A farmer is never wasting time when he is leaning on a gate looking at his animals.
And a photographer is never wasting time gazing at the sky.
The sky is the source of the best light for photography.
The sky is the backdrop to many of your photographs.
The sky is an ever-changing canvas, from light to dark and back to light again. It is never the same from one moment to the next, and it never repeats its patterns.
The sky is a constant source of inspiration and wonder.
Yesterday morning I did was what I often do first thing … I went out on to my balcony to look at the sky. The sun was still below the horizon and there, in the East, was a beautiful sun pillar, with a faint mock sun at the top of it.
A sun pillar, with a faint mock sun at the top, over the Swiss Alps at dawn
I dashed inside, grabbed my tripod, extended the legs, slammed a 300mm lens on my camera and fixed it to the tripod.
Here in the Northern Hemisphere, with the cooling of the air, the season for sun pillars is beginning. They are caused by plate-like ice crystals high in the air, reflecting and refracting the sunlight. You can read more about them, and see more beautiful images at Les Cowley’s Atmospheric Optics website.
In fact, there are a wealth of sky sights that many people miss, simply because they never look up … sun dogs, haloes, fogbows, crepuscular rays, nacreous clouds, coronae, the zodiacal light … if you know what to look for there is almost always something happening in the sky.
The tricky part is photographing the show. Here, as I said, I used a 300mm lens with the camera on a sturdy tripod. I would have preferred to use a cable release to fire the shutter but I wasn’t sure where the thing was (I’m not a tidy person) and I didn’t want to waste time looking for it. Sometimes sun pillars often get better after sunrise, sometimes they don’t. This one didn’t. It vanished shortly after I took this photograph.
I used a shutter speed of 1/60th second with an aperture of ƒ11. I could have opened up the aperture quite a lot – and so given myself a higher shutter speed – but I didn’t want to as, like most lenses, this 300mm zoom performs best at medium apertures. Under these conditions a lens is being tested to its full.
Several of the photographs were too blurred to be useful – even with the camera on a tripod, firing the shutter by hand can introduce vibrations – but some came out fine.
As a bonus, I like the way in which the hills recede, with different shades of grey, into the background. And I like the silhouette of the poplar tree to the right, echoing the sun pillar. I’m not too sure about the pair of birds flying across the skyline. They could be mistaken for specks of dust. I toyed with the idea of cloning them out in post-processing, but then relented.
How often do you look up at the sky? Do you know what to look for? Are you able to recognise a sky sight when you see it?
As a photographer, make a habit of looking up. If you don’t do this already you’ll be amazed at what you’re missing.
And you say …