How do I take landscape photos that are actually worth looking at?

The commonest landscape photograph is taken at midday from a viewpoint car park, includes everything visible, and looks nothing like the experience of standing there. Fixing that is mostly about when you go and what you put in the front of the frame.

What you'll need

• A tripod (optional)
• A polarising filter (optional)
• Weatherproof clothing and a torch for early starts (optional)

Step by step

1. Go at the right time.Low sun rakes across the land, throws long shadows and reveals shape and texture. Overhead sun flattens everything and produces harsh contrast. The hour either side of sunrise and sunset is not a cliché — it is when the light does the work for you.
2. Choose one subject.A tree, a building, a rock, a bend in a river, a break in the cloud. A photograph of everything in front of you is a photograph of nothing. Decide what the picture is about before you set up.
3. Build a foreground.Something within two or three metres of the camera — rocks, grasses, a stream, a wall, a path. Depth in a flat image comes from a strong relationship between something near and something far. Without it, the picture is a distant strip.
4. Get low and get close.Crouching and moving the camera to within a metre of a foreground element makes it large and immediate, and the distance beyond it feels vast. This is the single technique that most changes landscape photographs.
5. Set aperture for depth of field.f/8 to f/11 on most lenses. Focus roughly a third into the scene, or use the focus distance that keeps both the foreground and the horizon acceptably sharp. Beyond f/16 diffraction starts to soften the whole image.
6. Use a tripod and low ISO.It lets you use the aperture and shutter you want rather than the ones the light allows, it slows you down enough to look at the frame properly, and it makes the small compositional adjustments possible.
7. Keep the horizon level and off centre.A tilted horizon is the most noticeable technical fault in a landscape. Put it on the upper third when the land is the subject and on the lower third when the sky is.
8. Use a polariser for water, foliage and haze.It cuts reflections off wet rock and leaves so their real colour shows, deepens a blue sky, and reduces atmospheric haze in distant hills. It costs two stops, which is another reason for the tripod.
9. Handle the sky honestly.If the sky is featureless white, use very little of it. If it is dramatic, use a lot. A graduated filter or two blended exposures lets you keep detail in a bright sky above a dark land.
10. Come back.The photograph you want is usually a matter of being there in the right conditions rather than of technique. Scout in poor light, note where the sun rises and sets relative to the subject, and return.

Tips

• Weather that keeps other people indoors — clearing storms, mist, low cloud, frost, snow — produces the pictures worth having. Flat blue sky is the least interesting light there is.
• Check the sunrise and sunset direction for your location before you go. Apps will show where the sun will be relative to the subject on a given date.
• Include a person or a building for scale in mountain and coastal shots. Without one, nothing conveys how large the landscape is.

Common mistakes

• Photographing the view rather than a subject — The eye scans a landscape and assembles it; a photograph presents it all at once and flat. Without one clear subject there is nothing for a viewer to look at.
• Standing at full height at a viewpoint — It gives every photograph the same familiar high, distant, foreground-free composition. Getting low and close to something changes the picture completely.
• Going at midday because it is convenient — The light is overhead, contrast is at its harshest, and colours are washed. No amount of editing produces low golden light from an overhead sun.

If it doesn't work

Questions people ask