Site seeing with some friends from Grenoble, France.

We watched a beautiful sunset at High Cliff State Park and really enjoyed the colors.

This is a technically difficult picture to pull off for several reasons.  The first is the backlight from the sunset will fool your camera into making their faces really dark.  However, if you expose for their faces the sunset will be too bright and all the color will be lost.  The second is the high depth of field requires a small aperture which will drive the shutter speed down and the ISO up.  Low shutter speed – motion blur and the high ISO means noise.  I love my Panasonic LX7 camera but it is not low noise at high ISO.

So how to overcome, adapt, improvise?  Two solutions.  First you can bracket 3 shots and combine in Photoshop.  Essentially one picture gets the sunset right, one picture gets the guys right and one picture is in the middle.  The second solution is to add a bit of fill flash.  You set the in manual to expose for the sunset and you add some flash so the people are lit.

Can you guess which one I used?

Panasonic Lumix LX7 | 4.7mm | 1/100sec at f/5.6 ISO 80