Lighting Conditions

Lighting Conditions

by William Lulow

Lighting conditions are rarely the same twice! Unless, of course, you can set them up in a studio. Natural light is always different. I was in this same spot a year ago and got quite a different sunset:

This is taken from the same spot one year ago:

 When you are dealing with natural light many things can change in sometimes, fractions of seconds, especially late in the day when light can be the most beautiful and the most fleeting! The earth is rotating on its own axis at 1000 miles per hour! So, you might be surprised how fast a sunset will disappear completely! Earliest and latest times in the day are often the most dramatic, though because the sun’s rays are being refracted through the atmosphere and it is the extreme angle that makes for the amazing reds and pinks in the sky. But the colors are fleeting! So one of the tricks to getting really great sunset shots is to arrive at the location and set your camera on a tripod way before the sun actually sets. Then, as the sun begins to go down, make several exposures at various meter readings and settings. As the sun gets lower, don’t try to increase your ISO setting. Keep it at 100 and vary the exposure with the shutter speed setting. Nothing in the scene is really moving except the earth. So, you don’t have to stop any action. You will also want to use a small lens opening (f/stop) to get as much depth-of-field as possible. The final image can also be tweaked in Photoshop to get just the right saturation.