The other evening I was picking up my in-laws with my wife. She went into the airport to welcome them home and I waited with the car. As I was waiting I decided to pull the camera out and take a picture of the sun going down.
Here are four images to show you how I got to the final result. All of these were taken in Aperture Priority.
This initial shot is with Auto White Balance at 0 EV. Nothing special.
mytoesarecold gallery series
Now changed my EV to -1.5 because I really don’t care about exposing the the trees correctly as they are not my primary subject here. We end up with this which is a tad better.
mytoesarecold gallery series
From here I changed my White Balance to Cloudy (from Auto) and got the image below.
mytoesarecold gallery series
I liked the result but thought it could still use a bit more punch so I did a custom White Balance based on Cloudy which shifted the color to the blue/purple spectrum just a tad more.
mytoesarecold gallery series
Finally, I took a landscape version for good measure to see which I liked more.
mytoesarecold gallery series
This is quite often how I take photos. I start with the camera in Auto mode (to some degree) and begin changing one setting at a time until the image most resembles reality.
It is important to note that none of these were finished in post processing. They were all done “in camera” as I clicked the shutter release.
The bottom two images here are the closest to what the sky looked like that I could get in my 3 minutes at the airport before the in-laws came out with the luggage.