Shooting sunsets

[Brian4all]

The other night, there was a big orange sun setting over a hill. I got a perfect shot, but when I viewed the picture later, the sun was kind of white instead of that bright orange with the light pinkish clouds surrounding . Any advice would be appreciated.

 

[Alex_B]

Did you select exposure manually or did you do it on full auto? Maybe you did auto with an integral metering over the whole scene? then the sun would most likely be overexposed and blow out as you described.

 

[Brian4all]

I used auto focus. I don't know what integral metering is, but if you could explain, it would be appreciated. I'm wondering if I should have used the sun setting unde scene position. Thanks again.

 

[Alex_B]

it means your camera TTL metering integrates over the whole frame to determine the overall brightness of the scene. Since the sun, which is extremely bright, only occupies a small area of the scene, it will not influence that metering much. Hence it will be overexposed in the end. try other metering modes (spot) and play around abit. you can also do it the way you did, but then compensate by deliberately "underexposing" a few stops according to your metering.

or do manual exposure.

 

[Brian4all]

Not sure about the underexposing thing. By manual exposure do you mean manual focus. I guess you can tell I'm a noob.