Staff

We love outdoor photography but we like it even better when there’s some element of the “extreme” involved. Yes, extreme is tough to define but for this assignment we were looking for images of dizzying mountaintops shot from harrowing angles, exploding volcanoes, dangling ice climbers, kayakers barreling through rapids, or stunning displays of weather. We didn’t get all of those things but we did get some amazing images from Shutterbug readers. Check out our favorite 10 outdoor images that made us see the awesomeness and danger of nature in the extreme.

We’re a little surprised—but maybe we shouldn’t be—that Fine Art Photography was one of our most popular and most competitive assignments yet. Maybe it’s because fine art photography, as a category, can encompass so many different subjects, including landscapes, cityscapes, macros, wide angles, long exposures, abstracts, portraits, nudes, semi-nudes, black and whites, color photos, surreal photos, hyperreal photos, nature photos, and on and on and on.

Beautiful lighting, in many ways, is what photography is all about. And as our readers proved with this month’s submissions, if you want great lighting, all you need to do is look outside your window. While it’s not entirely surprising, our 10 favorite photos from this month’s assignment are all bathed in natural light. The results are simply radiant.

For this assignment, we wanted you to go all dark and moody and share images that recalled classic “film noir” movies. For those readers who skipped Cinema Appreciation class, film noir is a French term used to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas from the 1940s and ’50s. But we weren’t looking for crime scenes (necessarily). Here’s what we asked you to shoot for: gritty, high-contrast images, preferably in black and white, captured in low-light conditions. Of course, color photos were eligible, too, but we wanted them shadowy and mysterious: more Edward Hopper than Walt Disney.