Once Sunset is Over Use Your Camera Try a Little Night Photography
Photography is all about taking a single moment in time and recording it for a lifetime. Whether your are a photojournalist recording an event for the news, or you are a fine art landscape photographer capturing a feeling, it is always about that one magical moment. In photography, those moments happen fast and if you are not prepared to capture them when they happen you are going to miss out.
The one thing I tell myself all the time is “Don’t put the camera away yet!”. The reason is simple: you just never know what is going to happen next, and sunset is no exception. At sunrise and sunset the light is changing so rapidly that many beautiful landscape and seascape scenes last for only a moment. So many times when I am out shooting I will see the sun dip below the horizon, and within a few minutes the other photographers have packed up and left. After the sunset he light becomes softer, the colors become more blueish, and the stars begin to shine. The moon will rise in the sky, and this is when night photography begins!
The other night I forgot my rule. The sunset was not great, the colors just didn’t pop. I just wasn’t feeling the photography. A few minutes after sunset, I shrugged my shoulders and decided to pack it in. Several minutes later my camera was safely stowed away and I was headed back down the beach when my buddy said “Wow, look at those clouds!”. I turned to look and was taken back by what I saw. While the sun may have been long gone, the nearly full moon low on the horizon was lighting the cloudy sky up in ways that I have rarely seen before.
Moonlit Clouds Over Narragansett Bay
The photograph above was shot with a wide angle lens in order to capture as much of the sky as I could get. To me it really helps enhance the sense of movement in the clouds, and helps to make them appear more stretched out, like a cotton ball being pulled apart. With an ISO of 200 and an Aperture of f/8.0, my shutter speed 140 seconds, more then long enough to really allow the clouds to move across the sky, and removed any ripples from the water creating a really smooth reflection of the sky.
As the moon rose across the night sky the light show slowly faded away, but for those magical moments it was something special to see. I hope that this will encourage you to keep the camera out of the bag a little longer and explore the possibilities that night photography has to offer! Enjoy!