Picture Correct

Most meteor showers require photographers to stay awake until the early morning hours. The Draconid meteor shower, peaking around October 8, 2026, is different. Its best viewing opportunities often come during the evening, shortly after the sky gets dark. That makes it an excellent opportunity to practice meteor photography without staying up all night. The Draconids originate from debris left behind by Comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner.

Night photography can make Manual Mode feel more complicated than it really is. During the day, you can often change a setting and immediately see what happened. At night, exposures may last several seconds, autofocus can struggle, and the camera’s meter can become less useful. The solution isn’t to memorize dozens of settings. Instead, give each of the three exposure settings one specific job. Once you decide what matters most in the scene, the settings become much easier to choose.

Fall can be one of the most exciting times of year to photograph. Color is everywhere—red leaves, golden trees, winding paths, textured branches, and patches of warm afternoon light. But all that visual interest creates a surprisingly common problem: There’s too much competing for attention. A scene that looks beautiful to your eyes can become a cluttered photograph because your brain is very good at ignoring distractions. Your camera isn’t.

Fall leaves can look beautiful in almost any light, but there’s one lighting direction that can completely transform them: backlighting. Instead of photographing with the sun behind you, place the leaves between your camera and the sun. Because many leaves are partially translucent, sunlight can pass through them. Reds become richer, yellows turn almost golden, and tiny veins and textures suddenly become much more visible. Best of all, this is an easy exercise you can try almost anywhere.

If you’ve ever used Unsharp Mask or a similar sharpening tool, you’ve probably seen three controls: Amount. Radius. Threshold. They can seem technical, but each has a specific job. Once you understand them, sharpening becomes much easier. Sharpening doesn’t actually restore missing detail. Instead, it increases contrast along edges, making existing detail appear more defined. Using Unsharp Mask to Sharpen Photos Amount controls the strength of the sharpening effect.

You don’t need hours of free time or a photography trip every weekend to become a better photographer. Some of the best photography habits take only a few minutes. The key is keeping photography part of your normal routine rather than waiting for the perfect day to go shooting. Photo captured by Erik Mclean Find one thing worth photographing. It could be morning light through a window, an interesting shadow, your dog, or the sunset on the way home.

Nikon just announced an interesting new full-frame camera, and it isn’t really aimed at photographers who spend their time debating autofocus modes and custom button configurations. The new Nikon Z5IIC appears to be designed for people who have outgrown their smartphone camera but aren’t necessarily interested in immediately learning every technical aspect of photography. And Nikon made one particularly unusual decision to accomplish that: There’s no viewfinder.

Modern smartphones might give you several camera choices: 0.5×, 1×, 2×, 3×, 5× and sometimes even more. It can be tempting to think of these simply as different zoom levels. But there’s something important happening behind those little numbers: You’re often switching between completely different cameras. And in many situations, 1× is the camera that will give you the best image quality. For further training, check out the 🍁 Fall Capture Sale on our Smartphone Photo Guide.

When photographers think about fall, the first thing that usually comes to mind is colorful foliage. Bright reds. Deep oranges. Golden leaves covering the landscape. But some of the best fall photography actually happens before peak color arrives. The transition into autumn changes much more than the trees. Light, weather, wildlife, and even familiar landscapes begin to look different—and those changes create opportunities that are easy to overlook. Photo captured by Pascal Debrunner 1.

Before summer officially comes to an end, here’s a quick photography challenge you can try today. I call it the End-of-Summer Sharpness Test. Find a stationary subject with plenty of fine detail—a tree, building, sign, fence, or anything else that will make sharpness easy to judge. Photo captured by Chris Leipelt Now photograph it handheld using the same focal length at: 1/30 sec 1/60 sec 1/125 sec 1/250 sec Adjust your ISO as necessary to keep the exposure roughly the same.