Sunset on Badkhal Lake

[deepakrao]

Hi all
I've been keenly following the posts in this forum and I'd love it if the members of this community can help me in improving my photography. I'm uploading a picture of sunset..Please suggest improvements on composition, exposure etc..Also it'd be great help if you can take out some time to suggest possible PP changes in this photo

EXIF info:
f-stop-f/9
Iso-100
Exposure time-1/200
focal length-18mm
flash-no
exposure bias-zero step

[deepakrao]

Somehow photo at the previous link didn't work...so I'm posting it again
IMG_1176 | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

[milosh]

Hello there, welcome to DPS!

Taking this shot, you encountered a problem called large dynamic range. Basically, the range of tones (from the darkest to the lightest) in the scene in front of you is too great for you camera to handle. Your camera can record only a limited range of lightness. When the dynamic range of the scene is greater than your camera's dynamic range, your shot will have either underexposed shadow areas or blown out (overexposed) highlight areas. Which brings me to the first issue with your photo: the contrast range was too big for your camera to handle, which resulted in underexposed lower part of the photo. It is so dark that I can't even see it's a lake. I can't see any detail in that part of the photo. When you are faced with situation like this one, you can do couple of things: you can take two shots, one exposed for the ground and the other for the sky, and then combine them in Photoshop. Or you can also use Graduated Neutral Density filters (GND filters) which are shaded on one half, and they let you record the scene properly with a single exposure.

Although you have a nice sky and some interesting Sun rays, the lack of detail in the ground/water makes it pretty uninteresting. Shooting a sunset directly into the Sun and achieving proper exposure and getting a believable image takes a lot of practice and use of proper techniques.

[navcom]

Hi and welcome!

I'll second milosh's comments about dynamic range. I would highly recommend using a graduated ND filter for this type of scene. It almost screams for one with the straight horizon. It will also help with creating more interest.

I will focus my critique a bit more on your composition question. Milosh is right in that the picture is rather boring. This is due to there not being a main subject. Don't get me wrong...sunsets are gorgeous! Unfortunately most of the time the sun or a colorful sky in and of itself does not make a very compelling main subject. We've all seen a thousand sunsets and sunrises and our viewers were not actually there experiencing the whole scene...the humidity, smells, air, or peripheral scenes. All this makes the scene for the photographer compelling but the viewer only experiences a 2-D representation on a piece of paper.

As photographers, we need to convey the scene through thoughtful composition. For sunsets, this usually means we need to pick another main subject in the scene. I use the "frosting on a cake" analogy. Most people don't like to eat frosting all by itself. And cake without frosting can go either way. But add frosting to the cake and you have something really special.

Sunsets are just like this. Your scene is the cake and the sunset and colorful sky are like the frosting....they add tons to your scene but are rarely the scene itself. So considering this analogy, compose your scene first. Find something else to be your main subject (usually, but not always, a foreground subject) and then let the sun and sky shine down on it and add the "wow" factor.

I would also consider using the rule of thirds. While no rule is definite nor should any rule be used all the time, the rule of thirds is one that will usually add to any scene versus no rule at all. And it's a great tool for beginners as it gets the photographer to think more about composition and how elements interact with each other in a scene.

Hope that helps!

[Michael_2010]

I agree with the other comments. You have a nice sky with a lot of potential, but the horizontal band of darkness does not work well in silhouette. You would need some type of vertical lines to create visual interest. If your foreground is nice, you could bracket the shot then merge the different exposures at your desk. A layer blend is the easiest way to go and also renders the most natural appearance, imo.

[SwissJon]

I'm so pleased to see Milosh hasn't jumped completely on the HDR bandwagon.

I just want to clarify the difference between your eye and the camera when handling dynamic range, maybe that way you can understand why cameras need ND Grads at the time of taking the picture, and why doing HDR post processing isn't such a good idea.

OK, Think about this, you're outside on a very sunny day, you aren't wearing any sunglasses, then you go inside. Everything looks really dark for a while until your eyes adapt, then they look normal. The reason being is that your pupils have contracted, letting less light reach your retina, which act very much like the speed/ISO/Aperture exposure triangle on the camera. Eventually your eyes adapt, and the house looks a comfortable brightness. No you go outside again.. What happens, it's really bright once more, and you put sunglasses on to compensate. The next time you go inside, you take your sunglasses off, and everything looks normal much more quickly.While you're outside, in oder to look into shadey areas, you lift your sunglasses up and look in thos areas, and can see much better.

Ok, so this is basically what an ND Grad is.. It's a pair of sunglasses that you place over the brightest part of a lens and allows you to see into the shady areas without needing to adjust the triangle mentioned above.

So why can't we just combine two pictures, one where the camera is set for the shady areas, and one for the sunny areas? Well, we can, it's called HDR, but it gives you a different result to using a filter. What happens with the filter is that you're selectively dimming certain brighter areas, usually the sky. With an HDR, the software takes ALL bright areas and dims them, and ALL dark areas and brightens them.. Thus reducing the contrast in the photograph to something your computer can handle.

Personally I'm not a fan of HDR photography. I would prefer to put a piece of glass in front of the lens and produce something that resembles something I'm familiar with. Your eye is used to strong shadows, it's also able to adapt to strong light, so putting the camera's sunglasses on in the bright areas is familiar to us. with HDR, you lose the depth of shadows in exchange for detail, and this is done everywhere on the photograph, and this is unfamiliar to your eye. Some people think it's good, others, like me, don't like it. That's a very subjective thing. I won't say that there's no place for HDR in the world, clearly there is, much like some people like modern art and others like impressionism.. It's a matter of taste.. Both techniques are valid, but can produce very different results.

Anyway, that's my 2 cents for this morning. Better go have a shower and get the camera out, it's a beautiful day and the dog needs a walk.

[deepakrao]

Thanks to Milosh,Navcom,Michael_2010 and SwissJon...I'm really glad to have got very good pieces of advice from you guys...I'd buy a GND filter soon and would come out with a photograph better both technically as well as aesthetically...

[SwissJon]

Originally Posted by deepakrao

Thanks to Milosh,Navcom,Michael_2010 and SwissJon...I'm really glad to have got very good pieces of advice from you guys...I'd buy a GND filter soon and would come out with a photograph better both technically as well as aesthetically...

GND's come in all makes and sizes, I had a lot of bad ones from "Cokin".. The cheap ones found on fleabay for $5 or something like that, they give a really strong orangy colour cast and what they called ND4 was exactly the same as what they called ND8..

I very much like the Hi-Tech ones I have now, cost me £30 for a set of three soft grad 0.3-0.9, and I'll buy them again, they also have a slight colour cast, but it's not nearly as noticeable as the Cokins. And they fit into the Cokin P Holder, so you're only looking at a couple of $ for the holder, instead of the frankly ridiculous £30 I've seen some advertised for. One thing you have to remember with the Hi-Techs is that they're resin. This means that they scratch VERY easily.. Keep them in a soft lint free pouch and never let one rub against another.

Oh, and one last tip.. When buying ANY filter, buy it to fit the largest diameter lens you have and then get an adapter for the smaller diameters. This will have two positive effects.. One, you only have to buy one filter for all your lenses, not one for each of your lenses, and two, you can stack them without vignetting.

[milosh]

Originally Posted by SwissJon

I'm so pleased to see Milosh hasn't jumped completely on the HDR bandwagon.

Why would I?

Just to clarify a bit, when I said that you can take two shots with different exposures and combine them in Photoshop, I was referring to manual blending of two images using layers. I thought of mentioning HDR, but I didn't want to, since it could only further confuse the OP. Like you Jon, I'm not a fan of super realistic HDR photography (which unfortunately counts for majority of HDRs today), but HDR technique can be also be used to create very believable, natural looking photos. Here's one example: Front Page Photos before 2010 - Digital Outback Photo and a very good article on HDR: The Art of HDR Photography Part 1: Guides: Learn: Digital Photography Review

[SwissJon]

Originally Posted by milosh

Why would I?

Just to clarify a bit, when I said that you can take two shots with different exposures and combine them in Photoshop, I was referring to manual blending of two images using layers. I thought of mentioning HDR, but I didn't want to, since it could only further confuse the OP. Like you Jon, I'm not a fan of super realistic HDR photography (which unfortunately counts for majority of HDRs today), but HDR technique can be also be used to create very believable, natural looking photos. Here's one example: Front Page Photos before 2010 - Digital Outback Photo and a very good article on HDR: The Art of HDR Photography Part 1: Guides: Learn: Digital Photography Review

LoL.. Now we're opening a whole can of worms! I was expecting someone to recommend it and I'm yet to be convinced it has its place in creating realistic landscape photographs. The only HDR images I've seen that involve landscapes lack contrast and/or create an obviously fake, almost fantasy scene and fall, in my opinion, into the realms of computer art.

Now the link you provided DOES create a realistic photo, and I've seen others done just as well, but it isn't a landscape photo. I'm willing to have an open mind about this, there's always a grey area between two distinct forms of art, but it's not the grey areas that cause me problems.. I don't dislike HDR photos because "they're HDR", I dislike HDR photos that distort reality to the point that I start to dislike the photo. Some people might say the same about Black and White photography, but how far can you desaturate a photo before draw that line? You can't, it's subjective, there is no line, the line is simply, "I like" or "I don't like".. My solution to that is to try, as near as damnit, to get the light that hits the camera's sensor to do so within the dynamic range capabilities of the sensor, which involves ND Grads, and also to embrace the times where it doesn't, by, for example, the use of sillouettes.

Anyway, like I said, it's subjective. What I like or don't like bears no relevence to what you or anyone else likes or doesn't like.