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The best light for landscape photography

Hoe vermijd je hard licht?

If I plan to take landscape photos, it is the first thing I pay attention to: the weather. Will it remain dry, because I still find rain difficult, does the sun shine, when does the sun rise and set, is it cloudy?

What is in my system is that I always look for the time on the day that the light is as soft as possible. Since I prefer to shoot in the evening than in the morning, especially in the summer, I will know when the golden hour starts and ends that day. I have a calendar in my diary that indicates that exactly. This time elapses about two minutes a day.

Because I am so focused on sunlight and the golden hour, I sometimes forget to take my camera in cloudy weather. If it's cloudy all day, I can shoot all day. The cloud cover provides a beautiful, soft, diffused light and ensures a beautiful light distribution in the photo. So nowadays I am extra focused on the cloudy days. Especially since I determine the light in the photo in post-processing and I can control a photo with soft light much better afterwards than with a photo with direct sunlight.

Below are some examples of photos taken during a cloudy day. You can see how much you can change in post-processing.

I wonder how you look at it.

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