Digital Photography: The Missing Manual

Landscape and Nature

Unlike portraiture, where you have to arrange the lights and the models, landscape photography demands a different discipline—patience. Nature calls the shots here. Your job is to be prepared and in position.

Making the Most of Natural Light

When you shoot natural landscapes, you become as much explorer as photographer. Beautiful shots are all around you; it’s your job to locate them in time and space. As you wander through nature with your camera, you develop a new way of looking at the world. You learn to see the subtle differences in lighting at different times of day, for example, and how shadows affect your photograph. The most important principles of nature photography follow.

TROUBLESHOOTING MOMENTHow to Really Get Rid of Red Eye

For years now, camera manufacturers have been inflicting red-eye reduction mode on their customers. It’s a series of bright, strobing flashes that’s not only annoying to the people you’re photographing, but doesn’t even work.

What causes red eye? In a dimly lit room, the subject’s pupil dilates, revealing more of the retina. On cameras where the flash is close to the camera lens (as it almost always is), the light from the flash shines through the dilated pupil, bounces off the retina, and reflects as a red circle directly back into the lens. (The same thing happens to animals, too, except that the color is sometimes green instead of red.)

The solution is to move the flash away from the camera lens. That way, the reflection from ...