Stock Shot Project

I had done a close up sunset recently, but wanted to do a series where the sun would completely fill the frame.  It takes a 2000mm lens to do that, but my longest lens is the Nikon 200-400mm f/4 zoom.  To increase the focal length I attached the Nikon 1.4x tele-converter.  Next I also attached a 3x tele-converter by Kenko, which is the only company that makes a 3x.  That gave a total of 1680mm.  Still not enough so I used the Nikon D7000 because its APS-sized sensor has a 1.5x multiple and resulted in a 2520mm focal length.  That was too much so I backed off the zoom to 320mm for a total of 2016mm.

It is extremely dangerous to look directly into the sun.  By putting the D7000 into live-view mode I was able to compose the each shot on the camera's LCD screen.  Auto-focus would not work in a situation like this so I obtained infinity focus by focusing manually on a distant building.  Later I re-composed the image with the sun in it. The base exposure I used was f/14, 1/4000 second, and 100 ISO.  Variations from that produced different results.

These are four examples of the nine final shots that resulted from just the one sunset.  This one is yellow because it was shot the earliest and had a more open exposure of f/11.

Towards the end of the sunset the sky went red and the sun yellow because I dropped the exposure to f/32.  The entire sunset photo session lasted about 25 minutes.