How to become a Professional Landscape Photographer

My first piece of advice is to invest time and effort into developing your skills as a landscape photographer. You need to create a stunning portfolio that showcases a variety of landscapes and demonstrates your location knowledge. You may choose to focus solely on your home country or a specific region, but your portfolio will be stronger if you also travel to new places. This allows you to showcase different environments and expand your expertise in the process. Diversity doesn’t mean you need to branch into other genres like portrait or wildlife photography. Instead, it means exploring different aspects of landscapes—mountains, waterfalls, cliff sides, forests, coastlines, and so on. Doing this will inevitably strengthen your skills.

As you progress, you’ll naturally build both your landscape photography portfolio and a social media presence. Aim for a cohesive “look” across your work, which can be achieved through a consistent editing style. 

Avoid simply copying others; that won’t set you apart. Instead, invest in tutorials, learn editing techniques, and gradually develop your own style. Inspiration is important, and practicing to achieve certain looks is valuable, but your work should still feel original to you. You should enjoy the creative process just as much as the final result. This is probably a good time to mention I have plenty of editing tutorials if you want a place to start.

Yes, you will need social media accounts, and the platforms continue to grow and shift as new sites emerge. Back when I started, the only available site to post landscape photos was 1x.com. Now there are multiple platforms, including Instagram, 500px, Behance, and Rednote, to name a few.

Don’t stress about posting a certain number of times per week just to satisfy the algorithm or go viral. In fact, I recommend not putting too much effort into this at the start—just post consistently. If you become good enough at photography, popularity will come in time. If you focus only on playing the engagement game, you’ll spend countless hours doing that instead of investing in your photography or growing your business in more meaningful ways. In the beginning, your main goal should be building a strong portfolio, not chasing likes or virality. Once you have years of work and an established collection of photos, you can always re-post your original content when you have a larger following.

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That said, you should still be aware of how to grow your online presence. For example, you can run ads on Facebook, Instagram, or Google. You could also promote something free—like a tutorial, e-book, or preset—that people can download from your website in exchange for subscribing.

Speaking of websites, it’s important that you have one! You can use any website builder—there are plenty of easy-to-use options with convenient setups and well done preset designs, such as Squarespace or Wix. Having a website will instantly make you appear more professional and approachable. More importantly, it gives people the chance to view your work in higher resolution than social media platforms allow. My advice is to go for a template based website over a unique personalized website. The latter costs time and money and don’t always look or perform better. 

Another way to increase your online presence as a professional landscape photographer is by creating content! Now that you’ve spent years developing your photography skills, you’ve built a lot of knowledge—and sharing that knowledge can help you make money or attract people to your business. There are many ways to do this: writing blogs to generate traffic to your website, creating tutorials (and releasing snippets on YouTube), or even publishing full tutorials on YouTube as a way to get monetized. All of these are effective ways to reach a bigger audience. You can also build a newsletter that people sign up for through your website, which is a great way to promote yourself and your products.

Having a niche has always been important for standing out from the crowd—but right now, it’s especially crucial because landscape photography is saturated. The number of people offering landscape photography content and landscape photography tours compared to the number of actual photographers wanting to go on tours and people wanting to buy prints etc is unbalanced. 

A niche could be, for example: high-mountain selfies, night photography, ice photography, aerial photography, or specialized workshops in a particular region where you’re the expert. This can set you apart as a professional landscape photographer and become the thing people recognize you for.

Once you feel confident enough to be a landscape photography workshop leader or organizer, start by guiding tours for others. This will help you connect with potential future clients and give you valuable experience in the logistics and responsibilities involved in running a tour.

Make yourself a checklist of requirements when looking for this type of work. For example:

•  Will you be paid fairly? Guiding landscape photography tours is hard work and should come with proper compensation—typically between €400 and €1,000 per day, depending on your reputation and the tour price charged to clients.

•  If you do find a job working for someone guiding their tours, check what does the contract saying regarding running your own tours. Some companies include clauses that prevent guides from running their own tours once they leave, especially in those locations which you have been touring for that business. Think carefully about how that might affect your future plans.

If you’re truly serious about leading your own tours, you may want to jump straight into running them yourself. However, collaborating with other landscape photographers or gaining experience by guiding for an established company is an excellent way to build your name and learn the ropes before going independent.

Yes, landscape photography takes passion and commitment, but it also takes time to build a large enough following to make it a stable source of income. My advice is to keep another job on the side when you’re starting out. Jumping into landscape photography full-time right away isn’t ideal, as it puts too much pressure on achieving success—and that pressure can cause you to lose the enjoyment and forget why you started in the first place. Having a side job allows you to take the time you need without unnecessary stress. It gives you the freedom to develop your style without having to focus on the commercial side (just yet). For example, I began as a uni student and pursued landscape photography as a hobby for six years before running my own workshops.