- 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...
Landscape Sin #4: Harsh, Midday Sun
This shot really has it all. Sure, it has that trademark harsh, dried-out, awful, soul-sapping, direct midday sun look to it (even though it was actually shot around 10:20 a.m., so the light will actually get worse as the day goes on). But, it also has some bonus features, like an ugly dead tree, a bald, cloudless sky, and junk coming into the frame from the edges. (I ought to win some sort of bad light award for this one.) So, if you look around and the light on your landscape looks anything like this, you know one thing: you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time. You should be at breakfast, back in your hotel taking a nap, feeding a gopher the contents of your purse, whittling a scale model of the U.S. Capitol building out of a dead tree branch, anything other than actually taking a photo. This light was designed to punish nature and the efforts of anyone who holds up a camera and aims it at any landscape.