Sunset Photography

After spending almost two days indoors doing work, I decided to take my gear and walk around Baltimore's Mount Vernon neighborhood. However, I didn't see any good opportunities to shoot, so I headed to the inner harbor and Federal hill hoping today would offer a beautiful sunset. Spring and summer sunsets are colorful in Baltimore and I haven't had an opportunity to shoot them the past few days when the days have been clear with little clouds.

I wasn't disappointed. This was one of those orange-yellow sunsets that completely inundated the cloudless sky. Since I had decided not to bring my tripod, I had to shoot at ISO 800. I also wanted to create a silhouette with the Ravens stadium so I used a 300mm lens. I underexposed by about 1/3 of a stop.

On the imageabove, I included an out-of-focus tree in the foreground to balance out the left side and add a little something to the picture.

 As I always shoot RAW, I had to adjust contrast, sharpening and noise reduction, but I didn't increase vibrance or saturation. The sky really was that orange. I then cropped the image to 1x3 aspect.

Overall, glad I headed out and worked on my sunset photography rather than sticking indoors.

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Sunset

Canon 500D (Rebel T1i) with EF-S 55-250mm IS @116mm 1/125s F/16 ISO 400

Being without a filter, wider aperture lens, a tripod, and a camera without low-noise, high ISO performance, I still couldn't let this sunset go without attempting to capture it.

For this type of shot, you really need to do two things; use a tripod and use the Manual setting where you set your own shutter speed and aperture. Using just shutter priority or aperture priority will make your shot either underexposed or overexposed, and a tripod eliminates camera shake.

I didn't have a tripod, so I did the best I could in the situation. However, I knew I played it safe, shot RAW and simulated the Polarizer filter in Photoshop using Channels.

Here's what the original image looked like:

You can notice the biggest difference in the highlights and the elimination of the haze. 

You can find the simple polarizer filter Photoshop tutorial here.

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