Landscape photography from the field

Portrait Techniques

What Landscape Photographers Get Wrong About Outdoor Portraits (And How to Fix It Fast)
Video Tutorials

What Landscape Photographers Get Wrong About Outdoor Portraits (And How to Fix It Fast)

Most of my working life is spent waiting. Waiting for light, waiting for clouds to shift, waiting for the river surface to go still. I am not, by any stretch, a portrait photographer. But here’s the thing about spending twenty years in the field: you develop an eye for how light falls on a subject, and eventually someone asks you to put a person in front of that light instead of a mountain.

What Landscape Photographers Get Wrong When They Add a Human Element (And How to Fix It Fast)
Video Tutorials

What Landscape Photographers Get Wrong When They Add a Human Element (And How to Fix It Fast)

Most of my working life is spent without a person in the frame. The mountain, the river, the pre-dawn sky — that’s my subject, and I’ve spent twenty years learning how to read those things. But landscapes with a human figure are some of my best-selling prints, and workshops I run in central Oregon almost always include a session where participants photograph each other in the field. That’s where I started noticing a consistent problem: photographers who can perfectly compose a ridgeline have no idea what to do the moment a person walks into the shot.