Landscape

Sun pillars

A few days ago near Anchorage, Alaska, Shawn Standley went out to search for the perfect Christmas tree. A helpful column of light led him right to it:

"This spruce tree and a flock of passing waxwings was highlighted by a setting sun pillar," says Standley. "It was a beautiful sight."

Sun pillars are caused by ice in the air. Plate-shaped ice crystals flutter down from freezing clouds like leaves falling from trees. They act like thousands of little mirrors reflecting the light of the setting sun into a towering pillar--or Christmas-tree finder, as the case may be.

Sun's Warmth

Indeed, says English nature photographer Andrew Greenwood, "although the winter air here in Cheshire is frigid, the sun's warmth can still be felt, and shows its presence through the melting of snow." To illustrate the point in an artistic way, he took this picture yesterday using a Nikon D50:

"Here we see our world reflected in a tiny droplet of meltwater," he continues. "The surface curvature of the droplet was such that the sun appeared twice! It just goes to show that wondrous optical effects can be seen even on the smallest scale."

To all of Yours from little Old Me

Artists Dick and Pat Ensing

Artists Dick and Pat Ensing

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Artist Liz van der Werff

Artist Liz van der Werff

International Photography Contest Tips

From Mike Yamashita

Learn to take better nature photographs.

From Mark Thiessen

How to make better portraits of people.

Tips from Toensing

Focus on Places

Go with reality. Not every place is beautiful; ugliness can make a good photo too.

Be mindful of the climate you work in and protect your gear accordingly.

Remember the rule of thirds—divide the frame into nine boxes and place the story's key elements at the interior intersections.

Remember that rules are made to be broken: know the rules, then break them well.

Light is everything, so use it appropriately. I shot the photo above around noon (breaking every rule!) as it helped tell the story of Australia's climate problems.

Published: August 2009

International Photography Contest

Focus on Places

National Geographic photographer Amy Toensing is your expert mentor in the Places category.

Photograph by Amy Toensing

When Amy Toensing traveled to Thailand, Malaysia, Nepal, and India at the age of 20, she realized that a camera offered her a way to engage the world. "I've always been curious," she explains, "and photography was a license to engage in people's lives, to discover more about places I visited. It gave me a role in the world."

Toensing was drawn to places through their people, and gradually her work evolved toward the social issues that shape everyday life. Whether documenting life on the New Jersey Shore or the Kingdom of Tonga, she seeks out the familiar rather than the exotic. "I look for the ordinary in the extraordinary," she says. "I think about place the way I think about people: every place has its own personality, its own moods. A good photographer becomes attuned to these."

Toensing captured the mood of Australia's Murray-Darling Basin drought (above) by photographing the barren land with a high horizon in the day's harshest light. She followed Simon Booth as he checked his ranch for growth after a rare rainfall. "It still looked like moonscape," she explains. "These people were simply overpowered by the dramatic changes in their world. Murray-Darling was the story of a landscape and of people's fading place in it.”