Sunset Oak

If you look very closely at this photo, you will see a corn field at the bottom, with the rows running towards the sunset, disappearing on the horizon. This was an interesting element that I would have loved to bring out more, but it came down a long-standing landscape photography dilemma:

Expose for the sky or expose for the ground?

Had I exposed for the ground, bringing out the crop rows, the sky would have been overexposed, losing all of the sunset color.

Had I exposed for the sky – well, I did expose for the sky and this is what I got.

A lot of professional landscape photographers will always take 2 photos of a landscape – one exposed for the sky and one for the ground. They will then merge those two photos in photoshop to get the best of both worlds.

I’m okay with that – they’re not photojournalists, so who cares? IN the end they get a nice photo and that’s the whole point, right? Still, this is all I could do with one photo and I’m okay with that too.

Canon EOS 5D
Canon EF 17-40mm f/4L USM