Immerse yourself in clouds and skies with Laura Vink! Colorful skies, extraordinary cloud formations, threatening dark skies; the possibilities in this contest are endless. I’m super excited to check out all of your photos. Click the button to read my tips for photographing cloudy skies.
The more interesting the sky, the more space it deserves in the photo. So the more beautiful the sky, the lower the horizon in your photo. Incidentally, a beautiful sky does not mean that the rest of the photo is unimportant. Also pay close attention to the foreground and choose the composition consciously. Is the foreground ugly or messy? Then you can of course also zoom in on special cloud formations, for example. If you shoot by the water, you can capture the breathtaking sky with its reflection in the water.
I really enjoy photographing a sunrise or sunset, because of the colors in the sky. Clouds are a requirement here and it’s always an interesting finding the right balance. You don’t want too many clouds, because then the sunlight will be blocked. But if there are too few clouds, you will not see any colors.
You see the red, pink or sometimes even purple in the sky when the sun is below the horizon. That is why I always try to be at the location at least half an hour before sunrise in the morning. If, like me, you don’t like getting up early, this may feel like a daunting task. But trust me, it’s worth it. At a sunset, I also don’t pack my camera bag as soon as the sun has disappeared, but I will definitely hang around for a while. It is amazing how much more beautiful the sky sometimes gets and you really don’t want to miss that!
Is the contrast between the sky and the foreground too strong? There’s a chance the sky in the photo becomes too bright or the foreground becomes dark. In this case, a gradual gray filter helps to reduce the contrast.
When I first started shooting, I was very clearly a “good weather photographer”. You didn’t see me shooting when it was foggy or with the threat of a rain shower coming. Now I know that circumstances like that can produce some really cool photos. For example, from a thunderstorm or rain that you can see coming from afar. With a little luck, the sun will still shine on the landscape in front of you. Which gives the dark clouds an extra threatening character. And who knows, you may even receive a rainbow as a gift!
Windy? Beautiful! It gives you the opportunity to experiment with slow shutter speeds, where the moving clouds can give an extra dynamic to the image. But you can also wait for the wind to blow that one cloud into the right place in your landscape photo.
I wish you lots of photo fun!
