3 Essential Items Every Landscape Photographer Needs
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Every landscape photographer needs to have a camera and lens. That’s pretty obvious. You can get by with just a phone or point-and-shoot camera, but it will limit the style of photograph that you can eventually.
So let’s assume that you have a DSLR or mirrorless camera. You’ve taken the plunge and upped your game. Now you are prepared to take on the pros.
But what other bits of kit should you have?
What can take you from a simple snapper to a fully fledged amateur photographer?
What can help you be creative in the field and get those pictures that you so admire with other photographers.
Here are the 3 bits of kit that I think every landscape photographer cannot be without.
They live in my bag or I carry them whenever I go to take landscape images. Every photographer needs these 3 bits of kit at some point. Especially if they are trying to expand their photography and get those professional looking images!
Number 1 - Tripod
It’s such an obvious thing but lots of people don’t bother with using a tripod and think they can get everything that they need handheld. But that is impossible! You must use a tripod at some point.
Don’t get me wrong, I know that being handheld can give a sense of freedom and makes it easy to move between angles and positions.
But the tripod gives your camera stability, which is essential if you start shooting images with a longer exposure.
I’ve found that as well as providing stability, it makes me think about the scene in front of me more. It makes me slow down and look before starting to snap pictures.
I take the whole scene in and I look for the image that I want to create.
I try and see if there are any s-curves or frames of which I can make use. I consider my direction, where the sun is and how it will affect my image, where the wind is and whether it will cause any shake or drive the rain onto the front of my lens. I look for foreground interest.
In other words, I create an image rather than snap a photo. Hopping around from viewpoint to viewpoint can get you some good photos but 9 times out of 10 those photos will be a bit crap. They will be at a bad angle, there will be something intruding upon the image, there will be some element overexposed, there could be a million things wrong with it.
By using a tripod, however, you pause, you think, you consider, you can move and create an image of which to be proud. And most other landscape photographers that you talk to will tell you the same thing.
If you have a tripod use it! If you don’t have one, go get one! There are some great, yet affordable options available on Amazon UK, for example I have this Sirui Tripod that I use when I am travelling! Once you start progressing further you may want to upgrade it to something that does everything that you want.
I currently have 3 tripods which I use for different situations. 1 is a Sirui travel sized tripod, brilliant little tripod that is the perfect size to always have with me. 1 is a Manfrotto standard sized tripod with the central column able to go horizontal, very useful for shooting above something.
And my most recent acquisition is a 3 Legged Thing, British designed and manufactured, and the central column is completely removable allowing me to get close to the ground. As well as these I have a Sirui ball head for use with my landscape lenses and a Sirui gimbal head for use with my heavy wildlife lenses.
This is what works for me and is by no means what you should have.
You need to find what works for you!
UPDATE - 25/11/2020
Since I wrote this article, I have changed my tripod to a Gitzo Series 5 LS. Fantastic tripod, super stable and extends beyond my height, which can be useful.
It’s fitted with a Manfrotto Bowl Head which means I can safely level the base of the tripod when the legs are positioned somewhat haphazardly and I am using a simple tripod head: Andoer Panoramic Tilt Head 360.
It moves in the directions I need it to, it’s fairly simple so should be easily repaired, but it’s not perfect and would only be useful if you were using a bowl head tripod!
I switched from the 3 Legged Thing to a Gitzo because it just wasn’t quite stable enough or rugged enough for what I wanted. I think the 3 Legged Thing is a good tripod and I look forward to see what they develop in the future but it just wasn’t working for me after a year of heavy use.
I also wanted a bowl head to create a level platform quickly and easily for shooting panoramas.
Number 2 - Filter Kit
Nearly every landscape photo I take, I use one or more filters. You can do a lot in Photoshop or even Lightroom these days but that doesn’t mean that you should do everything on it.
Having physical, glass or acrylic filters really makes a difference to how you work. I use soft edge graduated filters to help balance the exposure, so that the sky is not a white mass or the land is just a shadowed lump.
I can use a 1, 2 or 3 stop graduated neutral density filter to darken the sky and bring everything in to balance.
Let me explain a bit. Neutral density filters are grey in colour, they don’t change the colour of the light, if they do it is very minimal. The numbers 1 or 0.3, 2 or 0.6, and 3 or 0.9, refers to how dark this grey hue is.
So, 1 is the equivalent of being just 1 setting darker, 2 is 2 settings darker, etc. That’s why it brings the whole picture in balance.
Think of it like putting sunglasses on half the picture. They make it so the sky is darker but you can still see the land in front of you.
Filters also enable you to darken the whole picture, slowing the shutter down and enabling you to capture a long exposure image. This is how photographer’s get those dreamy white seascapes or nice flowing waterfalls. Typically 6 stops or 10 stops is used, which look completely black when you hold them up. These are the darkest of filters.
You can also get polariser filters, these bend the light coming into the lens which cuts reflections from water or stone and can make the skies much more dramatic. A great addition to any landscape photographers kit!
Most photographer’s would tell you to buy Lee filters, but these are really expensive. Absolutely fantastic and I would recommend them as well, and I am using them now. But really expensive when starting to explore the use of filters.
This is what I did: I bought a cheap filter kit from Amazon, a simple £30 kit that not only included neutral density filters but a tonne of coloured filters, which can be fun to experiment with, especially in black and white. This helped me to explore the uses of neutral density without having to pay the large amounts Lee filters require.
That being said, the cheaper filters will give your images a horrible colour change (also known as colour cast). The set that I had, gave my images a dark purple colour. This was why I switched to Lee and Hi-tech when I could afford it. They have been engineered to not have any colour cast. The big 3 competitors are Lee the classic; Hi-tech, which produce some really good results; and Kase, a new brand that looks to be quite good as well.
I can’t recommend filters enough. They really change how you capture landscape images. That being said, you will really need a tripod if you want to do any long exposures. It’s just impossible without a tripod. So bear that in mind!
UPDATE - 25/11/2020
I’ve since invested in a full Kase Filter Kit, available from their website. It’s a fantastic piece of kit a lot of advantages over my old kit. Mainly the fact that everything has been designed to work together!
The top highlights for me are the fact the polariser goes at the back of the filter holder: reducing vignetting in wide angle shots; the foam gasket to stop light leaking when using a 6 or 10 stop ND filter is built into the holder rather than glued onto the filter; and I love the bag that they sent with the kit!
It’s expensive filters but comparable to the Lee Kit. It’s up to you to choose which one you want to invest in! You can see them in use here…
Number 3 - Remote control/Intervalometer
This last one is the one I have the least experience with. Most of the time I use the 2 second timer on the camera itself. This way I press the button, it counts down 2 seconds before starting to take the image. The reason I do this is to reduce the possibility of shaking the camera once the image has started to be taken. Very important when taking long exposures.
That being said, I do have 2 remote controls. One is wireless and one is wired.
The wireless one can be really useful, as it means I can move around the area and I don’t have to be with the camera. If you are a selfie taker then I bet you can see the usefulness. If you want to you can move into the frame of the picture, press the button on the remote and boom the perfect selfie and landscape photo in one. You can also use this if your exposure is going to be more than 30 seconds, enabling you to expose for 1, 2, 10 minutes or more. There’s a screen on the remote telling you how long it has been exposing for. Wonderfully useful!
The wired remote is also an intervalometer. This is relatively new for me. But it means that I can set the remote control to take a sequence of images with a delay between each frame and for as long as I want it to. So, it’s similar to the wireless remote, but it can take up to 400 images over 150 hours.
This is brilliant if you want to do a time lapse video or if you want to do astrophotography. For astrophotography, such as star trails, you need to stack a lot of images to make those trails. With a minimum amount of time between the images as possible. Most intervalometers require a 1 second delay between images. Just enough! A very valuable piece of kit to explore some new style of landscape images.
Conclusion
These 3 items live in my camera bag and I use them for all sorts of situations. I never go out without my tripod and filter kit. Those items are completely essential for my landscape photography and I bet 99 out of 100 landscape photographers agree. The last item is useful if you want to expand your landscape photography out of sunlight hours or if you want to include yourself in the image. All 3 should make you think about your landscapes a lot more and help you improve your photographer!
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Written by Daniel Long
Daniel Long created DRL Photography as a place to showcase his work as a photographer. Daniel has learnt a lot about photography and wishes to impart this knowledge with you, although the world is an ever changing place and he always says “you can never learn everything.” So as he makes his way, he continues to learn knew techniques, skills and information about photography. He focuses on Landscape and Wildlife photography and Daniel has a special focus on Scotland, his home away from home. As well as writing about photography and taking pictures out in the field, Daniel offers guided photography days so he can share his knowledge and locations in an effort to give his clients the best opportunities possible. Have a browse around this website to see his images, guided experiences and articles about photography. If you have any questions don’t hesitate to get in contact.
