For the normal person, blue skies make for a lovely day, but for the landscape photographer, they can be pretty drab and boring. That does not mean you can't take great shots, though; it just means you need to try for different images than you would otherwise. This great video discusses how you can turn monotonous blue skies into fantastic images.
Taking photographs of cities at night can be a veritable feast of colors, reflections, and light, but it can also be tricky. Here are my five best tips for taking shots of cities at night.
Reflections are a fantastic way to create more visual interest in a photo or to add a pleasing symmetry that helps to balance the composition. They take a bit of technique and consideration, however, and this fantastic video will give you five helpful tips to make your reflection images more powerful.
Long exposure photography is a highly popular technique, one that is a ton of fun and an excellent way to create stunning images. If you want to improve your long exposure work, this fantastic video will give you lots of great tips for better images.
A lot of photography is learning how to control different parameters: lighting, composition, posing, etc., but one thing we will never have control over is the sky. Bad skies are something we all have to deal with at one time or another, and this great video will show you three different ways you can fix them.
If you want to create a consistent body of work, it is crucial that you unify the elements of style that go into each image. One of the most overlooked of these is proper cropping, and this excellent video will show you why that is such a crucial thing to master.
How essential is sharpening to your editing workflow? Do you actually know how the sharpening sliders work?
Long exposure photography is a fascinating discipline. It can be used in many ways and to great effect if you want to bring some mood and mystery into your photography.
It happens to all of us at one point or another: our camera breaks, the weather does not cooperate, etc. We have all had a failed photoshoot before. This great video features a photographer discussing four different failed photoshoots of his own.
Focal length is one of the most crucial choices in making a landscape photo and can drastically alter the look of the final image. How do you choose the right focal length for a given scene? This excellent video the importance of foreground elements and how to create a balanced composition through the correct choice of focal length.
Polarizing filters are one of the last camera filters that cannot be replicated by software. But is a polarizing filter better to reduce haze in landscapes than Adobe Lightroom's Dehaze tool?
For many years now, I have religiously bracketed all my landscape images and macro images of flowers. This is why you should give serious consideration to always doing the same.
Becoming a professional landscape photographer may sound easy to some. There are no clients to work with, no schedule, no lights or backdrops, just nature, you, and your camera. Or is it?
Adventure photography has taken its place as a component of the broader commercial market. Characterized by stunning, hard-to-reach locations and demanding conditions, gear can be critical to getting the shot. These days, mirrorless’ features make it the format of choice.
When the dynamic range of a scenery is very large, it might be necessary to use some kind of trick in order to keep it inside the histogram. At least, if you want to prevent pure white or black in the picture. Some use filters, others use bracketing. But why not use both?
Landscape photography can be an incredibly rewarding genre for professionals and hobbyists alike, but just like any other genre, it has its own considerations, techniques, and gear you should know about. If you are ready to get started in landscape photography, this fantastic video will get you up and running in no time.
Contemporary landscape photography is dominated by the same 20-50 locations. We have all seen specific locations being reproduced and reinterpreted repeatedly, and only a few stand out from the crowd. The key to making unique landscape photos is very simple: find something new to photograph.
The moon is an easily looked over subject for landscape and astrophotography. For beginners it can be surprisingly difficult to capture well, and for veterans of photography it can be difficult to get it to align with all the elements of your frame. Here are seven great tips for capturing the moon more effectively.
Choosing where to focus in a landscape photo can be a tricky thing, with photographers often resorting to techniques like using the hyperfocal distance or focus stacking. If that is something you struggle with, this excellent video will show you five different ways to choose where to focus in a landscape image.
When you think of landscape photography, you likely think of vividly colorful images. However, there is an entirely different world of black and white landscapes that can be just as entrancing in their own way, and this great video will show you how you can create them using Lightroom.
The rule of thirds is often considered the first and most basic compositional rule to learn. However, I strongly disagree with this, as following this rule might end up both destroying your compositions and contaminating your thinking for years to come.
A lot of us struggle to find great landscape photography locations, and it can be frustrating trying to find opportunities, particularly during this time, when travel is very limited. If that is something you struggle with, this great video will show you how you can find better locations for shoots.
Composition is by far one of the trickiest parts of creating a successful landscape image — full of nuance and competing elements that must work in harmony. This fantastic video discusses one of the most difficult composition problems in landscape photography and how you can address it to create better, more compelling images.
One of the most useful and common creative tools a photographer can have in their bag is a neutral density (ND) filter. ND filters come in a variety of different strengths that can have diverse effects on your photos, and this great video will show you how the various options will change your images.
If you struggle with getting sharp photos, this is for you, and even if you are experienced, there might be a tip or two to pick up.
Our friends over at GuruShots, "The World’s Greatest Photo Game,” recently offered a challenge where particpants submitted their best images "Lit by Twilight." There were thousands of entries and 39.4 million votes throughout the contest but the top winners have been chose. See who won as well as the 100 top rated images below.
One of the best parts of photography is the chance to experience numerous epic locations and use your skills to document them in all their majesty. This excellent video features a photographer discussing three of his dream locations and why he loves them so much.
When you think of landscape photography, you probably think of vibrant, colorful images that pop off the screen, but there is an entire world of black and white photography that can be just as powerful and that is well worth exploring. This fantastic video will show you how to create dramatic, eye-catching black and white landscape images that have a powerful impact.
There surely is nothing worse than coming home from a shoot and seeing you have missed focus or you have parts of your photo out of focus when you intended for it to be in focus.
Watching how others work is one way to improve. Watching how extremely successful people work is an even faster, better way to improve. In this video, watch how a very popular photographer edits images sent to him.
Do you ever think that some approaches to creating landscape photographs go too far? At what point do we stop and say it's too much?
Luminar 4 is a great alternative for editing landscape photos and particularly for exploring your creativity. This informative video will show you how you can use the program to enhance a landscape image.
Like most of you, I'm cooped up at home other than occasional forage for groceries. As a landscape photographer in Arizona, there's plenty of landscape, but I'm doing my best to abide by the stay at home rules. So basically, the landscapes are in one place, I'm looking at 4 walls.
As photographers, we tend to wander outside when the light and our available landscape are in their optimal conditions for our shooting style. So, what if you were to change it up a little bit and challenge yourself to embrace the nature at its worst?
The last supermoon of 2020 is on May 7, and it is a great chance to take an entrancing and unique image incorporating it into a landscape or cityscape of your choice. This excellent video will show you how to plan and take a supermoon photo worthy of framing and hanging on your wall.
The Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) is a 2653 mile foot path that connects Mexico and Canada via California, Oregon, and Washington. Travel blogger Mac, who runs the website HalfwayAnywhere, hiked the Pacific Crest Trail and took one second of film each day to create a 3 minute video montage that shows some of the most incredible landscapes anywhere in the world.
Knowing how to objectively evaluate your own work is crucial to growing as a photographer and continuing to offer the best possible images to your clients. This fantastic video will give you a five-step process to evaluating the quality of your photos and understanding where you need to improve.
I know a lot of us can't go outside right now to shoot panoramas due to quarantines and self-isolation, but perhaps you have some panoramic shots you took months back on a trip somewhere, buried away on a hard drive in the cupboard. Now's a good time to dust them off and get to work!
There are so many things to keep in mind doing landscape photography and a complicated scene is often one of them. With a minimalist approach, you bypass a lot of that confusion and end up with often much more attractive photos.
Most of the time, we think of Lightroom as a place for cataloging and global edits, but it also has some great local adjustment capabilities that can really put the finishing touches on an image. This excellent video will show you how to take advantage of those local adjustment features to improve your landscape images.
We are currently locked down in Puerto Rico, and it's literally illegal for us to go outside to take photos, but we found an old lesson we filmed in Alaska that was never released.
Foggy forest photos are a beautiful and ethereal interplay between the sharp, defined, and intricate lines and geometry of trees and the nebulous fog. With the challenging conditions, they can be a bit tricky to shoot, however, but this great video will give you a wide range of helpful tips to get fantastic shots.
Landscape photography can become an addiction — including your photography gear. When is the right time to give in to the urge of trying something new — and what's important in the beginning?
California is a place we all seem to hold a special place for. It is the subject of songs, movies, and the dreams of many Americans. Take a moment to see how beautiful the Golden State landscape truly is in this stunning time-lapse video.
Landscape photography is a vast genre with a wide range of different subjects and creative avenues you can pursue. This fantastic video shows the often overlooked and beautiful subjects you can find in the forest during the springtime.
Professional landscape photographers do a lot more than simply pack their bag and head out into the wilderness to find great shots. There is an impressive amount of careful planning that goes into most shoots that often leverages some very helpful modern tools. This excellent video will show you how to plan your own landscape shoot to give yourself the best chances of a successful outcome.
Lately, I've been in somewhat of a slump. For a couple of months, I haven't shot very much other than products in my office studio.
There is a bit of trend toward heavy post-processing in landscape photography these days, with advanced techniques like luminosity masks and focus stacking prevailing in lots of images. And while there is certainly nothing inherently wrong with those techniques, sometimes, it is satisfying to use simple, straightforward techniques to finish a photo. This great video will show you a range of simple methods in Lightroom for creating compelling landscape images.
Luminar 4 brings with it lots of interesting capabilities, including some fantastic AI tools. This great video examines what you can accomplish with it when working on landscape images.
As a photographer with a decent following on both YouTube and Instagram, you start to see certain patterns in the comments and direct messages. One question I see repeatedly is about camera settings. “What is the EXIF data of X or Y photo?”. I always wonder why people want that information.
