Reader's Comments - Index of - Free

Light
Overcast Skylight
A high overcast is perfect for a lot of photography. A studio photographer would think of this as "the
mother of all softboxes". If you want to capture architectural details, an overcast day lets you do it
without shadows obscuring anything. Overcast and/or rainy days are also the times to go into the forest
and take pictures of trees. The one bad thing that you can say about an overcast day is that a big white
sky makes a very bad photographic subject. Try to make sure that your photos have hardly any sky in
them.
Overcast skies are slightly more blue (7000 degrees Kelvin) than the color temperature for which
daylight film is designed (5500 K; a mixture of direct sun and skylight). Officially, the Kodak
Professional Photoguide will tell you to use an 81C warming filter. I wouldn't bother unless you are
photographing clothing for a catalog. [For comparison, open shade from a clear blue sky is 11,000 or
12,000 degrees Kelvin and requires an 85C filter.]
http://www.photo.net/making-photographs/light (5 of 22)7/3/2005 2:22:38 AM