16 Sunset photography tips for vibrant photos

Lately the sunsets have been showing off again, so it seems like a really good time for a sunset photography tutorial. Here in the UK sunset is now at a more reasonable hour, which is helpful, but also there are more clouds around as we move away from summer… and clouds and sunsets go together like fairgrounds and candyfloss!

In this photography tutorial I cover everything, starting with what to take with you on a sunset shoot. There’s info for beginners to start taking sunset photos straight away and also tips for more advanced photographers to improve their sunset photography. I’ve also included tips for portrait photos at sunset.

Let’s get started, but first, you’ll find my downloadable sunset camera settings cheat sheet helpful…

 

1. Equipment for good sunset photos

Sunsets are so amazing that they make sunset photography easy …once you know the best sunset photography settings to use. You really don’t need any fancy gear. You can capture great sunset photos on any camera, including your phone.

Sometimes extra equipment can help, but as I said, it’s definitely not essential. If you have the following items, in addition to your camera and lens of course, you’ll find them handy for sunset photography:

Tripod

You don’t have to have a tripod to take great sunset photos, but if you want to carry on photographing after the sun has sunk below the horizon, when the colors start to deep to dark blue, your shutter speed will drop.

When photographing with a shutter speed below 1/60 most of us need a tripod to carry on photographing in low light without risking blur from camera shake.

Graduated neutral density filter

A graduated neutral density filter is ideal for sunset photography to avoid blowing out the sky. It’s dark at the top and fades to clear part way down, allowing you to capture a darker sky without darkening the land too much. This in turn helps you to capture beautifully saturated colors of sunset.

2. Clean your lens

You know how difficult it is to see through a dirty windscreen when you’re driving into the sun? You can see all the dirt, even if your windscreen isn’t that bad!

It’s the same with your lens. Every little speck of dust will show up when that low angled sun starts hitting your lens. Even if you don’t have the sun in shot, dust will be obvious.

Yes, you can clean up dust spots later on the computer, but, as I always say, why spend extra time on the computer if you don’t have to?

3. Prepare for your shoot ahead of time

Obviously you can’t prepare for every great sunset you photograph. Sometimes we’re lucky to be in the right place, at the right time, with a camera in our hand. Love those days!

But a little pre-shoot preparation can take your sunset photoshoot to the next level. 

There’s a great little app you can use called The Photographer’s Ephemeris to see exactly where and what time the sun will set where you want to shoot. It’s available for android and IOS for a small amount, and is free to use on your computer.

Once you know when sunset is happening, you can plan to arrive early to scout the area for the best position for when sunset starts.

Cities are great for sunsets – just look for roads that lead to where the sun is setting.

4. Shoot RAW (if possible)

Because sunset photography includes extremes of light, from very bright highlights to dark shadows, it’s best to shoot in RAW if you have software that you can use to process the photos after your shoot. 

If you don’t have the software, shoot in JPEG, otherwise you won’t be able to open the photos on your computer, which would be so frustrating.

Photographing in RAW allows you to bring back some of the shadow detail and tone down some of the highlights to increase the dynamic range of your photos and accentuate all those beautiful sunset colors.

5. Exposure metering for sunsets

The whole point of photographing at sunset is to capture amazing colors, so it stands to reason that the sky’s a really important feature in the photo. Therefore, the sky needs to be a priority when setting your exposure.

Use spot metering and position the point over a bright part of the sky to measure the exposure for that area. Not on the sun though, if it’s in shot.

This will ensure that the bright areas ares are well exposed, so the colors will be vibrant. If the rest of the image is slightly too dark, you can always increase the brightness a bit in post processing.

Rather recover shadows than lose the highlights.

By shooting low and including the reflections in the wet sand Jacub Gomez has made a nice sunset so much more interesting.

6. Bracket your sunset shots

Speaking of high dynamic range, exposure bracketing is awesome if you want to composite the photos into an HDR image afterwards on your computer.

Setting bracketing for exposure will result in, usually, three photos at three different exposures for the scene. One underexposed, one the correct exposure and one overexposed.

Automatic exposure bracketing

Many cameras are capable of automatic bracketing for exposures and, depending on your camera, you have options for how many shots you want to take.

Manual exposure bracketing

If you don’t have an automatic setting for exposure bracketing, you can still do it. You just need to adjust the exposure manually. You can do this one of two ways:

Exposure compensation

Use exposure compensation to bracket your exposures if you’re in:

• Aperture priority mode
• Shutter priority mode
• Program mode

Manual mode

To take your three different exposures in manual mode, simply adjust the:

• Shutter speed, 
• or aperture, but preferably shutter speed

7. Focal length for sunset photos

If you’re photographing the sunset as a landscape image, use a wide angle.

A focal length of anywhere between 16mm and 35mm will allow you to include a large amount of scenery. If you include the sun in the image, the sun itself will be smaller in the photo than if you used, for example, a focal length of 75mm. 

As the sun will be the brightest part of the image, you don’t want it to be too large. It’s the colors of sunset that you want to capture.

This is a good time to mention that you shouldn’t look directly at the sun through your lens as it can damage your eyesight. If the sun is big in the frame, rather use your LCD screen to view the scene and set up the shot.

For portrait photography at sunset, don’t use a focal length below 50mm. A wider angle lens will distort your subject’s features, unless they’re small in the center of the frame, with the majority of the image being the landscape. The best focal length lenses to use for outdoor portraits are between 85mm and 200mm.

Sometimes it’s not about the sunset, but how the low sun lights up even simple plants and creates a warm, comfortable end of day feeling. It’s always worth looking around you while you’re waiting for the sun to be be in exactly the right position for sunset photos.

8. Set your ISO

The ideal ISO setting to use for sunset photography is between the base native ISO setting of your camera and a mid range ISO setting. You’ll need to check your manual to make sure of yours (it will be somewhere between 64 and 200).

If you find that your exposure is too dark, you can increase your ISO, but try not to go higher than 400 on a crop frame camera or 800 on a full frame camera. This is especially so if you have dark areas in your photo as these areas will be noisy with a high ISO.

9. Choose your aperture

You don’t need to be in manual mode to photograph sunsets, but it helps if you prioritise your aperture setting. So use aperture priority if manual mode isn’t your thing.

You want your aperture to be between f8 and f16 for landscapes. Lower than f8 and your depth of field will be too shallow, resulting in a blurry foreground or background, depending on where you focus. Higher than f16 and diffraction could occur, which will reduce the sharpness of your image.

However, a blurry background works beautifully for portrait photography to make your subject stand out. As the light is lower at sunset, this is really helpful, because you can set a much wider aperture than earlier in the day. Anything from f5.6 and wider will work well for sunset portraits.

10. Decide on your shutter speed

If you’re handholding the camera, you need to keep your shutter speed above 1/60th. If you’re using a tripod, and you’re not photographing moving subjects, you can of course set your shutter speed as low as you like.

Bear in mind though that your choice of focal length affects the lowest shutter speed you can safely handhold a camera. The rule of thumb is that the shutter speed should be one over the focal length you use. 

In other words, if your focal length is 70mm, your shutter speed should be at least 70mm. I prefer it to be at least 1.5 times the focal length as I’m not that great at holding a camera steady. So, if I shoot at 70mm, I like my shutter speed to be 1/140th or higher.

11. White balance settings for sunset photography

The whole joy of sunset photography is that beautiful golden light, so make the most of it by setting your white balance to cloudy or shady.

These white balance settings warm up an image, to counteract the bluer light of shade and clouds, so when used at sunset they make an image even warmer. 

In case you missed the cheat sheet, here it is again…

 

12. Sunset photography composition tips

Two composition techniques that are particularly great for sunset photos are:

• Rule of thirds
• Leading lines

Rule of thirds

Rule of thirds composition is really important if you include the horizon in your sunset photo. 

Avoid putting the horizon smack bang in the middle of your photo. It makes the composition dull and chances are your foreground will be dark anyway. 

Besides, you’re there to photograph the amazing colors in the sky, so make the most of them using the rule of thirds:

• Position your horizon along the bottom intersection if you want a lot of sky
• or use the top intersection if instead you want to include foreground interest and reflections

The line of rocks leads the eye into the scene, making what would otherwise have been just a pretty sunset dynamic and interesting.

Leading lines

Whilst the sunset itself is always a beautiful sight, when you scout your location use the time to find leading lines to use in your composition. This will also make your composition far more interesting.

13. Portrait sunset photography

The light at golden hour and sunset is perfect for portrait photography! But you need to use a reflector, otherwise:

• If you’re photographing somebody with the light behind them and expose for the sky, your subject will be dark
• Exposing for your subject, will blow out the background and you’ll lose all those amazing sunset colors

If you position your subject so that the sun lights them from the side, use a reflector to bounce light back into them from their shadow side. This will help to lighten the shadows and will make a huge different to the photo.

My preference when photogrpahing with the sunset in the background is to expose for the sunset and light my subject with off camera flash. Even better, underexpose the background slightly to truly capture the sunset colors. You can use speedlights, strobe lighting or LED lights.

Another advantage of sunset photography is that the level of light is often low enough not to need to use high speed sync. So if your flash doesn’t have HSS capability, you won’t be limited to using natural light only.

A low, golden sun is perfect for portrait photography. This natural light photo was taken moments before the sun disappeared.

Silhouettes

On the other, hand sunset is a perfect time for silhouettes!

I wrote a tutorial on silhouette photography so check out the link below. Meanwhile, here’s my very quick silhouette advice:

• Expose for the sky
• Photograph into the light
• Shoot from a low angle
• Make sure your subjects are separated and not bunched together in an unrecognizable blob
• Get them to make interesting shapes

14. Be mindful of dropping light levels

At sunset the light levels drop fast, so it’s really important to keep an eye on your shutter speed as the light changes. 

Make adjustments as the sun sets and up your ISO rather than opening your aperture wider than f8 when shooting landscapes. For portrait photography at sunset, if you want a blurry background, you can use a wider aperture.

15. Don’t stop too soon

Once the sun dips below the horizon the sky is often at it’s most impressive, so keep on photographing for a while beyond the official sunset time.

Even better, allow an extra half an hour after sunset so that you can catch the deeper magenta, blues and purples as sunset slides into the blue hour. You won’t have long though, because blue hour can be as short as 20 minutes.

You’ll definitely need to be very aware of low light levels and might need a tripod, or something to rest your camera on.

Once the sun dips below the horizon the light for portrait photography is very soft and still has a gentle golden glow. On this occasion though it was a cloudless sky, so the sunset itself wasn’t impressive.

16. The impact of clouds on sunset photos

Not that you have any control over the clouds, but it helps to know that on clear days the sunsets aren’t as great as on cloudy days. Not hugely cloudy days, but days with enough clouds to make it interesting.

Clouds are light catchers, so they’re the sunset photographer’s best friend. 

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