6 Tips for Shooting Great Sunset Photos

Try these six tricks to capture powerful photos imbued with the beauty and positive feelings of sunsets.

1. Get a Full View:
Position yourself on a beach or a highpoint to allow an unrestricted view of the sun for maximum impact. An alternative is to capture the sun falling between trees, next to an attractive monument or reflecting off the water. Make sure your photo isn't too busy with other objects that distract attention.

2. Keep Shooting:
More attempts will increase your chances of getting the right results. As the sun gets lower, it tends to get redder as well, so your results should improve in the final moments of a sunset.

3. Look for Clouds:
Sunsets on cloudy evenings are more colorful and interesting than sunsets on clear evenings. While you may not actually capture the sun itself in these photos, capturing an amazing variety of colors and rich cloudy textures will make up for it.

4. Shoot Off-Center:
Bring more life to your sunset photos by positioning the horizon away from the center of your photo. Instead, keep it near the bottom of the shot to dramatically highlight the sky. In combination with this, leaving some foreground in the shot, such as a person or a tree, will give greater interest and give you a great opportunity to work on silhouette photographs.

5. Use Multiple Exposure Settings:
Your camera's light meter will often under-expose sunsets because there is still quite a bit of light, so bracketing (taking several shots at different exposures) may be needed to find the perfect exposure. A little under-exposure can help to make the colors of a sunset richer. If you want to include the details of a person in the foreground, try using fill flash and night mode. This will bring out their details while still allowing enough exposure to get rich colors – remember to use a tripod in this case to avoid camera shake.

6 Zoom In:
It is effective to use a long focal length for sunsets, because the sun will appear much larger and more impressive in the sky. Either choose the longest optical zoom lens setting on your camera or use a longer telephoto lens on your SLR.

Author: Gary Hendricks

10 Tips to Shoot Better Pictures with your Digital Camera

With the boom of the digital photography more pictures then ever are being shot everyday. The Digital Photography allows to increase significantly the picture production by lowering costs. But does the quality increase on the same ratio ? Probably not.

With few simple tips it is possible to take more advantage of your own equipment and increase the value of your own pictures.

1) Get closer to the Subject: 90% of the pictures are taking too far of the subject. Just step towards your subject and ensure that it fills completely your visor. It is never too close.

2) Use a tripod: take a light high quality tripod with you and use it! You will be able to capture more details of your subject and increase the sharpness, specially when taking scenics, arquitecture and landscapes.

3) Use the "Raw" mode of your digital camera: JPG pictures allows only 8 bit per channel, this means the information per channel is restricted and you may loose information when processing your picture later in your digital lab. RAW modes support the full range of your digital equipment and provides highly flexibility to re- process your pictures afterwards.

4) Use low ISO values: your digital camera is able to be setup to high ISO Values (ISO 500-1500), however the noise of the sensor will increase dramatically, needing also an intensive post-processing, i.e. using noise reduction filters. Use higher ISO values only when its unavoidable

5) Keep it simple: in photography less is more. Concentrate on the message you desire to capture and try to eliminate everything else. Keep your backgrounds simple and your main subject understandable without anything else that could disturbe your clear message.

6) Bring profundity in your pictures. The world has three dimensions, but your pictures only two. A subject that looks great to your eyes may appear flat in your pictures. Play with diagonal elements crossing the picture, but with simplicity of lines.

7) Either Fore or Background: a typical beginner error is to try to capture fore and background on the same picture. This is the typical "tourist" picture in front of some touristic attraction. Decide if you would like to capture the fore- or the background and concentrate on one subject. Only by using extreme wide-angle lens and a good composition you can have both.

8) Discover hidden details: The world is infinite complex and contains innumerable details that are waiting to be captured by your lenses. Use tele-photo lenses to bring to the audience what only you have discovered.

9) Don´t place your subject in the middle. Your pictures will be boring if everything is symetric and the subject is exact in the middle. Apply the "golden section" of the "rule of the thirds". Keep your composition balanced. Of course, extreme symmetry can be wonderful, if applied properly.

10) Unleash your creativity: once you have carefully applied the rules 1-9, forget them and start using creative photography. Don´t use tripod and move your camera intentionally in order to get blure pictures, play with high ISO values and extreme perspectives, extreme light situations and unusual subjects. You will be a great photographer.

Author: Alex Timaios

Understanding Exposure

Light is the key!

One trick which i have written about is understanding the right hand side of the hisotgram in digital photography and exposing to the right theory. A lot of people automatically shy away from this because we all know blowing highlights is the cardinal sin in digital photography!

Learn to understand light, learn to paint with light and learn how your image sensor controls and records light and hopefully you will have a greater understanding of exposure and how to deal with it.

Understanding your image sensor

Your cameras sensor works by recording light reflectance from black (reflectance of 0) to white (reflectance of 255; or 247 shown by my tests) / shades of gray where 18% is average exposure at a reflectance of 119 (in my honest oppion for the Nikon D70). The histogram shows this, Black (shadows) on the left, white on the right (highlights) and midtones in the middle. You'll notice red lines dividing up your histogram on your Nikon D70. The distance between these lines is around 1 f-stop of light; this varies for cameras with different dynamic ranges e.g. fuji s3 could be 1.5 stops. Therefore you know if your photo is peaking on your histogram 1 bar left of center it is around 1stop underexposed.

Now as mentioned, your cameras sensor records light on a linear scale. This is all processed as data levels through the RAW processing engine of your camera. Your camera records the most amount of data levels in the highlights (reflectance of 255/247) on the far right hand side of the histogram. I keep using the reflectance value of 247, simply because 247 is the refletance reached when pure white is recorded and 247-255 is the same value (hence why my custom curves always end at 247). Anyway, the highlights (far right hand side of the histogram) record 2048 data levels. This is halved as you loose 1 stop of light. E.g. as you move from right to left on your histogram, measued by the red dividers. Remember the dividers mark around 1 stop of light. Therefore moving from the highlights and then left to the next red divider (the bright tones), you loose around 1 stop of light and your data levels captured by the sensor are halved to 1024 data levels. This is halved again as you go from the bright tones to the midtones and so forth.

Therefore, if you understand this, you will realise that, if you dont fill the right hand side of your histogram with information you are effectivly throwing away half of your camera sensors's potential.

Working with light

You'll still get good pictures even if you didnt know about this, however, the more tonal spread you can achieve the more impact your images will have. If you can get a full set of tones in your pictures (data captured evenly from the shadows, peaking through the midtones and stretching to the highlights) you will get more contrast, graduation and dynamic range leading to a well rounded image. Filling in those right hand gaps will, as mentioned give you much more data levels to play with if you need to post process. Now to do this you need to understand the laws of photography and effectivly painting with light. Light is the underlying key to all of this. I see all too often people trying to photograph in mid-day or afternoon sun complaining of blown highlights or loss of tones through the mid-section. Its impossible on any camera to get good results of harsh lighting. You have to compromise! And by compromise i mean spot meter your subjects or use center-weighting. If your photography in direct sunlight-midday, theres always going to be a massive difference between shadows and highlights, far too much difference in f-stop's for your camera, or any cameras dynamic range to handle. Therefore your pictures will be dull, your midtones, under-exposed and the highlights blown. The midtones (the middle of your histogram) is where the tones should peak and this is the key. You'll need to get close in to your subject and spot or center-weight the exposure so at least your subject is well exposed. Getting in tight will minimise or even cut out the sky or very bright highlights that can fool your cameras meter.

To get the best tonal distribution you'll need nice soft light which you can find early morning or late evening. Harsh sunlight means a massive exposure difference between the sunlitt areas and shadows, too much for any camera to meter for and record accordingly.

So now hopefully you will now have an idea of how your image sensor deals with light and how stops of light, dynamic range and working with light plays just as much an important part in digital photography as it did with film. Its all too common these days to forget the rules of photographt and working with light by simply blaming very expensive equipment for not performing. Digital is versatile, its easier then ever to take photographs with digital bodies and people are taking more photo's than ever. More people own cameras than ever before now and that means a lot of people who didn't start off with film in which you had to learn how to deal with light and exposure. It also means a lot of trips out with the family and that means mid-day photography. And as we understand from this article mid-day is the hardest time of day to get good results.

This article isn't telling you how and when to take photographs, hopefully what i have written will educate you more into understand the restrictions and factors surrounding exposure and image sensors. Hopefully it has explained how light is the key factor and will hopefully make you think about how the light is going to effect your next frame. This will hopefully give you the scope to learn to manage and work with light and in the meantime, it will help you understand your histogram.


Understanding Exposure | Digital Camera Resource