Boost your sunrises and sunsets
Techniques
14 September 2007 10:25
Sunrises and sunsets are probably the most exciting and rewarding times to shoot any landscape. It’s technically challenging and it’s pure chance as to whether you’ll see any good light or not, but it’s worth the effort because every sunrise and sunset is unique and has the potential of producing the most jaw-dropping and inspiring scenes possible.
The fantastic colours in the sky and the low angle of light can transform even the most mundane landscape, but only if you know how to best use your D-SLR and software. It’s actually a lot harder than you might think to get right, due to the strong colours and high contrast.
Getting the correct exposure, when the sun is low in the sky, can be a real challenge. This is mainly due to the massive amounts of contrast in the scene. Not only have you got to balance a bright sky with an almost silhouetted foreground, but many photos will also include the sun in the frame – the brightest thing in our galaxy!
But that’s not all. Another complication is the presence of very rich warm colours, and these colours must be handled very delicately. Even a marginal amount of overexposure can cause strong colours to break up and turn into a solid block of a single colour, rather than smooth graduated tones, or even change colour altogether – bright red skies are particularly tricky to capture well. Even the best in-camera metering systems will get the exposure wrong from time to time, so if you want consistently well-exposed images you need to take control.
In reality, it’s often impossible to correctly expose for everything in the scene, so what you’re after is a trade-off between burn-out and underexposure. You don’t want the shot to be too bright, otherwise large areas of your image will burn-out – this means you’ll lose detail in the highlights and patches of your image will go completely white. However, you don’t want your image to be too dark either, as you’ll start to lose detail in shadow areas such as the foreground, plus the colours will become muddy and dull.
What makes matters even trickier is that digital cameras don’t handle overexposure quite so well as film cameras did. Rather than recording a nice smooth transition between bright tones and completely burned-out white areas, they usually record an ugly harsh edge around the pure white bits. Leaving your camera on auto will normally exaggerate these problems. So follow our step-by-step guide.
First of all put your camera on a tripod, as this will minimise camera shake and also let you experiment using different exposures with the same composition. Choose manual mode using the mode selector and then set your ISO to the lowest value possible (usually ISO 100) for lovely smooth tones. Finally, choose Sunny white balance to record more accurate colours.
If you have a good RAW converter, shoot in RAW mode because this contains a wider range of tones than JPEG and gives you more flexibility when it comes to enhancing your image on your PC, and truthfully most shots will need some boosting. Shooting in RAW+JPEG mode is a good idea if you’re not confident with using RAW, as you can always revert back to the JPEG version if you have difficulties, or use it as a reference when enhancing the RAW.
Unless you’ve got good reason not to, you should always expose for the sky in your landscape. The reason for this is that it’s relatively easy to brighten shadow areas using good imaging software, but it’s almost impossible to recover overexposed detail. Try this metering technique. Point your camera upward so that the sky fills the frame. Now select an aperture of around f/16 – this will help reduce flare around the sun and will increase your chances of getting an attractive starburst effect around it rather than just an ugly blob of white.
Next adjust the shutter speed so the exposure meter reads 0. Take a shot and inspect the image on the LCD screen to check for burn-out. While reviewing your image, it’s a good idea to use the highlight-warning feature so that burn-out areas flash to indicate where there’s a problem. Remember, you’re looking for a trade-off between burn-out and underexposure, so make sure your photo is as bright as possible before burn-out becomes an issue. If the shot is too dark, decrease the shutter speed and take another test shot. If there’s way too much burn-out, increase the shutter speed and take another shot.
You’re now ready to compose your shot and snap away as normal. However, make sure you keep checking the exposure of your image on the LCD screen to ensure it’s still accurate – if the sun bobs behind a cloud, you’ll almost certainly have to adjust the shutter speed to compensate. If you’re in doubt about what exposure is best, it’s a good idea to bracket your shots. This simply means you should take several shots of the same scene using a range of shutter speeds so you can choose the best one later on.
