Nature Photography How To

We assumed the first thing Jim Graham does in order to create his elegant landscape images is decide how to isolate his subjects from distracting backgrounds to achieve the always-desired single subject, clearly defined.

We were wrong. The first thing he does is ask himself: What do I see? Then he asks: How do I use the camera to communicate the feeling I have about what I see?

Blurring the background of a photo is a very effective way to make the main subject of an image really pop off the page. It’s possible to create this effect in the camera or during the editing process, and today’s tutorial involves the latter.

The task of accurately setting the white and black points during post processing refers to adjusting the brightest and darkest tonal values of a photograph to achieve a full range of tones from pure white to pure black. This tutorial from the Photo Masters YouTube channel explains how to get the job done for perfectly balanced images.

If you ask a bunch of accomplished landscape photographers to name their most difficult challenges, they'll likely express two key considerations. One is arriving at a correct exposure in scenes with a wide-range of tones from bright highlights to deep shadows. Another is achieving sharp results when there are a number of objects within the frame.

Most of my columns for this website concern the ideas and purposes behind the photographs I take. I always include information about the technology used to achieve the photos, which could be as basic as the f/stop chosen to direct your attention, or the use of a ND filter to make a long exposure possible. That approach is not incidental or coincidental; the stories are planned along those lines because my ideas come first, and technology’s purpose is to support those ideas.

Lately we've been featuring tutorials that highlight the versatility of older post-processing tools that have fallen by the wayside as Adobe continues to add new headline-grabbing features to Photoshop, Lightroom, and Adobe Camera Raw (ACR). We're doing this again today in the following video that describes why you should take another look at the efficient High Pass filter sharpening tool.