced to go all the way to f22, you might still have too much light in your scene.

such that you can't go slower than one fourth of a second or even one tenth of a second. What a neutral density filter does is it actually darkens your whole scene so you can now go slower and slower shutter speeds to get more and more of a silky water effect. This is really, really good for water photography. Great for waterfalls, like I said, and creeks and all that. But it's specifically when you're shooting in very bright conditions, when you're already maxed out on limiting light in your camera through the lowest ISO possible.

and the biggest F number possible, and it still gives you too much light, and you're just kind of stuck at that one tenth of a shutter speed. So neutral density filters are probably the one filter that you 100 % cannot mimic in Lightroom. There's just no way to do it, and they are still quite useful. If you want to dive deeper into other filter topics and even other filters like...

graduated neutral densities, I'll recommend that you check out my all about filter episode because I get real nerdy real quick and I give a lot of detail on these filters as well as others, but really for landscape photography, especially from like the 101, 102 level, ways to instantly elevate, I honestly just don't think filters are a core piece of the kit.

Okay, now we're getting to the end of the episode and I want to talk about editing. This is sort of like the crossing the finish line for landscape photography. Because so many people are using editing and editing is getting so good, you really have to edit your landscape photography in order to buff out the shadows, reduce those bright spots, and really make your photo pop. You are amongst competition today. Whether you're a casual photographer or getting and becoming a pro photographer,

Even if your photo is great out of camera, you're competing with people that spend a lot of time editing. So I do recommend spending some time editing your shots. But this doesn't mean that you have to spend hours on a single photo. There are some really, really simple tricks and tips and tools for landscape photography that I'm gonna go over here.

The first thing is masking. So when you're in landscapes that have uneven lighting or especially if you're photographing at sunset or sunrise times a day and you get sky in your shot and the foreground and mid-ground are perfectly lit, but the sky is just too bright or too dark, you are going to want to mask one or the other. You're going to want to mask the sky or mask the foreground. And to do so, you just go to your masking panel in Photoshop or Lightroom or Camera Raw.

simply select it and then you can start adjusting the lighting there. It is so incredibly powerful and quick how you can just simply mask the landscape, mask just the sky or just the ground and change the lighting, the contrast, the saturation to suit your needs, which is just a game changer in photography for how quickly you can do that.

So the other type of masking that I really like to use is sort of a three part here. I like to use the brush mask so I can treat just individual little parts of the scene, like if I need to change the brightness or the contrast of a certain tree or just the edge of a mountain. If I want to exaggerate a nice light beam coming through, I might use the brush tool. But I'm finding that nowadays I'm using radial masking a lot where I can create a circle.

an oval, an ellipsis. And what I find that I like about this versus masking the entire sky is when you use things like a radial mask, it's much more like what the eye sees, and it's much more what light actually does. Light doesn't, it doesn't behave in ways that only lights the mountains or only lights the sky. Light behaves in circles and in ovals and in gradients.

So I find that using the radial mask and the gradient mask can be just such a nicer, softer touch to your overall photography that I do recommend checking them out.

this, I do have an episode on my YouTube channel. Just search Court Whelan on YouTube and three key Lightroom masks. And I have a whole eight minute tutorial

these three things. Brushes,

gradient masks, and radial masks. And you'll see pretty quickly how I use them, and how I think they're honestly a lot more natural, while also having a lot of power and a lot of control over your landscape photography. But other than that, the main sliders that I'm looking at, again, I'm looking at luminance to mirror what a polarizer might do. I'm treating the shadows, which is usually bringing out some light in shadows. I'm usually dimming down my highlights, so I...

rescue some of the the tone and texture and color from highlights and I'm messing with clarity a little bit to give a little bit more definition across my scene and then sometimes when I really want to go nuts especially in big big landscapes I do use the D haze slider and the D haze slider is something that can be abused very very quickly

But Dehaze as well as Clarity sliders are what we call meta sliders, where they're actually changing multiple different tones on that S curve at one time. So try them out, be careful with them, but they are very, very powerful tools to make your landscape photography instantly look really, really good.

The final thing I want to talk about is just a pro tip that you want to watch the weather. And this isn't like a warning, like be careful of lightning storms. This is watch the weather because some of the best landscape photography you can possibly have is when there is weather, maybe not tumultuous weather. You don't want to be out in big hail storms or thunderstorms. But when you have clouds, when you have dramatic lighting, when you have big billowy cumulonimbus clouds or very high level cirrus clouds, weather can be a really, really great thing. So

Although you have to be safe, of course, and very cognizant of not putting yourself in harm's way, dramatic weather can give you not just great sunrises and sunsets and great golden hours and blue hours, but great times of day at any point in the day. In fact, that might be the biggest and best hack for photographing in midday, other than just visualizing via black and white, is to pay attention to the clouds. Where is the sun in relation to the clouds, and is it going to get really interesting really quickly?

Can you photograph on a nice overcast day to get that very even lighting? So paying attention to weather is one thing, but my final point here is paying attention to where the sun is gonna be in the sky on a given day for a given landscape is also really important. So if you're on a photo trip or you're doing your own photo journey and you're in some beautiful area, like let's say you're in the Rocky Mountains and you really wanna photograph this one snow-capped peak, but you want to get angled, soft, early morning light.

There is a wonderful app out there called the Sun Surveyor app

reality to track the sun across the sky, forecast where it's gonna be in relation to where you're at at a given moment. Maybe it's where your Airbnb is, maybe it's where the trailhead is, maybe it's where the mountain scene is, and you can figure out where the sun is going to be in relation to your photographic subject, and it has been an absolute game changer for me.

So check out the Sun Surveyor app. has way more than just tracking the sun across the sky. It can track the Milky Way, it can track sunset timing, all sorts of great stuff. It is a paid app. I think it's like $10 on the various app stores. But as far as the fact that lighting is one of the most important things for great landscape photography and the fact that you want to figure out where you need to be, where you wanna be for the blue hour, golden hour, for night photography, for astro, the Sun Surveyor app is a great

technological tool to put it all together to get you in the right place in the right time to get extraordinary light

for whatever you're trying to photograph in any place in the world. And it works with GPS, so you don't even need to have cell signal. I know for a lot of us, we don't have cell signal when we're in some of the most beautiful places in the planet. So check that out. I think it's gonna be a really big boon for your landscape photography.

Well, there you have it, folks. Landscape photography 101. We talked about where to focus and how to focus that one third of the way into the scene. The idea that you really want to have layers of your scene with foreground, mid-ground, background. Don't be afraid of tripods They're big, they're clunky, they're cumbersome, but for landscape photographer, they are paramount. Think about the times a day. We may not have the whole day to be out there, but what time of day suits your type of photography? And how might you be able to use the sun and forecast the sun?

to give that perfect lighting on your mountain scene, on your cactus scene, on that extraordinary landscape that you have found and are about to fall in love with via your photography.

Make sure you think about exposure, start with even, hedge your bets, err on the side of underexposure,

then make sure you spend some time editing, and practice with masks. Masking is going to be your number one tool. I plugged my YouTube channel, but there are plenty of other YouTube videos out there that will talk to you about masking for landscape photography. Will Patino is one of the masters at it. So go out there, give it a shot, and I know you're gonna have some real, real fun times ahead of you with not just

the next great landscape in your future, but with these tools and tips to elevate your landscape photography. Thanks so much for joining folks. Talk to you next time.


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Court Whelan

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