Amazing landscape images don't happen on their own. They require hard work in order to get to the right location. Sometimes harder work in order to wake up on time and a good deal of luck in order to get the right conditions so that they all fit together. Nature's Light runs workshops in several amazing locations to try and make it that much easier. However, we have a number of photographers who have indicated they would like to join one or more of us on a real adventure in the mountains, the kind we do on our off-time. Read on if you are interested in joining a trek in the Drakensberg Mountains to capture the mountain light.

AS we enter November and mark a world that has been in effective lockdown since March this year, we can start to look ahead and hope that there is some glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel that is Covid-19. Here at Nature's Light we are cautiously optimistic that 6 months from now things will be slowly returning, if not to absolute 'normal', back to some sense of normality. Whether it is from a vaccine, better treatment or just plain hard-headedness by citizens, it is likely that travel and workshops will be happening by mid year 2021.

Deciding whether to travel or not is difficult on a number of counts. From a personal point of view, are you likely to be infected and fall sick in another country. This impacts on medical insurance and whether you are even able to get cover to travel at this time. From a broader point of view, even if you are what is deemed 'asymptomatic', are you further spreading the virus.

With the above in mind, we do feel that by the time our workshops start again (all international workshops were postponed through to 2021) it is likely that both vaccine's and effective treatment will be available (our first cross-border workshop is only in April 2021).

So you have decided that you need a new set of legs and you like what you see in the Leofoto Ranger series of carbon fibre tripod legs (If you want to know more about the Leofoto tripods you can read this primer on understanding what makes them different: https://landscapegear.co.za/blogs/news/introducing-the-ranger). Here comes the crunch then, The LS-324C and the LS-285C are the same price and have very little difference between them on paper. So how do you decide which one to go for? Let’s start by looking at the actual specs between the two sets of legs:

Editing in layers is a principle concept for being able to work in Photoshop. In this post we'll take a look at very basic masking techniques to start down the road of layered editing in Photoshop, or any other bitmap editor for that matter.

Understanding how to edit an image in Photoshop boils down to three core fundamentals, these being; layers, selections and adjustments. Everything that can be done in Photoshop, from the simplest edit to most complex of photo montages, revolves around the use of these three core features. Obviously there is more to layers, selections, and adjustments as you become more knowledgeable of Photoshop, but these are the building blocks that have to be understood in order to get any further in Photoshop editing.

Due to the lock-downs facing a large swathe of the global population, we have tried to accommodate photographers who are wanting to improve some of their editing skills while they are confined to home. As such, we are moving the seminar sessions to online small group teaching sessions using the popular Zoom desktop app.

The calendar of sessions is still available on the site under the Seminar Sessions. the online sessions will remain small so as to keep the classroom atmosphere as well as the opportunity for participants to engage with the instructor.

When you are in a programme like Lightroom or Capture One, the use of presets becomes a quick and easy - as well as fast - way to make changes to images. Rather than changing every setting individually, a photographer can select a preset that they have created, or even bought, to reset several parameters to one or several images at a time. To say that saves time is an understatement. Taking all the time required to individually adjust images, the use of presets can literally save hours out of a week of editing.

Lightroom has a killer feature that seems to often get overlooked by people who use it - Keywording. Maybe it’s because keywording is the least sexy part of the image pipeline. Yet it is an extraordinarily important part of every photographer’s workflow, and one that is not given nearly enough attention as it should. Keywords are by far the best way to find photographs when you have a large number of images that need to be sorted through. Lightroom continues to be one of the easiest ways to add keywords to an image, and one of the fastest ways to fin an image in a vast library, so long as you have actually keyword the images in the first place.

Nik, as an application, has been around since 2000 when it was was first incorporated into Nikon’s RAW software called Capture NX2. What made the software special was something called U-point technology. In a rather trite naming convention, it is supposed to refer to the fact that '‘you point somewhere, and it works'’. Yet, this is pretty much how U-point does work. Nils Kokemohr (founder and CTO of Nik Software), managed to create an application that looks at luminosity, colour and tone as a way of selecting an area for image editing. To this day, it is one of the most intuitive and effective ways to select localised areas in an image for colour editing. At any rate, Nik’s intellectual property has passed through several hands from Nikon, to their own, to Google and thence to DxO. In a nutshell, the selection tool that was first introduced in 2000 is still going strong, yet there are photographers who still aren’t aware of it’s power and how to use it effectively.