Dan Havlik

One of the most misunderstood and overlooked of photo accessories is, without a doubt, the lowly lens hood. At best, most photographers simply take lens hoods for granted. At worst, they leave them in their camera bags where they serve no purpose except to take up valuable space where you could be storing filters or extra batteries.

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.

This amazing image of a baby humpback whale by Karim Iliya earned him a coveted 2018 Hasselblad Masters Award, which is one of the premier international competitions for professional photographers. Iliya captured the award-winning shot off the islands of Vava’u in Tonga during a freedive.

Why go wide when you can go long? That’s the message of Shutterbug’s latest how-to video tutorial offering five reasons why you should be using a telephoto lens to shoot landscape photos.