Sunsets and Sunrises

Sunsets and sunrises are popular subjects because they're beautiful, colorful, and their images often look as if a lot of thought went into them, even if you just point the camera and fire away. Some photographers specialize in them. Although photographically they are almost identical, I prefer sunsets to sunrises for a couple technical reasons. First, I am not usually awake in time to see a sunrise, although I sometimes catch one when I go to bed late after an all-night session browsing the Internet. Second, at the latitude where I live, for much of the year, it's a lot warmer at sundown than at sunset, and I don't particularly like cold weather. Finally, it's more difficult to scout out your location for a sunrise shot than it is for a sunset shot. Sunset follows a period of lightness (called "daytime") and you can spend hours looking for just the right spot, and use the waning daylight to decide exactly where to stand to capture the sunset as the sun dips below the horizon. Dawn, in sharp contrast, occurs after a really dark period, and you may have difficulty planning your shot in the relatively short interval just before sunrise.

Here are some tips for shooting photos of sunsets (or sunrises):

• If your camera has an automatic white-balance control that can be overridden, see if you have a Sunset/Sunrise white-balance setting as well as a Sunset/Sunrise programmed exposure mode. The former will let you avoid having the desired warm tones of the sunset neutralized by the white balance control, and the latter can allow you to get a correct exposure despite the backlighting provided by the sun. With sunset photos, you generally want a dark, silhouette effect punctuated by the bright orb of the sun.
• Don't stare at the sun, even through the viewfinder. I usually compose my sunset photos with the sun slightly out of the frame, then recompose just before taking the photo.
• Avoid splitting your photo in half with the horizon in the middle. Your picture will be more interesting if the horizon is about one-third up from the bottom (to emphasize the sky) or one third down from the top (to emphasize the foreground). Remember the Rule of Thirds.
• Sunsets don't have to be composed horizontally! Vertically oriented shots, like the one shown in up can be interesting. In that photo, I broke several "rules" by using vertical orientation for a "landscape" photo, and didn't wait until the last moment to shoot. True sunset was actually about 30 minutes away when the picture was taken. I deliberately underexposed the photo to create a sunset image