So I’m not a photographer, I’m someone who likes travelling and really enjoys taking photos at the different places I go with my phone. I’m usually really happy with my city photography. Food is ok. But landscapes are terrible.
The mountains look small and not steep. Depth and distance does not come through at all. It just seems flat and underwhelming on camera, when the view I’m seeing with my eyes is the most inspiring thing of all time. I wish I could capture half of that.
Is there any advice you have for me taking photos with my phone (google pixel 7). Is there some type of camera or lens I could look into hiring and learning how to use (2bh I’m pretty clueless on that stuff but would be down to learn). Thanks!
Hey!
Here are three concise tips for you:
Optimize Lighting
- Capture landscapes during the golden hours, around sunrise or sunset, for soft, warm light.
- Experiment with angles to avoid harsh shadows and enhance the overall mood of your shots.
Composition Matters
- Apply the rule of thirds by placing key elements along the grid lines or at their intersections for a balanced composition.
- Utilize leading lines to guide the viewer’s eye through the image, creating depth and interest.
Focus and Depth
- Tap on the main subject on your phone screen to ensure it’s in focus. This helps in creating sharp and detailed images.
- Experiment with the depth of field by using the portrait mode or adjusting the aperture settings if available. This can add a dimension to your landscape shots.
Give these a try and let me know how you get on!
Mike
This reads suspiciously like ChatGPT.
All subjective unless you show us your shots. Eye is in the beholder, I take plenty of landscape photos on my iPhone 14 and gaze at them later endlessly. It’s all about framing, some people have an eye for it, some don’t. It’s considered an art form for a reason.
Climb a mountain use the 70-200 for framing photos. Then go down to 24mm lense
Only 1kg difference between them
Light, light, light. If the lightning is flat, uninteresting, mediocre, mild - your shot will be as well. Learn to spot and/or anticipate good lightning conditions.
It’s because a view doesn’t necessarily make a landscape photograph. If you spot a view it’s a good idea to scout the location and think how the scene could be shot (the composition), the direction (EWSN), what the weather’s doing and the time of day. All these factors come in to make a great shot.
I recently picked up my first ultrawide lens (fuji 14) and did a bit of reading on how to shoot with an ultrawide. Recommend a duckduckgo search on it, I think the suggestions would help you. A lot of it aligns with what people are saying here, but with more detail.
The hardest part of good landscape photography is getting there
… At the right time on the right day
It’s interesting reading about how some truly great shots came to be. Revisiting the same place many times until the light was perfect. Sometimes over the course of years.
Imagine getting to Mesa Arch in Canyonlands and you’ve got one day there. You bust your tail getting there before sunrise to get the iconic shot, and its clouds on the horizon blocking the sun. Or the kids aren’t ready so you’re a half hour late. Or you left the ultra-wide at the vacation rental.
Besides what everyone else is saying, work on your perspective as well. Don’t just hold your phone/camera up at face level and snap. Crouch, hold it up high, and shift about. You’ll find the view can change drastically with a bit of movement. Sometimes that will add a bit of foreground interest or clean up the view for a more engaging main subject.
This. If I can tell how tall you are, you’re not making enough effort.
They say that the camera adds ten pounds and ten years to a human subject, which is why top models and actors tend to be extraordinarily good looking. An average attractive person in real life, unfortunately and regrettably, looks ugly in a photo. It’s the nature of the medium.
Likewise, the camera turns typical landscapes into something dull and flat in a photo. It takes a truly extraordinary landscape to look better than ordinary in a photo.
At one time, artists and thinkers developed a theory about what kinds of landscapes are worthy of being painted, or photographed, or simply visited, and these are the “picturesque”, and not at all ordinary.
What a delightful bit of history behind what I never considered to be anything other than a simple word. I will be thinking about it all day :)
You’ve already received lots of good advice.
Basically you want foreground, mid ground and background for the wide angle lens of your camera, if you can find it.
Research ‘composition for landscape’ on the Internet so you can learn more.
An article like this:
Phoness are great cameras, but this is one of their weaknesses. Having a wide angle lens gives a wide view and pushes the background even further away. That means you are best offsetting it with ensuring the composition leads the eye as u/Sweathog1016 illustrates, or something of interest is in the foreground. Exposure is also more tricky to get right for the whole frame. The advantage to a DSLR here is using a long telephoto lens will compress the field/frame, making distant objects larger and loom over the foreground… I think this is what you are seeing and missing https://www.iphotography.com/blog/what-is-lens-compression-in-photography/
also, how fricken good is the human eye/brain at imaging… amazing stuff
I like to find natural framing for a scene.
I haven’t worked this one up yet as there is a lot of latitude in the shadows. But notice the water leading to the mountains and the trees framing the whole scene? And I love water, so that helps.
I find I’m usually light limited as I’m traveling with the family and we get places when we get there. I’m sure this could look completely different another time of day if I had the time to invest in a truly great shot.
Leading lines and sub framing nice pic 👍
Cool shot😎
Glacier?
In Banff along the Icefields Parkway. Short hike.
Great shot. I think it could be cool if you crop out the bottom so the water appears to be flowing off the bottom of the frame
Nice shot. Is this in Canada?
Affirmative. Banff National Park along the Icefields Parkway. A short hike into the woods.
The mountains look small and not steep. Depth and distance does not come through at all. It just seems flat and underwhelming on camera, when the view I’m seeing with my eyes is the most inspiring thing of all time. I wish I could capture half of that.
This is like the most common problem people have with landscapes.
Your eyes have a 180degree massive view, but your center of vision makes really distant stuff very clear. You also mentally filter out all the junk.
So you end up experiencing this impossible wide angle telephoto effect.
What people do wrong is they use a wide angle shot from a vista point that works for human vision.
The flaw is that a wide angle image has all the close stuff very large in the frame, so it makes the very distant mountains look tiny in comparison. But a telephoto image can be narrow and doesn’t give the sweeping vista sense.
There are few tricks.
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print the image huge. If the image is a wide angle shot but printed at the same scale as it was in real life, you get the same sense of scale. Smaller works, but not as dramatic. Basically an expensive solution.
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Use a telephoto or normal lens instead of a wide angle lens, but put something between you and the mountains for scale. You have to balance how wide your image looks, but you don’t want the foreground immediately next to the camera. And you want a person, or a house, or something of scale far away enough that the mountains tower over it.
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have really good light and weather. If the colors, light, clouds, mist, ect give a sense of volume to the space can make it have a sense of scale. Make sure you are higher up and looking straight on vs looking upwards. Still make sure the to not have the foreground.
Basically the foreground is your enemy. It clutters the frame with small stuff that will be larger then the massive landscape.
As someone who has an ultra-wide lens on order, this is timely and useful advice.
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Don’t waste your bland shots, visit the same place again, take pictures in different time or different weather and make a collection. The bland shots could compliment good shots.
Unfortunately, your phone is not equipped with a telephoto lens.
Very broadly, the rule of thumb is this; if you are close use wide angle and if you are far away use telephoto. This is a good rule of thumb in most photography. Going wide to ‘get it all in’ (and the pixel 7 has a wide lens) is a recipe for getting a ton of sky and land that looks like it is really far away. A lot of landscape photographers use telephoto lenses.
So what do you do? Get much, much, much, much closer to your subject.
