Nature Photography How To

Good composition skills are important for all types of photography, and when it comes to shooting landscapes they can be difficult to master because of the often complicated nature of outdoor scenes. In the tutorial below, you’ll learn six valuable tips that will help you compose landscape photos with more power and impact.

Andy Mumford is an accomplished landscape photographer based in Lisbon, Portugal, who travels the world shooting and teaching workshops. In this tutorial, he explains how to create images with simplicity and order when photographing the great outdoors.

Mumford says properly composed photographs enable those viewing an image to experience some of the emotions the photographer feels when making the shot. His experience as an instructor comes into play in this tutorial, because the rules of composition are more abstract and subjective than technical skills like exposure and lighting.

Mumford begins with what he says is an essential point to understand; namely that a camera sees a scene differently than how we perceive it with our eyes. He explains that our eyes subliminally “edit” a landscape setting to create natural order, by “removing” extraneous objects that clutter the view. Cameras, of course, include everything in a scene, and it’s up to the photographer to create order out of chaos by using sound compositional skills.

While all this sounds a bit philosophical, Mumford demonstrates six concrete compositional techniques that contribute to powerful landscape photographs, illustrated with images that “work,” and those that do not. It’s a different, but illuminating approach that will definitely help you create balance and harmony in outdoors scenes for more compelling images.

You can find more helpful advice from Mumford on his YouTube channel, and we encourage you to check out an earlier tutorial we posted with more landscape tips from another experienced photographer.