Did you take a beautiful picture of the sky?

When shooting large-scale landscape films, we can't do without the sky, because the sky always gives people yearning and mystery, and it can also bring better visual impact to our own landscape films. Play a sense of space and three-dimensional picture. However, many photographers always feel that they can't shoot the beautiful sky that seems to attract the audience at a glance when they start to take landscape photography. Here Bian Xiao gives you four systematic skills, please read them patiently. If you really study hard, I believe you can shoot a large beautiful sky like the one below.

Tip: In fact, when shooting the beautiful scenery of the sky, the key is the cloud. Taking good photos and making good use of the cloud can significantly improve your film production rate.

Let's talk about how to shoot clouds and how to make good use of them. What auxiliary equipment do you need? What is the principle of controlling exposure? What special methods can be used?

1. Choose the expression form according to the form, which requires observation and flexible adjustment of your shooting angle.

Clouds are varied in shape. It is very important to adjust the shooting method according to the shape of the cloud.

For a large continuous cloud, you can consider shooting a big scene with a wide-angle lens to reflect its majestic momentum:

However, there will be winds. In the process of shooting, you will find that the cloud has a running direction, or a relative sense of depth. At this time, you need to adjust the relative direction yourself:

If the clouds in the sky are scattered and divided into blocks, you can use a telephoto lens to select one of them with interesting and beautiful shape as the main body and the other clouds as the foil.

It is suggested that the central composition should be adopted, and the proportion of the main picture should be appropriately increased to better express its form.

Do you still need to pay attention to keeping the subject as much as possible when shooting? Body? Integrity, don't let the edge of the frame cut off part of it:

The most taboo of cloud photography is that there are many incomplete clouds in the picture at the same time, which makes people unable to tell which one is the main body. The picture lacks primary and secondary, and there is no focus.

As shown below, the center of the picture is empty, and there are many clouds on the edge that have been cut off by framing, so the picture lacks focus and appears chaotic:

Even if the sky is blue, it can't save this photo. Everyone should take a warning. The whole photo has no sense of completeness and layering. This is a pile of rubbish.

2. Control the exposure. Good exposure control can show different effects.

When taking pictures with clouds as the main body, the light ratio of the picture is often relatively large: there is a brightness difference between the sky and the ground, and there is also a brightness difference between the cloud itself and the sky.

As mentioned above, just shooting the sky may make the picture too empty, and it is best to include the scenery on the ground. In order to prevent the sky from being too bright, losing details or the ground from being too dark, you need to reduce the light ratio.

When using, be sure to adjust the gradient position and aim the gradient at the boundary of the dark/bright part of the picture, so that the sky can be darkened without affecting the ground scenery;

The finger in the picture above is holding a gradient gray lens, which can effectively balance the light ratio between the sky and the water surface, so that the effect will be more layered?

If you lack relevant props, you can wait until the brightness of the sky is low at dusk. Or change the composition, so that the ground scene only occupies a small part of the picture, and then silhouette. About how to shoot silhouettes, I published some articles in Bian Xiao Headline. You can learn through them.