Bad Weather - Help!

A

analog_addict

Well-known member
Hi everyone,

I have a corporate job this week that involves shooting a lot of landscapes of my local area to be used as a rolling VT at a conference. I'm shooting on a 5D using a slider.

The problem is the weather is bad at the moment. No rain but generally dark with grey skies. Is there anything I can do to make it not seem so grim? Anyone have any tips?

Thanks.
 
Well, that depends a whole lot on how you want it to look... But, purely guessing from the info in your post, maybe overexpose slightly and add a bit of warmth. Be careful though so you don't blow out the whole image. You could do some, if not all, of that in post if you aren't sure about what you are doing.
 
I try to get as close as possible in camera with my white balance when it comes to Canon DSLRs. H264 can easily break up when you push is slightly.
 
Lights !!!! See if you can't brighten up, highlight and backlight some of the closer subjects in the landscape with car lights diffused with bed sheets. Car lights reflected correctly can be quite warm.

Cheers,
Pete
 
I would increase saturation a bit and maybe a little more contrast. Look for breaks in the weather when the sun peaks thru which can yeild some dramatic opportunities.
 
Mark Williams said:
I would increase saturation a bit and maybe a little more contrast. Look for breaks in the weather when the sun peaks thru which can yeild some dramatic opportunities.
Click to expand...

Best option... whenever you're shooting landscapes, you just have to work around the weather's schedule. Even Al Gore hasn't figured out how to control the weather to his liking yet.
 
Sometimes, a blue-grad filter can help if the sky is not too dark & gray. Worth a try if you have one.

Light-washed out skies can sometimes be blued-in successfully with a "darken" transfer mode. With DSLR footage, the aliasing/sharpening can mess you up; but in AE, you can often pull a mask from the sky and soften edges of tree branches/etc that cross the sky. I do a lot of work for a TX land developer and I'm constantly dropping complex, cloudy blue skies in over the cloudless Texas searing skies. A moving lens flare can be "instant summer".

If you're just really stuck, see if you can source any stills of your area that you can pan into your shots. You'd be surprised how mixing stills with motion footage can fool the eye. You can always drop a foreground layer in and pan the 3D camera (After effects), getting some parallax. That can be "instant HD video footage" that looks very convincing. You can key out the skies from stills in Photoshop and drop them over moving cloud footage or slowly-sliding cloud layers, etc.
 
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