[irrelevant]I’ve spent some time over the Christ­mas hol­i­days revamp­ing this blog (mostly under the hood though). Just quickly: For a while now I’ve been using a word­press plu­gin called Yet another pho­tob­log together with some cus­tom code to auto­mat­ic­ally gen­er­ate in a non-​messy way the EXIF table you see at the end of each post and to cre­ate the reflec­tion below the images. Unfor­tu­nately I didn’t use this nice plug­in from the begin­ning, so there were about 30 pic­ture posts left out. But since the plu­gin does a very eleg­ant job of everything I’ve decided to migrate the old posts so that now every post goes through the plu­gin. This then allowed me to auto­mat­ic­ally gen­er­ate a com­pre­hens­ive list of all the pic­tures dis­cussed so far, which you can find by click­ing on any of the “More pic­tures” links. Also, the ran­dom pic­tures in the top right are now picked from all the images pos­ted so far. Finally, thanks to the won­der­ful php-​typography class the typo­graphy of the posts should be cleaner, and best of all: there’s now hyphen­a­tion — I never thought this would be pos­sible with HTML, but there you have it![/irrelevant]

Today’s photo was shot way back in 2007, and shows one of the massive sun­sets we get here in Maynooth in the winter months. Now when you shoot sun­sets, as I said before, the most import­ant thing is expos­ure and white bal­ance. And com­pos­i­tion.

-> Expos­ure: If you cam­era is set to auto­matic, it usu­ally over­ex­poses sun­set scenes and you loose all the intense col­ours. So make sure you set your expos­ure com­pens­a­tion to some neg­at­ive value (exper­i­ment around a bit, start­ing from, say, –1 EV).

-> White bal­ance: You’re best off using the a scene mode (most cam­eras have a “sun­set mode” of some sort) which should take care of that. If you have con­trol over the white bal­ance though, make sure your above at least 6000K with some extra magenta added in too.

-> Com­pos­i­tion: It always helps if you have an extra sub­ject apart from the sun­set in the scene. You see, unfor­tu­nately there are way too many sun­set (or sky pic­tures in gen­eral) around, so a pic­ture of just a sun­set is usu­ally quite bor­ing, no mat­ter how impress­ive it is. Instead, try to include an extra sub­ject in your pic­ture, like the two guys here you walked past just at the right moment. That way, you gen­er­ate an extra amount of dis­tinc­tion to all those sun­set pic­tures out there…