shooting the sunset

[shelly22]

Yesterday evening I tried shooting the sunset from my bedroom window just to try and practise using my camera really.

Im not sure about the pictures though, i dunno they just seem a bit :/ i think i might have shot it too dark the trees look too black?

any advice please?






shell x

[jet_kit]

Hi Shell and welcome to the forum.
There's no right or wrong in the taking of any image. It's all about the picture you want to create, all we can say is how we might have tackled the same situation.
For the first image I think I would have tried to get a little more shadow detail going, which would also made the whole sky brighter. This is easy to say, but the content of the shadows may be cluttered with all kinds unappealing bits and pieces and might be better as it is. Only you will know that. What you could try is upping the Brightness in your PP Software and see where that takes you. Play with the contrast, saturation and vibrance settings, these may lift the image for you. One of the beauties of sunsets are that you can go crazy-wild in software and get stunning effects.
The second image is more difficult. You may have waited a little too long. To get the best results the sun needs to have just gone down but still illuminating the clouds brightly. You can try playing in software, but I suspect it's got less going for it than the first. I'm looking for patterns that give the picture that something special, but I'm not really seeing them. There's no real focal point of interest that the eye is drawn to. Try to find something specific that you want to portray, then arrange the elements of the picture to draw the eye to it.

[shelly22]

Hey,

thanks for replying really appreciate it

Yeah i understand what you mean now about there not being any focal point, maybe i should have just focused in on a tree a bit more with sunset behind it or something? shall try that next time. ideally being by the beach with the sunset would be nice but living in a town there's not one near me.

Im just starting out learning my canon 400d slr camera so its just a matter of getting used to the camera and all the settings i suppose. im used to good old point and shoot cameras lol

x

[donoreo]

Shooting something bright and something dark (which is what a sunset is) puts a lot of demands on your camera. You can compensate for this either with the camera by using filters or on the computer using...uh.er filters (just the digital kind). There are many tutorials for making a copy of your photo and adjusting the exposure on one for the ground and the other for the sky and then merging them.

If you do have questions, there are plenty of people here who can help.