We all know it, the weather is bad and there is nothing we can do about it. At least as landscape photographers, anyway. For the past, almost two months time the weather in Denmark where I live has been horrendous, grey and moody skies with almost daily showers. Giving not much hope of getting out and enjoy the autumn colours. Does the bad weather mean you can do nothing?
No, Yesterday I watched one of my favourite youtube channels by Thomas Heaton (links below). In the video which is included below, he is out enjoying a calm morning, trying to get an epic panoramic shot in the box. During the video mr. Heaton reflects on the duration of the autumn and the probability of having bad weather ruining the autumn experience for you.
So what do you do when you have nothing to do, due to bad weather. As a trained scientist I turn to the only thing I am really good at, I do research and work on my techniques.
Bad Weather, Do research!
When the weather turns bad photography wise, so you cannot have those golden hour shots with lots of colours and lots of contrast. You can do one of at least two things. The first thing is to go out shooting anyway, maybe you have some interest in the sky after all. Then the moodiness of the bad weather might provide fantastic photos. However, in Denmark we are not blessed by interest in the sky very often, typically the sky is covered by a uniform grey body of clouds, giving no point of interest for an image. Hence my approach to this bad weather situation has been to try and wait for the bad weather clear out, and then do some research on what I find very difficult in post-production.
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Since I started this blog post, Thomas Heaton has published another fantastic video about how to edit the panoramic fore which he has taken photos in the video embedded in this post. I used the technique from this tutorial on an old image of the North Sea from a lovely place near to the small village of Lønstrup in the northern part of Jutland. Above you can see my approach to a panoramic photo. The point of polishing my skills in Lightroom and Photoshop is to refine the product that I can deliver, I normally I tend to do as much of the work on location, and as little in post-production as possible. Sometimes I use filters and presets as described in a previous article Speed up your workflow in lightroom