Landscapes!

Hello its me!...trouble that is..lol.....
I am working my way through Photography at a snails pace ,I want to enter the world of landscape photography and my efforts so far are poor to say the least!. I seek to achieve the kind of shot featured in mags and on websites where the whole of the pic from back to front is in focus.What sort of lens do I need and is it going to cost me an arm and 2 legs?....I am the proud owner of a istds!,,,wonderful machine in the right hands,just a pity they aren't mine..lol.....HOPE YOU CAN HELP...THANKS....KEN P.

What you want is plenty of depth of field - and that means using a very small aperture and a fairly wide lens.

Bear in mind, though, that a lot of the best landscapes are taken with large format cameras, not APS-C sized DSLRs.

Get yourself a good wide-angle, put it on a sturdy tripod, and step it down to it's smallest aperture - f16 or f32. If your camera has mirror lock-up, use that. Pentaxes usually combine this, sensibly, with a 2-second delay.

G

Ken,

George has said it all really. If you want to shoot landscapes for your own pleasure, your camera, with a decent wide angle lens will be great.

If you eventually want to sell your images to stock agencies, you probably have the wrong camera, but a great one to start with.

To start you off, search the web and learn about hyperfocal distance. Learn it, master it, and you will eventually achieve the results you want. Focussing a lens at its hyperfocal distance together with a small aperture is what makes those 'killer' landscape shots stand out as being totally in focus.

Then look at using circular polarising, and neutral density graduated (ND-Grads as they are known) filters to 'enhance' the scene. Just don't overdo it, you will not improve much on nature, just help it a little.

Then learn about natural lighting. If you had 16 hours of daylight at one particular landscape scene and you took one shot per hour, each of the 16 shots would look subtly different. The first and last shot would look wildly different. You'll need to learn which parts of the day produces the lighting effect that you need to accomplish your desired result.

That should be enough homework for now. Good luck, next week I'll be asking questions

Regards,

Oh, and one other thing. . .

Shoot in RAW mode.

You can fix an aweful lot more issues in a RAW image than you can JPG.

Cheers,

Lock the camera down on a tripod, shoot several frames, with different areas of focus, preferrably at small apetures, like f/22 or f/32. Combine the images in Photoshop, and use masks to get rid of the out-of-focus areas, showing the in-focus areas.

Or, just buy a decent 4x5 camera and shoot with a wide angle lens at f/64 or f/96. Works for me.

Hi,

one tip that I can pass on.. don't focus to infinity or at the horizon. Focus about a third of the way into the landscape, usually about half way up the actual land part of the image. (if using the rule of thirds, for instance.. sky=1/3 land=2/3) This puts the centre of the land part of the scene, normally the focal point of the image, in focus.

Cheers

Liam

Liam,

The focus point you describe is called the 'hyperfocal distance' that I referred to in my post above.

Cheers,

Hi Peter,

so I was doing the right thing without knowing why ? That makes a change.. usually I do all the wrong things for the wrong reasons.

Cheers

Liam

Liam,

Me too. I know loads of 'stuff' about seemingly unimportant things and not enough 'stuff' about what matters.

For anyone interested to know a bit more about hyperfocal distance and its uses, have a look at this page

Cheers,

once you get upto speed on lens choice, tripod, composition, then learn the raw stuff (jpeg will do while learning), get the hang of using the cameras exposure meter, and start shopping for a neutral grad filter, a circular polarizer, and a blue/yello vari-color polarizer.

Oh, and most landscape photographer have a siesta from 10 AM to 4 PM - low angled sunlight often picks out textures in the landscape better. In the middle of the day try using Infra-Red filters for a very different view - but that's probably a bit more than a beginner wants to bite off. Enjoy, it's fun!

Thank you for all this information,,and here's me thinking it was going to be relativley easy,,,,,,Iwas wrong wasn't I!..lol...I will digest it all and get back to you.First stop the lens shop..the only wide angle lens I have is a Hoya HMC 28MM!..............THANKS AGAIN Ken.

Ken,

If landscape photography was easy, we'd all be out doin' it instead of sitting here pretending we know something about it

In my humble opinion the SMC Pentax 12-24mm DA zoom makes a very good landscape lens. The 16-45mm DA zoom is pretty good too. If you want ultra wide, have a look at the 10-20mm zoom from Sigma. Folks here seem to like it. Above all else, make sure in the first instance that you buy a lens of rectilinear construction rather than fisheye because you'll be wanting any straight lines in your image to be straight, not bent.

Regards,

To adapt an old phrase to new technology "Those who can, do, those who can't, blog"

Or take them mid afternoon and manipulate, the digi age rewrites (or relaxes) some of the rules.



DA16-45, 1/125s f/22.0 at 45.0mm iso200.