Iceland Aurora Photographic

The magic cloth technique was born out of the need to get the image right in the camera but to still increase the dynamic range of a scene. Under normal circumstances, the top part of a landscape is brighter than the lower half. Even with a mirror lake the difference can be a couple of stops. In order to get the best exposure of both the land and the sky, photographers have traditionally used filters which are darker at the top and clear at the bottom. These are called Graduated Filters (grad) and although they come in different colours, the most popular are Neutral Density (ND - Grad). Neutral density adds no colour to the scene. Aside from different colours, Grad filters come in different strengths - measures in stops. They also come as soft or hard grads.

When you are taking your camera into cold conditions, it will be wise to follow a few simple precautions to protect you and your gear.

Feet

One of the most important thing to protect! They are, after all, what is going to get you out of potential danger.  You need to think about protecting them first and foremost.  Cold climates can present several different dangers to feet. The first is cold.

So you have the night photography bug. You sit twiddling your thumbs in the daylight hours waiting for the light to fade so that you can go out and leave your camera perfectly still with its shutter open for many tens of minutes. You are not alone!!

I have chosen select high quality suppliers to present these products to you. They can be purchased directly from their on-line stores and they will be delivered to you in the time specified by the supplier.

These are similar to the tours, but are generally shorter and involve more tuition and less travel.

Until recently it was common practice for landscape photographers to slightly underexpose image to increase highlight detail and increase saturation. But there is a new school of thought which suggests over exposing just short of blowing out the highlights will actually give you a better range of colours.

This tutorial looks at ways to convert your image to black and white using the tools available in Photoshop CS3. There may be work arounds for other versions of photoshop or other image editors, but the work horse in this tutorial is the powerful 'Black and White Tool' in CS3 which has a great selection of filter presets. To emulate this without the tool, you could try blending channel levels.

This is a quick and simple technique for correcting the colour of an image in photoshop. It is not always successful and will not give you the desired results 100% of the time. But as it is quick and easy it is definitely one to try first.

This tutorial offers an alternative to the saturation option when you wish to dramatically boost the colours in an image. We will make a photoshop action for this colour boosting technique so that it  can be applied easily to any image in the future. More information about creating an action can be found here.

Hyperfocal distance is the art in photography of achieving as much sharpness as possible throughout the image. In other words, it involves careful focusing adjustments to ensure that objects close to the camera and objects in the distance all have the same sharp focus, but more accurately, the hyperfocal distance is that point of focus where things are in focus from a point half way between you and the focal point all the way onward to infinity. Hyper-focal distance is more of a landscape photographer's concept. When shooting landscapes, I never use auto-focus.