Thursday 12 May 2016

Blue Skies - Photography Week 16 (2016)

Landscape photographers often bemoan blue skies for being featureless and uninteresting. I can see their point if they happened everyday. Given this year's the awful winter weather, the occasional
blue sky is both welcome and uplifting.

Instinctively, when capturing blue or cloudless skies, I tend to change my point of view. I don't need too much sky to make the composition. Normally the balance of sky to land would be roughly one third to two thirds. With blue skies, this ratio moves closer to one fifth to four fifths as this capture illustrates:


The above image was taken at my regular haunt of Godrevy beach and lighthouse. The lower aspect provides an interesting composition using the sand ripples to lead to the rock and then the curve of the sitting water to point to the lighthouse. This curve also compliments the shape of the cliff providing balance to the composition. In this instance the blue sky, with some evening colour, does a good job of emphasising the lighthouse and the rock it sits on.

My only niggle with the composition is the rock sitting almost on the middle of the picture. Recomposing and altering the ratio of sky to land pushes this rock away from the centre placing a greater emphasis on the sand ripples. As the blue sky does not have any shapes features it can be squeezed almost to the top of the cliff line:


Working in portrait has fewer compositional options. Maintaining the foreground width often dictates the ratio of sky in the composition. Changing the point of view by getting higher helps to reduce the amount of sky but this tends to elongate the middle ground:



I probably think there is too much sky in the standard portrait format. When taking the image I was thinking that a crop may be required. Later in post processing I changed the image ratio to 4:5:



I was also considering a crop for the following image.

One of the photographic features on Godrevy beach is cloud reflected in the wet sand. Without clouds it can lack interest both in the sky and the sand as this image illustrates:


Cropping to 16:9 ratio improves the compositional impact:


Like many aspects of landscape photography, blue or cloudless skies is another challenge that requires a bit of thought and creativity. I am particularly pleased with the first two images in this post due to the brightness and the composition - although I can't totally decide which one I prefer.

Just before the sun disappeared I captured this final shot into the light:










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