A beautiful sunset or sunrise is hard to resist if you have a camera in your hands, and while it’s hard not to make a colourful, pretty image, most of these pictures hardly merits a second glance. Even though no two sunsets is ever the same, just about all sunset/sunrise photographs are! The reason? Probably the glorious colours and patterns that nature puts on display are so wonderful that the photographer assumes that their photographs will have the same impact. Impossible! Think about it: you cut a couple of square inches out of that vast display that arches over the whole world, divorce it from the sounds and winds and scents and your own experiences and emotions and present it to the world on a computer screen or piece of shiny cardboard...Sorry!
There are stunning sunset and sunrise photographs, but they don’t just happen. They need some foresight, some effort and, often, some post-production work.
Foresight - Great sunrise and sunset shots that result without any forethought are lucky accidents. The best ones come out of planning. I live on the East Coast of a very large island. If I want to shoot sunsets over the ocean, I have to plan very differently than for similar sunsets; but I do have to plan.
Scout out locations for good for sunrises and sunsets in the daytime before you plan to shoot. Find paces where you can see the sun track all the way down to the horizon, where it will set behind interesting buildings or geological features. Look for closer features to include as foreground elements and silhouettes. Expect to shoot for about half an hour or so before the sun is due to go down (consult a newspaper, tidal chart or almanac to know when this will be. Remember, the sun does not rise and set at the same time everywhere, and take into account local features that the charts will not, like that tall copse of trees that will knock another 10 minutes off your available shooting time.
Allow another 30 minutes after the official sunset time. This is often the very best time to take your pictures, as the reflected glow is not overwhelmed by the intense light of the sun itself, and contrast ranges come down to with =in the range of your camera.
In the mornings, the opposite is true: be ready to shoot 30 minutes before dawn. At either end of the day, remember to look over your shoulder. The reflected colours opposite to the sun are often at least as impressive, and again, the range from brightest to darkest tomes are more likely to be within the dynamic range you camera can handle.
The Weather - Different types of sunsets are entirely a product of the weather. Climate, cloud types, rain, wind, time of year and other factors are responsible or different types of lights and patterns in the sky. Don’t avoid clear days because they can produce some wonderful colours, and some locations like Cable Beach in Western Australia turn on amazing displays without a cloud in the sky. Still, it’s usually the times where there is cloud around that the real action happens! Dust or smoke haze in the air as they can produce amazing results, so storm weather warnings, sandstorms and bushfire alerts are also sunset photography alerts.
Useful Equipment - A tripod comes into its own at the very beginning of dawn shoots and at the tail end of sunset. Outside of these extremes, hand holding should give perfectly satisfactory results; you are photographing light, not what the light reflects from, so even if you need a torch to set your camera (a useful thing to carry), there will still be light enough to record the sun and sky. If you have a wide-angle lens, take it by all means, but you will probably for more work for your medium telephoto lenses - 90mm to 150mm. Even the wonderfully “bloated” sun you seen when there is a lot of smoke haze or ash in the air is still relatively small in the viewfinder unless you magnify it.
Composition Techniques - Even longer lenses can give better control of your composition. If you want the sun to be a feature of your shot you’ll need to zoom in on it using anything from a 200mm lens upwards. This will increase your need for a tripod.
Don’t forget that your lens is a magnifying glass. You should not not look at the sun at any time, but never through a magnifying lens!
Don’t neglect vertical photos. Apart from the variety and interest of a less typical photo, vertical pictures stitch together to form a much more impressive sunset than horizontal images (see my Intel on Panorama).
Sunsets need a point of interest if they are to be anything more than a splash of pretty colour. One of the best ways to add one is to incorporate a silhouette. Note that I said “incorporate” rather than “include”. Every element in a photo needs to have some function and to contribute the the overall emotion or story that the photograph is to convey. The actual silhouette could be anything that support that idea - mountain range, tree, building, a pier or a person. The value of the silhouettes is what is important: it must add mood and/or context to your sunset/ sunrise.
Unless you have a particular reason for doing so, try not to place elements like the horizon, sun, silhouettes on the centre lines. If you do decide that you want to do that, I would suggest you also take an alternative shot that follows the rule of thirds.
Exposure Techniques - Shoot at a variety of exposures - They will probably all be right! There are many ways that a sunset can be interpreted, although if you let your camera decide for you, often the shot will be under exposed because the sky is still reasonably light.
The most reliable way to meter is to take a reading just to the side of the sun, outside it’s bright halo. You can do this by switching to aperture or shutter priority mode and to take a variety of shots at different exposures. Alternatively, you can use exposure lock: focus on the point you want to meter from, depress the shutter button half way, then recompose your shot before you finish pressing the button down.
You should try exposures 1 and 2 stops higher and lower than the camera recommends. So. if your camera says to shoot at 1/60th of a second at f/8 you would shoot at that, but then two more (at 1/60 at f/5.6 and then at f/11). In doing so you end up with a series of shots at different exposures which will all give you slightly different results and colours . Your camera will probably have a setting to do this automatically. It’s called “exposure bracketing” and should be in your manual. This not only gives you a choice of “looks”, but opens up the possibility of making a High Dynamic Range picture. This technique merges the three images to produce on which captures a much wider spectrum of tomes and colours than could otherwise be produced.
White Balance - Modern cameras understand that the colour of light varies, and they try to compensate. If your camera doesn’t realise that you want everything to look warmer than usual it’s auto white balance mode (AWB) may replace the golden tones of sunrise or sunset with the colder tones of midday. If you model does a good job in AWB that’s fine. If not, manually set Sunset, or Cloudy or even Tungsten. If it has none of these, see if you can manually set the white balance, which usually means going into the menu, pointing the camera at a grey or white card and using this to reset the white balance. Again, check the manual. The easiest way to ensure you get what you intend is to shoot in RAW mode if you camera can do this.
Sunsets or sunrises are in a constant state of change. Don’t trust you eye to tell you they are changing, but shoot throughout - you will be surprised at the variety colours from the first flush to well after the sun goes down or appears.
