Shooting Sunsets
I was away from the City this weekend in the Riverlands and as the day was ending I noticed what I thought might just make a dramatic sunset picture.
So, I grabbed the Camera and looked at what was on offer and waited.
The things that I saw that could make up a great sunset were some fairly dramatic cloud formations, a partially obscured sun (by Clouds) and a horizon with a couple of points of Interest.
Shooting into the sun has it's own challenges and one of them is that the metering is likely to be a bit off. Shooting into a light source generally means that you will need to apply some Positive exposure compensation to get the correct exposure.
Shooting sunsets is one of the few times when shooting landscapes that the Aperture is not so important - I shot a series of photos and set the camera up as follows.
- Aperture Priority
- ISO 100
- F5.6
- +1 to +1.7 Exposure compensation
I knew that I wanted the sun to be present in the photos, but I didn't want it to be the main feature, so I set myself up so that the sun was directly behind a tree in the scene.
Well, I had the 11-22 lens on the Camera and the sun was still above the horizon so I had time to experiment somewhat and took a series of 9 shots over about 3-4 minutes as the light changed.
My 2 favourites were No 1 and No 5 - for various different reasons.
Anyway, here they are....
In the first shot, I took a little bit of time to postion myself so that the tree "shaded" the sun somewhat. This shot was done at 20mm which is quite narrow for a landscape - but I really just emphasised the 3 trees and the dramatic but different colours in the clouds. There is just enough detail in the foreground so that vague shapes can be made out which I think gives it a bit of depth - something that can be difficult with shooting sunsets.
Shot number 5 I took at a full 11mm - it was as wide as I could go. This time, I chose to include only the minimal amount of foreground in the shot. I was trying to capture not only the trees on the horizon, the colour but the vastness of the sky and the falloff of light away from the sun.
Some of the other shots I experimented somewhat with different focal lengths and differring amounts of exposure compensation. I even tried a shot in portrait orentation.
The Portrait version, while still a great sunset just didn't have the impact of the other photos.
As the sun went down, the quality of the light on the clouds faded very quickly. When I got home and loaded these pictures onto my Computer, I was very happy with the results.
