Same here more or less. For example, even though I’m not specifically planning hiking, I’ll check Alltrails for details about the terrain, difficulty, etc. then compare that to blogs.
What’s kind of funny is to search for top landscape photography locations anywhere and look at what gets recommended as landscape – Street, indoor, architecture, sports… 
One caveat (which I guess most people here know): while one can combine hiking with photography, the ideal conditions are different for the two.
Eg for hiking I prefer a sunny weather, with mid-20C temperatures. This gives you very crisp shadows and requires a lot of compromises when doing landscapes. Something misty works much better, but it is no fun for hiking hours in.
Similarly, golden hour is best for everything, but unless you get up really, really early, golden hour on a mountaintop means that you are hiking down in the dark, half the speed and twice the wrong turns.
I still prefer it this way, just that it is unlikely to make the most of all landscapes.
Your reply ties a bit towards what was said in another thread:
I feel like the secret to these landscape photographers is indeed both getting to places, and having the determination to wake up very early (or stay up late), perhaps camping.
It’s easy to spot a pattern with a lot of them, white males in their 50s or 60s, the demographic group most likely to have loads of money to spend on helicopter trips to remote places or personalized tours through mountain ranges and so on.
This is why I think landscape photographers which capture the “ordinary” are far more impressive than a guy that pays his way to a remote mountain. Btw, when I say “ordinary” I also mean the places Len mentioned, for example. National parks or even most places in your own country fall into “ordinary” in my mind. Extraordinary would be places someone like Andy Mumford visits, the guy lives as an expat in Portugal and yet you rarely see any photo of his coming from the country.
Of course this changes based on where you are from. I guess Alaskans or something have affordable bush plane trips into amazing places.
Yeah. Also, when it’s relatively warm in the early hours (summer), the sun rises too early, so you might be getting up at 3 am, to see the sunrise at 5 am… when the sunrise is late enough, then it’s quite cold in the morning, and during autumn you’re likely not going to need all that extra clothing later on. Winter is the best for sunrise timing, but also very cold to hike…
A bit of an aside, but that said…
I agree, but for me it’s not necessarily that the location is easy or remote, the processing is minimal or heavy, etc. (although certainly over processing can ruin an image). I don’t recall if I’ve posted these particular thoughts here before (maybe) but what makes a really REALLY good landscape photo to me is not really the image. Good composition, good light, catching the moment, etc. – They all are excellent and are usually the building blocks for a good image.
But what sets the extraordinary ones apart is the feeling of “draw”, of attraction. That image makes the viewer want to be right there, in that moment, seeing and experiencing the place literally as the photographer did. (Actually, it’s probably more “as the photographer’s carefully composed, shot and processed image communicates”, but I digress. 
) The icing on the cake for a really superior landscape image is, IMO, that it makes me want to be there. In a manner of speaking, the image is deeper than the frame its hung in. Maybe that’s conceptually related to ‘feel’ in music?
For me, personally (and I realize others are different) that’s what attracts me to landscape more than to street, architecture, portrait, etc. None of the others make me want to “be there”. Not to say they’re bad, nor inferior, images. They just don’t “draw” me like a good landscape. The next person / photographer? Maybe, maybe not.
A good landscape can be any subject matter – Large, small, intimate, grand… doesn’t matter. And back to @hatsnp’s comment, it can be almost anywhere. It just has to check all the boxes. For me personally, where I live doesn’t check those boxes, for me. But it might for others.
And none of that is to intended dismiss images that don’t ‘draw’ me, I’m just commenting on the very apex of the pyramid.
Yep, completely agree
Like @Tamas_Papp, I have a bit of a “where the wind takes me” attitude towards my photography. Since I was a kid, I would always just take my camera with me whenever we went on holiday or took a trip to somewhere interesting. On a holiday or trip, I’m drawn to anything unusual and “eye-catching” for want of a better expression, and because it’s all new to me, there are countless times my eye is caught, in urban areas as well as in the landscape.
But over the last decade or two as my passion for photography has increased, I’ve been getting out and about in my local area more. I find this to be much more difficult because your eyes aren’t seeing anything “fresh”. But it has helped me massively with “seeing”. I’m always on the lookout for hidden beauty now, even to a fault (I can’t stop looking around me, which annoys anyone with me ) Even though the scenes might be familiar, there are always “micro scenes” hidden within the ordinary, little patches of light or colour, or shapes that come together in a pleasing way.
And I’ve just started to plan a few specific shots using Photopills, maps, etc., what you might call classic landscape shots. I’ve already dropped pins in a lot of places that might be productive in terms of shots, most of them parks of some kind or areas of natural beauty (the city itself isn’t particularly photogenic). But I really don’t enjoy this kind of planning as much. I find all the research a bit tedious, and something about a planned shot just doesn’t feel like my kind of photography. I’m doing it for experience and because of a few shots I’ve had in mind for a while, but I think my first and one true love will always be just having my camera with me and shooting whatever catches my eye. I love the idea of capturing the unexpected and unearthing scenes that no one else has probably bothered with.
So, I guess all that to say that my key ingredient is just planning trips/outings to somewhere interesting, and the photography will take care of itself. And that interesting place can be sublime natural beauty or simply somewhere different to what you usually see every day. That way your brain will be triggered by anything out of the ordinary.
When it’s no 100F and 80% humidity, the GR goes with me to make walks more interesting. Most of the time I just go out the front door and start walking, which limits me to about a 2 mile radius. I’ve covered almost all of that radius, but when you really start looking and embrase the idea that “a man never steps in the same river twice” idea, you’ll see that a lot changes. It is subtle often times, but its not exactly the same.
The thing in this exercise that can make the most difference is going at different times of the day. Light makes everything.
The more I think about it, the more I realize that for me… scenic locations kinda suck for photography. Whenever it comes to a scene/subject often photographed be people, I rarely walk away with a picture I really like. There are exceptions, but I find most such pictures boring. There has to be something extra to the photo, like a combination of using stuff as framing, light, or other imperfections.
Lately I’ve found my favorite photos to be mostly random objects/scenes either at home, or on the street, where I take the “people without people” kind of shots.
I have annual calendar reminders for the first few weeks of DST in the spring and the last few weeks of DST in the fall. The sunrise times (in the general neighbourhood of 7:30-8:00) are manageable* at those times, even for a hard core night owl like me.
What’s that strange concept? Never heard of it here in BC!
Now that we’ve scrapped it, It will be interesting to see if the later dawns encourage me to get out more to see them.
Man, I’d love to have permanent DST here in Ontario. Our premier has said he wants to do it, but only if neighbouring US states also do it. Somehow, I suspect that those conversations are no longer happening.
This was the exact same line we were fed for years until this year. That excuse never sat well with me even when the US was being friendly to us because we somehow manage to trade with other provinces, states and countries just fine regardless of time zone.
After the recent shenanigans with the US, thankfully our premier didn’t mess about.
This is possibly going off in a different direction from @lphilpot’s original post, but this fascinates me as an idea:
What is it about photographing an oft-captured scene that appeals?
A couple of (for-me) rare-to-visit such locations are:
I’ve been to location 1 in the years 1981, 1992, 1993, and 2017.
I’ve been to location 2 in the years 2015 and 2023
Part of me wants to get the iconic shot - in the case of (1) it’s standing on the Marienbrueke with the castle on the spur and the valley to its right and the Forgensee (lake) behind it. But it was raining steadily when I was there in 2017, and the prints from 1992-3 have not aged well, nor have I still the negatives.
The “money shot” for me at Hobbiton is the view across “the Water” to “The Green Dragon” - and trying to imitate the wonderful scene at the end of the Jackson LOTR trilogy with the “We were home” voiceover by Elijah Wood (Frodo). In 2015 the water in the artificial lake was low, and in 2023 it was raining.
And yet …
The captures that I have are satisfying in the knowledge that:
I feel the same about the rainy day I was in Paris in 1993 - I bought some slides that were on sale of landmarks, but it was the ones I took (slide film also) even in the grey-ish weather, of Tour Eiffel, Sacre Couer, L’Arc de Triomphe, Champs Elysees, that are the more satisfying memories.
Ditto for London.
It is quite seldom that I find any of my photography completely satisfying, but I also ask myself: what is the purpose/function of my taking pictures? Partly it brings joy in the capture (and more recently post-production) - the process is its own reward. But greater is - for me - the ready index to memories that may otherwise be much vaguer.
Do I strive for technical excellence in exposure/composition/depth of field/light conditions? Yes. (but the light conditions are often subservient to when I find the time to get out someplace to take pictures - chasing golden hour is sometimes difficult, as mentioned earlier in this thread.)
However, especially when its a place you cannot easily get to again, any capture is better than no capture, and technical excellence is not the be-all and end-all, IMO.
I’ve been struggling with this, too. A few years ago, I went on a photography trip with a good friend. He’s very much into landscapes, and (at the time) long exposures. During that trip, I learned that I… wasn’t into these things.
I took some decent enough landscapes, but somehow they failed to stir anything in me. The pictures that did end up being meaningful to me, were the ones with him or me in the frame. It’s the human element that I enjoy, preferably the personal connection.
We’re planning our next trip right now. We’ll see how that goes.
I feel the same way. I also prefer to take shots of family & friends with the landscape highlights, preferably without anyone posing for a photo, just spontaneously. An ill-composed shot of this kind is worth 10 perfect landscapes in golden hour for me. [The downside is that I post very few photos here.]
I recently had a BBQ with some friends I have known since university. They have teenage kids now (the tempus here does fugit quite a bit). I brought out some albums that featured them (the parents) from the olden days, which led to stories, which led to other stories… it was fun day.
What keeps me from enjoying my own local and regional images is that it was not really enjoyable to be out there taking them. The process, generically, is enjoyable but the local / regional locations almost always are not. Regardless of what the final image may be, I have no genuinely good memories connected with taking them. So there’s no attraction in the final image.
I have the opposite problem. When I’m photographing locally I’m entirely focused on finding images / interesting compositions. I get in the “photography zone” and enjoy my final images much more as a result. When I’m away (at least with others who aren’t photographing) I find it hard to get into the zone and I’m too much concentrated on enjoying the holiday.
I usually plan photography trips away on my own and enjoy them most when they’re similar (but different) sorts of locations to what I shoot locally (urban / street art / architecture). If I go to the normal “touristy” locations I could take nice photographs but they mostly go against my normal style so I don’t often get inspired or like what I take when I get home.
How do I plan photography trips? Poorly 
If I see something interesting while driving, I plan to get back to it at some point. Then I generally start walking in the direction I want to go and if I’m lucky, i eventually end up there.
But some times I just stumble upon places while looking around in the woods.
Most of the waterfalls I’ve found in the last year I located just by following streams through the woods.
You’ll be “following” for a LLLLLLOOONNNGGGGGG time in Louisiana looking for a waterfall! LOL In fact, you’ll “follow” right out of the state!