Photography guides

I’ve written a few photography guides to help you prepare for your workshop, and they function as references for the future. My favorite is my one-page ‘zine that I made about landscape photography.

• The Landscape Photography Zine Issue 1 Read Only
• The Landscape Photography Zine Issue 1 Print Version

Here are few downloads to look over:

• Everything you need to know about photography settings in 10 paragraphs
• Reference Guides and Cheat Sheets

Other photography resources

If you’re still working on building a photography system, learn more in this article: http://www.bryanhansel.com/2015/february-newsletter-lens-choices-and-building-a-photography-system/

Software and Apps

These apps and software tools can help you plan photo outings, work with night-sky images, and improve your photographs in post-processing. You don’t need all of them. Choose the ones that fit the kind of photography you enjoy.

Image Editing and Cataloging

• Lightroom Classic: My primary program for organizing and editing photographs. Its masking tools are especially useful for controlling how the viewer’s eye moves through an image. Lightroom Classic also includes AI-powered Denoise for reducing image noise. I teach an Online Lightroom Class.
• Photoshop: Useful for processing night-sky images, blending exposures, and refining the foreground and sky.
• Affinity by Canva: A free image editor with tools that can be useful for astrophotography processing, focus stacking, and more. It also includes a desktop publisher and vector graphics editing module.
• DxO Photolab and the Nik Collection: Save 15% off their software using the code HANSEL15. Photo-processing software with a traditional pricing model instead of a monthly fee. It includes tools for noise reduction, lens corrections, and RAW processing. Nik Collection is an editing suite with specialized tools that plug into software, such as Lightroom, Photoshop, and Affinity. I use the Nik Collection as part of my infrared photography workflow.

Planning and Weather

• PhotoPills: Plan photographs around the positions of the sun, moon, and Milky Way. It also includes depth-of-field and hyperfocal distance tools, augmented-reality features, and other planning tools.
• Stellarium: A planetarium that shows the stars, planets, and other celestial objects visible from your location. Useful for identifying what you’re seeing in the night sky and planning astrophotography.
• Glendale: An aurora forecasting and alert app to help you plan northern lights photography.
• NOAA Weather & Tides: Uses official NOAA weather data to show the forecasted weather, wind speed and direction, and cloud cover by hour. Available for Android and iPhone.

Night-Sky Photography

I teach a two-image blending technique for night-sky photography in my workshops. Stacking is another approach, and the programs below are useful if you’d like to explore it. I rarely use stacking for my own night-sky images these days, but it can be effective in the right situations.

• Sequator: Free Windows software for stacking night-sky images, including techniques that reduce noise while preserving stars. I seldom use this style of night photography anymore.
• Starry Landscape Stacker: Mac software for stacking night-sky images while keeping the landscape aligned. I seldom use this style of night photography anymore.
• StarStaX: Combines multiple exposures to create star-trail images. I find it more fun to do one 30-minute or an hour-long exposure.

Recommended books

I find myself returning to these books for inspiration or for reference, especially the Galen Rowell books. All these have earned a place on my bookshelf.

• Galen Rowell’s Inner Game of Outdoor Photography: This is a good starting point to Galen Rowell and a book I come back to over and over. His look still feels modern and has impact. The subject matter is diverse and the tricks and tips you find in his books are like finding gold in the bottom of your pan.
• Ansel Adams’  Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs: Do you question whether you should use filters or edit your photos? If so, pick up a copy of this book and you’ll see everything that Ansel Adams did both in the field, during developing and in the darkroom to make his prints. If you’ve never shot black and white, some of the technical terms will go over your head, but he talks about his vision and then what he did to make that vision happen on the print.
• Art Wolfe’s The Art of the Photograph: Essential Habits for Stronger Compositions & Art Wolfe’s The New Art of Photographing Nature: While not written by Wolfe, the book has inspirational photography and good advice based on the advice that Art Wolfe would give.
• Bruce Barnbaum’s The Art of Photography: An Approach to Personal Expression or the Updated version: Most of this book is pure gold.
• Why You Like This Photo: One of the best photography books on how your mind sees the world and how to exploit that using photography.

More inspiration

• LensWork is a great photography magazine and well worth subscribing to. It’s the only photography magazine I still subscribe to. The quality of the printing and photography makes it worth keeping on your bookshelf.
• The Online Photographer: Long-time blogger and former photography magazine editor, Michael C. Johnston, continues to blog about photography and sometimes unrelated topics. One of the best photography reads on the internet.