landscape help

I'm going to Hawaii next week and while I probably should have done more practicing with my 10-22mm lens, I just haven't had the time. The last two times I did bring it out, it was really overcast or hazy, and bad time of day so I didn't get a chance to get some nice shots. I did notice that a lot of my shots looked washed out or overexposed.

I'm using a rebel xt, so I'm wondering what kind of settings should I be playing with? I've been leaving it in P mode, I've been reading that I should set my f stop higher to keep everything in focus, how high should I go? I'm going to try and see if I can go out and take some evening shots later this week to mess around a bit, but any advice would be appreciated I am also bringing my tripod and plan to get up early and take photos at sunset.

Besides all that, I know the lighting situation will vary how I set my camera, but what are some generic guidelines to try? Do I need to be on shutter priority or aperture? Manual focus?

Landscape brings to mind - great DOF to me. I'd have my camera in Av. Bottom center focus point turned on.

Hi Soapy

I'll give you a few tips...but only if you take me with you

I have that combo, when shooting landscapes I use AV (aperture priority) at f13 and let the camera decide Shutter speed, f13 should give you good depth of field, you could probably open up a little more towards f10 if your shutter speed is quite slow, I use tripod mostly so this isn't an issue.

When shooting around the 10mm mark watch for barrel distortion on verticals, this can be corrected in post processing but avoidable through your composition or pushing the lens out towards the 15mm mark.

I'd love to hang around and give you more help but my work shift is about to end, I'll check here when I get home if you have any questions

Buggbairn wrote:
Hi Soapy

I'll give you a few tips...but only if you take me with you

I have that combo, when shooting landscapes I use AV (aperture priority) at f13 and let the camera decide Shutter speed, f13 should give you good depth of field, you could probably open up a little more towards f10 if your shutter speed is quite slow, I use tripod mostly so this isn't an issue.

When shooting around the 10mm mark watch for barrel distortion on verticals, this can be corrected in post processing but avoidable through your composition or pushing the lens out towards the 15mm mark.

I'd love to hang around and give you more help but my work shift is about to end, I'll check here when I get home if you have any questions

Thanks for the tip! For focusing... are you using auto focus or manual? I find that autofocus I can never get my red dots in the right place and with manual, well I don't trust myself enough to get it to look right Then again, I haven't practice much either so that's not an excuse.

When you're talking about barrel distortion, do you mean when it starts looking a bit warped? Do I want to always hang around the 15mm mark?

I love your pictures btw

A bit of both to be honest

I have a angle finder which I use most of the time, it enlarges what you normally see through the viewfinder. If I'm hopping around quite a lot I just use AF center.

Yes barrel distortion looks cool in certain situations, In landscape shots though I leave it out if I can.

This type of shot is fine at 10mm

Glad to see you will be in Hawaii. I grew up there, although I now live in the South Pacific. Lots of photo opportunities (endless in fact).

I have the same lens and what I found useful for landscapes is to print out a hyperfocal chart for the lens (I got mine from www.dofmaster.com - its free).

Then you can manually set for the hyperfocal distance (assuming you want as much as possible in focus) and go from there.

Hope that helps.

Soapy, it sounds like you're relatively inexperienced with your camera. If I've got that wrong, what I'm about to say will sound terribly obvious, and I apologise for that. But just to be on the safe side:

One thing you need to be wary of with an ultra-wide-angle lens is that there could be a lot of sky in the photo, and this can confuse the camera's meter. You can easily end up with shots where the sky looks fine but the ground is too dark. The safest thing to do is to get into the habit of checking the histogram on the camera after you've taken the shot; if it's on the dark side, then add in a bit of exposure compensation. But not too much - you don't want to blow out the highlights because then they can never be recovered.

Yes I'm inexperienced, I was reading about the histogram and it mentioned to keep it to the right? So pretend I don't know how to use my camera at all, how do I accomplish this? Les suggested I do bracketing, I'll have to read my manual to figure out how to do that. Is it just a setting? Sorry for all these questions, I should really probably read my manual but they're just so dry. I like reading tutorial sites online instead

I know I should try harder, but when I see all those focal numbers.. I'm reminded of my physics class and my eyes start to glaze over...

I appreciate all the tips and help, my photography class kind of glossed over white balance so I didn't really learn how to use my camera, I ended up learning how to fix pictures in photoshop instead.

To accomplish bracketing, you're going to need to be in P, Av, Tv or M mode and select the AEB setting ('Auto Exposure Bracketing') under the Setup-2 menu for the Rebel XT.

I think that knowing where to do your metering is going to have the greatest impact. For landscapes you're going to want a DOF of, what, f/16 - f/32? Get into M(anual) mode, select f/16 for your aperture and look through the viewfinder as you point the lens at various places in the overall scene. Notice that the indicators in the viewfinder move around as you point at different things - the Rebel XT is metering for you, and based on that is recommending that you raise or lower your shutter speed to produce a good exposure.

Metering modes on the Rebel XT are a little limited, but if in M mode I like to go with center-weighted average metering (it's the bottom-most Metering Mode setting in the Setup-1 menu). Partial Metering is okay too as a poor man's spot metering tool, but with a wide angle lens like yours it's not especially useful.

You'll simply have to play around a little to see what amounts to an exposure you like best, but metering off the reflected light in the water that Buggbairn put up is one good rule of thumb to follow. So is the Sunny-16 rule if you're really lazy.

Thanks for that explanation and the sites! Very very helpful....

You probably don't need to go as far as f/16, especially if using a wide angle (the shorter the focal length, the deeper the depth of field). Beyond about f/11 on an XT, 20D or 30D, diffraction begins to soften the photo.

For landscape work, you tend to be focussed at or near infinity. That pushes you towards deeper depth of field, too.

DoFMaster has already been mentioned - I suggest going here and feeding in some numbers to get an idea of depth of field.

Hyperfocal distance has already been mentioned. That's the distance at which infinity comes into acceptable focus (for a given circle of confusion). If you don't have foreground / mid range detail that you want in focus, I'd focus at infinity, not the hyperfocal distance. This will make infinity its sharpest possible.


The best thing to do is experiment. If you're unsure of settings, take the picture again with different settings. Bracket. Learn how to interpret histograms and use the camera's review facility.

David