Video: On location with Nigel Danson, focus and exposure tips for your landscape photography

 

 

If you ever struggle with focus or exposure in your landscape photography, Nigel Danson's latest video on location in the Lake District in the United Kingdom should prove helpful. Danson is asked about focus and exposure the most of all photography topics.

When it comes to focusing, the big question is, 'Where do you focus?' If you're photographing a portrait, that question is easy. You focus on your subject's eyes. However, with landscape photography, there's not always a single subject, and even if there is, it's not always the case that you want to focus on it. The scene often has depth, with objects you want to be sharp ranging from the foreground all the way to the background. You will often stop your lens down, ensuring that you have more depth of field, but even so, it's not always the case that you can get everything in focus without using a focus stacking technique. To see how Danson approaches this tricky topic, check out his video below and check out Danson's detailed video about focus stacking and photo editing.

In the video above, Danson also talks about how he exposes images in the field. With most cameras, you can see a live histogram. If you don't know what a histogram is, don't worry, you can check out this helpful guide from Photography Life. By monitoring your histogram, you can make informed exposure decisions out in the field, whether that's changing your shutter speed, ISO, aperture or exposure compensation if you're using automatic shooting modes. You want to capture as much detail as possible without blowing out your highlights, which means that your histogram should have spikes approaching the right edge without the rightmost edge having a large spike. The right edge is pure white (the left edge is pure black). It's worth noting that your camera will show you a histogram from a JPEG file. Your RAW image – you should be shooting in RAW file format – will have a bit more flexibility than your camera's histogram shows.

What about when you're photographing a scene with a lot of shadow and highlight area like Danson does at about the 8-minute mark in the video above? His approach is to dial his exposure back to have a gap on the right side of the histogram and then slowly increase exposure to push it as far as possible to the right.

Before wrapping this news post up, I wanted to point out the World Landscape Photographer contest that Danson founded in 2020 during the early days of the pandemic. The current contest, which accepts entries until May 31, is raising money for the Ukraine Crisis Appeal of the Red Cross. There are many great prizes, including a Nikon Z7 II and 24-70mm F4 S lens for the overall winner. For the full breakdown of prizes and rules, click here.

Best of luck to Danson with his back surgery today! Longtime viewers of Danson's videos will know that he's struggled with chronic back pain, so we hope the operation is successful and his recovery is as easy as possible. If you'd like to see more of Danson's work, visit his YouTube channel and website. You can also follow him on Instagram.

(Via Nigel Danson)