Fighting The Light.

If there is one thing that everyone has tried to take a picture of, it is a sunset, I too cannot deny the allure of the orange sky: the beautiful colours, the gorgeous reflections and the stark contrast of the silhouettes, what is there not to love? However, these photos seldom come out as expected and you often hear the phrase "you should have been there, it looked so much better", hopefully if you read this you will be able to say "you should have been there, it looked just like that".

Here we see one of the most common problems with sunset photos, the sky is brighter than the foreground, this makes it very hard to get the correct exposure across the frame without filters or photoshopping. I set my exposure for the foreground and so the sky is totally blown out.

This time I adjusted my exposure for the sky, unlike the previous picture this one is at least usable, the silhouette of the temple making for a nice foreground interest. However, the colours in the sky are nowhere near as spectacular as they were when I was there, now I could probably use lightroom to get somewhere near the correct colours but I am incredibly lazy and would rather just get them straight out of the camera, also while you can get close in post processing you can never quite get that same sky with lightroom alone. One of the best ways to get more colour is by waiting until after sunset.

This image was taken 15-20 mins after the sun had set, that meant that the sky was nowhere near as bright and allowed the camera to pick up all of the colours, now there is still a difference in brightness between the sky and the foreground which is why the rocks are silhouettes but i think it works for this image. I used a telephoto lens to isolate just this section of the scene and to emphasise the background so that I just had bright orange sky, had I used a wider lens I would have got the transition into blue which wasn't really what i was going for with this picture. Using a telephoto lens for landscape photography is something that is drastically under used, you will see hundreds of wide angle landscapes so you can take in the full grandeur of the whole scene but speaking as someone who will actively seak out the best way to be as lazy as possible, I find a good way to get nice landscape photos is to break the larger scene down into several photos of specific aspects of the scene. Using a long telephoto lens is also how you get those spectacular photos of the moon where it looks huge, as the long focal length emphasizes the scale of the background compared to the foreground.

Here is an image of the same subject but with a wide angle lens, it is completely different, the bright orange sky that dominated the previous image is now far less prominent and instead it is the cliffs either side that attract the eye, to get a compelling wide angle image you need a foreground interest that stands out. The image still works but isn't as eye catching as the previous picture as it lacks a good foreground subject. Again I set the exposure for the sky closest to the water to ensure that none of the image was overexposed, however the lower exposure means that I lose details in the shadows resulting in silhouettes. This image was also taken several minutes after the sun had set and yet the sky retained many of the colours that you see before sunset with the benefit that the scene is much more balanced in terms of brightness.

This is another wide angle image of the same scene but taken later on, because it lacks a good foreground subject it doesn't work, also it could do with a tighter crop on the bottom of the picture to reduce the negative space and to ensure the horizon more closely follows the rule of thirds. I included this photo because it shows another way to introduce more interest into the frame by waiting a little later to get stars in the exposure.

This final image was taken as the sun was setting so I had to use a graduated filter as the sky was far brighter than the foreground and I wanted to retain the detail in the shadows. A graduated filter is a filter where half of it is dark and the other half is clear, this means that less light gets through the dark half allowing for the exposure to be set higher than it otherwise would, which decreases the contrast between the foreground and the background. The other thing that this photo illustrates is the effect of clouds in the scene, so often you see sunset photos with no clouds, these almost always look flat and uninteresting, a long exposure with clouds in the sky gives the image a sense of movement and also provides varying colours and interest above the horizon. When I got this photo back on the computer the foreground was still a little dark despite the 3 stop graduated filter, so I had to bring up the shadows in lightroom, this improved the image but unfortunately my camera suffers from high noise even at low ISOs, so it is a little noisier than I would like. Despite the technical imperfections, this picture is one of my favourites because the composition works, the jetty makes an interesting foreground and provides a leading line in the frame while also following the rule of thirds. I also used a 10 stop ND filter to extend the shutter speed so that the motion of the water is removed while the motion of the clouds is accentuated. Hopefully this will help you to get photos of the sunset that actually reach your expectations. I will go into more detail about using post processing to get the results you want in a later entry.