Creating Sunsets

One of the biggest things about an outdoor photo meetup is that you can never count on the weather.

Unless an event has a backup rain date, you pretty much have to take whatever outdoor conditions that present themselves. If the weather isn't perfect on the date of the event, you can either choose not to go or you can go and make the best of the situation.

On Monday, I joined a gathering of people from my photography meetup group at Sultan Farm, near Ashton, east of Ottawa. There were both photographers and models for this meetup, though in truth, I was only interested in photographing the farm field, which was full of sunflowers in bloom.

If you've seen Wednesday's post, you've seen some of my photos from that day. DW also tagged along, which was nice, because she's never joined a photo meetup with my group and I wanted to show her that it wasn't about a bunch of men ogling models.

I brought three cameras with me for the shoot: my Nikon D750, with a 50mm f/1.8 lens, my D7200, with an 18-105mm, f/3.5-5.6 lens, and my smartphone. I'm planning to write a comparison post, which I'll share next week. Stay tuned.

I was hoping to capture close-up and wide-angle shots of the field, hoping for a great sunset to set the sky off. Indeed, Monday started off great with lots of sunshine and a few clouds: I was hoping for a few clouds at sunset because I find the sky is more dramatic at that time when clouds are about.

A cloudless sky at sunset, for me, is kind of boring.

As DW and I headed out for the shoot, we noticed that there were more clouds in the sky than earlier in the day but I was excited. With this sort of cloud coverage, which still kept the sun visible, I knew that we were in for a dramatic sunset.

But as we got closer to our venue, I was beginning to have my doubts. The sun disappeared behind a thick blanket of clouds and blue sky was becoming a rare commodity. By the time we pulled up to Sultan Farm, the sky was overcast.

"At least we won't have harsh shadows to worry about," I said to DW, trying to stay optimistic. I had a flash with me, as well as a tripod, but if the sky was going to stay overcast as we headed into sunset, these tools wouldn't be necessary.

In fact, we decided that with an overcast sky, we weren't even going to stay until sunset.

For most of the photos, I didn't worry about capturing sky. I focused on the flowers in the fields, typically going for closeups. The bees were busy, fluttering from flower to flower, and I'd try to capture one or two at work.

When the sky did appear in the background, it was either a light grey or white. In fact, one of the photos in my Wordless Wednesday post shows a closeup of a sunflower with a white background, almost as though it was captured in a studio. By overexposing for the flower, the sky seemed white.

I captured a white-sky background for a few photos, getting low and shooting upward so that there was nothing in the background but a blank canvas. I told myself that I could always create the background in post production.

I've already written about my AI photo software and how I could change a sky if I didn't like the one that came for an event. Sometimes, the added sky greatly improves the overall photo.

Other times, it can be a distraction.

For this one shot, I find it's a bit of both.

Creating this final photo also took much longer than I had planned and I don't know if all of the effort was worth it.

First, I edited the raw photo in Corel AfterShot, which came with my recently uploaded 2023 version of Corel PaintShop Pro. It's the first version of this software that I've actually bought, now that DW no longer works for the company and was able to download it for free.

I still love the product and the $30 for the upgrade was worth it.

I use AfterShot to do initial edits, like straighten the image, perform a white balance, bring out blacks, and sharpen the image. When I'm happy with the initial changes, I export the file to PSP, where I perform my usual edits, such as fill light, contrast, colour saturation, removing unwanted objects, and whatever I have to do to bring the photo to life.

It sounds like a lot but for the most part, my edits are minor.

I had taken a photo of four sunflowers that were standing taller than other flowers in the field. I crouched low and shot upward, knowing that the flowers were going to be the only objects in the frame. I also knew that by overexposing by one stop, I'd have a bare background.

Perfect for what I wanted to do next.

I saved the file as a JPEG and then opened it in Luminar AI. I went to the Sky feature and picked a sunset sky that I wished had been there when I snapped the photo. I was happy with the sky but in placing it in the background, the sunflowers were darker than I wanted, so I saved the file and opened it again in PSP.

Here's where the time-consuming work came in.

Using the selection tool, I isolated every bit of the background sky. Because there were so many colours and so many shades, I had to hold down the Shift key and click hundreds of points in the background. It must have taken me at least a half hour just to select everything in the sky.

I then inverted the selections, so that the background wouldn't change while I worked on bringing the sunflowers out from virtual shadows. I increased the fill light as much as I dared without the flowers appearing washed out and also still appearing as though they were backlit.

Here's the final result.

What do you think? A lot of colour, right?

I think that from the moment I opened the raw file until I saved this version of the photo, it had taken me nearly an hour to get this result.

I don't think I'd do this again. It took about as much time to edit this one file as it took me to edit most of the remaining files for this meetup.

I won't tell you what camera captured this image until I share my camera comparison post, next week.

Happy Friday!