Outdoor Photography How To

Jim Harmer didn’t start out as a travel and nature photographer. He was in law school when the photography bug bit him, and, before he knew it, he was traveling the world, capturing moments in time with his camera.

Photographer Chase Jarvis recently shared this whimsical image on his Facebook page along with the quote “You’ll never influence the world by trying to be like it.” Jarvis’s following of some 140,000 Facebook fans went wild, giving the post nearly 1,500 Likes, 77 shares, and many positive comments.

Located on Havasupai tribal lands, Havasu Falls is in a deep canyon leading to the Colorado River, and requires a 12-mile hike just to get there. The travertine formations at Havasu Falls are created from minerals in the water and over time the water droplets have precipitated away, leaving these intricate formations.

While in Hawaii for a month-long shoot in 2013, Colin Anderson was fortunate enough to meet a native named Pomai. Upon talking to him, Anderson discovered that his lineage dated back 27 generations, which meant his roots predated that of King Kamehameha the Great.

Jim Graham captured this adorable image of a sleeping sled dog in front of a majestic backdrop during a trip this past summer to Greenland. The image was shot in Ilulissat, which is in western Greenland, approximately 220 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

I get ’em. You probably get ’em too. Those feelings of photographic futility when the sky and the ground and your car and your imagination are all the same dim shade of dirty, dingy gray, and there’s really no point to stepping outside to take photographs. How do you beat the bad weather doldrums? Here are a few ideas. 

We love outdoor photography but we like it even better when there’s some element of the “extreme” involved. Yes, extreme is tough to define but for this assignment we were looking for images of dizzying mountaintops shot from harrowing angles, exploding volcanoes, dangling ice climbers, kayakers barreling through rapids, or stunning displays of weather. We didn’t get all of those things but we did get some amazing images from Shutterbug readers. Check out our favorite 10 outdoor images that made us see the awesomeness and danger of nature in the extreme.