How to Take Beautiful Autumn Photos

Before you reach for your camera, think about what you love most about autumn. Perhaps it’s the misty mornings that give way to warm days and crisp evenings, or the deep hues and changing colours of the trees. It may even be the golden quality of the light, or the textural delight of fallen leaves swirling toward, and gathering on, the ground.

Whatever it is, pick a focal point that you’d like to capture in your autumn photography and keep this top of mind as you head out for your first shoot.

All year round, one of our top landscape photography tips is to shoot during the golden hours, or the hour before sunrise and the hour before sunset. These hours are particularly golden in autumn, when the dusk and dawn light is warm, soft, and free of overly bright lights and dark shadows. 

In autumn, the best time to take golden hour photos is between 6 30 and 7 AM in the morning and 4 30 and 5 PM in the evening. If you can schedule your shoots during these times, you’ll be rewarded with well-balanced golden hour photos that won’t require a lot of editing in the lighting department.

When you’re working with a beautiful autumn backdrop, experiment with your photo composition and play around with new angles. If you’re shooting wide landscape images and loving the colours of the leaves covering the ground, why not get up close and fill your frame with those vibrant, crunchy leaves?

While you’re at it, you could even go one step further and reach for your favourite macro lens. These lenses are brilliant for showcasing the tiny details people would otherwise miss, like the delicate veins or spotty edges of leaves. 

Once you start exercising those creative muscles, you’ll find the options are endless! And by doing this, you’ll not only sharpen your skills in composition, but also end up with much more unique photos.

Our advice? Create a photo book or a set of framed images that track the stages of the season. For example, you could try to capture a leaf when it first falls to the ground, and as it curls up and changes from green to yellow or brown.

Top Tip: Use our Australian-made picture frames to display your autumn landscape photos.

As every photographer knows, half the battle of taking good photos in any season is using the right camera settings. To help you start shooting stunning autumn photos straight away and save yourself time at the editing stage, we recommend using the following manual settings.

Set a smaller aperture of f11 or greater

If you’re shooting detailed autumn landscapes, you’ll want a deeper depth of field - which is where a smaller aperture comes in. This allows your digital camera to let in more light and achieve a good exposure while keeping the background and foreground of your image in focus. Note that this might also involve raising the ISO or shooting with a slower shutter speed, so it’s worth using a tripod for stable images.

Adjust the white balance

Many photographers agree that shooting with a warmer white balance helps better capture those warm, golden autumn colours. But the best white balance setting depends on the conditions you’re shooting in. “Daylight” or “Shade” will work best on most average days with a bit of sunshine, while “Cloudy” should always be used on overcast days.

Shoot in RAW mode

Unlike a compressed lossy JPEG image, RAW images retain all their original data and image quality. This means you can easily edit autumn photos and adjust the exposure, white balance and colour saturation in post-production, without sacrificing the quality of your images.

Now that you know the settings to use, it’s time to build out your autumn photography tool kit. As a minimum, we recommend the following equipment for taking vibrant, detailed autumn photos.

A DSLR or mirrorless camera

Image quality is everything, and a DSLR or mirrorless camera will guarantee you clear, crisp, and bright autumn photos. If a DSLR is a little out of your budget, there are plenty of affordable mirrorless cameras that rival their quality. 

Wide-angle zoom lens

To hone in on the dramatic detail of autumn landscapes, you’ll want to use a lens with a wide focal length between 16mm and 35mm. These lenses allow you to fit more scenery in your frame, giving you the freedom to point and shoot and crop out any unwanted details in post-production.

Other lenses

If you’re shooting from a distance and want to zoom in on specific details, reach for a telephoto lens - a 60mm to 135mm lens should do the trick. And to take those, close-up fallen autumn leaves photos, you might want to keep a macro lens handy.

A tripod 

Setting a smaller aperture often means shooting with a slower shutter speed, which can increase blurring. To reduce camera shake, mount your camera on a tripod or monopod. As a bonus, this will free up your hands so you can better survey the scene and see if you can find a fresh angle.

A circular polarising filter

These filters really help the colours in your image “pop.” Along with boosting colour saturation, they reduce reflections, which is great if you’re working with a lake, beach, or other body of water. Polarising filters are also adjustable, so you can increase or decrease their strength until you’re satisfied with the effect.