NEW PHOTO TIPS
Professional landscape photographer Peter Eastway gives you the lowdown on how to achieve the highest-quality photos of the world around us
For me, landscape photography is all about the emotion. It’s about creating atmosphere and interpreting how I feel about my scene using equipment and techniques that produce the finest quality. It’s a weird synthesis of left and right-brain thinking, where I get to solve technical and logistical challenges, like getting to the location in the first place, and then hopefully create something magical as well.
I am quite comfortable comparing my approach to landscape photography with producing a Hollywood feature film, where it’s all about visual storytelling and creating a cinematic experience. However, I imagine other landscape photographers would prefer their work to be compared to a BBC wildlife documentary, where production values are designed to produce a ‘genuine’ or ‘realistic’ experience.
Both are valid approaches to landscape photography. Photographers with no real interest in selling their work nevertheless aspire to a ‘professional’ standard of photography and, in many ways, being an amateur is the perfect position because you only have yourself to please. On the other hand, if you’re selling your landscape photos, your work has to satisfy your customers. Suddenly your creativity may be curtailed because what you love photographing ‘doesn’t sell’ to your market, so you may need to adapt.
Being a professional landscape photographer is a wonderful dream, but whether you have a change of career in mind or not, producing professionalquality landscape prints is something we can all aspire to. And there’s no doubt, shooting as an unencumbered amateur is the best way to enjoy it!
1 ARE BIGGER SENSOR CAMERAS BEST?
Medium format camera quality comes at a cost, and there are many EOS cameras that will take top-class photos
CHOOSING THE best camera for landscape photography is usually a compromise between price and quality. Fortunately, modern cameras are so good that any 20MP+ recent Canon EOS DSLR or mirrorless camera from the past five years is capable of producing superlative landscape photographs – as long as you don’t want to make huge prints. Although even if you do want to make huge prints, stitching frames together into a panorama can capture the extra pixels required to make highly detailed files.
The ultimate machine for landscape photography, in terms of detail and fidelity, is usually considered to be the medium-format digital camera. Models from Phase One, Hasselblad, Fujifilm and Pentax vary widely in price. You can find a 50-megapixel medium-format came
