Seasonal Light

If you’re from the northern or southern hemisphere you’ll be familiar with the changing of the seasons.. basically the earth is tilted on its axis (on its north to south pole) and it leans over at an angle during its yearly cycle around the Sun. This means for those of us in the northern or southern hemisphere, you get this change in the position of sunset and the sunrise relative to the earth which opens up a wealth of photographic opportunities with the changing positions of sunsets and rises throughout the year. The benefit is this process creates ever changing weather patterns and temperature variations resulting in fantastic and unpredictable sky.

 

Comments

  1. Can you achieve the same result in post, instead of using a graduated ND filter for bringing down sky brightness, or is it always better to get it done right at the source?

    1. Hi you can take bracketed exposures at source so that you can merge a darker exposure of the sky with the standard one but if you have waves or trees movement etc then it’s more difficult. I always prefer to capture it in one exposure if possible with filters.

      1. Sounds good, thanks for your reply. So I guess masking everything above the horizon line in Lightroom and reducing its exposure, is just not the same ? I do understand the desire to get it right in camera, don’t get me wrong, but curious what your mindset is over simple edits like the one suggested?

        1. Hi, by masking above the horizon line and reducing the exposure on the RAW file you can often pull back one to two stops of exposure but with an ND filter you are already stoping 3 stops of exposure and then can still pull back more if you need. The difference is simply that with many sky vs foreground scenario there is not enough latitude to pull back the exposure correctly from one shot without the filter. If you don’t want to use the filters then it would be better to take another shot just for the sky that was around 3 stops less than the foreground exposure and blend that image with the original.

          1. Oh, yeah! This is the juicy answer I was looking for! Thank you sir, it makes all the sense in the world now. That answer alone, was worth this month’s fee.

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