Shooting a blue sky

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David Evans

Well-known member
Hi,

I've been struggling to try to shoot blue skies while retaining light and detail on the ground, but as skies are much brighter than the ground, I'm left with a white sky and good ground detail, or blue sky and a black ground (no detail). Lately I've been using a Hoya Circular Polarizer and it does get a little better, but I still can't get perfect blue skies and good lighting detail on the ground (these are all outdoor shots!). What do you guys do to fix these particular shots?

Thanks!
 
if you want to record both at the same time, you have two options.

1- plan ahead and capture the image when the sky and ground are closer or both in the range of the camera "magic hours".

2- shoot the scene and the skies separately(one after the other or using two cameras), and composite the image.

if it's just a blue sky(no clouds), people usually sacrifice the sky, and just add it from another footage, like just shooting some sky footage after ur done with the shoot.
 
Have you tried a linear polarizer? I've heard that they can tend to have stronger effects than a circular polarizer.

Another thing that comes to mind is secondary color correction, if you can get it to not be totally blown out.

I'm honestly surprised that this is even an issue to begin with though. Is the sun pointing towards the camera? I have PLENTY of shots of the sky and the ground both taking up good portions of a shot but both having proper exposure. Is the ground in a shadow of something?
 
It look like you had a lot of overcast. There isn't much you can do about that. when you did have blue it wasn't bad but a polarizer would make it much richer.
 
phudsontx said:
It look like you had a lot of overcast. There isn't much you can do about that. when you did have blue it wasn't bad but a polarizer would make it much richer.
Click to expand...

No, it looks overcast in the footage, but it was actually blue as it can be. There is a shot of a lamp at 2:35 where you see the white sky and then I focus on that same lamp from below and the sky is blue. Would you recommend a circular or a linear polarizer?

Thanks
 
You had a break in the clouds and changed exposure thus the blue on the tighter.

White cloud does one thing when hit by the sun, turns into a huge softbox. So thats how it can look.

A circular polariser acts similar to a grad on sky shots, you can adjust it so the darker area is across the sky allowing you to correctly expose your shot across the frame. In the opening shots where you have a clear half frame sky a graduated ND would have done the job well.

Where there is patchy white cloud in the sky, and you do want clean exposure try to shoot away from it.
 
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