Landscape pictures are very, very popular and they’re pretty easy to take. Let me show you how to optimize your camera for a landscape picture.

Now, I know that this camera has a landscape mode, but I don’t really like using this mode for a couple of reasons. A couple of times, I’ve had issues with this mode where it didn’t do really what it was supposed to do. The landscape mode is intended to get everything in focus, everything from the very near to the very far. It’s supposed to choose the smallest aperture possible given the amount of light. However, I’ve had a few cases where that has not happened so I try and avoid using that mode from now on. Instead, I use the aperture value mode, and this mode allows me to predetermine the aperture that I would like to use and this is really a lot more easy than it sounds, so I’ll show you in a second and the camera will compensate whatever aperture I decide.

So let’s go ahead and turn the camera on and I’ll show you in the back. First, let’s go ahead and set up our function menu. Go ahead and press the function button to access this menu. At the top, my ISO is currently set to 200. I would recommend starting out at 50, let’s just move that over to 50. If the scene is dark, if you’re outdoors and it’s dusk or there isn’t a whole lot of lighting because it’s cloudy, then you may need to increase the ISO. But typically during the day, 50 should be just fine. Even at a cloudy day, 50 would be great. So start there.

Let’s go down to white balance. My white balance is currently set to daylight. Again, if you’re outdoors during the day, this is fantastic. If it’s a cloudy day, choose cloudy. You’re not going to be taking a whole lot of landscape pictures indoors, so the indoor white balance options, tungsten and fluorescent may be irrelevant, but you can if you like to use this trick indoors to capture to make everything in focus.

So let’s keep going down. Draft mode is at single shot. This is great. The effect is turned off, that’s fantastic. My flash is irrelevant with landscapes. You’re not going to use a flash. It’s not going to help at all so you want to turn the flash off anyway, and your metering is evaluative which—from the most part, this is actually very good. You want the camera to look at the entire scene in order to judge what the right amount of light is. So let’s escape the function menu, click the function button once again. Now you’ll notice at the top, my flash icon indicates as the flash is not going to fire which is exactly what I want. If you’re does not look like the no flash icon, just go ahead and press the up navigation button or the flash button. Press that to scroll through the different flash options until you get to no flash. So we don’t want to use the flash.

And finally at the very bottom, you’ll see that my aperture is highlighted and has this two green arrows indicating that I can adjust that value with the right and left navigation buttons. So right now, I’m going to set to F8 which actually is very good for landscapes. you want a very high F number, otherwise, a small aperture—meaning of small aperture, a high—F number is a small aperture so that’s going to get everything from there to far in focus. So sometimes, if you zoom in, then you can actually get it even higher than F8, but right now, I’m zoomed out so F8 is the highest that I can have. So I’ll just press the shutter button halfway. This is true for every picture you take. Press the shutter halfway, wait for the camera to focus and then press the shutter button the rest of the way to take the picture. So let me show you what that looks like. I’ll press the button halfway, focus—you can see it right now with my lighting situation, this indicates that I’m at 125th of a second and F8. I can either increase my ISO to compensate and have a faster shutter speed so I’ll be able to hold it. 125th of a second is pretty slow and will be very, very difficult to hand hold.

So the other thing that I can do is go back to my aperture and decrease the F number increasing the size of the aperture. Now, that’s going to get me a slightly shallower depth of field, but even at 7.1, it’s still probably okay in most cases so let me try and do that. I’ll just press the left navigation button to get that 7.1, press the shutter button once again and you can see now, I’m at 130th of a second. That’s okay especially if I rest against something. I can rest against a tree for example or a wall. I should have no problem hand holding 130th of a second. But if you don’t feel confident, then I would go ahead and increase the ISO at this point because you probably don’t want your aperture to be any larger than that. So that should do it.