Landscape photography from the field

Video Tutorials

The Unplanned Shoot: How Surrendering Your Shot List Can Unlock Better Landscape Photography
Video Tutorials

The Unplanned Shoot: How Surrendering Your Shot List Can Unlock Better Landscape Photography

I am, by nature, a planner. I have a spreadsheet with moon phases, a folder of location pins organized by season, and a notes app full of compositions I’ve been mentally rehearsing for months. For twenty years, that structure has served me well. It’s also made me lazy in ways I didn’t notice until recently. I kept returning to the same locations, the same angles, the same reliable shots that I knew would work.

What Four Years of Print Mistakes Taught Me (And What Mark Denney Confirmed)
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What Four Years of Print Mistakes Taught Me (And What Mark Denney Confirmed)

Printing your own landscape work is one of those things that sounds straightforward until you’re standing in front of a $500 printer at midnight, holding a large sheet of paper that looks nothing like what was on your calibrated monitor, wondering where the last two hours went. I’ve been there more than once. After twenty years of selling prints and running workshops out of Bend, Oregon, I still consider printing one of the most humbling parts of this craft.

How I Use Camera Raw to Rescue Underexposed Landscape RAWs (A Step-by-Step Breakdown)
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How I Use Camera Raw to Rescue Underexposed Landscape RAWs (A Step-by-Step Breakdown)

There’s a specific kind of RAW file that sits in every landscape photographer’s catalog. It’s the one that looks nearly unusable on first glance - deeply shadowed, murky in the midtones, shot that way on purpose because the sky was on the edge of blowing out and you had no choice. I have hundreds of them. For years I treated files like that as near-losses, something to fix with a shrug and a heavy hand on the exposure slider.

What 365 Days of Full-Time Landscape Photography Actually Teaches You About the Business Side
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What 365 Days of Full-Time Landscape Photography Actually Teaches You About the Business Side

There’s a particular kind of dread I know well: waking up to thick fog rolling through the valley, grabbing your gear in the dark, and then sitting in your truck with no clear plan. The conditions are perfect. You have nowhere to go. After twenty years doing this full-time out of Bend, Oregon, I’ve learned that the fog doesn’t wait for indecision. You either have a list of locations ready or you watch a once-a-season morning dissolve into flat midday light.

Five Camera Features I Stopped Ignoring (And Why My Forest Shots Finally Got Better)
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Five Camera Features I Stopped Ignoring (And Why My Forest Shots Finally Got Better)

There’s a particular kind of humbling that happens when you’ve been shooting landscapes for two decades and a tutorial still makes you stop and rethink your defaults. I’ve logged thousands of pre-dawn mornings, stood in enough freezing rivers to qualify for some kind of aquatic endurance record, and I still catch myself bypassing camera features I’ve labeled as “not for serious work.” That instinct, it turns out, can quietly cost you shots.

How to Use Flash in Full Sun for Outdoor Portraits (And Why Landscape Photographers Should Know This)
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How to Use Flash in Full Sun for Outdoor Portraits (And Why Landscape Photographers Should Know This)

Most of my work is landscape and nature photography. No subjects, no strobes, no reflectors. Just me, the land, and whatever light the sky decides to offer. But I run workshops, and workshops mean people in the frame. And people in the frame at 1pm in a sun-drenched high desert meadow outside Bend? That’s a different problem entirely. For years I defaulted to shade. Overcast days. Golden hour. Anything to avoid the flat, squinting, harsh-shadowed mess that midday sun creates on a human face.

Finding the Shot When Motivation Runs Dry: Lessons from a Film Camera and a Coming Storm
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Finding the Shot When Motivation Runs Dry: Lessons from a Film Camera and a Coming Storm

There’s a particular kind of rut that doesn’t announce itself loudly. It creeps in slowly, disguised as bad weather or a busy schedule or the sense that there’s nothing worth photographing nearby. I’ve been in it more times than I care to admit. After two decades of shooting landscapes full-time, I still have stretches where I make every excuse to stay home rather than go out and face a blank viewfinder.

Why Beautiful Light Isn't Luck: What a Swiss Alps Workshop Taught Me About Showing Up Every Day
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Why Beautiful Light Isn't Luck: What a Swiss Alps Workshop Taught Me About Showing Up Every Day

There’s a question I get at nearly every workshop I run out here in the Oregon high desert: “How do you know when the light is going to be good?” My honest answer is that you often don’t. What you do know is that if you keep showing up with intention, the light rewards you eventually. That’s the core lesson buried inside Thomas Heaton’s Swiss Alps photography tutorial, and it’s one that resonates deeply with how I’ve spent the last two decades working in the field.

Why Your Landscape Photos Look Muddy in Post (And the Exposure Fix That Changed How I Shoot)
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Why Your Landscape Photos Look Muddy in Post (And the Exposure Fix That Changed How I Shoot)

There’s a specific kind of frustration I know well. You’re standing at the edge of a ridge in the dark, the sky is doing something extraordinary, and you fire off what feels like a solid set of exposures. Then you get home, pull the files into Lightroom, and the shadows are a soupy mess of noise. You push the exposure slider and the image just falls apart. After twenty years of shooting landscapes professionally, I still have to remind myself that what looks good on the back of the camera and what’s actually in that raw file are two entirely different conversations.

Drone Landscape Photography: Why Altitude Alone Isn't Enough
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Drone Landscape Photography: Why Altitude Alone Isn't Enough

I’ll be honest: for a long time I resisted the drone. Twenty years of hauling packs up ridgelines before sunrise, earning compositions the hard way, and then a consumer quadcopter shows up and anyone can float over the scene in thirty seconds. It stung a little. But the thing that actually changed my mind wasn’t the footage I saw. It was a question somebody asked me at one of my workshops: “Does the altitude matter if the photograph is still bad?

Golden Hour or Blue Hour for Portraits? What a NYC Workshop Taught Me About Shooting Both in the Same Evening
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Golden Hour or Blue Hour for Portraits? What a NYC Workshop Taught Me About Shooting Both in the Same Evening

I’ve spent two decades chasing light across high desert, alpine tundra, and volcanic coastline. Portraits aren’t my primary work. But light is, and lately I’ve been asking myself a harder version of a question I thought I’d already answered: not just when to shoot, but how differently I should be working when the same location shifts from golden to blue. I kept defaulting to golden hour out of habit, packing up before blue hour ever fully arrived.

The Orton Effect Done Right: A Landscape Photographer's Step-by-Step Guide
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The Orton Effect Done Right: A Landscape Photographer's Step-by-Step Guide

There’s a specific kind of dread I feel when I look at an edit and realize I’ve gone too far. The scene was real, the light was extraordinary, and somewhere between the raw file and the finished image I turned a mountain meadow into something that looks like a greeting card. After twenty years of making landscape photographs, I still do it occasionally with the Orton effect, which is why I kept coming back to this tutorial.