Determinación de Betaglucano

Clouds often are a key part of the sky over a landscape (Figure 6.9). Clouds look dif-ferent over difdif-ferent landscapes, and these differences can enhance and enrich your landscape to give it a stronger feeling of place.

Sometimes the clouds look great in front of you, but not so great when captured by the camera, which can be very disappointing. In part, this goes back to the challenge of how we see the world versus how the camera sees the world (see Chapter 2).

Another important aspect of making clouds look like clouds in your photograph is exposure. As discussed earlier, you need to be sure that you’re neither overexposing nor underexposing your clouds. Overexposing clouds washes them out so they look like blank blobs of white. Underexposing makes them look gray and murky, not at all the way most clouds look like unless they’re filled with rain.

There are other things you can do to bring out the clouds. An important filter for the landscape photographer is the polarizing filter—which could just as easily be called the “sky filter” because it often enhances and brings out clouds in the sky (Figure 6.10). A polarizing filter does not, however, automatically give you better sky.

Here are some tips for getting the most out of a polarizing filter:

• Rotate the filter. A polarizing filter is designed to rotate in its mount. As you rotate it, its effect on the sky changes. Before putting the filter on your lens, hold the filter up to the sky and rotate it to get an idea of what it will or won’t do. If it doesn’t have much effect, don’t use it because it just cuts exposure to your sensor without any benefit.

• Use a circular polarizer. A circular polarizer is a specific type of polarizer that works best with modern cameras and their exposure meters.

• Turn so the sun is at your side. A polarizing filter has its maximum effect on sky at 90 degrees to the sun. That’s where you’ll get the most dramatic darkening of the sky and separation of clouds. If you shoot toward the sun or away from the sun, you may see no effect on the sky at all.

• Be careful of wide-angle lenses. Because a polarizing filter changes its effect on the sky as you turn toward or away from the sun, a wide-angle lens can overemphasize this. The result can be very uneven skies when you’re using a polarizing filter.

• Be wary of black skies. Under certain conditions, the polarizer can make the sky too dark. This is especially common when you’re up in the mountains at altitude.

Just be sure that, as you rotate the filter for effect, the sky still looks like sky.

ptg7971238

ptg7971238

138

A polarizing filter offers another benefit for landscape photographers besides affecting skies. It can remove glare. By removing glare from leaves, for example, a landscape featuring a forest can have a richer green. You also can remove glare from water—although you need to be careful (otherwise, very clear water can seem to disappear).

An important way of dealing with clouds is to work on your image in the computer.

This isn’t about Photoshop or digital manipulation—it’s exactly what Ansel Adams did when he worked on his beautiful images in the darkroom. This is a traditional dark-room technique for photography, and it’s very important because the camera simply doesn’t always capture clouds the way we see them.

digitaL darkroom tooLs

In general, this book isn’t about working on images in the computer, although the final chapter does include some things that I think are important to consider if you’re really interested in landscape photography. Landscape photography has a long tradition of dark-room work and programs like Adobe Photoshop Lightdark-room really help you do some of the same things that Ansel Adams did, but now in the computer.

However, for clouds, I recommend programs such as Viveza and Silver Efex Pro, both from Nik Software. These programs, and some others in the Nik lineup, include the Structure control, which has a huge effect on skies. This single slider will do more for you than any camera or lens purchase to improve your landscape images (Figure 6.11).

FIgure 6.11

The clouds for the opening shot in this chapter were processed in Vivesa 2 with the Structure slider.

ptg7971238

111333999

c h a p t e r 6 : s k y

Chapter 6 Assignments

Silhouettes at Sunset

Silhouettes at sunset are such an important part of landscape photography with skies. This is something that you really should experiment with before there is an outstanding sunset in front of you. Find a landscape with some trees that can be clearly seen against a sunset sky. Shoot a series of compositions of those trees against the sunset. Use your zoom lens to make the trees big in the frame in some pictures and then just a small part of the scene at the bottom of the composition. Try all sorts of positions for those trees against the sunset.

Check out a Blank Sky

Go out and deliberately photograph a landscape with a blank sky. I’m not talking just about a sky that has no clouds—a rich blue sky can be an interesting sky. Instead, look for a sky that doesn’t have much color and doesn’t have much in the way of clouds (or if it does have clouds, the clouds have no definition). Try a variety of compositions where the sky fills up most of the frame all the way down to the sky being barely visible. Notice how much that blank sky will dominate the picture.

Sky King or Pawn

Find a pleasant landscape nearby that you can photograph easily. Go out to that landscape when there are nice clouds in the sky. Capture the scene in a variety of compositions, constantly changing how much sky is actually in your picture. This exercise forces you to look at how a sky can interact with the rest of the scene. The sky can be the king of the composition or just a pawn.

Share your results with the book’s Flickr group!

Join the group here: www.flickr.com/groups/LandscapesfromSnapshotstoGreatShots

ptg7971238

7

ISO 100 1/90 sec.

f/11 10mm (APS-C)

ptg7971238

Connecting with a