"Summer’s Last Sunset Serenade"

"Summer’s Last Sunset Serenade"
©David A. Ziser

Here an image I did for one of my Kelby Training videos a few years ago.  It’s still one of my favorites.  I remember we were shooting on the beach very close to sunset.  What’s amazing to me is how quickly the sunset drops out of the sky at the end of the day.  If you don’t work quickly, you will definitely miss the shot.

The other issue with our shoot was the fact that we did not have much color happening in the sky.  That necessitated the use of a longer lens to expand the background of the sunset behind the couple.  That’s why I love shooting with my 70-200mm lens when faced with this situation.  It does a nice job spreading the clouds out around the couple.

OK, what’s the challenge for this image – to capture some dramatic detail in the sky.  The best way to do that is by slightly underexposing the sky.  That should really saturate the colors in the sky and around the sun.  But, I wanted the couple to “pop” from the scene too.  That's easy with my Quantum flash on full power or 150 W.S. acting as a backlight on the couple.  This time of the day made it easy to select the proper F-stop/Shutter speed combo for the shot and I think we pulled off a great image.

Camera specs: Canon 40D fitted with 70-200mm IS lens at 95mm, F5.6 @ 1/320 second, ISO 200.  Enjoy!  -David