Outdoor Tips

It's winter, and with the season come wonderful opportunities to produce some great snow and ice photos. On the following pages are a few tips to help you do just that.

The basic idea is to have the brightest areas of snow or ice appear white, but with a trace of detail. Very small areas can be blank white, but large areas should have some texture and detail.

Autumn is a season of change, accompanied by colorful foliage, pumpkin patches, and costumed children decked out for Halloween. Days become shorter and the sun is positioned lower in the southern sky, creating warmer light than in the summer months.

If you want to photograph fall colors, find out when the peak time will be.

Beautiful scenic views rank among our most popular subjects to photograph, but surprisingly, they can be one of the most challenging subjects to capture on film or a memory card. The human eye perceives a scene differently than the camera does--we tend to see selectively, while the camera lens simply takes it all in. Also, there are elements that add to our experience...

Shooting good photos in dim light is challenging, but can also be quite rewarding, because capturing the feel of the existing light generally produces a more pleasant picture than using on-camera flash.

The basic problems facing the low-light photographer are being able to use a fast enough shutter speed to permit hand-held shooting, and being able to use a small enough lens aperture to...

Photographs of beautiful landscapes made in the right conditions can be absolutely stunning. The keys are to be there in those conditions, and to be ready to record them when you find them.

You can greatly enhance your chances of being there at the right time by doing your research. It's frustrating to travel to a stunning scenic site, only to be socked in by a blizzard—or to find...

You don't need a lot of fancy equipment to get good bird photos. Professional bird photographers do use some serious items (the 600mm f/4 supertelephoto lens favored by many costs more than my whole "bird" outfit, which includes both 35mm and digital AF SLR bodies), and you probably need similar gear and...