How-To

Create The Old Masters Look With Modern Gear

The literal trailblazers of nature photography—Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Eliot Porter, Carleton Watkins, Edward Muybridge and others—carried heavy and sensitive equipment through miles of unpaved wilderness in order to bring back photographs of the...

Primal Perception

The way we see color today is shaped by events from 35 million years ago, when some nocturnal primates shifted to a diurnal lifestyle, and began to seek out leaves and fruits by day instead of insects and other prey by night.

Local Knowledge

I’ve said it before, and I’m here to say it again. Get to know a landscape! Get to know your landscape, a favorite location where you can return often in all kinds of light and weather and season. Hopefully, this will be a place nearby where, by loo...

The Lowdown On Zooms

My son has a digital point-and-shoot camera with an 18x zoom, but when you zoom to the extreme end, the viewfinder displays a message that it’s a digital zoom, and the resulting quality isn’t very good. Is it also true that zoom lenses on D-SLRs don’t...

Web Optimization Part II

In the January/February issue, we addressed the concepts of examining your target audience and choosing the appropriate file size and image size for the intended display. Here, we’ll look at the important steps of applying sharpness and applying...

Be A Photography Rebel

In the age of inexpensive, high-quality digital cameras, suddenly everyone is a photographer. The digital revolution has unleashed a horde of shooters, all vying to become the next Ansel Adams. As a result, it gets tougher and tougher to stand out...

Adventure, Kiwi Style

As I write this, I’ve relocated and have been living for less than a week in my new home base on the South Island of New Zealand. The coastal town of Dunedin will be base camp for the next six months. From my experience, New Zealand could very well be...

Lights, Locomotive, Action!

One of my favorite things to do in between trips is to find photographic projects that are close to home. If I don’t have to lug my stuff through airports, on and off airplanes and in and out of taxis, I have that much more energy to make pictures. ...

Just A Little Background Information

I want to take wildflower images with the background thrown completely out of focus. The problem is that my telephoto lens (75-300mm) is an ƒ/5.6 lens, and I fear that it won’t do an acceptable job of making the background nothing more than color. Do I...

Geotagging

Like many photographers, I take a lot of photos and struggle with the organizational aspects of my imaging workflow. While I do my best to tag images when importing them to my PC, I typically rely on the date and my memory to find the photos I’m l...

Southwestern Safaris

So a wildlife photo safari to Africa or the Pantanal isn’t in your budget. Don’t put away your camera! Several ranches with spectacular wildlife diversity and facilities for photographers await in the Texas Hill Country, the Rio Grande Valley and the...

Legacy: Think Like Ansel Adams Today

The legacy of Ansel Adams is a driving creative force that motivates every outdoor photographer. Through his treks to Yosemite Valley and other American landscapes, Adams almost single-handedly created modern nature photography. We know many readers...

Don’t Take My Kodachrome Away

Q I’m using a Nikon Coolscan V to digitize some of my film images into versions I can display or market online. I choose good, technically correct slides to convert. Typically, E-6 images (Velvia, Ektachrome VS, Ektachrome G...

Shoot More, Process Less

In this age of digital cameras, super-computers and image-editing software that requires a PhD to master, it’s all too easy to spend hours under the soft glow of a computer screen endlessly fine-tuning your images. I call it the “postproduction suc...

Be The King In The Rookery

Walking past the very alive and very smelly alligators I can hear what sounds like a million voices all talking in the distance. As I round the corner in the predawn light, I can make out, at first, some dark shapes. Walking further, it appears as if...

Sharp Is King

In the quest for high-quality digital capture in the uncontrolled setting of the outdoors, we’re always seeking ways to overcome ambient conditions that pose obstacles to our photographic vision.

Photoshop CS4 And The Nature Photographer

Many photographers anticipate the arrival of a new version of Photoshop. Should I upgrade or not? Photoshop CS4 offers outstanding tools, naturally, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily for everyone.

Web Optimization, Part I

Optimizing photographs for display on the web is as essential as ever. While many photographers focus attention on optimizing photographs for print, it’s important to recognize how powerful first impressions can be with web-based photographs.

10 Tips For Better Autofocus

It’s easy to take autofocus for granted. I know, I do. This technology is amazing—your camera has to figure out what should be sharp in a scene, focus the lens and take the picture, all in a fraction of a second.

Holiday Book Guide

Lining the bookshelf with new large-format photography hardcovers this holiday season shouldn’t be too difficult.

Photoshop Secrets Of The Pros

There’s no shortage of options when it comes to using Adobe Photoshop to improve the quality of your nature photography. Photoshop is, after all, the standard by which all other image-editing software programs are measured.

Digiscoping

One of the biggest challenges photographing wildlife is having enough magnification. You want to fill the frame and utilize all of the resolution of your digital SLR, but for most of us that means having an extreme telephoto lens, which can be...

Quality Of Light

Family and friends have to get used to a photographer’s definition of good shooting conditions. They’ll ask, “How’s the weather out?”, whereas a photographer will ask, “How’s the light?” One of the key components of any photograph—whether you’re working...

Keeping Your Camera Steady

Anyone who has attended a George Lepp seminar knows that tripods are a favorite subject! And in the age of digital, where multiple composited images solve problems such as excessive contrast and limited depth of field, a tripod is a must.

The Mobile Photographer

I’m limited to movement in a walker or electric cart. I would like to start photography again. Is there a tool that could be clamped onto the walker or cart that would hold a camera out of the way while I move into position and then would permit the...

BetterPhoto For Better Photos

The Internet has made it easier than ever to find information on almost any subject, and photography is no exception. While reading up on how to use your camera or the basics of exposure, many people learn faster and better with feedback. But...

Dust & Snow: Shooting In Extreme Conditions

The wind is howling—not sure of the speed exactly, but the weather report suggested gusts of 30 mph or more with a wind chill in the area of -50º F. Wind chill is an understatement when the ambient temperature is already -30º F. The word “chill” seems a...

Multitasking

Shooting and compositing multiple exposures can provide you with unique and creative images. Many camera bodies have settings that prevent the shutter from advancing, allowing an infinite number of exposures to be made on the same frame. For most of...

Bird Photo Tips

Birds are fascinating critters, a fact that hits home more frequently the more I hang out with them. Photographing birds is a challenge, but a most enjoyable and rewarding one. Here are some keys to creating better bird photos.

ACDSee Pro 2

ACDSee Pro 2 is the latest upgrade to ACD Systems’ popular workflow-management software. Besides making it easy to download, organize, archive and locate your images, ACDSee Pro 2 provides powerful editing and RAW-processing capabilities. One-click...