Today, we are excited to announce the newest adventure in Elia Locardi’s Photographing the World series. Welcome to Photographing the World 4!

Fstoppers first teamed up with landscape photographer Elia Locardi back in 2014. While attending the world’s largest photograph convention, Photokina in Cologne, Germany, we first met Elia and his wife, Naomi. After a few rounds of Bavarian beers, an interesting idea was born. What if we created a comprehensive photography tutorial that not only taught Elia’s best post processing techniques, but we also filmed him capturing the photos on location at some of the most epic landscapes in the world? Sure, it would be complicated, expensive, and extremely time-consuming, but it could also become one of the most exhaustive tutorials in the landscape genre.

What we didn’t realize back then is the framework for this adventure would actually wind up becoming two tutorials, one on landscape photography and another on cityscape photography. The first one, “Photographing The World 1: Landscape Photography and Post-Processing,” would focus on intro and intermediate level landscape techniques while the second tutorial, “Photographing the World 2: Cityscape, Astrophotography, and Advanced Post-Processing,” would focus on intro and intermediate level cityscape techniques, including Elia’s “time blending” approach of mixing images from the same location but during different lighting conditions.

Elia Locardi travels to Patagonia in PTW4

The success of both Photographing the World 1 and 2 led to a new adventure in early 2017. Simply called “Photographing the World 3: Advanced Cityscapes,” Elia set out to teach even more difficult locations throughout Dubai, New York City, and Italy. With a few more years of refining his photography and even more powerful mirrorless and medium format cameras, Elia explored some of the most advanced techniques he uses when shooting both modern and ancient architecture around the world.

Back to Landscapes

After producing a more advanced tutorial on cityscape photography, Elia wanted to go back and explore more challenging landscape environments and teach the latest shooting and post-production techniques he is known for. Instead of traveling to a foreign land, the first part of “Photographing the World 4” starts off in our own backyard as we travel to Arizona and Utah in the western part of the United States. Believe it or not, Elia Locardi has never visited the desert environment of his own native country. With each of these epic locations, you are able to see how Elia not only scouts and prepares for each photo, but you also get to see him work through unique challenges he has never faced. Some of the locations featured on this first leg of the trip include Bryce Canyon, Horseshoe Bend, Angel’s Landing, the famous Mesa Arch, and Monument Valley.

Here are a few before and after images from the first half of PTW 4.

After shooting throughout Utah and Arizona, we then flew to South America to explore the exotic mountains of Patagonia. During this leg of the trip, Elia was faced with some of the harshest weather we have ever experienced while filming “Photographing the World.” The first location we visited was Torres del Paine National Park in southern Chile. Here, Elia focused on capturing the glacial lakes, rivers, and rocks that lead up to the iconic mountain towers. We then explore more of Patagonia by traveling to El Chalten in Argentina. It is here that Elia captured the elusive Fitz Roy mountain and explored some of the winding rivers that are found in the Los Glaciares National Park. The final leg of South America led us to Conguillio National Park located within the Andes Mountains of central Chile. Here, Elia hiked through the Sierra Nevada mountains to photograph the Llaima Volcano.

All New Behind the Scenes Series

Just like with all of the “Photographing the World” tutorials, PTW 4 comes with 10 new episodes of behind the scenes goodness. This candid mini-documentary shows everything that went right and wrong during the filming of the entire tutorial. Not only will you get to see much of the culture, food, and diversity these locations have to offer, but you’ll also see some of the logistical challenges each shooting location presented Elia and the Fstoppers team during filming. We will be releasing these new PTW 4 episodes over the next year on our Youtube Channel, and you can enjoy the first episode below for free.

If you are interested in landscape photography