Who can resist photographing a dramatic sunset? I know I can't!
I photographed this particular sunset from the West Shore at Llandudno on the North Wales coast, a place where normally the sun just disappears into a bank of haze on the horizon so a nice crisp sunset is always a treat.
When I'm photographing sunsets I always have to pay particular attention to exposure. Even if the luminosity is OK I find that the exposure needs to be dialled right back in order to preserve some sort of colour detail in the red channel, otherwise the sun becomes just a solid block of colour.
On this occasion I had to let the red channel burn out a bit in order to preserve some detail in the sea, and then in post processing I desaturated yellows in the sun until the histogram was more balanced and the face of the sun had some colour gradation back again.
All of this messing about to try and get what comes out of a camera even remotely close to what our eyes can actually see just reminds me of what an awesome piece of God's design the human eye/brain combination really is.
Filename - sunset 01.jpg
Camera - Canon 5D
Lens - 100-400mm zoom @ 400mm
Exposure - 1/1600sec @ f11, ISO400
Location - Llandudno, North Wales
This image - 533x800px JPEG
Conversion - ACR & PS-CS2
Comments - Fast shutter speed and lens stabilisation used to prevent camera shake
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