Nature Photography How To

Last week we featured a very popular tutorial, explaining several reasons why landscape photos may be unsharp, with a foolproof technique for solving the problems. Today's lesson takes a similar approach with regard to capturing crisp images of birds.

All photographers strive to create photos with accurate focus, and most of us prefer to get things right in the camera. This saves time during the editing process, and helps avoid the temptation to take things too far—ending up with an unsightly, “crispy” effect.

We all know that Blue Hour is one of the best times to shoot attention-grabbing images in the field. The challenge, however, is that sometimes our results fail to capture the magic and whimsy that we saw through the viewfinder as the sun dipped below the horizon.

One of the challenges with landscape photography is maximizing depth of field. That’s because well-composed images often incorporate important elements in the foreground, midground and background. Shooting with small aperture settings helps, but that approach often causes image quality to suffer, and may not yield the wide range of sharpness you desire.

Outdoor scenes often appear less impressive on the computer than they did through the viewfinder, and the problem never seems to be better colors and contrast than we remember. The opposite is usually true, which is why most photographers edit their work.

So what goes into making an epic landscape photograph? That’s a difficult, if not impossible, question to answer because the notion of artistic beauty is a very subjective matter. What we do know, however, is that you have to check a few boxes off your list before any image can be considered fantastic.

This tutorial with five pro tips for capturing eye-catching nature and wildlife images is different than others we've featured in the past, thanks to the thoughtful and contemplative style of professional photographer Kevin Nordstrom. You'll follow him explore the shore of a lake while capturing amazing photos of birds, turtles, wildflower and more.