Change Drab Skies into Bold Skies

Shooting on overcast days is terrific. It sure beats mid-day sun with heavy shadows and overly bright highlights. When photographing buildings overcast is very helpful for a nice exposure.

But what do to with that lifeless, dreary sky? Drop in a new one! Go out and shoot clouds on a day when the sky is full of them. Make a jpeg file and file it in its own folder called something like “clouds for new sky.” Of course you need to remove the old sky then place the new layer underneath the original layer.

Does the lighting match in each of these images? No, not really. But consider the use of the image, does it have to match? Sometimes it does, and sometimes it might not have to be perfect.

In the case of this church image, the intended use was for a bookmark. I was giving them to the church family members with the books of the Bible on the back for quick reference. So in this case, perfectly matching lighting was not an issue. I rather liked the impact of the bold sky.

You might want to get really creative and photograph storms and other skies for backgrounds.

If making the lighting match was critical, go out late in the day or early in the morning and shoot when the shadows are long and the lighting is softer.

A really good digital artist can actually tweak lighting in Photoshop also to make an image even more believable. I have a sample of this with a portrait session I did that I can share with you in a few weeks.

Oh – a good tip for shooting buildings (if you have the luxury of time) is to go in the spring or late fall when the leaves from the trees are not blocking out too much of the structure.