Project 16 and 18: Dusk/Sunrise and Sunset. A second and third attempt.

As I was dissatisfied with the first images that I used for this project, whilst I was staying in Musselburgh I decided to repeat the exercise with some more interesting backgrounds.

This first set is of the Forth Road Bridge taken from the tiny harbour at South Queensferry. Again as in the first set of images the gradation from deep orange to blue is more evident in the first wide angle shot from each pair. The blue disappears with the telephoto effect. In these shots there is some cloud on the horizon and this diffuses the full glare of the sun while it is still above the horizon.

 

The following set were taken from the small harbour of Fisherharrow, Musselburgh. Here the sky is more clear and so while the sun is still above the horizon it causes flare, especially with the wide angle shots. Interestingly though when I placed the rigging of the yachts across the sun it produced a pleasing sun star, especially with the wide angle shots.

What have I learned:

When photographing sunsets there are many variations that give pleasing results. Longer exposure times produce more detail in the shadows but then the sky can become more blown out and lose the rich colours. In neither iof these sets of images have I used an ND grad as the masts of the yachts and the bridge structure would have created complications. I could have used exposure fusion, either in photomatix or photoshop but I decided to use the images as they were for this project. Partly for the purposes of the exercise but also because I like the silhouette effect from sunset images and am not sure that a lot of detail in the shadows would look realistic. I do like the effect of using some flash (covered in project 17) though. I noticed that when the sky is clear as in the second set the wide angle images tended to be more underexposed so may some exposure compensation would be useful with clear skies and wide angle.