Category: Tips & Techniques

It’s not the first time that the DSLR has been declared dead, but it may be the first time that a CEO of major camera manufacturer has made it clear that his company cannot compete against smartphone cameras. It was all over the press last …

Within the visual arts, we define Visualization as the practice of seeing in the mind’s eye a finished piece of artwork before it is created. It is a particularly important skill for Art Photographers to learn, and Ansel Adams described the process as follows:

“When I’m ready to make a photograph, I think I quite obviously see in my mind’s eye something that is not literally there in the true meaning of the word. I’m interested in something which is built up from within, rather than just extracted from without.” — Ansel Adams

The Dehaze slider in Lightroom is one of the most powerful and useful tools and produces contrast far beyond what we can do with curves, clarity sliders in Lightroom, or third-party plugins. It brings dynamic contrast to thin or washed out skies and reveals details that you cannot see with your own eyes.

I can’t tell you how many messed up, utterly chaotic, Lightroom catalogs I’ve seen as an Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop Instructor; lost images, lost drives, collections substituting for folders, duplicate images, triplicate images, Photoshop files sent off into the ether and photographers on the verge …

As a rule, I recoil from anything described as “auto,” any promise of instant gratification and the term ‘pleasing image’, which Adobe uses in their description of their new AUTO workflow button, seems ‘snap shotty.’ Well, forget all of that because Lightroom’s new AUTO command is impressive, a feature that you can use with a high degree of confidence in many image situations.

During our National Park Photography Master Class and First Horizons workshops, we are often using filters for photography- specifically neutral density (ND) filters. To be clear, these are full neutral density filters, not gradients which are sometimes used to darken landscape skies.

Creating a powerful, meaningful, and innovative landscape photography composition is a visual challenge for all of us.

For many of us, Creative Landscape Photography Composition is not an intuitive skill. It is something that I work at each time I go to the field such as on this rare windless morning in Mojave National Preserve.