(gentle upbeat music)
- Hi, my name is agent Schroder.
And today, we're gonna talk through some basics
when it comes to landscape photography.
Now, when I say landscape,
I'm talking about mountains, waterfalls, forests,
and even urban landscapes, like buildings or dams.
In these environments,
it's important to capture the entire scene in its vastness,
so you can share the same emotion you felt when viewing it.
And since technology is advanced,
you can even use your smartphone camera
to take landscape portraits.
Pretty cool.
Today, I will be using a mirrorless camera
and a few accessories to help capture our scene.
Here's what you'll need:
a camera that supports removable lenses,
a wide angle lens, a tripod,
a circular polarizer, and a carrying bag.
All right, let's dive in.
First, let's grab our camera.
In my hand, I have the Canon EOS R6 mirrorless camera.
Having a full frame sensor is beneficial
because it will capture more pixels
and has a wider aspect ratio
when compared to a crop sensor.
When it comes to landscape photography,
capturing a larger image is important,
and the full frame sensor makes it easier for you
to achieve that.
Next, let's attach our wide angle lens
and begin to dial in our framing.
I'll start by lining up the color dots on the lens
and camera body, inserting gently
and then do about a quarter turn clockwise
or counterclockwise depending on your camera
until the lens locks.
You'll notice my dots are red
but yours could be another common color,
like white, for instance.
Now, I'm using this Canon RF 15 to 35 millimeter zoom lens.
What I love about zoom lenses
is that you can simply rotate the zoom ring
to adjust wider or narrower like this.
If you don't have a wide angle zoom lens, that's okay.
It just means you'll have to do a little extra legwork
to frame up the right shot.
Once you're happy with your composition,
let's make sure the scene is in focus.
With landscape pictures,
sometimes it can be hard to figure out what to focus on.
If there's a subject, that's easy, focus on that.
If it is a wide open landscape,
focus about a third of the way into the scene
to maximize what is in focus.
Now, most landscape photography
tries to get all things in the scene in focus,
which means you will want to be setting your aperture
between F11 and F16 to maximize the depth of field
or what's in focus.
If you plan on doing some nighttime landscape photography,
you may wanna look for a faster lens,
something less than F2.8 for the aperture.
I have mindset to F11 to start.
Go ahead and set yours.
To adjust the f-stop on my camera,
I will make sure that my camera is in the manual setting
by setting the mode dial to M.
Then turn the quick control dial one
until I see the f-stop get to the desired setting.
I could also tap the aperture option on the screen
and then turn any of the dials.
You will also wanna adjust your camera's ISO.
For some of the best image quality and color,
I would suggest shooting at the lowest native ISO.
My camera, the Canon EOS R6,
has an ISO of a hundred at its lowest.
So I'll go ahead and adjust my setting to that.
On my camera, turning the quick control dial two
will allow me to adjust
and I can see the change on the screen.
Another option is to tap the ISO setting on the screen
and use any of the dials,
similar to what I did with the aperture setting.
Next, it's time to check your shutter speed.
As the light changes, so will my shutter speed.
If the shutter speed gets too low, you may get motion blur.
One-60th of a second is as slow as I go
for handheld photographs.
I can either adjust my ISO or aperture or get on my tripod.
All right, so we have our ISO and our aperture set,
what's next?
Well, there are some settings on your camera
that you might want to change
before we start taking pictures.
For example, if you plan on making detailed edits
to your photos, you'll wanna set your camera to RAW mode.
This will save more data with each picture,
giving you better range for editing things
like color, contrast, shadows, and highlights,
which can be helpful when editing landscape photos.
However, you should know that if you use RAW mode,
the file size of each picture will be much larger
and might require a professional photo editing tool
like Photoshop or Lightroom to import and adjust.
If you don't plan on making refined edits to your photos,
you might want to keep it in JPEG mode.
With JPEG mode, the camera will compress each image
to keep the file size lower.
Just note that this means you'll lose some information
even if the camera is set on the highest resolution.
All right, we're ready to start taking some pictures.
(camera shutter clicking)
Looking pretty good.
Oh, and a tip, to protect your lens
and avoid lens or sun flares, use your lens hood.
They just screw right onto the end of your lens like this.
Now, let's talk about the other tools we mentioned
that will help improve your landscape shots even further.
The first being a tripod.
Like I mentioned before,
a tripod is first and foremost a great stabilizer
and can help eliminate motion blur from slow shutter speeds.
It also allows you to experiment
with things like long exposure, panoramas, and time lapses.
I'm going to use this Peak Design Travel 60-inch Tripod,
but feel free to grab yours and follow along.
The steps should be pretty similar.
When setting up your tripod,
first, mount the camera to the tripod plate.
Then extend the legs from the bottom section
and make final adjustments
with the upper portions of the legs.
This will help prevent having to bend down
to adjust at the bottom part of the tripod.
Here's a pro tip.
Extend your tripod legs
instead of extending the center pole.
The center pole is most susceptible to wind and movement,
making a blurry image.
I'll go ahead and mount my camera and adjust my height.
Also a great tip, when using a tripod,
it is essential to turn off any vibration reduction
or image stabilization on your lens
or it will introduce movement instead of reducing it.
All right, we've addressed better stabilization,
but what about adding deeper color?
This is where I use my polarizer,
an important tool to help make skies bluer, colors richer,
and help remove glare and reflections from the water.
And it simply goes on the end of your lens like this.
The Hoya 82 millimeter NXT Plus CRPL filter I'm using
is amazing and works just like polarizing sunglasses,
except that you have more control
as you can spin it around
to adjust the amount of polarization you want for your shot.
And because it helps reduce the amount of light
coming into the camera,
it can help with long exposures of moving water,
like in waterfalls.
(camera shutter clicks)
This feels pretty realistic to me,
so I'll keep it here.
Remember, you don't wanna always leave this filter on.
It will limit the amount of light that comes in
and can create unrealistic sky effects.
(camera shutter clicks)
Look at that.
We've just dialed in some pretty great landscape photos.
You should be feeling good.
Now, after the perfect vista's been captured,
we'll grab our backpack and put everything back in storage
for our next great landscape photography adventure.
Or if mid session you need access to extra batteries,
multiple lenses, additional memory card, even some snacks,
having this backpack will be all the more helpful.
Just remember, we highly recommend storing your lenses
with their lens cap on when not shooting.
This will help keep your lens clean.
All right, these are just a few tips
to help you with landscape photography.
I hope this inspires you to get out there
and take some pictures.
Hopefully this video was helpful.
If it was, give it a like.
If you have any questions, leave them in the comments below.
Don't forget to subscribe to our channel
for more Tech Tips from Best Buy.
Thanks for watching.
(gentle music)