The Sky Fire app was calling for a nice sunset last night, so I got out again to Lake Tahoe for some Christmas Eve photography fun. Well, Merry Christmas to me, it was a great one! It was also a short one... The sunset colors only lasted a few minutes, I was feeling lucky to have captured a nice panoramic image above Kings Beach, Lake Tahoe at the peak of the colorful explosion.
This first image is a stitched panoramic image. Meaning, I shot several photos while panning the camera on the tripod. I then stitched the images together using a program called PTGui. In my opinion, PTGui almost always does a better job of stitching images together when compared to using Photoshop's panorama tool. It is 14 photos, that are combined in to one wide high resolution photo. Shot with the Canon 5DS R and a 16-35mm lens. The camera's ISO was 50, the lens aperture was f/16, and each of the 14 exposures were 10 seconds long. A tripod was used, and a 1.2 stop graduated neutral density filter was used on the front of the lens.
This second image was also shot with the Canon 5DS R, but a 24-105 mm lens was used, and the lens was set at 88mm. It is a much closer look at the intense sunset colors, most of the colors in the clouds had faded by the time I set up this shot.The camera's ISO was 50, the lens aperture was f/16, and it was a 10 second exposure. A tripod was used, and a 1.2 graduated neutral density filter was used on the front of the lens. Yup! It was the same settings as the images for the photo above, the only difference was the lens choice.
And this selfie... well, it was shot with the Samsung S22+. Happy photographer!
Thank you for looking. I hope you are all having a great Christmas today! (if you celebrate it... if not, I hope you're having a great regular day 🙂)
Scott Thompson
Scott Shots Photography
www.ScottShotsPhoto.com
