Landscape photography offers powerful opportunities to create mood and visual appeal through outdoor beauty. However, since it involves shooting in the great outdoors, landscape photographers have to do a little extra preparation to ensure a safe and effective shoot. So how to optimize your toolkit for this rewarding (and beautiful!) practice?
As photographers, we spend a great deal of money on essentials like lenses, cases and camera bodies — but small accessories can make a big impact. Our four favorites:
Filter Holder
Being able to easily access your filters is essential to capturing outdoor lighting condition’s nuance. A good filter holder should be able to store, at minimum, two filters (two 4×4″ and two 4×6″), your circular polarizer, and adapter rings, plus protect them from jostling or scratching. Seek out a well-cushioned model to keep these essential tools both safe and handy, or look up one of the Internet’s variety of tutorials to create an effective DIY version.
Tripod Feet
The tripod is your camera’s best friend — and therefore yours — in the field. Keeping it stabilized isn’t just important to achieve a good shot: in rocky or unstable terrain, a tripod spill could be disaster for your lens. Protect your equipment and your output with tripod feet. There are two main varieties, foot spikes and claw feet. The first locks the legs deeply into sand or loose earth, while the second can grip onto a rock face — even steeply angled ones.
Hoodman
There’s nothing worse thinking you’ve made the “perfect shot” only to get home view the image on your comouter screen and find that one of your main areas of focus in not sharp. Our LCD viewing screens on cameras are a good way to compose, but a poor way to check if what we want to be in focus is in focus. So we highly recommend a Hoodman for viewing. These devices enlarge what you are seeing on the camera’s view screen and allow you to make the necessary adjustments prior to making the image.
Souped-Up GPS
Keeping a specific and accurate record of where you’ve been can be a massive help to the landscape photographer. Finding the perfect angle from a well-known location, visualizing whether you’ve been shooting in one place too much, or marking a new hotspot: all can be accomplished through a simple iOS app called GPS Tracks, which exports geo-data info right into photos’ EXIF data as they’re taken.
Visit our homepage today to discover a wealth of resources and opportunities for the aspiring photographer. Our accessible photography workshops and exotic guided trips can help you hone your skills, develop a unique style, and boost your artistic potential.
