As photographers, we generally strive for level images; a tilted horizon is one of the first things we notice in a photo. However, what looks level and what's actually level might be two different things, and this great video examines the difference.
Popular YouTuber and landscape photographer Serge Ramelli goes through some tips on how to make images taken in poor weather conditions, more attractive.
The sky usually plays an important role in shaping the mood and tone of the pictures you make while photographing outdoors. If mother nature doesn't want to cooperate and give you a desirable sky while shooting, a stock image could help save the day.
Every focal length has its own challenges, and when it comes to wide angle lenses, creating effective compositions can be particularly difficult. This helpful video will give you five tips for creating more compelling wide angle shots.
There are three basic elements that control the exposure or overall brightness in your images: shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. But aside from controlling exposure, these camera settings also have a couple of side effects. To help understand all this, Dave Morrow comes to our rescue by teaching the exposure triangle.
One of the most useful Photoshop skills you can have is the ability to convincingly replace the sky in an image. This great tutorial will show how to do just that, from placing and masking the sky in to blending it effectively.
When New Hampshire-based photographer Ron Risman posted an image he captured March 3rd of waves crashing against Whaleback Lighthouse off the coast of New Castle, N.H., he had no idea who Eric Gendron was. But after a local meteorologist shared the photo, an incredible coincidence brought the two together as fast as social media could spread the word of what some people thought had to be a case of thievery.
Last week photographers from around the world came together for the annual WPPI conference in Las Vegas. It is common to hear many photographers talk about their plans to hit the desert for incredible landscapes or portrait sessions in between classes and workshops. A few tips from pro boudoir photographers can help you the next time you are able to take the trip.
Who knows how many new videos and articles are put on the line each day talking about the gear you should own as a photographer? And, more importantly, when was the last time that you read an article about gear that promised to get you closer to the action, help make you more energetic, and it can charge all of your batteries too?
Piracy is a major issue among all types of creatives. Regardless of if you make handbags, design websites, create beautiful paintings, produce movies, or craft amazing photographs, at some point or another, someone is going to steal and rip off your work. Recently, we decided to run a social experiment; we actually pirated one of our own tutorials and put it online for free before it was even released to the public. What happened next was pretty interesting.
Getting ready for your next trip? Travel is hard enough as a tourist, but as a nomadic photographer, a lot can go wrong. Whether the plane runs out of overhead storage or you’re in a car crash, solid packing will help you to comfortably face the unexpected so you can shoot from dawn till twilight, then change plans last minute with as little inconvenience as possible. Here are some techniques that have helped me nail ultralight packing to travel indefinitely as a nomadic photographer—or skip to the end for my one bag packing list!
Have you ever wondered when, and why you should crop a photo? In this post I'll explain how using the crop tool effectively can hugely improve the storytelling abilities in your photography. I'll also show you how cropping a photo can take your shot from average to great by allowing you to follow some key rules of composition.
Episode 27 of Critique the Community took one of the most popular genres here on Fstoppers and added a twist. We asked the community to submit any landscape or cityscape shot taken above 50mm.
In his latest video, Thomas Heaton shows just how committed he is to his craft, battling sub-zero blizzard conditions in search of a "cracking" image.
Oxford is quite the most beautiful city. It has history and is full of stories that will enchant you and the non-photographers traveling with you. Just a tour of the main colleges would be enough to fill your camera with stunning images.
You're trekking across Scotland and you come up to a waterfall that's screaming to be photographed. In your mind, you already know you want that beautiful, streaky, long-exposure water. As luck would have it, you're hungry, shaky, and your tripod is enjoying a day off in your Airbnb. What's next?
Are you starting to print your photography? Are you looking to sell prints for the fans of your work? This new video gives a great rundown of colorimetry, papers, and the value of the print.
When each frame takes a half a minute or more to capture, the road to learning long exposure photography can be a long one. Here’s a much-needed shortcut to get started with this classic photo technique.
As a photographer, becoming a digital nomad empowers you to see the world as a native, not as a tourist. It’s helped me take better photos, boosted my creativity, and given me more time to dedicate to photography outside my day job. You don’t need to wait till you hit the road: you can start becoming a digital nomad now before you ever sell your house.
The Internet can take you to places that you might never get to see in person such as the famed astronomical clock in Prague’s Old Town Square or the Amundsen–Scott research station in Antarctica. And, there are cameras situated at literally the top of the world capturing things in the night sky that you may have never even seen before.
Our next episode of Critique the Community will offer a slightly different take on landscape photography as we will be focusing only on shots taken over 50mm. Submit your best telephoto landscape or cityscape shot below and receive a chance to win a free Fstoppers original tutorial.
If you watch a lot of YouTube vlogs or tutorials on landscape photography, you're probably pretty used to voice-overs and background music. And while those are fine for storytelling and education, they might hide what the experience is actually like. This great video will show you the natural experience.
A few months ago, Fstoppers released “Photographing The World 3” with Elia Locardi. This 18-hour tutorial covers everything you could want to know about landscape and cityscape photography.
Most landscape photographers argue that scouting locations ahead of time creates the best final product. I beg to differ.
Half of creating a landscape image is in the editing process. This is where you shape the photo to match your personal style and to make whatever statement or evoke whatever feeling you'd like it to. This helpful video will show you how to add depth and drama to a landscape shot using Lightroom.
Landscape photography can be a fickle thing, particularly since you're very much at the mercy of the light and elements. That's when patience becomes an important virtue from which you'll reap the rewards, as this great video talks about.
My social media feeds are full of awesome photographs at epic locations taken by talented photographers. So, why don’t any of them want to tell the Internet where they got the shot?
Minimalism in any art form is a deceptively difficult thing to pull off successfully, as the increased importance of every element shrinks the line between profound and mundane to a razor's edge. Nonetheless, the practice of minimalism — even if only ars gratia artis — can be a sort artistic sieve through which a clarity of your own expression emerges.
When someone mentions Rembrandt in connection with photography, you almost certainly think of the lighting of portrait subjects. It turns out, however, that we can take quite a bit about how he treated light and composition and apply it to landscape work as well.
I'm a firm believer that there are two types of fatigue, the good tired and the bad tired. The bad tired is when you feel stressed and/or unsatisfied, but the good tired is when you feel accomplished. This great video explores the latter.
Our latest series of behind the scenes episodes with Elia Locardi are almost over. In today's episode we continue to explore the rooftops of Dubai in search of the perfect cityscape photograph of the city. We then head out to a remote desert to photograph the stars only to find out our guide had other plans. This is “Photographing the World III” behind the scenes episode 12!
Achieving perfect white balance is highly important for many types of photographic work, however landscape photography will usually benefit from a bit of creative coloring.
Look at enough photos and watch enough YouTube, and you might begin to suspect that landscape photography consists solely of jetting to exotic locations and arriving just as that golden light crests a mountain. And sure, those moments are there, but this great video examines what the average days are like. Spoiler alert: they're pretty great.
Of all the focal lengths, I personally think wide-angle lenses might take the most getting used to when it comes to creating compelling imagery that takes advantage of their unique properties and avoids their pitfalls. This helpful video will give you some great tips for taking better shots with them.
Baber Afzal is well known for his dramatic looking fine art cityscape and landscape pictures. In this 12-minute long tutorial, he’ll show you how to achieve the same look on your pictures by taking you through one of his edits in Capture One and giving precious tips along the way.
The U.K. recently experienced an incredible lunar eclipse by the name of “super blue blood moon.” Here, one professional skyline and cityscape photographer, Michael Tomas, aka London Viewpoints, talks us through photographing the momentous event, as well as his other impressive works.
In the frozen depths of Canada, The Camera Store TV joined up with Wildlife Photographer Joe Desjardins to try out the Panasonic G9 for outdoor nature photography. Can this Micro Four Thirds camera stack up in a genre traditionally executed with DSLRs?
Cruising in an airplane high above Earth you sometimes get to see places that are nearly impossible to reach, or even view, from the ground. Taking photos of those sights is not only fun but it can serve as a memory that you were sort of there in the first place. If you like geography, geology, or history in general it can also be an excellent reference so that you can investigate the area further once you’re back on terra firma.
A few months ago we released the landscape photography tutorial Photographing The World 3 with Elia Locardi. Today, the behind the scenes series on the creation of that tutorial continues with Episode 11.
Not many of us can say that we’ve shot on every single continent, but Kenneth Browne is here to tell us how he dealt with one of the toughest shooting locations on earth.
Hidden within the heart of Adobe Photoshop is a filter that many are familiar with, yet most fail to use to its full potential. It is a powerful, all encompassing workhorse, and its abilities may just change the way you approach your Photoshop edits. Ladies and gentlemen, let's explore the often ignored Camera Raw Filter.
For me and many photographers that I know, compositing and post-processing is fine, even needed in many cases. The thing that we all seem to get wrapped around the axle about is when a fellow artist is not entirely forthcoming about how a work was produced.
One of the most spectacular natural phenomenons to photograph, this year’s Horsetail Fall “firefall” event at Yosemite National Park is host of a new pilot program that will require one of a limited number of permits in order to access closed roads leading to the best vantage points.
With the new year now well underway, I took some time this week to ponder my motivations for doing photography in the first place. I think it is healthy to every now and again stop and evaluate where you are, what you’re doing, and whether or not it is worth spending your precious time on. Maybe there are some nuggets of useful information from this exercise that will prove useful for you. If nothing else, perhaps it’ll nudge you to reflect on your own photographic journey and help you get to where you want to go.
If you're a photographer living in a coastal city, hobbyist or otherwise, it's almost a given you've taken your camera seaside to snap what you were hoping to be some stunners. This has been the case for me, and I was sorely disappointed when my photos were nothing like what I had imagined they would be. If only there were an extensive, nit-picking guide to creating the photos you see in your head. Anton Gorlin has created just that: an impressively in-depth guide to seascape photography that really gets down to the nitty-gritty.
Two weeks ago I wrote an article concerning Zion National Park's even stricter guidelines for their commercial use authorization permits for photography workshops operating within the park and this spurred a great deal of debate in the photographic community as well as among other professional photographers operating out of the park. Many photographers were upset at the changes to not allow tripods on trails while others were confused as Zion had explicitly stated photography on a tripod was allowed in these areas. Zion National Park has finally officially responded to the concerns in the new CUA.
Traveling 5,500 kilometers in six weeks, Filmmaker Florian Nick explored the wilds of British Columbia and Alberta in search of beautiful scenery, capturing 54,000 photos along the way. The result is a gorgeous time-lapse film showcasing the best of the region in stunning detail and sweeping scale. Nick discussed the making of the film with Fstoppers.
For a while now, I have been a big fan of the videos that Tony and Chelsea Northrup put together. Their channel is a wealth of knowledge that I visit many times. This particular video, one of their most recent, is one I found to be particularly helpful. If you are like me in that you don't often have the chance to shoot in fog, much less shoot in it frequently, then these tips will be helpful to make the timing and execution of your foggy excursions be that much more successful.
We are now up to episode 10 in our behind-the-scenes adventures with Elia Locardi. After photographing some of the most beautiful locations in Italy, it was time to travel from Europe to the Middle East. For the next part of “Photographing the World,” we wanted to capture images of one of the most modern cities in the world: Dubai. As you will see in this episode, Dubai has some of the most ridiculous yet awesome activities out in the desert.
Landscape photography is one of the most accessible genres of photography. As long as you don’t live in the middle of a city or sprawling suburb, it’s easy to just go outside and start shooting. I was always drawn to the natural world, so landscape photography was an easy path for me, but sometimes, the most rewarding shots are well off the beaten trail. That is why I’ve made a list of safety precautions you can take to reduce the risk you take and to minimize your impact on the environment.
