Blue Skies and More

One of the biggest technical differences between professional photography and "snapshots" is the sky. If you expose to best capture the scene, the sky is often washed out or even white, while professional shots will have skies with deep cerulean blue color, amazing cloud formations, or other interesting colors and textures. There are several techniques that make this possible and some require a digital SLR camera.

As I've said before, you can't do quality digital photography without a decent digital SLR camera. You can find a decent used SLR and set of lens for just a few hundred dollars. People often upgrade and just want to get something for their "old" stuff which is often barely used. Get a Nikon or Canon because they have the most quality lenses available. For instance, I see Nikon D90s for under $400 with lenses and the D90 is a very nice, versatile camera with excellent electronics.

One big advantage of a digital SLR is that you can change lenses, but the other is that you can add filters onto those lenses. For any lens that you will use for outside shooting, you should have a ultraviolet (UV) filter permanently on the lens to protect the camera's sensor. The sensor is what actually captures the image and it's very sensitive to damaging UV light. The UV filter also helps with glare. The "secret" filter necessary for capturing great skies is a circular polarizing filter. To use this filter, you simply turn the filter until the sky gets to it's darkest, this darkens the sky relative to the rest of the image giving you deeper blues with a blue sky, and better balance and detail with a cloudy sky. For a flat gray sky, professionals will often add color and texture to the sky using various Photoshop techniques which I won't discuss here. (There are thousands of how-to videos and tutorials on YouTube and the Adobe website that cover this quite well. There are of course other image editing programs for much less money that are quite capable.) Of course, no polarizing filter will allow you to shoot directly into the sun, but it will allow you to shoot more toward the sun then you can without it. To help eliminate lens flare and light kicks, find a shaded spot to shoot from or use a lens hood to block the sun from hitting the lens directly.

It's always best when possible to scout your location in person or on a map so you can take your shot when the sun is behind you and the subject is well lit. If the subject faces east, try to shoot it in the morning; if it faces west, shoot it in the afternoon. When it's not possible to be there at the optimal time, you can still get a good shot if you position yourself well, and shoot very tight to eliminate as much sky as possible.

Another technique is to reduce your exposure. For most outside shooting, I set my exposure at least 1/3 of a stop under the metered level; in bright light at least 2/3 of a stop under. I do this for two reasons, better exposure for the sky and to eliminate blown out highlights. In your post processing, you can almost always recover detail in darker areas except for maybe the very deepest shadows, but blown out highlights have no detail to recover; they are just big white spots that ruin your image.

So, use a circular polarizing filter with these other techniques and practices, and you will be on your way to having better images with better skies. Have fun.