Nature Photography How To

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.

One big challenge when photographing birds or other types of wildlife involves dealing with subjects that appear in front of busy backgrounds—a situation that tends to happen more often than not. There are ways to remedy this problem in post-processing, but wouldn't you rather get things right in the camera? This tutorial from Backcountry Gallery explains how it's done.

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.

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.

Bad habits can ruin you landscape photography and if you want to get better sometimes it's just a case of changing your behavior. Landscape photographer Mark Denney knows a lot about fixing bad habits in order to capture winning images. He admits he's been dealing with them since he started in photography.

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.