The Yellow Monorail & The Sun of Our Spaceship Earth

The Yellow Monorail

The fact that the yellow monorail showed up for this shot could not have been more perfect. I setup in this spot to wait for the monorail and hoped it would come in time to shoot it with the wonderful sunburst that was happening off to my right. There were really gorgeous yellow tones  in that area of the sky that were reflecting very nicely across the silver placards of the Leave a Legacy stones. Additionally I was seeing a nice yellow glow on the edge of Spaceship Earth that was creating a sweet yellow gradient. Perhaps then a contrasting colored monorail would have been nice but I think the yellow monorail really helps to solidify the yellow color scheme throughout the image.

Shooting into the Sun

Shooting into the sun like this can be problematic however. When doing so I always bracket and often times up to 7 or even 9 exposures depending on the scene. This is fine when you have no moving elements but in this case I had the fast moving monorail to account for. You have to then time it just right so the monorail is on the beam in the location you want at the same time that the correct exposure for the monorail is going off. There is a bit of room for error thankfully as shooting into the sun means your exposures are going to be very fast. If you are shooting on a tripod you also have the option of shooting the scene without the monorail and then shooting a non bracketed exposure just for the monorail and blending them in post. In this case I wanted to capture the scene as it was. I was able to choose an exposure that was correct for nearly the entire scene and do only a little bit of blending for the super bright sun area from my underexposures.