The Canon Magazine 33
LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY
Ste
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05
Take to the skies
Drone photography has taken
off in recent years – no pun intended.
Thanks to falling prices and advanced
systems helping novices to fly safely
without crashing, drone photography is
now accessible to all. Of course, a large
dose of common sense is required whenyou pilot an aerial device that can injure
people. But in scenic locations with few or
no people around, drones allow you to get
a unique perspective on the landscape
below. Most drones made by DJI and
Mavic allow you to shoot stills in Raw, and
will hover in the same spot while shooting
three bracketed exposures.Shoot wide open
Achieving a large depth of field is a mantra you’ll hear
over and over again when talking about landscape
photography. This is a decent rule of thumb for many shots, but it’s not
always the best or only option. For images where there’s foreground
interest, such as wild flowers or cracked earth, knocking the
background out of focus, so it’s recognizable enough to add context
but not sharp enough to demand attention, is a great technique.
Focus on the foreground object and set the aperture to f/2.8 or f/4.07
Try a telephoto lens
It goes without saying that an ultra wide-
angle lens, such as 10-18mm on APS-C cameras and
16-35mm for full-frame, is an essential piece of kit.
But relying solely on this focal range will severely limit
your ability to capture every scene at its best.
Wide-angle lenses are
best for landscapes where
there’s strong foreground
interest or lead-in lines
close to the camera.
Telephoto lenses are great
for scenes where the main
subject, like mountains,
has no foreground interest
and is quite some distance
from the camera.
Another advantage of
telephoto lenses is that
they can create the
illusion of perspective
compression, making
elements at different
distances from the
camera appear closer
together. A 70-200mm
f/4 lens is ideal because
it’s small and light.04
Focus with ease
Focusing your camera lens is
one of the most challenging aspects of
landscape photography – after getting
to a glorious location and experiencing
amazing light, of course. The thing about
focusing, despite what some people might
tell you, is that it’s actually really simple,
and there are two straightforward
approaches you can try to make
the task much easier for yourself.
One popular method is to turn on Live
View and zoom the screen into a point
that’s roughly one third of the distance into
the scene and manually focus on this point.
Another trick, and one that may seem
haphazard, is to set the focus on the lens
barrel to just before infinity (as shown
above). It may need tweaking slightly, but
it’s a quick and easy way to focus perfectly.AlexwisePetr^ Jilek^ /Shutterstock06