Day 25 – Sunset Photography At Upper Two Medicine Lake

Lots of people asked me how to photograph sunset.  I’ve produced a quick video so you know next time what the best time is.

As you can see from the sunset calendar, the official sunset time at Two Medicine Lake, Glacier National Park, is 8:17pm on Sept 1, 2013.

Here are three HDR JPEG photos, unprocessed, straight from my Canon 5D Mark III, same composition, taken at different time that evening, just to give you an idea of the color changes.

The photo below was taken at 8pm, about 20 minutes before the sunset.  You see lots of gold colors in the cloud, and if you photograph a lake like I did, you’ll get the same colors in the reflection as well.

This one below was taken at 8:21pm, just 4 minutes after the exact sunset time.  This is when you start to see a mixture of orange, pink, light purples emerging.  The foreground mountains however might appear darker in your image due to the diminishing light source.

This final one was taken at 8:27pm, 10 minutes after the exact sunset time.  You can tell the colors started to fade, and the sky turned into blue or grey.

Nevertheless, the strength of the colors, the time window you’ll be able to capture the colors depend on how heavy the cloud is, how far into the horizon you can see, whether you have a mountain or building obstructing your view etc.  Every sunset will be different.  The above is a simple guide for you.  I’m sure you’ll find out how amazing and fun it is to photograph your own sunset.

Tip of the day

Note: HDR is not my preferred method to photograph lake, as stacking images with moving subjects such as lake surface or clouds does not generate perfect result. Here are a few more lake examples with one shot method (my preferred method):

• unprocessed RAW images of Kintla Lake

• post processed images of Bowman Lake

Happy photographing, until next time!

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