Nature Photography How To

Whether you own a new mirrorless camera or shoot with a long-time friend, choosing the best settings for your style of photography is one key to achieving optimum results. If you're thinking to yourself, "I've already configured my camera properly," think again because there may be a few oft-ignored camera settings that you should at least try out.

We regularly urge you to try something different, capture images outside your comfort zone, and create photos that stand out from the rest. Today’s beginners guide to panorama photography is a great way to do exactly that.

You don’t start off talking about photography when you talk to Paul Edmondson about how he creates his striking fine art landscape images. You talk about what he notices and what he chooses from all that the landscape offers. 

We repeatedly discuss the concept of sharpness because it's such a critical component of all really good images. But there's an oft-ignored concept that you may not have heard until now; revealing why some sharp images appear soft to you and the viewer .

After almost 40 years of making platinum prints, chemical fumes had harmed Tom Millea’s lungs to a point where he could no longer go into the darkroom. He says, “Closing my studio was traumatic in the extreme.” He didn’t believe that anyone else was capable of printing his work as he envisioned it. He liked computers but had no desire to try to make digital prints look like his platinum prints. “One technique could not replace the other,” he says. He selected prints from his inventory to sell in gallery shows and considered himself retired.

But by 2004, when the color palette of digital inks had changed, Millea thought his prints were beautiful, and comparable with his darkroom images. He began making digital color photographs full-time using an Epson 2200 printer. Over the next five years, he says, “By myself, step by step, I learned to use the computer to make images I felt were uniquely my own.” He eventually put together a complete digital studio with Apple computers and two Epson printers, the 4800 and the 9800. He could then make his own prints up to 40x60”.

Long lenses are exciting to use because they enable us to view and capture images with far greater magnification than what we can see with our eyes. They also deliver dramatic, compressed perspectives and enable photographers to isolate subjects from busy backgrounds.

Arriving at a proper exposure can often be a challenge, especially when shooting under difficult lighting conditions outdoors. In this helpful video, Romanian pro photographer Toma Bonciu explains how to read a camera’s histogram and use the information to nail perfect exposures with ease.