Pfeiffer Beach Portal Sunset Photo: Before, After and Time-lapse

Just before sunset, the sun’s last orange sunlight shines through the portal cave at Pfeiffer State Beach, for only a few weeks around the Winter solstice.

What I find really interesting is that like in the image above, the splash has a mixture of direct faint orange light from the last bit of the sun, and the blue light from the sky, and the result is a more pink-magenta shade of orange.This is a fairly unique case where nearly all of the sun’s evolving influence is shooting through the narrow cave.  A previous splash I caught just two photos earlier is much more orange.  It’s amazing how lighting from all different directions can affect parts of an image, and for how short I time some of these effects can be!

Of course many people looked at this images and couldn’t believe that it’s a fair representation of the actual event (not heavily Photoshopped), so here’s the original exposure, completely unedited:

Under extreme lighting situations like this, the camera simply doesn’t react to the scene in a way even remotely similar to the way our eyes do.  Our eyes close down to darken the extremely bright areas, and our pupils dilate to lighten in the dark areas.  So we photographers do that key step in post-processing software, to help the result better match what we saw onsite.  That’s what I’ve done on this single exposure: lightened the whole image and especially the shadows, while darkening the brightest areas just like our eyes would.  With the exception of removing a couple of dust spots, it was all done as whole-photo operations, no area or detail was selectively lightened, darkened, or colored.  The goal was simply to restore the image to what is seen onsite in the last few moments of sunset light.  This sort of minor adjustment is easy, fast, and results in a far more realistic image than many other common or popular photo processing options these days (it’s particularly superior leaving the image straight out of the camera, unedited, in a result like the unrealistically camera-affected “before” example here).

Here’s a time-lapse I watched a timelapse video I captured from this same sunset event, and the same moment and splash… blue sky, orange sun and sunlight, blue light on the shaded waves and white foam, occurs about 17 seconds into it: