Last night's sunset at Donner Lake was a stunner! I wasn't originally planning on going out but I looked at the Skyfire app while cooking dinner and decided it would not be a movie night at home. I was going shooting!
You can see the sunset forecast down below, it was looking about as good as it gets. My first location didn't work out. I went to a spot above Downtown Truckee, however there was a house in the foreground with a big construction project going on so I had to quickly rethink my goal and drive down to Donner Lake for an easy shoreline shot. The color ended up exploding soon after I got there and I was very happy I didn't make it a Netflix night. When I get three keeper compositions from one sunset, well, I call that success. Panoramas are pretty popular when it comes to prints, verticals are often licensed to publications, and it's hard to go wrong with a traditional 2:3 ratio horizontal.
All three photos above were shot with a Canon 5DSr and a 16-35mm lens. The ISO and camera settings varied but I did use a graduated neutral density filter on the front of the lens, and a tripod for all three. The top photo is a stitched panorama photo, where multiple photos are stitched together to form one very wide angle photo.
I thought I'd take a couple screen shots of the Skyfire app while out there. That dark red color for Tuesday evening is what originally got me excited. It's not often that dark red. The left screenshot is Donner Lake, the right one is zoomed out a bit, you can see where Donner is compared to Sacramento and Reno. The crosshairs is where I was standing for the shot, dock #2. That was a big sunset area!
Happy photographer:
Thanks for looking and I hope you are all having a great day!
Scott Thompson
www.ScottShotsPhoto.com