Nice sunset pictures

[golympio]

Hi everyone, today I wanted to share a simple tip, it's been quite useful for me so I guess it can be for other readers too.

While I was walking down this bridge, I saw the sun setting, I got out my camera, took 3 quick bracketed shots, and got this. I guess it looks OK, but boring, well it's a sunset.

(click through to view it bigger)

Then I turn around, it hit me! I went on the other side of the bridge, did the same, and got very interesting colors!


(click through to view it bigger)

The tip here is: when shooting a sunset, turn 180° and you're quite likely to make a nice picture.

The settings were identical for both pictures:
Canon 50d with Tokina 11-16mm at 11mm,
f/8,
ISO 100
3 exposures -2, 0, +2, handheld
Tonemapping in Photomatix, levels/colors in Lightroom

What I could've done better:
- Put down the tripod, shoot more exposures with a wider bracketing (and I did, the result is here and shows noticeably less digital noise)
- Wait a little for the light to egalise and take just one picture, and save the time and hassle of doing a HDR picture...
- Take more time adjusting levels to bring out more detail


(hint: for the assiduous forum readers, if you look closely you can see in the first picture another bridge that I shot a couple of days ago)

[JerInTheBox]

Gorgeous photos, and a great tip. Sunsets (and sunrises, but those may as well not exist as far as my hours are concerned) are pretty tough to shoot well, but if you look behind you they're bound to be casting all sorts of beautiful, colorful light on everything.

[wattsbw2004]

I really love the surge of water in the 1st and great cool colors in the 2nd. Great work!

[golympio]

Thanks!
I just hope it can help other readers making better pictures, like this forum did for me.

Here are other pictures from the same shoot.
Another framing of the same shot, 10 minutes before:

(click through to see it bigger)

And this is the bridge I stood on:

(click throught to see it bigger)

I post little pictures, because if people like me are reading the forum on their phones it's much easier. then it takes 1 second to click on the image and have it much bigger, all the original sizes are available on flikr.

[Glayva]

Lovely pictures with some very interesting colors.

[Shutterbugdeb]

Wow, I never thought of that. Thanks for sharing.

[apple]

very nice! very interesting colours indeed