How to photograph sunsets

Here is a sunset image we took whilst in Hungary last week, this is looking out over the small town of Paty. This is not a full tutorial, just a quick tip guide on how to photograph sunsets.To take a shot like this you will need the following:

DSLR Camera
Tripod
Adobe Photoshop/Elements

Shoot at as low an ISO as you can, 100 is good. Your aperture should be around F/11 for a landscape like this. Your shutter-speed can then be adjusted to expose for the sky or the ground, take two to three photos at different exposures so you have images with detail in the sky and ground. Use a timer so that when you take the picture your hand does not jolt the camera and move the alignment. Use a tripod so your composition does not change.

In Photoshop lay one image onto the other and use Layer Masks to select the areas from each image you want. Flatten the image. Add sharpening, dodging and burning where necessary.

To learn more about the methods used here get yourself onto our Basic Course to learn Manual Mode and then the Landscape Courses to learn some more advanced work, following this take a look at the Lightroom and Photoshop courses.

To take awesome portraits during sunset you need to Manually expose for the sky, this will force everything else into darkness including your model. To light up your subject you can use a manner of different outdoor lighting equipment, however this one was not done this way. If you are only shooting headshots or 3/4 length you can get away by using your pop-up flash or a hotshoe flashgun. Leave it on ETTL if attached to your camera as it does a pretty good job.