Photography

Hey!

Here are three concise tips for you:

Optimize Lighting

• Capture landscapes during the golden hours, around sunrise or sunset, for soft, warm light.
• Experiment with angles to avoid harsh shadows and enhance the overall mood of your shots.

Composition Matters

• Apply the rule of thirds by placing key elements along the grid lines or at their intersections for a balanced composition.
• Utilize leading lines to guide the viewer's eye through the image, creating depth and interest.

Focus and Depth

• Tap on the main subject on your phone screen to ensure it's in focus. This helps in creating sharp and detailed images.
• Experiment with the depth of field by using the portrait mode or adjusting the aperture settings if available. This can add a dimension to your landscape shots.

Give these a try and let me know how you get on!

Mike

I like to find natural framing for a scene.

https://preview.redd.it/e2o8wipppv2c1.jpeg?width=4000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c55e344717e48be5b6abf993813de05d2ae84e8e

I haven’t worked this one up yet as there is a lot of latitude in the shadows. But notice the water leading to the mountains and the trees framing the whole scene? And I love water, so that helps.

I find I’m usually light limited as I’m traveling with the family and we get places when we get there. I’m sure this could look completely different another time of day if I had the time to invest in a truly great shot.

Climb a mountain use the 70-200 for framing photos. Then go down to 24mm lense

It’s because a view doesn’t necessarily make a landscape photograph. If you spot a view it’s a good idea to scout the location and think how the scene could be shot (the composition), the direction (EWSN), what the weather’s doing and the time of day. All these factors come in to make a great shot.

The hardest part of good landscape photography is getting there

Besides what everyone else is saying, work on your perspective as well. Don't just hold your phone/camera up at face level and snap. Crouch, hold it up high, and shift about. You'll find the view can change drastically with a bit of movement. Sometimes that will add a bit of foreground interest or clean up the view for a more engaging main subject.

They say that the camera adds ten pounds and ten years to a human subject, which is why top models and actors tend to be extraordinarily good looking. An average attractive person in real life, unfortunately and regrettably, looks ugly in a photo. It’s the nature of the medium.

Likewise, the camera turns typical landscapes into something dull and flat in a photo. It takes a truly extraordinary landscape to look better than ordinary in a photo.

At one time, artists and thinkers developed a theory about what kinds of landscapes are worthy of being painted, or photographed, or simply visited, and these are the “picturesque”, and not at all ordinary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picturesque

You've already received lots of good advice.

Basically you want foreground, mid ground and background for the wide angle lens of your camera, if you can find it.

Research 'composition for landscape' on the Internet so you can learn more.

An article like this:

https://digital-photography-school.com/?p=543

Phoness are great cameras, but this is one of their weaknesses. Having a wide angle lens gives a wide view and pushes the background even further away. That means you are best offsetting it with ensuring the composition leads the eye as u/Sweathog1016 illustrates, or something of interest is in the foreground. Exposure is also more tricky to get right for the whole frame. The advantage to a DSLR here is using a long telephoto lens will compress the field/frame, making distant objects larger and loom over the foreground.... I think this is what you are seeing and missing https://www.iphotography.com/blog/what-is-lens-compression-in-photography/

also, how fricken good is the human eye/brain at imaging.... amazing stuff

The mountains look small and not steep. Depth and distance does not come through at all. It just seems flat and underwhelming on camera, when the view I'm seeing with my eyes is the most inspiring thing of all time. I wish I could capture half of that.

This is like the most common problem people have with landscapes.

Your eyes have a 180degree massive view, but your center of vision makes really distant stuff very clear. You also mentally filter out all the junk.

So you end up experiencing this impossible wide angle telephoto effect.

What people do wrong is they use a wide angle shot from a vista point that works for human vision.

The flaw is that a wide angle image has all the close stuff very large in the frame, so it makes the very distant mountains look tiny in comparison. But a telephoto image can be narrow and doesn't give the sweeping vista sense.

There are few tricks.

1. print the image huge. If the image is a wide angle shot but printed at the same scale as it was in real life, you get the same sense of scale. Smaller works, but not as dramatic. Basically an expensive solution.

2. Use a telephoto or normal lens instead of a wide angle lens, but put something between you and the mountains for scale. You have to balance how wide your image looks, but you don't want the foreground immediately next to the camera. And you want a person, or a house, or something of scale far away enough that the mountains tower over it.

3. have really good light and weather. If the colors, light, clouds, mist, ect give a sense of volume to the space can make it have a sense of scale. Make sure you are higher up and looking straight on vs looking upwards. Still make sure the to not have the foreground.

Basically the foreground is your enemy. It clutters the frame with small stuff that will be larger then the massive landscape.

Unfortunately, your phone is not equipped with a telephoto lens.

Very broadly, the rule of thumb is this; if you are close use wide angle and if you are far away use telephoto. This is a good rule of thumb in most photography. Going wide to 'get it all in' (and the pixel 7 has a wide lens) is a recipe for getting a ton of sky and land that looks like it is really far away. A lot of landscape photographers use telephoto lenses.

So what do you do? Get much, much, much, much closer to your subject.

Every photo needs a subject. Don't just take pictures of the landscape. Instead, try to take a picture of something specific that is a part of the landscape.

Inspiration.

Learn how other people tackle similar landscapes. See what they to and understand why.

For landscape I really enjoy watching and listening to:

https://youtube.com/@NigelDanson?si=xiVfPIK-fJodsBSL

https://youtube.com/@ThomasHeatonPhoto?si=_NLCIh5-hm8NSx4b

Don‘t copy what they do but understand why they do it this way.

For general motivation and inspiration:

https://youtube.com/@seantuck?si=wGgSRqpxbbGOHRSx

Double negative

Look at this guy's mountain photography, he is using long lenses.

https://carucci.photography

Phone cameras, unlike 'real' cameras lack depth of field due to (mainly) the small sensor size.

A lot of the top comments here are spot on. To add to it a bit, Photography in general is so much more about lighting than most people realize. If you are taking a photo at 1pm on a clear day, almost anything landscape wise will look pretty flat and low contrast. That same photo taken 5 min before sunset with a semi cloudy sky will almost always look better. Not saying you cant get good photos in less than perfect conditions, but just to keep in mind how the light is shaping the subjects around you.

While using a proper camera will yield an image of higher quality, you can still take great photos of landscapes with your phone provided you are working with in the limitations of your phone. As others have mentioned, most camera phones by default use a pretty wide field of view which will make things look smaller and smaller the further away from you they are in which case your options are to zoom in/use a different camera on your phone or get physically closer to your subject.

As for tips, the two biggest 'quickest' ways to decent shots are to keep in mind the rule of 3rds and leading lines (tons of info on these on youtube). If your subject is placed well and its got something leading the viewers eye to it, should be in a good spot.

Here are a few landscape shots I've taken on my phone for reference:
https://twitter.com/tripppage/status/1715743020966900120
https://www.instagram.com/p/CU5VjarJkDG/?hl=en
https://twitter.com/tripppage/status/1715763124949979293

I recently picked up my first ultrawide lens (fuji 14) and did a bit of reading on how to shoot with an ultrawide. Recommend a duckduckgo search on it, I think the suggestions would help you. A lot of it aligns with what people are saying here, but with more detail.

Light, light, light. If the lightning is flat, uninteresting, mediocre, mild - your shot will be as well. Learn to spot and/or anticipate good lightning conditions.

All subjective unless you show us your shots. Eye is in the beholder, I take plenty of landscape photos on my iPhone 14 and gaze at them later endlessly. It’s all about framing, some people have an eye for it, some don’t. It’s considered an art form for a reason.

I find it helps to have something in the frame that gives scale and context - a cabin, a person hiking, an elk, whatever.

Lighting, lighting, lighting. The same boring scene at noon can be fantastic at 5:00. Filters are also very useful: even with a phone, you can hold a filter (e.g. a circular polarizer) in front of your lens and sometimes get good results. The composition suggestions folks have given are also good, but you don't necessarily need a complex, multilayer scene to create a good image - however, even a complex scene may not help you if the lighting is too poor.

lol I got the opposite problem! Happy with my landscape/nature/wildlife shots but absolutely can’t figure out urban photography. I love looking at urban photography but when I’m in a city I just don’t see it, and I can’t capture what I don’t see. I stopped bringing my camera whenever I go into a city. Not worth bringing it and potentially having it stolen when I don’t get anything out of bringing it anyway.

To your problem, could it be the zoom and depth perception? Different lenses will bring different views. Sometimes I take a bunch of photos and stitch them together in order to get the result I want.

Moment is a company that does lenses for mobiles. You have to buy a case for them that the lens can attach to. They're very robust little lenses. They should help to bring the view more in line with what your eyes are seeing.

https://www.shopmoment.com/mobile/phone-lenses

Don't waste your bland shots, visit the same place again, take pictures in different time or different weather and make a collection. The bland shots could compliment good shots.