Outdoor Photography How To

It's usually pretty easy to find a beautiful landscape scene while traveling through the backcounty, but it can be far more challenging to translate what you see in the viewfinder to an exceptional image. In this episode from one of our favorite young outdoor photographers you'll learn four shooting and editing tips that anyone can accomplish with ease.

Photographer Austin James Jackson is a Utah-based pro who shares in-the-field videos and post-processing tutorials that will help landscape shooters of all skills levels improve their results. This episode describes how to inject depth and dimension for attention-grabbing landscape photos.

Jackson puts it like this: "Creating depth in your images in one of the best ways you can enhance your landscape photography, and I'm going to cover how to do this with just a few clicks in the camera or on the computer." The techniques you'll learn in barely 14 minutes are equally powerful for improving other types of outdoor photography.

Jackson begins with a simple image-editing trick for adding more contrast to the foreground of a shot as compared to areas that are further back in the frame. He explains that landscape scenes inherently display more contrast in areas close to the camera because faraway elements tend to suffer from atmospheric haze.

It's easy to accentuate this disparity with a simple and effective Lightroom edit—thereby increasing the apparent depth throughout the image. What about when you're out in the field? Jackson describes the importance of "thinking about separation in your images." In other words, consider how objects, the foreground, and the background interact to significantly boost depth.

This technique can be accomplished with the careful use of light, but Jackson says "it can be a lot easier to do this via color and paying close attention to what appears behind the key element in a scene." You'll also see how a small shift in your vantage point factors into the equation.

There are two more foolproof methods to go; one accomplished in the camera and the other during post processing. Along the way you'll pick up some valuable compositional advice for injecting dimension and eye appeal to every image you shoot.

After watching the video head over to Jackson's instructional YouTube channel where you'll find many more videos targeted at landscape photographers and others who regularly shoot in the great outdoors.

And if you want to do things differently and capture photos with a unique look, be sure to watch an earlier tutorial from another accomplished pro who demonstrates why and how you should experiment with shooting landscape photographs after dark.