Sunset at Torrey Pines Beach

Beautiful warm sunset light reflected on the water always makes for a great landscape shot. That may be why sunsets over water are perhaps among the most shot landscapes.

To take great sunset shots, one has to go prepared, and follow some simple, yet important, techniques. Always remember to take your tripod. There won’t be much light during sunset, and using a stable tripod would be necessary to get sharper images. Also be careful with the exposure. The sun light, even at sunset, can still be quite harsh, and that can confuse most in-camera matrix metering systems, and can result in dull improperly exposed pictures when any of the auto exposure modes is used. In general, try to underexpose a bit in order to get richer and more dramatic colors. A good technique would be to switch from matrix metering to spot metering, and to read the exposure from an area near -but not directly on- the setting sun.

You can find many good tips and techniques for sunset photography online. Here are a couple of examples:

1) 30 Sunset Photography Tips

2) 12 Tips for Photographing Stunning Sunsets

3) Shooting Spectacular Sunrises and Sunsets

We spent this past Thanksgiving holiday with some of our family in Carlsbad. The next day, around sunset time, we decided to go for a walk on Torrey Pines State Beach, one of the many beautiful beaches in Southern California. Taking sunset pictures was not in our plan this time, and therefore, against our own recommendation, we did not go prepared. We had neither our wide-angle lens nor any of our tripods. But just being at such a beautiful beach during sunset, it is really hard to fight the urge for taking pictures regardless of your preparation or the type of camera or equipment you may have with you. Fortunately, we had our Nikon D7000 DSLR with our 24-70mm f/2.8 lens attached. So we decided to take our chance and take a few shots, as shown below. While far from perfect, these shots came out acceptable given our lack of preparation and setup. They are all shot handheld in RAW, and then processed and converted to JPEG in Lightroom 4. To convert to B&W, we either use some of our LR presets, or sometimes use 3rd party plug-ins such as Nik Software‘s Silver Efex Pro or onOne Software‘s Perfect B&W.

Thanks for visiting and hope you like the pictures…