In March a new and beautifully produced Landscape Photography magazine launches which I will write for. This is my first article:

In landscape photography, one of the first and most common questions that people will ask is about methods for controlling the sky. To most mortal men ‘controlling the sky’ might seem a grandiose task on a par with something a modern day Icarus & Ithacus might take on. However, to a band of dedicated, some might say almost-committed, early rising, wet-booted, cold-footed landscape photography devotees it is one of the most basic skills we have to master. Now of course if an infinite number of chimps, working on an infinite number of typewriters, for infinite amount of time could produce the works of Shakespeare then it is not beyond the wit of man to see that us landscape chimps will come up with many complex ways to solve our sky based issues and probably then spend quite a lot of time arguing about which is ‘the’ way.

To start from the beginning, why do we need to control the sky?

Well, in fairness, it is not only the sky. Photography is basically all about ‘light’. You have a sensor or a piece of film and you need to capture the light that the lens is pointed at in sufficient amounts to make the image that the photographer envisaged at the time of exposure. The light makes the image and the light is what will guide the viewer to the areas of the image we want them to see and the way that we want them to see it. The problems come from the limitations of technology Vs the complex human form. The human eye & brain combo is a pretty lethal machine and can outwit the most complex technology. This is the reason that we have to jump through hoops to try to replicate even the most basic of views that we see and process without thought on a daily basis.

The most common manifestation of this issue is where the sky meets the land. Generally the sky is substantially brighter than the land. Our human brain knows this and the eye can cope with a substantial dramatic range and so we see the detail in the ground and the buildings or mountains in the distance but also the little fluffy clouds floating through the sky. The camera sensor though cannot cope with these dramatic differences and must be exposed for one or t’other correctly. This will result in either a blacked out foreground or a burnt out sky with no detail in one of them. If you are really lucky, you might even burn out the sky, black out the land and correctly expose for just a small part of the sky. This then is the start of the issue that we need to overcome. Realising this is unfortunately is also only the start of many problems. Many residents of the photographic virtual world tend to believe that they have ‘the answer’ and that there is some flaw in the argument of people who choose other options and they secretly believe that this flaw also translates to flaws in their psyche, personality and probably their moral fibre too.

At the moment there are several principal & popular ways to address this issue (and many sub methods within them):

1) Graduated Filters
2) Manual Blending
3) HDR
4) A mix of the above
5) Shoot low contrast scenes e.g. cut out the sky altogether

So let us take a quick look at these different methods in as balanced a way as an honest man with a pre-defined preference can manage. In these examples, I have included some initial costs of what it would take to take to get started with each of these models and an overview of how they work.

1) Graduated Filters
a. Cokin P Series rough cost about £100 to buy the adapter ring, the filter holder and a mix of hard & soft grads reputed to have a purple colour cast.
b. Hi-Tech more than Cokin but less than Lee
c. Lee Filters – V Good quality filters with hardly any colour cast (reputed to scratch easily)
d. There are loads of others and you can spend lots and lots if you are so inclined.

These come in 2 types, soft grad or hard grad. The difference is the rate at which they change from dark to light. Soft – has a soft fade and hard – changes quickly. They are each better suited to different situations and cameras.

They also come in different strengths to cope with different light conditions and can be stacked to increase their strength. The basic premise is that you darken the sky to within a couple of ‘stops’ of the land so that you have detail in both and so that the sky does still appear lighter than the ground e.g. as your eye saw it.

The alleged benefits of graduated filters are that they allow you to ‘get it right in camera’. However, there are limited in the situations that they can cope with and most landscape photographers these days process their images digitally anyway so I personally am not sure of the benefits of this model in a digital work-flow, unless you generally like cleaning and carrying things that is. If, however, this is already engrained in your practice or you are a film-based photographer then sure: ‘why change’. Otherwise, look carefully at what you want to achieve and consider if this model will actually allow you to deliver on those intentions and provide a justifiable return on your investment.

If a photographer does adopt this way of working and they honestly limit themselves to it then they are essentially restricting the number of situations that they can shoot or at least the accuracy that their capture can convey.

The main reason for this limitation is that the graduations are straight lines and even if you use a soft grad there are many situations when the elements in the foreground continue up in to sky e.g. buildings on hills, mountains, trees that you use to frame the shot etc. There are also lots of occasions when there will be light elements in the foreground that you will want to darken down too.

As for my opinion, well I like purple as much as the next man. It is a lovely colour: Regal, some might say. Freud, I believe, had other opinions. However, when it comes to landscape photography we do not need to add our own splash. I also love burnt and blackened trees as photographic subjects but I think that unless I am on charred ground or the Namibian desert then I do not think we need to add the effect ourselves. For me this model is just not taking advantage of the options we currently have available and does not do as good a job as we are capable of of representing the image as pre-visualized or witnessed.

The main downsides are: colour casts on your shots that are very difficult to remove. More chance to get something dirty: finger prints, sea spray etc & additional expense. Image quality (IQ) can also suffer using cheap versions of these filters. If you are spending good money of the best glass you can afford to get the crispest, sharpest image then would you really want to stick a cheap bit of purple plastic between you and your subject?

That said, some of the most gorgeous landscape images you see from some of the most accomplished photographers will have used Graduated filters so they can not be all bad, just a bit cumbersome and old-fashioned maybe?

If you do choose to go down this route you will need:
1 – Adapter ring to fit to any lenses you want to attach the filter holder to
2 – A filter holder that slides on to the ring
3 – The set of filters (probably start with soft grads though some people say only hard are necessary for crop sensor cameras)

2) Post Processing

a. Manual blending

The basic concept of this model is that you take a shot for the light area(s) (usually the sky) and a shot for the darker area(s) (usually the land) then put one on top of the other and ‘mask’ the bits that you do not want to see. This results in a final image; not coloured, not perfumed, just as-is. As scenes grow in complexity and your skills grow with practice you can blend as more than 2 layers to represent the scene as envisaged at time of capture. Changing ‘blending modes’ of the different layers also affects the output and pre-defined actions are available to purchase on-line. At its simplest this takes a few moments, at its most complicated it can take little while to get right. You can even replicate the straight-cut effect of a hard or soft edged graduation if you are nostalgic for the dark (room) ages.

For my money this allows you to get the closest to the scene that you witnessed in the field because there is nothing between you and the scene except your skills, your lenses and your sensor.

This method allows you as the photographer to retain control and not be restricted by a hard-edged piece of coloured glass or to hand processing rights a software app either developed by a well-meaning software developer on the other side of the world based on algorithms and equations.

You can do this in a variety of programs such as: Elements (about £100?), Photoshop (more expensive) or similar apps by other manufactures. You can usually download trial versions of the software too free for 30 days and you will probably need these programs anyway even if you choose one of the other processing work-flows.

One of the things that you will find with this model is that many people, who generally do not have too much experience with photography, call this ‘photo-shopping’ as if it is a modern idea robbing photography of purity, truth and decency. In reality though, landscape photographers have used this model since the days before filters were invented. Manually blending shots in post-processing to retain detail in the skies was actually how Eadweard Muybridge (he of trotting horse fame) had to process his landscape images in the days before Ansel Adams was even a twinkle in the milk-man’s eye.

The image below shows how this manual blending can cope with complex lighting situations and provide an accurate, faithful image.

b. Virtual ND filters

Programs like the latest version of Aperture or Lightroom now allow you to apply a ND filter to raw images post capture. This has some advantages over the ‘actual’ filters in that you can add or remove parts of the filters to give them a user-defined shape. However, the camera can only capture a limited dynamic range to if there is too much contrast in the scene then the highlights or the deepest shadows would still be lost i.e. in situations with a very bright sky and dark foreground it will not work. Therefore you cannot rely on this method alone unless you only shoot fairly low contrast scenes. However, if you only need a couple of stops then this can be a great user defined alternative the ND filters for the following reasons:

a) No colour cast
b) User defined strength
c) User defined amount of graduation
d) Easy to alter the exact position or other settings post capture

This image shows some of the customisable settings and the options allowed by this simple and powerful tool as used here in Lightroom 3.

c. HDR
HDR refers to ‘High Dynamic Range’. The principle behind this is that you take several images of the scene so that you have detail captured for all the areas of shadow and highlight within a scene. The computer will blend these images together based on setting chosen by the user to generate an image that represents potentially even greater a dynamic range that the human eye could have seen.

HDR is gaining in popularity and the techniques and software are constantly being refined. i-phones even have an HDR mode built in now. In the past this method of processing has had a poor reputation because it is very easy to mis-use. Many HDR images on the web will have a ‘cartoon’ look of being over-saturated and over-processed. This can work extremely well for gritty, urban scenes and really add punch. However, when the same techniques are applied to landscapes, for me personally, I am left cold.

However, for some practitioners who spend the necessary time to refine a method that works for them they can extract some real beauty from challenging scenes. The things to watch out for if attempting this method are: obvious signs of over processing, too much detail in area of shadow. Shadows are not evil and do exist. These can be used to your advantage. ‘The Shadows’, however, are another matter altogether though and I can think of no good reason for ‘The Shadows’ at all and if there was a software program to remove all trace of Cliff & his buddies then I think we should all take full advantage of it!

Programs like Photoshop have HDR embedded but you can also buy standalone apps such as photomatix. Again the cost for this somewhere round the £100 mark.

The other methods are fairly self-explanatory but the honest ‘answer’ is that there is no 1 way to process or capture shots. The best advice I can give is to try out various techniques then dedicate yourself to a particular process, reach a decent standard then try branching out and experimenting to augment your usual workflow. Understanding, different ways of working and increasing your knowledge can only increase the number of situations that you are equipped to deal with. The end image is after all, what that really matters. For my money though, if you can tell how a landscape image was processed then the process needs refining. When you look at a landscape image, you should be thinking about the image not obviously over darkened trees, unreal skies or glowing halos.

This topic is hotly debated on many Tog’ing forums and you just have to pick a method works best for you.

Basically there will be a cost but whether you choose to use software of hardware the cheapest option will be about £100 or so. Good luck and do remember that whichever model you go with the truth you find is only ‘your truth’ and not ‘the truth’. There is room for more than 1 Landscape model in this world so can’t we all just get along?