So it’s not sunny? There are plenty of opportunities for outdoor photography even on dull days when the sky is covered with nothing but featureless gray cloud. Woodlands are often a good bet.
Photography Under Overcast Skies
Whether close up or from a distance, with the full growth of summer or in the stark, leafless winters, trees and their surroundings make fascinating shapes. They exhibit some surprisingly photogenic colors throughout the year, not only in the Fall or when the Spring flowers are in bloom. And an overcast sky eliminates the tricky problems of exposing for strong sunlight and deep shadows.
Here are some examples from a mixed forest in an English December.
The first shot shows a moss-covered tree stump in the lower right third of the frame. Even in dull conditions one side is noticeably lighter than the other, and the lighter side looks better facing into the picture. Setting the head of the tripod just a foot or so above the ground for a low angle shot brings up the detail and contrasting colors of the moss and leaves, exaggerates the size of the stump and reduces what would otherwise be a wide middle ground of brown leaves.
Hyperfocal Distance
Clarity is everything for a shot like this, so the tripod must be rock solid and the exposure taken either with a cable release or with the camera’s self-timer, to avoid jogging the camera. Stopping down to f22 and manually setting the focus to the hyperfocal distance keeps the whole picture sharp, even with a 3.2 second exposure. The curving line of trees in the background, adds depth to the shot.
The second picture is of a patch of mossy undergrowth where some leaves have fallen, creating pleasing patterns on the forest floor. The attraction of the picture is the natural shapes of the moss and leaves, and their contrasting green and brown colors. Again, pin-sharp clarity is essential if the shot is to work at all. This shot was taken at 88mm, close in to the subject to fill the frame, at an aperture of f8 to keep everything clear, for 1/3 second.
Natural Textures
The third shot shows the textures of an almost luminous green whirl on the stump of a tree that fell long ago, again zooming in close at 105mm to fill the frame. An aperture of f4 creates a narrow depth of field, and allows the lower left and top right corners of the picture to fall out of focus, keeping attention on the texture of the tree stump.
As always, working with RAW files rather than jpegs adds a great deal of flexibility at the final stage of the photo production process. Within Adobe Lightroom a little tweaking of the vibrancy and a light touch on the saturation slider can strengthen each of these shots, while maintaining their integrity. But it is also worth exploring other possibilities. The third shot makes an interesting picture in monochrome, with the green color slider dragged down by a few points for greater contrast.
Paul Lightfoot - I lived and worked in Asia for many years, managing and monitoring rural development projects for a living and using that experience to ...
