Of all the subjects you can choose to photograph, a landscape can be one of the easiest there is. After all, you just need to find a decent view and some half-decent light and you're away!

Well, sort of.

If you look at many landscape photos, or you’ve tried your hand at landscape photography before, you'll appreciate that there's a lot more to it than meets the eye.

Research and planning

To take great landscape photos, you need to do your research. You need to find an interesting location and then decide upon the best time of day (and year) to visit.

The basics laws of landscape photography would involve the likes of using the rule of thirds, using a f/16 setting and using a wide-angle lens. All of these tips make perfect sense, of course - but if you want to take your own landscape photography to the next level, sometimes you need to think outside the box.

And one top tip for how you can improve your landscape shots does just that. It is:

Don't always use a wide-angle lens

Fitting a wide-angle lens is very much the default position for landscape photographers. You are going to naturally fall back on this. You will probably use a wide-angle lens most of the time - but you certainly don't need to use one all the time.

Telephoto lenses and zoom offer you a wide range of possibilities. They will help you be more creative and the result will be some very interesting landscape photos.

Shooting from distance will mean that you end up with an image where the foreground of the shot and the background seem to be very close together. This compressed perspective effect can be very effective. For very distant objects, you will need to choose a longer focal length to fill the frame.

A longer focal length lens is especially useful if you are taking a panoramic shot. Often a wide-angle lens will distort. By switching to a telephoto lens, the perspective is retained and a more natural shot can be achieved.