Mountain Sunset

That looks like a neat location. And good job making the stars pop.

That’s a hard time of day to shoot stars, when there’s still some light on the horizon like that. It’s super easy to wash out the sky if you make the exposure any brighter, which is usually what you need to see stars. However, you didn’t wash out the sky here, so that’s good and you edited the stars to make them pop so that’s all good.

I can’t think of many ways to make the shot better except maybe to include something of interest in the foreground. It feels too vast of an area for tree branches to work, but I wonder if there was like a telescope silhouetted up against the sky, pointing toward the heavens or something! Do you have a telescope?

• This reply was modified 56 years, 8 months ago by .

Hi @lukevrable, those are great pictures and looks like you were shooting in the blue hour.

I guess combining the sunset and stars may be a little tricky, especially since both subjects may require different camera angles (sunsets may be taken with the horizon positioned just below the upper third of the picture, according to the Rule of Thirds; shooting stars would probably be taken with the camera angle you used). But since you you were trying to capture both stars and sunset, the camera angle you used seems suitable. For sunsets, I would suggest shooting them during the golden hour (the period right before sunset, in this case).

I hope the above information was helpful and useful as it represents the opinion of a REALLY amateur photographer. Looks like you can get gorgeous sunsets in your area! 🙂

• This reply was modified 56 years, 8 months ago by .

Another comment… adding in stars is not an issue if you’re just shooting for yourself, but if you ever want to use the photos anywhere there is sure to be someone who will notice that the constellations are from some other (imaginary) solar system… 😉