10 tips for great winter landscapes

Professional landscape photographer Peter Eastway gives you the lowdown on how to achieve the highest-quality photos of the world around us

For me, landscape photography is all about the emotion. It’s about creating atmosphere and interpreting how I feel about my scene using equipment and techniques that produce the finest quality. It’s a weird synthesis of left and right-brain thinking, where I get to solve technical and logistical challenges, like getting to the location in the first place, and then hopefully create something magical as well.

I am quite comfortable comparing my approach to landscape photography with producing a Hollywood feature film, where it’s all about visual storytelling and creating a cinematic experience. However, I imagine other landscape photographers would prefer their work to be compared to a BBC wildlife documentary, where production values are designed to produce a ‘genuine’ or ‘realistic’ experience.

Both are valid approaches to landscape photography. Photographers with no real interest in selling their work nevertheless aspire to a ‘professional’ standard of photography and, in many ways, being an amateur is the perfect position because you only have yourself to please. On the other hand, if you’re selling your landscape photos, your work has to satisfy your customers. Suddenly your creativity may be curtailed because what you love photographing ‘doesn’t sell’ to your market, so you may need to adapt.

Being a professional landscape photographer is a wonderful dream, but whether you have a change of career in mind or not, producing professional-quality landscape prints is something we can all aspire to. And there’s no doubt, shooting as an unencumbered amateur is the best way to enjoy it!