Outdoor Photography How To

Autumn is our favorite time of year for nature photography, and scenes of colorful reflections on a lake, stream, or pond offer abundant opportunities for capturing spectacular landscape photos.

Natural looking outdoor portraits can be difficult to make, especially under harsh lighting conditions. Using flash can help you meet this challenge, but only if you employ the proper technique. 

Landscape photographers who always stow their gear when the weather turns bad miss out on a whole realm of unique opportunities. In this tutorial you’ll learn how to shoot images that capture the essence of moody, rainy days, and make dramatic black-and-white conversions of your photos in Lightroom. 

“Focus stacking” is a powerful image-editing technique for increasing the apparent depth of field in an image, and it’s relatively easy to accomplish. The idea is to shoot several photos of a scene at slightly different distances, and then merge the sharpest portions of each shot using Photoshop, Lightroom or another editing program.

Most photographers love their state-of-the-art cameras and premium glass, and they strive to capture perfectly exposed images from the best locations possible. But according to one top pro, all of that is meaningless unless you have the patience to wait for the decisive moment before snapping the shutter.

Not long ago we featured a tutorial from photographer Evan Ranft describing composition mistakes that cause “eyeball confusion” in photos. In this latest video, Ranft demonstrates four more common errors that can ruin an otherwise great cityscape image.

Romanian nature photographer Toma Bonciu (AKA “Photo Tom”) is one of our favorite sources of quick and helpful videos for outdoor shooters. This episode is what you might call a “learning how to see” tutorial, that will also unburden you of carrying extra gear.