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In this section, we’ll cover some of the main gear expectations most landscape/cityscape photographers deal with. Don’t feel obligated to buy any of it, especially all at once; your gear will be an ever-evolving stream of equipment that you’ll buy, sell and upgrade over years and years. But it’s important to know what’s out there.

If you’re going to specialize in landscape or cityscape photography, a full frame camera is a great investment. We will explain why and what features and accessories are important to these types of photography.

A photographer shouldn’t be inhibited by their equipment though. I’ll use a DSLR with a good sensor when I can, obviously, but if there’s a gorgeous, spontaneous photo op and all I have is my iPhone, I won’t hesitate to capture the moment.

Good cityscape photography makes the viewer feel both things: awe and terror. It should make them feel exhilarated at the endless possibilities tucked into every corner of downtown Tokyo, but also petrified at the enormity of Shanghai’s systemic twisting roads. From an aerial view we can spot all the boats in Toronto’s harbor, the landmarks of New York’s skyline, and the signature rivers coursing through London, Seoul and Paris.

Shooting cityscapes isn’t all that different from shooting landscapes. The same general rules apply: skyscrapers are mountains, roads are rivers and dramatic clouds make them look that much cooler.

The biggest difference is that cities change at night. A mountain is a mountain any time of day, but by night, a building transforms into a blaze of lights to challenge the stars, roads light up with moving dots of red and yellow, neon lights line the streets in attempts to catch your eye.

Visually, cities come alive at night.

All other settings constant (f/13, ISO 400) shooting in aperture priority, watch the effect of shutter speed length on traffic moving across a bridge as it gets darker in the evening:

Moving traffic is like a city’s bloodstream—it’s always moving, pulsating through veiny streets, bringing images to life. Capturing traffic in a city is almost inevitable, and while it’s hard to shoot it “wrong” by simply taking a long-exposure shot of any length, it can also be hard to control the exact shot you want.

Telling a story with people in it is a surefire way to increase human interest. Like I mentioned in the “Including People” chapter of the Landscapes section of this book, people love seeing people: it creates a sense of empathy, realism and perspective that pure cityscapes lack, and satiates viewers’ inherent curiosity about the lives of others.

While the same rules of artistic composition apply (rule of thirds, leading lines, and so on), you’re unlikely to have the time to set them up: street photographers move quickly, quietly and rarely have time for a second shot.

When it comes to intersections, some bigger cities—New York, Tokyo, Toronto—will have four-way crosswalks, where pedestrians stream across in all directions, stopping cars on all four sides of the intersection. These make especially great hectic shots, with cloudy masses surrounded by headlights and condo lights.

The world has grown beyond just Photoshop. Adobe is still the leader of the pack, with products like Lightroom and Bridge supplementing Photoshop in many photographers’ arsenals (including my own); I also use Photomatix occasionally, which is an industry leader for HDR processing.

Photoshop’s competitors (Corel’s PaintShop Pro, Serif’s PhotoPlus, Capture One Pro; there are many) are viable alternatives at sometimes as little as half the cost of Adobe’s mainstays, and if you already have one of those, the general rules of what we’re going to be discussing in this section will likely hold true, even if the tool names are different.

For our purposes, though, I’ll be sticking with Lightroom, Photoshop, Bridge and Photomatix. You don’t need to buy all these, but it’s still good to know what the possibilities are. If you only invest in one program, I would recommend Lightroom.

The first few pages in this section will cover the quick and effective processing methods using the Lightroom presets provided with the book, then we will dive in deeper if you want to take your photos further.

Photography has traditionally been the realm of the real. It documents things. You’d see something, snap a photo of it, and record that moment for as long as your photo exists.

Then people realized that the reality you capture is only as true as the camera’s perspective. Perspective could be toyed with. This changed the way people worked with depth, color and reality itself.

Today, capturing reality is half the battle. Playing with multiple exposures, HDR and perspective can create worlds beyond what we can see with our own eyes. Trick photography takes that pioneering kernel of photography—capturing reality—and takes it one step further.

Now, we capture the reality of our imaginations.