Spectacular Sky at Sunset

On the Evening of 09/23, I was driving home from my local warehouse store and saw some low clouds streaming. I thought to myself that they would make for some great photos provided they were still around when the sun was just getting ready to set and the sunlight from the west could indeed hit them to the east.

A strong cold front with flash-flooding rains had passed through and was about 25 miles to the east as the crow flies. I’m not sure what these clouds were or why they were occurring – I have to assume they were anafrontal-related somehow maybe related to a low pressure spinning up. They were low, some were very bulbous within larger ripples, and the bulbous ones would billow down for a time. They were streaming north, just like the precipitation cells did along the front as the front slowly moved east.

When I got home, I unloaded my purchases and a few minutes later, the sky turned a brilliant red when I walked by my open front door due to my kids playing outside. My daughter ran inside and remarked that she wanted to get my wife’s phone to take a photo of it. I immediately grabbed my camera too.

The scene outside to the east was one of the most spectacular and photogenic skies I’ve seen at my house that I’ve been living in for nearly two decades. I started taking photos and adjusting settings to help get the photos just right. Fortunately, the sky stayed that way for several minutes right as the sun set to the west painting the clouds red and a deep gray in the shadows with small lavender hues from the sky in the lighter areas. Sunset was at 7:01pm that day and all the photos were taken between 6:59pm and 7:02pm.

Here’s the first decent photo I got after adjusting my settings (which ultimately were f/7.1, 1/100 second, ISO-500):

It looks unnatural, but that’s the way the sky looked. I do have a brief workflow for my photos and that is to take them into Adobe’s RAW editor, switch to Adobe landscape color profile (if it’s a wildlife or outdoor shot), perform an AUTO, then tweak settings from there. Most of the time, Adobe’s AUTO pushes the exposure value too high for my liking, so I often drop that back down and that was the case for these photos. It also pushes vibrancy up, which I find unnecessary, so I drop that back down as well.

The interesting thing about these photos is that Adobe dropped the saturation down slightly, so if anything, these photos are desaturated when they appear over-saturated. I also drop the sharpening value down to 25 because I don’t like sharpening (Adobe sets it at 40 for some reason) and increase the noise reduction value to 25 because I’ve found the camera to be fairly noisy and a value of 25 removes the noise without starting to turn the photo into a painting.

The most significant effect the RAW editor had on these photos was the shadow and highlight recovery and that shows in the shadows. An auto-color after exiting the RAW editor and opening it in Photoshop results in the darkest grays turning a charcoal color and I felt that made it look even closer to the way the sky looked, although a touch more dramatic. I also do a RAW file enhancement on the photo because that increases the resolution of the file (my camera is only 12mp) without losing detail. In fact, the detail gets a bit better.

Here’s the same section of the sky about thirty seconds later:

Here’s a closeup of one of the bulbous clouds that was billowing down right in front of the house:

Here’s the sky looking slightly northeast. The angriness in front of the house can still be seen at the top of the frame, but it transitions to oranges lower on the horizon.

And here’s the sky looking more north. The clouds within the ripples aren’t as bulbous, and thus, the shadows aren’t quite as dramatic. The red color isn’t quite as vibrant either.