Learn the essential in-camera steps to capture the end-of-day light and then apply targetted processing to make the best of your sunset shots
Difficulty level: Intermediate
Time taken: 1.5 hours
In many ways, sunset is the best time to shoot landscape photography. While dawn is the other golden hour for capturing scenic images, providing warmer light and softer shadows than midday, atmospheric factors often result in more saturated colours towards the end of the day. The other advantage of staying out later, rather than getting up early, is that the light is getting progressively better as the sun lowers in the sky and so the window for the best images is generally longer.
However, capturing golden hour shots at the coast comes with several unique challenges. The close proximity of the sun to the reflective surface of the ocean often results in easily blown highlights. To make matters worse, these clipped areas are difficult to balance due to the localised nature of the exposure difference – it’s not often possible to filter these areas using an ND grad and HDR blending might require further local adjustment.
For this project, we’re going to explore how to balance exposure and colour to maximise the sunset atmosphere. With careful camera work, these steps can be applied to any scene, anywhere. The aim is to recognise those characteristics that make the golden hours so attractive to the eye and learn to make these aspects as prominent in your images as possible.
Shooting steps
1Set metering mode With extreme contrast, there is a risk of miscalculating the exposure. Spot metering underexposed the cliffs and beach, but Evaluative gave an exposure that didn’t match any area well. Center-Weighted ensured zones close to the sun didn’t overly influence the AE system but highlights weren’t ignored totally.
2 Attach a hood To achieve the glowing sunset effect I’m after in this scene, we need to shoot towards the sun, which is just out of the frame. However, this opens up the risk of lens flare, so a hood is essential. If you don’t have a hood for your lens model, use a baseball cap or similar item to shade the sun-facing side of the optic.
3 Crop the scene Many sunset images fail because too much of the scene not illuminated by the golden light is included. To enhance the effect, a quick and easy solution is to crop into the areas covered by the directional light. For this image, I used a 70-200mm lens to compress the illuminated areas and exclude a darker foreground.
4 Control white balance Although we think
