As a Fashion Photographer, Lee felt more than a little out of his depth when he landed on the shores of Senja, Norway for a recent Gather.ly trip. This didn't stop him from giving it his all to capture the spectacular scenery surrounding him. Boy, did he capture it. Our minds were blown with his breathtaking shots of the picturesque mountains and lakes he explored.

Here, Lee shares his (sometimes less than conventional) tips for capturing the perfect landscape shot.

Kit used to capture this shot:

- 5D Mk III

- Canon EF 35mm F1.4 L USM Lens

- Manfrotto Wilderness Tripod with Pro Fluid Video Mini Head

- Photoshop CS6

I haven't shot too many landscapes in my time as a photographer, but I had just enough knowledge to work in a way that is needed to create this kind of image. Landscape photography is not as straight forward as you might think.

There has always been debate on the rules of composing a landscape image, but I'm not one for rules - I just experiment with an angle that pleases me. There were a few things that I had in mind when working out where to shoot from in this instance. I noticed the angles of the mountains from each side of my frame were leading the eye into the middle of the image, which is a good thing! You want the viewer to spend as much time as possible exploring the image so this is a little trick to keep them immersed.

Something I learnt from Gather.ly collective member Jon Reid is that showing something or someone in an image gives the viewer a sense of scale. The red building on the right of the frame helps with this effect. I also stuck the horizon bang in the middle of frame, this can be frowned upon in the world of landscape photography but it worked for this image.

The final image was constructed of 3 separate photographs. To perfectly expose an entire image, you need to consider 3 different areas of the scene.

- Average overall exposure. A perfectly metered image of the whole scene is required. I exposed for the mid tones as I normally would when metering and this will form the base for the final image.

- Exposing for the sky. Shooting in midday sun as I was here, it's important that the sky looks as impressive as possible. Capturing these nice blue tones required its own separate exposure to the rest of the image.

- Exposing for the details. In other words I over-exposed the whole image by 1 stop which gave me access to some of the darker parts of the image, just in case I needed this later in post-production.

I was shooting with my MkIII on HDR Mode. This is a new function to the 5D series and it can be used badly if you don't know how it works. HDR (or High Dynamic Range) when in use automatically takes 3 pictures and gives you the choice of how each image will be exposed. Here I was shooting with the dynamic range adjusted to ±1 EV. This gave me 3 images exposed 1 stop apart. It's very important to have a sturdy tripod when bracketing exposures, the images need to line up perfectly to be combined as one later in post-production.

Average overall exposure | F22 1/80sec ISO 100

Exposing for the sky | F22 1/160sec ISO 100

Exposing for the shadows | F22 1/40sec ISO 100

Be aware that when using HDR Mode your camera will automatically merge the three images in camera and produce one more photo. This merged image will be a JPEG, even if you're shooting RAW. I normally just use this as a preview of the combined exposure, then merge the three images manually later.

I chose to shoot with the lens' smallest aperture of F22 to make sure everything from the water in the foreground to the mountains in the distance were nice and sharp. I set my ISO to 100 to keep the digital noise to the minimum and metered my shutter speed accordingly.

The first step I took in creating my final image was to look at my base image shot at 0 EV. I made my initial tonal and contrast adjustments in Camera RAW 7.1, and synchronised the adjustments to the other two images. This is a simple way of making sure that any changes you make to one image are transferred to the others. Remember that you're working to create one image, so any colour or white balance adjustments made here need to be made on each individual photograph.

Once in Photoshop, I stacked the three images on top of each other and made sure they were all lined up correctly. I knew that I wanted to crop my final image to a more panoramic aspect ratio, so I did this first to save any un-necessary editing. With my base image at the bottom, I started by deciding what I needed from the other images to make the shot look great.

Starting with the sky from my -1 EV exposure I used a mask with a soft brush and brushed in the part I wanted to combine with my base image. The great thing about using masks is that any adjustments you make to the image are completely non destructive, meaning that you can easily go back and refine any change at any stage of the edit process. I started with quite a rough mask which I refined later.

Then I looked at what I wanted to take from my over exposed image +1 EV. I don't normally take a lot from this exposure, just little bits of detail that could not have been captured in one exposure.

Now I had my rough selection from each image, I spent time refining the masks, conscious that the final image must look real and not too Photoshopped. This can be the problem when shooting HDR, you have the ability to focus on every detail, which can over-complicate the image and make it look unreal. Photoshop is a tool best used to make the most out of a visual, but don't overcook the editing process. You want the viewer to experience something they can believe when looking at your photograph, and not see the editing before the image itself.

Reviewing the overall exposure, the scene looked as my eye saw it at the time. From here I made further colour corrections to enhance the image. I used Selective Colour in the layer adjustments to bring out the blues in the sky and the water, and added an overall saturation layer just to make the image pop. I also played with the contrast using Curves and used Dodge and Burn to differentiate some of the tones in the mountains and clouds.

Finally I sharpened the image with unsharp mask set to -

Amount 99%

Radius 1.4 Pixels

Threshold 1 Levels

An amazing result! Massive thanks to Lee for sharing his approach to capturing landscape images with us to help you all out there on your photography ventures. His images are simply amazing so make sure to check out his round up of the trip here.