landscapes

Outdoor photographers are trained to recognize good light. For most situations, this means the “golden times” right after sunrise and before sunset, and sometimes the pastel light just before dawn and at dusk. Of course, depending on your latitude, the “golden hour” can sometimes be more like the “golden ten minutes.” Other times, sunrises and sunsets just don’t happen. Clouds in the wrong place on the horizon can kill your chance at amazing light, and weather conditions are often unpredictable, as my students discovered a few weeks ago in South Dakota, where we got fogged in until after 10AM one day.

Photographs have no depth. They're two-dimensional facsimiles of a three-dimensional world.

But photographers, like magicians, deal in illusion. If we understand what creates the illusion of depth in a photograph and how to enhance that illusion, we can make our images more believable.

When we think of landscape photography, many of us tend to think of our wide-angle lenses. There are situations, though, in which a telephoto lens is a better choice—or the only choice.

A contrast mask is one of the most useful processing techniques I know of. Many people seem unaware of the technique. It's very easy to learn and to apply.

Things start to go wrong before the sun is up. Some photographic outings are like that.