Photographing Sunsets With the Canon G16

This view has become very familiar to me this past summer. The sun setting over Lake Freeman. I have captured it a few different ways, but it really seems to look different every time. A couple of weeks ago I did not get the color that I was hoping for from the sunset. I did get a nice scene though that I knew would look good in silhouette. I was up on the deck of the lake house so I had a nice separation of the boats on the water. Normally I like to be as low as I can be, but here it seemed to work very well. I had my Canon 5D Mark III in the car, but the scene happened very quickly, and all I had on my was the Canon Powershot G16. I put it into manual mode, and used the viewfinder to dial in the scene. That is a great thing about the G16 is that you can see the results of your settings change in real time in on the screen. The shot came out pretty good, and with some luck the boats added some interest to the photo.

Editing The Photo in Lightroom 5

For this photo I didn’t want a preset to work off of. I knew that I just needed a couple of tweaks to make it the way that I saw it in person. I adjusted the highlights and the exposure to start off. I then applied a graduated filter to the scene to darken the sky a bit. The range of light was huge here, and the RAW file helped me bring out all that I saw in person. A slight temperature adjustment, and I was done with the photo.