Portrait of Windy Weather-
Making good environmental portraits involves keeping your eyes open for good backdrop imagery. While looking for a good landscape to make a portrait of a friend of mine this scene came into view. Travelling south this view is right off of the Parks Highway just south of Cantwell, Alaska.
Using Filters
This photograph show clouds with a 100mm to 400mm Canon Zoom fitted with a polarizer filter. The idea here was to get the blue of the sky as dark as possible and to bring the clouds out from the bright background. The subtleness of the clouds feathery look against the blue sky background make a dream effect. The filter, helps turn the sky dark and cuts the brightness of the snow in the foreground mountains.
Imaging Landscapes-
Any image made of landscapes is susceptible to changing light and cloud cover. In some cases this is an enhancement, in others in flattens the image. This landscape has plenty of contract and good highlights which make the image of the lenticular clouds somewhat surreal.
Many of the out takes during this photo shoot are verticals not just landscape horizontals. Remember magazine covers and advertisements normally use this shape image. Websites are drifting more toward the big horizontal look, so I make both and think hard to save negative space for pull quotes and headlines. Text used in a photograph will need either a deep, or light background to make the words more readable.
Photographers making images like this will use the space to put in a watermark to make their image harder to plagiarize.