How to prepare and take your best landscape photos

Read the weather

Apps like Met Office Weather Forecast are invaluable when it comes to predicting the weather. Combine this with a photography planning app, such as Photopills, and you can work out precisely what direction light comes from at specific times and dates.

Come prepared

The weather can quickly turn bad, but it can clear up just as fast too. We carry waterproofs and a camera rain cover on every shoot, so we can withstand the wet. There’s nothing worse than heading off in defeat, only to witness the glorious conditions you wanted all along.

Ahead of time

If you’ve planned where you’re going to stand to capture the best light, the last thing you want is to arrive late and find out another photographer has taken your spot. If you’re shooting popular hotspots that are known to get busy, ensure you get there first.

Set for success

Even with the light changing, it’s still good to get your settings right and lock the focus. We knew we wanted our ISO at its lowest setting and our aperture to be about f/8 to f/16. From there we needed to alter the shutter speed, to suit the lighting.

Fast filters

The best light is often fleeting, so make sure you set up any filters as quickly as possible. Calculating your exposure with the LEE Filters app will also save time, although our Nikon Z 6’s electronic viewfinder meant we could clearly view any changes to our exposure in real time.

Wait for it...

Patience won’t guarantee results, but it’ll shift the odds in your favour; we waited around 40 minutes for a break in the clouds. A remote shutter release is invaluable at moments like these, because the light only lasted a few seconds and if we were using a self-timer we might have missed it.