Outdoor Photography How To

A couple days ago we featured an interesting tutorial explaining how to shoot intentionally blurry photos and capture artistic images full of motion and emotion. Today it's back to a primary goal of most landscape photographers; namely, the best way to maximize sharpness when shooting in the field.

If you're a regular visitor to the Shutterbug website you know that we frequently post tutorials on attaining fast and precise focus. That's because many of our favorite instructors have a personal technique that differ from others, and it's worth giving them all a try until you find a method that works best for you.

We’ve talked a lot in the past about the difficulty of properly exposing landscape photos, because of ever-changing light and the wide range of brightness that often occurs within the frame. It’s often just as challenging, for different reasons, to attain proper focus—an equally critical consideration.

Let's say you've tried all the conventional advice for capturing sharp photos, and some of your images are still soft. You use a tripod, choose the right aperture, shutter speed, and focus area, yet nothing seems to work.

So you come across a beautiful scene, use the camera’s histogram to nail exposure, and find a great composition. Well, you just made a great shot—unless you pull it up on the computer and discover that the image is soft.

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.