Join OM System Ambassador Lee Hoy at Big Bend National Park to be immersed in mastering manual exposure for landscape photography. Mastering manual exposure for landscape photography in December involves understanding how the winter light interacts with the park’s vast and varied terrain. The lower angle of the sun in December casts long shadows and creates dramatic contrasts between light and dark, especially around sunrise and sunset. To capture the full range of tones, photographers should rely on manual exposure settings to balance highlights and shadows, often using a smaller aperture (f/8–f/16) for greater depth of field while adjusting ISO and shutter speed to match the available light. A tripod becomes essential during the golden hours when longer exposures are needed to maintain image clarity.

Big Bend’s diverse landscapes—from the Chisos Mountains to the Chihuahuan Desert—present unique exposure challenges. Desert scenes in winter often feature a stark interplay of bright skies and dark, textured foregrounds. Using OM System’s live highlight alerts can help expose for key elements in the frame, such as a glowing ridge or a sunlit rock formation. Using the built-in Live Graduated neutral density filter on the OM-1 Mark II (or external filters) can also be helpful for balancing exposure between bright skies and shadowed valleys, but exposure bracketing is equally effective when fine-tuned through trial and error.

In December, the weather in Big Bend can shift quickly, with clouds and atmospheric haze changing light quality by the hour. Manual exposure gives photographers control in these variable conditions, allowing them to emphasize the mood—whether it’s a moody overcast canyon or a sun-drenched desert basin. Keeping an eye on the live highlights and histogram helps avoid overexposing bright skies or underexposing foreground detail. With practice, manual exposure becomes second nature, enabling photographers to capture the quiet, expansive beauty of Big Bend in its serene winter stillness.

Lee has taught countless nature photographers a much simpler approach to exposing your images to the right using the live highlight alerts of the OM System cameras in manual exposure. This results in properly exposing our images the majority of the time and means we spend less time focusing and worrying about the technical side of photography and we are then freed to concentrate on the creative elements of nature photography.

The Topics

• OM System Exposure Settings 
• The Trinity of Photography (Shutter Speed, Aperture, ISO)
• Exposing to the Right: The Why & How
• Mastering Live Highlight Alerts & Histograms
• Dealing With Extreme Tonal Differences – Exposure Bracketing & HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photography
• Reading Light in Landscape Scenes

Mastering manual exposure for landscape photography will free you to focus on the composition elements of a landscape image such as visual balance, compositional rules, the use of leading lines, capturing incredible light, examining the edges of your frame, when to include a foreground element and when you don’t need one, and many other compositional techniques.

Lee has taught these techniques worldwide, from Yellowstone National Park to the Galapagos Islands, Patagonia, Wyoming, Texas, and Alaska. Now, he’s bringing this knowledge to his favorite destination, Big Bend National Park offering a unique opportunity to learn at one of North America’s most unique national parks..

What’s Included:

• Pre-workshop Zoom session for prep and Q&A
• In-field instruction focusing on landscape photography
• Opening presentation to introduce the various OM System exposure settings, exposing to the right (ETTR)
• Learning how to handle high contrast scenes with filters (built-in and external), exposure bracketing and HDR techniques
• Post-workshop Zoom image critique