Day 8: Sunset

A few days ago someone posted on facebook on how awesome the sunset was, and I had no clue! I must have been inside at the time. As I was driving home today I noticed how great the clouds looked, all wispy and wavy (one of these days I'd like to study up on weather so I can learn what makes them that way and perhaps use more technical terms). So as soon as I got home I did something I haven't done in a long time - I put the wide angle lens on the camera. (We have a Tamron 17-50mm lens. )




17mm (28mm equiv), 1/60s, f/4.0, ISO 100, aperture priority, spot metering mode

• I've been using the zoom lens so much lately that I was really surprised at how wide this lens was! Unfortunately I didn't have time to get to a spot with a better foreground. This was taken in front of our house (the houses in the picture are our neighbor's). Could you imagine the pictures that could have come from being on top of South Mountain tonight???!!!
• I used spot metering on the sky so that it was exposed for the sky to get the bright colors. If I were to use matrix metering, you would see more of the foreground and the sky would be overexposed, which I didn't want. One thing that I have learned since getting into photography: you know those awesome professional photos that you see on calendars where the clouds in the sky look awesome and the ground looks perfectly exposed? They cheated! Well, ok cheating is not the right word, but in a lot of cases that is impossible to do without either a special filter (gradient filter), or post-processing (HDR - you take multiple exposures and combine them) or both.
• I actually did some post-processing today! I almost didn't use this photo because one of the houses in the picture had their porch light on. But then I discovered that Picasa has a Retouch feature, where you can cover up blemishes. Awesome!!