Hot Weather + Last Night's Sunset

The weather over the past few days has been quite warm - hitting 33 yesterday, 32 again today, and a forecast high of 31 again tomorrow. Considering that this is the tail end of February (traditionally the hottest month of the year in Christchurch) this is not too surprising! With the warm weather, we also sometimes get some rather dramatic skies. Last night was no exception!

Summer Has Returned - Tonight's Sunset

After several weeks of windy/wet/overcast/chilly weather, summer finally returned today, with a high of 28 C (+ warm night), a colourful sunset, and another hot sunny day tomorrow with 30 C

Stunning Hot-Day Sunset

The past two days have been sweltering hot here in Christchurch, with a high of 29 deg C yesterday, 28 deg C today, and remaining warm overnight (i.e. it was still 21 deg C at midnight, and is forecast to stay that way till morning). This has lead to some amazing sunsets again, as you can see below... From this evening:

 I was out and about watering the plants during both - which turned out to be both a curse and a blessing: on the plus side, I got to be outside watching the sunset and taking photos; on the downside, I ended up watering the plants in the dark! Haha... ;)

Fiery Sunset

This evening, the sunset was quite spectacular! It's been a while since we've had any really interesting ones - with all the foul overcast weather we've been having over the past month.  Over the past 2 days though, we've been having a period of nice warm weather, with some norwest breezes and generally unsettled spring weather which would've contributed to the display :)

Awesome Sunset - Wave Cloud

Following on from Saturday's classic lumpy nor'wester, the sunset this evening was equally pretty (and every bit as chilly again). The TV weatherman called it "wave cloud" (or at least the clouds floating nearby), so I'll just call it that.

 

Humid Surreal Sunset

Today marked the start of what is shaping to be another hot summery weekend, with temperatures rising to 27 degrees and hovering around that mark for most of the day. However, bang on 8pm though, a brief rain shower came through, giving the plants a well-needed drink, and bringing the temperatures down a bit to a more comfortable temperature (though that was counterbalanced by the increase in humidity... yuck!). This lead to some very interesting cloud formations, a double rainbow, and an even fancier sunset...

What a day...

Following quite a tumultuous day, we had a nice and pretty sunset this evening (though it was starting to get quite chilly too)

Canon 7D - Blue-Green Twilight Color Balance - Revisited

In a post last month, I discussed a new tool for fine tuning white balance in-camera: White Balance Shift. Since then, I've been playing around with this setting on a numerous occasions, with mixed results (notably, for the tail end of the sunset on Aug 20). Last week, an opportunity to use this came up, with a crisp clear night and the fickle blue-green twilight that had eluded me up till now...

Finally, I think I've nailed it! The shot above was all in-camera white balance (no tweaks applied, as far as I can remember). The settings for this are as follows:

• White Balance Mode (aka "Base" WB) = Shade
• WB Shift = B7, G6
• Exposure Compensation = -1 1/3

Contrary to my initial belief, it was necessary to bias the WB towards blue (instead of amber) to really draw out those rich bluish-green hues. Otherwise, you just get purple blue, with all the green-bits turned to white or faint orange-yellow. So, there you have it! The recipe for capturing blue-green twilights.

Tonight's Sunset

Following a day of blustery norwesters, we had yet another interesting sunset this evening. Originally, it didn't look too promising, as there was just a lot of blue sky around everywhere. But, around 6:15, I caught sight of a large pink cloud formation out to the east. Heading outside, I quickly discovered that besides the interesting cloud to the east, there was also some interesting action going on to the west!

Sunsets this week

With the unsettled spring weather this week (following a really nice and sunny settled period over the past week or two), we've had a number of spectacular sunsets this week. As they say, some of the most dramatic sunsets occur on the days with the highest probability of also turning out to be complete fizzers where the cloud cover just blotted out everything. That said, I'm beginning to feel like I'm starting to be able to guess which days are likely to produce some interesting skies to look at. Today's sunset was one of those...

 Today

 Tuesday

Monday

Last night's sunset

Despite a cold change and predicted rain during the afternoon, last night's sunset was still somewhat decent (though obviously not as impressive as the one that I'd missed on Wednesday). It was however bitterly cold - within a minute of being out there, I was like an ice block, despite wearing a jacket and gloves!

Tail-End of Sunset - 20 August

Here's are some shots of the tail end of the sunset this evening, which I almost missed completely. Annoyingly though, when I did see it, it was really quite a sight - but my camera was over 1km away, and not where I wanted it most. Grr!

Here are some consolatory shots I managed to snap as soon as I got home, though by that stage, the southern sky had darkened ~1 stop, the lovely red glow on the horizon was getting blocked by all the houses in the way, and the fleeting twilight "green-glow" I'd seen along the way had started to fade again.

Firey Blue Sunset

Here are some shots from last night's sunset. Although I missed the start of it, I managed to catch the second half from 5:30 onwards after spying the strong orange-red glow it was emitting across the north-western corner of the sky.