Comments on: Shooting a Sunset

By: Jessica Torrance

Jessica Torrance — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 14:41:07 +0000

This is great for anyone who is new to photography because it explains it well, it is short and simple so you don’t get bored reading a long essay. I hope that I will be able to attempt capturing a picture of a sunset sometime.

By: Anis

Anis — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 06:55:31 +0000

I have been taking photographs of sunsets since past few weeks. I have to plan the place that I will visit because the only way to make a sunset different than the typical shadow in the sea is to get an object which will look good in silhoutte, so sometimes I chose a landmark, street lamps, boats etc. So I believe one should imagine the photo before and plan to visit specific places to take a variety of photos. If you are lucky you might get some unexpected objects such as aeroplane, birds. I learnt from my experiments the following:

1. If the sun is too bright, you will not get a good photo, because the sky will be too bright, and if you try to underexpose to get the sun’s circle, the foreground will be completely dark.

2. The best photos are within 15 minutes before the sunset. AV priority mode is mostly right in my Canon D 500, but I felt that speed priority ith speed of 1/25 sec is also great for vivid colours.

3. In white balance, I chose it towards orange which takes the dark shadows and make them look warm.

4. Sometimes, you can get the rays of the sun spread in all direction, but that happens when some object in the foreground restricts the complete exposure of sun. They look good too. I keep on experimenting speed levels and viewing in the screen to see which setting gives the right exposure.

Anis

By: Derek Watterson

Derek Watterson — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 16:33:32 +0000

It's hard to say if there are "best clouds" for a sunrise or sunset. A haze helps to scatter the light and dampen the intensity of the sun. You can make a prediction several hours before a sunset but part of what makes a sunset so interesting is that the conditions change every minute when you have cumulus clouds moving along.It used to be a bigger deal to have the clouds dampen the sun and give you more evenly lit composition. With HDR photography you can still get the intensity of the sunrise or set while capturing the details of the scene like the photo below: You're point of ND filters is a great addition. They're essentially sun glasses for your camera to allow your "camera's eyes" to open wider and see more detail rather than squinting. They're a good alternative if you're not interested in HDR photography.I'd love to see your photo of the moon. You can upload it to photo bucket or Flickr and post the url in the comments. The only guess I have was that the overall exposure was -5 although the moon looked just right, so it must have been a small moon?

By: Frank Deland

Frank Deland — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 15:31:04 +0000

You mention cloud formations conducive to beautiful sunsets. Which are the ‘best’ clouds? Can you judge several hours before a sunset? I have seen beautiful sunrises on cloudless mornings? How about cloudless sunsets?

I notice when my camera (Olympus e-620) is in Manual mode, I cannot change the Exposure compensation. For example, when photographing a full moon, I set the camera to f/11 @ 1/125 ISO 100. The exposure went to -5. When I later looked at the metadata, the exposure setting read –. The image was very good. The sensor must be automatically setting the exposure values.

Did I miss mention of ND filters? By darkening the sunlit sky, the filter allows opening the stops so that more of the dark foreground can be exposed. Right?

By: Linda

Linda — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 18:30:37 +0000

Can you shoot sunsets with a point and shoot camera? I have a Nixon L-120
Thanks