how to get great skies in your landscape images

Firstly, huge apologies for the yellow text this week.  For some utterly strange and unexplained reason, all the text in this week's post defaulted to black instead of my usual white on blue background making it really difficult to read.  So, I had to choose another colour as white was not an option.  Strange, strange days!!

Landscape photography, well any kind of photography really, is all about light.  But you’ll often hear landscape photographers like me talking about “great light” or saying things like “the light exploded” or the sky “caught fire”.

Now, you can shoot a landscape in any light.  However, the light that works best is that soft, diffused light you get at the extremes of the day.  And when this light is combined with a really interesting sky, then that is when you’ll see people like me getting excited.

Although there is software available that lets you replace skies and even corrects other parts of the exposure to suit, I’m a firm believer in getting things right “in camera” and not relying too heavily on software.

So, here are my golden rules for getting “killer” skies:

1.     get out and take pictures when the sky looks at its best.  As lovely as a cloudless blue sky may be, it’s not the best for creating interesting landscape images

2.     look for days when the weather changes from rainy (the stormier the better) to sunny as these changes often result in the best-looking skies, and try to tie your shoot with the changing conditions

3.    try to fill at least a third of your image with an interesting sky (and less if the sky is not so great)

4.    when metering your exposure, make sure to protect the brightest parts of the scene so you don’t end up with “blown-out” highlights which are impossible to recover in post processing

5. remember that your camera has a much lower dynamic range than your own eyes

6.  bracket your images if necessary (shoot one at the camera’s given exposure then at least another two with -1 and -2, etc. exposure compensation dialled in) and one with +1 dialled in

7.   use a graduated neutral density filter to hold in the exposure in the sky even more if necessary (at sunrise and sunset, a reverse graduated filter is handy)

  

8.    if you’ve taken all the necessary precautions, then when it comes to processing your image in Lightroom or whatever software you use you should be able to keep any editing to a minimum

9.     when I’m processing my images, I tend to follow these steps in respect of the sky:

a.     drag a graduated filter mask over the sky

b.     reduce highlights

c.     tweak exposure if necessary

d.     add texture and clarity

e.     add a little dehaze

f.      play with saturation to your taste.

I find that following the above steps helps ensure you get the best skies to start with and that once captured you can process them to bring the very best out of them.  After all, you got up at 4am in the first place to capture that stellar sunrise so you might as well make the most of it!

But what if you haven’t got an interesting sky to begin with.  Perhaps you’re stuck with a crystal blue or cloud filled sky.  What can you do?

Blue skies can be enhanced by the use of a polarising filter.  This will deepen the blue to give you a more saturated sky.  Or you could turn your image into a black and white one, or further just concentrate on the foreground or an interesting subject within it and try to obscure or omit the sky from your image altogether.

Grey, cloudy skies, although challenging can result in lovely images.  Again, a black and white conversion could work.  Or, alternatively, using a neutral density filter to increase your exposure time to give a sense of movement in the sky can produce fantastic results.

Remember, photography is an artform.  It’s all about how you see and interpret a scene that matters.  And as I always say with digital images, it costs nothing to practice and experiment.

I've published a video on my YouTube channel to accompany this week's post.  You can take a look at that right

here if you're interested.