Aperture Priority

Hi, I'm Ian Plant, and right now I'm coming to you from the amazing, the incredible, the beautiful nation of Iceland. When making landscape photos, I almost always shoot in aperture priority mode. And the reason for this is that your aperture is typically your most important variable for landscape photography. Aperture controls depth of field, which is the range of sharp focus and you're seeing from near to far. When you're making landscape photos typically you want everything in focus from very near to very far away.

So you need to use small apertures like F11 or F16 to get the sharp focus you need throughout the entire picture frame. What I'm shooting in aperture priority mode, the camera is making the metering decisions for me. So if I need to adjust my exposure, I will use exposure compensation to make the exposure brighter or darker, depending on what the scene needs. When you're shooting in aperture priority mode, you're choosing one variable, the aperture, but your camera's choosing the shutter speed in an effort to come up with a correct exposure. For most landscape scenes, shutter speed is not going to be a critical variable.

But for some scenes, for example, if you're photographing moving water and you want to get the perfect shutter speed to blur the water, or if you're photographing the field of flowers that are blowing in the wind and you need a quick shutter speed to stop the action, then you need to find a way to get the shutter speed set where you want it to be. Usually what I do when I'm shooting in aperture priority mode is I adjust my ISO up or down in an effort to get the correct shutter speed. So when you're making landscape photos, especially in quick changing light, I think that you'll find that aperture priority mode used in connection with exposure compensation will be a quick and easy way to make sure that you have the proper aperture and the proper exposure for your landscape scene.