The BEST camera SETTINGS for landscape photography

so how do you like my lighting setup a couple of soft boxes to light me up here and some headlight here microphone just outside so you can't see it and then a background here I'm not sure about the background maybe I should put a green screen so it looks like I'm actually in the forest but yeah I don't know it's also very nice because I can do this in sweatpants so it's yeah comfortable at the same time so today's video is all about camera settings for landscape photography and you might ask if there is a set of best settings that you can apply to all landscape photography and of course there are not think about it it wouldn't make sense to have all those different options for settings if there was only one that worked the best in all situations the settings always depends on the scene and are relative to how you want to capture it what you want to capture the camera you use the lens you use if you have a tripod and the amount of available light that is of course a ton of variable factors and that is the reason why there are no settings that work in all situations in this video I will give a brush-up about it but I do assume that you have a basic understanding of shutter speed aperture and ISO if you do not and you are completely new to photography be sure to check out Nigel Danson's video about exposure it is hands-down the best video about this topic on YouTube if you increase a decrease the shutter speed or aperture you increase a decrease the exposure of the photo if you increase the ISO you increase the brightness of the photo by amplifying the signal if you increase a decrease the shutter speed you make everything that moves and you see more or less blurry if you increase the ISO you make the photo more noisy and if you change the aperture you also change the depth of field which generally means that you want to have a closed down aperture when you do landscape photography because you want to have as much of the scene in focus as possible it is also important to notice that all lenses have an aperture where they are the sharpest this is all relative to a camera system to the lens and to the focal length usually for full-frame wide-angle lenses and standard zooms its f/8 to f/11 if you go beyond f-16 you introduce quite a lot of diffraction so you get a little bit more blurry for it it's not blurry but it is just a little bit more soft if you have a hundred to four hundred lens like I do you can usually shoot through f-22 without a significant drop of quality or sharpness to the lens my small camera like this one here I'm filming at the rx100 mark 7 is usually where I can see sharpest between f5 and ef5 6 and that is the same for my drone the DJI Mavic 2 Pro the point is to find the optimal balance between the shutter speed the aperture and the ISO in relation to the scene with all this in mind and claiming that there are no best settings for landscape photography I usually do approach most scenes with the same mindset I generally want to have the sharpest and cleanest photo without compromising the feeling of the photo the dynamics of the photo of the composition of the photo my safety and the safety of my gear so you actually have to be quite pragmatic when it comes to settings so usually when I approach a scene I usually always shoot with ISO hundred or ISO 50 X 100 is the base ISO of my camera and I so 50 is an extended low ISO which means that you over expose with one stop and then the camera pulls back that brightness of the photo this should theoretically give a cleaner photo in regard to noise but you lose a little bit of dynamic range well exactly one step of dynamic range in the highlights the rule of thumb is to have as low an ISO as possible as to get as clean a photo as possible thereafter I analyze the scene for what aperture I will need I usually go for f/8 to f/11 just to get the sharpest possible photo however I usually do have a quite deep depth of field so I usually stop down to f-16 just to have everything in focus if that is not possible then I might consider focus stacking or go all the way to f-22 but it depends on the scene and the conditions and I usually just let the shutter speed be what I needed to be to get an optimal exposure however if the scene has a lot of movement such as with a seascape or at a waterfall or there's a lot of wind that shakes the camera I need to take the shutter speed into consideration if I need a specific shutter speed and I am over exposing the scene I usually try to balance it out using filters if that is not possible I try to change the aperture without compromising the depth of field and lastly I try to adjust the ISO just a little bit without introducing too much noise if I have maxed out the threshold of either my depth of field or ISO I have to go back and rethink the shutter speed and my entire setup you usually do have a wide range of settings you can use without actually changing the outcome of the final photo and you can push most modern RAW files quite a lot in to brightness and noise reduction in the editing phase but you cannot fix in post processing is the depth of field or a photo which is out-of-focus blurry photos are also extremely hard to fix and usually the result is not satisfying so when it comes to the settings the depth of field is quite important to make sure that you have everything in focus that you need to have in focus and in regard to exposure the most important thing you need to remember is just to have your information within the histogram be sure to get my ebook about composition landscape photography if you want to know more about that subject I cover all the basic principles of composition in an easy-to-understand format with tons of examples you can get it down in the description or also down in the description you can check out the free lite version by signing up for my newsletter so in this section of the video I will go through some of my own photos analyze them and tell why I chose the settings that I chose for them so in this first example here from the black church in Iceland it is just a very simple composition straight on I didn't really need to think too much about the settings I went with f9 because as I said it's just about the sharpest iso hundred on a tripod 16 millimeter and then the shutter speed was just what the shutter speed was 150th of a second so in this photo because it was handheld I did need to prioritize the shutter speed a tiny bit it's quite wide angle so again I didn't really need to think much about the aperture either and I only really needed to make sure that the exposure was correct for the highlights so this photo here as you can see I'm photographing it from the top of a bridge at fairly wide angle and I shot it with my little Eric's hundred mark 4 and I didn't really have to think about the depth of fields and I'm pretty sure I shot this at Auto so the camera just went to f-18 and an ISO of 125 and a hundred of a second at 24 millimeter and it just works like that there's nothing in this scene that you would really need to think much about like it could have been shot at like if a door if five six or whatever at another shutter speed and it would have changed anything so this photo is quite interesting because whenever you have a reflection you actually do not need to shoot with an aperture which is close down because the foreground reflection is the same aperture that's what you need for the background so technically there isn't really a foreground in this photo here I could have probably shot it at f28 and it wouldn't have mattered so just by stopping down I made the photo a little bit sharper and I can honestly not remember if I needed to use a filter or not it probably did when it is it is a four five and and thirty seconds but because this is only the blue hour it's not during night so this here is actually a photo that confuses people so much it's a panorama of three photos I'm pretty sure I photographed them horizontally and I use the ten stop filter and it was raining here and had these huge waves coming towards me and taking off the filter and fiddling around with all those things I just didn't do it so I shot it at if to eight and f28 is actually sufficient to get this entire scene in focus and without the sharpness it's a tiny bit soft but it's only like 30 mega pixels on a 5d mark 3 so it's not like something which is super important to have super sharp because you don't really have that many make pictures to work with anyway and as you can see on the foreground long exposed waves a short long exposure just to get the streaks in the waves so when this photo here from the Faroe Islands I was literally sitting in the waterfall and I of course wanted the the streaks from the water but I really had to be pragmatic because I was like slipping down and it was very wet and and hard to get so just had to make sure without feeling too much around with the camera that I had one shot which won't focus from front to back and going to f-22 was just what I needed I didn't need to use filters because I could go to ISO 50 and and get 1.5 seconds of shutter speed so in this particular case I just really needed to get that shot done without having to focus like or anything like that if 20 to nobody can see the difference in sharpness anyway in this particular case I am not sure if I used filters or not but just to get this wave here as a short long exposure of 0.8 seconds f-14 to get everything in focus from front to back at ISO 50 I didn't use filters maybe I did using it sixth up filter it is daylight so I might have so this one here this is a focus stacked version because I was all the way down at minimum focus distance you can actually see that the very bottom of the photo is a little bit out of focus even though I'm shooting at F 20 the reason why I decided to go with F 20 was simply just to make sure that I had as much overlap between my focus tagged photos as possible because the narrower my depth of field is the more shots I have to take and in this particular case I had the tripod on this very very thin sheet of ice that I didn't want to break so each time I had to refocus and fiddle with the camera there was a risk of me breaking this sheet of ice and obviously I didn't want to do that so I had to compromise the sharpness a little bit just to make sure that I didn't have to take as many photos and and risk touching the camera as much as to break the ice so in this particular case yes optimally if you do choose a focus stack just to get it as sharp as possible you might as well just go with the sharpest part of the lens but in some cases as on this one here it made sense for me to go with if to instead and a shot from the famous ice beach in Iceland here when the water is on the way out is usually when you want to catch those streaks and for me about one second usually works pretty well between half a second and one second and f-16 iso hundred fourteen millimeter and I'm pretty sure I also have a sixth up filter on this one here again it all depends on how much light there is and here I'm shooting into the Sun which is hit a little bit behind some some thin clouds but I'm pretty sure use the filter to get this all the way to one second and in this particular case the waves were on their way in and here I find that about one third of a second to 0.3 seconds usually works fairly well to catch the streaks and then of course f-16 to get everything in focus ISO 50:12 millimeter and in this particular case I remember I didn't need to use the filter in this shot from an ice cave it is actually two photos two exposures thirty second at f/11 and ISO 3200 to to get the ice cave and all the Blues but some of the highlights were a little bit bloom so I also went with a exposure of 15 seconds at f11 and ISO 1600 1600 to merge them together and this just goes to show that sometimes there's simply just not enough light and then you just have to up the ISO and the reason why I went with Ethel evan was that then the ice cave is a little bit narrow so I wanted to make sure that I got everything in focus from back to front so the top of the ice cave wasn't focused and I would rather want it to be in focus with a little bit of noise in it then not have it in focus and have a clean photo so again here it's a question about what you prioritize so this photo here was one of those that was really really hot because I needed to make some compromises I'm sitting in a bus and shooting out the front window and and this scene just appears in front of us and I had to prioritize the shutter speed quite a lot because the boss obviously makes everything go go bomb be so and not to move the camera or just catch the scene and get the sharpness I really needed a fast shutter speed which meant I had to take the aperture down but shooting a 104 millimeter means that the foreground does become a little bit out of focus which is obviously dead in this particular case so this photo here is actually two photos one at 1/8 of a second for the foreground and one at 150th of a second for the background and I'm pretty sure able to use the filter for the background here shut it f6 3 at 16 millimeter and I did crop it to a vertical format so it the original photo is quite a lot wider and that is why I can use f6 3 and get everything in focus from front to back in this particular case I wanted to catch the streaks also in the foreground here but I wanted the fast shutter speed off the waterfall so usually streaks as I've already said coming towards you works between one third of a second and up to half a second it depends a little bit about your distance to the waves or the the water and how fast that water goes so one shot for the foreground at 0.4 f-16 is 112 millimeter with a filter on and one for the background where I got a fast shutter speed off the waterfall at one fiftieth of a second f-14 I just wandered again but without the filter so I had to take my big filter system out between these two photos with itself is hard and merging these two photos to it that's not a perfect overlap but I managed to do it with the water and so forth it's it's fairly easy to shots that you can merge even though the the pixels are not on top of each other when you work with them in Photoshop so this photo here is probably one of the hardest photos I've ever had to make in regard to settings because there are a lot of difficulties here it is night so I need a long exposure to make sure that I get enough light onto the sensor usually you would want to shoot with an open aperture so you don't need a long exposure but in this particular case I needed to stop down the aperture to get that Sun star which is actually a moon star because this is the moon and then I had to up or compensate for that with an ISO of 800 so what I had to do was I had to make sure that the moon was behind the arch when I started the exposure and then I just had to wait for the moon to come out hit the camera for a few seconds enough fight to light up and and I could make sure to get that moon boom spike Sun star moon moon star and then stopped the exposure and that meant that I got this very long exposure to compensate for the close down aperture as to also get some details in the shadows so sometimes I don't always get the settings right and it's annoying but it also happens to me in this particular case here I had to work really really hard to try to find as many compositions as possible and before these light beams went away and and the fog went away and evaporated so these two photos here as you can see they are shot at more or less the same settings at f11 but I'm shooting them at almost 100 millimeter which means that I actually would have had to stop down the aperture even more I am on a tripod so I could easily have done that but as you can see here I focused on the front trees here to make sure they were in focus but the background is just too much out of focus annoyingly out of focus it doesn't matter if I show it on Instagram but on a big print to me in this particular case I would have preferred to shoot I'll add f-16 or at least have focused stacked the photo when you work fast and you don't get to think it completely through then I students like this can happen this photo here is not a problem because I probably focused on on this chopped off a fallen branch in the middle so I did get everything in focus in the front and then the background trees are a little bit out of focus but in this particular case because the foreground is so close to the camera and I focused on that even at f11 my background was way too much power focus as you can see throughout all these examples the settings vary quite a lot but in most cases it didn't really matter whether or not I used an aperture of f56 or f-16 the only thing that it would change would be the choice of my shutter speed but if the shutter speed doesn't matter then who bloody cares what aperture I used as long as the photo is in focus and sharp enough for a big print you cannot deduce from the exif data if the photographer was battling a rain shower if the photo was taken out the front window of a bus if he was balancing on top of a waterfall and trying not to slip down or he was very close to minimum focus distance all these factors highly influenced the settings that you choose but if you do not know the context in which the photo was taken then the exif data will just end up confusing you all reduce your creativity at a certain scene because you think you can only photograph it in a certain way because you have learned that you need to have the optimal settings and if you don't you will be ridiculed by other photographers I think this is like one of the most toxic parts of the photography community and large what camera brand you use what settings you use you have to do X Y and C to be a great photographer is utterly bullcrap so let's stop focusing so much on the settings as you can see here it is not that important that you use f5 or if you use F eight in the end yes the settings does help you to catch focus get a clean photo and get a special blur in the water but it's extremely rare if not never that you need to have some exact settings to get the photo even with the sharpest photo your photo will still suck if you don't tell a story inspire people catch a special moment or make a wacky composition and composition is something that I focus a lot on in my landscape photography if you want to learn more about composition be sure to get my ebook there is a link down in the description and you can also get my free lite version by signing up for my newsletter as always I would HIGHLY appreciate a like and let me hear your relation to settings down in the comments

Channel: Mads Peter Iversen

Views: 73,155

Rating: 4.9577556 out of 5

Keywords: photography, landscape photography, camera settings, landscape photography tutorial, photography tutorial, landscape photography tips, photography for beginners, camera settings for landscape photography, photography settings, landscape photography settings, landscape photography camera settings, best settings for landscape photography, best landscape settings, best photography settings, iso, aperture, shutter speed, photography for beginners tutorial, best aperture, learn

Id: 5_qIXaQkNRE

Length: 22min 10sec (1330 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 21 2020