As Our Hero Rides Into the Sunset . . .

Sunset photography is all about the color.  Unfortunately, your camera doesn’t know that, so you have to tell it.  If you don’t, you can just about count on your sunset photographs coming out far less impressively than what you thought you saw.

And here’s why:  Your exposure meter will more than likely over expose the shot, especially if you use center-weighted metering.  Overexposure will wash out the colors, making them duller and not nearly as vibrant and memorable.  Also, your camera’s auto white balance feature may get confused by the bright colors and attempt to “fix” those colors for you.  So, what do you do about all this unwanted help from your camera?  Easy.  You compensate.

There is a way to get around the camera’s tendency to overexpose.  And the way to do that is to employ negative exposure compensation.  Below you will see a set of photographs.  The first has no exposure compensation.  The following four have a -⅔ exposure compensation.  The next four after that show a full stop of negative compensation.  Hovering your cursor above a shot will show the exposure compensation that was used, and clicking on a shot will expand it.  And, just to show that sunsets aren’t the only condition that can benefit from negative exposure compensation, I also threw one final picture to show how this technique can also add drama to darkened skies and ominous clouds.

To prevent the camera from ruining the colors, I manually set the white balance for all these shots to daylight.  This helps to ensure that the colors I saw were what the camera recorded.  If I hadn’t done this, there’s a very real possibility that the camera would think the shots were taken under a red light, causing it to try to make those reds closer to white.  That would have been a major disappointment, as you can see.

And here are the results: