As the harsh winter begins to settle in, I wanted to take one last chance to capture a Boston sunset before the weather became too cold. Luckily, this past Sunday the temperature rose to a balmy 50 degrees, and there happened to be a beautiful sunset with a nice mix of clouds. I set up under the BU Bridge, facing southwest into the sunset. I decided to try out a technique I’d just read about, taking a series of about 300 pictures after the sun set, every 5 seconds from 5:00-5:25 p.m. (official sunset time: 4:13 p.m.). The aperture and ISO were set to maximize exposure time, helping one photo to blur into the next.
Afterward, the sequence was compiled with Photoshop’s layer stacking’s lighten option, then a mixture of local noise and blur was used to remove some gradient banding. Finally, the image was processed in Lightroom for color and exposure tweaks.