An overcast, grey sky usually isn’t optimal for landscape photography. However, you can use it to create abstract, minimalistic photos. In this video, I’m going through the process of capturing and editing a minimalistic landscape photo.

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0:00 Intro

0:04 01. Finding a composition
The weather for the past days has been rather boring for landscape photography, but instead of staying at home I wanted to experiment with abstract, minimalistic photography. An overcast sky offers the perfect background for this, since there isn’t much structure and if there is you can easily smooth it out using longer exposures.

As you don’t have to worry about the background, you need to find a fitting foreground without much going on. In this case, I decided to look for a composition around a lake. For the composition I planned to split the photos in two parts right through the center: the top part being the sky while the foreground is filled by the lake. Still, I had to include something that draws attention. In this case I simply placed a wood pile the center to break the uniformity for the framing.

1:05 02. Camera Setup
As said earlier using longer exposures (in this case I used 30 seconds) helps to blur the remaining structure in the sky. Also, it helps to smoothen the water surface. During the day you might need to use a ND filter, otherwise the photo will end up overexposed.

As the wood pile was far out in the lake, I had to use a longer focal length to make it nicely visible in the photo. In this case I used the Sigma 70-300 mm and set it up all the way to 300 mm. Not only does this help with the framing but combined with the long exposure time it makes the motion blur of the clouds and water stronger.

2:03 03. Editing
I wanted to keep the original blue tones of the water, but to make the photo more interesting I had to change the sky part. For this reason, I decided to add a lot of contrast and make the upper part intentionally overexposed. As there is only some simply editing going on, I used Adobe Lightroom for the post processing.

Basic Adjustments
I started with the lens correction and switched the camera profile to Adobe Standard. Right away, I added contrast, dropped the highlights and increased the whites. To not get a oversaturated photo, I dropped the vibrance.

Local Adjustments
To separate the sky from the foreground I used a sharp graduated filter and heavily increased the exposure. As I don’t want to change the wood pile in the center, I made use of the luminance range mask settings of the graduated filter (this way the exposure gets added to the bright sky, but not to the dark wood pile).

Color Grading
Also, for the color grading there isn’t much going on, I simply dropped the aqua and blue saturation. Then, I used the split toning to apply a subtle blue tone to the shadows and the highlights.

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