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Dull Day Blues- Pentax User
It can be a real pain when the weather doesn’t play ball. It’s especially annoying when you have crawled out of bed at the crack of dawn to capture the first light of day and then find that the great weather the forecasters promised the night before has materialised into a thick covering of cloud instead. This flat lighting does nothing for that otherwise stunning landscape in front of you and ruins any other plans for a day’s photography ahead.
However, don’t despair, because all is not lost. You can still take great pictures on these kinds of days, you just need to adapt your style and subject matter to suit the prevailing conditions. Although a sunny day is ideal for most subjects, especially landscapes and will transform a scene by casting light and shadows across the subject, which creates vital depth and contrast, not all subjects benefit from this.
Overcast days soften the light and the cloud acts like a giant softbox, just like the kind you have in a photography studio. This therefore makes the light ideal for portraits. Soft lighting is kind to the complexion and you don’t get the harsh shadows that portrait photographers have to ‘fill in’ with a large, white reflector. It’s a flattering light and again portrait photographers prefer shooting in shade, rather than place their subject in bright sunlight for the same reason. So, make the most of this soft light to practise your portrait skills instead, knowing that you are going to get results that will be pleasing to the subject.
If your intention was to shoot beautifully lit landscapes, then simply change your tactics and look for details within the landscape instead. Swapping to a telephoto lens and picking out finer details in the landscape and excluding the sky, will make ideal abstract images. Although these details help make up the whole scene, they are great photographic subjects in their own right.
Look for shape and form with subjects such as dry-stone walls or natures natural patterns. Fallen trees, colourful vegetation, old fences, isolated trees and soft, rolling fields. All these can make great subjects when photographed in abstract form with overcast lighting, where their shape alone will make the image. Even closer and macro subjects can be shot with the same technique. Whether it’s a close up of a butterfly, a colourful flower or any other micro-sized subject, soft, even, overcast lighting certainly makes it easier to shoot.
The same types of subject can be found at the coast. Low tide reveals all sorts of subjects that lend themselves to being shot as abstracts, from the rippled sand on the beach to different shaped rocks and coastal erosion to the cliff faces. Rock pools and beautifully scrubbed pebbles are revealed at low tide and these work well when cropped as tight compositions.
If you are thinking of shooting in woodland, then again an overcast day is an ideal time to venture under the canopies. A bright, sunny day causes far too much contrast of light and shadow and your camera just won’t be able to cope with the range of difference in light. On an overcast day however, everything is evenly lit and so the subject in the wood or forest becomes the point of view rather than the way it is lit.
Waterfalls are a similar situation. These are often situated in darkly lit areas of the landscape and a bright day throws them into deep shadow, which your camera’s meter again will struggle to expose for. The low level of light of an overcast day will also help to keep your shutter speeds down, so that when you photograph the waterfall with the camera firmly on a tripod, you can easily use shutter speeds or ¼ of a second or longer to blur the water and create lovely soft movement, which contrasts nicely with the hard rocks and vegetation that usually surrounds them.
Even in the landscape, you can use the extended shutter speeds required on a dull day to add movement to your images. Water, foliage blowing in the breeze or even the clouds overhead, will all add a sense of drama to an image if allowed to move during your exposures. You can even use a neutral density filter over the lens to increase the exposure even more. An exposure time of thirty seconds will allow lots of movement and is quite possible on a dull day with a filter over the lens when combined with a small aperture and low ISO setting and virtually impossible to achieve on a sunny day.
If you like to try black and white occasionally then an overcast day is ideal to make the most of the medium. Black and white photography is more about shape, form and texture than light and so subjects shot in black and white will benefit from an overcast day. You can add drama to a B&W landscape by emphasising heavy clouds overhead with a strong ND grad over the lens, to bring out the definition of the clouds and even make them appear darker and more brooding than they are in real life. Some tweaks and simple manipulation in post-production can add to this further.
You can also use filters or the cameras White Balance settings, to add much needed mood to images that you shot in colour. By bringing the colour temperature down with the tungsten WB setting or adding a blue filter, you can give landscapes a bleak, cold look, which gives a sense of isolation and despair. Up the colour temperature to above 5500k with the cloudy WB setting or by adding a 81 series warm up filter, you can counteract the cool cast of a overcast day and give you images an injecting of warmth.
One last thing to try if the weather is poor outside and that’s to come inside. Whether shooting the interior of a building or using window light to shoot a still life set up, an overcast day is ideal for both and the soft, even light coming in through the window will make shooting much easier than strong sunlight streaming in and creating areas of dark shadow in the room itself. You could come back to shooting portraits again, if its too cold outside for your subject, then shooting them using the window light and perhaps adding a reflector on the opposite side to create very pleasing and natural results.
Whenever the weather hasn’t turned out as intended, don’t give up and put your camera away. Learn to embrace the change in conditions and use it to your advantage. There are plenty of subjects that will benefit this flat lighting and it’s a new challenge for you to find them when others have just given up and gone home.
© Craig Roberts
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