Photo How To

There's no better source of wildlife photography techniques than the Pangolin Photography YouTube Channel, a group of experienced safari guides and imaging experts based in Northern Botswana. The images used to illustrate their tutorials often depict big cats and other exotic species, but the advice they provide is also valuable for photographing birds at your neighborhood park, or a "photo safari" at the zoo.

Many photographers love buying new gear, in part because of all the marketing hype implying that the key to improving one's photography is a better camera and accessories. We love using great equipment as much as anyone, but this tutorial is all about seven pro hacks to that will significantly up your game when shooting in the field.

Last week we featured a tutorial explaining why your hand-held photos may be unsharp, with techniques you can employ in the field to fix the problem. That lesson turned out to be quite popular, as expected, because the goal of most photographers is fast and precise focus.

Long Exposure Noise Reduction is very helpful feature available in most modern digital cameras, including interchangeable lens models and many full-featured compacts. But as you'll see in the following tutorial from the Photo Genius YouTube channel, leaving this setting turned on by default will hold you back in certain situations.

A common mistake by outdoor photographers when shooting on the street or in the field is to begin popping off photos upon arriving at a destination for fear of losing a fleeting moment or great light. The problem with this common approach is that it often results in common images.

One of the biggest mistakes photographers make when processing photos is limiting their edits to global adjustments. In other words, all of their enhancements apply to the image as a whole—regardless of brightness and color differences through the scene.

So you just spent a day photographing birds or other forms of wildlife and returned home expecting to be impressed by the images you made. But low and behold, the photos you see on the computer aren't nearly as compelling as you thought.