Nature Photography How To

Most landscape photographers carry a polarizing filter in their bag for darkening pale skies, making colors more vibrant, and eliminating distracting reflections from water. But what if you’re out in the field and your polarizer is at home?

When heading out for a day of landscape photography, chances are you reach for a wide-angle lens—or perhaps one in the 70-200mm range. But if you want to create images with a unique look, it’s time to consider using a super-telephoto instead.

There’s still time to get outside and capture the colorful splendor of autumn, before winter drastically changes the landscape. If the images you capture don’t appear as vibrant as what you saw through the viewfinder, this tutorial is for you.

If there’s a more challenging photographic discipline than wildlife photography, I don’t know what it is. It requires heavy and expensive long focal length lenses, a sturdy tripod, and the physical prowess to schlep all this gear through physically demanding environments. If you’re thinking “that’s not you, Joe,” you are correctamundo so I asked a few friends for advice on telephoto lenses and this is what they told me.

Summer is a good time to get outdoors and shoot macro photographs of insects, flowers and other tiny critters. And best yet, you rarely have to venture beyond your backyard to find a variety of interesting subjects.

Photographers are known for chasing the latest and greatest gear, despite the adage that, “It’s the photographer—not the camera—that creates the image.” I’ll admit to owning a couple “state-of-the art” digital cameras myself. But my photo cabinet also includes a few “obsolete” models dating back to 2009.

Photographer Sean King met a tragic death last week while guiding a group of tourists to a lava-viewing point on the Big Island of Hawaii—the largest island in the Hawaiian chain. King succumbed to noxious lava fumes and was later found dead.