500px-er, landscape photographer, and online photography educator Craig McCormick is at it again, helping beginner landscape photographers take their skills to the next level. And nothing, perhaps, is more important to taking your landscape photography skills to the next level than learning and developing one particular habit: location scouting.
As Craig puts it in the description to his embedded video below, “finding compelling and inspiring landscape locations to shoot can be pretty hard, especially if you don’t know how to research them in the first place.”
So Craig has done the job of putting together a very solid, easy-to-understand intro to location scouting for landscape photography beginners who don’t know where to start. Interestingly enough, Craig’s answer to that “where to start” question is 500px!
Check out the video below:
One thing Craig didn’t mention in his video, that I think is worth adding to the 500px section, is that you can also visit a neat little part of the 500px website called the Map. In this view—which you can see for yourself by clicking here—you can zero in on a location using a map, and see all the photos uploaded from that location based on the manually added and automatic geotagging data on each photo.
This is not a perfect system, of course. Manually added GPS data isn’t always accurate, and sometimes there are so many pictures of a location that it’s downright impossible to zero in on an exact location. But if you have a spot in mind and just want to see photos captured in that area, it can be a very useful tool!
Try it out, and be sure to follow the rest of Craig’s suggestions too. Remember, it’s the techniques he mentioned above that help Craig to find and capture beautiful shots like these:
