Having the right light is critical to this genre, but Akoubian doesn’t just hope for the best when he’s out in the field. “Being in the right place at the right time is certainly important, but putting yourself there is even more important,” he explains. “When I’m looking for particular locations and compositional elements, there are a lot of locations I’ll go to. If it’s not quite right, I may go back another day, or I’ll make lemonade out of lemons. Miserable weather sometimes makes for great photography. A cloudy day, for instance, may be dreary, but it’s got a different feel to it—if you can get the viewer to feel that, too, then you’ve accomplished what you set out to do.”

Akoubian’s Tamron lenses enable him to extract the landscapes in front of his viewfinder and create eye-catching images. “I do most of my editing in the camera with the lenses,” he says. “Before I hit the shutter release, I step back from my camera and say, ‘This is what my image is going to be.’ From there, I’ll know what lens I’m going to need.”

His Tamron 10-24mm lens has become his tried-and-true photographic companion. “The wide-angle lens is a great compositional tool,” he says. “What I like most about the 10-24 is its aspherical glass: I don’t have to worry about distortion of zooming in and out; it will be clean all the way through the image, regardless of the focal length I choose. When I’m doing landscapes, I stay in the area of f/8 to f/16 to maximize that sharpness and take advantage of all the coatings Tamron puts in its lenses.”

When Akoubian finds a point of interest in his possible photograph and wants to isolate his subject, he switches over to a telephoto lens. “This is especially true with wildlife and macro work,” he explains. “I want that flower or coyote to stand out against everything—I don’t want competition with my subject. In those cases, I’ll usually shoot at f/2.8 or a similarly wide-open aperture (f/5.6 or below).

By maximizing the capabilities of his lenses, Akoubian is able to turn a seemingly straightforward shot into a study in geometry. “I was using the 10-24mm lens to shoot the sunrise at Tybee Island Pier,” he says. “The image I created, though, isn’t just a pier, it isn’t simply a sunrise image: It’s an image about the graphics of the leading lines, the vertical/horizontal composition, and the pattern of the shaded area of the pier in contrast to the colored areas of the ocean and the sunrise in the sky.”

The rule of thirds came into play while Akoubian was shooting along Mormon Row in the Grand Tetons with his 10-24. “I came across this unnamed barn, one of those iconic images you’ll find in the Grand Tetons,” he says. “I wanted to give the image a real wilderness feel. That tree in the image is a cottonwood—it really appealed to me as a foreground element because of its texture. The cottonwood served as the foreground, the barn was in the background, and then I had the Grand Tetons behind that.”

Sometimes, to capture exactly what he’s looking for, Akoubian has to play the waiting game. “Shooting at Otter Cliffs at Acadia National Park in Maine with my 10-24, I had to sit for 20 minutes waiting for a wave to hit the rocks just right,” he says. “I loved the way the sun had come in and lit up one area. I didn’t want a total blur of the water—I knew that shooting between 1/15th and 1/4 of a second was where I wanted to be. I adjusted my aperture until I got that setting.”

It pays to always be on the ready. With his 28-75mm lens, Akoubian was struggling to find a good photo op during the wildfires that were plaguing Oxbow Bend in the Grand Tetons. “The smoke was just horrible,” he says. “Everyone else started eating dinner and drinking wine, but I, the eternal optimist, grabbed my camera and set up my tripod. Suddenly, the sun dropped down, the smoke opened up, and the sky turned this brilliant flame orange. I looked up and there were wineglasses flying as everyone started running down to set their cameras up where I was.”

Capturing wildlife and even people in their natural environment is another way Akoubian shows off the scenery. “We were on a sleigh ride in the National Elk Refuge in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, watching the coyotes stalk and pursue their prey,” he says. “We were in a sleigh drawn by two horses with 18 people, so setting up a tripod would have been impossible. I had my 18-270mm lens with Vibration Compensation, though, which worked perfectly in this situation. I just put myself in a spot where I had a good, clean background and isolated the subject.”

Using his 70-200mm lens, Akoubian was able to capture an orphaned bear cub playing king of the hill. “A big storm had come along and a tree had fallen and killed this cub’s mother,” he says. “There had been a story on TV about him, so I called the owner of the refuge and told him I’d like to take some pictures and donate prints they could sell to raise money. These cubs could barely walk or run—a bear’s natural protection instinct is to climb, so we threw some logs into the grass. This little guy claimed the log and wasn’t letting his brother anywhere near it. I set my camera up on a tripod and shot it at f/2.8.”

Perhaps among his most interesting subjects was Hans, a former escapee from East Germany into West Germany during the Cold War. “Hans comes out to this dude ranch in Wyoming every year for one month, which he’s been doing for about 40 years,” says Akoubian. “The texture of his skin was perfect for this type of environment. I asked him if I could take his picture using my 70-200 lens, and he replied, ‘If you must.’ When he showed the pictures to his friends back home in Maine, they dubbed the picture ‘The Old Man in the Mountain.’ He looks like a great old cowboy.”

For more information on David Akoubian’s work, go to www.bearwoodsphotography.com.