Blue Sky By Morning

Blue Sky by Morning

Well, it really goes.....Red Sky by morning...Sailor's Warning or something like that.  But today's lesson has to do with the sky in your photos and why as a rule you should leave it out of the picture!


Now, the first thing you need to know is that light has a color or color temperature (you know this from science, right?).  For simplicity purposes I will just say that the color of light in the first hour of the day is cool or blueish and the last hour of the day it is warm or orangeish.  So, in the middle of the day, especially here in Texas when the sun is scorching everything, light doesn't have much color in terms of photographs.  You have heard of WHITE HOT, right?  Well, think of it in that way in order to remember this rule.  There will be more later on why you really want to avoid photos in the middle of the day for a variety of reasons. However as my recent vacation photos will prove, I will snap pictures around the clock inside, outside, wherever I may be, when I have a camera handy.

Castle with the sky in the upper right hand corner-very distracting isn't it? And it was impossible to crop out of the shot after the fact without cropping out part of the castle as well,

By and large the sky will just distract from what you are actually taking a picture of unless it happens to be the sunset or sunrise or it is one of those days when the sky is clear and blue and has beautiful puffy white clouds or huge dark thunderclouds.  Most of the time it will be gray and uninteresting or it will show up in your pictures as a colorless blob or distracting background that will actually detract from your subject.  Now, why is that?  Because your eye naturally travels to the lightest part of the photograph when you look at it.  Hopefully that is the shining face of your child or a color so rich that it draws your eye like a magnet in the case of a pretty flower.


What to do?  Zoom in is usually the thing to do.  You want to show the details of your subject anyway, so get in close so the viewer can easily tell that is what your focal point and the reason you are taking the picture anyway.  

I waited until we got closer to the castle so I could zoom in and leave out the sky.  Better?

If you can't avoid the sky by zooming in, then do what I suggested in a previous post.  Get to a higher vantage point than your subject, therefore filling your viewfinder with things below the horizon.  It seems easy in these castle photos because they sit on the side of a mountain, but you can usually move your position and make certain that your subject has something else behind them instead of the sky.  And while avoiding the sky, remember that goes for anything bright or white that is in high contrast to your subject.  Remember the other lesson where we talked about black and white and the range of "stops" of light between them?  Well the less contrast you have in terms of brightest white, (or grey, or other light shades) the more the other items in your picture will have the correct exposure.  Is contrast a bad thing.   No, but in extremes, it is hard to get right, especially with a point and shoot camera or when you really don't want to have to spend a lot of time working with your images in software after the facts.

If I stood a little more to the right, there would have been a lot more sky in this shot, but I moved left so I could fill the sky with the tree.  Almost got it all out!

So, take your best shot folks....the sky is the limit...or limit the sky....oh, you know what I mean!

Sometimes you are there just at the right time and the sky is such a lovely color that it actually enhances the photo!