At 1:45 a.m., photographer Maegan Lanham left camp and drove 54 miles down a backcountry road. She then hiked three and a half miles into a dark canyon, before gaining more than 1,300 feet to reach a ridge she had never stood on, for a sunrise that lasted minutes. She had no guarantee it would be worth the effort. That kind of dedication follows her everywhere, including a goal few photographers would think to chase, let alone finish: photographing every state park in Texas.

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The Milky Way that arched over the Tetons looked nothing like the RAW file that came home. At two in the morning, on Matt Suess' camera, it glowed. On his computer the next day it was flat and gray, the core buried in noise, the color drained out. Every photographer who has pointed a camera at the night sky knows that gap between the glow on the camera and the flat file the next morning. Getting that glow back is the real work.

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Linear Camera Profiles are one of those things that have been floating around the Lightroom community forever, but only a few people seem to use them. And while there are a lot of video tutorials on how to make a linear camera profile for your camera, there is almost nothing on how to use them in your editing workflow.

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Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Uganda needs no further explanation. It's a challenging landscape to navigate, and numerous animals inhabit it. But its most famous residents are the mountain gorillas.

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Over the last few decades, most photographers have believed that the more powerful the editing tool, the longer they need to spend behind a screen. Selection tools, color grading, and creative effects require layers of manual work and patience. A major update to one of photography’s oldest plug-in suites broke that pattern by taking the editing problems most photographers have accepted as unavoidable and building tools that solve them.

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One of the most overlooked decisions on a commercial photo set is what everyone sees on the monitor.

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I still can’t believe it: 15 years of being addicted to capturing the night sky. Did you know this addiction all started with my first bear encounter?

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Photographer Matt Suess was halfway through a 45-minute star trail exposure in Joshua Tree when he noticed a hazy band stretched across the sky. He had grown up in New England, where light pollution hid the Milky Way, so he didn’t know what he was looking at. He pointed his camera at it. It was Suess’s first time seeing the Milky Way, but the photos came back soft. Decades of night shooting later, understanding why is the kind of lesson only experience can teach.

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When we decide whether a photo is good or not, we apply subconsciously a set of principles that make the image appealing. Understanding those helps us better grasp why some photos work better than others.

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Wildlife photographer Tiffany Taxis had been sitting with a bear and her three cubs on the Alaska coast for hours when the large animal went rigid. She stopped nursing. Her gaze became focused and she started to drool. Thirty yards away, a lone wolf stood against the glaciers. Every photographer's instinct would say the same thing: zoom tight, fill the frame with the wolf. Taxis did the opposite. She pulled wide, trusting her storytelling instincts that years of art school had taught her.

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Discover how and why controlling color is essential in photography.

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Photography has everything to do with light. Therefore, the more we know how it behaves and interacts with our equipment, the greater the chance of getting a successful photo.

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The secret to a good photograph lies in your eye for composition and in how you see light interacting with both the world and your camera. In this, the first of a series of articles on light, we look at how its interactions with subjects can affect the feel of our photos.

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As technology has advanced, so too has noise control. Here's the basic information about why noise appears in your photos and how to deal with it.

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There’s more to photographing the sea than many people realize. Here are some handy techniques for safely photographing one of the most exciting and evocative subjects on our planet.

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Digital photography is wonderful. It has positively impacted my life from the second I picked up my first camera, a Nikon D80. However, the other side of that coin of accessibility and convenience and nearly infinite image-capture capabilities is a seemingly impenetrable pile of image files, including RAWs, JPEGs, and even videos, over almost 20 years. Finding what I'm looking for in my massive library has always been a nightmare. But it doesn't have to be, thanks to Excire Search 2026.

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After 25 years behind the camera, OM SYSTEM photographer Jerred Zegelis thought he knew the rules of photography. Shoot RAW. Stay neutral. Fix it in post. Art Filters are for amateurs. These weren't suggestions. For Zegelis, they were law, absorbed from forums, tutorials, and years of professional habit.

Then he invented a fictional town, shot an entire trip using a filter he once dismissed as cheesy, and intentionally started to break the rules. The Nebraska native calls the results the best work of his career.

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Master winter wildlife photography with expert tips on camera settings, gear, composition, and field strategies to capture stunning images of animals in snowy landscapes.

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Photography often feels like a battle against physics, where image quality supposedly demands heavy glass and aching backs. However, …

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Last night, photographers across the United States, as far south as Florida and Texas, were treated to auroras thanks to a severe (G4) geomagnetic storm. The fun is far from over, as experts predict that at least strong (G3) conditions will persist while severe conditions are expected.

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