14 Essential Landscape Photography Tutorials

From those cheeky chaps down under we get this from Rob at Lightstalking

The theme of landscape photography repeatedly shows up in the most popular posts on Light Stalking and if the proliferation of websites and magazines specifically about landscape is anything to go by, then it is very popular among the wider photography community too. Getting started in landscape need not be a huge exercise – there are literally hundreds of fantastic tutorials available for free online. We have taken the liberty of collecting some of our favorites.

©Keith Barnes, Tasmania

General Tutorials

Landscape Photography for the Serious Amateur – This remains one of the all time most popular posts on Light Stalking and is a fantastic introduction to the art from landscape photographer, Chris Gin.

11 Surefire Landscape Photography Tips – A general article from a great website.

Three Elements of a Great Landscape – the Photo Naturalist (who took the image above) is a great resource for any outdoor photographers, and this is a typically solid guide from that site. Check out their other landscape articles too.

©Keith Barnes, Tasmania

Situational Tutorials

Not all landscape is the same. You are going to have a hugely differing set of conditions between shooting a coastal landscape and shooting in the desert. These tutorials are a good start if you already know where you’re planning to shoot.

Digital in the Desert – shooting in the desert has a lot of unique challenges. This is a thorough review of some of the issues you will come up against.

13 Steps for Creative Coastline Photography – a tutorial by Simon Bray for the fantastic Tutsplus network – this one is worth checking out for the examples alone.

5 Quick Tips for Coastal Photography – another cool list of tips from Digital Photography School with some fine examples too.

A Guide to Capturing Autumn Mist – a seasonal guide for landscape photographers who are looking to get good captures of mist in their work.

©Keith Barnes, Tasmania

See the rest of these tutorials here

Click Here: 14 Essential Landscape Photography Tutorials

28 Cute and Beautiful Photographs of Penguins

I have a relationship with wildlife photography that is difficult to resolve. I know I will never manage to get the fantastic shots we can see on Wild Life Photographer of the year, in fact I am unlikely to get the sort of shots your local wildlife photography group will get. The reason is three fold, I do not have the patience to wait for animals to do their thing, I do not have suitable equipment as buying a 400mm f2.8 would be an excessive expense, I don’t like being cold or wet. Does this mark me out as a photographer who is not prepared to go that extra bit to get better pictures, well no because I do in my professional work or when I travel, I will happily sit and wait for the sun to get lower to achieve the shot I want. Even so I do enjoy pictures of wildlife and when I do have a camera in hand and some fauna does it stuff in front of me I am as likely as the next to start taking pictures. Sadly the results rarely get close to those of wildlife photographers.

I was in Australia throughout December and early January and was thrilled to see Fairy penguins at Bicheno in Tasmania. They came leaping out of the sea at about 8.30 at night to roost in their burrows in the sand dunes. It was too dark to take pictures, next morning I saw emu at a distance, I didn’t have a lens long enough and I saw an echidna but by the time I was ready he was heading off into the bush. At the Jelong caves in the Blue mountains I saw rock wallabies and surprisingly a duck billed platypus. Admittedly I had to get up at 5.30 in the morning to catch the platypus but as someone said they are rarer than whales and I managed to get a picture. So I do not do wild life photography. I leave it to those who have nothing better to do with their time than sit and wait, sometimes for weeks, for the animal to perform in front of their lens. These intrepid photographers will always do a better job than I could and looking at their pictures will always bring me more pleasure than looking at my own poor substitutes.

Here then is a gallery brought to you by Lightstalking of penguins, there are lots of pictures so worth visiting the Lightstalking site here

penguin group small by Antarctica Bound, on Flickr

/.\ by Anne Froehlich, on Flickr

Click Here: 28 Cute and Beautiful Photographs of Penguins

In case you are interested here is my picture of the duck billed platypus, this is a rare image partly because of the animal depicted and partly because I had to get up before sunrise.

©Keith Barnes

©Keith Barnes

 

Wildfires: an astonishing photograph of survivors in an age of catastrophe

Tim Holmes (not pictured) and his wife Tammy (second from left) huddled under a jetty for three hours with their grandchildren while their hometown in Tasmania was destroyed by wildfires. Photograph: Tim Holmes/AP

Jonathan Jones writes in The Guardian

The old newspaper saying that a good picture is worth a thousand words has rarely been proved more dramatically than it was when grandfather Tim Holmes took his family to shelter in the sea while fire consumed their Tasmania community – and remembered to bring along a camera

2013 has barely begun but this photograph of Holmes’s wife and their grandchildren sheltering from the wildfires in sea water under a jetty will surely be remembered 12 months from now as one of the year’s defining news images

READ MORE HERE