- The Secret to Shooting Sunsets
- Cutting Reflections in Water
- For Landscapes, You Need a Clear Subject
- Using Your LCD Monitor Outdoors
- A Trick for Shooting Great Rainbows
- A Timesaving Pano Trick
- The Trick for Using a Fisheye Lens
- When to Shoot Streams
- Don't Stop Shooting at Sunset
- How to Shoot Fog
- Getting Shots of Lightning (Manually)
- Getting Shots of Lightning (Automatically)
- Where to Focus for Landscape Shots
- Find the Great Light First
- How to Shoot on a Gray, Overcast Day
- A Trick for Great-Looking Flower Shots
- The Full-Frame Camera Advantage
- The Seven Deadly Sins of Landscape Photography
- Landscape Sin #1: Choppy Water
- Landscape Sin #2: Frozen Water in Waterfalls
- Landscape Sin #3: Bald, Cloudless Skies
- Landscape Sin #4: Harsh, Midday Sun
- Landscape Sin #5: A Crooked Horizon Line
- Landscape Sin #6: Distracting Junk Near Edge
- Landscape Sin #7: No Foreground Object
- And...Dead Trees and Tree Stumps...And...
The Seven Deadly Sins of Landscape Photography
Okay, in this chapter (and in part 1 of this book series), I’ve talked a lot about the things you need to do to make great landscape photos, but I haven’t talked a whole lot about what to avoid when taking landscape shots. That’s why in this new edition of the book I have included what I call “The Seven Deadly Sins of Landscape Photography,” and one more I threw in just for good measure, but that last line isn’t part of the official name because that would be really clunky. By the way, the shot you see above was taken in Glacier National Park in Montana (which is one of our largest national parks, spanning 1,013,322 acres) during a workshop I taught there with renowned landscape photographer Bill Fortney. Bill, who not coincidentally is one of but a handful of working photographers who happen to know the precise GPS location from which you can actually photograph this giant monolithic number seven (which soars more than 212 feet high at its peak), would be cringing right now if he read this because he would know that I obviously stuck that big seven there in Photoshop, after the fact (or he’d have a big seven in his shot, as well, which I’m pretty certain he does not). Nevertheless, this all makes a great (okay, decent) gateway to this new addition to the landscape chapter. If you can live your life avoiding these seven perilous pitfalls, your landscape shots will be blessed with the magical kiss of first morning light (not really, but they will certainly look a whole lot better).