Behind the Image | Making a Magical Sunset Photo

I posted a recent sunset image from Maghan + Kyle’s wedding on my Instagram and offered to post a how-to/making-of-the-image on my blog. So here I am!

To get how I work through an image like that, if first helps to share my thought process. About 20 minutes before sunset, I noticed that the sky was starting to look great with the potential for lots of color post-sunset. A lot of photographers use “golden hour” for wedding portraits, and I am no exception. That dewy pre-sunset light is usually amazing for portraits. But when I see the sky start to build some color, I get excited for that magical time about 10-20 minutes AFTER sunset.

It’s all about patience.

I usually give the couple a time buffer. In this instance, I told Maghan + Kyle it would be about 5-10 minutes. They were sitting down to eat at the time, so that gave them time to finish most of their meal.

I kept watching out the window for the deep color I was looking for. Finally I snapped this photo out the window and got all my settings right before I went outside. For example, this photo was taken at ISO 500, 1/200 and f7.1:

The key here is to expose for your ambient light FIRST (aka, the sunset), so I set all my settings even before we go outside, and then just tweak slightly as needed. I also picked out my spot, and I liked how I would get the silhouette of the tall grasses and some of the trees with the little ridge out by the road. You can barely see the split rail fence there too, but I didn’t think that would translate well to my photo, so we bypassed it.

I told the couple it was time to go outside, and asked them to follow me. I walked out to the spot, placed them into the first pose and set my light. I wish I would’ve grabbed a pulled back shot here so you could get an idea of how far out the light stand was, but I didn’t think about it.

You can however see just the edge of my MagMod sphere here, so you can get a slight idea of how far away it was. And this is just a simple speedlight on a stand with a Pocket Wizard trigger. The flash modifiers were 1 MagMod grid stacked under a MagMod sphere.

Final settings - ISO 500, 1/200, f8 (so only 1 stop different from what I shot through the window)

I don’t remember exactly, but the speedlight was set somewhere around 1/4 power, and as you can see, about 8-10 feet away from the couple, pointed so that the light would fall on both Maghan + Kyle.

How about time to do everything? The photo out the window was taken at 5:47pm. The first test photo was taken at 5:51 ( so 4 minutes later), and then my final photo of the series was taken at 5:55. So all said and done, we were outside for less than 8 minutes and I sent them back in to enjoy the rest of their reception!

Final favorite image from the series. I culled out 17 images total of this sunset series, and will deliver about 12 of those to the couple.

So there you have it! I hope this inspires you to try your own off-camera flash sunset photo. You can do it!