Earlier today I came across a question someone asked about “typical landscape photography settings.” I think their goal was to determine whether to make settings manually or automate them, what sort of initial settings might be useful, what techniques might be employed in typical situations, and so on. That covers a lot of ground, and there is a ton of room for variation depending on your goals and idea of what landscape photography is and is not.

In fact, at first the question seemed so broad and general that I wasn’t going to reply. However, rather than ignoring the question, I decided to offer a quick summary of some of the general techniques I may employ when making a landscape photograph. And since I had already written it I thought it might be useful to share it here, too.

(Of course, I have to acknowledge that this doesn’t address the most important things about landscape photography, namely how to approach the landscape, how to “see” the landscape as an esthetic subject, and how to go beyond mere technique to focus on the image itself and what it can express. That is another post. Or chapter. Or book. Or two. Or more.)

So, on to the short “answer,” or at least to my reply…

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Everyone has their own approach to landscape photography, but most folks I know photograph landscape using manual settings and manually focusing using live view. My typical starting point includes the following:

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