Using the weather to your advantage can really help improve your Pokémon GO AR photos. Whether it is wind, snow or sunshine, it doesn’t have to be extreme weather to make a difference, especially if you also utilise the Tiny Pokémon technique. I don’t often have a lot of room to take photos in, and living in the UK, we get cloud weather for 90% of the year, with a blink and you miss it chance of sunshine or snow. Using weather to my advantage can transform a photo.
Rain/Morning Dew
Taking advantage of morning dew, or rain drops left after rainfall can be a really cute way to showcase your Pokémon. This photo of Joltik is a personal favourite of mine that I’ve ever taken, and it is because of the raindrops. It also helps give some perspective and scale for how tiny Joltik is.
Rain itself isn’t much fun for risking your phone while you take photos, but being able to utilise the plants, flowers, and other greenery in your space can work so well. These two photos are barely edited, just a tiny bit of sharpening, the rain does all the talking.
Dew drops are something that can be easily faked for a photo too. Just fill a spray bottle with water, pick your plant or hedgerow, spray away, and suddenly morning has broken!
Frost/Snow
I live in England, we get maybe a couple of days of snow a year, if we are lucky, and even then, it isn’t much snow, and it never lasts long. What we do get, is frost! I often use frost to imitate snowy backgrounds so that I can amplify that wintery feeling.
This Spewpa photo was taken on an incredibly cold day, on a patio table outside my office that we use in summer. Fallen leaves are littered on it, and it was so cold that icy patterns covered the whole table. Close up it looks like snow fall, and really makes you feel the cool temperature.
Sunshine
While glaring sunshine can be an issue in photography due to the many shadows it creates, it can also be used to create unique lighting to elevate your AR photos. Bright sunlight can be tricky because Pokémon have set shadows that often don’t reflect real world lighting, so it becomes about thinking around the shadow, so that the photo can maintain some realism.
It was a really bright day when I took this Noibat photo, so while I didn’t like how the light looked for a photo in direct sunshine, peering through this tree the sun created some lens flare and made it much more interesting. Noibat’s shadow wasn’t really visible here, so it didn’t matter that it didn’t match the other shadows in the image.
In this Joltik photo (yes, I do love Joltik, I photograph it a lot!) the spots of sun breaking through the hedgerow give this more detail. I avoided placing Joltik in one of the bright spots, keeping it in the shade.
Sunshine is also a great way to improve photos taken with the Bokehmon technique. More dramatic light and shadows make the depth of field in the image more detailed and intriguing to look at. This photo of Scolipede had really bright sunlight peering through the trees, giving that beautiful shallow depth of field using the Bokehmon trick.
