Landscape Photography

What inspires you to pick up your camera? For Ivan Agerton, it’s people – and for all the talk about convergence between the worlds of stills and motion, Ivan is doing it. His ‘stills from motion’ portraits are both a visually gorgeous treat with their sublime use of slow motion, and thought provoking in the connection with the subject Ivan has captured. Not just creating eye candy, Agerton is a fascinating character and provides a great example of the life we can all construct for ourselves – if you decide to take the plunge and go for it.

Last month we had a contest and asked the Fstoppers Community to submit their best photos in five different categories. The winners of each category would win their choice of three Fstoppers Flash Discs or one free tutorial from the Fstoppers Store. We were very impressed with all of the talent from the community and were delighted to see such a wide spectrum of images in each category. We spent a great deal of time looking over each category, and after much deliberation, we have chosen one lucky winner from the five categories of Fashion, Landscape, Wedding, Glamour, and Portrait.

If a photograph is two-dimensional, understanding depth of field gives you a measure of control over the third dimension. Mastering it will give you more ability to render photographs with clarity and directness.

Memorial Day has passed and at least here in southern New England, summer is in the air. Around this time of year I find myself outside more often than not, but that's not always the case. Sometimes, the work load is too much and I get stuck in the studio or working in front of a computer for long hours during the day. If you're anything like me you can only take so much time indoors, so getting outside is essential. If the long days, warm nights, and sunshine aren’t enough to get you into the outdoors with a camera, here are a few reasons why getting outside can help you become a better photographer.

A lot of people associated HDR with over-processed, surreal images. This is not always the case. Shooting HDR can be very useful in different circumstances. It is often seen in real estate and landscape photography and can be very useful to balance a wide range of light levels. There are many programs out there for merging images together to create an HDR photo, but one of the simplest ways to create these dramatic photographs is using Photoshop's built-in HDR Pro.

Italian photographer Filippo Blengini embarked on a mission to take a panoramic photograph of Mount Blanc, Earth's 11th tallest mountain. After 70,000 individual photographs, 46 terabytes consumed, and 2 months of editing and processing later, the photo taken by Blengini and his team of five is currently the largest photograph in the world. Check out this video for a brief overview of how they did it.

One of the best camera backpack series just got an update, along with a few new bags. F-Stop Gear has been making quality backpacks for outdoor adventure filmmakers and photographers for a while now, and their latest products are looking to be even better. If you've owned or used the popular Loka series bag, you'll want to check out the new version, called the Ajna.

Our cameras today are extremely powerful with settings and features that help us archive stellar image quality. But sometimes the images we come home with just don't capture the true essence of what was photographed and what our eyes saw. The photo is just a bit overexposed or underexposed and doesn't capture what we felt in that moment we pressed down on the shutter button. We fiddle and tweak in Photoshop with sliders and brushes, but there is another tool to add to the arsenal: masks. Specifically, luminosity masks.

If you have ever been in a remote enough place and looked up at the night sky, you know how magical the universe can be with countless stars dotting a black canvas overhead. Many photographers capture the night sky with their camera resulting in spectacular images. But it’s one thing to step out into your backyard and point your camera up, and a completely different adventure to hike out to a remote location and capture the cosmos with the wilderness as your backdrop.

It’s not quite “sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads” like Dr. Evil intended, but the recently released photos of the European Southern Observatory’s new 22-watt LASER show a beautiful marriage of science and photography that’s hard not to love.

We all knew that this day would come and it may change the way we look at cinematography forever. It is pretty amazing to think that this entire feature length movie was created on nothing more than a humble iPhone.

The natural beauty contained within Enrique Pacheco’s latest time-lapse video “Reflections from Uyuni” is striking and remarkable. During South America’s rainy season, Pacheco journeyed through the Salar de Uyuni, the largest salt flat in the world, down to the Bolivian desert capturing surreal landscapes of these flooded lands. Fstoppers is happy to share the Spanish cinematographer’s insight as to what the experience was like shooting in such surreal locations.

Michigan-based photographer Vincent Brady spent five weeks in Iceland living out the back of a rental car to capture the ethereal footage found in his latest 360-degree time-lapse project “Aurora Panoramas Acoustic Borealis.” The video depicts Iceland in its full fantastic glory, with brightly colored auroras floating above fairytale landscapes. Set to an original mellow acoustic tune by long-time friend Brandon McCoy, this video makes for the perfect 4-minute weekend getaway.

Ever used a drone? If you have, you've almost certainly had that "oh sh*t" moment as your expensive, and admittedly, super awesome toy narrowly escaped a crash that would inevitably end its life. Well, Ryan Chatfield knows that feeling exactly. He was on a beach capturing a beautiful Western Australian sunset when his drone's batteries begin to die. Watch this video to see him race across the beach to save it before it plummets into the rocks and waves below!

For many centuries, scientists fought vehemently about the nature of light. Two sides debated a question pivotal to the development of physics: is light a particle or a wave? It wasn't until the 20th century that one of the most startling revelations about our universe came to prominence: light is both.

If you haven’t seen the stars in the sky in some time, you’re not alone. Thanks to the ever growing amount of light pollution in populated cities’ celestial domes, the heavens above us are becoming harder and harder to see. The Skyglow project aims to, forgive the pun, shed light on the subject. Filmmakers Gavin Heffernan and Harun Mehmedinovic shot this short film throughout Los Angeles – imagining the majestic universe just above.

Freelance motion graphics designer and London-based art director T Tagholm created this mesmerizing piece with the help of After Effects. I honestly can say what it is about this video that caught my eye but I found myself transfixed in a way that was reminiscent of the time I watched Koyaanisqatsi (the second time, not the first time when I fell asleep). The undeniably hypnotic 'simulacra' is part of a larger project that is still in the works but in the meantime you can check out T Tagholm earlier released piece, 'Plain Sight'.

Civil Engineer, Thomas Berge, is a hobbyist filmmaker from just outside of Stavanger, Norway. He has carefully edited together a ridiculously gorgeous combination of timelapses and hyperlapses of the west coast over the last three years that will have you calling your travel agent to book a flight out his way. It’s a five minute feast for your eyes that you don’t want to miss.

Watch as LA based photographer Dan Marker-Moore shows us how he stitches hundreds of photos together to make one Time Slice image. Dan travelled Hong Kong and Shanghai to shoot the same landscapes at different times of the day. This series of photos were then color corrected in Lightroom before a composite was created in After Effects. By lining up slices of the photographs, that had been offset in time / exposures, the photos create a sense of time-in-motion for each landscape.

There's no better way to start the week off than to watch a beautifully shot and composed time-lapse. Shane Black spent several months traveling through the U.S. and Canada teaching workshops and shooting this time-lapse. "Adventure is Calling" makes me want to get out of the house and explore how beautiful our planet is. Black spent about 4 months, traveled roughly 14,000 miles, and shot about 20,000 still for this inspiring 3 minute video.

Brothers Will Pattiz and Jim Pattiz are on a mission to spread greater awareness to the treasures that reside within America’s National Parks through visually stunning imagery. The first results of which are 3 short films, with a staggering 49 more in the works. I interviewed half of the Pattiz brothers, Will, and learned a bit more about how they got involved in such an ambitious undertaking.

Last year Alexis Coram's Technicolor Alaska - a mesmerizing time lapse film of the Northern Lights - was shared on Fstoppers along with being showcased in National Geographic's Short Film Showcase of the year. This year, Coram has created a new masterpiece, "Awake." Coram traveled back to Alaska this past February for a long weekend in hopes to catch another glimpse of the Northern Lights.

I’m a fan of Detroit. I love its history, its people, and the current fight within the city to bring it back to its former glory. There’s a movement going on in Detroit that’s often left out of the typical conversation. There’s an art scene. There’s music. There’s life. Chris Miele captured one specific part of Detroit that has become convenient to forget about in a time now popular for abandoned building urbexing. He’s an outdoor photographer who focused on the good still left in the city of Detroit, Michigan. Shying away from the usual "rubble porn", Miele showcases the awesome structures within a city's futuristic past.

We share over 1.8 billion photos per day, and thanks to the ever-growing technology in cameras paired with the expansive world of social media platforms it's become increasingly easy to add the title "photographer" to the resume. Apple has searched high and low for the world's absolute best photographers and their work that spans the planet. The "Shot on iPhone 6" World Gallery features photos from creatives spanning 70 cities in 24 countries, and brings the mobile photography community front and center proving again that the best camera is the one that's with you.

Over five terabytes filmed over the course of two grueling years, A Taste Of Austria is comprised of over 600 time-lapse clips intricately woven together through creative clip transitions. Time-lapse movies often take themselves entirely too seriously, focusing on the dramatic through epic song choice and long drawn out pans. This short video incorporates creative use of sound coupled with quick and calculated cuts to give the viewer a sense of a fast-paced guided tour through the spectacular European countryside.

Aaron Eveland, the videographer of the wedding duo in Hawaii known as Makai Creative, set out to recreate the classic look of The Endless Summer movie poster – gigantic sunsets behind surfers on the beach – and that he did with the help of a Canon 800mm f/5.6 lens, a 2x Extender, and a lot of trial and error. It’s all worth it as you can see in his short film, Sunchasers.

Alexandre Deschaumes is an acclaimed landscape and adventure photographer whose work creates a colorful dreamlike world made up of some of the planet's most rugged and unique terrain. The documentary film "La Quete D'Inspirations" (The Quest for Inspiration) is a breathtakingly beautiful film that depicts Deschaumes' work and his ultimate search for finding his own way as he magnifies the natural landscape.

Perhaps the benchmark of “making it” in this business is to earn an assignment that would cause all but those with the strongest moral character to push both ethical and legal boundaries if an opportunity to supplant the rightful hire were to present itself. Bicoastal photographer Navid Baraty is one such photographer that might draw out said envy from his peers with the most recent addition to his client list.

That's 10K – as in your 4K monitor, but not really...because it's 10K. Yes, photographer Joe Capra created a stunning 10K time-lapse with a PhaseOne IQ180 that shoots images with a resolution of 10,328 x 7,760 pixels. While this video is clearly put together in a proof-of-concept style, the clips still astound. We can't expect anyone to be able to view this at a real 10K resolution (the video is edited to 1080p and zooms in to show the full resolution), but the least you can do is view it in HD in full screen, at which point it becomes a gratifying kind of dizzying.

The world's eyes have been on climbing lately. With the recent incredible 19 day climb of the Dawn Wall in Yosemite Valley and now this, the Red Bull sponsored venture of scaling the frozen heights of Niagara Falls, climbing is producing some increasingly spectacular imagery. Canadian climber William Gadd became the first to ascend these icy walls - a dangerous stunt leaving us with incredible video and photos!

Who hasn’t contemplated the idea of living a simpler life? I know that I certainly have, pondering from time to time what my life would look with smaller bills and rent. What would my art be like if I could downsize just a bit? Could I ever dare? People everywhere are beginning to realize that they have become slaves to their own lifestyles. The need to be better and bigger than the next guy has taken over our lives, and had compromised our ability to live an authentic life.

Seventy years ago, on January 27, Russian soldiers arrived to liberate less than 8,000 prisoners still remaining at Nazi-Germany's deadliest concentration camp, Auschwitz-Berkinau. During the camp's operation, Auschwitz' officers were responsible for an estimated 1.1 million deaths. To mark the historic liberation of the camp, BBC treated its audience to a unique view that embodies the eerie and gruesome history of the vast camp.

While on an expedition in Antarctica, photographer Alex Cornell had the rare opportunity to photograph a recently flipped iceberg. Defining to the old adage "just the tip of the iceberg," it turns out the underside can be illuminated with unbelievable bright blues and striation that reveal visually stunning secrets of these sleeping giants. Witnessing a flip is uncommon, and moreover the surreal texture and colors distort the scale making it a truly incredible encounter.

Filmed and edited by Nejc Miljak, “Before You Wake Up” is a short production that casts a strong motivating monologue aimed at landscape photographers around the world. Alongside its message, the video portrays an awe-inspiring adventure into nature as photographer Janez Tolar captures images sunrise to sunset. The combination of these makes this semi-ethereal video too good to pass up sharing.

Snowy region shooters rejoice, there exists a way to completely get rid of all blue snow in your photographs! I know what you’re thinking: just adjust the white balance in any ol' image processor. Unfortunately, you will find that using this method is only winning half the battle for many images. In a few easy steps, you’ll learn how to make any winter photo much more pleasing to the eye.

Pressure, fear, joy, excitement – these are not uncommon emotions on any shoot. A few weeks ago, I spent a few hours in a helicopter above New York City with Vincent Laforet where we experienced all of these emotions. This exclusive interview and BTS video highlights not only what’s involved to produce aerial stills of this nature, but provides 5 key insights we can all apply to our own shoots.

It's always nice to nail that exposure for a beautiful portrait using a balance of different lights. Check out this short video by The Slanted Lens about the basics of shooting photos with Christmas lights. With the combination of proper exposure, time of day, a dramatic sky and some other pretty simple techniques, you can take some great holiday photos this season.

Peter Lik must be one very happy camper. Earlier we broke the news of the sale of the “Phantom”, a black and white image of Arizona’s Antelope Canyon, sold for a record breaking $6.5m, making it the most expensive photograph ever sold. A massive internal discussion amongst Fstoppers writers took place shortly thereafter, arguing whether any photograph was actually worth that much money.

A private collector in Las Vegas just bought Peter Lik's, "Phantom," today for an unprecedented $6.5 million making this sale the most expensive photograph in history. Peter didn't just call it a day with one sale, he also sold, "Illusion," for $2.4 million and, "Eternal Moods," for $1.1 million. That's just a cool $10 million dollar payday for LIK USA™. These sales from today now make Peter Lik hold four of the top 20 spots for most expensive photographs ever sold. He had already been listed previously with a $1 million sale for his image, "One."

It seems you can’t go a day or two without seeing a new time-lapse film of the Northern Lights. And while beautiful, it has become incredibly difficult for photographers and filmmakers to raise the bar on this much captured phenomenon. That was until Ole C. Salomonsen threw his hat in the ring.

Patrick and I have been in Iceland for 2 weeks with Elia Locardi filming our next tutorial on landscape/travel photography. We brought a truck-load of gear with us but our favorite piece has been our DJI phantom quadcopter. Here's a quick cut of our best drone footage in Iceland.

There's little debate that Iceland remains one of the most sought after locations for landscape photography and this new video from Lytro further emphasizes why that is. Although created as a promotional piece for the Illum camera, Lytro have done a wonderful job on the film by focusing more on photography, story telling and the beauty of the landscape, and simply letting the advantages of the camera shine through on their own.

Known for their well-built camera backpacks that cater to photographers and videographers who take their kit on outdoor adventures, F-Stop Gear is unveiling the "Shinn," a backpack that has an impressive 80 liter capacity. Made specifically for cinematographers with large camera kits, it's been field tested on expeditions around the world, and is now ready to be made available for everyone else.

While a great image of the Milky Way can be awe inspiring in and of itself, it becomes something else entirely when you add some motion. In just 20 minutes, you will have all the information needed to go out and shoot a time-lapse yourself. Whether or not you are willing to spend countless hours alone in the darkness however...

Follow Northern California-based photographer Brian Gaberman as he pursues his love of wet plate collodion photography, on a journey from New York City to Wolfeboro for Element.

Sean Goebel might only do photography in his spare time while working on his PhD in Astronomy, but that hasn't stopped him from licensing work to the likes of Canon, the Discovery Channel, and others. A quick watch of his timelapse works, including Epochs and Mauna Kea Heavens and it is easy to see why. His latest timelapse project is included here, along with a brief look into its creation.