4 Better Available Light Digital Photography
When will the sun set in your photographs? In a broad sense,
it depends on your locale in relation to the equator and the
season of the year. Northern latitudes have very long summer
days, with resulting sunsets that are later—almost approach-
ing night. The opposite occurs in winter. The sunset will
appear in the southern sky during winter months, shifting
north as spring and summer arrive. More exact data can
come from the weather section of your local newspaper,
which usually gives the precise times for the sun’s rise and
fall each day. You can also fi nd precise information from
the U.S. Naval Observatory Web site (http://aa.usno.navy.
mil/data/docs/RS_OneYear.php). It’s also possible to visualize
the sun’s setting point by watching it move during the late
afternoon. You can get close by watching the horizon brighten
in predawn. The sunrise is harder to pinpoint this way, but it
obviously gets brighter at a spot where the sun actually crests
the horizon.While on a trip to Acapulco, Joe carried a Leica D-Lux 2 with him almost all the time, and this image proves
that that you can also make interesting sunset images with point-and-shoot digital cameras. The D-Lux 2 lets
you capture images at 16:9 ratio, so this is the full, uncropped image that he made of the beach. Like many
similar cameras, this was made in one of the Scene modes that the camera offers (Landscape). © 2005 Joe
Farace.