Outdoor Photography How To

It may not seem like it, given the horrendous winter weather that swept across the country last week, but the onset of spring is barely a month away. And the new season brings with it a variety of interesting opportunities for macro and close-up photography.

Most of our tutorials involve tips, tricks, and techniques you can use to capture more compelling images. But today we’re going to switch things up by describing what NOT to do when shooting landscape, travel, and nature images.

Lens Filters were more commonly used back when everyone shot film, perhaps because some digital photographers are imbued with the notion that “You can always fix it in Photoshop.” And that’s a shame because putting a filter on your lens is an easy way to “get it right in the camera,” rather than resorting to post-processing enhancements.

Using long exposures during the day is a great way to create unique landscape and nature photos. This technique results in an ethereal look, with soft, dreamy water and cotton-like clouds. The typical approach is using ND filters to dramatically reduce the amount of light entering the camera, but there’s a post-processing trick for getting the job done.

Wide-angles lenses are an important component of a landscape photographer’s arsenal, because they make it easy to capture the splendor of expansive vistas. In this tutorial you’ll learn a specific application for wide-angle nature photography; namely, shooting beautiful sunset and blue hour images.

Sometimes you come across a great scene, apart from the fact that two or more objects in the frame are too close together for an ideal composition. In some situations it’s possible to rectify the problem by changing your vantage point, but if that’s not possible there’s a quick editing fix.

Life would be so much easier if there was one “best” way to shoot various types of images. Unfortunately there’s not, because photography is a subjective art. That said you will increase your odds of creating winning landscape photos if you follow the advice outlined below.