You see them everywhere, pretty landscape photographs that you wish you could take. And realistically you can, you don't need to travel 6000 miles away to the glorious peaks of the Himalayas or trek deep into the Amazon rainforest to find a suitable scene. In fact this leads us to tip #1
#1 -
The time of day is the most important decision you can make when trying out landscape photography, get your head into imagining how the light looks at certain times and you will start to create great images quickly.
For example, the images below were captured near sunrise -
To help in planning with this I use an app fromPhotoPills which shows the weather and sunrise/ sunset times amongst other very useful information.
#2 -
Use Google Earth/Maps, this tool is invaluable for searching for possible locations without having to travel. Before I used Maps, I would drive around, park up and put on my boots and start walking, usually during the morning or afternoon with the main focus on finding new locations which I would come back to later.
Being able to sit at home and look down all over the world allows me to scout out places with nice compositions, places to park, how to gain access to locations and what the environment may be like (beach, mucky fields or a small wall etc may be in the way). If you do this where you live locally you may be surprised by the number of locations on offer when you have a bird's eye view of it all.
I found this angle of the bridge from Google Maps -
#3 -
Wear clothes appropriate for the location, I'd much rather have wellies or waterproof boots on if I know I am going near the sea or rivers as there is nothing more annoying seeing a nice composition but you have to stand in a foot of water at 5AM in your bare feet all because you left your wellies at home.
Most of all go out and shoot, take photos and embrace those peaceful but chilly mornings whilst you wait for the sun to rise. Good luck!