5 Landscape Photography Settings Every Photographer Should Know

Introduction

Are you looking to take your landscape photography to the next level? Do you want to know the landscape photography settings that will really revolutionize your photos?

Don’t worry.

I’m going to share with you the five landscape photography settings that you can use all the time – including my favorite shooting modes, the best apertures, and more – so that your landscape photography looks consistently stunning.

Use Manual Mode to Bracket Your Photos for Perfect Exposures

Good landscape photography settings start with a spot-on exposure.

In other words:

If you want to capture great landscape images, you’ve got to get the brightness right so that every area of the photo has detail.

The darkest shadows should have detail.

The brightest highlights should have detail.

And in landscape photography, this is often a challenge. Because you’re often shooting dark foregrounds with brilliant skies, and the brilliant skies are so much brighter that your camera can’t capture detail in both the shadows and the bright skies.

So what do you do?

You bracket your exposures – using Manual mode.

That is, instead of capturing a single shot that exposes for everything in the photo, you capture several shots, spanning the range of very dark to very bright.

I recommend doing this in Manual mode because it gives you the most control over the entire image.

However, you can do this in Aperture Priority mode with exposure compensation, or you can even use your camera’s auto-bracketing function.

Modern mirrorless advantage: Today’s mirrorless cameras from Sony, Canon, Nikon, and Fujifilm offer 14-15 stops of dynamic range. In many situations, you can recover significant shadow and highlight detail from a single RAW file without bracketing. However, for extreme conditions like shooting directly into a sunset, bracketing remains the gold standard.

Here’s how bracketing works:

First, set your exposure for a middle value in the scene – an area that’s neither too dark nor too light. Then raise the shutter speed by a stop, so the shot is underexposed, and take a photo.

Next, drop the shutter speed back to the original exposure value, and take another photo.

Finally, drop the shutter speed down even further, so that your shot is overexposed by about a stop, and take a third photo.

Note that if your scene has an unusually extreme dynamic range, you may want to extend this bracketing further, capturing shots that are two stops underexposed and two stops overexposed (along with the shots I’ve already discussed). Checking the histogram on your EVF or LCD can help you determine whether this is necessary.

Once you’ve captured your set of bracketed exposures, you’ll need to blend them together using a photo editing program. Lightroom’s Photo Merge HDR feature handles this beautifully, as does Photoshop’s Merge to HDR Pro. You can also use dedicated HDR software like Photomatix Pro or HDR Efex.

And then…

After a little tweaking, you’ll have a final photo – that includes well-exposed areas in every part of the frame.

No highlight clipping, no shadow clipping, no exposure problems.

That’s the power of bracketing in Manual mode!

Use a Narrow Aperture to Ensure the Whole Photo Is Sharp

Bracketing your landscape photos is extremely important, especially if you’re working with high dynamic range scenes.

But when you’re bracketing exposures, you’ll need to choose the right aperture so that the entire scene is sharp from front to back.

How do you do this?

You use a sufficiently narrow aperture, one that ensures a deep depth of field.

The best apertures for landscape photography tend to start around f/8 and go all the way to f/16. The particular aperture you choose depends on the scene; if your scene has elements very close to your lens (that is, close foreground elements), you’ll need a narrower aperture. But if your scene only includes mid-ground and background elements, then an aperture of f/8 to f/11 will probably do the trick.

Avoid going narrower than f/16: While it might seem logical to use f/22 for maximum depth of field, diffraction starts to noticeably soften your images beyond f/16 on most cameras. On high-resolution sensors (45MP+), you may even notice softening starting at f/14.

In reality, it’s tough to predict in advance the best aperture for your particular scene. Modern mirrorless cameras make this easier with depth of field preview and focus peaking. Alternatively, you can take a test shot, zoom in on your LCD to check the foreground and background, then shoot again with a revised aperture.

You will occasionally come upon compositions where you just don’t have the right aperture capabilities to get the whole thing in focus. I’m talking about extreme wide-angle shots, with a rock or river or group of flowers smack-dab in the foreground, and a background far off in the distance.

In cases like that, you’ll need to use something called focus stacking, where you capture several photos of the scene, but with different points of focus.

In-camera focus bracketing: Most modern mirrorless cameras now include built-in focus bracketing modes. Sony, Canon, Nikon, Fujifilm, and Panasonic all offer this feature. The camera automatically captures a series of shots at different focus distances – you just set the step size and number of frames. This is a game-changer for landscape photographers who previously had to manually refocus between each shot.

So for a scene that’s a rock with a mountain in the distance, you might capture a photo with the rock as the point of focus, then another photo with the mid-ground as the point of focus (the area behind the rock), then finally an area with the background as the point of focus.

When you get home, you can pop the photos into Photoshop (or a dedicated focus-stacking program like Helicon Focus or Zerene Stacker) and create a single shot that’s sharp throughout.

Fortunately, if you don’t feel confident with focus-stacking, you can also just recompose the shot to include a foreground that’s not quite so dominating. That way, you can handle it using an aperture of f/11 to f/16, and everything will be sharp from the get-go.

Use Manual Focus to Select the Hyperfocal Distance

Whenever you’re determining your landscape photography settings, you need to ensure that you focus on the right part of the frame.

Because if you focus too far back, you’ll end up with a sharp background but a blurry foreground.

Like this:

And if you focus too far forward, you’ll end up with a sharp foreground but a blurry background:

Instead, you need to focus a certain distance into the scene, which is referred to as the hyperfocal distance.

You see, to maximize depth of field (and therefore sharpness), you must set your focus point on the hyperfocal distance. Because the hyperfocal distance is the sweet spot. If you can nail the hyperfocal distance, then you have the best chance of getting the whole shot sharp.

But how do you determine the hyperfocal distance?

There are hyperfocal distance calculators online and smartphone apps like PhotoPills and Hyperfocal Pro that make this precise. But many photographers prefer to avoid this step while in the field.

Instead, they switch their lens to manual focus, and follow a basic trick:

They focus a third of the way into the frame.

Because while a photographer’s ability to eyeball a third of the way into the frame is rarely perfect, it’ll get them pretty darn close to the hyperfocal distance (assuming you’ve chosen a sufficiently narrow aperture) – and will ensure that as much of the shot as possible is sharp.

Mirrorless focusing aids: Modern mirrorless cameras make manual focusing significantly easier with tools like focus peaking (which highlights in-focus edges with a colored overlay) and focus magnification (which lets you zoom in 5-10x to verify critical sharpness). Many cameras also display the current focus distance in the EVF, helping you dial in the hyperfocal distance more precisely.

Manual focus is often best for landscape photography because it ensures you can focus exactly where you want (and sometimes, there’s not an object a third of the way into the frame, so your autofocus will have nothing to lock onto).

Note that you can always check whether you’ve chosen a good focal point by using focus magnification on your EVF or LCD, or by taking a test shot and checking the foreground and background edges.

That way, you can be sure you captured a perfectly sharp shot.

Use Electronic Shutter or Self-Timer to Eliminate Camera Shake

Whenever you use a narrow aperture – which is often best! – your lens lets in very little light.

As a consequence, your photos will be far too dark, unless you compensate by raising the ISO or lowering the shutter speed.

In landscape photography, you want to keep the ISO as low as possible. This will ensure you have a minimum amount of noise, and that you don’t have to worry about losing detail or dynamic range.

So that leaves the shutter speed.

To capture well-exposed photos, you’ll often need to drop the shutter speed down to 1/10s to 10s (and beyond).

This requires a tripod; it’s almost impossible to handhold at 1/10s and keep your shots sharp.

(Alternatively, you can handhold at low shutter speeds but use the blur for artistic purposes, as in the photo above.)

But you’re also faced with another problem:

Vibrations from the camera itself.

Electronic shutter – the modern solution: Modern mirrorless cameras offer electronic (silent) shutter modes that completely eliminate mechanical vibration. There’s no physical curtain movement, no shutter shock – just pure, vibration-free capture. For tripod-based landscape photography, electronic shutter is often the best choice.

If you’re using a mechanical shutter (or a DSLR), vibrations from the shutter mechanism and mirror can cause slight blur, especially at certain “danger zone” shutter speeds (typically 1/15s to 1/2s).

For these situations, use the two-second self-timer function. That way, your camera won’t capture the photo for two seconds after you hit the shutter button, and any vibrations from your touch will have time to fade.

Smartphone remote apps: Every major camera manufacturer now offers a free smartphone app (Sony Imaging Edge, Canon Camera Connect, Nikon SnapBridge, etc.) that lets you trigger the shutter remotely. This is incredibly convenient – no need to buy a separate remote release, and you can even preview the shot and adjust settings from your phone.

But a two-second self-timer or electronic shutter should work perfectly fine. You can still capture sharp shots without any extra gear!

Use Your EVF Tools for Precise Composition and Exposure

Here’s your final landscape photography setting for gorgeous photos:

Take full advantage of your camera’s electronic viewfinder (EVF) and LCD tools.

If you’re shooting with a mirrorless camera, you’re always seeing a direct feed from the sensor – what used to be called “Live View” on DSLRs is simply how mirrorless cameras work. This is actually a huge advantage for landscape photographers.

Why is this so valuable?

Composition aids: Enable grid overlays (rule of thirds, golden ratio) to help you compose stronger shots. Use the electronic level to ensure your horizons are perfectly straight – no more crooked seascapes!

Exposure preview: Your EVF shows you exactly what the final exposure will look like in real-time. You can see if highlights are blown or shadows are crushed before you take the shot. Enable the live histogram for even more precision, and turn on “zebras” (striped highlight warnings) to instantly identify overexposed areas.

Focus verification: Use focus magnification (typically activated by pressing a dedicated button or the center of the control dial) to zoom in 5-10x and verify your focus point is tack-sharp. Combined with focus peaking, this makes achieving critical sharpness much easier than the old days of squinting through an optical viewfinder.

Articulating screens: Many modern cameras feature fully articulating or tilting LCD screens. This is invaluable for landscape photography – you can compose low-angle shots of foreground flowers without lying in the mud, or hold the camera overhead for unique perspectives.

So make sure you explore your camera’s EVF and LCD settings. Most photographers only scratch the surface of these tools.

Mastering them will improve your landscape photos!

5 Landscape Photography Settings Every Photographer Should Know: Conclusion

Now that you’ve finished this article, you know all about the best landscape photography settings – and how you can use them to capture amazing landscape photos.

Modern mirrorless cameras have made landscape photography more accessible than ever, with features like electronic shutters, in-camera focus bracketing, and advanced EVF tools that were unimaginable just a few years ago.

So get outside. Start practicing.

And make sure you follow the guidelines I’ve given you.

You’ll come away with some incredible photos – I guarantee it!

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