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How to shoot EPIC LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY with your PHONE // iPhone, Google Pixel, OnePlus, Samsung
Learn how to capture great landscape photos using your phone with a few easy to apply tips. This video features the Google Pixel 4a but works with any other smartphone like the iPhone, Samsung or OnePlus. To make landscape photography simple, I will talk about the right settings to use, the best light, the optimal weather and composition techniques, all of these only require your phone. These landscape photography techniques include the golden hour, blue hour, the rule of thirds, leading lines and more! It's a fun one!
🔗 High-Resolution Photos https://lbaphotographie.ca/epic-landscape-photos-with-the-google-pixel-4a
🔗 Why take RAW photos? https://youtu.be/CFqMMK4ug3g
🔗 Editing Tutorials https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6kUdfoIX4tzTqZ41_aJFU0XfyhN7r0gC
🔗 BUY the GOOGLE PIXEL 4a https://geni.us/google-pixel-4a
✨ WATCH NEXT ✨
- Google Pixel 4a Review https://youtu.be/7wNDXsDKoCg
- Google Pixel 4a vs Canon DSLR https://youtu.be/4KY9rIr0ifE
- Capturing stars with a phone https://youtu.be/LwnMOsq0Mpk
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📖 CHAPTERS 📖
00:00 - Introduction
00:53 - Camera settings
02:30 - Best Light in Landscape Photography
02:53 - Golden Hour, Sunsets & Sunrises
03:56 - Blue Hour
04:36 - Soft Natural Light
05:28 - Weather conditions
06:05 - Tell a story!
06:41 - Subject separation
08:28 - Join this community!
08:42 - What techniques to apply
09:11 - Landscape Composition Techniques
09:33 - The Rule of Thirds
10:49 - Vertical photos!?
12:07 - Perspective and Foreground Subject
12:59 - Leading Lines
14:30 - Most commun editing error!
15:02 - How to actually improve in landscape photography!
15:56 - A question for you!
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- Canon 6D Mk https://geni.us/canon-6d-mkii
- Google Pixel 4a https://geni.us/google-pixel-4a
- Canon ZOOM LENS EF24-105mm F4L IS II USM https://geni.us/canon-lens-24-105
- Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 Lens https://geni.us/canon-lens-16-35
- Canon EF 70-200mm f/4.0L-IS II USM Lens https://geni.us/canon-lens-70-200
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- 0:00 Introduction
- 0:53 Camera settings
- 2:30 Best Light in Landscape Photography
- 2:53 Golden Hour, Sunsets & Sunrises
- 3:56 Blue Hour
- 4:36 Soft Natural Light
- 5:28 Weather conditions
- 6:05 Tell a story!
- 6:41 Subject separation
- 8:28 Join this community!
- 8:42 What techniques to apply
- 9:11 Landscape Composition Techniques
- 9:33 The Rule of Thirds
- 10:49 Vertical photos!?
- 12:07 Perspective and Foreground Subject
- 12:59 Leading Lines
- 14:30 Most commun editing error!
- 15:02 How to actually improve in landscape photography!
- 15:56 A question for you!
hello everyone welcome to this wonderful snowstorm in this video i'm going to talk about how to get some epic shots using only your phone i'm going to be using my google pixel 4a but this works with whatever camera you have whether it's a samsung iphone oneplus xiaomi or any other camera let's get right into it for those of you who are new to this channel i'm like ben mahafford a young photographer and filmmaker on the journey to become better at this art in this video i will let you know how to capture some epic shots by talking about the camera settings you should be using the light conditions you're looking for the weather you want to have and how to compose some epic shots now let's talk about camera settings if you have a modded smartphone so like my google pixel 4a you don't have to change much inside of the camera app and this is because the camera app is already doing the hard work of creating a super high quality picture so it's going to take multiple frames every time you take a shot and it's going to merge all these frames together to create a higher quality final picture one thing i would change inside of the camera app so if we come inside of here and go on our event settings and this works for most smartphones too is go inside of the settings and make sure we have the option to select raw files so if we come here we have the option to enable raw and then if we go back inside of our main menu here we can actually select if we have a raw picture or not and this is because you're going to have more flexibility instead of the final shots to hit it dim if you don't know what are raw and why they're useful i'm going to link a video where i talked about that now let's talk about another very important setting inside of your camera app if we take a picture here of the trees and the sky and the snow in the front we're going to see that the trees come out very dark because the camera thinks that they're almost black compared to the sky and the snow in the foreground to fix this you actually just want to come here we're going to click on the house here and the trees then i'm gonna bring up the shadows you can see that they put them almost completely down we're gonna bring them back up to the maximum and now we're gonna take the picture and we're gonna see that now the camera does a much better job of keeping a lot more detail inside of the dark parts of the picture you could also do this using a raw file if you don't have an option like this on your camera while the sun is slowly coming out let's talk about what are good like conditions for landscape photography this is one thing when you become better in lansing photography you're going to realize you pass more and more time chasing the best light conditions possible to get better shots the first most obvious type of light that everybody likes in landscape photography is during golden hour if you don't know what is golden hour it's right before and right after sunrise and sunset where you get the very warm tones and also very saturated colors which are really great for landscape photography i would highly suggest that if you're starting out taking pictures to go out during sunrise or sunset because you can easily get unique shots by taking the sunrise and sunset because these are shots that most people are not as used to see if you're not sure when it's golden hour or is the sunrise or sunset i highly suggest the app that is called photo peels it's a little bit expensive but allows you to see when is a golden hour and where will be the sun situated so this is a really great app if you need to plan your shoot in advance to know where are the best conditions to take your shots so i highly suggest you go check out this app if you want to be getting better pictures of sunrise and sunset in my opinion the most underrated type of light is during blue hours so blabber is a few minutes before sunrise and a few minutes after sunrise where everything becomes very blue inside of the photos and this is very good instead of landscape photography because it allows you to get completely different shots that most people are not using at all so this is a pretty cool technique one problem with the google pixel 4 is that in the main camera it tends to make everything way too blue compared to what it should be so a little fix for that is to go inside of nightside mode that's going to correct the colors and get better looking shots uh when using this but this is a really cool technique to get some better lights inside of your photos i think that the biggest mistake that beginner landscape photographers make when taking pictures especially when you just snap pictures with your phone quickly is thinking that the blue sky day is the best time to take pictures it's actually probably the worst time to take pictures because you get very harsh shadows and highlights inside the scene which doesn't make anything look too good it's a lot better to take pictures with a sky like right now where you get very even lighting and very soft lighting which just makes everything look a lot better inside of the shot it's also really great when you have some clouds in the sky that create texture so right now it's very flat but if you had more texture inside of the clouds it can create very cool scenes where you have a lot more detail inside of the sky which creates a much more interesting photo in the end now let's talk about weather conditions unlike most people think a perfect blue sky day isn't the best day to be taking pictures you actually want extreme weather conditions so like right now if snowfall or if you have rain mist or fog or any conditions like that are great for taking landscape photos let's go take a few photos to see how it works in real world the reason it's important to use extreme weather conditions is that it allows to tell a completely different stories so for example right now with all the snow in the trees around i'm telling the story that we went through a complete winter storm this also applies when you're taking pictures with rain or with some fog where you can show a scene that is completely different than what most people are used to see and this allows to have a much more interesting shot of the landscape before the light completely disappears for tonight let's talk another reason why it's so great to have extreme weather conditions and this one is that allows to put more focus on your main subject so for example if we're taking a picture of the little island here and we had some heavy snowstorms some fog or something like that behind the island it would put the focus on the island and not all everything around it and this might seem unlogical because you might think that when you're taking a landscape photo you want to get everything inside of your shot but landscape photography is really about choosing subject and choosing separate parts inside of the photo and making these parts your main subject and putting them forward so by using fog or things like that you can really separate different elements in the shot and bring the focus on the element you really want to have as your main subject in the photo now if you're telling yourself that you don't have extreme conditions like snow to go take some landscape photos i will tell you that you probably have rain and rain is really great to get some landscape photos so first of all rain is going to allow just like fog or a heavy snowstorm to get these different layers inside of the shop another really great thing with some rain is that the colors are much more saturated which is really great when taking landscape photos because you want to have the most colors inside of your scene another really great thing with rain that i love to taking is after the fact you actually have these water droplets on tree branches or things like that and you can also get reflection where you can take the really cool landscape photos using the rain so don't stress if you don't have a winter you can actually go out when you have some rain and still get some really cool landscape photos if you're not part of this community what are you waiting for go hit that big red subscribe button to be notified when a new video comes out also consider sharing this with friends and family because what is even better than doing landscape photography alone is doing landscape photography with a friend or family one thing i hope that most of you understood is that you don't need all the conditions i talked about inside of this video to get perfect landscape shots the most important thing is actually to go outside and practice you can get some really good shots even you have a perfect blue sky and you can get some terrible shots even if you have a sunset so you really just need to go out whatever the conditions are and try and get the most photos and try to understand why a picture is good or not to be able to improve afterwards up to now we've been talking about techniques that to a certain point you don't have to control about them composition is one of the most important parts inside of photography and you have full control about it i'm not going to talk about some techniques that are in my opinion the most important to get some epic landscape shots now let's talk about the most well-known photography rule which is the rule of thirds this basically means you need to align your subject on one of the lines of thirds to help you with this we're first going to go inside our camera settings so here on the google pixel 4e we're going to go in the advanced settings then we're going to select the grid type and i'm going to select the 3x3 grid this works on any cell phone or any digital camera you're going to have an option to enable a grid like this the error that most people do when taking landscape photos is to center the subject so in this case our subject is the little brown house here so if we put it perfectly in the center and take a photo we're gonna see it creates a result that is okay but it's not a great shot to get a much more powerful image we actually want to use our rule of thirds so here we're going to put the house on the intersection of two of the lines of first and now if we take a shot we're gonna see that we're gonna get a much more powerful image in the end this is a rule that i respect in most of my shots and i'm going to put a few examples here so you can see how i respect it in most of my photos now let's talk about the second composition technique and this one is to not limit yourself to only taking horizontal orientation photos i know that the horizontal orientation is called landscape orientation but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't be taking landscape photos in a vertical mode the reason i love taking pictures with my google pixel 4a in a vertical mode is that it has a pretty wide primary lens like most other smartphones this means that when you're taking a picture in a horizontal mode you actually get a lot of distraction around your subject and one really important thing to remember inside of landscape photography is that your subject actually isn't your landscape it needs to be something a little bit more precise so in this case it's the house i have in front of me but it could be an island it could be a person it could be anything else that is interesting inside of your shot so by taking a vertical mode so if you come here and we place our house in the vertical mode we can actually see that we're going to get a much more interesting shot because you're going to have the top and the bottom that are going to have white space and this is going to bring more emphasis on your subject which is the house inside of this photo i'm going to put a few out of polos on the screen when i skied we have a lot of the sky that brings the emphasis on the mountains in the bottom now let's talk about another very important composition technique in lansing photography and this is to change your perspective most people take a picture at the height of their head or at their chest but you don't want to be like most people i would suggest getting closer to the ground or using a foreground subject like the little branches in the background here to get a more interesting shot for example a few days ago i took pictures of these branches and you can see that by moving just a little bit the camera you can get a completely different result i actually ended up liking more one other shot where i have to two branches that create a v and put the accent on your subject in the center here one common mistake i see when people are taking photos with a foreground subject is actually that you don't want to be hiding your main subject or touching it with the foreground subject so just be careful how you place the foreground subject in accordance with your main subject in the photo leading lines is one of the most powerful composition technique in landscape photography in my opinion the idea is that you want to use lines inside of your shot to guide the eye towards a subject i'm going to show a few examples because it might be a little bit hard to understand without any examples in the first shot here the lines of the cables of the chairlift point towards our subject here the person in the chair and this really helps your eye go towards it because it's really high contrast with the sky if you ever wondered why roads or path are so popular inside of lansky shops it's actually because they really help leading your eyes towards your subject here which is the house in the background so this is a very powerful technique when you have a role or something like that because your eyes can automatically follow that road and go towards your subject you can also create your own path so for example in this shot here i walked in the snow to create a path that goes towards the sunset in the background which is the subject i was trying to take inside of the picture my last image here is actually one where it's a counter example so here the leading line of the ski tracks points to the end of the lake but i actually want the people to be seeing the sunset here so in this shot it would be better if i didn't have any leading lines or any foreground subject here and just take the sunset right away because that's the part i want i want people to be seeing inside of the shot so be careful if leading lines because they can also point to some things in the shots that you don't necessarily want to be your main subject i won't talk about editing your photos too much inside of this video because i have more videos where i go in depth about editing your shots there's one error that is the most common when people ask me for comments that simply drives me crazy this is not leveling your horizon inside of your shots this is super easy to fix so you can go inside of google photos here then go in your edit settings go on crop and simply level your horizon pretty quickly now we're done so you saw it took five seconds to fix so there's no reason at all why you don't do it inside of your next shot i wanted this video by telling that the only real way to become better in landscape photography is to go outside and take some pictures you might not know but i took over 500 pictures with my google pixel 4a in the last few days and one exercise i like doing is taking different shots of the same subject it might not be the most epic landscape shot here with huge mountains or things like that but i still enjoy going outside and taking some pictures another very important thing is that once you go inside you want to go and look at your pictures and try to understand what you like inside of them and what you could improve in the future this is the only way to really improve indiana i also want to end by telling you that it's not important the number of likes you get on instagram the only thing that matters inside of landscape photography is if you enjoy the process i might go out and take pictures during a whole day and get none that are good but if i had a fun time outside that's really the only thing that counts with that being said i hope this video allowed you to learn some of the basics of taking epic landscape photos with your phone if you enjoyed this video please let me know by hitting the like button below and also consider subscribing if you want to learn more about photography or filmmaking i would also really appreciate if you shared this video with some friends or family i also have a question for you and i want to know if you would like more tutorials on landscape photography using your phone please let me know in the comments below see you in the next video bye
Video Links
- 🔗 High-Resolution Photos
- 🔗 Why take RAW photos?
- 🔗 Editing Tutorials
- 🔗 BUY the GOOGLE PIXEL 4a
- Google Pixel 4a Review
- Google Pixel 4a vs Canon DSLR
- Capturing stars with a phone
- Instagram: @loic.bellemare.alford ()
- My online store
- Affiliate link for Epidemic Sound
- https://kit.co/loic.bellemare.alford/youtube-gear
- DJI Pocket 2 Creator Combo
- 128 gb MicroSD card
- Canon 6D Mk
- Google Pixel 4a
- Canon ZOOM LENS EF24-105mm F4L IS II USM
- Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 Lens
- Canon EF 70-200mm f/4.0L-IS II USM Lens
- VANGUARD VEO 2 265CB CARBON FIBER TRIPOD
- DJI MAVIC AIR
- http://bit.ly/loicba
What is this video about?
I'm breaking down everything you need to know to shoot epic landscape photos with your phone—whether you're using a Google Pixel, iPhone, Samsung, OnePlus, or any other smartphone. No fancy gear required, just the device you already have and a few solid techniques.
Camera Settings
First, I'll show you which settings matter. On phones with advanced camera tech, the app is already doing heavy lifting by merging multiple frames. But enable RAW if your phone supports it—it gives you way more flexibility when editing. I also cover how to lift shadows and preserve detail in dark areas without blowing out the bright parts.
Chasing Light
Light is everything in landscape photography. Golden hour—those minutes before sunrise and after sunset—gives you warm, saturated tones that draw people in. But don't sleep on blue hour, those few minutes before sunrise and after sunset when everything turns blue. It's underrated and creates completely different shots. And here's the counterintuitive part: a flat, overcast sky often beats a perfect blue sky because harsh shadows and highlights just don't look as good. I'm also using an app called Photo Peels to plan shoots around optimal light conditions.
Weather is Your Friend
This might sound backwards, but extreme weather conditions—snow, rain, fog, mist—make better landscape photos than clear days. They let you tell a story and create separation between your subject and everything behind it. Rain specifically saturates colors more and leaves water droplets that reflect light beautifully.
Composition Techniques
The rule of thirds is the foundation: place your subject on one of the grid intersections instead of the center. Switch between horizontal and vertical orientations—vertical can emphasize your actual subject instead of distracting elements. Get low, use foreground elements, and look for leading lines (roads, paths, cables) that guide the eye toward what matters. And level your horizon—it takes five seconds and changes everything.
The Real Work
Here's the thing: you don't need perfect conditions or perfect gear. Go outside and shoot. I took over 500 photos in a few days with my Pixel 4a, and most weren't keepers. But reviewing what works and what doesn't is how you actually improve. The goal isn't likes on Instagram; it's enjoying the process of creating.