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Keep Taking Pictures After Sunset!

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Every once in awhile I find myself somewhere where there is a large number of people watching a sunset – and where there are people watching a sunset, there are people taking photos of it.

One interesting trend that I have noticed over the years is that as soon as the sun drops below the horizon, everyone puts their cameras away.

That’s it – show’s over – good job nature, nothing more to see here.

We all love a good sunset – but the best photos can often be captured after sunset – so in this article I want to show you some before and after examples of photos taken after sunset to hopefully inspire you to keep your camera out after the sun goes down.

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Ansel Adams’ biggest secret to stunning photography

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Ansel Adams was one of those people that becomes more and more fascinating the more you learn about him. Each bit of information you gained made you want to learn even more about either the man himself or photography in general.

In a video recently uploaded to Advancing Your Photography’s YouTube channel, host Mark Silber interviews his son, Michael Adams, and looks at how Ansel discovered what became his biggest epiphany in photography.

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What the heck is hyperfocal distance?

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I often get the feeling that photography is talked and written about as if its practitioners have an innate knowledge of the terms involved. Any craft or profession comes with its own specialist language, but if you’re new to it—and even if you’re not—you can often feel overwhelmed by the terminology, let alone the technicalities of the medium. Thinking back ‘hyperfocal distance’ is one of the terms that most baffled me.

You will most likely hear ‘hyperfocal distance’ mentioned in relation to landscape photography. It describes a mathematically calculated sweet-spot that, when you focus there, maximises the depth-of-field across your scene. For, while you might believe that using a small aperture and focusing at infinity would do the job, it doesn’t.

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How much landscape Photoshop is still a fair game?

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For a start, I think I am guilty of the very thing I am mentioning in this post, so, no need to comment about that at the bottom, plus, I also know that nothing I say here is new – but to me it’s becoming more and more prominent in my eyes.  The question is this – Should you be morphing your landscape images into something you prefer over the natural lay of the land ?.

I am all for removing the odd sheep or road sign to enhance the story or to clean up the narrative of what you are trying to say but to quite literally move or add mountains – that might be too much.  The other week I was out shooting in the UK, the South Pennines, at a place called High Force in fact. I wanted to try out the new 15 stop filter from Lee Filters.  I found it really difficult to get a long enough exposure to get the water following yet keeping the sky in.

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See How Photographer Tim Heaton Creates Amazing Winter Landscapes of Glencoe, Scotland

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Covering an array of mountains with names he refuses to even attempt to pronounce, landscape & travel photographer Thomas Heaton takes us on a whirlwind tour of Glencoe to photograph some amazing winter landscapes.

In this video documenting his two-and-a-bit-day visit, Thomas talks to us throughout his journey, explaining what he looks for in a landscape and how he captures it when he finds it.

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Get Up To $100,000 Per Year Doing Ansel Adams’ Job For The National Park Service

If you thought that film is dead and that there’s no money to be made in nature photography, you’d better think again.

74 years after the National Park Service commissioned the great Ansel Adams to document the National Parks, the NPS is looking for a full-time photographer to perform a similar job, and is offering a salary of up to $100,000 per year.

One of the fortunate photographer’s duties will be to capture large-format photos for the Library of Congress collection.

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How To Scout Awesome Locations For Landscape Photography

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One crucial element with Landscape photography is well…. the landscape. And while the photographer and the gear both come into play when shooting landscape, the primary star of the shoot is the land.

While jumping into a car, parking and starting to hike, while looking for a good location has some chances of succeeding, going to a location that you KNOW for a fact that has potential can drastically increase your hit/miss ratio.

So how do you go about finding good locations to shoot at? Landscape photographer Craig McCormick of Destructive Pixels has a neat workflow for doing online research and finding good locations to shoot at. (Or course, using online research tools is a almost a certain guarantee that you will be taking a photo where such photo was already taken, but this is an inherent trait with landscape photography in general)

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An ‘Open Letter’ to Landscape Photographers: It’s Time for an Etiquette Check

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YOUR SHOTS ARE NOT THAT UNIQUE, SO THERE’S NO REASON TO RUIN IT FOR EVERYONE ELSE.

Have you ever noticed that when you go to a Costco gas station, the rows of vehicles can be so orderly with everyone nicely lined up with a general polite and cordial demeanor. But once those friendly drivers park their fueled cars in the lot and trek inside the Costco store, all matters of civility, politeness and order disappears the moment you approach one of the food sample stands. Shoppers jockey their carts for position to seize that small pizza sample, blocking the little ones from taking cups of trail mix, and snatching that last mini-cup of yogurt like it’s the last one cup of yogurt for all of mankind.[Read More…]

These Are the Most Stunning Landscape Images from Google Earth

Google Earth is an incredible program with many practical applications.  For instance, I use it frequently for creating custom files for my handheld GPS and for mapping upcoming outdoor excursions.  One of the most powerful features of Google Earth is its stunning satellite imagery which covers the four corners of the globe.  This means that, for those too lazy/broke to travel the globe in real life, you can take in the splendors of the earth right from your desktop.  And, since Google Earth Pro went free earlier this year, you can “capture” it all in stunning HD.

Earth View is boasts having “a collection of the most beautiful and striking landscapes found in Google Earth.”  These images comprise varied settings from deserts to oceans, from prairies to mountains…and pretty much everything in between.  All of the hard work of location scouting has been done for you, the photos have been captured, and all you have to do is simply revel in a whole lot of awesome.

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12 Step Program for Editing Landscape Photography Without Plugins, Presets or Actions

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Have you ever been browsing through 500px wondering “what do I have to do to get my landscape photos to look like that”?

Well, the good news is that its probably a lot easier than you think – and you don’t even need plugins, presets or actions to do it.

So in this post, I am going to share my twelve step process to editing landscape photography.

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