I have had poor results photographing closeups of the Sun setting with my Canon 10D and wonder if other Prodiggers have had similar experiences.
This evening the Sun set as a deep red orb into a bluish landscape. It would have looked pretty on film, but on the digital camera the results were dire. Through the viewfinder the Sun was deep red, sharp and not very much brighter than the surrounding landscape. It would have been well within the latitude of even Kodachrome to record both the colour of the Sun and the landscape. But on the digital images when the Sun is correctly exposed (ie not saturated), the landscape is virtually invisible. Furthermore, instead of being an attractive red it appears a most unnatural pink, and surrounded by a paler pink halo. I put the question to a friend of mine who works with the Hubble Space Telescope and is familiar with the properties of CCD chips. He surmises that the infrared from the Sun penetrates the atmospheric absorption and both comes to a slightly different focus (this was a 400 mm refracting lens), and also travels deeper into the chip, causing halation from the back surface. He says the HST suffers from the same problem. The additional IR would also presumably increase the Sun's brightness and distort the colour. I'm going to try future shots using a mirror lens to avoid the defocusing problem, but now all I need is a 72 mm IR blocking filter! Or maybe I'll just use film for these shots in future. Robin Scagell Galaxy Picture Library =============================================================== GO TO http://www.prodig.org for ~ GUIDELINES ~ un/SUBSCRIBING ~ ITEMS for SALE
