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Unreal Sunset
9 March 2021
This particular sunset never actually occurred. Sure, the clouds formed just like this and there was a blush of sunset on them but as the light faded, that blush never turned into quite the blaze you see here.
Unreal Sunset. Nikon D200 with 43-86mm Nikkor at 43mm (65mm equivalent), f3.5, 1.30 second and ISO 200. Processed in Adobe Camera Raw.
Too bad because we were looking forward to that fire. And when the cloud bank on the horizon dampened the sunset, we were more than disappointed. We were feeling a bit deprived.
Fortunately we didn't have to sit there on our hands. We grabbed a camera and took a photo before any sense of disappointment had lingered on the horizon. We took a preliminary shot, waiting for the real fireworks. An insurance shot, so to speak.
It's the canopy of clouds that attracted us, actually.
The color wasn't that big a deal, as our small edit shows. It just accentuated the blanket of clouds that lay over us that evening. A black-and-white just doesn't quite get there.
It's been cold enough here that we're sleeping under a pile of blankets to stay warm until the sun came back up. So the promise of that crimson blanket was a comforting site.
It just wasn't fulfilled.
Now if Photo Corners were a general news publication reporting on the sunset each evening, it wouldn't be appropriate to fiddle even this much with the rendering. But in an article about editing the color data of a Raw file, it's entirely appropriate.
Sometimes you shouldn't, even if you can -- and sometimes it's perfectly acceptable to do things you otherwise shouldn't.
Because we shot Raw, we had a lot of latitude to play with the image and turned it into this not entirely fake but less disappointing scene.
Should the diety ever deign to take a day off, we're ready to step in.
