The Edge of Light

Not too long ago at the Photography Community I am a member at, one of the members asked about photographing Sunsets. This is a pretty common subject to want to photograph, and one that tends to frustrate the photographer as well. It is an all too common scenario where the photographer sees a beautiful sky and wants to capture it with a camera. However, once the photograph is taken, it looks nothing like what they saw.

There are some tips that will help you out when photographing the sun as it nears and passes the horizon. Like all pictures, the biggest parts of the photograph are the composition and the exposure. If you nail these two things, then you will have a great picture of one of nature's most beautiful sights.

Composition

The composition is important to any photograph, everything must flow together. When you are photographing sunrises and sunsets, the composition both becomes easier and harder at the same time. The complexities all but disappear as you are usually reduced to silhouettes of structures and landforms. However, because you are dealing with silhouettes, you have to make sure that what you are including in your photograph is easily recognizable.

As you can see in this image, the lifeguard tower and the fence stand out against the sky. Joined with the swath of beachgrass and the water in the distance, the viewer instantly knows the setting of this shot. The sky has a sense of place now, and the viewer becomes involved with the image. The same principle applies to elements that are further away as well.

Take for instance, the above photograph. The trees provide a close in silhouette, but the actual mountains themselves are also silhouetted in the distance. The low haze provides some texture differences to show distance, but you are hard pressed to see the green on the hills. All of this provides a sense of place to the sky and draws the viewer into the photograph.

Exposure

Exposure is easily the most important part of the photograph, and it happens to be the trickiest as well. As you will remember from our earlier discussion on exposure. the light meter in the camera will try to estimate where the middle tone is and will expose correctly. This usually works pretty well...except for photographs including the sun. The problem arises that the sun is so much brighter in the sky than everything else in the image. The camera wants to underexpose the frame to compensate for this. If you let the auto exposure do its job when the sun is still fairly high in the sky, you will be asking for trouble.

This photograph illustrates exactly what I am talking about in regards to the sun throwing the exposure off. With the sun still this high in the sky, it is very bright. Not only will this affect the exposure of the photograph, it will also potentially damage your digital sensor. The ideal thing to do here would be to wait until the sun is lower in the sky so the light has more atmosphere to travel through (remember, you are actually viewing the sun diagonally through the atmosphere). That will reduce the intensity of the light, and therefore make for a safer picture.

There are also other lessons to be learned from this photograph in the terms of exposure. Even if the sun was lower in the sky, it will still be much brighter than the surrounding elements and will affect the exposure. You can still use your auto exposure camera very effectively to photograph this scene. The easiest approach is to move the frame to one side or another of the sun, removing it from view. Now you only have the sky and the ground elements in the frame. Lock you exposure here and then move back to the original composition including the sun. You will find that the sky will brighten up a bit and you will start to see more colors. Again, you need to make sure the sun is a good deal lower, otherwise you will be blowing the sun out completely and it will just be this hot white spot in the picture.

Another technique that can be used is to spot meter a point in the sky that you determine to be a middle tone. Once you spot meter that point, you will set your exposure accordingly, and recompose the picture. Again, your light meter will go nuts, but that is just because it is wanting you to reduce the exposure to bring the sun closer to a middle tone...which it is not.

One other technique is to use part of your composition to block some of the intensity of the sun. This can be a cloud, a tree, or maybe some tall grass in certain situations.

As you see here, the large grouping of leaves stood between the camera and the sun reducing the intensity of the light. The sun is still quite high in the sky, and this would not be a recommended shot without having something to reduce the brightness of the sun. The sun is exposed right to the point that it would have been blown out, but is not harsh on the eyes.

Pitfalls

I know that many sunrise/sunset photographs are taken with some form of automatic setting where the camera chooses the aperture and the shutter speed. We allknow the relationship between these two functions by now. To speed up the shutter speed, the aperturewill have to be opened up. The problem with automatic cameras is that they will always be biased to the quickest shutter speed possible. This is actually a good thing because it makes it easier to hand hold the camera and not blur your picture. However, in low light, that means that the camera will open the aperture up as far as it can. This will limit your depth of field and cause things that are not in your immediate area of focus to appear blurred. Carolyn also has a great example of what I am talking about.

While the limited depth of field works very well here, you can see exactly what I am talking about. The vegetation in the distance is very blurred as is the sun. This will give a dreamy quality to the image, and is a technique I have used from time to time myself. Keep in mind that point of focus, however. With an automatic camera, the auto focus will usually lock focus on the closes point. Combined with that wide aperture, you might be setting yourself up for a picture that was not what you wanted to capture.

Written by Greg A. Kiser