No Skies Were Harmed in the Making of My Photographs
Sky Swap: Just Because You Can, Doesn’t Mean You Should
When I was a teenager and first took an interest in photography, some of the earliest subjects I liked to photograph were clouds. I was learning how to use a camera and they were a great subject to photograph. They were always moving and changing. Whether I was using a pocket instamatic, or an SLR with the manual focusing ring racked to infinity, they would always be in focus when prints came back from the Fotomat. While playing with the various dials and buttons on my camera and learning what they did, I could capture big ones, small ones, light ones, dark ones, and imagine how cool it would be to get a photo of lightning.
Many years later, I still like photographing clouds. These days I seem to include them in photographs of nature more frequently than making them the main subject of my photos. This evolution was not something I thought about until recently.
I was reminded of my “cloud period” by a constant barrage of emails from photography software companies touting their sky swapping capabilities. Based on the number of messages I have received about sky replacement technology, it appears this functionality has become the main capability we all use to determine which post-processing software we buy.
