Christmas Eve 2015, Sunset along the Sudbury River, Heard Farm, Wayland, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2016.
I absolutely promise that I will not spend the entire year posting sunset photographs that I took on a very warm Christmas Eve along the Sudbury River. I was, in fact, all set to stop when I was looking over my proofs from the event and decided that I had to try one in black and white.
What had originally drawn me to the scene were some striated patterns in the clouds where the sun was leaking through, and it seemed that this would develop better in black and white. I loved the dynamic range of the original images immediately – the power of 14 bit dynamic range – and I went to work.
A truism of sunset photography is that you need to anticipate the scene. The actual image appears as the sky will look perhaps 30 to 60 min later. So here the “world” is a lot darker. And I have to say I love it. The final image is lusciously velvet in its blacks, sparing but brilliant in its whites. I used just a bit of sepia toning.
Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 70 mm, ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE Mode, 1/2500th sec at f/7.1 with -1 exposure compensation.