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Q: How do I make my pictures look three-dimensional?

A: Shoot in early and late daylight to provide modeling to natural features. Use ultrawide-angle lenses to record a greater angle of view than we can see with our eyes. Include a foreground object at a close distance in wide-angle shots. Alternatively, use a very long lens to intensify the effects of haze or fog across many layers at a scenic viewpoint. And it helps to include a range of exposures from dark to light to cause the eye to travel towards a distant focal point.

Olympic National Park, WA: Tripod-mounted Canon EOS 5D with 17-40mm f/4L Canon EF lens, 1.3 sec at f/18 through a 2-stop split ND filter to keep detail in the sky, ISO 50.

Q: How do I balance the exposure between sky and foreground?

A: Give priority to controlling highlight exposure for the best color. It's better to lose shadow areas than highlight detail. To keep both, use a split neutral-density filter to balance the exposure of the top and bottom of the frame. Spotmeter the sky and foreground to determine the difference in stops, indicating how strong a filter to use. But don't add so much neutral density to the sky that it's the same brightness as the foreground -- it will look unnatural. The foreground should be at least 1 stop darker.

Shoot in RAW to have enough exposure information to bring out foreground detail in image-editing software (e.g., Fill Light and Recovery tools in Adobe Photoshop CS3).

An advanced technique involves combining multiple exposures, or different exposures from the same RAW file. See "Filters vs. Photoshop" in the September 2007 issue.

Q: How do I get vivid skies?

A: Include clouds to accentuate their depth and add visual interest. Be sure to use a polarizing filter to darken blue sky and intensify its contrast with clouds. Rotating the polarizer will allow you to get the precise effect that you want.

Use wide-angle lenses, whose extreme field of view pulls elements in the scene together in a radial effect that draws the eye. But watch out! You don't want to fall into the trap of darkening the sky unevenly by using a polarizer with too wide a lens.

Expose for the highlights first in most situations -- color can easily be lost through overexposure.

Mount Rainier, WA: Tripod-mounted Canon EOS 5D with 17-40mm f/4L Canon EF lens, 1/50 sec at f/18 through a polarizer to bring out cloud definition, and 2-stop soft-edge split ND filter to balance exposure top and bottom, ISO 100.

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