The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Great balls of fire! How to get the best shot
Emma Featherstone on the science behind the perfect sunset, the best places on Earth to see one – and tips for capturing the display on camera
Easter has crept up on us, and the summer countdown is under way. We are itching to squirrel away our winter layers and replace them with linens and cottons. Such outfits will be ideal for a ringside seat on Mediterranean sunsets. Soon you might be matching a Greek island palette of tangerine or fuchsia to your cocktail as you track the sails of a tall ship falling into shadow.
The curious among us – as the process begins around 7.30pm each night this month – might ponder why today’s sunset brings either an Oscarworthy show, or a forgettable squib. Kirsty McCabe, senior broadcast meteorologist and editor of the Royal Meteorological Society’s MetMatters website, offers (if amateur and actual physicists will allow) a brief class on this daily phenomenon.
The reds, oranges and yellows appear for the same reason the sky is blue: the process of Rayleigh scattering. Sunlight comprises a spectrum of colours with varying wavelengths. Rays of light collide with molecules as they enter the Earth’s atmosphere. The shortest lengths – blues and violets – are scattered most strongly, so whichever way you look the sky appears blue. However, at dusk (and dawn), the rays travel a greater distance through the atmosphere and the shorter lengths are filtered out, leaving the typical sunset colours behind.
When dissecting the perfect sunset, the ingredients vary, but a thunderstorm earlier in the day is reason to celebrate, while a muggy afternoon in the city will only dampen the hues, says McCabe. Lower humidity means lighter, brighter sunsets and is part of the ideal recipe. British skies provide a certain bonus, too: clouds. “We need to have something to bounce the light off,” McCabe explains.
The next thing to consider is the season. It may seem counter intuitive, but the cooler, crisper air of winter can create more vivid sunsets. They are briefer around the equinox, in March and September, and linger longest at the twice-yearly solstice.
Therefore, in a little under three months (June 22), if you time your trip to Santorini, San Francisco or St Ives just right, you could luxuriate in a full five minutes of the sun’s crescendo as well as soaking up the golden hour (a photographer’s dream) that precedes it and the rest of “civil” twilight (up to 48 minutes in London).
Where, then, might you find the most exemplary sunset on your next break? And how might you capture that on film?
ARRIVE EARLY
Teagan Cunniffe, a travel photographer based some of the time in Africa, says the best sites are on that continent, particularly in Namibia. The Sossusvlei area, with vast stretches of sand edged by tall dunes, is among them. When shooting the sunset or, as is often the case, seeking out its light for “glowy” portrait shots, Cunniffe arrives at least an hour beforehand to experiment. If the sky is shrouded in cloud, she finds a break on the horizon – and her early arrival gives her time to find the perfect spot.
You might even choose your destination according to the event. The Karoo in South Africa is one of Cunniffe’s favourites. “The still emptiness of areas near Prince Albert, like at Roam Private Game Reserve, provide for spectacular scenes all to yourself as does the Cederberg: try doing the overnight Wolfberg Arch hike and camping underneath the rock formation.”
CONSIDER GOING ANALOG
To find a sunset image that will impress friends (and even warrant a social media post), you might factor in the destination’s latitude. Frédéric Lagrange, a photographer and director, who has spent years working across Asia, says sunsets have more intensity close to the equator.
Lagrange uses analog film, which adds a painterly quality and is more faithful to the image seen by the eye. Most recently, he has been training his camera on the sunsets of Indonesia’s Maluku Islands. He also rates those found in Mongolia, such as in the Gobi Desert. Here, the pure, cold air creates pinkish tones and the dunes lend interest to the scene.
BEWARE POLLUTION
Initially casual viewers can easily find themselves turning into sunset anoraks. The family of Stephen Corfidi, a lead forecaster at the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center in the United States, roll their eyes when he rushes to the window as the sunset steams in at supper time. He began noting more remarkable displays as a child and has since looked back at weather records on those days, to see whether the conditions were optimum or not.
Corfidi has been a severe weather meteorologist for most of his career, but is often quoted for his expertise on sunsets: he wrote an article in an attempt to correct some of the “bad science” he had encountered on the subject. “The big [myth] is that dust and pollution make a sunset better, but nothing is further from the truth,” says Corfidi.
Water vapour molecules grab on to these pollution molecules. As those grow, the atmosphere includes particles that are roughly the same size as that wavelength. These act like a mirror between viewer and the sun, muting the light, so the sunset isn’t as vibrant.
STUDY YOUR CAMERA SETTINGS
Sunsets, as Corfidi’s beginnings reveal, can be a route into a lifelong interest in meteorology and a gateway drug for budding photographers. Paul Reiffer has travelled the world photographing sunsets and runs workshops for amateurs. He has advice for those picking up a digital camera.
If you want to focus on the sun itself, as opposed to the colours its setting creates, you need to decide what type of image you want first, says Reiffer. Next, plan the aperture (the size of the hole that lets light into your camera) and lens settings around that composition: “If you want the starburst effect, you need to shoot with a small aperture: F16 or F11. If you want to see the sun as a disk, the actual shape of the sun, you need to be at a very wide aperture, so something like F4, F2.8.”
The eye is drawn to the brightest point on a photograph. To avoid that when shooting the sun, and rendering the rest of the scene void, Reiffer suggests underexposing the image.
FRAME YOUR SHOT
Remember that you might encounter a sunset scene by accident, with little time to tweak camera settings. Britain’s mercurial weather has brought many unexpected wins for Justin Foulkes. His vast back catalogue of UK images proves you can test out your sunsetcatching skills any time. Among them is a shot of Berry Pomeroy, a village close to his home in Totnes, Devon. At the end of a day of work he spotted the view over a rapeseed field and orchard.
“A passing spring shower caught the light of the setting sun and the dark clouds provided a perfect colour contrast to the yellow field and the orange sunset,” Foulkes says.
WATCH THE WEATHER
That morning, Foulkes would have checked his weather apps (he consults the BBC and the Met Office, as they use different sources) but watching the sky is always the best way to predict the sunset – even Corfidi admits as much.
The Devon hills provide a silhouette to that shot, a factor that is important for good framing. “Normally you would pick a city skyline, or up on Dartmoor you might get some of the tors lit by the sunset, or a lake or the sea, which might reflect it.”
An old saying familiar in Britain (but not necessarily overseas) is “red sky at night, shepherd’s delight”. This, McCabe explains, is because most of our weather systems come from the west and move east. As the days stack towards summer, a red-hued sunset should signal a good day ahead.