shooting with difficult skies kestrel shot

[spudhead]

So feedback and suggestions on how to deal with flat white skies and grey skies, many times I see the kestrels hunting while out walking it is very often in poor lighting against grey or white skies

• ILCE-9
• Sony FE 200–600mm F5.6–6.3 G OSS (SEL200600G)
• 600.0 mm
• ƒ/8
• 1/3200 sec
• ISO 3200

, so I do what I can to keep shooting, so advise please

 

[Gaz]

I visited Europe in November and it struck me how different it is to live in an environment with almost no shadows. It made me more conscious of the light. I like to photograph architecture so this was a very different game for me. When I got home I started playing around by masking the sky in Lightroom to pull up some detail in the clouds…. And, a couple of times, I changed the hue but that doesn’t reflect onto the subject, which can make it look un-natural (my Lightroom skills are rudimentary at best),
Then I started stripping out the sky and replacing them with a nice one. I couldn’t take that seriously.
Then I started cropping out the sky.

It’s a wonderful problem to consider. A world with no shadow. For many shots I decided to embrace the soft light, though I’ve got a couple of thousand images I haven’t looked at because they didn’t grab me.

Masking the sky to pull up the detail and increase the saturation of the sky

• ILCE-7M4
• FE 24-240mm F3.5-6.3 OSS
• 24.0 mm
• ƒ/6.3
• 1/100 sec
• ISO 100

Not a great image.

Here’s one where I embraced the lighting conditions and tried to express the soft sky yielding no shadow….

• iPhone 14 Pro
• iPhone 14 Pro back triple camera 6.86mm f/1.78
• 6.9 mm
• ƒ/1.8
• 1/2200 sec
• ISO 80

I feel this one.