Nature Photography How To

We all know how a bland, pale sky can spoil an otherwise beautiful nature scene. But if you have a minute to spare, the powerful video below explains how to create dramatic skies and add the WOW factor to images in Photoshop.

Pro photographer Tom Mackie gets so many questions about how to make photos “pop,” he decided to do a whole video on the subject, which we have embedded below. And while a lot of folks might think all you need is some deft Photoshop skills to get your images to sparkle, there’s really a lot more that goes into it than that.

I've always loved the natural world and was hiking, backpacking, and adventuring outdoors long before I first picked up a camera. Simply put, there's a lot of natural beauty in this world: It inspires me, and I've made it my mission in life to share that beauty with others.

Don’t you sometimes wish you could go back in time and give your younger self some advice that you’ve learned much later in life? That’s the crux of landscape photographer Nigel Danson’s video below where he offers “7 Simple Photography Tips I Wish I Knew Earlier.”

The amazing video below by photographer Mark Smith is almost like a National Geographic tour of an entire ecosystem. In this case, it’s the Hood Canal, which is sandwiched between Seattle and the Olympic National Forest in Washington state and “attracts a wide variety of impressive animals,” as Smith puts it. And he will photograph many of them, including, most impressively, soaring and fighting eagles who will battle each other for fresh fish.

Tripods tend to be standard equipment for wildlife photographers striving for optimum sharpness. But when photographing birds, these three-legged camera supports can often be an encumbrance— especially when shooting birds in flight.