That Sky

Beautiful sky out there today.. blue with lots of puffy clouds. If you are a photoshopper, it is a good day to get some sky shots to use in composite images later. Just be sure to grab some at different focal lengths and angles so that you can match up well with whatever subject you want to put in front. If you don't the sky replacement will be obvious and possibly ugly.


Also, shoot some that are out of focus. Open up the aperture and focus on something closer to the camera then take the cloud shot. This will be more convincing if you shot the subject with a short depth-of-field, and be less distracting in the final composition.


Of course, for the newspaper we can't do crazy stuff like that, but we do get to play when mocking up concepts or creating non-news graphics.

This young cowboy made a nice news photo last year. The overcast evening sky made the light on his face perfect (And a giant white arena wall to the right as reflector helped).


But a new sky makes the whole thing look nicer for this cover concept as we work on the look of a new quarterly magazine we will begin producing later this year.


Creating a catalog of images for art use is tedious, but worth the effort. Just be sure to tag your photos with good keywords when you import so that you can find them when you need them.

Don J.