A question I often get asked is “What settings did you use to take that photograph?”. I understand the curiosity. However, I feel the important part of camera settings is to understand what they do and how to use them, rather than know the settings a photographer used for a specific image - the latter really won’t help anyone much.
Discussion around camera settings for landscape photography is mostly focused around the exposure triangle - ISO, Aperture and Shutter Speed. We need to understand how each of these three settings influence our exposure but also how they control the overall appearance of the photographs we take. Our cameras have many settings but I also like to draw peoples attention to Focal Length when thinking about which Aperture to use. Focal Length, along with other factors, affects Depth of Field.
I talk through how I decided on the camera settings for this image here.
As a guideline, when taking landscape images I try to:
Keep ISO as low as possible to give me the best image quality
Use an Aperture which gives me the desired Depth of Field for the scene I’m photographing
Use a Shutter Speed which helps create my vision for the photograph (be it having all motion frozen and appear sharp, or show some movement e.g. in water)
Keep in mind the Exposure Triangle and adjust settings as necessary to create the correct exposure
If you see a photograph and the camera settings used are visible, there is often no useful information to be gained from knowing those settings which were used by the photographer. It may be interesting but for them to mean anything you’d have had to be there with the photographer, know which type of camera they used (e.g. full frame, medium format), where they focused, the distance in the scene, how fast any movement was (e.g. tree movement, water flow), what their vision was for the photograph, which filters were used (if any) and so on. It is also important to realise that a different combination of settings could have been used to produce another photograph of the same scene, taken at the same time, and to the end viewer it would look the same.
My advice is to learn what ISO, Aperture and Shutter Speed do and I have a video which can help you do this. I talk through the settings I decided to use for a number of photographs and most importantly why I chose those settings. You can watch the video on my YouTube channel here.
