Why Are My Blue Skies Coming Out Stark White Rather Than Pleasant Greys

Sirius Glass said:

Yes, you need a polarizing filter or one of the colored filters to darken the sky.

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Polarizing filters are not a panacea. They work best when the sun is at 90º to the lens axis. And polarizers can affect color saturation, too. They can kill reflections, such as in water or glass or polished steel--which can be good or bad, depending on what you want from the shot. A polarizer will have pretty much no effect on an overcast day except to add a few stops to your exposure.

Grey, flat skies are... boring. In fact, I've always thought skies are boring, full stop. Unless they are full of birds, or aircraft, or such things. Images with clouds in them are usually images of clouds. Also boring.

Try less sky in your images. More ground detail. Expose accordingly. Your images without so much sky will be more... less boring.

B&W filers are best used to bring out details in the ground part of images. A light yellow lives on all my film Nikons, and recently when I bought a new (to me) Leica iif, the first filter I bought for the Summitar 50/2.0 was... a light yellow.

ozmoose said:

Images with clouds in them are usually images of clouds. Also boring.

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It depends:

Pieter12 said:

Polarizing filters are not a panacea. They work best when the sun is at 90º to the lens axis. And polarizers can affect color saturation, too. They can kill reflections, such as in water or glass or polished steel--which can be good or bad, depending on what you want from the shot. A polarizer will have pretty much no effect on an overcast day except to add a few stops to your exposure.

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The polarizer is just one of many choices. On another thread I stated that if I need to darken the skies and I did not bring my color filters, then I would use a polarizer. Generally I use the polarizer for black & white film if I have a need to remove reflections or glints.

A gradiated burn of sky or just mask it and throw in a different sky.

If its just flat cloudless sky you arent going to have anything in the negative even with a filter - its either going to be white slab or grey slab in scene so its going to need work afterwards in darkroom or photoshop.

Sirius Glass said:

Yes, you need a polarizing filter or one of the colored filters to darken the sky.

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foc isn't the OP / person who is asking for advice

Craig - "work afterwards" - you mean faking in clouds with PS afterwards? Old timers did it with dilute red dye on the back of the neg, which worked faster and easier than PS for faking both clouds in plain sky or cigarette smoke back when that nasty habit was still considered fashionable, but the smoke itself in a portrait studio would have veiled the shot, and over the long haul, covered everything with soot and nicotine stains. The even before that, in blue-sensitive plate days, they'd keep separate negs with just clouds on them and sandwich it with the primary negative. Blue sensitive film with a blue sky obviously comes out with a blank sky. But people like Timothy O' Sullivan, Muybridge, and Carleton Watkins learned how to make wonderfully graphic cutout compositions with white skies, just like people like Brett Weston later did with graphic deep blacks shapes using panchromatic film. What works ,works; what doesn't are rote generic formulas about what a sky should look like.

And ozmoose - are you sure it's no you that's boring instead? Maybe you should try that cut-off-the-sky recommendation to portrait photography analogously - "just cut off your head; it will be less boring". That's a great way to get lots of paying clients.

But Matt already threw an ace card on the table. Definitely not a boring sky.

DREW WILEY said:

Craig - "work afterwards" - you mean faking in clouds with PS afterwards? Old timers did it with dilute red dye on the back of the neg, which worked faster and easier than PS for faking both clouds in plain sky or cigarette smoke back when that nasty habit was still considered fashionable, but the smoke itself in a portrait studio would have veiled the shot, and over the long haul, covered everything with soot and nicotine stains. The even before that, in blue-sensitive plate days, they'd keep separate negs with just clouds on them and sandwich it with the primary negative. Blue sensitive film with a blue sky obviously comes out with a blank sky. But people like Timothy O' Sullivan, Muybridge, and Carleton Watkins learned how to make wonderfully graphic cutout compositions with white skies, just like people like Brett Weston later did with graphic deep blacks shapes using panchromatic film. What works ,works; what doesn't are rote generic formulas about what a sky should look like.

And ozmoose - are you sure it's no you that's boring instead? Maybe you should try that cut-off-the-sky recommendation to portrait photography analogously - "just cut off your head; it will be less boring". That's a great way to get lots of paying clients.

But Matt already threw an ace card on the table. Definitely not a boring sky.

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Well either darkroom or photoshop depending on ops weapon of choice. Like you say Drew its a very old problem with a lot of different solutions over the years. Many ways to skin that cat.

A nice graduated burn can also be very effective in lieu of putting in a new sky i think.

ozmoose said:

Grey, flat skies are... boring. In fact, I've always thought skies are boring, full stop. Unless they are full of birds, or aircraft, or such things. Images with clouds in them are usually images of clouds. Also boring.

Try less sky in your images. More ground detail. Expose accordingly. Your images without so much sky will be more... less boring.

B&W filers are best used to bring out details in the ground part of images. A light yellow lives on all my film Nikons, and recently when I bought a new (to me) Leica iif, the first filter I bought for the Summitar 50/2.0 was... a light yellow.

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The sky is incredibly important for establishing atmosphere (I miss the Germanic word stimmung/stemning (danish) in English often. Literally voicing or tuning. It’s atmosphere but subtly encompasses much more than that).

The structure and colour of the sky and the temperature of the light it emits, is very directly linked to the amygdalae and epiphysis. So it affects us directly in a very visceral way.

Of course, with a photo and in black and white things are quite different.
But there is still a very different aesthetic effect with various cloud patterns versus a clear blue sky, or clearly heavily overcast day looking photo, as with most orthochromatic photos.

It simply sets the ground mood for the photo.

For B&W polarizers are very uncomplicated. Colour balance has little effect, unless it’s violent shifts.
Even for noon day shots, where looking through the filter, the effect is only a faint wall around the horizon, the effect on the final photo is often far greater than you’d think.
I’d say depending on atmosphere from half a stop to a stop.

In the morning and afternoon when the effect is strongest and is a band going north to south like dark wide rainbow, you just have to get creative to get a piece of that sky in your photo. But then that is photography. IE knowing where to stand.

Without seeing a sample of the negative or the print/scan, it is very hard to offer advice.
My first question is, what is the difference in lighting between the sky and the subject on the ground, in other words how many stops of a difference (lighting ratio)?

Where I live (not renowned for its sunny weather!) on a sunny day the difference can be 4 stops or 1:16.
No filter can correct that, unless you try a graduated ND which should (at the densest) be 2 stops or 1:4.
The other solution is to wet print the B&W negative in a darkroom and use dodge or burn (ground or sky).

Helge said:

The sky is incredibly important for establishing atmosphere...

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This, but not only atmosphere. Photography is often about organizing space - the space the subject occupies and/or the relationship different subjects have between them within the space. The sky in itself may be boring, but in outdoor photography, on the flat, bi-dimensional monochrome surface of the photograph, the sky is not just empty space. It is part of the organization, and has a relationship with everything else, often a defining one, in the sense that the amount of sky you put can create different spacial relationships, which in turn can suggest different meanings.

Robert Adams, to pick one example who obviously thought about this, uses different amounts of sky in The New West for various effects - with lots of sky you get a very "western" sense of space, isolation, immense possibilities coinciding with a very modern existential emptiness; but other times, with less sky, of an already cramped space in which people have overtaken nature.

In other words, as usual in photography, you can't make a general rule about whether or not to put more or less sky in your picture. The answer, as always, is "it depends".

MattKing said:

It depends:
View attachment 277613

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This image is definitely an exception to the 'boring' rule. Nice to see a good one (for a change).

DREW WILEY said:

And ozmoose - are you sure it's no you that's boring instead?

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Rest easy, boy. Most assuredly sure am I, I am not boring. I do seem to have drilled into a nerve here...

Returning to the original question:

It seems the problem here is one of simply not recognizing and assessing the situation well. It's not difficult to meter foreground and sky and know beforehand that the sky will be rendered close to (or completely) white in the final print. This type of visualization is exactly what the Zone System was developed for; it seems the OP could benefit from it.

FWIW, blank white skies can be perfect in an image, as can detailed clouds as well as dark, almost black, red-filtered skies. Knowing what's available before you release the shutter helps a lot with constructing the image...

Best,

Doremus

Doremus Scudder said:

FWIW, blank white skies can be perfect in an image, as can detailed clouds as well as dark, almost black, red-filtered skies.

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Yep:

No ozmoose, you didn't drill into a nerve. You just set yourself up for an inevitable sarcastic rebuttal by making a ridiculous generic statement. You repeated that mistake by stating "most". So in the latter case, it sounds like you haven't seen the work of very many good photographers. The "boring rule" seems to be in your own head. Do you lock yourself in a white room like a padded cell, where everything, including the wall and ceiling look all the same? Been out in the real world lately? I don't think I've even seen a "boring sky" in my entire life. Just depends on what you are attuned to. The atmosphere is full of magic. Affixing that magic on a negative or chrome and then printing it well is another matter. But yes, you do insult us by somehow imagining that skies aren't successfully rendered over and over and over again by photographers in an eloquent manner. If you don't see what's there, well, that's your problem, not ours.

But I guess I should be open-minded about all this, and someday experiment very very hard trying to create a boring sky in one of my own prints, just to test your hypothesis.

foc said:

Where I live (not renowned for its sunny weather!) on a sunny day the difference can be 4 stops or 1:16.
No filter can correct that...

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Which brings us to the only valid rule in photography: you can't have it all.

In many cases, because of the wide range foc mentions, you just won't be able to have texture in the sky, middle grey at middle grey, and full details in the shadows. Something's got to give, and it's your decision, as a photographer, to see what you are willing to sacrifice to get the result you want.

Once one gets to understand how black and white film works, and which specific films to choose for certain applications, then in a sense, you can have it all. Given the right choice of film and development, very wide ranges of illumination can be captured in the same scene, and done so sensitively, without needing to resort to runaway bulldozer techniques like neutral grad filters. I've never used a grad filter or polarizer for a black and white shot in my entire life, and don't like em for color applications either. I'm not implying that's wrong to do, but I personally find those options both unnecessary and relatively crude hatchet-job approaches. I like to capture all the intricate sparkle and magic of the light, and not beat it into submission with a polarizer. But that's a whole other topic in its own right.

I could make the same sort of axiomatic reply to the problem of photographing low-contrast weather, like the previous reference to Ireland. I've never been to Ireland, though I would certainly love to some day. But from what I have seen photographed or filmed of it, the lighting conditions must often be very analogous to what we get around here, where veiling coastal fog is common much of the year, right now in fact. But I can go out with my 8X10 camera and use the same film for a soft four stop scene when the fog is in, as well as for a twelve stop scene when direct sunlight comes out unhindered a few hours on the same day, when those same coastal forests suddenly exist in very high contrast. No, not just any film will accept that, or have the right kind of versatility. But that's why we need to understand respective films themselves, and not trust generic advice. Is that fact difficult and annoying to accept? Not if you're like me, and love the challenge. I dance with the light, and let it lead.

DREW WILEY said:

Once one gets to understand how black and white film works, and which specific films to choose for certain applications, then in a sense, you can have it all. Given the right choice of film and development, very wide ranges of illumination can be captured in the same scene, and done so sensitively, without needing to resort to runaway bulldozer techniques like neutral grad filters. I've never used a grad filter or polarizer for a black and white shot in my entire life, and don't like em for color applications either. I'm not implying that's wrong to do, but I personally find those options both unnecessary and relatively crude hatchet-job approaches. I like to capture all the intricate sparkle and magic of the light, and not beat it into submission with a polarizer. But that's a whole other topic in its own right.

I could make the same sort of axiomatic reply to the problem of photographing low-contrast weather, like the previous reference to Ireland. I've never been to Ireland, though I would certainly love to some day. But from what I have seen photographed or filmed of it, the lighting conditions must often be very analogous to what we get around here, where veiling coastal fog is common much of the year, right now in fact. But I can go out with my 8X10 camera and use the same film for a soft four stop scene when the fog is in, as well as for a twelve stop scene when direct sunlight comes out unhindered a few hours on the same day, when those same coastal forests suddenly exist in very high contrast. No, not just any film will accept that, or have the right kind of versatility. But that's why we need to understand respective films themselves, and not trust generic advice. Is that fact difficult and annoying to accept? Not if you're like me, and love the challenge. I dance with the light, and let it lead.

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Pulled 400 quality film will hold plus 20 stops without breaking a sweat. TMax 100 only a little less.
But question is what is the exact quality towards the last of those stops?
And certain films don’t have that much. Aviphot for example, or some other very fine grained conventional film.
And if you want to make slides, then you certainly need to nail exposure and keep it within what is reasonable to project.

Helge - that kind of ridiculously overstretched postulate is exactly what I'm recommending against. Twenty stops - utter nonsense! Yes, there are certain specialty developers that can do unusual things. But once you go down that path of extreme compensation, or even compensating development in general if not done conservatively, the effect you end up with is like taking a nice thick juicy roast beef sandwich and running a highway asphalt roller over it, smashing everything inside as if laminating two pieces of typing paper with a little smeared goo in the middle. Likewise, one smashes all the sparkle and midtone microtonality in their negative, crushing its life in the process. And I do know how to do very low contrast development of TMax films, and for what reasons; pictorial photography is not one of them.

I've specialized in high-contrast shots many decades, and know how to capture everything in the same shot from the delicate sparkle in glimmering glacial ice to black detail in volcanic rocks that are themselves dark, and all in between - without resorting to compression. The details of how this is done belong on another kind of thread, and I've hinted on the topic before. But otherwise, I am extremely familiar with what TMX100 can and can't do, as well as TMY400, at least apart from some radical treatment that beats the life out the scene. Realistically, both are 11 stop films, or 12 if you're willing to skate on the edge, but that's more than most.

DREW WILEY said:

Helge - that kind of ridiculously overstretched postulate is exactly what I'm recommending against. Twenty stops - utter nonsense! Yes, there are certain specialty developers that can do unusual things. But once you go down that path of extreme compensation, or even compensating development in general if not done conservatively, the effect you end up with is like taking a nice thick juicy roast beef sandwich and running a highway asphalt roller over it, smashing everything inside as if laminating two pieces of typing paper with a little smeared goo in the middle. Likewise, one smashes all the sparkle and midtone microtonality in their negative, crushing its life in the process. And I do know how to do very low contrast development of TMax films, and for what reasons; pictorial photography is not one of them.

I've specialized in high-contrast shots many decades, and know how to capture everything in the same shot from the delicate sparkle in glimmering glacial ice to black detail in volcanic rocks that are themselves dark, and all in between - without resorting to compression. The details of how this is done belong on another kind of thread, and I've hinted on the topic before. But otherwise, I am extremely familiar with what TMX100 can and can't do, as well as TMY400, at least apart from some radical treatment that beats the life out the scene. Realistically, both are 11 stop films, or 12 if you're willing to skate on the edge, but that's more than most.

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Did I sound like I advocate it?
That’s why other means than darkroom fu is often preferable in addition or alone.
There is a lot to be said for getting it right in camera.

Google “dynamic range of tmax 400” though.

Yep, Helge, we certainly agree on that - it's one thing to get extreme density on a neg, but it can be a different thing entirely to bag it realistically as usable density. Besides, unless one is involved in scientific photography or something analogous, it's darn rare to even stumble upon a scene with a density range of 12 or more stops. But yup, I'm quite aware of what Googling the subject will come up with - among other things, what we in this country call a lot of malarky. I know what a densitometer is just as well as anyone else. Taming a curve on graph plotting paper or with a computer profiler is not the same thing as taming it on printing paper.

What 's "obligatory" about anything? Being stuck with rules, either way, is what leads to boring. Think of every shot in question being its own unique challenge and opportunity instead. The sky can factor in a multitude of ways. Like I already mentioned, there's nothing boring about the sky, weather, or atmosphere itself - it's how people try to level all that into certain visual stereotypes when taking pictures that kills the magic.

But I do know an indisputable cure for thinking the sky is boring. Take a hike with me on some summer afternoon to one or our high mountains passes when a magnificent thundercloud front is approaching like a freight train. It will be electrifying experience, especially if you even think about setting up your camera instead of running downhill as fast as you possibly can!

jnantz said:

foc isn't the OP / person who is asking for advice

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It is called clarification after someone questioned an answer.

Bingo! It was inevitable that eventually someone just had to bring up AA. Talk about stereotypes! But ya also have to recognize that how he did it doesn't necessary equate to how a lot of wannabee clones do it. Mere technique doesn't count. Everyone can read the how-to books; not many can actually sense the light to the same degree. Most go over the top and spoil it. Sure, I've got some prints in that vein. I've also got a lot that aren't. But having come from those mountains, I do have an appreciation for AA's sensitivity to the light n' clouds and so forth that many flatlanders and smog dwellers can't quite understand, cause they've never been absorbed into it, so to speak. So I really do get it. But if a scene in my mind works better taking a totally different approach, let's say, for example, a much more open sky with the sense of scale and atmosphere being accentuated by lightening it instead of darkening ala AA, then that's why I'll do, or even blank it out completely white for sake of graphic effect, much like the old blue sensitive landscape masters did.

My very favorite picture of all time of the El Capitan monolith in Yosemite was not any of the famous dark-sky ones by AA, but a totally blank sky version taken by Edweard Muybridge. It has an overriding sense of scale and monumentality bound to its sheer graphic simplicity, nearly white on white. My second favorite might be my own, taken on edge during a snowstorm from atop a high ice cone, which I chiseled off the top of with my ice axe for sake of my 4X5 tripod, itself with a white sky, but more silky and subtle in atmosphere, and silvery with respect to the granite, than Muybridge's version from down below. But I did bag the same impression of monumentality and sheer scale. I was there with my nephew when he was surveying his next intended climbing route up the Dawn Wall directly overhead, only the third ascent of that extreme route ever. He discovered that Warren Harding's claim to have climbed it on only a pint of water a day, over twenty days, was true - there were still dozens of wine bottles left stuffed in big cracks along the way!

But now that I brought up smog, and earlier made the statement that I've never seen a boring sky.... well, for months on end last year our skies were so filled with smoke as to obscure any kind of cloud detail. But there was an utterly magical property to it almost like an amber Godfather movie effect, yet with soft veiling yellow-brown haze doing amazing things with hues both natural and manmade, in a manner no mere camera filter could have done. But the air was just too unhealthy to do much outdoor shooting; and besides, all that fine white and yellowish ash raining down days on end would be terrible for camera equipment. My lungs hurt for weeks afterwards. So ya gotta pick and choose yer battles.