I’ve been in Germany for a week and although we have not had a lot of rain, it has been predominantly overcast. There was a time when I would have called it “bad weather” for photography and been frustrated because I could not make postcard photos with beautiful clear blue skies. Everyone loves clear blue skies and the warm “Golden Hour” light of early morning and late afternoon. But when traveling you can not always get what you want.

The weather is beyond ones control. You can try to plan your trip around a good weather forecast, but often that is not an option. Such is the case for me on this trip. When the weather is not ideal I often plan my schedule to use such days to scout shooting locations and return when the weather is more favorable. On this trip this is not necessarily an option. I am often operating on the schedule of others and only get one opportunity to visit a given location. So when you have to shoot in unfavorable weather there are some techniques you can use to improve your results. By modifying your expectations and working with what you have you can still create good photos. Here are some tips for getting the best results from your travel photographs when the weather is bad unexpected.

Avoid Big Skies

Yellow wildflowers blanket a field beneath the town of Muenster-Sarmsheim, Germany

Overcast skies are not the best for compositions with big skies. Grey skies usually “blow out” or go all white adding nothing and usually distracting from your composition. So pick compositions which exclude them as much as possible. Include brightly colored subjects that hold your viewers attention.

Focus on Details

Cobble Stonesin the roadway at the Imperial Castle, Nuremberg, Germany

Avoid big blank grey skies all together and focus on details. Look to photograph little details that help tell the story of where you are.

Use That Giant Softbox In the Sky

Uwe Westermann helping his daughter Lea drink from a fountain at the Playmobil Fun Park, Zirndorf, Germany

Think of a big grey sky as a giant softbox. When the sun is hidden behind clouds it diffuses the light just as a softbox that a studio photographer uses would. Instead of hard shadow forming light typical from direct sunlight an overcast day provides soft contouring light. This means you can often shoot with pleasing results in the middle of the day when the sun is high overhead. It’s great light for flowers and portraits. It also allows colors to become more saturated.

Shoot at Dusk

Burg (Castle) Veldenstein at night, Neuhaus, Germany photographed in a rain storm.

I call it the “blue hour”. The best night photography is often not actually created in the dark of night, but rather in the dwindling light of dusk. At dusk there is still light reflecting off the atmosphere illuminating it in a rich blue that radiates onto the scene below. This happens just after the sun has set and the lights of the city are turning on. This is the time to create shots with a feeling of night. Use a tripod as shutter speeds will be slow and shoot through this dusk period searching for the perfect balance as the city lights come on and the light of the sky dwindles. The best part of the blue hour is that it happens rather the sky is clear or cloudy. In fact on a rainy evening you can often benefit from light reflecting off of wet surfaces.

Use High Dynamic Range (HDR) Photography

Burg (Castle) Veldenstein under stormy skies, Neuhaus, Germany, This image is made of 7 bracketed exposures.

New to my arsenal of tricks for shooting on cloudy grey days is HDR photography. The reason grey skies blow out is because the sky contains so much more light than is getting to the subject on the ground. The latitude or ability of your camera to capture this wide range of values is just not sufficient to properly expose for both the brightness of the sky and the darkness of your subject on the ground. With HDR photography however you can capture this wide range of values rendering the richness of a stormy sky while holding detail in the darker areas on the ground. To learn more about HDR photography and how it works read my post HDR Is For Me.

Choose the Proper White Balance

Remember to choose the appropriate white balance setting on your camera to fit the lighting conditions of your scene. Sunlight filtering through clouds creates a blue shift in the color of the light. The proper white balance setting will counteract this and help keep your photos properly color balanced making them look more natural and pleasingly warm. If it is an over cast day choose the cloudy setting. If the clouds are really thick or you are in the shade, use the shady setting. Of course if you are shooting in RAW you can always change or tweak your color balance in post-production, but if you are shooting in jpeg or don’t like to spend time tweaking your photos after the fact, it’s best to get it right the first time.

So change your attitude and vocabulary, there is no bad weather for photography. Adapt your approach to the conditions and circumstances you are presented with.