Three Tips For Finding New Landscape Photography Locations (2023)

Introduction

Three Tips For Finding New Landscape Photography Locations
Finding new landscape photography locations is one of the most important things I do to keep myself excited about photography. In this video, I'll share three tips on how to find new landscape photography locations that I actually use all the time. One takes time, one is controversial, and one allows me to search the entire globe from my office.

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Content

Hey, what's up everyone in this video.

I wanted to share a few different ways three to be exact of different ways.

You can find photography locations.

I know that there's like this big discrepancy on like how you actually go out and look for places and scout locations, but it's such a big part of landscape photography.

I thought I wanted to make a video on how I try to find new locations to photograph so jumping right into it.

The number one way to find new locations.

And this is actually my favorite way is just to literally drive around aimlessly.

I've been doing this a lot near where I live right now in west tennessee and finding a lot of different locations, just whether that's finding places on social media that I've never heard of before or literally just driving around back roads and looking for directions that my subject may face, and that could be east for sunrise or west for sunset or just knowing, hey, this could set up really nice for a foreground for some time lapse.

Photography.

There are a lot of different ways that you can find those places just driving around.

And then logging them later with an app like photo pills.

Now, I'm not going to get into how to actually log those in and save those locations, because I've made a full tutorial video on how to use photo pills for landscape photography, if you click or tap the card that's showing up on your screen right now, you can watch that whole video on how to use photo pills to plan out your shooting and also save some locations to your phone.

So that the next time you do see conditions setting up correctly.

You can go out and photograph those places too.

So the number one way is kind of a cop-out, but it truly is my favorite way of finding new locations and that's just to drive around with no end goal in sight.

Now, the second way is a little bit controversial, because I have this love hate relationship with social media, it's, really great for finding locations and new places that you've never heard of before with the geo tagging with social media.

However, I don't use geotagging specifically to vary my new locations on social media, just because I want to preserve those places and not have too much foot traffic going into lesser trafficked areas that can really damage those locations.

And also set them up for some vandalism that's become more prominent in the past few years.

So when you do find locations on social media, it is smart to figure out beforehand.

You know, do I want to post this location? Do I not? Can it handle foot traffic? Can it not so it's smart to figure that out before? However, if you do find one that is geotagged on social media.

It is a great way to find new locations, following different hashtags of like hike tennessee.

A lot of times.

I find good locations and good hikes to go on whether it leads to a good photograph or not that's a great way to find places to explore and find places to shoot.

I found a lot of different waterfalls using techniques like that.

While also using the post, when I do go to a location like that to raise awareness on how it can be damaged and how you can reduce your footprint in those areas, too just remember that if you are geotagging be sure that you know, it's a location that can handle the foot traffic, please now, the third and final way that I love to find new locations is using my computer as a resource specifically google earth.

Now I've used software like this for a long time, it's, actually what I got my college degree in looking at aerial photography and satellite imagery, I majored in something called geographic information systems.

And it just allows me to see a bird's eye view of a whole place.

So google earth is very similar to that.

I know, kind of what to look for in that.

So I have my hometown pulled up right here.

And just looking at it.

I can see the greener areas are going to be the fields or forests that I can go and explore.

And I can go put a pin there on something to explore later.

You can also search.

So you can do something like natchez trace state park, which is a local state park that I'm close to, and it will zoom in on that location.

And you can kind of just search around in these places and find different areas of the forest or of the park that might be a good, photography, location, too.

And what I like to do is just look for features like this like here's, a lake that I can use.

I can scroll in and see.

Okay, here looks like a little bit of a bridge or a boardwalk here that I can use to shoot west.

Or on this end, I can shoot kind of a northeast direction for sunrise.

So I can look up those locations later and know, I can go back to these places.

Now, a really good way to use google earth.

And what I like to do is look for geographic features.

So what I'm going to do is just kind of zoom out I'm going to center my hometown of where I live jackson tennessee, right in the middle of the screen and then I'm going to zoom out to roughly where a three hour drive might be from my home.

And within that three hour window, you can see I have a lot of different geographic systems that I can photograph.

So here is kind of like the flat mississippi valley that runs through memphis.

If I look towards eastern tennessee, here is a plateau that runs through east tennessee.

So I have a lot of features down in chattanooga.

I can look at there's just a lot of possibilities here and spending time to go through and find these locations can be really beneficial for you to know.

Next time.

I go shoot or next time, I'm around this specific town or city.

I can look up these different hikes that I can go on.

So, for example, let's scroll into like, if I was going to nashville and know that I can visit this couchville lake cedar glade state area, and I have a sunset location with hunt, longhunter state park in here, too.

So what I can do is come down here to the bottom left add a place mark and just scroll over to maybe a good location, let's say, right here.

And I can say long hunter sunset.

I don't have any projects saved.

So I just save that.

And now it saves.

This location for me to explore later and have it saved into my location.

So again, when I go and visit a town or a city, I know that these are the places that I can go to photograph those in.

This is a great technique to use too when you are looking for places on a photo trip.

So you can do that by clicking and dragging this little person.

And I just like to click and drag and hover over these little circles where it gives me a photo option to explore so here's, a photo that comes up.

And these are just great ways to get kind of like a ground view of what this location looks like looks like I am facing if I go by the compass kind of northeast.

So maybe this is a good sunrise, location to come to so always look for different ways of finding new locations, but be responsible when you do get out to those locations and start photographing them.

Do you share them? Do them? Do you not is this a fragile location, always be aware and do your research before you get out to them.

So you don't get into a tricky situation of having no water or no food or no shelter.