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Cloud Light

Next up is Cloud Light. I don't really fell that I have had my fair shake at good cloud light. This is one of those things where you, it's the lottery ticket, you've got to have nice clouds, but they can't be totally covering the horizon. This is basically where light is illuminating those beautiful clouds. This is the stereotypical, beautiful sunrise sunset situation. So, a lot of great things about this. We've got that great color going on. It's contrast range that our cameras can deal with, so we can have things in the foreground, which is nice, and one of the things I didn't realize until, I don't know one of these situations, is I just saw how bright the sky was and the beautiful color in the sky, and I just looked around and I was like, "Wow, everything around me looks really, really nice." And it's because you have a beautiful reflector up in the sky. All right, so we have to have clouds, and so clouds are not the enemy, okay? Remember that, don't curse the clouds. Don't get rid...

of the clouds, we do want clouds. But we have got to have an opening, so we have got to get that sun in there. We have got to have a door for that to come through. And this is one of those things where I have made very bad predictions. I have thought it will never happen today, and it did happen, and so, you have got to pay close attention to the weather, but be optimistic as well. And so, if you do want to shoot twilight stuff, you are not as likely to get it with these clouds because there is going to be too many clouds blocking the sky and the golden hour where you have nice sunshine, you may not get that as well, and so that three peaks that we talked about it's rare that you will get all three peaks on any one day. You are more likely to get either one or two, but there are a lot of different situations, and you may get really lucky. And so, be aware of the weather patterns. What is the expected weather going to be? The neutral density filter will be a big help controlling the light in the top half of the frame. Finding something in the foreground because you are going to have even lighting on it. You want to have something interesting there to work with, and have a plan and be prepared to shoot very quickly. I know in some situations I have been there early and I could, I start getting that feeling, this is going to be good, I think I am ready for something here. You have to say, "Okay, what am I going to do? What am I going to shoot?" And I would often find three different shots that I could get, and what I would do is I would shoot one, two, three, and then the light is a little different by the time I have made those three shots, it is three or four minutes later. I am going to go back to one because maybe light is better or maybe it is worse, but maybe it is better. And then, I will go back to two, and I will go back to three, and then I will just cycle through those three things. That way, I will have a pretty good chance of getting all of them during a pretty good light. You know, chances are if it peaks really quickly, I am only going to get one of them, and I better prioritize which one is the most important when that light is at the very best. In other cases, I am kind of stuck, and it's like, I've got this one little thing here to work with and that's all I got, but it's really nice to kind of go back and forth maybe between different lenses or slightly different subjects. And so, when I am thinking about cloud light, one of the things I am doing is I am looking up in the sky, all right? I know this isn't much of a photograph, but I am looking for that airliner that has that jet stream behind it, the contrast behind it, and now I know, okay, the light is coming around. She's coming around the bend, right, next five minutes, and so you kind of know when to prepare for things. You know, every once in a while, like I was out on a really cold morning, it's like when do I go back to the car to get my extra gloves, you know? It's like, okay, I have a few minutes before the light is going to hit the clouds here, so that is just kind of your early warning detection for sunrise. And so, that light coming up hitting those clouds, so looking for a day with a little bit of clouds. And so, let's bring our Earth again. And so, you are up here on the top. Okay, this is not quite anatomically correct you might say, so light coming in straight through, very little atmosphere will give us a very, very clean light. And the reason that we're getting some very nice light at sunrise and sunset is because it is cutting through so much of our atmosphere, and the kind of hard thing is that the worse the pollution the better the light. Forest fires, if you have a forest fire in the area, you are often going to get some really unusual light that is often very, very good. And this is where you do want clouds above you, but you need to have that break on the horizon. And so that break on that horizon, for me, literally is the light at the end of the tunnel. All right, that's what I love to see. And so, in some cases, you might have two layers of clouds, and the lower level might not have that break, there might be a break illuminating the upper layer of clouds. And this lighting situation happens very, very quickly and notice the color of the landscape down here, and that's being affected by the color of the clouds. And that's what makes these unique is that this only happens for a very, very short period of time. And so, a few minutes later this is going to be a silhouette, but right now, with this light bouncing off the sand I can still see the foreground. This was in Antarctica, this was a panorama stitch. And it is technically not quite sunset, it is still, the sun is hiding behind a mountain, but we are getting some really nice cloud light. Stitch of about three or four images horizontally. And probably the best cloud light I have ever seen was down in Bolivia, it just had a color that I had not seen before. This is not altered in color, I'm not sure what to call it, it is kind of a salmon color. But it was just glowing, and one of the things I really liked about it was that the sun just because of that particular way the clouds, the formation of clouds at that particular time, the mountain was blocked from direct sunshine, but the sun was hitting the clouds behind it. And so, being ready for those unusual situations. And this was one of those things, where our group was sitting down to dinner, and I looked outside and something felt different. The light just looked unusual, and it's like I'll eat a cold dinner, I am going to go out and shoot. (laughter) You know, this is worth a cold dinner. And I remember this a lot longer than I did the cold dinner. Now, something else that I have seen happen, I was photographing down at Mount Uhud, and I call this a color pop, there is a moment and I have mentioned before how things can come and go very quickly, and it's not like you have an hour to shoot sunrise and sunset. You have one minute when it really is nice. And I had just kind of an unusual event, and it was kind of fun because I was shooting with multiple cameras at the time. And so, I was shooting with a time-lapse camera, and you can see what have time lapsed people down here on the lake, and if you watch the top of the mountain, watch the color of the mountain, we have got sunset coming up right around here. It's going to get a little darker, and then there is going to be a little pop right there. And then it gets darker again, it wasn't completely even, and I don't have a perfectly good explanation. There might have been a cloud that crossed in front of the sun, or it just cut through a different part of the atmosphere. But looking at the individual images, this is from the time-lapse, and although it seems kind of dark, but actually that best color image came fairly late down here, and with a different exposure I can get a really nice shot with it, and so, if I was to graph this out, as we move towards sunset, let's go ahead and get this started. I started shooting 33 minutes before sunset, so that golden hour isn't golden 33 minutes. It really only starts getting good 23 minutes before, but it's really only great right here in the last ten minutes or so, it has that little dip, and then it pops on color right about at sunset and sometimes just a little after sunset because the light is cutting through so much of that atmosphere, and then five minutes later it is completely dead. And so, that golden hour is not exactly a golden hour at least at this latitude, like maybe if you go up to Alaska or much farther north, you might get more of an hour. The silhouette is kind of another thing to be thinking about when shooting sunrise and sunset. And so, if you have something that is going to look good kind of in a two dimensional form with not a lot of light on the foreground it can work really well, these make for very nice images, even if you need to make them really small they read very well small. And so, if you somehow, if you need, like you have a catalog, you are putting the catalog together and we need just a small, little image here, go for a silhouette, they read very easily. And so, we want to look for maximum color and very distinctive shapes. And so, this was a little bit of artificially, "Hey, go up to the top of that peek, stand there, and I am going to move around, and get this." And these come and go very quickly, obviously. So you have to be kind of scouting things out ahead of time, and very tricky exposure. So, usually, manual exposure, trying some different things, there are often some highlights that are really blown out in many cases. And so, sun obviously needs to be fairly low on the horizon, and you need to have something that is very distinctive that is going to look good because you are not going to see any detail, you can't tell what color coat this climber is wearing. So, you need that distinctive shape. The better the shape, the better the color, the more impact you are going to have. And you are probably going to need to under expose because if you look at that image, the great majority of that image is darker than average. So, here you are trying to line up subjects that have great shape with really good color. I don't know why these two boys came and just stood right there, but I moved by camera over where I had nice lots of color right around where they were to get a shot. Lots of great places for doing this. Silhouettes at sunrise and in the twilight time. So, something else we will just kind of do a little diversion here and talk about the starburst. And a lot of people always asking the question, "How do you get that sun to do that little bursting of rays and so forth?" And so, this is a lens flare coming from the light that you are shooting. And so, it is going to help if you stop your aperture down fairly far in order to do this. I am going to show you why here in just a moment. And so, if you notice in this particular photograph, where do we see the sunrise? We see him down below, and we don't see him up above. And that is simply because it is easier to see light over dark compared to light over light. And so, that's just giving a dark background for us to see those sunrises. And so, you have got to have something kind of black behind it, and so placing dark objects right around it will help see, it will help you see those sun rays. And they do tend to work a little better with wide-angle lenses and so a good time to pull out that 16/35 or so then slightly obscure that sun with something over there. Although the light is not obscured here, it has a dark background behind it, so you can do this with artificial lights or the sun itself. Now, what is kind of interesting is noticing the rays of beam coming from the sun, notice how many there are, and as we change different lenses, we have a different number of beams coming out of that lens. And that is as a result of the lens that you are using, and the number of aperture blades in your lens. Which is one of the little technical specifications you can look on a lens is how many blades are in the aperture, and there is a variety that ranges anywhere from five up to nine, but we will just go through five, six, and seven here. What is causing those rays of light is where those blades kind of cause a little crease or a little corner for the light to be funneled. And so, what happens is where those little corners are is where you are going to get your light rays, but what is interesting is not only do they go where the crease or the median of those blades are it goes exactly in the opposite direction as well. So, what ends up happening is if you have an odd number of blades, you will have an even number of sun beams. If you have an even number of blades, well the opposite is exactly in the direction of another set of blades, and so you end up always with an even number of sun rays coming out of a lens for its sun flower. And so, you can see 14 in this case. And so, remember when I was telling you that I often shoot three different subjects? Well, in this case I couldn't move around, so I was shooting with three different lens so that I could choose, and I didn't realize it at the time, but each of these lenses had a different number of blades, and so I got different sun stars with each of the three different lenses that I was choosing. And so, to get a photograph like this, the key thing is I am stopping my aperture down. This is F11, so you don't have to go down to F22, but F11 in this case, you know, I was in Greece, and the whole thing was under construction, nobody was shooting photos, but that sun was coming through just a really tiny point, and I knew that I had all this dark area around it. And talk about a really clean starburst here. I noticed that some of the newer cameras have a little bit better, they know this is not just a something that happens, this is something that people will shoot for, and they have actually done a great way of really cleaning things up because there were some older lenses that, which it's not as clean and smooth and it's a little bit more messy of a starburst. And so, here I am very specifically moving myself back and forth in order to get this shot. I'll line it up and then I'll move back and forth, and I might shoot two or three photos going a little bit left to right to get slightly different parts of that sun obscured. And so, you need just a small little gap to get a little bit of that light through.