Nature vs Landscape Photography

What’s the difference between nature and landscape photography, you ask?  You’re not alone!  

Consulting Google tends to leave us scratching our heads and asking even more questions than when we started.  

Does nature and landscape photography require different skills?

Do I need different gear for nature vs landscape photography? 

Why should I care if there is a difference between the two?

I’m going to dig in and answer these questions and more for us.  Let’s go!

Definitions of Nature and Landscape Photography

I wanted to know what each word means outside of the world of photography, so I opened up the good old Oxford dictionary….I actually pulled it up online.  Then, I wanted to do a little digging to see what these words mean in the context of photography.

Nature is defined by Oxford as the phenomena of the physical world collectively, including plants, animals, the landscape, and other features and products of the earth, as opposed to humans or human creations.

Nature photography is basically defined as a wide range of photography taken outdoors and devoted to displaying natural elements such as landscapes, wildlife, plants, and close-ups of natural scenes and textures. 

Landscape is defined in Oxford as all the visible features of an area of countryside or land, often considered in terms of their aesthetic appeal.  Makes sense, land-scape.

Now, landscape photography shows spaces within the world, sometimes vast and unending, but other times microscopic. Landscape photographs typically capture the presence of nature on land, the sea, and in space.

From these definitions we can gather, nature photography is an umbrella term for many subsets of photography, the most popular of which are landscape photography, wildlife photography, and flowers/flora photography.  And, while landscape photography is a subset of nature photography, it is also an umbrella for seascapes, mountainscapes, astrophotography, and intimate landscapes, to name a few.

Now that we can define these two types of photography, let’s explore the gear and skills necessary for each.  Let’s start with the gear.

Gear for Nature and Landscape Photography

We will just talk about the basics for now.  I could go into great depth with all of these topics, which I will do in other posts.  Tripods, filters, shutter releases, etc go beyond the scope of this article.  We are going to just focus…no pun intended…on the basics of camera and lenses.

Not to sound cliche, but whatever camera you own will work for both, nature and landscape photography.  

Before buying my first mirrorless camera, I shot exclusively with a point and shoot camera.  It started out as a way to document my outdoor adventures and gradually grew into a photography hobby.  I had my eye on a few dslrs and mirrorless cameras, but given that it’s expensive I decided to continue using my point and shoot.  I wanted to make sure that photography wasn’t just a phase before spending my paycheck on a more expensive camera.  And, I decided to learn the basics like the exposure triangle and composition with my point and shoot.   Let me tell you, some of my favorite photos were taken with that point and shoot camera.

Now, I shoot all types of nature photography with my mirrorless camera.  Big wide landscapes to more intimate landscapes.  Wildlife to flowers and everything in between.  I’ve recently started dabbling in astrophotography, my main limitation has nothing to do with my gear, simply the fact that I’m not a night person.

Lenses are a little more complicated and diverse, but you absolutely can use the same lens for nature and landscape photography.

After buying my first mirrorless camera I only owned and shot everything with the kit lens for the first year.  The photos I made ran the gamut of nature photography.  I shot mountainscapes, wildlife, macro, etc.

If you want to specialize in a specific type of photography, you might want to get a lens suited for that type.  A macro lens if you want to focus on macro photography.  A lens with a wide aperture of 2.8 if you want to photograph the stars and milky way.  But, if you want to be a generalist, you don’t necessarily need a quiver full of lenses.  

Skills Needed for Each

The great thing about photography, the basic skills carry over across the board.  No matter what type of photography you like to shoot, nature, landscape, product, portraiture, etc, etc you need to understand the exposure triangle, composition, focusing, lighting, etc.  Stay tuned, each of these topics are so important that they will be getting their own in depth articles.

Aperture, shutter speed, and ISO make up the three sides of the exposure triangle.  And, are extremely important for all photographers to understand.  These three controls work together to create a photo that is properly exposed, which is  important for every type of photography.

The basic idea of composition is, where do you place your main subject within the photo to tell the story of the moment.  One of the most common rules of composition is the rule of thirds.  Others include leading lines, rule of odds, fill the frame, etc.  Again, important for any photographer to know.

I think it goes without saying that focus is important to all forms of photography.  Nature and landscape photographers alike want the subject of the photo to be in focus.  Even abstract photographers will need to understand focus to create the image they want.

Light is, once again, important to every type of photography as it is the source that creates all of our photos.  Nature and landscape photographers share the same light sources, the sun, moon and stars.  The sun for example plays a crucial role in both nature and landscape photography.  You need to observe and understand it throughout the day as it moves through the sky and changes contrast, is it a clear sky or cloudy, is the position of the sun going to front light, sidelight, or backlight your subject which could be a mountain, tree, moose, etc.

Does it matter?    

Before we answer the question, does it matter if you’re known as a nature photographer or a landscape photographer, we need to answer a different question.  What is your goal with photography?

If you are a hobby photographer who just loves to take photos of anything and everything, you probably don’t care which title people give you.  When people ask what kind of photographer you are or what do you like to photograph, everything will be the enthusiastic answer you give them.

If you are a professional photographer and are creating a brand around your photography, it’s much more important to identify with one or the other.  You want to build your brand around the type of photography you like to create.

If your passion is photographing animals, you want to brand yourself as a wildlife photographer.  If your portfolio is focused on landscapes, brand yourself as a landscape photographer.  If you like to photograph all things in nature, a nature photographer. 

When I was starting out on my professional photography journey, my heart was set on creating beautiful landscape images, but I found myself absolutely loving wildlife also.  Then, I found I have a thing for trees.  And, the night sky.  Oh, and macro images.  I love the great outdoors and creating images of it all, so I brand myself as a nature photographer.

Create Both!

Whether you are a hobby photographer, a professional landscape photographer, wildlife photographer, etc, you should shoot it all.  

If you spend enough time doing photography, you find that rarely do you get any cooperation out of mother nature.  The elk in the field during blue hour make their way into the trees on the far side as the sun comes up.  The sun is hidden behind a big cloud so you don’t get that golden hour light or the skies are clear making for boring skies.  The wind is blowing the leaves and foliage ruining your planned long exposure shot.  I could go on….

As a personal example, I live in Colorado and it is notorious for clear blue skies in the summer.  It makes for extremely boring landscape photos and makes me a little disinterested.  So, during the summer I tend to spend more time photographing wildlife, intimate landscapes, macro, etc.  

This helps my photography in a lot of ways.  If the boring skies caused me to put my camera down during the summer months, I would have to spend time relearning the basics that were once automatic to me, and that’s if I even pick up my camera again.  

It also helps to keep the creative juices flowing which keeps me from becoming bored with photography.  This creativity gives me new perspectives and techniques to apply to my photography.  It allows my photography to grow and improve in so many ways.  

You might not want to specialize in all types of nature photography, but it’s so beneficial to you  to practice them all.

Just Get Out and Create!

In the end I think we can say that nature photography and landscape photography are one in the same, yet different in their own ways.

The basic gear and skill can be used for both, so why not do both!  You might be surprised by the transformation of your photos, even if you specialize in one type of photography.

So, get out there and create amazing images of nature!  Words are just semantics, afterall.

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