Location Taken: Agewa Bay, Ontario, Canada
Time Taken: June 2010
I’m feeling in a sunset mood today, so here’s a lovely sunset picture.
This is yet another from the highly photogenic Agewa Bay. I’m not sure why I got so many good photos in the one night I was there, but I did. Some of it was the scenery, of course. It is a quite lovely bay, after all. Other aspects were the time of day (twilight) and the air quality (quite good).
Perhaps I should explain more, whether you like it or not.
With photography, there are two times of day when you will get better photos just due to the angle of the light: dawn and dusk. Midday, the light is coming from straight above. This leads to flatter levels of contrast on your subject, and unappealing shadows. It also tends to be a bit harsh and washes out the image. Night is obviously not the best lighting either. Dawn and dusk both have the light coming in at an angle, creating dynamic shadows, and the light is dimmed some due to coming through more atmosphere. Dusk also has the advantage of having very warm lighting, since the heat of the day builds up humidity and particles in the atmosphere that shift the wavelength of the light even further to the red.
If you want a further explanation about the science there, here’s a basic description. I don’t fully feel like going into it in this post myself.
Now, on to air quality and photography. There are certain days that just have the right combination of weather, humidity, sun angle, etc. that produce light that is neither too harsh nor too dim. This means it has to be either clear skies or only a few clouds, since full clouds change the light to indirect lighting. Indirect lighting is caused by the photons hitting the water vapor in the cloud, bouncing a few times, and losing its original angle by the time it escapes the cloud. This means the light from the sun is coming in from multiple angles. More of an object is lit, but it dims the light (since less is hitting any one spot) and removes all traces of sharpness to the shadows. Indirect lighting can be useful for certain subjects, but such photos usually aren’t as dynamic as those using direct lighting. The soft shadows and dimness lead to lower contrast, after all.
Days with ideal air quality are fairly rare, all told. Usually one of the factors is off just enough to matter. Still, when I spot a day with good air quality, I will often go out to take photos. I did that this Friday, actually. It tends to lead to a higher percentage of photos that come out exactly as I wanted them to. And to places that will show up more on my Saturday photos, like Agewa Bay did.
