Sunset photography with the kit lens (18–55mm)

Do you have limited gear like me? I use the canon kit lens, which limits my ability to take low-light photography. That gives me a huge problem with sunset photography, because then either the highlights will be completely white or the shadows will be completely black.

Yes, I could just put it on a tripod and do HDR, but I don’t have a tripod with me currently. Therefore I’ve had to find a way to take amazing sunset photos that are well exposed with what I have.
And I’ve figured it out. See the photo behind this text? That is taken with the kit lens during the sunset, but there is still detail in both the highlights and shadows. Read this post to learn how to do so.

Exclaimer
I’m currently in Cuba, Cienfuegos, where Internet is very, very limited. It is pretty expensive and you can only get it at the city center square. Therefore I’ve chosen to only post 1 blog-post per week, every friday, but then to compensate I will go more in-depth and write longer posts, that teach skills and techniques to take amazing photos.

Okay, lets get back to it. My trick is to expose for the highlights. Make sure the highlights are exposed properly, because if you overexpose the highlights, they will become all white, and you will lose the information. That means you can’t fix it on the computer later. But underexposed parts, you can still fix on the computer.
Therefore: Expose for the highlights.

Look at the two photos above. The leftimage is the original, the photo I took with the camera, and the right one is the end result. It is possible to do that, when your highlights are properly exposed, and it is the only possibility to get an image that well exposed with for example the kit lens that I have.
And, when you have gear that limits you, you have to think outside the box, to work around the limitations.

First, let me explain how you make sure your highlights are properly exposed. If they are not, then you can’t do this trick.

Exposing for the highlights

When you take a photo with the decision to do this trick in the post-production, then it is very important that your highlights are properly exposed. Just focus on the highlights. The shadows are not so important in this case.

The way you do so, is by using the histogram. The histogram is a very powerful tool to know how works, when you take photos. It helps you expose your images.
In this post, I’ll just explain how you use the histogram for this trick. I’m going to write an in-depth blog-post just about the histogram works another time.

Where is the histogram?
I use a canon camera, so that is the only type of camera, where I’m 100% sure where it is. It is probably going to be the same on other cameras, so try. Otherwise, ask Google.

On a canon camera, you open live-view. If you don’t know what it is, then it is when you turn your LCD-screen on your camera into the viewfinder, so it shows the live-view of what would see through the viewfinder.
Because the viewfinder just shows you, what the lens sees. It doesn’t show you the image with your settings. But when you use live-view, you can actually see how the image will look with your settings.
The way you do so, is by pressing the little red camera button, that you normally use to start a video recording.

Then you press the “Info” button until the histogram shows in the top right corner. The image down under is the histogram from Adobe Lightroom. The one on your camera will look a little but different, but you will recognize it. The histogram on your camera will only be white. It won’t have colors.

Making sure it is properly exposed.
The left side of the histogram, is the shadows, and the middle part is the mid-tones and then the right side, is the highlights.

You want to make sure that spikes/hills doesn’t hit the right side of the histogram. In the histogram above, you can see that the spikes/hills hits the left side. If it does so on the right side, then you want to let in less light. That you can either do by setting your shutter-speed at a higher number or setting your aperture at a higher number. I almost always choose to set my shutter-speed at a higher number.

- The reason for that is because I like background-and foreground-blur in my images, and to achieve that, I need a low aperture-number.
If you don’t know how the aperture works, then read my other blog-post, where I explain it.

Make it amazing (Post-production)

I use Adobe Lightroom 5 to do this little trick, so I will show my settings from Lightroom.
It is very important to shoot in raw-setting, to do this trick, because you want as much information as possible in the photo to do so. So make sure you shoot with the quality setting “Raw.” If you don’t know how, then just ask Google.

Under here, you can see my basic-panel from Lightroom. This is the exact edit that I did to the image above.

Shadows and highlights
The first thing I do, when I start editing a photo with this trick in mind, is to adjust the shadows and highlights. I bring the shadows up to +100, and then I bring the highlights down to -100.
That evens out the highlights and the shadows in the photo. Brings them closer to each other, so they are both approximately equally lit up.

Blacks and Whites
After that, I go down to the blacks and whites.
This I do, to add some contrast between the dark areas and the light areas in the photo. Because when you edit the shadows and highlights, the photo becomes quite flat.
On mac, if you hold down the Alt-key while moving the whites up and down, the screen becomes black.
It does so, because you are editing the highlights in the image. When you start to pull the whites closer to +100, you will see that at some point, colors (white or other colors), will start to show on top of the black background. When color shows, it tells you that this area is now overexposed; it is blown out (completely white).
You want just very little or no colors on top of the black background.

With the blacks, you do the same, but instead of moving it closer to +100, you move it closer to -100. Because you want to add more darkness. With the blacks, it is more personal how much darkness you want. But as you will see in the video down under, I like to bring in quite a lot of darkness in the image, to add a lot of contrast.

Exposure and contrast
If your image still looks a bit dark, you can add some exposure. I have done so in this image.
After that, add contrast. This is also a personal preference, depending on how much contrast you like in your images.

Clarity, vibrance and saturation
Finally, we add clarity and color. I always bring up the clarity a bit to make the sky more clear and for example the street in this image.
Thereafter I bring up the colors — In this photo I only used the vibrance, but you can use saturation or both. Vibrance only affects the mid-tones, whereas the saturation affects everything. I like to add more color, to make the sky pop and add more yellow sunlight to the street and buildings.

Now that you know all this, just remember that you have to press the Alt-key to make the image all white or black, when you edit the blacks and white.

Is it cheating?

Some people might call it cheating, when you do like this to create a beautiful image, but photography now a days, are as much about your skills at taking the photo, as it is about your skills in the post-production.

I won’t call it cheating, and being a bad photographer, because I didn’t come home with a lot of photos that went totally wrong and then tried to fix them.
No, it is solely a creative decision you chose to do. You still took the photo from the right angle, right composition, etc. So it is just a creative decision. And especially when you take the photo with this trick in mind, then you purposely underexpose the photo to do this. So it is 100% a creative decision.

Photography is not what it used to be. The times have changed.
Go try it out!

(a couple more examples under here)

Follow me on Instagram to see my latest photos: https://www.instagram.com/lui_brandstrup/

- Lui Dupont Brandstrup