I have been using my Olympus E-M10mkII for years. I moved to Germany a while ago, and coming from an world of sunshine/constantly blue skies (New Mexico), the skies in Europe just bring the entire picture down! I know this is a “me” issue, but me is struggling.
Recently, I have been really noticing that my images just look muddy. I am not sure if it is a recent trend, or if i have just started spending more time with the images. I tend to notice it more in images with sky, but I just cant tell what is going on here.
99% of the time I shoot with the dinky pancake kit lens, which makes the whole camera pocketable.
Is it my elderly camera?
Is it my low spec lens?
Is it a lack of filters?
Is my eye for composition just so bad i am managing to capture only bad light?
I put in a couple sample images, along with a raw of one of the most obvious offenders.
No. None of that matters, although a polarizing filter could add some more pop to the sky and cut through haze.
The sky in the first photo is just the kind of sky you’ll have to learn to deal with. Not sure if it ever gets any better in Germany
You could probably get some inspiration from James Popsys, for how to deal with that:
The last two are arguably underexposed, especially if you intend to edit the raw, since you lose some dynamic range and color fidelity in the shadows. Doing ETTR in such situations would help. Here’s the raw histogram for reference:
Welcome to Europe
I have the same problem in the UK, so I sympathise.
You can try not to get much grey sky in - it biases the metering of you camera so the rest of the image in under exposed. Zoom in, find interesting smaller subjects, etc to avoid the boring sky.
Try using positive exposure compensation to raise the interesting parts of your image. If the sky gets blown out, never mind, it’s featureless grey anyway.
Graduated ND filters can help with your landscapes, or raise the interesting parts in post.
Notice anything?
Yeah, that I lived in Utah for a year and a half and never made it to either of those places! Beautiful.
I have been meaning to start trying to bring out a zoomier lens … It will be a good opportunity to practice NOT getting the sky in the picture. Seems simple but I know I will immediately forget once I start
The issue of the bright dull skies: every one is bothered by it and no one has a solution for it. Bruce Williams dedicated one of his tutorials to it, but your possibilities are limited. Landscape photographers advocate to avoid these skies: the composition is nearly always a better solution.
Next, a typical American issue: the Netherlands are not a part of Germany. The first photo was recently taken in Utrecht, the Netherlands. To be precise on the Oude Gracht and you see the tower of the Dom cathedral without the scaffolding. That was removed recently
Thats fair – it was in my “pictures that made me upset” folder, not sorted by geography.
My problem is with a huge portion of Europe, Germany just gets the brunt of my frustration.
Hello, this one is processed in a pre-dev version of RawTherapee, with the Generalized Hyperbolic Stretch function. I added some Tone Equalizer, a Graduated Filter and Haze Removal. Nothing wrong with your camera in my opinion.
I’m not sure I would call any of the photos muddy, actually.
The first has very soft, low-contrast light, which would be great for portraits, but might require a bit more work for other genres. With an overcast sky like that you obviously don’t get the “glow” and contrast that you might with a bright sky, but the colors do have good saturation. If you didn’t have the grey sky in the frame, I suspect the scene would appear much nicer, with the colors seeming much more saturated. But try to blow it out, James Popsys style.
The last two appear to have been taken at either sunrise or sunset (which is why I kept my edit fairly dark), with those typical pink clouds. The wispy clouds do mean that the blue in sky gets polluted a bit, which combined with the low light, makes the scene seem very subdued. Had the photos been taken just 10 minutes later or earlier (as the case may be), they would likely have been much “cleaner” and more punchy, although I think the last one is fine as is. But brightening in post do help a lot to bring out the colors. In my edit I also separated the colors in the sky somewhat.
Not sure what loss that would be. In darktable there’s no difference in fidelity whether you raise or lower exposure, and you can’t clip the highlights. In other raw editors you might cause clipping or otherwise make it hard to recover highlights, though, if you raise it too far.
Poked it with a stick. The different edits helped me feel better about what it had potential to be.
I need to work on my awareness of the scene as a whole, and less on the “ooh pretty castle, lets put that in the left somewhere”
