Michelle K Wood Photography

 It may seem like a funny question. Landscape orientation, in which your photo is wider than it is tall, is for landscapes, right? Portrait orientation in which your photo is taller than it is wide, is for, well, portraits and people! I invite you to try new things! Especially if there is a particular landmark feature you're trying to highlight in your composition. Honestly, I thought everyone did this but I'm learning it's rare that photographers turn their cameras on the side and take landscape photos in portrait orientation. Here are two photos of the same landscape, one in landscape orientation and one in portrait. Check them out and see what you think! If it looks like something fun to play with, try it next time you're out! Composition tip: The way to get that sapphire colored water, actually it's ice in these photos...not editing in post! It's in the timing: be on location in the late afternoon or evening, take the photo when the sun is behind you and

Warm-up exercises are a great practice to add to any regular routine or task you do! Photography Yoga? No, just my grandson wishing I'd hurry up taking floral macros so we could continue our walk!  I hadn’t thought about this until seeing a recent article for artists that suggested drawing circles, squares, triangles, wavy shapes and straight lines as warm-up exercises. This is not only for the eye, but the fingers and wrists as well as mental coordination. It makes so much sense, and yet unless you’re a football player or an opera singer, probably no one has ever made the ‘warm up’ suggestion to you. What does this mean for photographers? We need to get creative. I shoot nature and conservation photos, figuring out what kind of warm up goes with that just took a bit of observation. I’m up and down a lot, getting close to small plants and insects on the ground, so some knee-flexing is a good warm up for me. Stretches that loosen up my shoulders are beneficial since I’m swing

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Great photos take great planning. Not necessarily elaborate or complicated, but definitely great attention to detail. Here are some tips for planning three popular styles of photography, closeups, landscapes, and portraits. Closeups – bokeh. The whole point behind a closeup is the attention to the detail of your subject. You can emphasize that by creating a nice background blur so the background does not draw attention away from your subject. Be close to your subject and use a low f-stop (wide-open aperture) to create nice bokeh/blur. The other thing you can do with a closeup is to fill the frame with the subject so you don't have to worry about background at all. Landscape – leading lines. Landscapes are an opportunity to take the viewer on an adventure, to explore all the nooks and crannies laid out before them. Try for an anchoring detail in the foreground and leading lines to extend through the adventure. Landscapes typically don't want bokeh/blur, so use a high f-stop

You will find the most beautiful, kindest, gentlest light for your landscape photos during the Golden Hour or the Blue Hour.  Golden Hour is the 90 minutes just after sunrise and just before sunset . The light is soft and gives a lovely hue to your landscapes, and especially portraits of people taken outside.  Blue Hour , technically known as Civil Twilight, is the 45 minutes just before sunrise and just after sunset . This is just before the sun peeks over the horizon and just after the setting sun sinks below the horizon. It offers a very dim, sometimes spooky or eerie light to your landscapes. It is not suitable for people portraits unless you want the blue-ish background and have some fill light to use on your subject, or if you are doing some zombie photos! As shutter speeds will be slow due to low light conditions, you will probably want to use a tripod to steady your camera.  To plan ahead, especially if you're traveling, you'll want to determine the exact times of day