So I am very new when it comes to photography and video recording. I have a P3S and was wondering if anyone had any settings that worked for videoing sunsets. I currently have everything on automatic and the sunset is either completely white or the ground is completely dark. I attached an example of the issue I'm having.
Sunset Settings?
- Thread starter Spiff
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Meta4
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As long as you have an image that's half very bright and half very dark, the camera (any camera) will have trouble correctly exposing the highlights and the shadows together.
You can move your horizon so that your composition is mostly sky or mostly ground but 50/50 is always going to give you a problem.
What you need is a graduated filter, this is one from my kit @Rainbowers sells here. He does very fast shipping too btw.
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Also there is a graduated filter tool in lightroom but it does not work as well as shooting with a graduated filter.
Only a camera with HDR video capabilities would be able to overcome the issue inherently and without filters for video. My camcorder has this feature, but it's extremely rare to find and I doubt that the P3 will ever have it for video, even with firmware updates. However, for still images, you could try turning on HDR in the camera settings to see if it makes a difference, or use the auto exposure bracketing to take images with varying exposures to ultimately assemble your own HDR images.
As Aaron407 pointed out HDR or image fusion (if the typical HDR effect is to much on the cartoon look for your taste) will work for you. I wouldnt use the auto bracket setting for this though, from memory the exposures are only one third of an EV (also describes at "f stop") apart. For a three frame HDR i would shoot manually to get one frame above and one below the average (middle) metered exposure of 2 EV's. 5 frames go 1.5 EV. Meter off a bright point in your sky and a mid area in your foreground (tap the screeen in auto exposure mode and note the shutter speed for both). The midpoint shutter speed will be the middle frame of your HDR bracket. Switch to manual mode and take your shots with determined shutter speeds.
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