Morning red needs some special requirements to appear. Learn how to plan and photograph the red sky for a masterpiece.
My latest YouTube video on how to predict and photograph red skies. The red sky is one of the most beautiful weather phenomena, but the thing is: it doesn’t happen every day. We need some special requests, and basically it’s all about the right weather, place and time.
Where does red come from?
As white sunlight passes through our atmosphere, airborne particles filter out spectral colors with varying intensities. Blue is the most filtered; it is scattered in all directions. This is also why the sky is blue and this is why the white sun looks yellow during the day.
When the sun is low, as at sunset and sunrise, light must travel a much higher distance through the atmosphere. More light is filtered, and since red is the least filtered color, the light turns red. But this is not enough to turn the sky red.
Canvas for light
Whenever we want to draw, we need any fabric or paper. For the red sky, the clouds are our frame. When red light hits the clouds, they turn red. But we need the right clouds in the right places.
Cumulus clouds are single, smooth clouds with only a small area below. Cloud layers, on the other hand, cover the entire sky or at least a large part of it. The area at the bottom of them is quite high.
Bring the sun under the clouds
We want the clouds to be illuminated from below. But how should that work? At first glance, this seems impossible, because the sun will always be farther away than the clouds. But when we consider our planet to be a sphere and the sun does not set or rise but our Earth is rotating, it becomes easier to understand how to get the sun to position so that our clouds are lighting from below.
A few minutes before sunrise and a few minutes after sunset, the sun is below the horizon. If there are clouds above our subject and if there is a gap in the sky behind our subject, the sun can shine through that gap and our clouds will be illuminated. by sunlight. As light has to travel an extremely long distance through the atmosphere from where it is, more light is filtered, and eventually, red light illuminates the clouds at the bottom. Single cumulus clouds lead to a lot of small areas of saturation in the scene. Multi-layered clouds lead to a large area of alternate illumination.
How to predict red sky?
It is quite difficult if not impossible to predict red skies on weather apps. The weather app only gives you one version of the weather forecast for a single point. They not only show you the type of cloud and also don’t show you the space you need.
This is why you should use weather maps instead. You just need to find a nice subject, to make sure there are clouds above your subject and there is a big gap in the clouds behind it. How big the distance depends on how high the clouds are. But if your distance is 120 miles or more, chances are high that it will work.
What you should also consider
Avoid low-level clouds. They will block sunlight. Switch to mid- or high-level clouds instead. They are much higher up and the sun can shine on them from below.
If you want to use a shorter focal length, consider that a red sky will only be a small part of your composition. You can use a red sky to highlight a particular area in your composition, which can aid in a tranquil mood in the morning or evening. If you use a longer focal length instead, the red sky will have more weight in the image. The sky itself can be the subject and the mood can be quite dramatic.
Quite important is the chart. The sun is below the horizon, so we only get light reflected from the bottom of the clouds. And it’s red – really red. Sometimes it’s so red that I have to desaturate the image afterwards. This is why your graph is lying. The histogram shows only the sum of red, green, and blue light. In red sky conditions, there is almost no blue and no green there, just red. It is quite likely that the histogram shows a well-exposed image, even though the red channel is overexposed. I just looked at the histogram of the color channels. For red sky photography, I’m only interested in the red channel here.
Don’t just capture weather phenomena
Red turns everything into an overwhelmingly magical mood. The problem is that the red sky itself looks so great that we can forget to consider everything we need to get an attractive composition. But it’s composition that makes the difference between an average shot and a masterpiece.
In the video mentioned above, you will see how I took a panoramic photo of a beautiful mountain range in the distance. I consider subtle ripples in the bottom right corner to emphasize the contrast in the reflection between the obscured mountain and the bright sky. Shutter speed makes a big difference here. These ripples fix the image, and due to the mountain’s diagonal slopes, we are led back to the vanishing point, highlighted by the wonderful red sky in the distance. All the mountains, the clouds in the sky, and all the fog on the water are nicely balanced.
For more tips on photographing red skies and enjoying the whole adventure, check out the video above.
