‘Waves of Rainclouds’, New Zealand, South Island, Lewis Pass
Image by WanderingtheWorld (www.ChrisFord.com)
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Below is an excerpt from my travel blog. Cheers.
Capturing clouds in a photograph is never easy. Clouds are illuminated by the bright sky and often become blown out (or too bright for your camera’s sensor to capture the tonal range that your eye can see). HDR is able to pick this range up but it takes a bit of experience to bring it back into your photo.
For those of you who know Photoshop well – Clouds are bright. So how do you bring this back into your photo while still keeping detail within the cloud? I find that duplicating your background layer (or original layer) in Photoshop and running a filter like Nik Software’s Silvereffex Pro (which turns the photo to black and white) works well. Working with either the ‘soft light’, ‘overlay’ or ‘luminosity’ blending mode is best when masking back the black and white layer into your original copy. The black and white layer (in a blending mode that combines the black and white and the original copy) is key to enhancing the cloud and making it look real. Adding an additional ‘bleach bypass’ filter really brings out the whites behind the darker detail in the cloud’s foreground giving it a 3-D effect. I was happy with how the clouds turned out in this shot and it’s spot on as to how I remember it.
This shot was taken while I was driving through Lewis Pass in New Zealand. I love how waves of rainclouds in New Zealand’s mountains would come at you, one after another. You can clearly see the line of rain racing at you in this photo. Being able to see the next wave of the storm this clear and being able to gage the speed at which it’s racing towards you reminded me of swimming in the ocean as a kid and bracing yourself for the next wave of Mother Earth’s might.
