A vertical or horizontal landscape photo - part 1
Saturday 10 October 2026, 14:41 by Nando Harmsen | 900 views | 6 commentsThis article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.
A landscape or portrait photo? Should you hold the camera horizontally, or is vertical better? The choice is determined by the subject, but also by what you want to say with the photo. It is also very much a personal choice.
Do you choose a portrait photo? Or is a landscape photo better? Never follow so-called rules or self-imposed rules. Look at the subject and what you want to say with the photo.
A landscape photo is usually taken as a landscape photo. That is why it is also called landscape orientation. Feel free to deviate from this if the subject calls for it. But do think about it.
A portrait orientation, in other words a vertical photo, gives you plenty of space to show the foreground through to the background. It can also emphasise height, such as with a path between trees.
Road framed by trees - f/8, 1/100s, 1600 ISO @ 27mm
Even so, a vertical orientation is not always the best choice. Especially not with that path between the trees. You can see the height, but it says nothing about the forest the path runs through.
Choose a landscape orientation, a horizontal photo? Then you emphasise much better how the path runs through a forest. Try it out by taking a photo in both orientations.
Path through a forest - f/8, 1/100s, 1600 ISO @ 18mm
About the author
Nando Harmsen has been photographing for more than 40 years. He specialises in wedding photography and landscape photography. Nando also gives talks, workshops, masterclasses and photo trips, and regularly reviews new and interesting equipment.
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6 comments
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Donald Willemsen wrote on Saturday 10 October 2026 at 20:45 | replyI photograph with a crop-sensor camera and I have a 10-18mm wide-angle zoom. With it I can show a great deal of the landscape, but the image is displayed enormously reduced, with quite a loss of detail. If I make a vertical panorama with a short telephoto lens, I get to see more detail, but the image also gets 'squashed together'. This in turn means that some of the depth in the landscape is lost. I struggle with that quite a bit. I still haven't figured out how to find the golden mean in that. I now want to experiment with my newly purchased 100mm tilt/shift lens. I know the principle of taking 3 photos horizontally with this t/s lens, but I would like to receive some more tips.
Translated from Dutch. -
Nando
wrote on Tuesday 13 October 2026 at 13:16
| reply
This has already been discussed many times.
Translated from Dutch.
Have another read through this article. Then you'll see that there is no 'stitched-together' image, that what you're doing is nothing more than generating a high resolution (which you will in fact never need)
https://photofacts.nl/landschapsfotografie/het-verschil-tussen-een-groothoekfoto-en-een-panorama-met-teleobjectief -
Govaerts wrote on Tuesday 13 October 2026 at 14:15 | replyThis week here in Salinopólis (Brazil) I am going to take a photo, horizontally at low tide (at 7.00 a.m.) on the beach with a view of the ocean, placing the emphasis on the foreground and the patterns in the beach sand resulting from the receding water level. I have decided to opt for a 50mm lens and not for the "expanse" that a wide-angle lens provides, nor for the telephoto lens, to avoid compressing the foreground and background towards each other. I am curious....
Translated from Dutch. -
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Liesbeth Verkade wrote on Tuesday 13 October 2026 at 17:43 | replyI caught myself choosing a portrait-oriented photo very easily. Over the past 2 weeks in France, I very consciously also took lots of landscape-oriented photos of the same subject/the same place. A few more days on the road. Once I'm home, I'll take a leisurely look at which photos are the best for me.
Translated from Dutch. -
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