“To hills of green and shadows cool,” wrote Rudyard Kipling in his poem A Coming May. And although green vegetation is always welcome after harsh winters, lively plants can complicate bird photography. Grass and leaves can sometimes be overpowering in their distracting randomness and in their crazy effects on background blur.
Composition and Art Category Archive
Is Photography a Numbers Game?
I’m not sure precisely when I crossed 100,000 photos, but I’m well past that mark now. In another few weeks, my Lightroom catalog will hit 200,000. Even these might be rookie numbers if you’re a sports or wildlife photographer, or if you’ve been doing wedding photography for a while.
How to Choose Between Similar Versions of a Photo
Something tough about photography is choosing between similar variations of the same photo. If you're especially shutter-happy, you might end up with many similar photos on your hard drive without a clear "best" image among them. Although you could just pick one of these photos at random, I think that...
Landscape Photography with a Shallow Depth of Field
As a landscape photographer, you have many different ways to control the emotional message of your work. The time of day, your focal length, the direction you face, how you edit the image, and so on – all of these impact the creative feel of a photo. But what about depth of field?
Lessons Learned from Photo Critiques
As many of you know, a recent project we’ve been publishing for our Members is a monthly photo critique livestream. It’s always nice to see the great work you sending us, and we also get to discuss a lot of the non-technical aspects of photography, like composition, light, and color.
Aspect Ratio in Photography: What You Need to Know
The aspect ratio of an image is the ratio between its length and its width. Almost all modern digital cameras create images with a 3:2 or 4:3 aspect ratio, while the 16:9 format is common for video. On the other hand, the aspect ratio of a photo can be changed...
10 Tips to Take More Interesting Wildlife Photos
Wildlife photography is one of the most demanding forms of photography because so much is unpredictable. At times, there are only fleeting moments to capture the shot you want. Sometimes the mentality of "just get any photo" can get in the way of capturing more intentional, artistic, and interesting photos....
From Photography to Commodity: A Technological Metamorphosis
It's often said that there has never been a better time to be a photographer. In one way, I think this is true - more than ever before, we've got the most amazing tools to produce beautiful images. But parallel to the development of these amazing tools, something disturbing has...
The Easiest Way to Improve Your Wildlife Photos? Remember the Background!
There are many reasons why wildlife photos can turn out poorly, but there's one that I see more than anything else. Is it bad focus? Not any more - subject detection has really minimized that problem. What about high ISO noise? Nope, a few clicks and the photo looks clean....
Enjoying Photography in a High-Tech World
In modern times, pursuing photography can feel like walking into a hurricane. It seems that with every passing day, we are bombarded not only with millions of new images, but new gear that seems to need upgrading every few months. And, recently, we're being told that we need to apply...