Walk To The Sun

In landscape photography no matter how beautiful the scenery being photographed, having a dramatic and vibrant sky can be the difference between a so-so and a So Good! photograph.

Forget about clear skies.

For the most dramatic skies with the most vibrant colors you need clouds. Not just a few little wisps of clouds either, you need enough clouds in the sky to capture the fiery light of the rising sun.

The down side to chasing vibrant, dramatic skies like in these photos is quite often I come away with nothing.

Let me explain.

When chasing vibrant sky I pay close attention to the weather and incoming/outgoing weather fronts. Living on the east coast of the U.S. I look for passing storm fronts that are moving out over the ocean around sunrise, my hope being that the sun, or at least some of its glowing light, will reach the distant horizon before the leading edge of the storm does. If all goes as I hope I may come away with photos filled with beautiful scenery and vibrant fiery sky.


All doesn’t always go as planned though. In fact I would have to say that I have lost my gamble with the weather more often than I have won. Sometimes the clouds beat the sun to the horizon, dashing any hopes of a colorfully vibrant sky, and the times the forecast is wrong and the clouds or storm passes leaving me with clear blue, and rather boring to my taste, sky.

However when I do get lucky and win, I often win big with skies like the ones seen in the accompanying images.


Tips and tools for capturing your own vibrant sky.

1 – Get an alarm clock and use it! You’re going to need to get out of bed early, very early depending on how far you are from your chosen destination. I plan to be on location at least 30 minutes prior to actual sunrise. Some of the most dramatic light you’ll capture happens well before the sun actually peeks over the horizon, and there’s nothing worse than watching that glorious color materialize, and subsequently disappear, while you’re still in your car.

2 – Be set up and ready. Weather fronts can pass quickly giving you a very small window of opportunity to capture what can often be fleeting. Sometimes you may have 5-10 minutes or more of the most spectacular sky you’ve ever seen. Other times you’ll be lucky if it lasts 2. If you’re still fumbling around setting up your camera and tripod it could be over before you’re ready.

3 – Filters are your friend. There is likely to be quite a bit of contrast between the brightness of the sky and the brightness of the foreground. There are two ways to deal with this. One is to take multiple photos with one exposed for the sky and one exposed for the foreground then blending them in Photoshop. The other, and my preferred method is the use of graduated neutral density filters (GNDs) while in the field. My two favorite, both from Singh-Ray, are a 3-stop soft edge GND and a Daryl Benson 3-stop reverse GND. Of those two the reverse GND gets the most use because I photograph seascapes so often.

With GND filters you can more closely balance the exposure across the scene which in turn lessens the amount of post processing time per image. Basically, the more right you get in camera the less fixing and fiddling you need to do in the computer.

If you’d like to see more Vibrant, click HERE to see what everyone else is doing for the Weekly Photo Challenge.

26 thoughts on “Chasing Vibrant Sky

  1. Excellent Jeff! I’ve stated doing some early morning images. Getting up and getting to the shoot is never fun but once there, it is wonderful….as is a coffee stop on the ride home. Cheers!

    1. Thank you! Yes, the whole getting up early thing can be a tough one of you’re not a morning person. You could just shoot around sunset, the same principals apply. And you get to sleep in too.

  2. Something about winter in Wisconsin brings on these fiery skies. The sun is so low in the south that it slips under the cloud cover just before setting or rising. It helps to be at my window on the second floor on a hill, too. But then, taking a picture out my window isn’t the best set up.

    1. I went from using them to blending multiple exposures back to using them again. What really made me go back to using filters instead of HDR was that every time I shot a series of exposures for HDR I was never completely happy with the results. It just wasn’t as natural looking as I wanted.

    1. Yes it is, it’s what keeps me going back to some locations over and over again in search of the “perfect” sky. For me any time behind the camera is “stress down” time for me. Except maybe those times when i can tell that the sky is about to ignite. Then I’m so wound up I have a hard time concentrating. You know those times when everything comes together perfectly and you just know the sky is going to catch fire in a few minutes. Then I’m all “Oh my god, oh my god, this is going to be awesome! (Please don’t let me screw it up 😉 )”

Comments and thoughtful critiques are always welcome.


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