Self taught learning can only take you so far. Watching videos on Youtube is great to learn one specific thing, but it is one directional information. There is no feedback and you get different answers to the same question. Who can you trust?
And then there are video courses, but again, they can only take you just so far because the information you receive is not personalized to you.
And finally, there is your own level of motivation. Staying motivated to keep learning and progressing is difficult on your own.
Being a lone wolf learning is not easy! And your learning can be very slow. What could take weeks ends up taking years.
The actual issue is that you have unique and special photography goals, and you are not learning specificially from someone who has already climbed the mountain that you are trying to climb.
But the great news for you is that I'm going to to show you how just one small push in the right direction can result in a massive change to your creativity, motivation, and skills. You see, creating gorgeous fine art photos is not the result of just having the technical skills, it is the result of having the confidence AND the skills. And you get both these things by having a mentor and coach who can reach down and pull you up.
Bottom line: Taking stunning fine art landscape photos is so much easier when you have the right mentor and coach!
oh and one more thing...
I'm not going to tell you that I am somehow special because I figured this out on my own, but I am going to tell you a quick story about how a failure on an important photo shoot actually changed my photography forever.
I was a photo hobbyist. At the time, I wouldn't even say the words, "I am a photographer", but rather, I would say "I love taking pictures". I had a full time job and I tried to fit photography in to my busy life. I was a solo learner, and I had no one to mentor me in photography.
I wanted to take a spectacular panorama photo of a rocky ocean shoreline, so I planned a photoshoot on an evening when there was going to be a good sunset. I drove for an hour and hiked for 20 minutes to get to the shoreline and got setup in anticipation of the blue hour light.
When the sky turned into warm colors I took a single photo of the scene (see it below) and then I took a series of photos that I would later stitch together into a panorama. I was happy with the photo shoot and I was confidence my panorama was going to turn out beautifully, so I packed up and drove home.
That night I excitedly uploaded my photos to my computer at home and quickly stitched together the pano in Photoshop. This is what I call the moment of truth. But to my total dismay, the straight horizon line on the pano image was wavy. It went up and down like a syne wave.
I was so upset! What did I do wrong? How could the straight horizon line end up as a wavy line?