Ten Percent
One of the great things about shooting at night is the 10% rule (my own) goes up to about 90% at night. The 10% rule is: of the amount of times you go out to shoot a sunrise/sunset, 10% of the time you’ll get a great one. Colors streaming and morphing across the sky and you find yourself trying to come up with new ways to compose new shots in the few minutes that you have. It’s really quite a frenzy if you’ve never done it and it is a thrilling few minutes. But as I said, few and far between. Combine that with the fact that we photographers with day jobs can only “snipe” our foray’s between our bill paying obligations, it becomes easy to see why shooting a great sunrise/sunset is very challenging. How many times have we been driving to/from work watching great color in the sky? A lot more than when we’re in field with camera!
When shooting at night several things change into your favor. First a clear night sky is interesting and a feature of a night landscape shot. For CO, with 300 days of sun, that translates to 300 clear night skies. Odds, just went way up. Plus, when you add partly cloudy skies or thin wispy cloud layers with just a bit of light pollution from neighboring town it’s easy to see why the odds of capturing something special is far greater.
Lastly, whenever I’m planning a night adventure I always try to overlap one or both sunrise/sunset. You never know when the 10% rule will overlap one of these trips and it’s best to plan accordingly and take advantage. This shot for example is from a scoping trip of the town of Blanca, CO where Brad McGinley and arrived in the late afternoon the day before to scope out a night shoot of Blanca Peak. Our goal was to find a foreground of the area, but what’s one to do when faced with a scene like this?
This shot is a composition of two. Shot at 200mm to limit the amount of sky actually in the shot to the colorful portion, the foreground was light painted just a bit and focus stacked due to the long focal length.