Sunset Flames
By Brian Auer • August 10th, 2007Here’s a shot from my recent trip across the country, on my move from New Jersey to California. This sunset photo was taken at the Grand Canyon in Arizona, right after the sun went down. We showed up at the Canyon just before sunset, so I only had a few minutes to get ready for the big color show. The clouds were amazing, and it was a great show. This one spot just above the sun was lit up like flames, and lucky for me I was using my super-wide, so I was able to capture the whole thing. I exposed this shot for the sky and allowed the foreground to go almost black (though there was some color information in there). I also shot at ISO100 in order to minimize any noise, which in turn caused a low shutter speed, which in turn caused me to use a large aperture. If it were any darker, I would have had to bump the ISO up a notch.
The JPEG (1) was pretty dull and washed out, but the RAW conversion (2) started looking a little better due to a white balance adjustment and an increase in vibrancy. I started off the editing a little dodging (3) using a curves adjustment layer and mask to brighten the highlights. Then I did some burning (4) with a curves adjustment layer and mask to darken the shadows and help bring out the depth in the clouds. After the photo started looking a little better, I applied a curves adjustment layer (5) to increase the contrast a bit further. The last step was a hard mix layer blend (6) at 32% opacity and 20% fill, which really helped bring out the colors and contrast. Due to the inherent softness of the photo, I left out the sharpening step.
** You can also see this photo on Zooomr and Flickr **
Photo by Brian Auer
07/13/07 Grand Canyon
Sunset Flames
Konica Minolta Maxxum 7D
Sigma 10-20mm f/4-5.6 EX DC HSM
15mm equiv * f/4 * 1/60s * ISO100
Brian Auer is a photography enthusiast from San Diego, California. He's also the guy behind the Epic Edits Weblog. As a hobbyist photographer since 2003, his passion has been to constantly improve his photography skill set, to share his own knowledge with others, and to become an integral part of the photographic community.
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Very cool shot Brian!
Those are the kind of shots for which you have to be at the right place at the right time to get them. Unfortunately I always don’t have my camera with me when I get great landscape opportunities
I hope you’ll find more time to post now that you are all moved.
Hey Jenni, it’s been a while since I’ve talked to you. I’m trying to get back into things. I just need to get the cable internet hooked back up and I’ll be all set.
I figured as much. Moving is messy business.
Depending on which RSS feed from my side you were subscribed to, my new post won’t show up any more. I accidentally killed one feed :-[
Cool, thanks for the heads up. I think the one in my reader was dead, so I added the new one. The new page layout looks pretty nice too — it looks like you’ve done a little bit of work on it.
Brian, I am so totally nabbing your layout. It’s perfect for showing the post-processing steps of a single photo.
I like the fact that you left out the sharpening step to keep the photo feeling soft and warm.
Nab all you want — it’s fine. I’d like to see some of your processing steps, and anybody else’s for that matter. I like seeing the start to finish kind of thing, but not a lot of people do it unless it’s wrapped up in a huge tutorial.
Stunning photo Brian! Well done.
It’s very interesting to see the process involved in turning the image from raw to output. It’s also interesting to see how your process differs from mine.
My only concern would be for novice photographers. The terminology would be quite overwhelming. Have you ever, or do you plan to write a more involved process as a kind of tutorial? It would be something valuable for sure.
Maybe I should beat you to it
Thanks Neil! I did do one of my photos as an in-depth write up, and you can find it at Graffiti Photography: Photoshop Technique. I found that it took a lot of extra time to say the same thing, but I also think that it was worth it for a really specific technique. For the regular stuff (like this one), I don’t know that dragging it out would be worth the extra time.
My approach for addressing the novice photographers has been to write tutorial articles on one specific aspect of my process, so it can be applied to more than one photo. For example, I’ve written about Photo Sharpening Techniques, Layer Mask Creation, and Dodging and Burning.
I’ll continue to write up tutorials on specific techniques in Photoshop, and I’m more than open to suggestions for topics.