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four and a half minutes after sunset

Kyoto had some wonderful sunsets last month. The picture above is a crop from a shot I took from the top (fifth) floor of my building just after sunset. It doesn't look much different than the original frame, except for the size of the birds. Here's the uncropped frame...

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 200mm — ¹/250 sec, f/4.5, ISO 100 — full exif

I'd used my 200mm zoom to try to isolate the orange, and just got lucky with the birds. A couple of minutes prior, I was using my wide-angle lens and got some of the blah cityscape in there, as well as an airplane far above....

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 17mm — ¹/100 sec, f/6.3, ISO 100 — full exif
Dusk above Kyoto

It's interesting to compare the colors of this sunset with those on my Sunset from the Ferry post. This sunset was decidedly orange, while the other one was very red. The difference perhaps was a lack of haze this time? Adding weight to that hypothesis is that you'll find even redder colors on my Sunrise, Malaysian Style post, from a morning when both the humidity and temperature were approaching 100.

Anyway, back to this shot, I was happy to have gotten that first one; I'd tried the same thing earlier in the month, and failed (the failed shot having been included on my first taste of fall colors post).

If you look carefully at the larger version of that last shot, you can see Kyoto Tower – the tallest structure in Kyoto – in the distance, to the left of center. (It also appears on the first picture of my post about Kyoto Station.)