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.

I created this photograph as part of a series for a regional health network that wanted local landscape photographs to display throughout its facilities. When I came across this fisherman standing in the water surrounded by autumn color, I immediately liked the quiet feeling of the scene. But where I placed him within the frame was just as important as the subject itself. This is a good example of the Rule of Thirds. Imagine dividing your photograph with two vertical lines and two horizontal lines, creating nine equal sections. Instead of automatically placing your main subject directly in the middle, try positioning it near one of those lines or where two of the lines intersect. In this photograph, the fisherman is positioned close to the right vertical third of the frame. That placement gives him visual importance while leaving plenty of space to the left for the landscape and his fishing rod. Notice what happens if you imagine him directly in the center. The photograph would become much more static. By moving him toward the right third, the composition has better balance and gives your eye room to travel through the scene. The fishing rod also becomes an important compositional element. It creates a diagonal line that leads your eye from the fisherman back toward the left side of the photograph. The Rule of Thirds isn’t a law that you have to follow every time. Think of it as a simple tool that can help you make more interesting compositions—especially when you are first learning to move your subject away from the center. Try this with your camera: Turn on the grid display in your viewfinder or on the back of your camera. The next time you photograph a person, tree, building, or other strong subject, make one photograph with the subject centered and another with it positioned on a third. Compare the two. Which composition do you prefer—and why?

I took this photograph of the Statue of Liberty while I was in New York working on another project. Like many photographers, when I am traveling for one assignment or series, I try to stay alert for other photographs that might be worth making. When I visited the Statue of Liberty, I made a clean photograph with a bright blue sky in the background. Technically, there was nothing wrong with it. The exposure was good, the subject was clear, and it documented the location well. But to me, it felt a little boring. That is an important lesson in itself. A photograph can be technically correct and still not communicate much emotion. So I decided to keep working on the image in post-processing. I replaced the sky with a different one, then tried a second version that had more dramatic clouds and a stronger mood. That second sky became my choice because it gave the statue a more powerful presence. This raises a good discussion point for photographers: When does the creative process end? For some photographers, the goal is to keep the image exactly as captured. For others, especially in fine art photography, editing becomes part of the interpretation. I see post-processing as another creative decision—similar to choosing lens, framing, exposure, or time of day. The important thing is that your editing choices should support the image and strengthen what you want the viewer to feel. In this case, the dramatic sky helped transform a straightforward travel photograph into a more expressive final image. Question for you: Have you ever taken a photograph that was good, but not quite finished until you worked on it in editing? Share your thoughts—or your before-and-after process—in the comments.