Video: Wildlife and landscape photography tips and techniques with Sony Artisan of Imagery Colby Brown

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posted Monday, November 28, 2022 at 12:30 PM EST

Sony Artisan of Imagery photographer Colby Brown spent extended time at the Napo Wildlife Center in Ecuador filming a wildlife and landscape photography video series for B&H. Throughout the seven-part video series, plus a bonus Q&A episode, Brown extensively covered a wide range of photography topics, including researching and planning a trip, must-have wildlife and landscape photography gear, advanced shooting tips and an in-depth editing tutorial.

In the first full episode, Brown focused on research and planning. Research is critical to improving your odds of capturing beautiful photographs. When photographing wildlife, it's important to understand your prospective subject. Knowing as much as possible about the animals you want to photograph will make it easier to find your subject and provide the intel you need to be ready for the perfect shot. As for landscape photography, knowing the best locations is a great place to start. Still, you can improve your photography by researching lighting and weather conditions, and performing scouting trips.

Even with perfect preparation, you still need the right gear to take the best shots. That doesn't mean you need the most expensive top-of-the-line cameras and lenses, but you must have gear equipped to capture the images you want. For wildlife photography, autofocus accuracy and speed matter a lot, as does image quality across a wide range of ISO settings. You'll also often want long telephoto lenses. Regarding landscape photography, speed matters less, but you'll often want a high-resolution image sensor paired with wide-angle and standard-length lenses. In the video below, Colby Brown shares what's in his camera bag, including his Sony A1 camera and various G and G Master Sony lenses. Don't worry if you aren't a Sony shooter, as other manufacturers, like Canon and Nikon, offer many similar lenses in their mirrorless lineups.

The next two episodes are excellent in-the-field videos with Brown as he does landscape photography in Cotopaxi, Ecuador, and wildlife photography in an Ecuadorian rainforest. During each video below, Brown shares his various landscape and wildlife photography techniques, including using various lenses, creating panoramas, shooting time-lapses, adjusting camera and autofocus settings, composing wildlife shots with beautiful backgrounds and much more.

In the penultimate episode, Brown gets up close and personal with the Amazon rainforest's diverse range of small creatures, including insects, arachnids, amphibians and reptiles. Macro photography is a specialized niche, whether it's macro wildlife photography or shooting up-close photos of still-life subjects. Strong technical skills are very important when doing macro wildlife photography, as you're working with a razor-thin depth of field and very little room for error. Watch Brown's macro wildlife video below to learn some awesome techniques you can use to improve your macro photography.

Finishing Colby Brown's video series with B&H is an hour-long tutorial for editing wildlife and landscape photos using Adobe Lightroom Classic and Adobe Photoshop. Alongside these popular photo editing apps, Brown also uses Topaz DeNoise AI specifically for noise reduction. Throughout the in-depth tutorial below, Brown works on some of the images he captured during his Ecuador adventure, and performs various editing tasks like cropping, masking, basic adjustments, and much more.