1
LEVEL YO U R S H OT Compose your image and zoom in as much as you
need for a tidy composition that isolates a focal point. To fine-tune
your framing, switch on LiveView and access your virtual horizon to
ensure that, most importantly, the horizon is level but also that the lens
is level on the vertical axis; when shooting landscapes at longer focal
lengths you’ll want the camera and lens level to avoid distortion.2
FOCUS MANUALLY Use manual focus to isolate the focal point itself.
When shooting from a distance, you’re often cutting out any
foreground interest so focusing directly on the most prominent feature
in the landscape will ensure the whole scene is in focus. At this stage,
make sure that image stabilisation is switched off because with the
camera on a tripod having it turned on could actually introduce blur.3
CAMERA SETTINGS Set the camera to aperture-priority mode at f/11
with ISO 100. This should produce the sharpest possible results and
a reasonably large depth-of-field, as well as no noise. Make sure White
Balance is set to Daylight so if you’re shooting at sunrise or sunset, the
camera is able to capture the colours in the sky without neutralising
them, which is exactly what Auto White Balance would do.4
ADD FILTERS Even when shooting with a telephoto, you can use ND
grads to maintain sky detail. The exact types of ND grads you’ll need
to use will depend entirely on the landscape you’re shooting, but for
this image I used a three-stop reverse ND Grad to capture the horizon
line that’s brighter than the higher sky, as well as a four-stop soft grad
to further reduce the contrast between ground and sky.30 Digital SLR Photography December 2019