I went to a spot down at the bay to capture what I thought would be a nice sunset. When I arrived at my location, I was rather underwhelmed by the lack of clouds in the area of the sky where the sun was approaching the horizon. However, not all was lost. I looked 90 degrees to my right and was greeted by the scene you see here.
I decided to try a series of long exposures to see how they would fit together as a panorama. The result is a set of four photos taken with my iPhone 16 Pro Max mounted on a tripod (this is a must), and an app called ReeXpose by the folks at Reeflex. I also used my 240 mm Telephoto lens by the same company. As you may have read in an older post, this lens is amazing.
The next night, the sky looked much more promising for a beautiful sunset so I ventured out to a small hamlet north of town and met up with a friend who was doing a time-lapse of the sun sinking below the horizon. I got some of the best sunset photos of my life!
Long Exposure on iPhone
ReeXpose is strictly for capturing long exposure DNG files – no JPG, Tiff or HEIC, just DNG, which is the file extension for Digital Negative. Having this capability in an iPhone is such a good asset because you have all the control in editing you’d expect from a RAW file. And I should note that the iPhone doesn’t shoot a long exposure like a traditional digital camera where the shutter stays open for the length of the shot; the iPhone has an electronic shutter which means the sensor is activated during the capture time.
Apple restricts the length of time for the shutter activation to one second, except for their own proprietary Night Mode where it can run for three consecutive exposures to create a 30 second shot.
Limitations
Since the iPhone has that limitation for the shutter, ReeXpose takes a series of exposures and stacks them as they are shot in a process called frame averaging. The secret to a successful image is to never over-expose your highlights. With the ISO set to the minimum value, I turn on the Zebra Stripes and dial the Shutter Speed up until the Zebra Stripes disappear.
If you’re not familiar with Zebra Stripes, they are a graphic overlay on the screen to indicate when you have any over or under-exposure in the scene. ReeXpose shows red stripes for over-exposure, and blue stripe for the areas that are too dark. Don’t worry if the shadows look too dark; they can easily be recovered when you process the image, but once the highlights are blown out, that’s it, they can’t be recovered. This will generally happen in cases where there is some very high contrast in the scene.
As for the post processing of this image, I did it all in Luminar Neo on my iMac. I’ve been doing most of my editing this way lately. In fact, most of my shooting has been in Bayer RAW because I like to get the maximum quality out of the sensor. I guess you could say I take a photographic approach to my iPhone photography.
What are your experiences with capturing the setting sun? Do you use your iPhone or a traditional camera?
Thanks for stopping by. I hope to work on the Portfolio pages of the site in the near future so stay tuned.
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