Impactful Landscape Photography - The Four Ingredients

I often reflect on why I spend a lot of my time with landscape photography, both shooting and processing. The reasons why are a topic all their own. But all the time I spend shooting, studying, and practicing, has made me reflect on what it is that creates stunning landscape photographs. I think about how to take my photographs to that next level.

In my mind, it comes down to four ingredients. There are exceptions to every rule, of course, but there are four ingredients that must come together to create exceptional landscape and nature imagery. Several of which we can control, and one in which we cannot, at least for the most part.

1. Craft

The first ingredient in creating amazing landscape images is knowing your craft. And when I say craft, I am referring to the technical settings and techniques involved in mastering your camera and in shooting landscape photography more specifically. It is important to put in the time to learn the basics of photography, including the exposure triangle, white balance, focus and metering modes.

2. Vision

The second ingredient in creating amazing landscape images is vision. Learning the tools and techniques is just half the equation. Beyond understanding the technicals, we have to learn to see in our minds what we want to create with these techniques. The two go hand in hand, as the stronger understanding of the technicals and the more we hone our craft, the stronger and more creative our vision grows.

Vision helps us find that unique perspective or puts an artistic polish on the image through post processing. Craft is the skill while vision allows us to express ourselves with that skill. The more we practice the various techniques, in shooting and processing, the more creative possibilities open up to us. We learn to see what we might not have seen before.

For me, this vision comes from framing images in my mind as I drive or hike, and from reflecting on past clicks of the shutter that fall short of impressing me. Just like our craft, our vision grows from practice and is integral to creating unique and impactful landscape images.

3. Opportunity

To practice and develop both craft and vision, there must be opportunity. Sometimes these opportunities may fall in your lap and other times you must create opportunities. You have to sacrifice sleep or time with family to get out when the light is good or to travel to a place which inspires you.

The opportunity factor can be a little complicated because in many ways you have control. You may want to go shooting at night in the city or in the middle of nowhere to find dark skies, but venturing out alone as a woman can feel scary or unsafe.

The trouble with having (and to some extent choosing) limited opportunities leads me to the fourth ingredient over which we have little to no control.....

4. Luck

The fourth ingredient is luck. And when I say luck I am referring to the luck of Mother Nature. We have absolutely no control over the weather! Where we sometimes, but not always, have a little control is that we can make an effort to go out to shoot when we see an optimistic forecast. You can head out for sunset when the forecast is for partly cloudy or head out to shoot the Milky Way during the New Moon and a clear forecast.

But you cannot control when that beautiful puffy cloud filled sky in the afternoon suddenly decides to become clear with no sunset colour whatsoever. If you head out to shoot those stars and the clouds come earlier than expected, you cannot just blow them away.

If you plan a trip to the mountains in the autumn when it is usually peak colour and peak comes the next week, there is nothing you can do about it. You can get up every morning of a vacation, but if you get a week of clear skies, your sunrise will look mostly the same. There is nothing you can do to change the weather when Mother Nature foils your plans.