Nature Photography How To

It’s not impossible to capture compelling landscape photos on flat, foggy days, but more often these conditions result in boring, uninspiring images. If that’s what you get on your next outing in the field, we encourage you not to trash the photos with the intent on returning on a better day.

So you sit down behind the computer, open what you thought was a great shot, and the image quality is unexpectedly really bad. Time to move it to the trash and try again, right? Well, not so fast.

One sure way to ruin an otherwise great photo is to miss the exposure and end up with ugly blown-out highlights. The problem typically occurs with landscape images when the sun peaks out from behind the clouds. But this unsightly mistake also happens with other types of images—both indoors and out—and doesn’t necessarily mean you have to blow off the shot.

It's not unusual to return from a day in the field and discover that some of your images are either too light or too dark. That's because landscape scenes often have a wide range of tones that are difficult to capture accurately in a single shot.

Regardless of the type of images you shoot you've likely captured photos with ugly, unnatural color casts. There are various ways to correct this unfortunate problem during the editing process, and today you'll discover a quick and oft-ignored technique In Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw (ACR).

Getting the light right is an essential task whether you're shooting indoors or out, and sometimes this means adding supplemental light to achieve perfect exposures. One choice is using a flash, but some photographers are intimidated by the techniques and settings that are required.

If you're a Shutterbug reader you likely own a few lenses, or at least a couple zooms offering a variety of focal lengths. But do you really understand how the focal length you choose impacts more than just the magnification of a subject?