Shooting sunsets and silhouettes

LuckySe7en · Jul 28, 2011

I'll be hitting the beach this weekend and I think it'll be a great opportunity to get some sunset shots and silhouettes. Question is, what settings work best to achieve the effect I'm after?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Malone · Jul 28, 2011

Here's a link that may help -

Silhouette Photography | Photography Mad

I'm sure others will chime in with more specifics.

tirediron · Jul 28, 2011

You'll need to be more specific about just what effect you're after... For shooting sunsets, graduated ND filters are very useful and for shooting silhouettes, meter the bright area of the source light, expose for that, but focus on the subject you want silhouetted.

bazooka · Jul 28, 2011

Set your camera to Manual and aim at the sky adjacent to the sun (but not directly at the sun). Meter off of that and set a neutral exposure, or perhaps a third or two higher. This will expose the sky perfectly and leave your subjects in silhouette. It will also give you consistency for every shot where semi-auto modes will change depending on how much sky you have in the shot.

AgentDrex · Jul 28, 2011

I like to set the subject right in front of the sun and shoot super fast:

LuckySe7en · Jul 28, 2011

bazooka said:
Set your camera to Manual and aim at the sky adjacent to the sun (but not directly at the sun). Meter off of that and set a neutral exposure, or perhaps a third or two higher. This will expose the sky perfectly and leave your subjects in silhouette. It will also give you consistency for every shot where semi-auto modes will change depending on how much sky you have in the shot.

Maybe I need to do a little more research. I'm not sure how to meter off the sky. What do I look for on my screen? I have a canon xs

LuckySe7en · Jul 28, 2011

This is the effect I'm after. Possibly with everything in focus, not just the subject.

unpopular · Jul 28, 2011

Assuming you have a camera capable of it... Manual mode, spot meter off any clouds' whitest portion, expose at 2 to 3 stops more exposure. Use shutter speed, so if the meter reads 1/500, expose at 1/125 - 1/60. If no clouds are present, meter at where the sky registers medium blue, expose without compensation (the way that the meter reads). If you aren't familiar with the latitude of your camera, be sure to check the image in camera.

(optional technical stuff)

What's happening here is that when you spot meter off a specific tone the meter is calibrated to render that tone as middle tone, i.e. not black shadows, not white hilights, but close to the middle in between. When you increase the exposure, that tone is rendered lighter than what the camera expects. So when you meter off the whitest portion of the clouds and provide more exposure than what the camera suggests, the cloud becomes lighter in the image and the rest of the scene follows. If you didn't adjust, then the whole image, cloud and all, would be under exposed.

In the second scenario, because the sky is already "middle blue" the spot meter will provide accurate exposure. You could carefully meter off or near the sun, however because the sun is SO bright it will throw off the entire exposure since the camera only has so much "latitude" - the range from darkest to lightest that it can effectively resolve.

MissCream · Jul 28, 2011

Here is one I did the other day, it's a bit under exposed and could be cropped a lot better but all I did was {try to} expose for the sunset. The subject will naturally be under exposed.