Why my Dad likes clouds

(Yet) Another Big Sky, originally uploaded by Bexley98.

It’s taken nearly 2 decades, but I’ve finally realised what my Dad sees in clouds.

Dad spent most of his career in the RAF/Ministry of Defence, before retiring about 10 years ago. For most of his career he’s been involved to varying degrees with meteorology, the study of weather.

A combination of photography and my new job have made me stop and appreciate clouds whenever I get the chance. For most of my life, I’m too busy to truly appreciate the amazing variety, complexity and sheer magnitude of the sky, especially here in Scotland.

My new role has had me travelling for a few days every week, which makes blogging, photography and social networking incredibly difficult to do – especially when you’re hotel doesn’t have Wi-Fi and you’re working 12 hour days. So my regular weekend photowalks have become more than simply a photography exercise, they’ve become my chance to stop, relax and spend some time away from the rush of my increasingly busy life.

And so we come to clouds. In some of my earlier posts, I’ve mentioned how I really struggle with getting the composition right when shooting seascapes. You have an incredible vista, sea, sky, sand, but nothing to lead the eye in, no focal point. I’ve tried getting low/high/playing with depth of field, but the one thing I’d never really considered was using the incredible cloud formations as the MAIN part of the scene.

Hopefully I’ve rectified this in some of my recent photos, you can be the judge of that, look at my Flickr or Picasa for some samples.

I’m by no means an expert…but here’s some tips that I’ve picked up when shooting clouds:

*I NEVER get exposure right first time. I tend to shoot 3 or more shots of the same thing with different white balance settings until I get something that looks about right. You can also manage exposure through using the ‘A’ or ‘Aperture’ mode; this enables you to control the aperture whilst the camera computes the shutter speed, sometimes this technique helps you by speeding up shutter speed to avoid over-exposing shots.

*Whilst you can correct lots of things in post-processing, if you’ve blown the highlights or chronically under-exposed a shot, it’s difficult to impossible to claw that detail back.

*Shoot landscape and portrait. Shooting portrait obviously gives you more height and therefore more sky and less land which can force the view to look at your sky.

*Shoot black and white and boost the contrast - It’s weird, but by removing colour, you add a level of integrity that doesn’t exist in the colour version.

*Shoot ‘infra-red’ – Or if you don’t have the gear to do that, de-saturate a shot, then boost the blue and decrease the green in your colour mixer until you get a pleasing mix.

*HDR – Looks great, but it’s very easy to make your skies too blue and unnaturally over-saturated when working in this medium. If you want a surrealistic shot then simply turn all the settings to 100 and hit the ‘process’ button, but if you’re simply then wanting to create a “shot that pops” then use the more subtle ‘tone mapping’ option on the brilliant Photomatix software or just manage your saturation in Photoshop.

The three best ways I’ve found to improve my abilities as a photographer are:

1) READ: Learn from the best, use resources like TWiP and the ever-brilliant Scott Bournes new Photofocus site. Additionally, if you’re not on Twitter then get on it, read this and start following these incredible photographers. A lot of forward-thinking professional photographers are now using Twitter as their ‘Route 1’ for interacting with customers and colleagues alike. This enables enthusiasts like me to learn from the best in handy, bite-size chunks.

2) LOOK: Look at other peoples photographs. I set myself the goal of looking at 100 photos a week, Flickrs ‘explored’ category is good way to start browsing shots and you’ll soon have a set of your favourite photographers. Ask yourself why you like these images and why you don’t like others. Try and replicate your favourite shots and If you don’t like an image, ask yourself what you would have done differently? Then try your concept in the field.

3) TAKE: Take pictures. Take more pictures. Then take more pictures. MAKE yourself take pictures every week, take your camera to visit your family & friends, walk your dog, to work. At least half of the pictures I really love are of normal people doing normal things but captured in an innovative way by the photographer. I look at the shots I took a year ago and am amazed at how much I’ve learned. Then I look at a shot like this and realise I still I have so much to learn.

I’ll try not to leave it so long…