Sneak Peaks at Snap Shots

Welcome back to Lets Go Big Tunes weekly Photography tips blog, where I share tips found online that can help everyone from beginner to expert. This week I start having a look at landscape shots. *content from https://www.techradar.com

Whether you've just got a new camera and are looking to learn some new photography techniques or have been shooting for a while and want to master some old ones, this essential photographer's resource is here to help. This list of photography techniques to try covers some of the most popular types of photography, so whether you want to improve your portrait photography or learn how to take better landscapes, discover the secret to sharp close-up photos or start out in street photography, you'll find some essential tips and tricks here.

Tip 4. Long lens landscapes

It's instinctive to reach for a wide-angle lens when photographing landscapes, but a telephoto lens is also an essential part of the creative landscape photographer's camera kit.

A telephoto lens enables you to compress the elements of a scene, making the foreground and background appear closer together than in a photo taken with an ultra-wide lens.

Zoom in with a long lens and mountain ranges will seem more tightly packed, trees in a forests more densely populated.

Telephoto lenses can also make it easier to compose landscape photos as they capture a narrower angle of view compared to wide-angle lenses. Being able to simplify a scenic often makes for stronger pictures.

Tip 5. HDR landscape photos

High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography enables you to capture detail in all areas of a picture - from shadows through to highlights - that you normally couldn't squeeze into a single picture.

HDR photography essentially involves taking a number of photos at different exposures - either manually or using your DSLR's autoexposure bracketing function - and then blending the best bits of each exposure into a single image.

Enthusiast and semi-pro DSLRs like the Canon EOS 5D Mark III and the Nikon D800 have built-in HDR photography modes that do the blending for you in-camera. However, for more control and flexibility, do it later in specialist software.

Tip 6. Long-exposure landscapes

Using a long exposure to photograph a landscape will cause any moving elements to be recorded as motion blur.

Waterfalls, waves and trees on windy days will all add interesting movement to landscape photos if you use a shutter speed of several seconds to photograph them.

Getting a slow enough exposure usually requires a small aperture, low ISO and low light. However, you can also achieve this in bright daylight by attaching a Neutral Density filter to the lens.

ND filters come in a range of strengths, each blocking the amount of light that enters the lens by a different amount.

Strong ND filters, such as the Lee Filters Big Stopper, will allow you to use extremely long exposures on even the brightest days, creating long exposure photos that stretch for many minutes rather than being over in seconds.

A 10-stop ND filter like the Big Stopper or the B+W ND110 can enable you to turn a crashing sea into a milk-smooth millpond.

Gear guide: Best ND filters: 6 top models tested

See you next week with more Landscape photography tips