Why Your Skies Keep Blowing Out (And What a Decade of Field Teaching Reveals About the Fix)

Why Your Skies Keep Blowing Out (And What a Decade of Field Teaching Reveals About the Fix)

I have stood in more blown-out sunsets than I care to count. Not my sunsets — the ones other photographers show me on the back of their cameras, faces fallen, asking why the sky looks like a white sheet when thirty seconds ago it was on fire. After twenty years shooting landscapes full-time, I’ve watched this exact moment of disappointment repeat itself on workshop hillsides from the Oregon coast to the high desert.

Stop Guessing Your Exposure: A Field Guide to Reading the Histogram at Golden Hour

Stop Guessing Your Exposure: A Field Guide to Reading the Histogram at Golden Hour

There is a particular kind of frustration that comes from standing at the edge of a lake at 5am, the sky doing something extraordinary, and blowing the shot because you trusted your eyes instead of your data. I’ve done it more times than I care to admit. The sky looked balanced through the viewfinder, the image felt right, and then I got home and found a washed-out sun with no detail to recover.