Of all the types of photography digital or film I think the most popular is nature photography. Let's face it of all of the photographic subjects nature has the most to offer in not only patterns, symmetry, textures, colors, lighting and subjects. With trees, lakes and rivers, oceans and beaches, rocks and mountains, ice, fire, rain, clouds and so much more there is an infinite variety of subjects to choose from and best of all most of them change or are so random that no two shots of the same subject will ever be the same. I don't think it gets much cooler than that.

Now anyone can go out a shoot clouds or a lake or what not. But, if you want pictures that are post card quality or better yet gallery quality well worth printing and spending a couple of bucks on good framing then there are things you need to know. Yes, there is more to it than just pointing your camera at a lake and pressing the button. There are things like the time of day, lighting, angles, looking for textures and other things that will set your picture apart from all of the other pictures of the same lake.

Outdoor Photographer Landscape and Nature Photography with Photoshop CS2 Front Cover | Back Cover is the perfect book to turn to. It covers a very wide range of subjects all dealing with photographing landscapes and nature.

Chapters:

Chapter 1: An Approach to Photoshop

Chapter 2: What Would Ansel Do?

Chapter 3: Start Right

Chapter 4: Setting the Stage: Basic Steps

Chapter 5: A Short Course in Camera Raw

Chapter 6: Layers 101

Chapter 7: Developing Midtones

Chapter 8: Color Adjustment Refined

Chapter 9: Better Images through Local Adjustment

Chapter 10: Putting It All Together: An Approach That Works

Chapter 11: Clean It Up

Chapter 12: Extending the Tonal Range of Scenes

Chapter 13: Classic Black and White

Chapter 14: Finishing the Image

Chapter 15: The Better Print

Appendix A: Photoshop Plug-ins for Nature Photographers

What I like most about this book is that it is subject specific in this case photographing landscapes and nature and it covers how to do this, things to consider and more, but it also covers using Adobe Photoshop CS2 and how to use it to perfect your landscape and nature photographs. My only real complaint about this book is that the overall design style of the book is not one of my favorites. Some aspects of its design is rather clumsy and un-refined looking for my taste, basically I don't like the look and feel of the Notes and Pro-Tip boxes, I know it is a small thing but still looks are important, if they weren't you wouldn't be interested in such a book. If you can get past this rather small thing the information contained in the book is in-depth, well written and presented well with a minimum of jargon. There are lots of full color sample shots and screen shots too. If you want to learn to shoot landscape and nature shots or you want to improve the shots you take this is a good book to choose and it covers only this subject.