Nikon D700 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 70 mm — ¹/400 sec, f/4.5, ISO 560 — map & image data — nearby photos
First Photo of the Evening
facing due west

This evening we had perhaps the most stunning sunset I have ever seen.

Sadly, I saw it from the photographically-unappealing vantage of the fifth-floor walkway in my condo, but at least I got to see it. When I first caught a glimpse, I literally sprinted for the elevator, and the photo above is the first I snapped when I got up there.

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 120 mm — ¹/125 sec, f/6.3, ISO 6400 — map & image data — nearby photos
Unrealistic
it was actually more amazing than this
facing south-west

(By the way, that's Kyoto Tower in the lower left, seen previously on my blog here, here, here, and here)

Some sunsets have a mesmerizing mix of reds, oranges, yellows, and a deep blue from the sky. Not this one. It had orange. Where it wasn't orange, it was overcast gray, and where it was orange, it was searing, deep, rich, monochromatic orange and nothing else.

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 200 mm — ¹/400 sec, f/9, ISO 1600 — map & image data — nearby photos
Bands of Color

Sadly, those oranges were completely out of the range of colors that my D700 could capture, and even more-so out of range than can fit into an sRGB color space, and super-duper wildly out of range of what a modern consumer monitor can display. As a result, these images likely appear, depending on your monitor, as a muddy mix of oranges, pinks, and yellows.

I've written about this “pushing bright colors toward white” problem that plagues digital image processing, and it certainly rears its ugly head here. There wasn't the slightest tinge of red, yellow, or pink in today's sunset – not the slightest – yet when I first excitedly loaded the images into Lightroom, they were all generally yellow instead of orange, with the brightest areas white instead of deeply rich (but bright) orange. The color channels were unevenly clipped, yielding a shift in this case from red to yellow, and eventually to white.

I ended up spending considerable time twiddling the develop dials in Lightroom to try to return the colors to reality, but in doing so, I had to lower the brightness of the entire scene so that all the color channels would no longer be clipped. The end result is that I get oranges that are as close as Lightroom my mid-level semi-pro Eizo monitor can produce, but the shadows are now much darker than they really were. Considering the unphotogenic nature of the cityscape view from my place, this darkening is perhaps a feature. 🙂

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 50mm f/1.2 — ¹/400 sec, f/8, ISO 3200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Wispy and Finely Detailed

Portrait-Mode Desktop-Background Versions
1050×1680  ·  1200×1920  ·  1600×2560     

But then I take those mostly-okay colors that yield pretty dazzling pictures, and squeeze the life out of them by shoving them into the sRGB color space that is the de facto standard on the web, and further wring out and discard the last bit of amazement by viewing them on with the highly-limited color rendering of my MacBook LCD. Sigh. They appear muddy and splotchy.

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 86 mm — ¹/250 sec, f/9, ISO 6400 — map & image data — nearby photos

Portrait-Mode Desktop-Background Versions
1050×1680  ·  1200×1920  ·  1600×2560     

Due to the way the sun was hitting the clouds from below (and often, shining through the wispy underside so that they sort of seemed to glow from within), the view was constantly shifting and changing.

The wave-like clouds in the next shot kept drawing my attention, but most of the detail is lost in these shots. Sigh again.

Nikon D700 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 110 mm — ¹/400 sec, f/2.8, ISO 900 — map & image data — nearby photos
Freaky Clouds

Basically, I'm at a loss on how to capture a scene like this.

I'm sure you're thinking that I created these vast fields of color (muddy or not) during post processing, and frankly, I don't blame you. I'd never believe that these nuclear-winter kinds of views could possibly be real if I hadn't seen it myself. It was a once-in-a-lifetime-(so far) event. I'll be 84 before I see another like it, if this rate holds.

It makes the last sunset I posted from my condo's fifth-floor walkway seem utterly pathetic.

Come to think of it, it makes every sunset I've ever posted seem pathetic, including this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and sunrises too: this, and this.

My scale for beautiful sunsets has been totally reset, but I still don't know how to photograph them even remotely well.