How to photograph sunsets

Wherever you are theres usually an opportunity to photograph a sun setting over the horizon with all its golden colours. You might point and shoot to get a decent record, but much more could be achieved with just a little extra thought.
Words & Pictures Peter Bargh

First lets look at what happens technically. As the sun sets the colour temperature of the light becomes warmer. This is scientifically rated with a value in K - short for Kelvin. At midday the K rating of a blue sky can be as high as 10,000K, producing a hard blue light which is the main reason why the sky looks ultra blue when photographed at this time of day. The average noon daylight is around 5500K and this is what colour film has been designed to cope with. So when you take a picture at these times the colours are recorded naturally. As the day progresses the light gradually changes colour, heading towards an orange hue as the day moves towards evening. At these times the rating is around 3000K and a normal daylight film picks up the orange hue, which could be seen as a colour cast. When photographing a person or a still-life the colour may spoil the photograph, but with sunsets it adds to the effect, giving you dramatic colours and lots of great potential.

Before you go out and shoot the sun, a word of warning WATCH YOUR EYES. I dont have to remind you that staring at the sun will damage your eyes, and pointing a lens thats potentially a magnifier will increase this risk. To be on the safe side always frame up with the sun just out of shot and then quickly reposition to take the photo and dont look directly at the sun. If youre using a long lens try to avoid looking through the viewfinder at all when the sun is in the frame. This may not be an easy task, but playing safe is better than damaging your eyesight.

Getting a good picture involves a small amount of preparation. The worst sunset pictures are those where the horizon splits the picture across the middle and theres nothing else to attract your eye. Dull Dull Dull! To avoid this ensure you have at least a tree, church spire, or person silhouetted in the shot too or maybe some foreground detail.

If you know where the sun will set you can ensure you are in the most advantageous spot to get a good composition. You may want the tree branches framing the sun, a building obscuring part of it or some useful foreground detail adding depth. The sun sets quickly so it pays to be in the right position in the first place to ensure you get the necessary shots.

If you arrive at your location early youll have time take a look at the scene an hour or so before the sun sets, or you may have an opportunity to return the next day so you can have a rehearsal. As the sun goes down it follows an arc so you can work out where it will be on the horizon, and if youre in an unsuitable spot you will be able to move location to get a better view. The sun also sets quickly so you need to act fast.

You would be naturally tempted to shoot in horizontal format here, but turning the camera on its side adds some foreground shape making the result more interesting.

In most sunset pictures you will usually focus on infinity, but your autofocus camera may be fooled if theres a lack of contrast. Most cameras have an AF ready light to confirm that they have focused. If yours doesnt activate you may be able to switch to manual and set the lens to infinity, or the camera may have an infinity or landscape focus mode that you can set. If you want to include some foreground detail you would need to pre-focus on that to avoid it looking blurred and you would use a small aperture to ensure the background comes out sharp too.

If your camera has a built-in flash you could be really creative and set an exposure that would underexpose the background and allow the flash to provide the correctly exposed foreground detail. These three shots are taken from the same location. Top is an overall scene using the 28mm setting. Bottom left is the same scene in portrait mode. And bottom right adds foreground detail and a wider aperture to throw the background subtly out of focus with flash to provide a better exposure for the foreground plant.

Your cameras meter can be fooled into producing the wrong exposure, especially when centre-weighted meters are used or when the sun is in the centre of the frame on matrix pattern mode. In these cases the sun is seen as the most important part of the scene so the metering adjust accordingly. This will result in a correctly exposed ball of orange with a very dark surround. If you compensate by using the technique of pointing down at the ground and locking the exposure you may find the sky washed out with the sun disappearing into this overexposed expanse of sky. The best thing to do is point the camera at the sky and move position so the sun is just out of the frame. Take a reading and use the exposure lock or set the exposure manually with this reading as reference. This ensures you open up a stop or two so that the surrounds have a little more detail in the shadow areas.

Here a few more visual tips to help make your sunset pictures glow:

This sunset gave an exposure of around 1/30sec at f/2, which could have been handheld, but I wanted to get some motion in the waves so I selected a more appropriate 1/2sec shutter speed at f/9.5 and rested the camera on some rocks to prevent camera shake.

Two views from the same position using a 28-80mm lens. The top shot was with the 28mm setting and the bottom one is a tighter crop using the 80mm setting.

Pointing the camera to the right would have produced a really boring shot whereas the trees add interest. You could use an APS camera in panoramic mode to get this elongated effect or crop the top and bottom off your 35mm or digital photo.

Shooting when its misty, morning or evening, can create dramatic results when the sun is visible. I took this shot while walking in the hills with the mist in the valleys. Notice I often place the sun to one side of the photograph. This helps the viewer focus on other areas of the picture and not think that the sun is the only point of the photograph.