Outdoor Photography How To

If you’re going to be a serious landscape photographer, you need a serious tripod but what’s mystifying is how little thought people put into picking one out. That’s exactly why professional photographer Tom Mackie of Landscape Photography iQ made the below video gear guide.

Are you confused by all those "weird" numbers, symbols, and other classifications on your memory cards? Well, don't feel bad because you're not alone—even though this terminology can be quite important to understand.

Many landscape photographers never leave home without a polarizing filter, and consider this simple accessory almost mandatory for everything they do. But as you see in the eye-opening tutorial below, one pro says polarizers may detract from an image in certain situations—depending on the specific scene at hand and the mood you want to create.

It’s not uncommon for photographers to adopt a “set-it-and-forget it” mentality when configuring their cameras, thereby ending up with photographs that aren’t as good as possible. Whether you call this habit lazy or uninformed, there are times when the choice of a custom setting results in more creative images.

Photographers revere the Golden Hour, but when does it actually get dark? You have a rough idea of when night falls where you live, but what if you’re traveling to a distant location in another time zone? Here’s a link to a US Navy website that will fetch all pertinent sunrise and sunset information that you need.

Before I answer the question above, a few words about the kinds of pictures I like to take. Simply, they are pictures that are different—different from what others might be shooting at a particular location, even different from what I might have shot at that location the last time I visited.

If you’ve been around the block more than once you’re no doubt familiar with many of the “rules” of composition. Budding outdoor photographers are told to use the Rule of Thirds, always include the foreground to create a sense of depth, and never position a subject in the middle of the frame or bisect a shot with the horizon.