Your best advice on techniques for photographing the daytime sky

Understanding WB and color temperature is very important. That will help you control the color of sunsets.

With thunderheads or bright clouds, exposing for highlights is a good option. With that you need to figure out how much of the highlights you can recover.

Learn to make stitched panos handheld. The sky is too dynamic to use tripods.

Two-man cross-cut saws work best on utility poles.
 
Understanding WB and color temperature is very important. That will help you control the color of sunsets.

With thunderheads or bright clouds, exposing for highlights is a good option. With that you need to figure out how much of the highlights you can recover.

Learn to make stitched panos handheld. The sky is too dynamic to use tripods.

Two-man cross-cut saws work best on utility poles.

Okay, Hikari, you owe me a dime . . . for laundry detergent. I read that line about two-man cross-cut saws, and I did a miracle . . . involving coffee, my nose, and a clean shirt.

Cheers, Jock
PS -- I'll know we're making real progress in digital photography when I see an "effects" setting for "power line filter."
 
Expose for the highlights and if you have landscape markers, particularly close ones, you can flash fill. If they are more distant you can also bracket your exposures for sky, mid ground and then darker ground to get your full dynamic range. As Sue said, landscape markers help to give an image some context.
 
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Both of the above shots were shot as metered by the camera with EV -0.7 however there was post processing applied, in particular work on shadows and highlights, mainly the former to recover foreground detail.


I then gave some thought to using ND graduated filters, all those below were as metered by the camera with EV compensation and ND grads as noted below each image

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EV +0.3, ND 0.6

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EV -0.3, ND 0.6

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EV -0.3, ND grad 0.6 plus 0.9, the lighting being quite extreme with the sun in shot

I was happy with the use of an ND grad filter, I think more gentle post processing was required to obtain satisfactory results and I will continue to use such a filter(s) for landscape work. The above shots were tripod mounted apart from the ewe and lamb which was hand held.

Barrie

Barrie
 
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