Nature Photography How To

There are numerous reasons for poorly exposed photos when shooting in the field under difficult lighting conditions, including harsh light, dark foregrounds, and bright washed-out skies to name a few. When you're faced with challenges like these, photos often  turn out to be a compete mess.

In terms of extreme locations, you can’t pick a place much more remote than the Falkland Islands. Located 300 miles off the tip of Argentina in the South Atlantic Ocean, the Falkland Islands consists of two main isles—East and West Falkland Islands, plus 776 smaller islets, covering 4,700 square miles.

Dodging and burning is a classic image-editing technique dating back to the heyday of film and the darkroom. Back then, dodging was used to lighten a specific portion of an image, while burning did the opposite.

The beautiful designs and colors that can be found in the feathers of many species of birds offer wonderful photo opportunities. You can create frame-filling shots of unique patterns, and it’s also possible to make interesting arrangements of the feathers that become a unique art form unto itself.

While Shutterbug reader Robert Dunham dreams of shooting the vast landscapes in Montana, he has found “great wonder and satisfaction in shooting macro” at his North Carolina home. He combines his two favorite pastimes, gardening and photography, by “taking a bunch of gear to the garden and splitting time between the spade and the camera.”

Remember last July 4 while watching the Independence Day festivities, and you thought to yourself, "I wish I had taken time to figure out how to photograph fireworks because I really could make some great images tonight?" That turns out to be a common refrain, so we're go to help you prepare for next week in advance.

Distortion is often a challenge with outdoor photos, like landscape images with tall trees, or city scenes with soaring buildings and other vertical lines. Fortunately, these distractions are very easy to fix during the editing process, as you’ll see in the quick tutorial below.