In pursuit of a sunset

This was one of the hottest summer days for this month and I was waiting for the clock to strike 7:00 pm in order to go out and find myself a nice landscape shot. In the afternoon there were magnificent clouds and they gave med fake hope for a nice sunset scene. I prepared myself and went out with a hope in my heart.

Just when I went out I met this old men taking his horse for a walk and graze. I just snaped some shots to make my settings and adjustments. I’ve selected Aperture priority at my Nikon D3200, at f/11 and ISO 100, with daylight white balance.

During my walk to the planned destination I passed by the Century tree. Over 100 years old, ginormous and majestic with nice shadow underneath – this tree is one of the oldest in the region. I am always looking for a new way to photograph it, so this time I just went to show it’s enormity by taking some close shots of the tree.



Bellow the tree there is an old stone cross. It’s left from ancient times and old people from the village tell different story for it. Some are saying that a man found gold underneath it, others are saying that there was buried the first settler of the village. I am not sure what the truth story is and as the village is getting less populated I doubt that I will found one day.

On my way to the first shooting place I stopped by an interesting plant called – Dipsacus Laciniatus.

You can see my walking path on the next map.

So I arrived on the lower (on the map) location and tried some shots against the sun. On this place I was just experimenting – I’ve take several images with different focusing point used with the idea to stack them later. Then I took some close shots on the hale bales and again some shots against the sun. 







I kept my eyes opened for an interesting shot, after seeing the cloudless sky, so I saw a small sparrow on a hale bale. I put my 55-200 lens and without moving much tried to catch a shot of him.
I guess the color of the hale bale is close to its colors and this make it hard to be seen, but at least I took an image of my little helper. It kept singing all the time I was taking images.
After that I moved to the other shooting location I had planned. I saw a field of sunflowers and started looking for a composition,. Again I took some more shots with different focus in order to make focus stacking.





I managed to find some small and still with the yellow leafs on them, sunflowers.

At this point I got upset by the lack of clouds in the sky and went to the nearby nature spring to freshen myself. On my way there I passed by a field that was recently harvested and full with small blue flowers called Chicory. Another thing that caught my attention was a small yellow flower alone in a piece of harvested field and a bush behind it.


I freshened up with some called mountain water and continue back home.

Just before putting my camera back in the bag I saw the sunset light on the far away mountain tops. Those mountain tops are part of the longest mountain chain in Bulgaria called – Stara Planina. They are one of the first mountains in the North-West part of the country. Before them was the top of the century tree, so I tried for last time this day to capture an image.



This was my hunt for the sunset. I never got that dreamy sunset shot, but I got lots of nice shots to play with. As it turned out the focus stacking did great job on some of the shots so I plan to use it in future more. Shooting against the sun wasn’t what I thought, so I will read some more about such type of photography. Overall I am very happy with my images.
Thank you for visiting my blog!