How do You Handle the Sky in B&W Landscapes

[Michael Heald]

Hello! As I've experimented with B&W landscapes, it seems that the white sky acts like a drain to the photo - the viewer's eye is drawn to the white sky and from there off the print, since the sky usually bordes the edge of a print. To avoid this, I've tried to find a way to darken the sky (red or polarizing filters) or make sure that there are dramatic clouds or some other framing element in the picture that holds the viewer's eye in the frame.

I went back through Ansel Adams's "Examples", Wynne Bullock's "The Enchanted Forest", and Edward Weston's "The Last years at Carmel" and they same to avoid the sky unless they changed the tone of the sky as Adams did with "MoonRise" and "Church and Road", or concentrate on objects, such as Weston did at Carmel.

I looked at Dykinga's "Nature Photography" and the blueness of the sky dramatically enhances many of his photos. The sky seems to work much better for color than for B&W it seems to me.

As a result, to me it seems that the sky is something that seems to drain the life out of B&W landscapes (unlike color) and needs to be changed either with filters or by finding something to keep the viewer's eye off the emptiness of B&W sky, like dramatic clouds and compositional frames within the photograph itself.

Do other folks find the sky to be more of a problem in B&W landscape as opposed to color? How do you handle it?

Best regards.

Mike

[Eric Leppanen]

Personally, I think a good dramatic sky can have an even bigger impact on B&W prints than color! If you look at some original Adams prints (I visited the AA touring exhibition several years ago), the clouds looked luminous, surreal and absolutely magnificent. "Clearing Winter Storm" and "The Golden Gate Before the Bridge" are good examples in your "40 Photos" book (the prints in the book don't do justice to the originals). IMO those dramatic clouds are a hallmark of Adams' work.

As for techniques to enhance the visual impact of clouds, I sometimes use a light or medium yellow (sometimes a red on rare occasions) filter to enhance cloud contrast. A polarizer can also sometimes work, although it is less useful when using wide-angle lenses due to uneven polarization (e.g., the left part of the sky will appear lighter/darker than the right part). A ND grad filter can even work too, to better hold cloud highlight values in a high contrast scene.

A completely empty sky usually is not much fun for either B&W or color photographs. Unless you are trying to convey a sense of vastness, I think a completely empty sky is usually a candidate for cropping.

Another key to "sky management" is to make sure there is sufficient color or tonal separation between the sky and landscape. If sky and landscape are insufficiently differentiated, then the entire image suffers. Here again, proper selection of color contrast filters (to darken the sky while hopefully leaving the landscape largely alone) or a polarizer can help. It is obviously easier to separate the two when shooting color film, although having both a solid color AND tonal difference will make the separation most convincing.

[John Kasaian]

I find that an orange filter will usually give me a tone more like the one I see without 'overdramatizing' the sky.

[Ralph Barker]

I think your assessment of the sky situation is close to dead-on, Mike. You either need to wait for it to be interesting, do something filter-wise to make it at least reasonably interesting, or exclude it from the composition. Empty skies, I think, generally give the image viewer too much empty space within which to get bored.

On the other hand, I could envision the rare high-key landscape in which the utter desolation of a spot could be the subject. The salt flats in Death Valley with an on-the-deck camera position might lend itself to that treatment with an empty, almost white sky.

For me, the way I develop and print, a #25 red usually does the trick with blue sky and good clouds. For others, an orange, yellow, or even yellow-green might work better. Otherwise, I try to exclude the sky from the composition.

There is, of course, the old trick of compositing an interesting sky neg with an otherwise sky-boring neg. Doing that with negs in an enlarger takes some skill, however.

[Bruce Watson]

...it seems that the white sky acts like a drain to the photo - the viewer's eye is drawn to the white sky...

If the sky is, in fact, white then you have a valid point. No amount of filtering is going to help a full overcast sky either.

I tend to make photographs with lots of sunlight. I like sunny skies, and the skies in my prints are predominently a mid to light gray. What clouds there are tend to be white and fluffy but don't dominate the scene.

When necessary I'll use a yellow or, more likely an orange filter to darken the blue sky and make the clouds stand out a bit more, but again this won't work with full overcast.

I guess in general I work with smaller scale things when the sky is overcast and try to take better advantage of the softer light. I'm not a big fan of grand vistas with flat light so I don't normally work that kind of image. My theory is that we are making photographs of light, and need to find compositions that take advantage of the light we have to best effect. So for full overcast sky, I generally work with subjects on the ground and leave the sky out of the image.

[Frank Petronio]

But maybe those empty meaningless skies are simply telling you that it is an empty meaningless photo? And maybe you need to hunt a little sharper to find something so strong that the sky doesn't matter?

[paulr]

The master of the empty sky was Timothy O'Sullivan. in the 19th century, when emulsions were blue sensitive, skies always printed white. Most photographers considered this a problem (for reasons like the ones you mention) and included as little sky as possible.

O'Sullivan realized the value of negative space, the way painters had learned (and the way modern painters and photographers would experiment relentlessly in the decades to come). He found ways to make a big white shape interesting. It had to be an interesting shape, and it had to play off of other large and small shapes in the landscape. If you compare his work to the work that came before, you'll see how radical his approach was. And how interesting it still might be today.

Of course now you have panchromatic film, so there can be tone and texture in the sky. A lot or a little. you really have an incredible range of options ... as wide ranging as the different kinds of skies you'll encounter. Sometimes the sky is set off against the land with blazing contrast; other times you can't tell where one ends and the other begins. Both expressions can be beautiful and worth exploring.

And of course, there's no need to include the sky. The horizonless landscape is a rich modern tradition. It brings a whole different sensibility and characteristic abstraction. Its masters include Weston, Frederick Sommer, and William Clift

Personally, I like the sky to look like the sky, whether it's blank or full of drama. I'd rather drink bathwater than look at another red-filtered western sky, oozing and billowing with Wagneriean melodrama. But that's just me. More on that in the recent thread on cliches.

[Ron Marshall]

I concur with what Paul said below. A blank sky can be an interesting part of a carefully composed image. I'm speaking of others work I have seen, I'm not quite there yet. I try to incorporate something in the forground to break-up the sky such as tree branches, if it will enhance the composition.

One of the first films I tried when I began LF was Ilford Ortho, which of course left the skies white. But I planned the compositions with that in mind and was quite happy with the results. Very fine grained film but too slow and poor reciprocity.

[David Karp]

I think even a blank sky can be interesting if used properly. For example, a thin section of sky across the top of an image can be used effectively as a border, or to give the image context. In such cases, clouds are not important, and perhaps a detriment. We just take what the light and the weather give us, and create something of our own from that.

Regarding filters, I usually don't use anything stronger than a yellow #12. (Of course, I have used everything up to a Red #25. One of my favorite photographs has a cloud that reminds me of a hammerhead shark photographed over the landscape using Ilford SFX in 120 and a #25. In that case, the landscape is there to serve the photograph of the sky, instead of vice versa.) I think that the filters we use also depend on where we live. If I lived somewhere else, a stronger filter might be needed to accomplish the same thing I can accomplish out west with a #12. (At least that is what some photographers who have worked elsewhere have mentioned to me.)

Finally, filter selection may depend on your film selection. The T-Max films were designed to render a scene much as it would be rendered with a traditional film and a #8 yellow filter. So, if you use T-Max, then maybe you would not need as strong a filter. That is why John Sexton told us at a workshop that he rarely uses a filter. He does not have to. His film of choice, T-Max, has one built in for him.

Was it Szarkowski who said that Adams's photographs were often photographs of weather rather than the landscape? I think it was, in an interview in Ric Burns's documentary on Adams. Cliche or not, (I think not) I love The Golden Gate Before the Bridge. (Developed in Pyro I believe - Now lets see this thread really get going!)

[paulr]

Was it Szarkowski who said that Adams's photographs were often photographs of weather rather than the landscape?

i think he said that (in the context of landscape) adams was one of the first whose work was more about weather than about geology. he was photographing ephemeral scenes ... changing clouds and changing light. this was historically important because adams was part of the first generation that COULD do this. Go back much farther, and emulstions lacked the spectral sensitivity (see O'Sullivan, above) and the speed to capture much more than the rocks and trees.