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How to take breathtaking photos on overcast days


When I travel, I stay at each location I visit for a few days to increase my chances of encountering the great light. But even a week is sometimes not enough to get a colorful sunrise or sunset. The sky is cloudless or completely overcast, preventing any interesting light from coming through. Night photography is one of the ways to deal with clear skies. But what can you do in gray weather?

When clouds cover the sky, you still have something to work with if those clouds show structure. You can experiment with black and white photography and find out the details in those clouds. Or you wait until the blue hour to breathe some color into the sky. If it’s just flat gray, you can try photographing forests, waterfalls, or subjects that allow you to exclude the sky from the image.

But as the gray weather persists, you’ll likely yearn to capture some dramatic light at some point. The good news is that gray skies can do just that if you’re in the right place at the right time.

Light pollution

The absence of complete darkness can negatively impact plants, animals, and people. Therefore, light pollution is often seen as something negative. Landscape photographers often try to avoid it to keep the illusion of unspoiled nature and not show any signs of human civilization in their photos. For astrophysicists, knowing where to find dark places is even more important than where. Apps like Plan.it Pro or Light map help with that.

But if you want to turn a gray sky into a burning sky, you can use light pollution or skylight to your advantage. In that case, you would look for a place with a lot of light pollution. Those places are located in or near larger cities, which create so-called light domes at night. They can give a gray sky with low and medium clouds a vibrant orange color.

This happened while I was photographing Playa de la Arnia one morning. The city of Santander behind the cliffs in the distance lit up the clouds creating a spectacular sight that looked like a dramatic sunrise.

Skylight is best experienced at the beginning of the blue hour in the morning or at the end of the evening. Because it’s pretty dark outside, you’ll often have to expose for a minute or so to show the details in the landscape. An alternative is to increase the ISO in your camera, which will allow you to expose for a shorter time at the expense of image quality.

I usually use high ISO photos to fine-tune my composition in the shadows and to see how the light will look in the final image. To the naked eye, it often looks much less beautiful than what the camera reveals during long exposures. Shorter exposures at high ISOs can also help calculate the correct exposure time for the final low ISO image. If you had to expose for 10 seconds at ISO 1,600 to get a good tonal distribution in the image, you had to keep the shutter open for 160 seconds at ISO 100 to get the same results.

To capture the full dynamic range of the scene, you should also include some shorter exposures to keep the bright oranges from being cropped. Another technique you can apply is time blending, which I talked about in a previous article. If your foreground is too dark when you shoot the bright sky, take more photos during the blue hour and use those to show more details through exposure matching.

In the morning, I usually keep my camera steady after catching the light and take more pictures for the foreground when it gets brighter. In the evening, I started taking photos around sunset to capture the complete transition from day to night. This photo of the Kuala Lumpur skyline shows the gray sky around sunset first turning blue and then starting to catch the reflected light of the city.

BALANCE

It doesn’t always require as much light as in Playa de la Arnia’s photo to achieve an interesting result. Sometimes, just a little bit of orange or magenta in the sky is enough, like in the Kuala Lumpur photo. If I take it afterwards, the whole sky with most of the city turns orange. At that point, the image will have a noticeable coloration, which is often difficult to correct. If the city’s incandescent lights are the sole source of light in a photograph, the natural colors will disappear behind an orange curtain. For a well-balanced image, you’ll want to avoid this monochrome look. The goal is to show at least one additional dominant color.

If you time the exposure correctly, the blue hour will provide this balance. At some point, the orange light and the ambient light in the sky were in equilibrium. That’s the moment you should try to capture. Keep your camera in position during the morning or evening and take lots of pictures. Then, choose the one with the best color for post-processing, or combine multiple images for the best results.

Edit photo

You have to be careful if you want to stitch together photos taken during light changes. The colors of the blue hour often don’t blend well with those captured when the sky is bright. If your goal is to use an hourglass image to show more detail while keeping the colors of the sky vibrant, you can use the Brightness blend mode:

  1. Make the photo with the bright sky as the base layer.

  2. Place the images now in blue on top and set their layer mode to Brightness.

  3. If there is variation between different images, select all layers and use Edit – Auto-align layers….

  4. Apply a black mask to all layers except your base layer.

  5. Use a soft, white brush and start painting the details.

In addition to those steps, it also helps to adjust white balance, brightness, and contrast during the raw processing to better match the photos before loading them into layers in Photoshop. This step is what you should do to prepare for any exposure blend. It will help you create more seamless results. If you balance the images properly, you don’t even need special masking techniques during the blending process.

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