My approach to teaching landscape photography can be summed up in eight words: Master the craft, and the art will follow.

For a landscape photographer, the meaning of craft goes well beyond an understanding of photographic basics like aperture and shutter speed, focus point and depth of field. It also includes the ability to locate promising subjects using topographic maps and computerized mapping tools. These computer programs help photographers visualize how light will play across the landscape and enable them to answer questions such as, "What is the best day in 2013 to photograph the full moon rising through Utah's world-famous Delicate Arch at sunset?".

Mastering the craft also means learning about atmospheric optics, the science of how sunlight interacts with our atmosphere. Atmospheric optics explains why the sky is often blue and sunsets are sometimes red. That knowledge can help photographers seek out spectacular light. Understanding the science of light also permits the knowledgeable photographer to predict where rainbows will appear. Atmospheric optics also explains why the bow-shaped twilight wedge, the blue shadow of the Earth cast on the western sky just before sunrise, reveals that the Earth is round even though you cannot directly observe the curvature of the horizon even from the summit of a 14,000-foot peak.

Most crucially, mastering the craft includes an understanding of how the complexities of human vision affect the way we see the world and the way we view art. To take just one example, our visual system can see a range of light intensities, from brightest highlight to deepest shadow, of about 10,000 to 1. A photographic print can only reproduce a range of light intensities of about 50 to 1. One of the fundamental problems for a landscape photographer is finding the most believable and natural-looking way to compress the very broad range of tones we see in the real world into the much narrower range of tones we can reproduce in a print. My workshops tackle this problem from many angles, starting with exposure in the field and concluding with a variety of techniques in the digital darkroom. These techniques include the "Rembrandt Solution," a technique pioneered by the 17th century master painter that is still relevant in the digital age. Used properly, the Rembrandt Solution can create the illusion of greater dynamic range in a print than actually exists.

​The third annual Colorado Photography Festival is scheduled for August 10-14, 2013. On Saturday, August 10th, a group of instructors will give lectures in the classroom on a wide variety of travel and nature photography topics. I will be offering a beginner's guide to digital landscape photography. Saturday's classroom sessions will be held at the Auraria campus in downtown Denver. On Sunday each of the instructors will lead a workshop with up to twelve participants at one of the many scenic locations around Denver. Participants will have their choice of any of the various workshops. I will be teaching a workshop titled Mastering Dramatic Light on Mt. Evans. In addition to me, this year's instructors will include Dan Ballard, Grant Collier, Russ Burden, Mark S. Johnson, Stephen G. Weaver, Andy Cook, David Kingham, Mary Lynne Ashley, and Rob Palmer. Mark S. Johnson will teach a Photoshop class on Monday, August 12th, and Dan Ballard will teach a three-day workshop from Tuesday, August 13th, through Thursday, August 15th.

The cost is $125 for the Saturday classroom sessions, $165 for any of the Sunday workshops, $125 for the Photoshop class and $575 for the three-day workshop. To get more information on the 2013 festival, please visit www.coloradophotographyfestival.com.