It was sunset Saturday evening after a pizza and a quick trip to the mall. Of course all I had with me was my phone, despite my promise to myself to aways take at least our little point-and-shoot camera. This was the best I could do.
This is a panorama made in Photoshop Elements rather than by the phone itself. The pano-mode on the iPhone is convenient and works pretty well, but this was a stressing scene. All the color was in the brightest part of the sky, but the phone wanted to expose for the largest area, which left the bright part of the sky overexposed. I resorted to taking two separate images, forcing the phone’s camera to expose more accurately for the bright sky, but even so, it doesn’t really capture the sky as we saw it. I think I might have been able to do better, but the light was going fast. The actual scene when I took the picture was about five minutes too late to capture the really dramatic sky we saw when we first walked out of the mall. I couldn’t take the picture then without getting parking lot lights and other stuff I didn’t want, so we got into the car and drove to a better vantage point. That gave us a better view of the sky, but it was already too late.
I think you’ve captured it beautifully. I can get a sense of what it looked like just a bit earlier. I was out trying to photograph the sunrise this morning here at the coast in Capitola, but the colors the camera saw was absolutely not what my eyes saw. It surprises me how challenging a sunrise or sunset is photograph.
I’m always disappointed with the colors my phone sees when I’m trying to take a picture of a sunrise or -set. Always.
My phone and camera shots never match what I see with my eyes, but I think that’s better than monkeying with the image to make it “better” than what I actually saw.
Robin — Thanks. As a long-time sky watcher, you can probably fill in the blanks when the photo doesn’t quite do it.
Ridger — I think the iPhone camera can do a good job on some things, but sunrises and sunsets are not among them.
Pablo — I think part of the problem is that when we look at a scene, we automatically and unconsciously adjust for bright and dark areas, building up an image in our mind of what we are looking at. The camera doesn’t have that capability. There is a function on the iPhone called HDR (High Dynamic Range), which lets the camera take multiple images, adjusting the exposure for light and dark areas for each one and then combining the images to get better overall exposure for the scene. It might help for sunrises and sunsets, but I’ve never tried it. I sometimes use Photoshop to bring out detail in dark areas that our eyes see but that the digital image has trouble showing. The detail can really be there, but the limits of the medium make it hard to show all of it.