One of the most common questions I get from photographers is how do I shoot directly into the sun & make the large sunrise & sunset pictures without using any photo manipulation software outside of Phocus or Lightroom.
Many of my sunrise & sunset images are also done in long exposures and in panorama formats, making it even trickier to shoot directly into the sun & maintain the correct exposures & look & feel.
Professional tips to shoot the sun directly
Tip 1: Using various gradual ND filters. Of the various types of ND filters, the most critical for shooting into the sun are the hard stop ND & reverse ND filters.
Since the sun would be the most intense source of light in your composition, you would need ND filters of various strengths. I personally prefer +3 to +4 stops at least. Any over exposure beyond that could be made up in Lightroom or Phocus.
You have to choose ND filters carefully – they can come very cheap on one side and very expensive on the other end. The main issues with cheap ND filters is the color cast they create in the picture. It is almost impossible to remove such color casts without using complex photo editors. The second issue with cheap ND filters is that they are made of cheap plastic or resin like material, rendering them to scratches and dirt. When you shoot directly into the sun through these filters, you will get a lot of erratic sun spots on your image, which could become a nightmare to correct in Lightroom.
I prefer to use the high end ND filters either from Singh Ray, Lee or B+W. They cost a lot more but helps you to make the picture perfect right in the camera.
Tip 2: Shooting with more than one filter or shooting with filters stacked together.
I almost always find myself shooting with stacked ND filters, that typically include a hard stop filter & a reverse ND filter. While that helps in containing the highlights created by the direct sunlight and balance the low exposure on the foreground, this arrangement creates a few challenging situations for the photographers.
Sun flares and sun spots are sometimes acceptable but many times these streaks of light could be difficult to manage appropriately while shooting. Two of the best ways to avoid such erratic streaks of light created due to multiple filters are to stack these filters real close to each other to prevent any space in between them. Air in between the filters cause complex diffraction & reflections causing a lot of distortion of the incident light. I usually stack them with a rubber band or sort of seal them up with a tape.
The second point to keep in mind is to avoid an angular composition with the sun in one corner of the frame. Angular light striking the filters will cause a lot more diffractions & reflection issues than when you are shooting into the sun directly.
Tip 3: Use a solid ND filter to increase the depth of field. Most landscape photographers shoot at f/11 or above. I personally shoot at f/16 to f/22 and an ISO of 50 ASA (or L01 on my Nikon) to get the desired area of the frame in focus.
When shooting into the sun I use a solid ND filter of +2 to +3 stops and then stack it up with other gradual or hard ND filters to accommodate the additional exposure compensations.
Tip 4: Shooting panoramas of sunrises & sunsets. If you plan to shoot panorama for large wall to wall prints, you would not likely crop a regular picture into a panoramic size, which would reduce the size of the picture to almost a third making it impossible for you to print a large panorama. I shoot a lot of panoramas and I use Lightroom or Phocus to stitch 4 to 6 individual frames together to create them.
The earlier tips of shooting directly into the sun remains. In addition to those, when shooting panorama of sunrise or sunset, the most critical thing is timing, since the sun changes position and along with that the color of light changes every second, especially when the sun is so close to the horizon.
When shooting multiple images to be stitched later into a panorama, I prefer not to exceed any shot by more than 2 seconds & shoot the series of overlapping frames very quickly before going over the whole process again to create the next set of single images. The common mistake some photographers make is to spend time re-taking individual frames, so when you finally get all the 4 or 5 frames you need, either the sun has shifted significantly or the light changed dramatically, neither of which you can make up in any software editors.
If you plan to do long exposure while shooting directly into the sun, you can still do that with some limitations. I have experimented a lot with this and here is what I finally found out:
- I use 2 – 3 reverse ND filters of various strengths together to make up for the sun’s own exposure & the comparatively low lights in the foreground
- Use a +3 to +4 stops ND filter. I use the ones with the threads so I can mount this ND filter directly onto the lens while I add the rectangular stacked filters on top
- I do not use any circular polarizer even when I am shooting medium or tele ranges. This is because as I pan my camera, circular polarizers would give a different intensity of the sky depending on which direction I shoot. The final picture will end up with dark blue skies on either side of the panorama with mild, washed our blue & orangish color in the middle
Tip 5: Overlapping & processing individual frames first for a great panorama. This is something I learnt after making bad panoramas for a while. My exposures across the panorama would be off by as much as 2 stops and I could not figure out how to create a more balanced, all natural exposure!
Finally I decided to process individual frames of the panorama for exposure in Lightroom before I stitched them together. From the selection of images I was able to get an idea of the average exposure & I was able to adjust the exposures of individual frames for this average exposure value. So when I stitched them together, the whole panorama appeared realistic & without any streaks of light or exposure glitches in spots.
If you still have hot spots on the final image, I recommend carefully using the dodging or cloning tools in Lightroom or Phocus. Phocus is a free photo processing software like Lightroom made by Hasselblad & is a really great one for all types of photography.
I am hoping that these 5 tips would help improve your photos & your panoramas especially if you are shooting sunrises & sunsets when the sun is very low on the horizon & especially when you want to shoot directly into the sun. If you still face challenges, email me with the details or leave a comment here & I will try to help you out.