Overcoming Gray Skies in Landscape Photography

In 2018, Minnesota saw lowest amount of Autumn sunshine since 1983. It seemed like it was always cloudy and when you’re a landscape photographer, cloudy skies can make for unexciting photos — that is unless you embrace the gray. So, how do you overcome gray skies in landscape photography? Here are a couple of tips.

Embrace the Gray Skies

It’s easy to look out the window and see gray skies and not head out for sunrise or sunset, but you can still get good shots even with gray skies. Just like with rainy days (see: Rainy Day Photography — Skip it?), the gray sky becomes a built-in softbox allowing you to capture scenes that would normally be too high in contrast to capture under blue skies. Also, think about shooting macros instead of landscapes, and in the winter think about shooting ice patterns or leafs frozen in ice.

For example, under sunlight each of these scene would have too much contrast to photograph, but the gray skies provided a soft lighting and low contrast that allowed the detail to come out in the shots.

Go Light on the Sky

When taking a near/far-style landscape shot, go light on the sky. Just include a sliver of the the sky in your shot. Most of the time, gray skies are boring so don’t include much of the sky at all — less than a third or quarter. The only time to vary from this is if the sky has lots of texture in the clouds. Then including more might be interesting.

Check out the following shots. On the two with uniform gray skies, only a little is included. While there’s very little included with the island shot, the sky has plenty of texture to make it interesting.

Embrace the Blue Hour

During the blue hour, the sky turns a deep blue and and the boring gray clouds start to look exciting, especially when you juxtaposition the blue with city lights or just echo the blue color into the foreground. The blue hour starts about 45 minutes after sunset and can last for about an hour. That varies depending on the time of year. For example, the blue hour in Grand Marais at the beginning of December starts at 4:30pm and ends by 4:45, so you only have 15 minutes to capture the shots you want. In the morning it starts at 7am and is over by 7:15am.

You can see the deep blue skies in the two images with Christmas lights — even the water goes deep blue while the lights look natural. In the ice image, the blue of the sky was echoed in the ice in the foreground.

Find Color

Finally, if the gray skies are getting to you, then go find some color to add to the scene. Your viewer’s eyes will be attracted to the splash of color and it won’t make the gray look so gray.

The most important thing you can do is get outside. Even with gray skies getting your photography mojo down, getting outside is good for your soul. You’ll feel better after you get outside.