How to take better landscape photos by seeing beyond the scenery
A personal guide to creating stronger landscape photographs by noticing light, weather, scale, subjects, details, and feeling beyond the scenery itself.
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Photography tutorials and practical breakdowns
A focused archive of field-tested articles on atmospheric landscape photography, editing, and the decisions behind stronger images.
System The full system Start with the connected workflow if you want presets, tools, and teaching in one place. Explore the system 
Presets EPIC Presets A restrained editing workflow for atmosphere, shape, and stronger consistency. Explore presets 
Night editing Borealis Presets A more believable path to aurora color when the sky needs control rather than intensity. View Borealis 
How to edit northern lights photography without ruining the atmosphere
Learn a professional workflow for editing Aurora Borealis photos. How to avoid neon colors and create atmospheric images that look perfect on any screen.
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5 Northern Lights Photography Mistakes (And How to Fix Them)
Are your aurora photos blurry or dark? Avoid these 5 common mistakes to capture sharp, cinematic Northern Lights images every time.
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Behind the photography: Underneath the Surface
On a freezing night in Lapland, I stood neck-deep in icy water, waiting for the northern lights. After days of failed shots and little sleep, the sky finally lit up and I captured a photo that shows how nature and we are always changing. Underneath the Surface is the story of that moment and the journey it took to get there.
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The Best AI Image Editing Tools for Landscape Photographers
Unleash the Power of Artificial Intelligence. The best AI image editing tools of for landscape photographers including Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop, Luminar Neo, and Topaz Labs. Elevate your photography, enhance your workflow, and bring your creative vision to life with these powerful AI-driven solutions.
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The Importance of a Beginner's Mind in Photography
Discover how embracing a beginner's mind has shaped my photography journey and how this powerful mindset can unlock your creative potential. In this post, we'll explore the importance of curiosity, stepping out of comfort zone, learning from mistakes, seeking feedback, and practicing mindfulness. Cultivate a beginner's mind to elevate your photography skills and find inspiration in every shot.
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Capturing the Beauty of Everyday Landscapes
Discover Mikko Lagerstedt's tips for capturing the hidden beauty in everyday landscapes. Learn to create stunning photographs with creative perspectives, lighting, and storytelling.
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Have You Lost Your Inspiration For Photography? A Toolkit to Find Your Inspiration Back.
I provide a toolkit of ten tips for photographers and creatives who have lost their inspiration, including being ready for inspiration, trying new techniques or subjects, getting out of your comfort zone, finding new topics, journaling, seeking inspiration elsewhere, opening your mind, planning a trip, collaborating with others, and seeking new experiences.
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Unlock Your Photography Potential
Set attainable photography goals to keep growing and improving. By setting specific goals, you'll stay motivated and inspired. Reflect on past experiences, break goals into smaller steps, and track progress in a journal. Experiment with different techniques and styles, and seek feedback to help you improve.
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The Art Of Capturing Winter Fog Photography
I will guide you through capturing stunning winter fog photographs in this post. You'll learn about finding the right location, choosing the right time of day, using a tripod, experimenting with white balance and compositions, using a polarizing filter, and editing in Lightroom. Let's get started!
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Editing Minimalistic Photography in Lightroom
Let's talk about how to edit minimalistic photographs in Lightroom. As you may know, I often use The Epic Preset collection to edit my photography because it saves me time and gives me a style I enjoy. But in this tutorial, I show you how I edit my minimalistic photographs in Lightroom if I don't use my presets.
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Minimalistic Photography
So what does minimalistic photography include? Minimalistic photography is a style of photography that focuses on simplicity and minimalism. In this kind of photography, simple compositions, clean lines, and a limited color palette make it unique.
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Winter photography – How to photograph in difficult Weather
In this post, I share my experience of capturing winter photographs in difficult weather conditions. I provide details about my camera equipment and clothing and share my location choices. I also share an example photograph, the equipment used to capture it, and the editing process in Lightroom using an EPIC Preset Collection.
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How to become a successful photographer?
In this article, I discuss the definition of success and how it applies to photography. Success in photography is not just about financial gain or social media popularity. It's about waking up and feeling proud of your work. To achieve success, you must keep creating and find inspiration in one thing that moves you forward. You must also show up consistently, enjoy the process, and create luck.
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5 Steps to Create Dreamy Astrophotography Using A Dual Exposure Technique
Five steps how to create and edit beautiful and dreamy astrophotography using dual exposure technique.
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4 Easy Steps to Edit Astrophotography in Lightroom
In this tutorial, we'll use my EPIC Preset Collection, which has a dedicated section for night photography. However, you can still follow along and make the adjustments yourself.
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4 Easy Steps to Capture Beautiful Astrophotography Landscapes
In this tutorial, I share my process for capturing beautiful astrophotography landscapes in four easy steps. I'll cover the essential gear needed for astrophotography, planning for astrophotography, capturing the astrophotographs, and using the dual exposure technique to take your astrophotography to another level. You'll learn a few tricks from this article whether you are new to astrophotography or an experienced nighttime shooter. So let's get started!
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Why you need to update to the latest version of Lightroom?
Are you tired of making tedious selections with the brush tool to your photographs in Lightroom? I know I’m. Lucky for us, this week, Adobe released updates to Lightroom CC, and Classic introducing new features, which I think will be extremely useful for most photographers. This article goes through
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Six ways to improve your landscape photography instantly
In this tutorial, I'll be sharing with you six simple and effective ways to improve your landscape photography instantly, all of which have been put together by the talented Mikko Lagerstedt. This tutorial covers a variety of topics, including how to plan for your photoshoots, why it's essential to take your time to explore the location, how to make the most of a tripod, the best camera settings to use, and some great tips for improving your composition and editing skills.
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Get Out of a Creative Rut and Reignite Your Creativity
A self-development guide for creatives who want to reignite their love for art and overcome a lack of motivation. In this guide, I share the steps that helped me and other photographers overcome creative ruts. The guide delves deep into self-development and finding inner motivation. I wrote this guide to share my experiences and teach solutions that worked for me so you don't have to make the same mistakes. I also share my favorite books in the last part of the guide for further research.
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How to create and use color profiles In Lightroom CC and Camera Raw?
How to create and use Lightroom Color Profiles inside Lightroom and Camera Raw?
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How to create EPIC colors in Lightroom CC & Camera RAW
How to create EPIC colors inside Lightroom CC and Camera Raw. A quick guide with all the steps to create a beautiful and striking sepia-toned EPIC photography edit.
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How to photograph minimalist landscapes?
I love to capture minimalist photographs, and it often comes naturally to me. A Zen-like view is more pleasing to my eye than a whole lot of mess in the frame. I always search the scenery to look for the main subject and how I could frame the composition so it would be simple and beautiful. In this
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Find your style in photography
There are excellent guides where you can learn techniques and compositional rules in photography; however, there are not many guides that give you advice on how to create a unique style. That's why I decided to write this tutorial from the experience I have had in photography. I believe that anyone
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How to Create a Moody Photo Manipulation
For my photographs, I use Lightroom 90 percent of the time so, it's not often I create photo manipulations, but recently I created a one because I felt inspired to do so. I guess it is a representation of hard times. Since the whole creating process is fresh in my mind, I want to share what goes int
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Intuitive Editing Workflow for Photographers
Organizing and going through your photographs after each shoot is one of those less focused aspects of photography, but I believe it is wildly overlooked. It’s an important part of the entire editing process. You must have an excellent system to approach editing intuitively, and that's why I wrote t
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Six Common Mistakes Most Photographers Make
I know a lot of photographers that have made most of these mistakes, and I certainly am one of those. So, I decided to share them with some insight on how you can avoid them. 1. You don't realize how much time and work goes into creating beautiful images. Yes, it's common to think that it doesn't
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How to Photograph the Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis)?
I love to capture the northern lights, and because I get questions from people on how to capture them, I decided to share my experiences on the topic. I’m sure it is possible to photograph some kind of shots of the northern lights with our phones. However, when talking about a decent quality image,
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10 Creativity Boosting Habits for Photographers
In this article, I talk about habits that, in my experience, boost creativity. Some of these habits I have learned from dozens of self-help books. Some are my own experiences from trials and errors in the past decade. I also tell you what my typical day looks like as a landscape photographer while I
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Nikon Z7 mirrorless camera for landscape photography? One year Later.
I'm not sponsored by Nikon to make this blog post; these are just my thoughts of the camera after using the camera a little over a year now. The setup I have been using for the past year: Nikon Z7 Sony XQD 120 GB Nikkor S 24–70 mm f/4.0 FTZ-adapter Nikkor AF-S 14–24 mm f/2.8 G
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Stay Inspired – Create a Catalog of Inspiration
How to feel more inspired? What inspires me? It's good to ask yourself these questions. For me, it's a collection of things. I have always loved to view paintings, drawings, watch movies and listen to music to feel inspired. Of course, there are plenty of ways to stay insp
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How to find inspiration for your photography?
In this weeks tutorial, I’m going to talk about the forever relevant subject: inspiration. Have you ever been uninspired to take photographs? I sure have been. And as I was talking with my photography friends yesterday, it’s quite common to lose interest and inspiration to take pictures. When you ar
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Set goals for your photography – The first step on becoming a full-time creative
In this weeks tutorial, we are talking about how to set goals for your photography, and what it takes to become full-time creative. As I said earlier in one of my previous tutorials " How to keep yourself motivated and take better photographs " asking questions is crucial if you
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How to add a glow to photographs in Photoshop
In this weeks tutorial, we are adding a glowing effect to photographs in Photoshop. I received a wonderful comment from Melissa, one of my readers regarding that it would be interesting to see a tutorial for Photoshop. So I thought why not share one of my favorite tricks on how to create glow in Pho
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How to create atmospheric photographs part II
Last week I promised a tutorial to show you how to create an atmospheric photograph in post-processing. The editing will be done mostly in Lightroom, but there are a couple of steps that I decided to do in Photoshop. The processing decisions are made from the notes I captured in the scenery. My goal
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How to create atmospheric photographs part I
The goal of this tutorial is to make you more aware of the process behind your photographs. I'm going to tell you the process I use to create work that inspires me. I talk about how to capture and edit atmospheric photographs. The thing about photography I find so fascinating is that you ca
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How to keep yourself motivated and take better photos?
As I'm looking back to my ten-year journey in photography, I realize that I have had my ups and downs. The thing that I have found out to be one of the keys to my success and for the other photographers I spend time with is perseverance. It's not a surprising thing, but how many of us o
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How to Match Colors in Lightroom
In this tutorial, you will learn how to match two photographs colors in Lightroom to create a composite image. We will take advantage of the new Reference View in the Lightroom CC Develop Module to see the images side by side. I chose cold colors to give this final image cool atmosphere.
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How to find your vision in Photography
How to find your vision in photography, art, and life? One of the most common questions I get from people is: What should I do to find my vision as I'm just starting in photography? In this guide, I have gathered some tools you can start to use straight away. Without further ado, let's cut to the ch
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Eight key things that make you stand out on Social Media – Major PING Alert!
Here is something a bit different from my regular posts. However, I believe it's something you will enjoy and learn from, whether you are a photographer, business owner or a freelancer. Last year I had the pleasure to teach a workshop in PING Helsinki (maybe you saw this post back then), which wa
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My Favorite Equipment Part I - Everyday Gear for Star and Landscape Photography
Since I get a lot of questions about my photography gear and tools I use, I decided to create a new series of equipment. As many have said – gear doesn't matter! However, if you have decent gear, it can inspire and help you to create more! I look at gear as tools, when it works great it works with y
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Winter Night Photography Checklist
It's that time of year when the temperature drops and snow covers landscapes. Winter is my favorite time to shoot landscapes. You can almost hear the silence from snow covered landscape photographs. The light is low and beautiful almost the entire day but as you know me I enjoy to photograph at nigh
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How to capture sharp star photographs
Thanks for the email responses for my last tutorial. I got a couple of questions about how do I manage to get sharp images at night of the stars. In this tutorial, I have listed the key elements you have to master when you want to capture most crisp images at night. 1. Focus If you want
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5 Steps to Work Like a Pro in Lightroom
In this tutorial, I show you how you can set up your Lightroom to optimize and quicken your workflow. I hope you enjoy the tutorial. 1. Use Collections and Smart Collections instead of Folders Creating a collection based catalog is the first thing I recommend to everyone who is starting to use Lig
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5 Steps to Boost Milky Way in Lightroom
Five steps how to boost stars and Milky Way in Lightroom. First you need a photograph captured in a dark situation pointing towards the Milky Way. Here is an example image captured in Yyteri, Finland. There are many things you need to know and consider before you can shoot these type of sce
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How to Create A Night Panorama With Lightroom CC
Adobe released the new Lightroom CC couple of weeks ago and I wanted to write what are the new features it includes. Lightroom 5 had some great features and new updates like advanced healing brush, spot removal and radial gradient tools. In Lightroom CC, there are some new features as well. The new
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PHASE - Adobe Camera Raw Presets
I'm happy to announce that the new Phase presets available now in Adobe Camera Raw. The Fine Art Presets work best with Photoshop CS 5 and newer. I have now added a 5 Inspiration Exercises to Create Inspiring Photography -guide included in the Lightroom and Camera Raw Phase prese
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How To Use Graduated Filters & Radial Filters in Lightroom 5
I made a short video tutorial on how to use Graduated Filters and Radial Filter to balance pictures and add colors. Hope you like it. Sorry that I sound bit weird, but I have the flu.:) Things I'll go through in the tutorial. Balancing photo with Graduated Filter Adding color with
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How to Fix Light Leak in Lightroom
Occasionally when I use my Nikon D800 and Nikkor 16 - 35 mm f/4.0 VR lens, I get these light leaks in long exposure photos also when using high ISO. Here is a quick and easy way to get rid of the light leaks by using the Adjustment Brush. Before:
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How To Install Lightroom Presets: Lightroom CC and CC Classic
A quick guide on how to install Lightroom CC and Classic Presets for desktop computers. Mac OS and Windows.
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Essential Photoshop Keyboard Shortcuts for Photographers
Here is a essential shortcut set for photographers using Photoshop to make your processing faster. Work space: F Switch Between Screen Mode CTRL+0 Fit Image In The Screen or Window CTRL/CMD + Zoom In CTRL/CMD - Zoom Out CT
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How To Use Fine Art Lightroom Presets
Here is a short video tutorial on how to edit photos by using my Fine Art Lightroom Presets. For these examples, I used the Star & Milky Way presets and the Split Toning Presets.
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How To Organize Photos in Lightroom Using Smart Collections
My Lightroom Catalogue was such a mess few days ago.. And my backups weren't really up to date and after reading some horror stories on loosing your images I wanted to make this my priority number uno. It's not a sexy task, but definitely something I had to do. The Collections and Folders were unor
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How To Process Fog & Mist Pictures in Lightroom
Hey everyone and Happy New Year! I thought I would give you insight on how I go through processing images taken in foggy situations. Here is a shot I took in Porvoo, Finland on one summer morning, just before the sunrise. Gear: Nikon D800, Nikon 16-35 mm f/4.0 VR, Sirui Tripo
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How To Process Star & Night Sky Pictures in Lightroom 5 & Photoshop
So after a successful photo trip ( Top 5 Tips to Photograph Stars & Night Sky ) to take photos of stars, here are a simple process I use to edit the RAW files. These work both in Lightroom 4, 5 and Camera Raw. I edit my pictures in 16 bit mode with Color Profile of Pro Photo and File Format
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How To Photograph Stars & Night Sky, Top 5 Tips
I got few emails regarding photographing the stars. So here are few of my tips to photograph stars and what I do to plan before going out. If you want to learn more about star photography, check out my eBook: Star Photography Masterclass 1. Location Scouting This is act
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