Nature Photography How To

If you’ve ever marveled at a spectacular landscape photograph and wondered how it was made, there’s a good chance the photographer employed a luminosity masking technique in Photoshop that provides extremely precise control over post-processing adjustments.

Researchers at the University of Tokyo used high-speed cameras to study the intricate manner in which ladybugs fold and unfold their wings as you can see in the amazing video below from the National Geographic YouTube channel.

Greg Benz is an accomplished landscape photographer with some serious post-processing skills, and in this Photoshop tutorial he reveals how to create epic seascape images by blending a series of photos into one killer shot.

Spring has (finally) sprung and it’s time to pull out your macro lens and get up close and personal with all the beautiful blooming flowers. To help celebrate the season, we decided to share this stunning time-lapse video that took three years and 8TB of images to create.

Some of you may remember Tom Anderson (AKA MySpace Tom), the Founder of MySpace who sold his social network to Rupert Murdock back in 2005 for a cool $580 million. Ever since, Anderson’s motto is “stop working and start playing” and he’s done that by pursuing a passion for photography.

Color Flow

Last October Shutterbug reader Neil Williams planned a two-day trip to Asheville, North Carolina, “to get some fall color on the Blue Ridge Parkway but the weather didn’t cooperate (heavy rain and complete lack of visibility).” So, he decided to change course slightly and make a quick trip to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee instead. 

Born in 1829, Carleton Watkins was perhaps the greatest of early American Western photographers, yet his images are largely unknown today. His photographs of Yosemite Valley and throughout California’s Sierra Nevada mountains have been compared by some to those of Ansel Adams that followed.