Outdoor Photography How To

There are worse things than being a beginning photographer. After all, you can make big improvements in your skills in a relatively short time. But if you consider yourself a more advanced shooter, and you still make beginner mistakes, that’s a cause for concern.

Serious landscape photographers tend to carry a lot of lens filters, including those for enhancing colors, to others that reduce the amount of light entering the camera and enable slow shutter speed effects. In the video below, you’ll see what an experienced pro says is the one filter he never leaves home without.

For those new to wildlife photography, birds provide a great opportunity for capturing impressive images. If you’re lucky enough to have a wildlife refuge nearby, that’s a great place to start. But you can also make some great photographs in your own backyard.

(Editor’s Note: Exploring Light is a monthly Shutterbug column featuring tips, tricks, and photo advice from professional photographers in the Canon Explorers of Light and Canon Legends education program. This month's column is by Adam Jones with tips on photographing wildlife and landscapes in our National Parks.

The practice of dodging and burning to manipulate exposure in different areas of an image dates back to the early days of film photography and the wet darkroom. Today we do the same thing in the digital darkroom to add drama and depth to our photos.

Have you ever marveled at long exposure nighttime photos and said to yourself, “I wish I could do that?” Actually you can, because these striking images of colorful light trails from cars and other eye-popping effects are quite easy to achieve.

Tilt-shift lenses are very powerful tools for all sorts of shooting from landscape to architectural photography. They enable you to fine-tune perspective and enhance depth of field by maximizing focus throughout an entire scene.