5 Steps to Prevent Motion Blur from Wind in Landscape Photography

Shooting landscape photography has always had its challenges, but shooting in the wind presents an entirely different set of obstacles. Trees, grasses and flowers showing motion blur can take the magic away from your hard earned photograph.

The conundrum is simple:

If you raise the film speed, you'll get noise in the image. That's easy, you can use a great program like Topaz Noise to reduce the noise but it will cost you dearly in the details and could prevent you from printing larger prints. 

If you open the aperture to raise the shutter speed you lose depth of field. That's easy as well, just focus stack and stitch the images together in Photoshop later. Ultimately, that won't work either because the trees, leaves etc., will be in a different position for each shot with the movement of the wind and the ghosting issues make this option unviable.

What's the answer? Balance. You need to find the right balance between the aperture, shutter and film speed. Follow these 5 steps to overcome moderate wind. 

1. Use one image. As mentioned, focus stacking will have too many ghosting issues so you'll need to get the entire image in one shot. You can bracket but the same is true, very little will line up correctly. Try bracketing and picking the one exposure that is the best all around exposure and start there.

2. Listen! Listen to the wind moving through the trees, it's an audible sound and when you hear a lull in the wind, wait a few of seconds then take the next shot.

3. Hang your camera backpack from your tripod for additional camera stabilization.

4. Use the widest lens you can to get the shot you want. Remember the wider the lens the better the depth of field. You will be better off using a 14-24mm and cropping the image than using a 24-70mm. After the crop you will have a smaller image, but it will have greater depth of field.

5. Rotate through all possible combinations of shutter speed, aperture and film speeds. In aperture priority, start at ISO 200 and F4, then take the photo in increments raising the film speed all the way to 800. Once complete, start over with an aperture of F5.6 and do the same drill. Shoot every combination all the way to ISO 800 and F8 or so, as each situation will be different. Generally, you need a shutter speed between 200 and 400 to stop most motion blur. You will end up with a ton of images but then you can throw them into Lightroom and work out which image has the best starting point and chance for success.

The image above was taken in the mountains of the Arizona desert. The winds were between 10 and 18mph with gusts even higher. At times, the wind was blowing so hard my backpack hanging from the tripod was swinging in the wind far enough to hit the legs of my tripod, and this is a 7 ft tripod. I found myself pushing the shutter which is on a 2 second lag, then quickly reaching down and holding the backpack stationary so it wouldn't hit the tripod legs. 

The sun popped out from the cloud cover which helped me greatly, so in the end, the chosen image was -0+, 21mm, 1/320, F8, and ISO 200. 

I hope these tips help, so give them a try.

Good luck and good light.

About David Williams: I specialize in LDS Temples, Landscape, Wildlife and Indigenous Cultural Photography. See my work at https://www.davidwilliamsphotography.com or follow on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/david_williams_photography_