Sunrise and sunset are two of the most popular subjects in photography and also two of the hardest to expose correctly, because the light is both extremely bright (the sun itself) and comparatively dark (the foreground) in the same frame, and it keeps changing throughout the shoot. Here's how to handle both problems.
The Core Challenge: Dynamic Range
A scene with the sun in frame has a dynamic range — the spread between its brightest and darkest areas — that often exceeds what a single exposure can capture cleanly. Expose for the sky and the foreground goes dark and silhouetted; expose for the foreground and the sky blows out to featureless white. Neither is wrong, exactly — silhouettes against a colorful sky are a legitimate and popular look — but you should choose deliberately rather than end up there by accident.
Aperture and Depth of Field
A narrow aperture (f/11–f/16) does double duty here: it keeps a wide scene sharp from foreground to horizon, and if the sun itself is in frame, a narrow aperture also produces the star-burst effect around it that many sunrise and sunset photos are known for. That starburst effect gets more pronounced as the aperture narrows further, so this is a case where stopping down has a clear creative payoff, not just a technical one.
Metering: Don't Trust the Average
Your camera's default metering mode averages brightness across the frame, and with the sun in the shot, that average gets dragged toward "too bright," leaving everything else underexposed. Spot metering off a mid-toned part of the scene — not the sun itself, and not the darkest shadow — gives a more useful starting exposure. From there, checking the histogram (rather than the LCD preview, which is unreliable in bright outdoor light) is the most reliable way to confirm you haven't blown out the sky or crushed the foreground more than you intended.
Graduated ND Filters: Compressing the Range In-Camera
A graduated neutral density filter, darkened at the top and clear at the bottom, can hold back the sky's brightness relative to the foreground directly at capture time, which is often more effective than trying to recover the same range afterward in editing. This is especially useful when the horizon is relatively flat — an open field, a beach, the sea — where a hard-edge graduated filter can align cleanly with it.
White Balance: Let the Warmth Through
Auto white balance sometimes tries to neutralize the orange and pink tones of golden hour, treating them as a color cast to correct rather than the actual color of the light. Setting white balance manually to Daylight or Cloudy (rather than Auto) generally preserves more of that warmth. If you're shooting RAW, this setting isn't permanent and can be adjusted afterward regardless of what you chose in-camera, which is one more reason RAW is worth considering for this kind of shooting.
Timing: The Light Changes Fast
The most dramatic color often isn't at the moment the sun touches the horizon — it's in the 20–30 minutes before sunrise or after sunset, sometimes called the "blue hour," when the sky can show deep blues and pinks well after direct sunlight is gone. Plan to arrive early and stay late rather than showing up for the single moment you expect to be best; the light shifts continuously, and some of the most useful shots happen when you weren't specifically watching for them.