How to create an intense red sky in your landscape photo?

Friday 29 April 2022, 22:44 by Nando Harmsen | 5,596 views | 2 comments

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

You know those landscape photos with an intensely red sky. The photos give the impression that the entire sky was coloured. Have you ever experienced this in real life? Did you know you can make this intense red sky happen in your landscape photo? I'll tell you how.

As landscape photographers, we are always looking for the best moments of the day. This is often sunrise or sunset, the golden hour. Ideally, we want the entire sky to be coloured by that golden light, just as we often see in other people's photos.

The entire sky is coloured during sunset. You don't see this very often, but it is what we want. This photo was taken at a 24mm focal length

The conditions naturally have to be right for that red sky. We don't want a clear sky, but there shouldn't be too many clouds either. The clouds have to be at the right height, so that the sun gets the chance to cast its light on them.

When we have these conditions, the beautiful red colour often turns out to appear only near the horizon. Above that, the colour quickly changes into the blue of a morning sky. That intensely red sky has not appeared in the photo after all.

Will it be colourful or not? You have to wait and see. The intense colours often remain low on the horizon, and when using a wide-angle lens, they appear small in the frame. This was taken at a 15mm focal length, on a 1.3x crop camera.

A completely red sky is actually quite rare. Especially when there also have to be beautiful cloud patterns. Your chances of seeing one only become good if you go out very often. Still, it is possible to make this happen.

The problem with a less impressive red sky is often the use of wide-angle and ultra-wide-angle lenses. We want to include as much as possible in the frame, including a foreground to meet the self-imposed requirement of creating depth.

A foreground can be fun, but you often need a wide-angle lens to make it work in your landscape. This means that those colours on the horizon will appear small in the frame.

Including a lot in the frame means that everything has to be made smaller. Otherwise, it obviously won't fit within the edges of your frame. Everything becomes small, except perhaps a foreground that you are practically standing on top of. So that band of colours on the horizon is also shown small.

If you have a foreground that is shown large because you are almost on top of it with your lens, that band of red colours looks even smaller. In addition, the wide-angle lens shows a large part of the blue sky above that intensely red sunrise or sunset.

Sunrise on Ameland. Lots of blue clouds, with only a narrow band of intense red colours. This photo isn't bad, but it is if you want the intense colours to be more dominant in the frame. This was taken at a 24mm focal length

I suspect you've already guessed the solution. Use a longer focal length. Zooming in makes the angle of view narrower, so that narrow band of intense red colours on the horizon appears larger. Zoom in far enough and the entire photo fills with the red colours of the sunrise or sunset.

Zooming in makes the part with the colours appear larger. This was taken at 70mm.

You don't always need a real telephoto lens to achieve this. Sometimes zooming in to a 35mm focal length is enough. At other times, 70mm works well, or something between 35mm and 70mm. But a focal length of 200mm or more can work too. The fun thing about that is that the sun's disc also appears large in the frame.

By zooming in even further, you have the intense colours fully in the frame. Beautiful, isn't it? This was taken at a 125mm focal length.

The next time you are out and find a beautiful sun on the horizon, with fantastic colours, forget for once that you 'have to' photograph as wide as possible. You don't have to. Choose the focal length that works best. For an intensely red sky in a landscape photo, that may well be a longer focal length.

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