"Day’s End At Land’s End"

"Day’s End At Land’s End"
©David A. Ziser

One thing you have to admit while in Cabo, Mexico is that the sunsets are fabulous just about every evening.  Last evening was no exception. We were visiting new friends up the beach from where we are staying and this was the view of the Sea of Cortez from their back yard property – simply breathtaking!

The challenge for sunset photographs is getting the exposure just right so that you preserve the color and richness of the sunset and still maintain details in the shadows.  Leaving the camera on “P” for program just will not do it. I choose to set the camera to “M” manual, then adjusted the aperture and shutter speed to capture just the result I wanted.

I should probably mention that I used the camera’s viewfinder as my exposure guide.  That seemed to work just fine because the image on the camera looked the same when I imported the image into Lightroom.  I love how the cameras give you decent feedback on your exposures when using their built in viewfinder.

Composition was easy for this image.  I positioned the sun in the bottom right quadrant of the viewfinder.  That opened up the rest of the frame for the beautiful cloud formation filling the sky.  A tweak of the “vibrancy” slider and a slight saturation push for the blue tones gave me the color values I wanted.  I added clarity to the water with the gradient tool to get my final result.

Camera specs:  Canon PowerShot SX50 HS Digital Camera zoomed to 40mm (35mm equiv) at F8.0 @ 1/200 second, ISO 200.  Enjoy!  -David