- The Golden Rule of Landscape Photography
- Become Married to Your Tripod
- Shoot in Aperture Priority Mode
- Composing Great Landscapes
- The Trick to Shooting Waterfalls
- A Tip for Shooting Forests
- Where to Put the Horizon Line
- Getting More Interesting Mountain Shots
- The Trick for Warmer Sunrises and Sunsets
- Turn on "The Blinkies" to Keep More Detail
- How to Deal with the Dreaded Blinkies
- How to Show Size
- Don't Set Up Your Tripod. Not Yet
- The Trick to Getting Richer Colors
- What to Shoot in Bad Weather
- Atmosphere Is Your Friend
- Getting Rid of Lens Flare—The Manual Way
- The Landscape Photographer’s Secret Weapon
- Keeping Your Horizons Straight
- Shooting on Cloudy Days
- Tips for Shooting Panoramas, Part 1
- Tips for Shooting Panoramas, Part 2
- Tips for Shooting Panoramas, Part 3
- Faking Panoramas
- Why You Need a Wide-Angle Lens
- Want to Take Things Up a Notch? Shoot Low
Getting More Interesting Mountain Shots
One theme you’ll see again and again throughout this book is to shoot from angles we don’t see every day. For example, if your subject is mountains, don’t shoot them from the road at the bottom of the mountain. This is exactly how we see mountains every day when we drive by them on the interstate, so if you shoot them like that (from the ground looking up), you’ll create shots that look very normal and average. If you want to create mountain shots that have real interest, give people a view they don’t normally see—shoot from up high. Either drive up as high as you can on the mountain, or hike up as high as is safe, then set up your camera and shoot down on or across the mountains. (This is the same theory as not shooting down on flowers. We don’t shoot down on flowers because that’s the view we normally have of them. In turn, we don’t shoot up at mountains, because we always see them from that same view. It’s boring, regular, and doesn’t show your viewer something they haven’t seen a hundred times before.)