Spring Sunset

2021 Keahole Sunset by Christopher Johnson.

This is the first sunset I photographed of 2021. The beauty of the passing showers in the distance prompted me to get away from my distractions at home.

My goal was to setup at a location where I could capture the sunset straight in the distance of an interesting and compelling foreground. Because of my experience of the coastline I had an idea of which location would be best. To help with the location I used an app that shows the path of the sun to know exactly where to setup.

The extremely short sunset and the inconsistent ocean swells I needed to act fast. I photographed several scenes and variations of those scenes. The more information of the scene, the more successful I would be at re-creating the scene as I saw it.  This image is a combination of two of those images.

A change of process.

A lot of photographers frown on combining images in-order to create a scene. I used to be one of them. I would use stacked filters and dangerous angles to create a scene just to get an all in one shot. This link, Keahole Sunset, is one of the more dangerous positions I put myself into to capture a shot. Just on the edge of a puka as low to the ground I could get.

A few years ago I started to adjust my methods and processes when I noticed my filters were all scratched and I needed new ones. My passion was re-creating the beauty of the Earth and I couldn’t do that with scratched filters. My images were all coming back fuzzy. New filters were on their way, but I still set out to capture nature.

Without filters I had to be creative in the field and as a result I took more variations of the same scene to combine in Photoshop later. A lot more time on the computer, but more flexibility and less fuzzy images. This new process became my go to process. Less fumbling in the field and more time creating and visualizing.

This image and many others are available for purchase on my FineArtAmerica store.

Spring Sunset in Hawaii Photograph by Christopher Johnson (fineartamerica.com)