Do you like to shoot sunset? However you do not have time to go to beach or mountain? Not a problem, sunsets are ubiquitous. No matter where you live, you get one every day. You can also shoot sunset at your door step or through your high rise office windows.

Here are some of the techniques I used to shoot sunset:

1. Stable Your Camera – The best way to stable your camera is mount your camera on tripod. Nothing beat this option. Beside that, use remote release cable or IR remote release to trigger the shutter in order to prevent camera shake.

2. Camera Setting – I always use Aperture Priority mode and use the lowest ISO. If your camera have Sunset scene mode, use it, camera will decide the optimum setting for you. The most important is turning your camera flash OFF.

3. Light Metering – Try to having a bit of under-exposure will allow you to get more vivid colors of the setting sun. There are two ways to achieve correct exposure when shooting the sunset:
   1. Use Spot Meter - Set your camera on the spot metering mode and take your meter to the bright area but not the sun directly.
   2. Use Negative Exposure Compensation - you can set your camera for negative compensation of 2/3 to 2 stops.

4. Focusing - Use manual focus because sometimes when shooting in extreme lighting conditions some cameras can have trouble focusing. Therefore switching to manual focus to ensure you get nice crisp shots.

5. Composition - Positioning the horizon away from the center of your photo can bring more life to your sunset photos. Instead, keep it near the bottom of the shot to dramatically highlight the sky. In combination with this, leaving some foreground in the shot, such as a person, building or a tree, will give greater interest and give you a great opportunity to work on silhouette photographs.

6. White Balance – Turn off the Auto White balance mode because when you set your camera to ‘Auto’ in it’s white balance mode you run the risk of losing some of the warm golden tones of a sunrise or sunset. Instead try shooting in ‘cloudy’ or ’shade’ to get more warm which sunset suppose to be.

WARNING !!!

No matter what, DO NOT look directly at the sun! Not with your bear bare eyes, and not through the eyepiece, it can cause irreversible damage to your eyes.

PP showed me this website this morning. Its a cool website to edit your photo online. I’ve explored it and find it way too cool hence I’ll share this out with you guys.

This website is called Picnik. It is Flash based, and so far its the fastest of the bunch. User interface wise, it is the most intuitive. I like this site’s color scheme, its soft colours is the current trend.

You’ll need to register to use this tool. Complete the simple registration form and you’re free to use the tool. One thing that I like about this tool is you’re able to open your photos from flickr, picasa, facebook and photobucket. I chose to connect to my photobucket’s images.

Some other cool features that comes with this web application are auto-fix, rotate, crop, resize, exposure, colors, sharpen and reducing red-eye. You can undo and redo the changes and also zoom in and out of your photo. Wow, thats way too cool and convenient. You should go and try it out and see how powerful the web application is.

We’ve also discovered some other sites that provides online photo editing tool as well.

• Adobe - Adobe’s free online version of Photoshop is nearly done …..
• Fauxto - Fauxto is a Flash-based Photoshop look-alike. It is the only layer-based online tool that we know of, and is by far the best of the bunch…..
• Picture2Life - Picture2Life is an Ajax based photo editor. It’s focused on grabbing and editing images that are already online…..
• Preloadr - Preloadr is a Flickr-specific tool that uses the Flickr API, even for account sign-in…..
• PXN8 - PXN8 is the best of the Ajax based editors (and the best overall until Picnik launched) and has a great user interface with the main features highlighted on large icons…..
• Snipshot - Snipshot, previously called Pixoh, is another very-good Ajax-based editing tool that stands out because of its above average design and the fact that they have an API into their service…..

Converging verticals problem is common when you are taking photos of buildings, especially with wide angle lens. This happens when you point the camera upwards to include the top of the building.

Some likes this distorting effect to create striking building images. To get this effect, all you need to do is to get closer to the building and point your camera upwards to make an extreme viewpoint.

For those who don’t like this effect, there are ways to correct the distortion. In this tutorial, I’m going to fix it by using Adobe Photoshop.

You can use the transform tool to correct it. Press Ctrl + ‘ to turn on the gridlines. This will help when you’re transforming the photo. Press Ctrl + T to transform the image.

Next, you’ll need to press Ctrl + Shift and click on the point at the bottom right. Move the point inwards, until the building is in a straight line as the gridlines. Repeat the same to the point at the bottom left. Press Enter to confirm your changes.

You may then crop out the photo by pressing C and select the area. Shown below is the comparison of before and after transformation.

There are some other ways apart from transforming your photo in Photoshop. You can buy shift or perspective control lenses. These specialized lenses uses a mechanism to move the position of the lens independent of the camera. It allows you to keep the camera vertical but stil include much more of the top of the building. Bear in mind that these things don’t come cheap.

Other than that, you can also try to take the building from further away. By moving further away, you also have more obstacles in front of you and you’ll tend to include more unwanted items in your foreground. Hence, a better and cheaper solution would still be using Photoshop to transform your image.