The following 5 examples represent the most commonly made mistake when taking landscape photographs.

1) Wonky Horizons

How often have you seen seascapes or landscape with sloping horizons. Its not hard to either straiten them in post processing or get them level in camera. Buy a spirit level to fin in the hot shoe or use the camera’s inbuilt spirit level if it has one.

2) Dull Sky

So often good clouds will make a picture. Blue sky can be boring. Avoid large area of blue sky with no interest by either cropping out in post processing or recomposing your picture to contain more foreground than sky.

3) Uninteresting Foreground

Avoid large areas of water or grass in the foreground. If it doesn’t add anything to the composition, get rid of it, either by recomposing your image, or cropping it out in Photograph. Great Landscapes have interest from foreground to background so try and crate story telling pictures that keep revealing more every time you look at them.

4) No Focal Point

All photos need a focal point, something to focus on, an element within the picture that take dominance over the rest of the image. A sunset is not enough to hold peoples attention.

5) Insufficient Depth OF Field

Either the foreground is out of focus or the background is blurred. If you have ever wondered how they get calendar pictures pin sharp from front to back they use something called hyper focal distancing. Use a Tripod, use a wide angled lens, set you camera focussing to manual, and adjust the focus to 1m or 3 feet, set the aperture to f/22 and you will have pin sharp shots from front to back.



If you would like to learn more about taking the perfect landscape photograph, see MyPhotoSchool’s tutor Sue Bishop 4 week online course Making the Perfect Landscape Photograph