Surprise Sunset

As I was driving home tonight, there was the most amazing sunset that totally took me by surprise. I thought that the sun had already set because it was so cloudy. But it hadn't! I crested a hill and in my mirror I saw a brilliant red glow on the horizon. I quickly found a spot to pull over and set up my camera.

I used my 18-135mm lens and put everything on a tripod to keep it steady. I bracketed by exposures and with the 0ev being at 1/5, f13, and ISO100. This gave me an awesome depth of field and also richness in colors. I had to use a very slow shutter speed, so I used a remote trigger so that I wouldn't bump the camera in between exposures.

This photo is also a panoramic, so I quickly took my bracketed shot then panned the camera for the next one.

Editing this was a bit tricky. I wanted to use a manual blending mode that I've started to use more often. The problem with doing this was that I had two photos that had to be put together to make a panorama. They would have to be edited exactly the same in order to blend into a pano correctly.

I went around this by just using Photomatix to make HDR images out of my bracketed shots and then merging the resulting photos into a pano. Then, I made multiple copies of the pano in Lr and applied different filters to each one. These versions were all brought into Ps and blended together with layer masks. When I was happy with my blended image, I applied sharpening via high pass filter.

Next, in Lr I made the sky more dramatic with a gradient adjustment layer to increase contrast and clarity, then warmed the whole image up so it wasn't so blue. I further edited the sky with and adjustment brush to add contrast. The sky just needed to pop more.

There was a lot of noise in the image, so I had to get rid of that with out making it too soft. I used Lr for noise reduction, then added some high pass filter layers in Ps to make it sharp again. This did sacrifice some image quality, but overall the less noise helps I think.

Finally, in Ps I tweaked the colors just a bit to add more warmth to the shadows and more pop to the highlights. This mean adding yellow to the blues and then increasing the saturation and contrast in the oranges and reds.

The image did really turn out the way I'd planned. It looks much more realistic then I thought it would turn out to be, which is perfectly fine. I love how it came out, but it's not what I envisioned at the start. It's not a bad thing at all though, more like a fun surprise. I may end up re-editing this to get an even different look!

See you tomorrow!