Watch this complete guide to manual mode to take your landscape photography to the next level

Landscape photography is something that most of us do at some point. Even if we’re not particularly interested in landscape as a topic, we often take our cameras with us when we go on vacation and want to be able to capture that beautiful scene that’s laid before us.

Newer photographers can often feel quite disappointed if they leave their cameras to figure things out for themselves in automatic modes and manual mode can seem overwhelming, but it’s really not that difficult to get to grips with, as Mads Peter Iversen demonstrates in his latest video.

The video is 24-minutes long and covers all of the topics you need in order to take control of your shot so that you decide how the final result looks and not how your camera thinks it should look. Even looking at the index of timestamps for the different sections in the video, it seems like it’s a lot of things to learn, but it’s really not once you break it down.

• 0:00 – Shooting full manual mode
• 0:55 – Focus mode
• 1:43 – Metering mode
• 2:27 – White balance
• 4:21 – Importance of MANUAL
• 5:38 – How I focus
• 7:55 – ISO, aperture, shutter speed, histogram, zebra stripes
• 11:25 – Manual or Aperture priority?
• 13:40 – Composition
• 15:54 – Drive mode, steadyshot, intervalometer
• 19:47 – Focus stack and aperture f/16
• 21:40 – Wide-angle, no Antarctica, editing, final photos

Mads explains the different components of how and why it’s probably in your best interests to take complete control over your camera’s settings as well as when and why it’s sometimes best to let your camera at least figure out some of the elements of your shots, even if not all of them. He also covers some of the post-processing techniques to make your landscapes look the best they can, too.

They say that shooting manual “slows you down” when shooting and if you find that it slows you down and makes you think a little more about the scene that you’re capturing. If that’s true for you, then maybe that’s a good thing. The important point is to keep trying until it becomes second nature. And when you’re shooting and enjoying landscapes, it’s not like you’re usually in a rush anyway, so it’s a good time to get to grips with it.

How do you shoot your landscapes?