A distant storm cell created a relatively heavy cloud layer on the evening of June 17, 2015. Looking at the sky from home, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to go for a drive. I didn’t think the prospects for a good sunset were that great. I eventually did drive out to the Bottoms. Once I was out there, the clouds still looked to heavy to allow for a good sunset, but I did see a layered look to the clouds on the horizon which suggested a slim possibility of seeing the sun.
As can be seen in the following series, that possibility happened :). The sun managed to peek between the layers, creating beams of light that kept getting better and more defined.
The beams faded as the sun set behind the lower cloud bank. The clouds to the north still glowed with soft color.
Sunset was at 9:01pm that evening. The color left the sky, and I packed up my tripod and camera. A few minutes later, as I was driving slowly back home, the sky exploded in color once again. Surprisingly, a faint set of beams once again appeared. The glow lasted only a few minutes, before once again fading.
I started driving home once again, but didn’t get far before noticing the lightning bugs. One clump of grass seemed to consistently have lightning bugs on it, so I pulled over. I haven’t tried photographing lightning bugs close up before, and I knew it would be a long shot to get good images in the low light, but I tried anyways. The next 2 photos aren’t the best quality wise, but I am happy with them under the circumstances. I was pushing my camera settings to try and get an exposure that I could hand hold the camera at and still produce an image. Focusing was nearly impossible in the low light. I would watch for a flash of light on a grass blade, then try and manually focus on the bug before it flew away. They didn’t sit still very long, and most of the my attempts were out of focus or missing the bug completely.
A note on my camera and lens for these 2 photos. I use a Canon 7d mark II and had a Tamron 70-300mm f/4-5.6 vc on. At 300mm, the lens aperture is 5.6, which is really slow, and doesn’t let a lot of light in. I set the camera to ISO 6400, and a shutter speed of 1/30s. The vibration control/image stabilization of the lens helped somewhat at the slow speed. I still had to brighten the image in processing and apply quite a bit of noise reduction. A 300mm, f/2.8 lens would have been nice, and would have allowed for lower ISO or higher shutter speeds and made focusing easier :).
The night still had one more surprise for me. I glanced behind me, and witnessed the sky glowing once again in a narrow beam. This was almost 1/2 hour after sunset; the last intense glow didn’t last long.
Kansas sunsets are amazing. This evening was even more spectacular to me because of how many times the sun created beams and cones of light. In the winter, I expect afterglow like I saw that evening. I don’t usually witness that kind of afterglow in summer.
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Rob Graham
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Graham Photography's Photographic blog 