Cameras For Landscape Photography

I have, quite literally, seen wonderful landscape photographs that were taken with a cookie tin. Yup, a cookie tin, with a pinhole in the front and photographic paper inside.

It can be done, but my goodness, it's hard to pull off. That's one reason why people pay for expensive cameras.

Of course that rather begs the question of which features are worth paying for when you buy a camera. In my opinion, the biggest single improvement you can make on the cookie tin is a light meter. Fortunately, you'd have a hard time finding a camera that doesn't have a built in light meter these days. After that, it gets more complicated.

One important factor is weight.

Plate cameras give superb results if you know how to use them, but there's no denying that they're heavy - some weigh 10 kg/22 lb. And then there's the weight of the plate holders and plates themselves. Plus, it's too heavy to hand-hold, so you'll need a hefty tripod for sure. That's a lot to carry up a mountain.

On the other hand, when used with a slow film, they give you the equivalent of 960 M pixels. That's 80 times as many as a modern 12 Mpixel DSLR.

A compact camera is very light and easy to carry. This is a major advantage on a long hike, especially if you're more enthusiastic than fit (like me!). And you can certainly take a great photo with one - most of the time. But boy are the other times frustrating!

Like many other landscape photographers, I compromise with a DSLR. This isn't just a good compromise between physical weight and image detail. I use a DSLR mostly because it's more flexible. It gives me both convenience and control.

A compact camera will select the focus, aperture, shutter speed and equivalent ISO for me which is quick and easy, but may not give the result I want. A plate camera (or any other manual camera) leaves me to do all that myself. This gives me full control - and plenty of chances to make a mistake. It's also slow, which may mean that the rainbow fades or the eagle files away from the perfect position. My lovely DSLR, on the other hand, will do everything automatically, unless I chose to override. So I can take a quick shot, and then decide that really I want to tweak the setting. For example, I may want to set a very small aperture (to maximize the depth of field). This means I need a slow shutter speed to compensate, but that's OK, because now I have time to put the camera on a tripod (and not all compacts have tripod sockets either.) Alternatively, I might decide that all that snow is going to fool the light meter, and increase the exposure. Of I might decide I want a very slow shutter speed to make the waterfall blur (it looks wetter like that).

There's more. My compact has a 3x optical zoom, but the DSLR has detachable lenses. Between them, they cover a wider range of focal lengths than the compact. More importantly, some have a much, much greater maximum aperture - wonderful for shooting in poor light, or reducing the depth of field. They even have filter threads. True, you can hand hold a filter in front of a compact, but you tend to have to concentrate so hard on juggling the two things that you don't see the coke can in the foreground until you get home.

So a DSLR isn't essential for taking good landscape photographs, but it certainly makes it easier. Why make it hard for yourself?

Let me help you to take great landscape photographs. For more more tips and tricks, click here.