The Cinderella Castle sunset picture has really become popular but I don’t really see many Spaceship Earth Sunset photos. Maybe I’m just not looking well enough but I’d like to see this become as popular as the Castle sunset shots. Frankly Spaceship Earth and the surrounding area offers many more unique shots shooting into the sun than Cinderella Castle does so there is a lot of room for artistic expression here. Perhaps the issue is that it’s at the front of the park and so most people are further into the park at sunset as opposed to Cinderella Castle which is located in the center of the park and easier to go to for sunset shots.
Shooting & Editing Spaceship Earth Sunset
This was shot with the Nikon D810 and Nikon 14-24 2.8 handheld. Of course shooting at this angle into the sun I got some nasty rainbow flaring in the trees. I find it incredibly distracting so the first thing I did was work on removing that. I manually blended a 3 exposure bracket (after aligning due to shooting handheld) to create my base image. I did my typical round of editing with levels adjustments, color balancing, saturation adjustments, etc. For whatever reason I found myself spending a lot of time adjusting the yellow color channel in this image. I was having a difficult time getting the yellow to look how I wanted. As it was becoming saturated it really took on an unappealing quality. Ultimately some selective color adjustments allowed me to fine tune it and get it close to what I wanted. My one regret is not taking the time to setup on a tripod for this shot. This would have allowed me to do a more extensive bracket and get a bit more detail around the sun.
