Esthetics of Black Skies in B&W Landscapes

[Michael Heald]

Hello! I just received Lenwork and their landscape portfolio has a lot of photos with black skies. The black skies do increase the drama. I presume that they were produced with a deep red filter and development for high contrast.
LF Magazine came at the same time. I checked the other portfolios in Lenswork and reviewed some Ansel Adams photos in The Making of 40 Photographs. Many have dark to very dark skies. The photos that have people in them don't (I presume this has to do with the effect of red filtering on skin tones and that these photos have much less sky in them).
At first blush, these photos appealed to me, then as I went back through these magazines and Ansel's book, I found myself drawn more to the photos that had darkening of skies, but not black skies.
What do folks think of black skies in high contrast landscapes? Best regards.

Mike

[clay harmon]

Wagner versus Chopin.

[Ken Lee]

What Clay said.

[Bruce Watson]

What Ken said.

[Michael Mutmansky]

What Bruce, Ken, and Clay said.

[Hugo Zhang]

What Bruce, Ken, Clay and Michael said.

[John Kasaian]

What Bruce, Ken, Clay and Michael said.

[John Kasaian]

...and Hugo

[Jack Flesher]

I agree with the first Michael ;) The over-abundance of zone II skies setting off zone VIII clouds wears thin on my viewing eye too. I definitely prefer dark skies, say zone III/IV, but not the almost IR style black we are seeing a lot of; they look "over-cooked" and fake to me.

[Pete Roody]

Michael,

I had the same reaction as you to the same issue of Lenswork. Of course this is just my preference. After all, Ansel used a red filter to darken the sky in his 'Half Dome' photo, and that wasn't half bad. :) These days I like a less filtered look like you see with Carlton Watkins shots of Yosemite. Of course, he had no choice since he used glass plates.

Pete

[Ralph Barker]

My sky preference also falls in the Zone III-IV range, or even Zone V sometimes, depending on the scene. The occasional Zone II sky is OK with me, though, if it "works" with the rest of the image.

[Bill_1856]

It was all the rage in the 1930s, when high-speed, low grain panchromatic film was finally available, along with low-cost polarizers. It bacame an overused fad, and began to look as dated as the fish-eye images of the '60s (gag a maggot).
No doubt it was a reaction to all the completely white skies in landscapes taken for the previous hundred years with color-blind or orthochromatic film. A "K2" filter was used almost universally on the cameras of photographers of that era.
Also, I wonder how much influence the movies had, with their simulated high-contrast "night scnes" made in the same way.
Another factor is that, compared with Eastern and European skies, Western US skies are actually far more intensely blue especially at the higher altitudes where much landscape work is done.
Interestingly, that ikon of black skies, St. Ansel's "Moonrise," was only printed that way in the last few years of his life. For the first 30 or so years he printed the sky dark brown showing much more of the clouds.
Personally, I prefer the more dramatic printing.

[Ole Tjugen]

I prefer Mahler myself - either IV or VI, but sometimes XVII is unavoidable.

[fred arnold]

Doesn't Mahler at XVII crack your glass plates, or am I mixing my artforms?

Seriously, the high-altitude western versus eastern interpretation is one I find interesting, since growing up in PA even skies i considered to be clear and blue are pretty pale compared to 6000 ft in Colorado or farther west. I've used a 25 red around here, and find it hard to get a proper black sky without printing everything else down to mush because the blue isn't intense enough to give a really good black.

I guess this is why I consider Zone-IV-> V skies (unless thunderstorming) to be normal with landscape, but don't object to darker when confronted with subject-matter that seems to be from dry, Western, sources. It's kind of like Velvia 50; the purplish blue skies look a little wierd with NJ in front of them, and about right with red-rock landscape and selenium plant in bloom in Moab.

(more of an Old Bach w/ Wagnerian moments than a Chopin type)

[Ole Tjugen]

We get incredibly deep blue skies here in Norway too, occasionally. Shot unfiltered on FP4+ they look quite nice - about zone VI. A yellow filter drops them right down to III, which is a little too dark for my taste. Other films (like APX100) seem to need a light yellow filter to bring them down to VI.

I try to avoid large areas of zone V - it looks like a big "blind spot" IMO.

Then there are the brilliantly white light-overcast-with-sun-and-light-rain which end up at XVII whatever I do to them. To preserve the feeling of brilliance in a print is challenging, but sometimes it works. :)

[scott_6029]

Whatever suits the scene...but if its a lot of sky with no clouds....I think its best to 'blow it out' and darken it with an orange or red...red is often a little too much in my opinion...but like others said, wagner or chopin. To heighten clounds perhaps a yellow or orange is best for me without going over the top.

[Brian Ellis]

Black skies sometimes work but usually they create a jarring, discordant effect to me, especially when coupled with bright white fluffy clouds. When I see black skies I usually think "camera club" because black skies tend to impress judges so that's what camera club people often strive for. To continue with the classical music analogy, John Cage.

[Kirk Gittings]

Whatever works for an image. I can't see Robert Adams with dramatic black skies nor would I like Moonrise with grey skies (an early version I have seen). There is no formula or "correct" aesthetic.

[Oren Grad]

I expose my film without filters. If I want music, I put something on the stereo.

[Brian Ellis]

" . . . After all, Ansel used a red filter to darken the sky in his 'Half Dome' photo, and that wasn't half bad."

But the sky in Half Dome is nowhere near black, at least not in any version I remember seeing. Looking at the copy in front of me (on the cover of his book "The Camera") the sky actually isn't even all that dark, I'd say about Zone IV.

[Kirk Gittings]

Many of the versions of "Monolith, Half Dome", that I have seen, have a deep black sky. Particularly the later prints. "Moonrise, Half Dome" is printed near middle grey. Which Half Dome image are you guys referring too?

[Brian C. Miller]

Black skies work best with stark white trees.

Some of the evergreens around here are so dark that they are nearly black. The only time they are lightened is with IR.

Otherwise, I do prefer that the scene look kind of what was in front of the lens.

[Richard M. Coda]

It's kind of like Velvia 50; the purplish blue skies look a little wierd with NJ in front of them, and about right with red-rock landscape and selenium plant in bloom in Moab.

Loved this quote... I'm formerly from Jersey, now in Scottsdale, AZ. It all ends up depending on the scene. I have done thunderclouds where the sky approaches III, and others where the sky is maybe V or VI. All are beautiful to me :)

[Charles Hohenstein]

To me, black and nearly-black skies are a cliche, and a little hard to swallow from the folks who rejected diffused focus lenses and pictorialist aesthetics as cliches. And it makes no difference to me at all that straight photography purists achieved this extremely artificial effect photographically, instead of by painting in the black. The end result is exactly the same. It is the photographic equivalent of over-acting.

[Kirk Gittings]

I do prefer that the scene look kind of what was in front of the lens.

You should shoot color if that is your goal.

B&W, by its very nature is an abstraction or interpretation of a colored world. It will never look like "what was in front of the lens", and why would you even want it to? The mere act of photographing the world in b&w is an act of artistic manipulation.

[Eric James]

Wagner shot BW with red filtration? I thought he used chromatic scale.

My unnaturally dark skies have always ruined images. In the right hands, and for certain motifs, a (plus-or-minus) Zone II sky works. Much like IR tonality can give a scene an otherworldly look, a dark sky can lend a pleasing mystique to an image - but for me, 9 time out of 10, it fails. If the photographer boldly places a daytime sky on ZII, the rest of the image - for me - must support this mood. There must be a thousand and one ways to achieve this. Maybe one day I'll stumble across one.

[JW Dewdney]

I guess it depends who your audience is... everything in this thread sounds like photography for the approval of other photographers. There are times, it seems to me, when a black sky can be very useful in the interpretation of the image (if one wants to connote the surreal, if appropriate for a given photograph, say). And other times when white skies might work best, too. Just depends on what you want to say with your image I suppose, right?

[Brian C. Miller]

The customer is always right, especially when they keep their mouth shut and shell out the money. :)

[Vaughn]

My landscape images rarely have sky in them. When they do I usually keep them close to how my eyes see the tonal relationship between the land and sky...or sometimes a little lighter. Zone-wise, perhaps a Zone VII to VII1/2 sky -- just a little darker than paperwhite.

But then, one must be careful of anything done out of habit rather than for a reason.

Vaughn

[Brian C. Miller]

You should shoot color if that is your goal.
But I can't hear in color. What does blue taste like?

[Kirk Gittings]

But I can't hear in color. What does blue taste like?


Ask Debussy.

[Michael Heald]

Hello! Thank you for the replies. I was curious to see what other folks thought of the Lenswork portfolio. I found the black skies alluring, but with so many photos with the black skies, by the end of the portfolio, the black skies started to become intrusive for me, that is, they started to call attention to themselves rather than to the photo compositions/themes, etc.
What I found interesting was examining some other photos in the issue (as well as in recent issues of B&W magazine and LF Magazine) that had gray or even white skies. They all worked for me as well, though there was no single theme that attracted me, and I started to wonder how their impact would have been different if they had black skies as well. Best regards.

Mike

[Pete Roody]

Many of the versions of "Monolith, Half Dome", that I have seen, have a deep black sky. Particularly the later prints. "Moonrise, Half Dome" is printed near middle grey. Which Half Dome image are you guys referring too?

I was referring to his "Monolith, The Face of Half Dome" taken in 1927. I saw an original print and it had a deep black sky. His " Moon and Half Dome" (taken 1960) has a lighter sky (grey).

[paulr]

Wagner vs. Chopin, sure, but also Wagner vs. modernism and everything that came after. It's a particular departure from reality that appeals to the Romantic esthetic, and was especially popular right after it became possible (when panchromatic films were invented early in the last century).

Guys like Adams often get lumped with Modernists like Weston and Strand, because their style was opposed to the pictorialists' in many ways ... but if you look at this work in the broader context of landscape art, it looks a lot more Romantic than modern. What does Adams' work resemble more ... the Modern painters, or victorian landscapists like Thomas Moran?

[Erich Hoeber]

Sure, black skies can be a cliche, but so can anything. I do a lot of abstracts, and it's a tool I use frequently.

[Kirk Gittings]

Erich,
Exactly.

At this point in time, over 40 years since New Topographics, the unromantic, unsentimental style of postmodern landscape photographers is now as much a cliche as the romanticized style it reacted against.


If this is new to you:


New Topographics is a movement in photographic art in which the landscape is depicted without sentimental representation of the world we inhabit as being a place we do not exist in. It is sometimes seen as a reaction against utopian representations in landscape photography, of the sort exemplified by Ansel Adams' photographs of Yosemite; depicting only unfettered nature at a time when industrialization was at its peak in the American economy. The photographers in the New Topographics style show landscapes that include roads, housing projects, bridges, and other aspects of the landscape which show the traces of human activity. The 1975 exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape defines this movement. William Jenkins organized this exhibition for the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester, NY. It included works by Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore and Henry Wessel, Jr. Wikipedia

[Larry Kalajainen]

At first blush, these photos appealed to me, then as I went back through these magazines and Ansel's book, I found myself drawn more to the photos that had darkening of skies, but not black skies.
What do folks think of black skies in high contrast landscapes? Best regards.

Mike

What most of the other guys have said. I tend to prefer Chopin over Wagner, though occasional doses of Die Valkyrie are welcome.
I just came back from New Mexico and kept a yellow filter over my lenses almost all the time. So on the negs, my skies are just natural looking with good separation between blue sky and clouds. If I wanted them to be more dramatic, I could have used a red filter, and sometimes do, but I agree that sometimes the skies can be made too dramatic.
Jerry Uelsmann, in the new issue of Camera Arts, spoke of watching Ansel print in his darkroom and at his suprise at how much burning and dodging Ansel did. I suspect quite a lot of that was in the skies.

Larry

[Bruce Barlow]

Good friend Peter Schrager has a bunch of pictures he made of New York skyscrapers with black skies - they're strong images, but they make me laugh because he's "working the cliche" so well in an unexpected way. I told him he should make them into a larger series: "Brett Weston Comes to New York."

I thought about the photography I see here on the east coast, and I rarely see black skies - perhaps denoting cliches in a different style. Maybe we should all do some cliche-busting just to see if we can do it well in similarly unexpected ways?

[Remigius]

Frank Zappa anyone?

[Patrik Roseen]

Frank Zappa anyone?

You mean E-6 in C-41 ?!

[Ed Richards]

> I thought about the photography I see here on the east coast, and I rarely see black skies

It is hard to get black skies if you have a lot of water haze in the air. I can only get them on the Gulf Coast on the rare days after a "blue norther" comes through - so called because it clears the sky and drives the humidity down for a day or two. I am often using a red 29 just to get some separation between clouds and the sky.

[Jorge Gasteazoro]

Black skies have never worked for me, they are fairly easy to get where I live and I have tried them a couple of times. Both times I decided it was not for me. If I want to give a feeling of luminosity I prefer skies that gradually change in tone from zone VIII to zone V.

[John Brady]

I think that for the right scene a very dark sky can work. The dark sky in this shot really accentuates the moon. This looks much better as a large print, but you can get the idea.

[scott_6029]

IF it's the lenswork I am thinking of, in the interview he says he shoots at sunrise, using 'difuse' light from the sun boucing off the clouds. The sky is for all intents and purpose, 'naturally' very dark. I do think the images look a little too photoshopped for my taste, however....

[paulr]

[QUOTE=Kirk Gittings;231311At this point in time, over 40 years since New Topographics, the unromantic, unsentimental style of postmodern landscape photographers is now as much a cliche as the romanticized style it reacted against.[/QUOTE]

I don't think either of these movements can be called cliché ... but they've each given birth to a bunch of stylistic clichés. Pictures like this

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/46932

poke fun at the new topographics esthetic taken to its deadpan extreme. They make you think less about the subject than they do about a bored photographer who's run out of ideas.

Likewise, most pictures with black skies make me think less about the sky than about ... a bored photographer who's run out of ideas. And who has a red filter.

[tim atherton]

Erich,
Exactly.

At this point in time, over 40 years since New Topographics, the unromantic, unsentimental style of postmodern landscape photographers is now as much a cliche as the romanticized style it reacted against.


though I'd have to say there's a good argument to be made that the New Topographics was really one of the last breaths of the romantic undercurrent that never quite disappeared in Modern photography - and that the irony (while often overplayed imo) has it's roots there, not really in post-modernism.

The rephotographics folks were much more consciously post-modern (and in their reaction against the New Topographics tended towards being overly ironic), as is Ruscha - who is often mistakenly lumped in with the New Topos.- but I'm not really sure that when it comes down to it most of the New Topographics folks were that post-modern at all.

[paulr]

...but I'm not really sure that when it comes down to it most of the New Topographics folks were that post-modern at all.

I've never considered the new topographics work postmodern. It always seemed like a natural outgrowth of late modernism to me. There's irony in some of the work, but it's hard to avoid ironic juxtapositions when working in the contemporary landscape.

The idea that modernism is hangs on to more of romanticism than it likes to admit has always interested me.

Wallace Stevens wrote an essay about William Carlos Williams, on WCW's 50th birthday. He proposed that even though the thought would horrify him, that Williams was a Romantic. That Williams' lifelong struggle against romanticism was actually a profound and honest expression of a Romantic disposition.

This is what intrigues me most ... that you can achieve a more pure and honest Romanticism when trying not to be Romantic than when trying to be..

[John Kasaian]

Perhaps its a matter of balance? All the early landscapes on ortho emulsions had white skies and so we needed an era of black skies to compensate. Now thats been done we call all use orange filters and the earth's polarity will go back to normal :D

[Michael Szedon]

While Adams' work did seem a reaction to an increasingly technological society, his use of multiple red filters, extensive dodging and burning, and multi-negative prints suggest to me that he would have loved Photoshop.

[Robert A. Zeichner]

I mostly feel that black skies are a bit over the top for most landscapes and that the technique of burning in otherwise natural skies in most cases, looks forced. That said, I've seen a few photographs in which very dark or nearly black skies seem to be appropriate. One issue is how the dark sky is achieved. With strong contrast filters, vegetation tends to go nearly black as well as the sky. This I don't care for. Of course for those working digitally, just about anything is possible within Photoshop. For the rest of us it may not be so easy. Attached are a before and after example of a negative that I reworked to change the sky photomechanically. I wrote an article about this technique and would be willing to offer it up to the LF Forum if there is interest.

[vann webb]

To me, the Red 25 is like a sledgehammer. When you need it, nothing else will do. However, like any tool that you have to be careful with, if you use it when you don't need it, you will probably wind up regretting it.

[Kirk Keyes]

I wrote an article about this technique and would be willing to offer it up to the LF Forum if there is interest.

I'm interested!

I've done something like this by making a mask with an inkjet printer and then registering it back with the original negative to burn in the sky.