It happens every year, and we’re not referring to the onset of spring for all you baseball fans. Rather, the tutorial below from the Park Cameras YouTube channel, addresses how to capture great landscape images during the bleak days of winter.

There’s plenty to deal with when shooting in the field this time of year, not the least of which is cold nasty weather that can be quite uncomfortable and detrimental to your gear. But in barely eight minutes you’ll pick up some tips for elevating your mood, finding suitable subjects amidst the bleakness, and making the most of what Michiganders refer to as the “winter wonderland.”

Instructor Gareth Evans admits that he’s always struggled during the last season of the year, but he keeps shooting because, well, that’s what we do. Today he reveals four favorite tips for leaning into challenges of winter and making the most of the season’s “wonderful light.” In fact, while it may not be particularly fun, some of the best images are captured when shooting under bad conditions, so don’t stash your gear until the weather improves.

One tip is to “embrace” these uninviting conditions and tell a story with the cold, wet weather, menacing skies, and  lonely landscapes full of barren trees. In other words, accentuate what you see rather than attempting to make it something it’s not. And he has several good suggestions for doing just that.

Evans also has some inspiring tips for using bad weather to advantage, instead of wasting time for colorful cheerful scenes that can rarely be found. As he says, “you can get loads of interesting drama by capturing crashing waves, blowing snow, rain, mist, and almost impenetrable fog.” These conditions can all be part of becoming a better visual storyteller.

Tip number three is making the most of the good light as soon as it appears, because in winter it usually won’t last for long. So make sure you’re prepared to capture these fleeting moments before they disappear into the gloom. He adds that “while the sun doesn’t get that high in the sky during winter, you may discover some of the finest soft light that you’ll see throughout the year.”

Last on Evans’ agenda is to try other genres of photography, like environmental or indoor portraiture, or creative food and product photography when you really can’t force yourself to leave home. Winter is also a great time to tackle that backlog of editing projects that you’ve been putting off for months.

Remember, the baseball season doesn’t begin until late March, so concentrate on making winter the best season it can be. There’s much more to earn on the Park Cameras instructional YouTube channel, with weekly lessons that will help you up your photography game, so be sure to pay a visit and check out what’s there.

On a related note, we also encourage you to watch the tutorial we posted recently from another accomplished landscape photographer, explaining how to shoot and edit beautiful minimalist winter landscape photographs with a moody, captivating look.

Landscape photography can be difficult depending upon ambient light and the position of the sun. Earlier this week we featured a powerful Lightroom tutorial for “relighting” dull and lifeless images, and today we have another one that addresses a different challenge.

The topic of this episode from the PHLOG Photography YouTube channel is enhancing images shot in harsh light. Under these conditions, with a wide range of tones, your photos may have either blown-out highlights, crushed shadows, or even both. And contrast can be a real problem.

When this occurs Lightroom can even out the tones to create images with balanced exposures, more accurate colors, and other key attributes. Instructor Christian Mohrle is a professional German landscape photographer, and he walks you through a straightforward process that you’ll employ time after time.

Mohrle makes everything easy to understand by including a link beneath the video for downloading his sample image so you can follow along and make the changes yourself. As is typical for Mohrle he begins with a few basic adjustments to the overall scene to create the best possible starting point for the selective enhancements that follow.

The image is a flat and dark lakeside shot with subdued colors and very poor contrast. After explaining why he didn’t use HDR to capture the shot, he changes the profile from Adobe Color to Adobe landscape which immediately opens ups the shadows, cuts the highlights, and slightly enhances saturation.

Other preliminary adjustments include increasing Color Temperature to introduce warmer tones in this sunrise shot. Mohrle then raises exposure to further lighten the shadows and reveal more details, while temporarily ignoring the highlights. He also pumps up the whites, drops Clarity and increases Texture.  A couple more quick tweaks and it time for the real meat of the lesson.

Mohrle demonstrates the remaining steps far better than we can explain them. Suffice to say that these are selective adjustments to specific portions of the scene that rely upon simple masks. Careful Color Grading comes next with the intent of improving the image while retaining a realistic look.

The transformation  is complete with Focus stacking in Photoshop and a bit of final cleanup that makes the image really sing.  You can find an abundance of image-editing lessons, particularly for landscape imagery, by paying a visit to Mohrle internationally popular YouTube channel.

And don’t forget to watch the tutorial mwntiioned above so you can make dull and lifeless landscape photographs a thing of the past. Yesterday’s guide to focus stacking for beginners will prove helpful as well.

The Canon RF 16mm f/2.8 is a tiny lens – almost a pancake – that can be thrown in your bag or jacket pocket while still covering full-frame! At $300, it’s a very exciting option that seems tailor-made to pair with a midrange zoom. But how does the Canon RF 16mm f/2.8 actually perform? This review will answer all your questions!

Here’s a quick tutorial that demystifies the process of focus stacking; a technique many photographers avoid because of conventional wisdom that the technique is overly complicated to get right. In fact, it’s super easy if you follow the straightforward tips below.

Instructor Jalen Oban describes the essential principles of this powerful method that enables you to achieve maximum sharpness from foreground to background and everything in between. It’s a technique regularly used by experienced landscape shooters, and Oban guides you through a simplified step-by-step process in barely seven minutes.

Oban’s approach may be easy but it’s a structured technique that delivers very polished results, and he ensures that you won’t skip any critical steps. He covers everything from shooting on location to processing the images in Photoshop.

Put simply, focus stacking involves merging multiple images of the same scene, each with a different point of focus. Oban pulls up a beautiful landscape image captured in Hawaii that relies upon focus stacking for its dramatic impact. The challenge is that there’s a vibrant hibiscus bloom a few inches from the camera, with an eye-catching waterfall far off in the distance

Both of these elements are critical to the scene and there’s really no way to keep both critically sharp with a single shot in the camera. In this instance only two images were required to get the job done, because the midrange of the scene is devoid of important details. Thus, Oban captured one photo focused on the hibiscus and a second with the focus point on the waterfall.

The edit works like this: You choose one of the shots and make whatever adjustments are necessary to the entire shot, like correcting exposure, contrast, and color enhancements. This is when you’ll also add a vignette if that’s part of your plan. Then you’ll learn how to copy these effects to the second photo in the sequence.

Now both images will look exactly the same, other for the different points of focus. Oban also provides a few tips for shooting these images properly for the stacking process that follows, the most important of which is to not move the camera before the first shot and others in the sequence.

As you’ll see, the image-blending procedure is surprisingly simple, as long as you load the photos into Photoshop as separate layers. Just follow Oban’s straightforward instructions and we guarantee that you’ll like what you see. There’s more to learn on Oban’s new YouTube channel, so pay a visit and check out.

We also recommend watching a tutorial we posted recently from another accomplished landscape photographer who explains how to avoid five landscape photography image-killing mistakes.