Four tips to get more creative in photographing landscapes

7th November 2016

Getting ideas out of your head and into your camera can be tough but Canon Masters, Mike Langford and Jackie Ranken reveal some simple tips to break your creative boundaries and help you bring your landscapes to life.

Isolate your ideas

It's the ideas that are most important. Challenge yourself to really understand what you do and don’t want to say with your image - and then try to do it in camera rather than in post-production.

When you’re looking at shapes and colours in the field you're normally looking at them all together, so it's really good to isolate ideas and work quite specifically – Mike Langford

Just get started and go with the flow

Always ensure you’re switched on because the hardest photograph to make is the first one. The best way to get going is just to get out there and do it. It’s a matter of being in the right place at the right time and responding to the exposure and your environment.

As a photographer, you come across ordinary everyday things. I like to see them in a different way – Jackie Ranken

Learn your gear

There's a plethora of stuff in the camera that most people don't use. Take the time to get to know your camera, and see all of the settings available to you. It's important to just play and make lots of images to perfect your craft.

You don't have to have pro gear to be creative or expressive, but you have to know what the gear that you've got can do – Mike Langford

Light dictates everything.

It's the angle that you're at, where you stand, what lens you use. Each lens shows the world in a different way. The wide angle shows the big world and as you come down to the telephoto lens you can isolate parts of that specific landscape. For a sense of motion and movement, check it out with live view.

When you're at the beach for example, you want to get a sense of where you are but without it just being a postcard. One example is to put on a really dark filter that you can hardly see through. This will allow you some slow shutter speeds when the sun is out and still get some blur to make it feel like a painting. – Jackie Ranken

If you would like to get more landscape photography tips, make sure to check our Landscape Photography 101 tutorial.

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