We all shoot sunsets. If you ask me I am going to say that colorful sunsets are among the most favorite photographed subjects. They are considered within the scope of landscape photography. We see a good share of them in an almost daily basis here in UHH.
Here in South Florida and from my observation of sunsets over the years they tend to be more colorful during our winter season. While I see lots of yellow in them during the summer months in winter the tendency is to get saturated with red.

This series, that I shot at a nearby lake, was done with the purpose of demonstrating how the colors change as it gets darker in the evening. In some of the shots I helped the colors just a bit using software but I was not far from reality. By all practical means these were the colors that evening.
If something called my attention it was the muted reds I saw in most of the images. I say this because in my experience reds are more dramatic in winter here in South Florida. Most of the afternoon it was partially cloudy and I cannot say if the weather had any influence on it. All of these images were shot as RAW data. I do not need to discuss here how flexible RAW data is when it comes to editing, I am sure we all know that. My editor is NX Studio and if I need further adjustments I use Affinity Photo.

When we have weak colors, we usually do when shooting RAW and we do need to work with them it is very reassuring knowing that we are working with 16 bits of data. Shifts in colors do not tend to occur. If working with JPEG files my advice is to leave the file alone. The more manipulation is done to a JPEG the better the chances for artifacts and color shifts. To repeat it again, my manipulation of colors was minimal in all of these files, I just helped the RAW data to bring back the muted colors without departing from reality.

I had a big laugh when I reached this place and noticed that I have left at home my L-clamp for the camera. Because I was using my Nikon 12-24 f4 AF-S DX I got away with slow shutter speeds and wide apertures. At times I rested the camera on the Arca Swiss type of clamp on the tripod, not a good support for slow shutter speeds. The camera was a Nikon D7000. I tend to use the self-timer with these subjects but it was useless without the L-clamp. No matter what, I still make lots of mistakes when I photograph.

The other lens I used was a like new Nikon 70-210 f4-5.6 AF-D lens that I bought practically brand new for a mere $78. I managed to get some sharp images with it but most of them were blurred due to the lack of adequate support for a tele. As I said, most images shot near maximum lens opening. If you see some light blur I also had a light wind to add to my problems.

So here you are, the changing colors of nature as I saw them. I had a great time shooting these. Will I forget the L-clamp next time? Who knows but I hope it will not be the tripod.