This photograph is a good example of how shutter speed can change the feeling of an image. I photographed this night scene outside the Oregon Express. What interested me was not only the building itself, but also the activity happening in front of it. If I had used a fast shutter speed, the people on the sidewalk would have been frozen in place. Instead, I used a slower shutter speed, which allowed the moving people to blur while the building and signs stayed sharp. That blur is important. It gives the photograph a sense of movement and helps communicate what the street actually felt like—busy, active, and alive. This is a useful lesson in photography: sometimes you do not want to freeze everything. Sometimes allowing motion to blur can make the image more expressive. A few things to notice in this photograph: - The stationary subjects—the building, signs, windows, and lamppost—remain recognizable. - The moving people become soft and ghostlike. - The contrast between those two things creates visual interest. - The neon and street lighting help establish the mood of the scene. If you want to try this yourself, go out in the evening and look for a place where people are moving through the frame. Use a tripod if possible, and experiment with slower shutter speeds. Compare what happens when you photograph the same scene at a fast shutter speed and then at a slower one. Ask yourself: Which version better communicates the feeling of the place? That is often the goal—not just recording what something looked like, but expressing what it felt like to be there. Have you experimented with slow shutter speeds at night? Post one of your examples in the comments.

I was walking through the woods when I noticed sunlight shining through these red leaves. I stopped immediately. There wasn’t anything particularly unusual about the leaves themselves. What made them interesting was the light. The sun was behind the leaves, which is called backlighting. Instead of illuminating the front surface, the light passed through the thin leaves and made them glow. It also revealed the veins, texture, and structure inside each leaf. That is an important photography lesson: The same subject can look completely different depending on the direction of the light. Front lighting tends to show color and detail clearly. Side lighting emphasizes shape and texture. Backlighting can create transparency, glowing edges, silhouettes, and strong separation between your subject and the background. For this photograph, I also moved in close and eliminated most of the surrounding woods. Simplifying the composition allowed the color and pattern of the leaves to become the entire subject. The softer background is important too. Because it contains less detail, your eye naturally goes toward the sharper, brighter leaves. Here’s something to try the next time you are outside: Walk around your subject before taking the photograph. Look at it with the light coming from the front, side, and behind. You may discover that simply changing your position creates a completely different photograph. And pay particular attention when sunlight shines through something—leaves, flowers, tall grass, even fabric. Those are often great opportunities for backlighting. The subject doesn’t always make the photograph. Sometimes the light does. Have you ever photographed a subject using backlighting? Share one of your examples in the comments.

This photograph from my Ohio landscape series is a good example of why you should stay alert even after you think you have your composition figured out. I was at Caesar Creek State Park preparing to photograph the sunset across the lake. I had already decided how I wanted to frame the scene. The leaves in the foreground created a natural border, the sun was dropping toward the horizon, and its reflection was creating a strong vertical line of light across the water. Then I heard a boat. At first, I didn’t know whether it would help or hurt the composition. Fortunately, the boat traveled directly across the reflection of the sun. I was ready and took the photograph. That boat changed the image. Without it, I still would have had a pleasant sunset photograph. But the boat gives your eye somewhere to go. It becomes the focal point, adds a sense of scale to the lake, and introduces a small human element into an otherwise purely natural scene. There is a useful photography lesson here: Plan your photograph—but stay open to something better happening. When you are photographing landscapes, it is easy to become so focused on the sunset, mountain, waterfall, or other main subject that you stop paying attention to what is changing around you. Listen. Watch. Wait. A bird may fly into the scene. A person may walk into exactly the right position. Clouds may suddenly catch the light. Or, as happened here, a boat may pass through your frame at exactly the right moment. There is certainly some luck involved. But luck only helps if your camera is ready. The next time you are waiting for a landscape photograph, don’t pack up too quickly. Keep watching the scene for another few minutes. Have you ever had something unexpected enter your composition and actually make the photograph better? Share your image or story with the group.

This photograph is titled Sunrise in Miami County, Ohio. I created it after being commissioned to photograph rural Miami County for a hospital medical practice that was building a new facility. They wanted artwork that reflected the local landscape and would give patients and visitors a connection to the surrounding community. The two photographs shown here demonstrate something I think is important for photographers to understand. One is the image straight out of the camera. The other is the photograph after I did my magic in Photoshop. The original photograph is not bad. It contains the information I captured when I pressed the shutter. But it doesn’t completely communicate what attracted me to the scene that morning. That is where editing becomes part of the creative process. In Photoshop, Lightroom, or other editing software, you can make decisions about: - Exposure and brightness - Highlights and shadows - Contrast - Color balance - Saturation - Local adjustments - Cropping - Where you want the viewer’s eye to go For this photograph, I wanted to emphasize the warm sunrise and the way the early morning light moved across the rural landscape. The editing helped bring the finished photograph closer to the way I experienced the scene. There is an important distinction here: editing is not automatically about making a photograph look artificial. Good editing should have a purpose. Ask yourself, What attracted me to this scene in the first place? Was it the light? The color? The mood? The texture? The relationship between different parts of the composition? Then use your editing software to strengthen those qualities. I often tell photographers that the camera gives you the raw material. What you do with that material afterward is another opportunity to make creative decisions. Just as choosing an aperture, shutter speed, lens, or camera position influences your photograph, so do the choices you make during editing. Try this exercise: Take one of your RAW photographs and create two or three different edits. Make one natural, one more dramatic, and one completely different. Then ask yourself which version best communicates what you wanted the photograph to say.

I took this photograph while driving home from Washington, D.C. I decided to stop at New River Gorge in West Virginia and spend some time looking for photographs. It was November, and when I arrived, I was a little disappointed. I thought I might be too late. Most of the colorful autumn leaves had already fallen, and the landscape wasn’t giving me the classic fall photograph I had pictured in my mind. Then the light changed. Across the gorge, I noticed a narrow streak of sunlight hitting a small group of trees. Everything around them remained relatively dark, which made those trees seem to glow. I had my 80–200mm zoom lens, so instead of trying to photograph the entire gorge, I zoomed in and isolated the area where the light was falling. This is one of the advantages of a telephoto lens in landscape photography. We often think of wide-angle lenses for landscapes, but a longer lens can help you simplify a complicated scene. You can eliminate distractions, isolate interesting patterns, and concentrate attention on one small portion of a much larger landscape. There is also an important lesson here about expectations. If I had decided there was nothing to photograph because peak fall color was over, I would have missed this image. Instead, I stopped looking for the photograph I had imagined and started looking at the light that was actually in front of me. The next time the weather, season, or location doesn’t look the way you expected, don’t immediately put the camera away. Look for a patch of light, an interesting shadow, a pattern, or a smaller detail. Sometimes the photograph you didn’t plan to take becomes the one you remember. Have you ever gone out expecting to photograph one thing and come home with something completely different? Share your photograph in the comments.