Sunsets and Such

A few nights ago I headed to Discovery Park for sunset. It was surprisingly breeze - more than I expected that evening - which limited what I could do. I did find, however, some Puget Sound gumweed (Grindelia integrifolia) which, for whatever reason, were not moving too much.

The first one features the soft lighting of almost-sunset. With that and a polarizing filter, you can see that the contrast is quite low for a sunlit shot. f/4.5 to blur the far background.

Below is the same plant with the sunset in the background. I've done this concept before (see here and here for the unedited versions) with gumweed and sunset; in this one, however, I made the sunset into a ball, so it's a distinguishably different iteration of the idea. I used f/4 to do that and to blur other background elements. This particular image also came right before the sun dipped completely below the horizon - that was how I managed to get such a yellow color. When the sun had been higher its center showed up as white.