Moody Light
I love a bit of mood and atmosphere in a landscape. For me, the time of day and the clouds / weather create the mood. But there is a lot I try and do with the camera and settings to bring what I am seeing (and feeling) into the picture.
I do very little to my images in post-processing (mostly sensor fluff removal!), so I try and get it right ‘in camera’, and also experiment. For example, in the image above, I was shooting into the sun, so was wary of lens flare as well as overexposing the reflections on the water; I wanted the pattern of the land at the fjord mouth and the clouds. So I stopped down by 1 to 2 stops, composed to miss the sun, and focused on the cloud reflections to get what I wanted.
In many of these images, I will have focused on the clouds to get the effect I wanted.
Settings and Approach
50 mm lens (or wider, for epic landscapes and dramatic weather).
Aperture Priority, set to f/22 or f/3.5 depending on light conditions.
ISO fixed to 100. Exposure compensation to minus 1 stop or more.
Challenges: Light direction. But use what you have. Blowing out the sun in the image (eg. Tálknafjörður beach below), to get the mood of the weather coming in is so worth it.
In this image of the coastline back from Grimsey, the light was really low and to the right of me; you can see from the purple shades of the rocks and clouds and the blackness of the sea, but there was a lot of light reflecting off of the snow capped peak, so I focused on this to get the contrast.
I shifted to shutter priority (1/500s) for these. I kept ISO at 100, as it was very overcast and I was worried about noise, given the black of the rocks. But there is always more light than I think there is (and definitely more than the camera thinks there is), especially from the white foam, so these really caught the dramatic windy and snowy weather.
In these shots from the Faroes, it was a lot brighter than these images would suggest, but to capture the beautiful spotlight effect of the sun through the clouds on the water, I used my trusty 50mm lens, on f/22 and focused on the small clouds in front of the sunspot on the water. This had the effect of darkening / under exposing the land, but I wanted the ‘chiaroscuro’ beam of light effect. It also makes the blue sky look like an oil painting.
