Hello,
I was messing around with taking picture of a sunset. I had some trouble with the lighting. The sunset looks ok but the rest is pretty dark. Any suggestion would be great. The picture was taken at 1/320 and F7.1.


<img src="http://i33.photobucket.com/albums/d73/dennylee60/DSC_002112.jpg" height="380" width="600" alt="Image hosted by Photobucket.com">

I think your exposure is OK. There's a quiet feel in this but you weren't fortunate enough that evening to have more clouds throughout the sky. I also try to have some interesting forms silhouetted by my sunsets, trees, barns and silos, windmills, water towers, stuff like that can perk up the scene. Sometimes you have to get the camera pretty low to get some grasses or distinctive bushes or weeds into the sky. When you have clouds or other elements closer to the sun you can zoom in to get the sun to be a more prominent part of the scene.

In the Nature and Wildlife forum there are a coupple threads on sunrises and sunsets - take a look at them for ideas.
http://forums.photographyreview.com/showthread.php?t=15714
http://forums.photographyreview.com/showthread.php?t=15593

Denny - Good advice from Chunk on the foreground items. The main color here is nice, but the overall shot seems a little soft for a 1/320 of a sec exposure... perhaps the auto-focus was a bit confused?

GB

Thanks for the suggestions. The links gave me some good ideas on what to do next time.