If you want to shoot sharp photos of stars, it helps to have the right lens for the job. After all, a good lens during the day might be a dud for resolving pinpoint stars in a photo’s corners at night. Here, I’ve tested five popular wide-angle lenses for astrophotography: the Laowa 12mm f/2.8, Rokinon 14mm f/2.4, Samyang 14mm f/2.8, Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8, and Irix 15mm f/2.4. How do they compare?
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The Refining Process: How Bad Photos Get Better
I suspect that many photographers have realized their best photos frequently come after several “getting there” images – scenes where something interesting stands out, and you gradually improve upon your early attempts, creating a composition that looks more and more refined by the end. The trend has been so clear in my personal photography that I thought it would be useful to show some examples, including how to apply this concept to your own work.
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Star Trail Photography Tutorial
In this article, I will demonstrate how to take photos of star trails when photographing the night sky. I will explain what type of camera, lens, and other gear is critical, as well as the importance of composition during dark nights; it is very important to know how the stars move on the sky to be able to visualize the final composition. I will also talk in detail about two main challenges: how to focus in darkness and how to…
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The Most Stubborn Myths in Landscape Photography
Chances are good that you’ve run across plenty of inaccuracies and misinformation in the online world of photography, landscape or otherwise. Some myths, though, stand the test of time, outlasting years of diligent debunking. Below are four of the most common myths and misconceptions you’ll find in the field of landscape photography, including some which are prevalent even among advanced photographers.
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Photographing an Ultra-High Contrast Landscape: Case Study
It’s a simple fact of life for many photographers that excessive contrast sometimes ruins a photo. If you’re photographing a scene with bright highlights and deep shadows, it can be a nightmare to expose your image properly – not losing any details on either side of the histogram. Here’s how I dealt with such a situation while taking pictures during an amazing sunrise, and how you can apply the same lessons to your own photography.
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Best Camera Settings for Astrophotography
Anyone who has ever tried to take pictures of the night sky knows that it can be a challenge. If your camera settings aren’t optimal, you may end up with a dark photo, motion blur, or unsharp corners. Things get even more difficult if you want a sharp foreground, or if you try to capture deep-sky pictures of distant interstellar objects. Hopefully, this article will give you a good idea of how to set your camera properly for astrophotography.
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A Professional’s Retrospective: Exploring The Fine Art of Nature
I was talking to someone recently who asked me what kind of photographs I make. I paused for a moment to ponder this basic but critical question, then answered that I specialize in photographing the details of nature. Although I revel in capturing the majestic grand scene when the elements all come together, I prefer focusing on the intimate landscape. Rather than describing the full scene in front of me, I zoom in tightly, attempting to imbue my images with…
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Hiking the Laugavegur in Iceland: What Worked, What Didn’t
I’ve always preferred hiking more than any other method of finding landscapes to photograph. There’s something to be said for stopping at any point you see something interesting, knowing that only a small percentage of other travelers have taken pictures at the same spot. I recently dragged that philosophy to the extreme, spending nine days on Iceland’s Laugavegur trail and several side hikes. Here, I’ll summarize the best and worst equipment I used along the way.
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Going Lightweight for Photography Expeditions
It’s the middle of the night and still bright outside. I’m in Iceland a few weeks after the summer solstice, and I just finished the longest hike of my life – a nine-day version of the Laugavegur. I’ll have several photos and articles to publish now that it’s done, including this first post about the process of going lightweight on such a long hike. How do you trim your camera setup for such an ordeal?
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Five Advanced Landscape Photography Tips
Often, landscape photography tips are meant for people who are just starting out and trying to get the hang of things. That’s great in many ways, but it does carry 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 for everyone to learn. This article goes through some of the most important ones with regards to creativity.
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How Photography Inspired Me to Love Science and Preserve the Planet
Science has a way of making heads turn away. The more complex it gets, the more abstract it becomes. And if you’re not constantly putting effort into working out the fine intricacies of it all, you might just get too overwhelmed to commit any interest to it. Science communication has been around for a while, then, trying to work out different ways to bring people closer to scientific issues. Today, we see an impressive production of films, videos, podcasts, lectures…
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What to Photograph in South Australia
I read many articles from all around the world sharing beautiful photography locations. However, there seems to be a lack of content about Australia. Having lived here for over five years now, I want to share with you some of the best landscape and wildlife photography locations that I have visited. In this article I am going to focus on South Australia, but I hope to keep building on it and adding new locations when I have the time.
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Photography as Part of the “Second Act” of Our Lives
I have been interested in photography since I was a teenager. However, as so often happens to all of us, life gets in the way of our interests and passions sometimes. Jobs, mortgages, kids, and family responsibilities become our priority in what I have come to call the “First Act” of our lives. Having successfully raised two children into adulthood and recently retired from our jobs, my wife and I have now entered what I refer to as the “Second…
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Telephotos: The Ideal Landscape Photography Lenses?
It’s no secret that landscape photographers love ultra-wides. If your lens isn’t equivalent to at least 16mm, you just aren’t part of the club. And if you really want to prove your worth, you’re definitely using a 14mm lens, or a 12mm, or, for the truly dedicated, a fisheye. (You can always de-fish it in Photoshop, after all.) But what if landscape photography has another side to it – a side that can be just as good? In fact, that…
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Of Light and Landscapes
In the fourth of a series of follow-up articles to The Quality of Light, I will describe my interpretation of the intersection of light and aesthetics in landscape photography as well as the thought process behind the construction of a singular landscape photo. My goal with this essay is to encourage my fellow landscape photographers to be inspired by light in the visualization process.
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A Study in Light, Shadows, and Landscapes
In the third of a series of follow-up articles to The Quality of Light, I will delve into my revered interests in photography: light and landscapes. In this article, I will extend the discussion of the quality of light by examining how landscape photographers of all levels can use light and shadows to create more compelling landscape images. I will also examine briefly the challenges in balancing light and composition in landscape photography.
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Choosing the Best Lens for Landscape Photography
If you’re a landscape photographer, you care about lenses. That is true even if you don’t know it’s true – a good lens is arguably the most important piece of equipment you can own. It is a common saying, and almost entirely accurate, that lenses matter more than your camera. So, what lenses are best for landscape photography, and how do you pick the right ones for your needs? This article covers some of the most important considerations.
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Recommended Camera Settings for Landscape Photography
It is crucial to set your camera properly if you want to take the highest quality landscape photos. However, with the large range of menu options and settings found in cameras today, it isn’t easy to find the optimal setup. This article covers the best camera settings to use for landscape photography, including many options that are “set it and forget it” parts of the menu that you rarely will need to adjust. Keep in mind that all of these…
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Five Tips for Improving Your Landscape Photography Compositions
Whether you are exclusively a landscape photographer or simply someone who likes to capture awesome shots of just about anything, landscape photography can be an excellent way to hone your ability to put together a composition. Lots of subjects that result in excellent shots require a photographer to react quickly in order to capture a moment that will be gone in mere seconds. A landscape, on the other hand, comes with a stillness that allows that same photographer to stop,…
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What is Low-Key Monochrome Photography?
With all the amazing new cameras and lenses creating outstanding color, most of us are flooded with saturated images all over social media. But, a few decades back, most of what we saw were gray worlds. Even though current day photography can bring out millions of colors to life, the gray world is calm, peaceful and fascinating on its own. In this article, we shall see how to make interesting monochrome images and bring them to life, in a nutshell.
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