Tips for shooting in a combination of cloudy/bright/hazy conditions?

[barjohn]

Whilst in a beautiful location on the Jurassic coast yesterday I struggled to get any good photographs, the coastline and sea at the shore came up well but the sky was just like a white sheet draped behind,giving less than satisfactory results. I used a polarizing filter which brought out the colour of the sea but no matter what combination of settings I used on manual or the auto settings I couldn't get round the hazy sky. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

[Tringa]

From your description I think you have two problems.

Hazy skies are just not very interesting and tend to look fairly boringly uniform. However, more importantly the sky almost certainly was still far brighter than the land. As you had the correct exposure for the land, the sky would inevitably be over exposed.

A polarising filter won't help in this situation. It will reduce reflections from non-metallic surfaces and will darken the sky (though not clouds) and then mainly at 90 degrees from the sun, but it will have little, if any, effect on a hazy sky.

A graduated filter (ie dark at the top and clear at the bottom) could help as it will reduce the light from the sky. An alternative is to bracket the exposures so you have one shot where the sky is correctly exposed and one exposed for the land and then blend them together with software.

Depending on how much the sky is over exposed you may be able to recover something from the shots with an editor.

Dave

[Polar01]

Barry: post an image and let us take a look, much easier to give a suggestion when one can see the supposed problem.

Cheers:

Allan

[Colin Southern]

Usually haze lowers contrast considerably -- meaning that we need to get aggressive in post-processing (usually with the blacks slider).

[barjohn]

Thanks everyone for the replies, I am trying to attach an image, but the uploader is misbehaving. The editor I am using is Cyberlink photodirector 2011, I've been trying to shoot in RAW as most people on here seem to recommend, can't make any headway with the software which came with my camera (Pentax k-r) and am certain that my next purchase will be Photoshop elements!

[rpcrowe]

I cartainly recommend getting PSE. I have found that Photoshop Elements 10 is quite a full featured program that can do MOST things that I want in post processing.

The one area in which it doesn't seem to have the capabilities of Photoshop CS-5 is "Content Aware Fill". Yes, PSE has a "Content Aware Fill Brush" but, I don't think that it is as capable as the CS-5 "Content Aware" fill. That is a shame because PSE-9 has a quite capable "Content Aware" capability which, for some unknown reason, was deleted when Adobe introduced PSE-10.