To take great sky photos, place the line that separates the sky from the ground or body of water anywhere along the horizontal lines of the Rule of Thirds. Whether you’re using the sky as your main subject or backdrop, it’s important that you consider the placement of the elements within your photos, particularly of the horizon and your foreground subject. Photo by Sebastien Gabriel on Unsplash Photo by Kaitlan Balsam on Unsplash Mind Your CompositionĪ good composition is key to stepping up your photography and creating professional-quality images. But for more surreal-looking skies, wait until the golden hour, which is the period before sunrise (dawn) and after sunset (dusk). This is because the rising and setting of the sun brings out some of the most stunning colors of the sky, including pinks and combinations of yellow and blue that we don’t normally see during midday.Īdd variety to your everyday sky photography by heading out and shooting during sunrise and sunset. Perhaps the easiest way to capture stunning skies is to shoot around the time the sun rises and sets. You’ll have more freedom to crop, adjust exposure levels, and even try out different white balance settings without degrading the quality of the image. RAW photos give you more dynamic range, colors, and resolution to manipulate and experiment with during the editing process. Understand the differences between RAW vs JPEG to pick the best one for you. Instead of shooting the usual JPEG images, try shooting in digital RAW format to ensure that the camera preserves all of the image information that the camera sensor gets. Read up and understand how the elements of the Exposure Triangle-shutter speed, ISO, and aperture-can each affect your resulting image and how they work hand-in-hand in capturing that perfect shot. While this can also be achieved by lowering your exposure compensation by a few steps, learning how to manipulate your manual camera settings can aid you in getting the shot you want, especially if there are foreground subjects that you also have to worry about. To capture great sky photography, you need to properly expose your shot in a way that will bring out the clouds and the color of the sky-which is actually quite difficult to do as there’s a higher likelihood of overexposure.

Blue sky photography backdrop