Here are a few tips that will help transform your landscape photography pictures from okay to WOW. Some of these may be rather obvious but even the obvious is sometimes forgotten when you are wrapped in the emotion of capturing that special shot.

1. Take a minute to think about the message or feeling you want to convey with that particular landscape image. This could mean making the focal point an isolated dessert flower, a small animal, an abandoned artifact or some other item of interest.

2. When composing your image, be careful to exclude annoying objects such as telephone or electrical wires, cell phone towers, signage or other man made artifacts that can ruin a good shot or entail lots of Photoshop work for removal.

3. Take advantage of naturally occurring lines or perspectives that direct a viewer’s eyes.

4. Choose the smallest aperture you can for the scene to maximize your depth of field to keep as much of your scene in focus as possible.

5. Find something interesting in the foreground to focus the interest on. We often are looking at objects far away which makes for an okay picture but focusing the attention on some closer objects can often change the whole feel of the image.

6. Consider natural lighting. Sometimes shooting around dusk or dawn can provide much more interesting shadows and lighting thereby adding more visual interest and emotion to your photos.