The Hidden Reason Your Landscape Photos Feel Busy and Flat

Standing in front of a landscape that feels unreal can make your brain short-circuit, and your photos often show it. This video breaks down a method for getting past that frozen, everything-is-important feeling without turning the moment into a checklist.

Coming to you from Andrea Livieri, this grounded video reframes what usually trips you up in the field. The problem is rarely your settings, it’s the split second when you arrive somewhere stunning and can’t rank what deserves attention. You swing your camera left, right, and back again, convinced the best frame is always somewhere else. Livieri describes that low-grade panic as a normal response to scale and beauty, not a personal failure. If you’ve ever rushed into shooting just to calm yourself down, you already know how that ends.

Instead of pushing generic advice like “slow down,” Livieri lays out a simple sequence you can actually remember when the light is moving. The first step is “see,” and it’s deliberately messy: you let the place hit you before you try to control it. Then comes “edit,” not editing on a computer, but editing in your head by choosing what to ignore. That’s the uncomfortable part, because it forces a decision, and decisions mean you cannot photograph everything. Only after that does “express” show up, where composition and exposure finally have a job to do, often with a constraint like sticking to one lens or one angle. If you jump straight to technique, you end up making busy photos that feel like you were trying to fit the whole place into one frame.

The “nail it” step is where this gets sharper, and it’s also where most people quietly bail. You find an idea, then you don’t stay long enough to make it work, so you walk away with safe frames and a nagging sense you missed something. Livieri’s point is blunt: a photograph is a decision about the scene, not the scene itself. That one sentence should make you rethink the way you move once you’ve picked a composition, especially when you’re tempted to “just grab a few” and keep roaming. He also challenges the cliché that intentional work always means fewer photos, and he draws a clean line between early-stage experimentation and later-stage commitment. There’s more nuance in how he talks about repetition versus restraint than you’d expect from a video that promises “four steps.”

The practical field prompts are the part you’ll want to steal immediately, but you don’t get them as a motivational speech. He suggests delaying the urge to even take the camera out, labeling your current phase so you stop demanding instant clarity, and making one “uncomfortable edit” before you shoot anything. That can mean choosing one obvious shot you will not take, even if it feels wrong, then living with that decision long enough to see what opens up. He also talks about constraints in a way that avoids macho discipline talk: the point is to reduce noise so a single idea can stand out. The video hints at how this plays out on ordinary days too, not just in famous locations, but he holds back enough detail that you’ll want to hear the full walkthrough and how he applies it when conditions change fast. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Livieri.

And if you really want to dive into landscape photography, check out our latest tutorial, "Photographing the World: Japan II - Discovering Hidden Gems with Elia Locardi!”