Photographers love their affordable, fast, and easy-to-carry “nifty fifty” lenses that can be used to capture a wide range of scenes from landscapes and portraits to nature photos and more. When your images fail to meet expectations, and you’re not sure why, it’s likely because you’re making one or more common mistakes when shooting with a 50mm prime.

Instructor Martin Castein is a London-based landscape and portrait photographer with more than a few tricks up his sleeve. In this eight-minute episode he explains why images with a nifty fifty look a bit different, the big mistakes a lot of photographers make, and the best way to create great compositions with this standard prime lens.

Castein begins with a discussion of perspective and the variables you must understand for thoughtful, effective framing that differ from the approach you take with wider or longer focal lengths. As he says, by doing things right, “you can have the best of an 85mm telephoto and a 35mm wide-angle combined. And that’s why many photographers are so excited about the oft-ignored 50mm option.”

One consideration is that the closer you get to tall subjects, the more the angle tilts as you strive to include everything into the frame. Other problems occur, in reverse, when shooting down from a high camera position. Castein explains that, unlike with a normal lens, these converging verticals become visually acceptable and appear intentional when you get to a certain point with wide-angle photography.

On the other hand, short telephotos like an 85mm “force you to move back far enough so that these corrections happen naturally.” That’s because shooting from a greater distance tends to flatten out the perspective because you can often shoot straight on, rather than being forced to tilt the camera up or down.

Castein says the one big challenge with 50mm lenses is that “you’re slap bang in the middle, and what we get can be slightly off” unless you take advantage of the composition techniques that he recommends for taking advantage of everything that your nifty fifty can do. There’s nothing difficult to learn, except a slight shift in your mindset and the camera angles you choose.

There’s much more to learn about landscape photography on Castein’s popular YouTube channel, so be sure to take a close look.

And speaking of lens techniques, don’t miss the tutorial we posted last week from another landscape photography expert who demonstrates why every serious outdoor shooter needs a telephoto lens and how to use it to capture attention-grabbing images that stand out from the crowd.

The sky is  usually a critical element of nature scenes, landscapes, and many other photos you capture in the field, and here’s what post-processing expert Matt Kloskowski says about this matter: “Before we can even work on the sky, we need to understand how to mask it before applying various tools and enhancements.”

Matt is an accomplished photographer, prolific author, and Photoshop Hall of Fame inductee whose mission “is to create videos that simplify the process of shooting great photos and editing them to get the results you’ve always wanted.” This quick episode demonstrates which Sky Selection tool works best depending on the specific image at hand.

There are several methods from which to choose and they all work a bit differently and are useful for different tasks. A familiarity with various techniques provides you with another option to fall back on when the first attempt falls short of expectations. And these are exactly what you’ll learn in the next nine minutes.

Matt’s demonstration takes place in the Masking panel, and his tips work exactly the same in any Adobe Raw editor you use, whether it’s Photoshop, Lightroom, or Adobe Camera Raw (ACR). You’ll also see why it can be important to apply a few global adjustments to an image before introducing sky selections for local enhancements.

The Select Sky tool is the option that Matt typically reaches for first and he demonstrates how this approach works to enhance details in a lakeside scene with an overly bright sky. This includes  an easy method for using a b&w overlay to refine a selection that isn’t absolutely perfect. In this case he employs a small brush with a low flow setting to include a portion of the distant mountains within his mask.

When this approach causes problems your second line of defense is to is to apply a Linear Gradient instead, and Matt walks you through the simple step-by-step procedure with another landscape photo that poses other challenges. This technique works somewhat like a Graduated ND filter when your goal is to modify the sky without biasing the tones of everything that falls below.

This method allows you to easily feather an edge and control a transition from hard to soft. And simple sliders get the job done in a hurry. The foregoing illustrates just two of the Sky Selection tools available, and the remainder of episode is devoted to other methods worthy of your attention.

Once the video concludes you may want to check out Kloskowski’s instructional YouTube channel where you’ll find many more image-editing tips and techniques.

We also encourage you to watch an earlier tutorial we featured with another post-processing expert who demonstrates several “insanely powerful” color-editing tools that anyone can use to create jaw-dropping outdoor photographs.