nikos pavlakis photography: An amazing sunset and lots of luck!!!

06-11-2012: It was early November and I had watched only one wonderful sunrise so far. I did not have my camera with me as a matter of fact, so it is like it never happened! I know that the most anticipated skies show up between 20 of October and 20 of November (give or take a few days), so every now and then I had my mind on the sky when the sun went down in the afternoon or up in the morning. I don’t know if this kind of sunset had eluded me those days, but this sunset in particular, seen with my own eyes, was something I will never forget. Such red and yellow tones in the sky I had rarely seen in my life! Well maybe once before many years from the same spot, but that’s another archived story…

Watching the clouds forming a veil in the sky urged me to rush for my camera and tripod. I knew I wanted a wide angle view, but not so wide to include the busy street below or the distant blinks of street lights that would ruin the mood. I knew what I wanted! I just wanted shadows contrasted with warm sun tones of the sunset, well maybe a little more warm than the nature intended… so I turned the white balance (in Post processing of course) a little to the warmer setting and this resulted to even more red and yellow in the sky. Some of the highlights were blown out (almost!) so a highlight recovery (in Lightroom) was necessary to be recovered. Of course I had to clone stamp all the bright dots of street lights and car lights that came out of the shadows ruining the contrasted mood.

The post processing time was around 5 minutes for the first photo and a couple of seconds for the next photos as the “recipe” was cloned. Some minor Photoshop cloning was necessary to a couple of photos, though. I wanted to give the clouds some volume, but I found out that whatever I did (clarity, Nik color effex with tonal contrast) resulted in noise in the sky, that with the noise reduction afterwards brought a mediocre quality in full size. Resized in 1024 pixels the quality was very good, but I don’t photograph 18 mpixels to bring out a sharp 0,7 Mpixel photo!!!