Landscape Photography

I'm excited to announce a new weekly segment, where you the Fstoppers community can submit your favorite image to be edited and retouched by me, Lance Nicoll. Post an image you recently shot, that hasn't been retouched yet, in the comments below. On Thursday I will retouch it an post the recording of the entire process! If you guys love it, I will continue to do this every week! – And maybe in the future even do it as a Live Retouch with Q&A. The rules are as listed below. Really excited to see everyone's submissions. Submit your image by Wednesday at Midnight to be selected.

You may have heard of "Skyfire" last year, a web-based platform that used custom weather forecasting models to predict the best times to shoot sunrise and sunset. Now, there is a new mobile app available for iOS that uses the Skyfire platform, called "The Photographers Ephemeris," that brings this service to a new level.

I have never really been into extreme sport videos ever in my life. The second I see someone decked out in Red Bull apparel, I am immediately turned off. But this video in particular has caught my attention. Everything from the directing, editing, camera operating, and sound design has been formulated perfectly into a four minute YouTube masterpiece.

I "met" Dan Dawley on craiglist over 5 years ago when Patrick and I were looking for an animator for our brand new website idea (Fstoppers). At the time, he was just getting into animation and none of us knew that Dan would become one of the top motion graphics animators in the country. Now, he's getting into video.

Over the next two days, you have a chance to submit your landscape photos to be critiqued by Elia Locardi and Fstoppers in a new episode of "Critique the Community." Our last Critique the Community with Elia Locardi included some great thoughts and advice on improving your images. If you would like another chance to have your picture reviewed by Elia, upload your landscape image of choice to your Fstoppers account, then paste the URL of the image in the comments below.

Light painting is difficult. Trying to paint something you can’t see while racing the timer of your cameras shutter is no easy feat. Legibly writing your own name can take a decent amount of practice. Watch as Julian Breton takes this act to the next level as he turns the intricate art of calligraphy into light paintings.

Welcome back to our weekly segment of Photographing The World Behind the Scenes where we take you through the process of filming our landscape photography tutorial with Elia Locardi. In last week's video, episode 2, we ran through 4 different lessons in 4 completely different locations around Iceland. This week's location, a glacier ice cave, was so amazing that we decided to dedicate an entire episode to it.

With July coming to an end, summer in the North East is in full swing and what better time to get out and shoot than the present. Whether you are shooting portraits or landscapes, in the daylight or under the stars, sometimes the best way to stay motivated and make sure you are having fun with your photography is to keep things simple. While I don’t go bare-bones with one camera and a lens, if I am out adventuring, chasing a sunset, or on a day trip hiking through the forest, I like to keep my gear minimal. While each piece of equipment has various uses, here is a look into my camera bag and different ways you can use each piece of equipment.

Beth Moon is a photographer who specializes in classic black and white imagery. Over the last 14 years she has been traveling the world documenting the oldest and largest trees on the planet. To promote her new book "Ancient Trees: Portraits in Time," Moon has shared this behind-the-scenes video of her platinum printing darkroom process which is pretty interesting to watch. Platinum printing is viewed by many to be the absolute best form of archival printing, and Moon's results are absolutely gorgeous.

If you haven't already heard, Fstoppers has teamed up with Elia Locardi to produce Photographing The World: Landscape Photography and Post-Processing. For the entire 2 months of filming this tutorial we filmed hours of behind the scenes footage every single day and we ended up editing it down to 8, 15 minute episodes.

This week we released our 5th photography tutorial: Photographing The World with Elia Locardi. Since this tutorial was going to be filmed over the course of 2 months in Iceland and New Zealand, we decided to turn the cameras back around on ourselves and show you how we filmed this massive video project.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No! That buzzing noise you hear overhead isn't superman either, it's a remote control drone with thousands of dollars in camera equipment strapped to the bottom. And wow do they get some cool images.

In September of 2014 Patrick and I met Elia Locardi totally by chance in the basement of a German beer house during Photokina. That night we learned that Elia had sold all of his possessions and had been traveling the world nonstop for 3 years taking landscape & travel photographs. Soon thereafter we decided to team up on the biggest project any of us had ever worked on.

With a bit a of planning, patience, and a whole bunch of luck, Australian photographer Dylan O'Donnell managed to capture this great shot of the International Space Station crossing in front of the face of an almost-full moon.

When I was just eight years old I would flip through the pages of National Geographic and imagine being a photographer in Africa. I was captivated by the faces and places that seemed worlds apart from my typical Middle American hometown. Fast forward years later, and I'm living the dream as a travel photographer working throughout Africa and Europe. If you've ever wanted to travel the world with your camera, here's my advice to help you get started and thrive in professional travel photography.

Long before "El Cap" became the easier way to pronounce Apple's upcoming operating system, it was the affectionately shortened moniker of Yosemite's most famous and respected rock climbing peak: El Capitan. Today, Google launches a project that takes Street View vertical, as each image was taken as a climber ascended the peak.

When I first heard about the Canon EF 11-24mm f/4 L USM, I couldn’t help but think of the famous “Spinal Tap” scene: “these go to 11!” It’s a hefty lens with a hefty price tag, so I had high expectations of it when it came time to review. It has risen to the occasion.

If you're like me, photography is not just about weddings and portraits. I love getting outdoors with my camera and exploring the mountains and forests around my hometown of Seattle, Washington. Anything from a day hike to a multi-night backpacking trip is always an opportunity to photograph my adventures and share these beautiful landscapes with others.

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.