Thank you for all who came to our landscape photography meeting, and we hope that we inspired you to get outside and capture some beautiful landscapes. If you missed the meeting or want to review, here is everything we talked about.

Hi, it is Nathaniel writing here. If you like traveling, road trips, hiking, weather, clouds, sunsets, sunrises, adventures, oceans, mountains, etc. then I bet you’ll be interested in landscape photography. To start off, here are the basic settings that you will want to keep in mind when doing landscape photography. You will want to use a tripod to keep your camera nice and steady. Most times, your shutter speed will be too long for you to hand hold your camera and get a sharp photo. Secondly, since we have our camera on a tripod, we want to use the lowest ISO (most likely ISO 100) so that we can have the least amount of noise and most amount of dynamic range in our photo. Since we often want everything in focus and do not care for a shallow depth of field, we want to pick a sharp aperture. For most lenses, it is around f/8 – f/11. Unlike other genres of photography, you do not need a really expensive lens with a bright aperture (i.e. f/1.4) because you will want to stop down anyway. Then, pick any shutter speed that gets you the correct exposure.

I find almost exclusively use Aperture Priority Mode for my landscape photography. Since the ambient light levels change quickly during sunrise or sunset, and the last thing that I want to be worried about is manually changing my settings to get the correct exposure. Instead of focusing on getting the correct exposure, I can focus on getting the correct composition. So, do not be afraid to use some of the automatic modes on your camera especially when they can save you time. On the topic of exposure, it is best to always underexposure your landscape photos so that you can retain all the details in your highlights. There is nothing worse than capturing a beautiful sunset with lovely colorful clouds only to realize that when you start editing, your sky is completely white. On digital cameras, it is much easier to bring up the shadows in post versus bringing down the highlights. Also, if the scene’s dynamic range is greater than your camera, then you should take multiple exposures and blend them in post-processing. As for focus, you can use auto focus to get the correct focus; however, since your camera will be on a tripod, then you should switch it to manual focus because there is no need to focus again. Lastly, you will want to use a 10 second timer (or intervalometer) so that you do not introduce unnecessary camera shake especially if you are doing a long exposure.

Anyone can use these settings and take a photo of a landscape, but that does not guarantee an interesting landscape photo. So how do you capture an interesting landscape? Well, it starts off by being in the right location at the right time. Unlike being in a studio where you can control the light, we have to rely on the sun in landscape photography. And the sunlight is more colorful and softer at sunrise and sunset. If you were to take a portrait photo, using a softbox will create much softer light versus a direct flash on the person’s face. The same is true for a landscape. The midday sun is like shining a direct light into the person’s face.

California Coastal Sunset. Photo by Nathaniel Young.

Now for a little story time. I am by no means a professional landscape photographer, so that is not what I get to do all the time. I have to go to work, and I have to take classes during the school year; therefore, I cannot just go out for every sunset and hope for beautiful conditions. So, over the summer of 2019, I wanted to go out for a sunset along the coast of California near where I live, but I also want to maximize my changes of a successful photo. And aside from my two family trips that had some level of prior planning, this ended up being the only other time I went out to do landscape photography that summer. So how did I know that this evening would a good one for sunset? Instead of relying on luck, I looked at the radar map to determine where the clouds were forming.

Going back to the thought of being “at the right location at the right time”. To find an interesting location for landscape photography, you have to do your research. Read online blogs, local guides, etc. to find interesting locations. I often find that looking at Google Maps Satellite View is a good way to find interesting geological features in the landscape that might be interesting to photograph. In addition, if you are at a location and have some time to spare, you might consider doing some location scouting. This can be done by just walking around to find interesting foreground subjects that can help tie together your landscape photo.

Next, finding the location of where the sun rises or sets is important to know. It is important to know because the direction of where the sun rises or sets is often the direction of the most colorful light. My favorite app to do this is PhotoPills ($9.99 on Google Play or Apple App Store). By using their planner, you can see specifically what direction the sun will be in at any time of day for any GPS location. One thing to keep in mind is that the sun sets much earlier in the winter time compared to the summer time. Therefore, the location of the sun along the horizon during different seasons will be much different. You can definitely see this effect in the PhotoPills application. The thick orange line is the direction of the sunset and the thick yellow line is the direction of the sunrise. The thinner yellow line is the direction of the sun at the current time.

Here is another photo of the same location as the first along the coast of California. However, this photo was taken in March compared to the other one which was taken in June. And by looking at both of the photos, you can see the different perspective of the sea stacks. Also, in the second photo, the sunstar effect was achieved by using an aperture of f/22. By closing the aperture of your lens, bright lights (in the case, the sun) will create a star effect. Different lenses with different number of aperture blades will create different looking sunstars.

So, we know that the best time for landscape photography is around sunrise and sunset; however, all sunrises or sunsets are not equal. In order to get a colorful sunrise or sunset, we have to have clouds in the sky to catch and reflect the sunlight. It is possible to get colorful sunrises/sunsets on any elevation clouds, but it is often the high altitude clouds that most landscape photographers get excited about. Mid and low altitude clouds can also catch beautiful colors too, but your window of opportunity will be less for the lower the altitude is. A good rule of thumb is that the lower the altitude clouds are, the closer you want to be the edge of the cloud bank. In addition, with med or high altitude clouds, it is possible to get colors in all directions; this means that you do not have to exactly be facing in the direction of the sunrise/sunset. But if you have too much low altitude clouds (or fog, atmospheric haze, etc.) it can block the light from reflecting off the cloud base which will make for a grey sunrise/sunset.

The best application that I have found to predict the altitude of clouds for any given location is called Clear Outside (Free on Google Play or Apple App Store). Basically, it will give you an hourly percentage of high, med, and low altitude clouds. This is great for understanding the altitude of the clouds, but it is not good for understanding where exactly the clouds are or how they are moving. For that, you will want to find a weather visualization application with a radar map. I really like using Flowx (Free on Google Play). Also, Windy is pretty good too (Free on Google Play or Apple App Store).

Central Coast California Sunset. Photo by Nathaniel Young.

Now for another story. This past break, my family and I headed down to the Central Coast in California. On the first evening, I captured this photo overlooking Morro Bay and Morro Rock (a volcanic plug). In this photo, you can see we have some high and med altitude clouds capturing the sunlight. In addition, we have a pretty clear horizon which means that there were no low clouds or fog blocking the sunlight from reflecting off the cloud base. In addition, at this time of year, the sun was setting in the southwest direction and my camera was facing in the northwest direction. You can see that the light is coming in from the left of the photo. All of this to say that you do not necessarily need to always be facing the direction of the sunrise/sunset to get colorful clouds. If we were to have more low hanging clouds, then the sunlight would not be able to catch on as many clouds, so you probably have to be facing closer towards direction of the sunrise/sunset.

Here are the Clear Outside and Flowx screenshots from that evening. And you can see that they are indeed pretty good predictions. The dot on the Flowx screenshot is actually closer to the beach versus where I was standing. One more thing to note is that the best colors always seem to happen before sunrise or after sunset. In this photo, we were running late the whole day and we did not get to this viewpoint until after sunset. Regardless, I still managed to catch the peak of the colors of the sunset. When you go out to photograph a sunset, do not be the person to pack up your gear when the sun sets because that is just when the show is getting started.

Half Dome Sunset. Photo by Nathaniel Young.

What if you do not have clouds in the sky to catch the sunlight? Well, zoom in with your lens. Try to Isolate your subject or focus on more intimate landscape scenes. It does not make for an interesting photo when half of your photo is an empty blue sky. If you happen to be in the mountains, you can catch some alpenglow. Alpenglow occurs when direct sunlight during sunrise/sunset hits the top of the mountain peak creating the reddish orange glow. For example, I found myself in a similar situation in Yosemite, but managed to catch some light on Half Dome. Lastly, if you cannot find those tighter compositions to exclude the sky, you can always just want for the stars to come out so you can do some astrophotography.

Finally, here are some other thoughts to consider. Before you go to a location, check to see if you can find a local webcam that shows a live feed of what the sky looks like. This can help you determine if the clouds are looking good for a colorful sunset. If you are doing seascapes, you should also check the tide charts. My favorite website for checking tide charts is Willy Weather. During low tide, you will often find interesting textures and details in the foreground that you otherwise would not see. My final tip is to be patient. Just set your camera up on your tripod and enjoy the scenery while the light changes.

If you enjoyed reading this and want to read more behind the scenes of my first and third photos in this blog post, then you can check out my personal blog on the first photo and third photo.

Also, here are some photos below from the meeting taken by Wenjun Ning.