Dramatic Sky

On Saturday afternoon, I went to my first photography meetup of the year. My photography group (club?) had organized an event at Britannia Beach, called Spring Fling.

A group of photographers and models would perform a series of shots, where models would move about, in various outfits, and the photographers would move from model to model, site to site. The photographers would direct the models but the models would often come up with ideas of their own.

It was a mutual collaboration.

Because the weather, late Saturday afternoon, wasn't great—it was cool and windy—using remote flashes and soft boxes was a challenge to say the least. It was like opening an umbrella in a wind storm: there was no way it wasn't going to send your flash to the ground. I didn't even take mine out of it's case, opting to put a speedlight on my camera's hot shoe, instead.

We all made the best of it.

The event was supposed to run from 5:30 to 8:30 but because of the less-than ideal weather, some of the models left early. By 8:00, the group called it a day. Good thing, too.

As we were gathering our equipment and heading to the parking lot, storm clouds blew in and soaked the beach. I made it into my car just as the rain came down in earnest and I could see a sand storm blowing on the main beach.

Before heading out, I decided to sit for a moment and cull the photos that definitely didn't turn out: when the flash didn't fire and a model would be cast in a silhouette that wasn't flattering; when my finger slipped on the shutter release before I had composed my frame; when the image wasn't properly in focus; when the model's eyes were caught in a blink or her expression wasn't intentional or flattering.

By the time I was ready to roll, the sky was glowing in a bright orange and I could see hues of pink and purple in the clouds. We were going to have a great sunset.

I put one of my cameras away and grabbed the other. With my smartphone in my back pocket, I had a third camera.

The sky was dramatic: one of the best I had seen in a while, and I was in a great location in which to capture it. I walked down one of the rocky breakers along the river and waited.

I took a lot of photos, switching between my D-SLR and my smartphone. When I finally got home, I quickly looked at the photos on my smartphone because they were the easiest to deal with (I was cold, hungry, and tired by the time I walked in the door).

Typically, any photo that I shoot of a sunset requires some post-editing. Either the sun has blown out all of the highlights or there's too much shadow, or the colour saturation isn't quite as vibrant as I remember seeing it with my own eyes. And so I open a photo editor like Snapseed, PaintShop Pro, or Luminar AI.

The first photo that I saw needed no tweaking. It was perfect.

On Sunday night, I finally looked at the photos on my D-SLR. Because I shoot in RAW, which captures a lot of data, there is always some tweaking that is required. But not a lot was required.

Which photo do you prefer?

It paid to hang around after the photo shoot. I would have never seen, let alone captured, this dramatic sky. (I'll share some of my photos from the shoot, tomorrow.)

Happy Tuesday!