Time With Nature: Sunset at the Lake

[JimFox]

I captured this last night, you might have seen the still image I posted yesterday. I wish I could have controlled the highlights in this, but shooting into the sun with video I have a lot less options. There is no bracketing for one to tame the highlights. Perhaps I should have underexposed a stop and then tried to bring up the shadows in post processing. The issue with video is even if it's 4k, it's essentially 8 bit, and not 16 bit or 32 bit. So if you remember what it was like in the early days of editing 8 jpgs that we were getting from our DSLR's, and just how quickly they could fall apart. That's the dilemma here. You can do a decent amount of post process, but when it comes to highlights or shadows, so far I have found the processing is very limited before it looks pixelated.

All that to say, I know this isn't perfect, and maybe I am just too sensitive to blown out highlights? But even with it's flaws, I think the sunset was pretty cool.

All comments are welcome,

Jim

 

[Ben Egbert]

You had some great color and clouds here. This would have made a great time lapse

 

[JimFox]

You had some great color and clouds here. This would have made a great time lapse

Thank so much Ben! Yeah, the colors were really awesome!

I miss doing timelapses, hopefully I can get some in sometime.

 

[Jim Dockery]

I'm with Ben on the Timelapse. I also agree with your issues with blown highlights. Apparently if you shoot in ProRes (the new iPhone can do that) or other codecs you can get almost RAW video, but the files are huge and take major storage and processing power in post, and like RAW photos the footage is very flat until processed. I've never used it myself and just try to expose for the highlights like I did when shooting slides and let the shadows go to black.

 

[JimFox]

I'm with Ben on the Timelapse. I also agree with your issues with blown highlights. Apparently if you shoot in ProRes (the new iPhone can do that) or other codecs you can get almost RAW video, but the files are huge and take major storage and processing power in post, and like RAW photos the footage is very flat until processed. I've never used it myself and just try to expose for the highlights like I did when shooting slides and let the shadows go to black.

Thanks Jim, yeah timelapses are cool, it's too bad they take more time to do. I have gotten a lot of good sunsets at that lake, so I need to choose a day and get there sooner so I can do a timelapse through the whole sunset.

That's interesting about the ProRes, but my iphone 11 Pro doesn't have that, and I am not upgrading phones for a while yet. But it would be cool to have a more Raw type of video.

In the old days of film and slides if I had to shoot into the sun like this I would have used an ND Grad to balance the light in a scene. The problem with video for me is that having the whole bottom third of an image turn black won't work. So I get what you are saying, and there are places that might work, but slides especially since they were projected to me had a different feel so that when the dark areas went black it felt natural.

As to shooting into the sun, it's something I need to work on for video to see how I best want to handle it. The blown out sun is probably something as photographers bother us much more then the rest of the population. So I need to keep that in mind too.

Thanks!

 

[JimFox]

@Ben Egbert and @Jim Dockery well you guys inspired me to make sure today that I got the Christmas lights hung up on the roof early enough that I could get to the lake in time to run and then set up a camera for a timelapse. I am currently compiling it now, it was another great sunset, so I hope it looks good. I probably should have used my D850 which is awesome for Timelapse but I have it set up for my moon shots right now and didn't want to mess with it. So I went with the D810, which is still pretty good for timelapses, it's just not as good as the D850. We will see...

 

[AlanLichty]

Nice sunset with very calm conditions. The light seemed OK after the first minute once the sun wasn't in the frame.

 

[JimFox]

Nice sunset with very calm conditions. The light seemed OK after the first minute once the sun wasn't in the frame.

Thanks Alan. Yeah, once the direct sun was gone, the iPhone seemed to have enough dynamic range. Shooting directly into the sun is something that we have to deal with no matter what camera we use. It's just worse on video since as I explained, to me it feels like I am editing an old 8 bit jpg file from 20 years ago when I edit video as to how easily the video can fall apart.