Blue Hour Starting

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Blue Hour Starting

One of the best sunsets of the year happened a couple of weeks ago. I was lucky enough to see it and luckier still to shoot it.

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The image above is from a bracketed set with 5 shots each, 1/3 stop apart. I kept the ƒ stop at 9.0 and started the shots without any exposure bias. Normally, I shoot brackets at 1/2 stop intervals, but they were too extreme. I exported the shots into HDR Efex Pro 2, part of the Nik Collection. I hadn’t tried the new version, so I was surprised with how quickly I got to a place that kept the clouds dark as well as kept the highlights on the orange clouds.

My variable netural density filter (affiliate link) helped with the capture, but this was all software. And fast, too.