Nature Photography How To

Landscape photography is one of the most popular genres among Shutterbug readers, and the tutorials we post typically involve shooting and editing techniques for achieving great results. But today we’re taking s step back, with an important preliminary task you should perform before pulling a camera out of your bag.

This oft-ignored topic is customizing your camera with the optimum camera settings for photographing the great outdoors. Think of it this way: Camera designers have no idea what type of photos you shoot most, so the default settings are those that generally work OK for a wide variety of tasks.

But you needn’t settle for OK, especially if you specialize is a specific type of shooting—be it sports, wildlife, portraiture or landscape photography. By setting up the camera properly for the task at hand, you’ll work faster, more intuitively, and make better images.

Ian worth is a British pro who has been a full-time landscape photographer for over a decade, and “loving every minute.” He’s new to the pages of Shutterbug, and you’ll be seeing more of him in the future. In today’s very helpful episode Worth demonstrates how he sets up and customizes his camera settings “for the best possible landscape photos.”

Worth’s advice actually works well for other forms of outdoor photography too. He urges everyone to get off the defaults and customize your camera settings in five basic areas that can be found (sometimes in different places) in whatever mirrorless camera you use.

First on the list is choosing the best screen settings for shooting in the field. From there he moves on to customizing menu settings in the most effective manner. And if you prefer to use manual mode, there’s a way to customize a camera for that. You’ll also learn Worth’s preferred approach to reassigning physical function buttons for quick access to your most frequently used parameters.

An added benefit of giving Worth’s advice a try is that you’ll become more familiar with the capabilities of your camera. And if you decide to switch things up and shoot something other than landscapes, it’s really easy to temporarily return to the default settings if need be.

There’s plenty of cool stuff on Worth’s instructional YouTube channel, so be sure to take a look. And if landscape photography is your passion, check out the tutorial we shared from another pro earlier, explaining a quick way to fix dull landscape photos with a unique effect in Lightroom.