Outdoor Photography How To

Today we're exploring the characteristics of soft light and the different ways it can affect the impact of outdoor images, whether they're landscapes, environmental portraits, or just about anything else. This tutorial comes to us from the folks the Great Big Photography World—a YouTube community of passionate creatives with a comprehensive range of lessons for shooters of all skills levels.

Don't let a little bad weather ruin your photo shoot. Sometimes a rainy day can make for an attractive portrait: you've just got to make sure your photos don't end up being all wet.

We've heard some people complain their portraits look blah because they can't find good locations to shoot them in. We're sorry but that's a poor excuse because, as pro photographer Manny Ortiz shows you below, good portraits can happen just about anywhere.

Summer offers many opportunities for landscape photographers, one of which is dramatic lightning that often accompanies thunderstorms this time of year. With a few basic techniques for photographing electrical storms, it’s easy to capture truly epic landscape images.

Shooting incredible color infrared (IR) photos is fascinating and surprisingly easy if you use the right tools and techniques. In this two-part story we first look at the conversion of a DSLR to shoot IR photos, and then later in Part 2 we explore everything you need to know to get great infrared imaging results (setting White Balance, Channel Swapping and post-processing techniques). Ready for some mind-blowing colors? Read on…

One powerful way to capture outdoor photos that make viewers pay attention with admiration is to thoughtfully compose a scene with proper balance throughout the frame. The quick tutorial below from Mike Smith provides several helpful techniques for doing just that.

Nailing exposure is a critical aspect of all genres of photography as you refine your skills, and this can be difficult when shooting outdoors under varied illumination. This is a particularly challenging task when the light is everchanging as clouds pass through a scene, or when subjects in motion move in and out of sunlight and shadow.