But you will find after starting this project that you are at the whim of mother-nature and time (as photographers, when are we not)? Keep in mind the type of sky you are wanting to capture and make sure to go out on location during the right time of day. OK so you can capture gorgeous images of the sky any time of day. Find a park or other area close by you can go to with little to no obstacles blocking the horizon and your sky overlays will look amazing! Why you ask? Well because to fit as much sky into your image you will need to capture your sky right along the horizon. You would think a sky is a sky and who cares if you take an image of it in your backyard right!? Wrong! Unless your home has a huge, empty field behind it this is probably not a good idea. This way I am guaranteed to have soft white clouds (not overly bright) and it is easy to lighten the shadows and dark areas in post processing later. To resolve this I use the spot metering method and I will measure the light off of the brightest area of my image. When photographing skies it is easy to get “hot spots” or overly white areas of an image because of all of the white and bright areas caused by the clouds and sun. You can try a zoom lens to try and capture your sky at different focal lengths and see what you come up with, the sky is the limit!Įxposing correctly is always important and always a hot topic among photographers. I personally used a 35mm prime lens when capturing images of the sky for this project. When capturing sky overlays the objective is to get as much cloudy, fluffy goodness as you can fit into your lens, for this reason I prefer to use a lens with a wider focal length. The best part is, it’s so easy, and everyone can do it. I came up with a solution, to make my own sky overlays. In this tutorial we are using our sky images as overlays to create skies where they do not exist or could be enhanced. A quick note: An overlay is simply an image captured by camera or otherwise constructed in an editing program.

Sky evening overlay