Stormy skies can be fun for landscape photography, but we don’t seem to get a lot of stormy skies here. On Saturday afternoon a line of dark clouds moved in to interrupt the clear blue skies, so I decided to head out to the wildlife refuge to see what I could do with the gloomy dramatic sky as a backdrop for some landscape photos.

Upon arriving at the refuge my thought was to hike up to the top of the ridge and check the view across the valley with the dark clouds on the horizon. Along the way I got distracted by some clumps of pink flowers and worked on them for a while. My strategy was to get down low with a wide angle lens to exaggerate the pink flowers in the frame.

I think the composition works OK, but I struggled a lot editing the colors in the image. Thanks to all the spring rains, the grasses were very green and seemed too bright and saturated against the gray sky. In editing I desaturated the greens and yellows to tame the grass and then boosted the saturation and luminance in the pinks and magentas bring out the flowers. Still not sure if this is best balance of colors, but at least it looks tolerable to me on my screen now.

I did eventually make it up to the top of the ridge and found the old weathered tree branch that I have photographed before. It was very windy, so I decided I would take some long exposures to hopefully blur out the grass swaying in the wind. To do this I used a 10-stop ND filter, which cuts the light getting into the lens allowing you to take a much longer exposure. With a 10-stop filter the calculation is easy as it only lets in approximately one-thousandth of the light so you just multiply the shutter speed by a thousand (or 10 stops). For example, when shooting this photo I adjusted the aperture without the filter until I had a shutter speed of 1/50 second, which would give me a shutter speed with the 10-stop ND filter of 1000/50 = 20 seconds. I then put on the ND filter, set a 1 second shutter delay to minimize camera shake, and took a 20 second exposure.

I don’t know if the blurred grass had as much of an impact on the image as I had hoped. Perhaps later in the year when the grass is longer and more golden I’ll go back and try again.

As I headed back down to the parking lot, I noticed the spent blooms of the horsemint and thought that they would photograph well with the stormy looking sky in the background. My strategy was to pick a flower that I could isolate by getting up close with a wide angle lens. A wide angle lens generally lets you shoot with a very short focus distance which can allow you to exaggerate the foreground subject. For example, with the image below I used a 14-24mm lens set at an ultra-wide 14mm and got up close to the flower making it appear very large in the frame.

Looking at my photo I decided that it might look better with a vertical orientation and this turned out to be my favorite photo of the afternoon. I shot this at 20mm, compared to 14mm above, which zoomed in more on the background clouds as well. The horizon may look crooked, but it was a hillside and I think the photo is level.

With editing I color selected the dull yellow horsemint petals and added some saturation and contrast. I desaturated the grass in the background to help the horsemint stand out. I also added some contrast to the sky to enhance the gloominess.

This was my attempt at capturing the gloomy beauty on a stormy day. I think I found a few good subjects and did some decent editing. What do you think? Did I overdo the editing or does it look OK?