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In the Clouds Photography
Photography tips/advice
Unfortunately digital sensor technology and photographic film are very intolerant of wide ranges of brightness: most films can "see" detail in only 5 to 7 f-stops range from highlight to shadow. Contrast that with human eyes that have a range 10 to 50 times as large. If you have ever photographed a scene that was partly in shadow and partly in sunlight and remember vivid detail in both portions yet the picture was nearly whitewashed in the sunlit portion and black in shadow, then you know the problem.
In my opinion, weather skyscapes present some of the most challenging issues in landscape photography. Often the sun is in or nearly in many photos. This presents the biggest problem for modern auto-everything cameras. Your camera's light meter is attempting to render everything in the scene as if it reflected 18% of the incident light. This corresponds pretty closely to the amount of brightness of a clear blue non-hazy sky 90° from the sun.
Pointing your camera toward the sun will cause the camera meter
to go off the high end of the scale. By adjusting (reducing) the aperature back to
so-called "normal" exposure (by increasing the f-stop), the resulting
image will be underexposed. In these cases, you actually want to overexpose the
scene such that the sun is rendered nearly white not the 18% gray your meter
would attempt to make it. The best advice for shooting into the sun is to meter the
scene without the sun in the viewfinder, get your shutter/aperature combination and
lock them, then place the sun back into the field of view and shoot. Herein lies
a basic exposure rule stated best in Galen Rowell's book
(The Art of Adventure Photography
General photography tips
- Practice, practice, and more practice.
- Know your camera and all bells and whistles.
- Use a tripod!
- Buy the best lenses you can afford. Forget all the marketing hype about which brand is best for camera bodies. All the big names are superb: Nikon, Canon, Pentax (I use these), Minolta, etc. Worry about the lenses and buy good ones - they are worth it.
- As often as practical use f-stops closer to the middle of the lens range. Just because a fancy lens goes to f2.8 doesn't mean you should shoot everything at that aperature. The extreme aperature settings on lenses produce the lowest quality optics for that lens.
- Use professional-grade film. Grocery store film generally is not handled with proper care as far as temperature and humidity concerns. I won't recommend slide over print film necessarily - it all depends on your goals and uses for your photos. Print film generally has more dynamic range than either slide film or digital camera sensors (see paragraph below).
- If possible, shoot with shorter focal length lenses. Big zooms are certainly necessary for wildlife photography (particularly to avoid encroaching on an animal's space), but telephoto lenses have contrast loss. Instead use shorter lenses and try getting closer.
- Buy high quality filters but use them sparingly. A simple UV filter can protect your lenses from scratches and damage from poor handling (but I recommend removing it for long exposures).
- Find and use a good local photo lab for development. You'll pay more for a good lab, but film and developing are cheap compared to those possibly rare, incredible photos.
Tips for photographing weather/sky
- Practice, practice, and more practice. This one is worth repeating.
- A polarizing filter can deepen a blue sky (maximum effect is 90° from the sun) but is often not necessary at all. These filters will have no effect at all directly toward or 180° away from the sun.
- A graduated neutral-density filter (I purchased a soft-edge 2-stop version from Singh-Ray) can aid significantly in high-contrast scenes like the three photos here. Without such a filter, the ground would have been rendered in deeper shadow for the same sky exposures.
- Bracket whenever shooting high-contrast scenes. If possible, spot meter multiple portions of the scene and bracket according to these measurements. In some instances I have encountered, bracketing as widely as two to four stops is necessary as opposed to a more typical bracket of only a third or half-stop.
- Carry a chamois with your equipment to wipe any water immediately off lenses and other gear. I also carry a nice Lenspen for quick dusting and cleaning.
- Use fill-flash. If your foreground is close enough, your on-camera flash may help balance a scene even in daylight.
Tips for photographing lightning
Photographing lightning at night is relatively easy provided you have access to remote areas away from town/city lights. One cardinal rule to obey: always focus at infinity. Anything less is plain stupidity. Associated with this rule: disable auto-focus, manually focus to infinity and do not touch it again. Here are some tips to help you:
- Use a tripod (duh). If you don't have one, how about a simple bean bag (I always carry a few with my gear).
- Remove any filters (UV, skylight, polarizers, etc.)
- Use your lens' middle values for aperature setting (f-8 or f-11) as that is typically the best optics.
- Use a cable-release cord to minimize vibrations that you would cause by pressing the shutter release on the camera body. Alternatively, most modern cameras have an option for firing after a delay of a few seconds.
- If appropriate, try using a flash to brighten the immediate foreground. I set my camera's "trailing-sync" flash mode.
- For daytime lightning photography, be ready to waste a lot of film. Because most lightning flashes are a series of bolts not a single one, you can fire your shutter as quickly as your reflexes allow and capture a strike on film. The faster your eye-hand coordination, the better your chances. With digital cameras it is simple to delete the failed shots.
- If ambient light is dim, then you may be able to close down your aperature and increase the time your shutter is open to capture a bolt. This is actually quite easy for storms that are producing very frequent lightning of perhaps a bolt every second or two.
- The last option is to build or purchase an electronic device that senses a lightning flash and triggers an electronic camera shutter to open. This isn't nearly as hard as it sounds. You can pick up a book on opto-electric circuits at Radio Shack. If your camera uses a mechanical shutter I'm afraid the task is much harder and slower.
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