When Photographing Sunsets, You Have To Fake Out The Camera`s


June 16, 1989|By Andy Grundberg.

When taking photographs of sunrises and sunsets, metering comes into play.

Expose a sunrise with the sun in the middle of the frame and you`ll end up with a dark image. No matter how fancy your camera`s exposure system is, when it sees a giant bright spot in its most sensitive area, it thinks of it as something middle gray, like a face. So it will underexpose the rest of the picture in an attempt to tone down the sun.

To get a correct exposure at sunrise or sunset, you must take a reading of an area of the sky that is less bright than the sun. A good way to do this is to swing the camera until the sun is about 30 degrees to one side. (Where this leaves the sun in the frame depends on the focal length of the lens you`re using.)

Once your camera has ``read`` the sky, you have to keep the reading locked in while you recompose. With all but manual-exposure cameras, this calls for an auto-exposure lock. Some cameras provide a special button that serves this purpose; others simply hold the exposure reading for as long as you hold your finger on the shutter button. I`d suggest rereading your instruction booklet if you`re in doubt about how it works with your particular model.

It`s easy to confuse the auto-exposure lock with another control, the auto-focus lock. Obviously, they function quite differently: one freezes an exposure reading and the other freezes a focus setting. Getting familiar with these controls should be one of the first steps of new-camera ownership.

In making a series of adjacent images to form a panorama, the metering trick is to settle on the right exposure first and then keep it the same for every shot. Otherwise, you`ll find that each print has a different density. Start by reading a part of the scene 90 degrees from the brightest part of the sky and lock in that exposure for every subsequent shot. I find it much easier to switch to manual mode when I`m working this way.

Remember, too, that when dealing with sunsets and sunrises it pays to bracket.