Apply a sky

Been trawling though my photo archives looking for landscape references, I've found a few good photos that stand alone as a ref for a painting but many that worked in one way but not another. The Falkland Islands are a place that is dominated by the sky and in many of my photos that's the element that does not work. I photograph a particular scene that I like but so often the sky & clouds are uninteresting and this wrecks the feel of the image.

Recently I've taken to shooting images of 'good' skies with the object of using them to fix scenes, I have about 300 of these good sky images now, sunsets, sunrises, stormy, windy, broken cloud but all 'good' images. A suitable sky can be pasted onto a photo to jazz it up (I use Corel PhotoPaint for this but any decent photoeditor will do), Here's a few photos I've 'fixed' in this way, they don't stand up as a photo in themselves but it gives me a more inspiring reference for a painting (I hope).

This is a photograph taken by my mother of a scene looking south west from somewhere near the Black Hill in Chartres, I prefer to have more sky and I'm not entirely comfortable with the high contrast of the slab of rock in the foreground...so...here it is cropped and with a new, more dynamic sky applied:

Here's a couple more:

Hill Cove

Hill Cove, this wasn't bad at all but again I wanted just a bit more going on, the Sky overlay came from another photo taken on the same day but about an hour later:

Fox Bay

Fox Bay, this was taken from our car...as was the sky only about 5 minutes earlier but quite a difference:

Must crack on and see if I can get some decent paintings from these, I feel that this will prove to be a useful trick.