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If you have ever been to Ireland you will be struck by the scenery. You might think all you have to do is point and shoot to get a good landscape photo. However if you don’t put some thought into it when you get back to the computer and upload your images many times you will be frustrated by the results. Why is such an ideal landscape so hard to capture photographically?

Here are the challenges I have found while photographing landscapes in Ireland:

Q. How do I get good exposure in Ireland. Because a lot of the Irish landscape has no trees, and dark foliage, there is a high contrast between land and sky. Often the sky is overexposed and the bottom half is underexposed.
Here is what you can do to get better exposure in your photographs of Ireland:
A 1. Get a graduated neutral density or GND filter. Sometimes you can get away without one on a cloudy day but when it’s sunny it is essential.
A 2. Shoot during magic hour and when there is overcast cloud cover.

Q. How do I capturing the vast landscapes in Ireland.

A 1. Go wide, get a wide angle lens, I use a 12 -24 mm Sigma aspherical.

A 2. The other option is to zoom in. I sometimes carry 3 lenses around with me and use a 70 to 200 mm a lot for mountains and beaches. In between or standard lenses will leave you frustrated a lot of the times with the Irish landscape.

Q. How do I keep my photographs of Ireland, particularly bog lands and mountains, from looking drab. Sometimes the subtle greens and sienna’s in the Irish landscape come out looking flat and drab in your digital photos. The sienna’s and ochres of heathery landscapes during the autumn and winter months really get lost in jpeg compression.

A 1. Shoot during magic hour.

A 2. If your camera has a “vivid” or “intense” setting use it. I usually have my Nikon set to “more vivid” for my landscape photos.

A 3. Shoot raw or tiff, as stated above some common colours in the Irish landscape are in the range that binned even in high quality jpeg compression.