Red Sky At Night, Sailor's Delight

One of my photography projects for 2013 is to work a bit more on taking silhouettes of objects against the sky.  I had found a nice spot at Seaway Park in Saint-Lambert to get a good view of the Jacques Cartier Bridge during a previous visit and then waited for a suitable sky to plan my outing.  The sky last Saturday was perfect, in my opinion.  There were some puffy clouds flying by an otherwise empty sky, which also reflected some of the red from the setting sun.  The ideal way to capture a silhouette is to kind of go opposite of what you would do while taking a usual photograph.  Instead of adjusting your camera settings for the foreground, in this case the bridge, you rather have to adjust them for the background, in this case the sky.  I took this shot at f/5.6, 1/160sec at 260mm.  Another technique that some people use with silhouettes is to take that reading, and then speed the shutter speed up higher than the camera recommends.  This can be accomplished in Manual mode by using the "-2...-1...-...+1...+2" indicator you can see in your viewfinder.  A faster shutter speed means less light gets into the camera which means that whatever isn't properly lit will probably come back rather dark (under exposed) in your picture.  I tried to use this technique here as well, but I wanted to keep a little bit of colour separation between the bridge and the trees at the bottom of the shot.  I cropped the image to 12"x4.5" in Photoshop and also had to use the Clone Stamp Tool to make a few dust marks disappear.  Time for a little lesson.  Always clean your equipment after every shoot.  I had taken this photo a few days after shooting the Romeo vs Juliette party which took place in a dusty church that was in mid-renovation.  I didn't clean my lenses or camera body after the event and when I was out shooting pictures of the bridge, I got an unwanted kick in the gut when the pictures showed up on my camera display with way more dust spots than I could handle.  As a result, the long exposure shot of the bridge against a blue sky had to wait for another day.  For 'educational purposes', I've included a shot of my dusty sky at the bottom of this post.  I suppose that with a fine hand and a good amount of time, I could sweep through the picture and get rid of the dust using the Clone Stamp Tool, but for me, I'd rather just take my lump and head back out there some other day with a clean lens and not waste all of those hours in Photoshop.  As luck would have it, it has been rather cloudy and rainy just about every evening since I took this photo, but the old Sailor's rhyme was correct.  The next morning was rather nice.