Having trouble...blowing out a lot of skys any tips?

I seem to be having issues blowing out the sky more often that I'd like. Any tips or tricks?

Should I meter of the sky and then recompose? I am practicing but looking for any guidance.

I'm certainly no expert, but are you shooting raw? It amazed me how well you can recover a blown out sky once I started shooting raw. The sky in the shot below was completely blow out right out of the camera, but just by cranking the "recovery" and playing with the "high" levels in PS, I was able to get it to this without a whole lot of effort. (click image for larger)

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I do shoot raw, I've had some success recovering in post but I'm trying to figure out what I'm supposed to doing differently

CPF always works best for me.

merlin2375 wrote in post #9043487
I do shoot raw, I've had some success recovering in post but I'm trying to figure out what I'm supposed to doing differently

If the sky is blown out, reduce your exposure. This may cause the rest of the picture to be underexposed though

Bryan Peterson's "Understanding Exposure" is a good guide to some of the basics.

If the highlights in the sky are important to you then spot meter off the brightest area of importance and set an exposure that puts that area at +3 stops on the meter. This is a technique I often use when the sky is important, such as when shooting BIF. Check for blinkies on your LCD to see whether you have any clipping and how much. Shoot with neutral picture style so as not to create false clipping warnings. It will do no harm to go over a little, as you can pull that back in post. If that causes your foreground to be too dark then you'll have to tackle that separately in post. Either that or use some sort of graduated or split filter to tone down the sky, or shoot HDR and combine exposures.

Here is a rough example. Nothing was blown in the capture, but the sky was right up against the right hand edge of the histogram. As it happens, I did not spot meter this, but I did set up my exposure in advance, by checking the histogram and blinkies in the camera, and then I was ready to take the shot when the right moment appeared....

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There's no easy answer. Sometimes I expose for the most important thing in the shot: Expose (to the) Right

Sometimes I expose for the brightest important highlight: Need an exposure crutch?

Sometimes I screw up & RAW saves me again.
Why I love RAW - '53 Ford Sunliner

Get a GND filter.

http://en.wikipedia.or​g …ed_neutral_dens​ity_filter

http://www.singh-ray.com/grndgrads.html

Yeah, exactly. Your options for situations like this are: underexpose the ground or overexpose the sky. To alleviate this, you can either bracket your shot, use a CPL, or a GND.

That's about all you can do, and which is best, depends on the circumstances.

I would always side with Expose for the sky.

Generally there is enough detail in the shadow areas to be recovered in PP but once the sky is blown, you have lost all detail.

CPL (Circular PoLariser) will help as it can hold back the sky by up to 2 stops as well as increasing the saturation.

GND - im not so keen on these because if you have any sort of uneven horizon, you can run into problems

Bracketting - my preferred option (after the CPL). It then becomes very easy to stack the 2 together in PP and bring out the detail by way of masks and selections.

And ALWAYS shoot RAW - it gives a huge amount of headroom in PP!

neilwood32 wrote in post #9049480
Bracketting - my preferred option (after the CPL). It then becomes very easy to stack the 2 together in PP and bring out the detail by way of masks and selections.

And ALWAYS shoot RAW - it gives a huge amount of headroom in PP!

If you hold the bracketed exposures perfectly still (tripod), you can always explore HDR as well.