The mountains look small and not steep. Depth and distance does not come through at all. It just seems flat and underwhelming on camera, when the view I’m seeing with my eyes is the most inspiring thing of all time. I wish I could capture half of that.

This is like the most common problem people have with landscapes.

Your eyes have a 180degree massive view, but your center of vision makes really distant stuff very clear. You also mentally filter out all the junk.

So you end up experiencing this impossible wide angle telephoto effect.

What people do wrong is they use a wide angle shot from a vista point that works for human vision.

The flaw is that a wide angle image has all the close stuff very large in the frame, so it makes the very distant mountains look tiny in comparison. But a telephoto image can be narrow and doesn’t give the sweeping vista sense.

There are few tricks.

1. print the image huge. If the image is a wide angle shot but printed at the same scale as it was in real life, you get the same sense of scale. Smaller works, but not as dramatic. Basically an expensive solution.

2. Use a telephoto or normal lens instead of a wide angle lens, but put something between you and the mountains for scale. You have to balance how wide your image looks, but you don’t want the foreground immediately next to the camera. And you want a person, or a house, or something of scale far away enough that the mountains tower over it.

3. have really good light and weather. If the colors, light, clouds, mist, ect give a sense of volume to the space can make it have a sense of scale. Make sure you are higher up and looking straight on vs looking upwards. Still make sure the to not have the foreground.

Basically the foreground is your enemy. It clutters the frame with small stuff that will be larger then the massive landscape.