Behind the Shot: Sunset Over Lake Superior

Hi, I'm Ian Plant, and right now I'm in the beautiful upper peninsula of Michigan on the shoreline of Lake Superior. And I'm here today to take you behind the shot of a photo I took inside a sandstone sea cave. It's along the shore. To get out here I had to wade through waist deep water for a few hundred feet. So I put on the lower half of a dry suit so I could get in the water without getting wet.

And I brought my equipment out here and I got inside the cave and I shot out looking out at the sunset. So what I'm waiting for is for the sun to drop down below a bank of clouds that's out there. There's a gap on the horizon. And when that happens the light's gonna come into the cave and I'm hoping to get some really beautiful sunset colors in the sky. Because the inside of the cave is really dark, it's gonna be difficult to get sufficient detail in both shadow and highlight areas of my image in just a single exposure.

So what I'll do is I'll take two exposures, one for the dark interior, one for the brighter exterior, and blend them together using Lightroom or Adobe Photoshop later on. But what I'm hoping for is when the sun comes down beneath the clouds, it's gonna flood the interior of the cave with a lot of light. And that's going to cut down on the contrast and make it easier for me to get both shadow detail and highlight detail. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to back up into the cave interior and shoot out through the cave. I'm gonna shoot the sunset framed by the cave walls.

And that way I'm gonna have a more interesting composition and I can use some of the water that's inside the cave as reflecting pools to reflect the sunset and to get a little bit more color in the scene or I can move a little bit closer to the shore and use some of the incoming waves that are coming in as an interesting foreground element. I decided to shoot this scene near the edge of the cave. I pulled back a little bit into the interior and I'm using an ultra wide angle lens, my Canon 11-24 at 11 millimeters. This gives me an expansive field of view. It opens up the interior of the cave.

So it allows me to shoot the sunset in the background, but also to include enough of the cave walls in the foreground to frame that background sunset scene. And I'm gonna wait for a wave to come crashing in, trigger maybe a half second or one second exposure, so I get a nice artistic blur and I'll use that to create dramatic foreground interests for my photograph. Wow! This has been an incredible photo shoot. I'm Ian Plant and thanks for watching.