Trump in Big Sky Country

The rally. It's very good. Lots of personal anecdotes. More personal than usual. 

I thought the sunsets in my little window to the American west are awesome, this tops them. 

I've seen about 20 similar photographs of this scene with AF1 in the background before the foothills with the sky beyond but the truly spectacular sunset is washed out in all of them as it is in the video. 

What a bummer. 

What a sad loss. 

Photography stuff ↓. Skip if not interested, you won't miss anything.

Here's what you do about that.

For your phone camera download an app that gives you the control of an slr, the ISO, shutter speed, aperture setting. Good luck with those things. They're weird. They're digital approximations of the real thing. But better than no control at all. 

These photos are taken inside a hangar. But the same thing applies if they're right outside the hangar or among the crowd in the settling light. 

On automatic setting your camera must consider the brightest area and the darkest area, and blend them.

This photograph is odd. The people cannot be this brightly illuminated, not the plane, when the sun is sinking behind the mountains. 

This is at least two photos of the same thing. 

If you make the subject the sky, your camera adjusts for the brightest area, then the people become silhouettes. 

If your camera focuses on the people then it opens up its aperture and slows its shutter to allow sufficient light for detail and that washes out the sky. 

All of the photos I've seen except this one have the sky washed out so an element of tremendous emotional  profundity of the event is not captured. 

Modern cameras have a setting for multiple shots called bracketing. On my camera it's the BKT button on the front. You set the f-stop and the camera will take three photos, one below the f-stop you set and another above the f-stop setting. The three photos are combined post-processing through another program.

To make sure you get that sky and get all the people then adjust the f-stop setting and do it again. 

In post processing you choose which photos in the set to combine into one, possibly all three, and that increases the dynamic range of the photo with detail in both light and dark areas. 

Pretty clever, eh?

Sometimes the pros will use a tripod and combine a dozen photographs of the same thing, for insanely detailed oversaturated photos. And you go, "Why don't my pictures ever come out like that?" 

It's because they're cheating like mad in post processing creating high dynamic range photographs. 

These photographer types are very clever technical people. The person who took this photo is. You can see for yourself it's unreal. Again, the people facing the camera and this side of AF1 cannot be this brightly illuminated in Montana's setting sun behind them. They've been lightened unnaturally. It might be so simple an adjustment as using the white eyedropper in post processing and selecting something white, boom, everything in the frame of that particular pixel of white becomes the most extreme white and everything else is adjusted to it. You can back out and pick another pixel of white and see its effect on the entire frame.  The sky is unaffected because there is no white there. It's like magic. 

There is also a black eyedropper and a mid-tone eyedropper to do the same thing. 

Ta-daaaaah. 

You are now bracketing multiple frame staked image high dynamic range post processing wizards. Like this guy.