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Hawaiian Sunsets • Click on the thumbnails to make them bigger • Best viewed at 1024 x 768 & millions of colors Yeah, I know, sunsets are a cliché in some circles. They smack of sweet and colorful cocktails. They reek of hackneyed travel magazine come-ons. They are the latitude 45 degrees north vision of a tropical paradise. I grew up in Washington State, latitude 48 degrees north, on the dark and dreary Olympic Peninsula and, thus, never glimpsed a sunset until I moved to Hawaii. So, sorry, I'm a sucker for a great sunset. In Hawaii, the atmosphere is often extremely clear and, hence, you may have to wait until the sun is only a few degrees above the horizon before shooting. Be patient, this wait is a way to avoid going blind and to control the extreme contrast of a tropical sunset. Keep in mind that sunset and twilight times near the equator are short and fleeting. Thus, with only a few minutes to work, it is helpful to plan and compose your photos before the sunset begins. You usually can't trust the camera's light meter with a big ball 'o fire in the middle of the viewfinder. With the sun just off-frame, meter a mid-toned section of the sky, lock exposure, compose and fire away. If the atmosphere is really hazy, i.e., not much contrast between the sun, sky and foreground, a normal reading from an evaluative or matrix type meter will usually do fine. If you have a big dark foreground object you should still meter off a mid-toned portion of the sky (e.g., "Haleiwa Beach" or "Tree at Ala Moana") or you'll get an overexposed image. If you shoot print film, tell your lab that you have sunset pictures and they should know what to do. They'll override the settings of the automatic printer so that the foreground objects (trees, rocks, etc.) go black, the sky is mid-toned and the sun is a brilliant ball of fire. If they don't know what to do, tell them! Otherwise you'll get great negatives and suckie, washed out prints. |
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