Photographing foggy/misty scenes requires much skill from the photographer. Fog usual occurs in the evening and lasts until early morning. Very often over water as the water is warmer than the surrounding air.

Fog and mist naturally knock out colour, rendering the scene quite ‘flat’ and lacking in contrast, so longer exposure times are required to achieve a good photograph. When there is light involved, generally at night, the fog/mist create refraction which can fool the camera’s light monitor – these are a couple of the obstacles the photographer faces when shooting foggy/misty scenes, and where great skill is required.

This round-up brings you more than 40 outstanding and beautiful photographs shot in foggy/misty weather.

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The title seems to be a contradiction in terms: how can natural cloud formations be unrealistic? But it does happen, and often!

Many times I look at the sky and consider that if an artist faithfully represented the cloud formation it would be considered unrealistic as a painting - which throws a shadow over the concept that artists are only limited by their own imagination - that is, if they want their art to appear realistic!

The best times to catch unrealistic cloud formations are sunrise and sunset and before, during or after a storm, however, strange formations can occur at any time of the day, any time of the year.

Here is a selection of beautiful but unrealistic natural cloud formations produced by outstanding photographers.

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Snow is a very unforgiving type of weather – it is cold, icy and generally dangerous to be out in.  However, there is no doubt it is beautiful – nature plays tricks with us with snow!

For those of us who see snow most years, it is difficult to imagine there are people in this world who have never seen it – I expect that is the same vice versa too!

Here I have collected a selection of 30 snowy scene photographs that are of picture postcard quality. The beauty of the scenes draw us in… but beware, snowy weather will chew you up and spit you out!!

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We can, at times, be quite horrified by the way wild animals treat their young. If there is a disability or the offspring is weak in any way, it is usually either abandoned and left to die or actually killed by the mother. In the wild only the fittest survive.

However, for those that are born strong and healthy, we humans could learn a lot from mothers in the wild. They provide food and schooling, along with play and comfort. There is nothing like a mother's love!

Here we bring you some beautiful images of wild mothers with their babies, along with a short synopsis of the life cycle of each species featured.

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In past times, black and white photography was not a choice - it was all there was available, and photographers and artists hand-coloured their black and white prints, normally in pastel shades, giving people very rosy cheeks, cherry-red lips and pale blue eyes.

In this age of digital photography, the colour usually has to be removed to produce a black and white or monochromatic image. This is done with photo editing software, and the black and white tones are adjusted to suit the image. Therefore, we can see very light hued images, or very dark toned photos - depending on both the subject of the photograph and the photographer/artist working on the post-production.

Here is a selection of more than 30 awe-inspiring examples of black and white photography for your viewing pleasure.

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National Geographic has always been renowned for its outstanding photography. Since the advent of the internet being available to the masses, the scope for National Geographic to gather more outstanding photography and bring it to their viewers and readershop has expanded greatly – they no longer rely solely on their own photographers’ images published in their monthly magazine.

For more than 10 years, the National Geographic website have been selecting a Photo of the Day, with a theme applied to each month.

For this round-up, I selected the Photo of the Day gallery from September 2010, the theme is Nature and Weather.

Some of these photos were shot by National Geographic’s photographers, and some are submissions from the Your Shot and My Shot galleries.

The photographer’s comments have been included for each photo.

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Fisheye lenses were originally developed for use in meteorological study, to enable a larger part of cloud formations to be included in the image.

Fisheye lenses are wide-angle lenses that take broad, panoramic, hemispherical images.

Photographers, being such creative souls, soon began using fisheye lenses to create skillful images with very different perspectives – fisheye lenses achieve extremely wide angles of view which give images a convex appearance.

There are two main types of fisheye lenses. A circular fisheye creates a circle within the film frame, so the outermost parts of the image remain dark.
A full-frame fisheye enlarges that circle to cover the entire frame. The first full-frame fisheye lens was produced by Nikon in the early 1970s.

As always with photography, subject, lighting, angle and many other factors come into play to get the perfect shot with a fisheye lens.

In this article we are featuring some stunning examples of photographs taken using a fisheye lens. Notice the subjects are often similar, as are the angles – there is quite a well-defined method of acheiving great images with fisheye lenses.

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This is an outstanding image of Kiz Kulesi (Maiden's Tower) in Istanbul, Turkey. The photographer is Melih Polat, or mlhplt on deviantart.com, who is a mechanical engineer by trade and a photography hobbyist.

You can check out his dA gallery which includes some beautiful photography, and clicking on the image below will take you to the page of origin.

Shadows are all around us, no matter what time of day or season it is, you can always see a shadow if you look hard enough.

The thing is, in general we don't actively look for shadows - there will be times when we notice a particularly nice, strange, well-defined, etc shadow, and also fun moments when we create shadows with our hands or bodies on a wall.

Photographers, on the other hand, are always looking out for such things as interesting, photogenic shadows in the hope of getting that great, split-second-timing opportunistic shot.

Creative photographers also set up shadow photography applying their lighting skills.

Here we feature nearly 30 outstanding photographs either with the shadow as the sole subject, or as a definitive part of the image.

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This outstanding photograph has not been subject to any digital manipulation. It is the work of Cyril Helnwein - an outstandingly creative and skilful photographer with very much his own style. He has galleries on his own site - Cyril Helnwein Photography, and on deviantART. Please stop by and take a look at more of his fantastic photography.