What are landscapes in photography?

In literal terms, landscape refers to all the features of the terrain that are visible to you. However, in the context of photography, the term ‘landscape’ can have several different meanings. 

Landscape photography is where you want to capture all of what you see in the frame, in focus. This typically would be the natural environment, such as hills, trees, rivers, and seas, but would also include elements of the built environment such as roads and buildings.

Landscape can also refer to the orientation of your camera. For example, when you hold the camera level, with the frame wider that it is taller, that is known as landscape orientation – even if you might not be taking pictures of landscapes.

Finally, Landscape can also refer to a setting on your camera. The most common setting here would be Landscape Mode, an automatic shooting mode that typically uses a smaller aperture to make sure everything is in focus. Landscape can also refer to the Picture Style setting on your Canon EOS camera, which provides a subtle boost in contrast, sharpness and saturation in blues and greens, to really make the landscape shots pop.