The concept of personal style is a fundamental topic in all art, not just photography. Everyone has their own way of seeing the world, and everything that people create is based upon this underlying uniqueness. In terms of photography, though, even mentioning personal style can seem strange — since our work is inherently based upon the real world, is it even possible to have a unique style? This question is especially relevant for fields like landscape and wildlife photography, which…
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How to Use Lightroom: A Complete Tutorial for Beginners
Adobe Lightroom is a behemoth of photography software with enough functions and processes to make any photographer crazy. At the simplest level, though, Lightroom was created to help you do just three main things: sort your photos, post-process them, and export them. On Photography Life alone, we already have more than 100 articles about Lightroom — the equivalent of several books — and other websites have countless more. Clearly, it is an important topic to learn, whether you are just…
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How to Get Enough Depth of Field for Landscapes at Night
One of the challenges of nighttime photography — particularly Milky Way and star photography — is to get enough depth of field. If you’re focused at the horizon, and you’re using the widest possible aperture on your lens, how could your foreground possibly be sharp? Yet, if you look at galleries online, you’ll see countless photographers capturing perfectly sharp photos of a landscape underneath the night sky. What techniques are they using? In this quick guide, I’ll lay out a…
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Four WINNING April Fool’s Day Photography Tips — You Won’t Believe #4
Happy April Fool’s Day! Each year, we try to write an article or two to remind people about the lighter side of photography. Last year, when we said that our entire team was switching over to Canon and refusing to review any other equipment, a solid number of people believed us. Great! Now that it’s 2017, we’re upping the ante by writing four top tips to improve your photography this April, including suggestions that will remain relevant even if Artificial Intelligence…
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Why the Technical Stuff Matters
Along with normal how-to articles and essays, I’ve always liked reading and writing very technical, nitty-gritty articles about photography — sometimes, articles on topics that rarely come up while actually taking pictures. In fact, I usually don’t even use my own sharpest aperture charts in the field, as useful as they are, since I don’t like carrying around charts. So, then, does all that technical stuff matter? Is it even worth talking about in the first place? These questions are very important to ask, since most people don’t want waste their…
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How to Find Beautiful Landscapes
Fundamentally, landscape photography is about the landscape that you capture. Although your subject isn’t the only important part of a photo — light and composition are also crucial — it is the cornerstone of a successful image. Even the best photographers in the world need to capture interesting subjects, or their work won’t have any appeal. In the article below, I’ll cover some of the top tips to finding great subjects for landscape photography, from in-depth planning to scouting for…
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ISO Invariance Explained
ISO invariance is one of the most talked-about topics in photography today, yet most people don’t really understand what it is. That isn’t a surprise; ISO invariance can be very technical and counter-intuitive, and it doesn’t fit well with many photographers’ general understanding of ISO. However, ISO invariance is an important topic, especially since many cameras today are close to being ISO invariant. If you want to maximize your camera’s dynamic range and avoid using “useless” ISO values, this topic…
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Improving Your Photos Without Buying More Gear
If you want to take your photos to another level, camera equipment is a natural place to look. It’s a very tangible part of photography; we work with our gear constantly. In fact, new equipment often does help you capture certain photos more easily, or it improves the technical quality of the images you take. However, it’s easy to get swept away in this marketing message and forget that there are other, better ways to improve your photos — techniques…
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How to Use Telephoto Lenses
Telephotos – lenses that are “zoomed in” to a significant degree – are wonderful tools for almost any genre of photography, but they aren’t necessarily easy to use. In particular, telephoto lenses will magnify any camera shake and provide a much thinner depth of field compared to wide angles. Don’t let that stop you, though. Telephotos have a unique way of showcasing the world — one which may be ideal for your photos. In this article, I’ll go in detail about…
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How to Focus for Star Photography
If you like taking landscape photos at night, you’ll surely be familiar with one of the main challenges: successfully focusing on the stars. Often, you can’t use autofocus, since there isn’t enough light for your camera’s focusing system to lock onto anything. Unfortunately, even manual focus doesn’t always work, which means you may need to use some out-of-the-box techniques to make it work. This article goes through some of the most useful tools that you have at your disposal.
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When to Use a Higher ISO for Landscape Photography
For landscape photography, most of the time, you’ll end up using your camera’s base ISO. That’s the power of a tripod; it lets you set long enough shutter speeds to capture a bright photo, even in dark environments at low ISO values. However, settings like this do not work for all images. Sometimes, depending upon the landscape, you’ll need to raise your ISO in order to capture a successful photograph. This article dives into the most common of those situations.
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Five Hidden Landscape Photography Tips
I’ve heard a lot of “hidden tips” for landscape photography over the years. Most of them weren’t helpful at all. But, along the way, I have collected a handful that really are useful — nuggets of wisdom that I still use today, and that I recommend to other photographers as often as possible. I’ve included the five most valuable hidden tips below. Perhaps you’ve heard some of these before, but I hope that at least a few of them will be completely…
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Rule of Thirds: Does It Really Work?
Perhaps you read our composition tips for landscape photography and realized something interesting: It never mentions the rule of thirds. If you aren’t familiar with this technique, you’re rare — the rule of thirds is, by far, the most common rule of composition you’ll find in photography. But does it actually work? Can it really improve your images? The truth is more complex than you may think.
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Seven Tips to Pick the Perfect Shutter Speed in Photography
Shutter speed is one of the most important settings to know as a photographer. It doesn’t get any more fundamental than this. To be specific, shutter speed is the length of time your camera sensor (or film) is exposed to light — essentially, how long your camera spends taking a photo. As simple as this sounds, though, shutter speed has an enormous influence on how your images appear. In this article, I will cover seven of the most important tips…
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Five Advanced Landscape Photography Tips
Most of the time, landscape photography tips are intended for beginners rather than advanced photographers. That’s a problem — it says to advanced photographers that there is nothing new to discover. But landscape photography is incredibly complex, and there are still techniques out there for everyone. This article goes through some of the most important. If you’re an advanced photographer, and you’re not sure what else there is to improve, my hope is that this will be a good start.
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Aperture and F-Stop Explained for Beginners
Aperture is perhaps the single most important camera setting that every photographer needs to know. Whether you do landscape photography, portrait photography, or anything in between, you have to set your aperture properly in order to capture successful photos. Below, I’ll dive some important terminology — aperture, f-stop, and f-number — and talk about how to use them for your own photography.
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Going Lightweight for Photography Expeditions
It’s almost midnight and still bright outside. I’m in Iceland during the summer solstice, when the sun never really sets. I’ve packed all the camera equipment I need for an overnight trek through amazing scenery, along with food, water, extra clothes, and other miscellaneous gear. How much does my fully loaded bag weigh? Eight kilos (eighteen pounds). This might not seem very lightweight, but, for a photography-centered expedition, it isn’t bad at all. So, how does that look in practice?
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Why Take Landscape Photos?
People take landscape photos for a variety of reasons. At a personal level, I know that my motivation is constantly changing. Today, landscape photography is a great way to be outdoors. Tomorrow, I’ll spend a rainy day editing the photos I just captured. Digging deeper, though, there are more fundamental reasons to take landscape photos, and they all have to do with your outlook on the world.
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The Best Night Photography Lenses for Nikon Cameras
Nighttime photography is something that a lot of photographers enjoy; I certainly do, along with countless others. Modern cameras can capture more detail at night than we can see with our naked eyes, revealing entire worlds that couldn’t exist otherwise. However, more than almost any other genre, night photography also challenges your camera equipment to its most extreme. In this article, I will go through some of the top lenses for Nikon cameras if you want to take pictures at night, including information about their…
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What Makes a Good Night Photography Lens?
Everywhere in the world, across the course of a year, the sun will be below the horizon just about 50% of the time. Although it can take a while for sunset to fade away completely, it’s safe to say that we spend a huge portion of our lives under dark skies. Normally, nighttime isn’t something that people equate with being awake, of course, but landscape photographers are strange people. In fact, moonlight and the Milky Way can lead to some…
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