Outdoor Photography How To

Proper exposure can make or break a landscape photo. While you can't, always, be assured of nailing the exposure straight out of the camera, there are techniques to increase your odds significantly.

One of the most popular is called "bracketing," which landscape photographer Mark Denney explains in the below how-to video.

"Perhaps one of the most difficult aspects of landscape photography is determining how to properly expose your photos when lighting conditions are less than ideal," Denney says. "These difficult lighting conditions are rather common when it comes to landscape and outdoor photography with the most frequent occurrence being a bright sky with a dark foreground. The dynamic range in today's cameras has never been better, but even the best cameras out there still struggle with properly exposing areas of extreme light and extreme dark within a single image, and this is where exposure bracketing helps."

In the below clip, Denney reviews what exposure bracketing is, how to use it, and why and when you should apply this camera technique to your landscape photos.

"The process may seem a bit intimidating at first, but once you try it on your own you'll quickly realize just how easy it really is," he notes. "You're basically just taking a series of photos with different exposure settings applied to each. I usually take three photos when I exposure bracket, one that's underexposed, one that's 'properly exposed' and one that's overexposed. Once you have your photo bracket series complete, you blend the images together and watch the magic unfold."

While there are multiple ways to blend your bracketed images, Denney uses Lightroom to merge his three photos together into one. So check out the tutorial and then go visit Denney's super helpful YouTube channel for more great content.