Sometimes you have to put the Camera in Manual

Living in the city, my opportunities to take the sunset pictures are limited, so this past weekend when I noticed I was going to have a great chance to take sunset pictures. I spent a few minutes with the sun falling trying to work out the exposure, but there are a few things I did not fully factor in. Remember, that if you underexposure your target, you will get MORE color, not less. More exposure leads to a whiter subject, which is why the sky is often blown out in photos to accurately expose the subjects.


1) I need to chimp faster. Chimping is the process of taking a photo, looking at the resulting picture, and then making adjustments to your exposure. It took me several tries to get the sky the way I wanted to look in this photo. This was taken AV with a -1 EV compensation, which resulted in 1/1250 at f5.6




2) Know your equipment. The following picture resulted when I turned the flash on at f 5.6, 1/180- the exposure changed. Either because I had left the flash setting on the camera in wireless mode, or didn't leave the flash in HSS (high speed sync mode), even though the flash was attached to the camera, it automatically defaulted to the regular max sync speed on 1/180. This may have been a more proper exposure for the sun, but I wanted to exaggerate the sunset which needed less ambient light. At the time, the sun was actually brighter than this to the naked eye.


With the sun falling there is limited time. When your subject is less than 2 years old, you need to have the shot ready to go in case he wanders in to your target area. I took several shots to get the sky adequately underexposed. With the sun falling, this exposure value changes very quickly. While ordinarily you may want to let your camera make your exposure decisions, you need to have control over your camera at times like this.