Heaton lives in Pennsylvania’s Chester County, but he spends a lot of time photographing locally in nearby Lancaster County (the heart of Amish Country), as well as at national parks and landmark sites. The 18-270’s versatility proved invaluable during one expedition in Lancaster, right after a big snowstorm. “We had gotten about a foot of snow, so not only was driving difficult—finding parking was even worse,” he explains. “I was driving along when I saw this quaint Amish schoolhouse in the distance, but I couldn’t get to it. I had to park in a parking lot and run through a field up until I hit a fence to get as close to it as possible.”

It was sunset, and an unpredictable storm front was rolling in—meaning Heaton was suddenly confronted with a perfect photo opportunity. “The whole image opened up before me in a span of about five minutes—all the magic of the storm and the clouds and that gorgeous light in the upper right-hand corner,” he recalls. “I didn’t have a lot of time. If I didn’t have the 18-270 and had to fumble through my bag looking for just the right lens to get this shot, I would have missed it. I shot it at 155mm, at f/11, 1/60th of a second.”

The 18-270 showed off its range once again on a recent trip to Havre de Grace, Maryland. “This was a scouting trip for one of the workshops I teach—I went down to the location a couple of days before the actual workshop,” says Heaton. “When I got there, I was down on the pier when I saw this amazing set of clouds rolling through. I had to run down to the dock as fast as I could; the light was moving very fast. You can see the red in the clouds from the storm front that was approaching. Once again, the 18-270 came through for me—I was standing on the dock, and I shot the sailboat at 75mm. With this lens, I can really compress a scene, or really open it up and make it wide. That’s the real beauty of this 18-270 lens—you can carry one lens and can get a lot of diversity.”

Another workshop trip resulted in an illuminated shot of the Washington Monument. “Every year I take a group down there to shoot and act as a sort of tour guide,” he says. “It was sunset, and we were actually facing the opposite direction, when I suggested we turn around and shoot the monument itself. It was bathed in this phenomenal pink-blue glow. The 18-270 shoots so well in low light like this—I normally have my ISO at 100, but I dialed it up to 400 and used a 4-second exposure at f/11. The lens isn’t zoomed out far as some people might think: It was at 27mm.”

The right lighting is obviously the most important factor for Heaton when he’s setting up his shots. “Learning to capture light will make extraordinary images from ordinary subjects” is a mantra that Heaton repeats to his students and on his Web site. “It doesn’t really matter how great a subject you have—if you get just the right light, it becomes a magic moment.”

Heaton enjoys heading out to the nearest creek or river and creating dreamy-looking shots as the current rushes by. “That’s actually my specialty—I’ve been drawn to water shots and moving water since childhood,” he says.

He put this technique into practice during a recent trip to the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. “It was spring, when all the greens are just a little bit richer than they normally are,” he says. “I just waited for the right light and used a long shutter speed to give it what I call that soft, cotton-candy flow. For the one creek shot with the golden glow, I shot it at 30mm, f/22, with a 15-second exposure; the other shot, where the creek is formed in the shape of a ‘C,’ was shot at 32mm, f/16, at 1 second.”

Heaton’s willing to crouch down into the water to get the best possible angles. “I was in a creek right here by my house, maybe a mile into town—the autumn leaves were floating in the water,” he says. “I had my camera and tripod set up about a foot above the water as the creek flowed past me. With that low perspective, I was actually able to exaggerate how big that creek looks—it’s really not that big of a creek.”

A trip out to Zion National Park reminded Heaton why the 18-270 is ideal out in the field. “We hiked up 3 miles up the narrows,” he says. “You’re walking through water at times, and you can’t really carry a lot of gear with you. But with the 18-270, I never had to stop and try and switch lenses; I was able to capture just about everything I was seeing. In cases like this, where you might not have a tripod, is also where the Vibration Compensation (VC) technology comes in handy—it ensures that a handheld shot always comes out sharp.”

Interesting shapes and angles can turn a usually ho-hum scene into an eye-catching image. As Heaton points out, nearly every landscape photographer has attempted a sweeping fall-foliage vista. While he was out at Pine Creek Gorge (also known as Pennsylvania’s Grand Canyon), Heaton noticed a set of triangle-shaped shadows across the mosaic of vibrantly hued mountains. “It almost looked like jack-o’-lantern eyes,” he says. “The geometry of the shadows made for a really interesting shot, which I took at 100mm, at f/11, 1/10th of a second.”

The jutting jags and peaks of Great Smoky Mountains National Park also served as a source of linear inspiration for Heaton: He shot Clingmans Dome, the highest point in the park at nearly 6,650 feet. “It was at sunrise, and the sun was just getting ready to break over the top of the mountain,” he says. “Every morning you get a nice little fog bank down in the valley, and we had a cloud break that filtered the sun out a little bit. This is an HDR (high dynamic range) shot, which means I took five images at different shutter speeds and combined them into one. That’s how I got all that detail in the sky and the ground, and the trees weren’t black. You can do that in a single-frame shot using split neutral-density filters, but with HDR, you can get a little more control over your foreground and background contrast range.”

Even when he ventures off of his usual nature beat, Heaton looks for shapes and lines that will pull the viewer in. “I love shooting street scenes,” he says. “A couple of us went down to Philadelphia because we had heard about some of the graffiti that was there. Some of these graffiti artists are totally amazing. We spotted this scene underneath a bridge, and the repeating lines just lent themselves to be photographed. I had to use a long exposure on this one, because the light underneath the bridge wasn’t that great, so I used an 8-second exposure at 25mm, f/16. I’ve been back there three or four times since to shoot this street art.”

Whatever creek he’s wading through or mountain he’s ascending in his quest for compelling photographs, Heaton knows that his trusty 18-270mm lens will get every shot. “I love capturing the moment in time when things happen,” he says. “My 18-270 helps me do that.”

For more on Heaton’s work, go to www.edheaton.com.