There is a saying “steal like an artist” and as catchy as it may be, I believe it is misunderstood. We are all the average of the five people we spend the most time around. if you look at artists that spend a lot of time with the ideas of artists that inspire them, then it is easy to see how these inspire similar works from them.
There are plenty of things that go into being successful in landscape photography. You might think of gear because of how technical it is or the connections to others in the profession whether art or influencers. However, I believe that the most important thing is persistence across everything you do. It is the pursuit of perfection (not necessarily always achieving it though) across various parts of landscape photography that makes you successful.
When practicing photography it isn’t always easy to compose and capture great images that are uniquely yours. Of course you will need good light and interesting subjects, but this isn’t the whole story.
It is important to fail. We all have taken bad images before. Everybody has done something cringe-worthy in their processing one time or another. Nobody has a perfect portfolio of images that they love from years prior.
It is always fun to challenge the eye. It helps us to become better photographers while also appreciating composition and art even more. A fun yet-simple idea is to think about and use shapes and patterns in your photography!
I have tried and failed in a lot of ways while practicing photography. Some have been more intense than others. I have made some more public mistakes and many more that nobody has seen!
When people look at the imagery produced today it will surely not be with the same viewpoint we have today. The world is ever changing and the landscapes we love to photograph will likely appear very different.
When starting out shooting landscapes it is easy to get lost in the noise of it all. You can make a lot of progress in the technical side of photography, but the images you shoot start to lose a sense of originality, inspiration, and feeling like they are your own.
Nobody starts out running. Photography takes a lot of work to be good at just like most things in life. I have been shooting for a relatively short amount of time taking it seriously for just over 4 years now.
When starting out in photography I believed I needed to shoot something big, identifiable, and popular. I would travel vast distances to photograph something that had been shot hundreds of times before because it had a formula I could follow. A prescription for the prefect landscape photograph.