Perfect planning

Learn how to create eyecatching landscapes with tips from

To me, photography is a way to provide a focus for my life, and a motivation to go out and explore the world around me. At first I simply chose locations to go walking based on recommended routes, taking the camera along, hoping to stumble upon an image. However, it quickly became apparent that while this unplanned spontaneous style of shooting could sometimes grant great and unexpected images, more often it would result in a mediocre shot of a location that had the potential to be much greater.

After coming to this realisation, I started to more thoroughly research the locations that I wanted to shoot and to plan my free time around getting to them at the correct time of day and in the ideal weather for the image that I envisioned.

To get the image shown here, I had to wait for a night when the weather conditions were predicted to be clear, then commit to camping out. This provided the best chance to catch the soft light from the low sun that was required to create the gentle highlights and shadows on the rocky foreground. I used a Fujifilm X-T2 with a 12mm Samyang prime lens (18mm full-frame equivalent), set up on a Gitzo tripod. The camera’s control dials were all set manually: a low ISO and narrow aperture were used to get the best image quality and largest depth of field possible. The shutter speed was then used to adjust the exposure.