Outdoor Photography How To

This assignment was simple but it was also highly competitive. Yes, we received many lovely landscape photos in our Picture This! gallery on Shutterbug.com, but we were looking for something extra special. And we got it, with these 10 images from readers offering incredible and unique vistas.

Anyone who has walked the streets with a camera (or a smartphone) has witnessed scenes of everyday life that seem too good to pass up for a photograph. But how often do you stop and actually capture them? That’s the trick to great street photography: you’ve got to be ready and you need to have no fear of shooting candid images of people on the street, most times without their permission. But there’s another type of street shooting that can be a little less stressful and that’s urban landscape photography. For this assignment, we asked you to think of your town or city as an urbanized Grand Canyon and to look for unique angles and great lighting to capture the architecture and setting.

It happens to the best of us: Sooner or later we all run out of fresh ideas and inspiration and fall into a rut. So how do you escape the doldrums and get the get the creative juices flowing once again?

I think I speak for nearly every photographer when I say going to a new location excites me, especially if it is one I have dreamed about for years. We all dream of these once-in-a-lifetime photo adventures. But the truth is for most photographers, the majority of our shooting is actually done in locations that are closer to home and allow us to return more regularly.

The first thing most of us think of when we hear the words “Zone System” is the great Ansel Adams, who developed this powerful exposure technique with Fred Archer over 80 years ago. The second thing that often comes to mind is the word “complicated.”

Do you understand the difference between a camera's optical viewfinder (OVF), electronic viewfinder (EVF), sand shooting in Live-View mode? There are important distinctions that affect how you work, and this tutorial from the Adorama TV YouTube channel explains everything you need to know.

We regularly urge you to try something different, capture images outside your comfort zone, and create photos that stand out from the rest. Today’s beginners guide to panorama photography is a great way to do exactly that.