The Best Camera Settings for Landscape Photography

A question I often get asked is “What settings did you use to take that photograph?”. I understand the curiosity. However, I feel the important part of camera settings is to understand what they do and how to use them, rather than know the settings a photographer used for a specific image - the latter really won’t help anyone much.

Discussion around camera settings for landscape photography is mostly focused around the exposure triangle - ISO, Aperture and Shutter Speed. We need to understand how each of these three settings influence our exposure but also how they control the overall appearance of the photographs we take. Our cameras have many settings but I also like to draw peoples attention to Focal Length when thinking about which Aperture to use. Focal Length, along with other factors, affects Depth of Field.

I talk through how I decided on the camera settings for this image here.

As a guideline, when taking landscape images I try to:

1. Keep ISO as low as possible to give me the best image quality

2. Use an Aperture which gives me the desired Depth of Field for the scene I’m photographing

3. Use a Shutter Speed which helps create my vision for the photograph (be it having all motion frozen and appear sharp, or show some movement e.g. in water)

4. Keep in mind the Exposure Triangle and adjust settings as necessary to create the correct exposure

If you see a photograph and the camera settings used are visible, there is often no useful information to be gained from knowing those settings which were used by the photographer. It may be interesting but for them to mean anything you’d have had to be there with the photographer, know which type of camera they used (e.g. full frame, medium format), where they focused, the distance in the scene, how fast any movement was (e.g. tree movement, water flow), what their vision was for the photograph, which filters were used (if any) and so on. It is also important to realise that a different combination of settings could have been used to produce another photograph of the same scene, taken at the same time, and to the end viewer it would look the same.

My advice is to learn what ISO, Aperture and Shutter Speed do and I have a video which can help you do this. I talk through the settings I decided to use for a number of photographs and most importantly why I chose those settings. You can watch the video on my YouTube channel here.

From Canon 5D Mark IV to Fuji X-T3 - Why I Changed Camera

After using my Canon 5D Mark IV for over 3 years I decided it was time to change camera, and I purchased the Fuji X-T3. This wasn’t a decision I made lightly, and it was one I pondered over for many many months. The Canon 5D Mark IV is an excellent camera and with it I had a number of excellent lenses, unfortunately with that comes a lot of weight which isn’t ideal when walking long distances for landscape photography. Also mirrorless technology brings a lot of new features which I felt could benefit my photography, for example the EVF, seeing the histogram in the viewfinder and much more.

One of the first images I captured when testing the Fujifilm X-T3.

So eventually I bought the Fuji X-T3 and two lenses as my initial purchase and began a test period where I put the camera and these lenses through their paces. I wanted to ensure I would be happy with the camera and the quality of images it and the lenses produced. The short answer is that I am.

If you’d like to know the full details of my change, the lenses I’ve bought and why, what I think of the image quality and see some of the first images I captured with the Fuji X-T3 then you can watch my video on my YouTube channel here.