Click Thumbnails to Enlarge
Capture warm evening light
Techniques
24 October 2007 14:10
The last hour of sunlight brings some of the best light for capturing the landscape. The atmosphere and conditions around sunset are quite different to those at sunrise – the main bonus being you don’t have to drag yourself out of bed early to capture it.
Shooting great sunsets is always a little down to luck – you can never guarantee the weather but there are clues during the day that point to a good sunset. Broken cloud will provide plenty of interest, with colour in the sky behind. Stormy weather can also produce some of the most dramatic sunsets, as the clouds tend to clear slightly as the sun goes down.
Capturing the low sun and dramatic skies at sunset require similar techniques to shooting at dawn, with the contrast between the sky and the foreground creating the greatest challenge. Using an ND grad will help you get as much detail as possible in both land and sky with a single balanced exposure.
You don’t need to just shoot stunning skies to make the most of the last light during the day. The low, raking sunlight and long shadows are perfect for giving depth, definition and form to the landscape. Watch how the lighting affects the landscape as the sun goes down. This evening light starts at least an hour before sunset, so get to your location early to make the most of the conditions.
It’s often best to keep the whole image in focus when shooting landscapes. Using the smallest aperture available on your lens (usually f/22) will give the maximum depth-of-field (the amount of the image that is acceptably sharp). But even this may not be enough when you want objects a few feet from the camera, and those in the far distance, to stay in sharp focus.
The way to get around this problem is to carefully choose where you focus. Focusing on infinity (the far distance) can mean that the foreground is blurred and vice versa. To get the maximum depth-of-field you need to focus around a third of the way into the scene. This is known as the hyperfocal distance, and involves some complicated maths to work out the exact point of focus, but for wide-angle shots this rule of thumb version will work just as well.