Outdoor Photography How To

One of the challenges with landscape photography is maximizing depth of field. That’s because well-composed images often incorporate important elements in the foreground, midground and background. Shooting with small aperture settings helps, but that approach often causes image quality to suffer, and may not yield the wide range of sharpness you desire.

Outdoor scenes often appear less impressive on the computer than they did through the viewfinder, and the problem never seems to be better colors and contrast than we remember. The opposite is usually true, which is why most photographers edit their work.

So what goes into making an epic landscape photograph? That’s a difficult, if not impossible, question to answer because the notion of artistic beauty is a very subjective matter. What we do know, however, is that you have to check a few boxes off your list before any image can be considered fantastic.

Experienced landscape photographers often make an artistic decision before setting up a shot, and it's one less-experienced shooter often ignore; namely, whether to capture the image in color or black a white. The decision you make can have a huge impact on the photos that follow.

The weather is nice and warm, flowers are blooming, and there are bugs and other tiny creatures everywhere you look. That means it macro time, and if you need a quick refresher you’ve come to the right place.

We all strive to make photographs that stand out from the crowd, and sometimes that means camera settings and shooting techniques that stray from conventional wisdom. Another way to give images a unique look is to employ unconventional editing techniques to create an eye-catching effect.

It’s an unfortunate fact than many photographers routinely hold their camera at eye level and point it straight ahead. There’s nothing wrong with doing this, and nice images are often the result, but sometimes there’s a better way.