Photography Tip: Sunsets

Okay I think I am missing Alicia's weekly photography challenge. So I had to share this..

I recently finished reading two of Bryan F. Peterson's photography books. I read Understanding Exposure and Understanding Digital Photography. If you are a beginner, definitely get the Understanding Digital Photography. If you are ready for a little more advanced, check out the first one.

In one of the books, to be honest, I can't remember which... he talked about how to take a picture of a sunset. In order to do this you need to be shooting in Manual mode, don't be scared you can do it! When you take a picture of a sunset, you probably think, hey aim at the sunset and shoot. If you do you will get something like this
Not a bad picture, but for this next picture I aimed up above the sun set, so in my view finder I could just see the gray clouds above the color. I then pushed my shutter button halfway and adjusted the exposure so it was correct, then I moved my camera down and WITHOUT changing the exposure I snapped this picture
These pictures were literally taken seconds apart, but look at the richness of the color in the second.

Sure if you got the first one you could adjust the color during photo editing, but why not shoot it right the first time.

And then I did some cropping to get ride of so much gray cloud and got this.To really see the difference click on the pictures to enlarge them.

Have fun taking pictures, just get out there and try things. When I was taking these pictures, I didn't just take these three, I took seven! But that is the beauty of digital.