7 Tips for Creating a Sense of Depth in Your Landscape Photos

Landscape photographer and YouTuber Mads Peter Iversen is back with another helpful tips video. This time, he’s covering a very important subject that many beginners fail to properly appreciate when they’re just starting out: how to create depth in your landscape imagery.

In this video, Mads covers 7 tips for creating depth that range from the well-understood and super basic like “use a wide angle lens” and “introduce some kind of foreground,” to the more esoteric like using fog/mist/dust to emphasize the layers in a scene. Other tips include using leading elements, letting the same element extend throughout your whole scene, and overlapping the layers of your scene.

He dives into each of the 7 points in detail, and provides an example image or two (or three) for every one, so even if you’re not quite sure what he means, Mads does a good job of both showing and telling.

Here are some of the samples from the video, each paired with the tip that he was trying to demonstrate:

Tip 1: Use a wide-angle lens.
Tip 2: Introduce a foreground
Tip 3: Use leading elements
Tip 4: Use the natural sense of depth created by having one element extend from foreground to background.
Tip 5: Make the layers in a scene overlap
Tip 6: Use fog/mist/dust to your advantage
Tip 7: Use depth of field to your advantage

To learn more about all of the tips mentioned above, check out the full video up top. And if you love landscape photography and enjoy Mads’ teaching style, definitely check out his YouTube channel for more tips, gear discussions, technique breakdowns, and more.

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