366 Days of 2012, Day 89 - Fiery Ball

What an amazing sunset we enjoyed this evening as this perfect fiery ball descended into the ocean.

My goal today was to experiment with taking photos exposed directly into the sun without overexposing and as I have no good quality neutral density filters that meant late in the day when the sun was at a low angle.
I was surprised at how bright the sun still was nearly on the horizon with a substantially stopped down aperture. Even at my fastest shutter speed I could have only opened up to around f/20.

The technical challenge encountered was focussing. The camera completely refused to auto-focus and I was not prepared to use live view with the camera pointed directly at the sun for fear of sensor damage. Manually focusing simply based on the viewfinder seemed ok but the results were quite soft in the final images.

Next time I will use some ND filters for live view manual focusing and then experiment with removing them or not for final shots.


Photo: Robert Rath, '366 Days of 2012, Day 89 - Fiery Ball'. 1/1600 sec at 400mm f/36, ISO 100