Nothing kills my desire more to do landscape photography—or be outdoors at all—than a cloudless sky. Almost as bad is the kind of cloudy day where there’s no gradient at all to the sky—it’s just a single unrelieved gray that is neither gathering itself to rain nor on the edge of breaking into individual clouds. It’s just a monochrome ceiling to the world, and everything below the sky becomes soft and boring as a result.
But a day with clouds in motion, some of them thick and dark, others thin and wispy, creates a raucous party of shadows upon the land. Every moment you look across a wide landscape, it is made anew. Every second of time is a different vision. Water and earth shine and glow, then suddenly disappear into a brief, mutable dark.
Especially at sunset and sunrise, there’s a big technical challenge involved. You can’t simply take two shots at different exposures and then merge the stack unless you’re really fast on the exposure adjustment, because when clouds are in motion in a windy sky, two moments even seconds apart are going to look notably different. It’s like calling out to a friend to look at the giant or the dragon or the castle in the clouds—by the time they find it, the shape is a blob. But if you shoot for a middle exposure value, something’s going to get blown out or something’s going to be too dark. Post-processing can only fix that so much: you’ll just have to decide what’s best to see.
It’s often hard to know when the sky will favor the land with this kind of tumult of light and shadow. I kind of like that too: you can’t read the weather forecast and say, “Today’s going to be one of those landscape days, take a walk and bring a camera.” There are places where’s like that most of the time, certainly. Mountains are often favored, and so also shores and beaches. I look south from where I live and work and a fair amount of the time I’m going to see a sharp gradient, a line in the sky, where the Delaware River is. Beyond its boundary, the sky may be cloudy where we are not, or brightly illuminated while we are under a grey blanket. Always, at least, it takes finding a place to look out to the horizon where nothing stands between you and the vanishing place where the land and sky meet. Clouds make interesting shadows on buildings and woods, but it’s hard often to tell when you’re deep in forest or under skyscrapers where the shadows really come from. Out in the open, all is clear even as the light comes and goes upon it.
For the sunrise and sunset: doesn't your camera have auto-exposure bracketing? My camera can do 5 exposures separated by 3EV each, or up to 9 exposures if the separation is 1EV or less. And shooting in RAW captures especially a lot more shadow detail than normal mode. To stack them, I'd probably want a tripod also.
It does; at the time I was taking these shots I was trying to make something of a religion about being pure manual to force myself to learn.