Outdoor Photography How To

So you come across a beautiful scene, use the camera’s histogram to nail exposure, and find a great composition. Well, you just made a great shot—unless you pull it up on the computer and discover that the image is soft.

One of the challenges with landscape photography is maximizing depth of field. That’s because well-composed images often incorporate important elements in the foreground, midground and background. Shooting with small aperture settings helps, but that approach often causes image quality to suffer, and may not yield the wide range of sharpness you desire.

Outdoor scenes often appear less impressive on the computer than they did through the viewfinder, and the problem never seems to be better colors and contrast than we remember. The opposite is usually true, which is why most photographers edit their work.

So what goes into making an epic landscape photograph? That’s a difficult, if not impossible, question to answer because the notion of artistic beauty is a very subjective matter. What we do know, however, is that you have to check a few boxes off your list before any image can be considered fantastic.

This tutorial with five pro tips for capturing eye-catching nature and wildlife images is different than others we've featured in the past, thanks to the thoughtful and contemplative style of professional photographer Kevin Nordstrom. You'll follow him explore the shore of a lake while capturing amazing photos of birds, turtles, wildflower and more.

Experienced landscape photographers often make an artistic decision before setting up a shot, and it's one less-experienced shooter often ignore; namely, whether to capture the image in color or black a white. The decision you make can have a huge impact on the photos that follow.

The weather is nice and warm, flowers are blooming, and there are bugs and other tiny creatures everywhere you look. That means it macro time, and if you need a quick refresher you’ve come to the right place.